welcome to los angeles, now get the fuck out

Los Angeles is a mean town. The saying goes that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, but my experience is that Los Angeles is a tougher town to crack. Many friends have come here and left for various reasons, but I know so many others (not friends) who couldn't take the heat and left. There is a dead-on rant/post on Craigslist re assholes in this town that paints a picture of someone come undone titled, "Fuck you LA, and the BMW you rode in on…" - hilarious.

My favorites:

This is it…the last straw. There have been other last straws, too many to count in fact, but this is really really it. I have spent 2 years in this godforsaken metropolis testing my tolerance for the intolerable and I have finally given up- I hate you I hate you I hate you.

FUCK YOU traffic on the 405 at 4am. When I’m driving home at 4am, I’m either drunk, horney, or crying (the only reason one is driving at 4am), so I need you to be clear. I spend my whole day at your mercy, doing runs, burning high-priced watered-down gas, and basing my entire social life on your whims, but at 4 fucking am, I need you to NOT CLOSE DOWN TO ONE FUCKING LANE. I hate you.

I’d put this old Italian thousand-year curse I know on you, but I think the wildfires, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and 800lb flying boulders have got it covered. Perhaps you’ll collapse under the weight of your own smog someday, but til then, you guessed it. FUCK YOU.

Although I am one of Los Angeles' biggest boosters, I have to admit that as a writer, sometimes this city just kicks my ass. But I have my reasons for being here and I'm trying to keep my eyes on the prize. Last year I worked at this company with, there's no other way to say it, a complete fucking idiot. This bozo was a wannabe hipster from Seattle. I've never been to Seattle, but he definitely belongs in a flyover state. There were many reasons I couldn't stand this guy, but here's just a sampling of why.

Bozo often spoke of his dream of becoming an actor, but he had the dream and not the drive. He didn't take acting classes, he didn't hit auditions, he didn't read scripts or keep up on what was going on in the industry, he had no idea what Meisner, Alexander or Method was, he'd never been on-camera, he'd never even been on a film or television set. When he learned that I was a writer, he proclaimed in an insanely me-too moment, "I'm a writer, too!". He'd never been published, didn't even know what the Writer's Market was, didn't belong to a writer's group, never took a class, never completed a single screenplay, teleplay, essay, never submitted to a publication or even had a story killed. But he did write a short story in high school that his buddies thought was kewl. One Monday he said to me, "Hey, I can write screenplays now!"

Reserving judgement, I asked, "Yeah? Did you write something?"

"A friend loaned me his copy of Final Draft. I figured out how to do that tab thing to write the dialogue and stuff."

Congratulations, now get yourself one of those baseball hats from The Writing Store that reads, "writer" and you'll be all set.

Ten years ago I was in New York City, visiting Carl, a friend who recently moved there for a better gig in the music industry. Carl said that when it is summer in NYC and he's in a sweltering, piss-soaked subway station waiting to get on a train to stand armpit to face for 20 crowded and smelly minutes for the ride home, he had to remember the reasons he moved to NYC in the first place or he'd move back to Manhattan Beach in a New York minute. That goes for anyone who moves to a competitive space. If you're gonna come, you better come correct. And if you're not ready to play where the big dogs bark, you're going to find your tail between your legs as you run back home where it's safe.

I hear Bozo is back in Seattle now, married and probably content to be a big fish in a small pond. Good riddance. Because there's already too much traffic on the freeway.