Most of you probably did not notice the absence of this newsletter in your inbox this past Sunday morning and I don’t blame you to be honest.
I was very busy this weekend trying to get my eyes to stop swelling after a bizarre allergic reaction (to what? Still not sure!) before beginning a long shitty journey to Los Angeles at a time on Monday morning that all right-thinking people would consider obscene.
I am in Los Angeles listening to people say the word “brand” repeatedly, along with a solid dozen other semantically drained words, and maybe it’s because I am still tired but I mostly want to yeet* myself into the Pacific Ocean, but I am in an armchair in the Beverly Hills Hotel which is actually quite far from the Pacific Ocean. At least the company I’m working for paid for my flight.
I am supposed to be moving to Los Angeles next year because that is what you are supposed to do when you want to be a TV writer and I feel like we gotta have a meeting about this or something because I do not want to move to a place that is on fire so often or one where walking a mile is a real bad idea. I keep trying to tell myself it will be fine and maybe even good even but…
There are so many buts.
You might think that’s weird considering I currently live on an extremely underfunded archipelago and also was crying at the fucking garbage state of the subway which resulted in a turned ankle a mere day ago, and what I would say to that is you are absolutely correct. It’s dumb to want to stay in a city that is actively hostile to me.
But here I sit, beside a (fake?) fire in a fancy hotel patronized by crusty white women in Range Rovers with Trump/Pence bumper stickers, longing only to walk past the mountain of trash on the sidewalk all down my street, into the dingy building incongruous to its neighbors, up up up the stairs, and into an apartment that is probably far too warm.
But it’s home.
*The greatest neologism of the 21st century.