Traffic Thoughts

I was sitting in my car on La Brea the other day, having hit my sixth straight red light, when the fact hit me that I miss New York City and am pretty much over LA.

What can I say? To me, at this point in my life, NYC is novel and exciting. By comparison, LA seems boring and tired. I went away for a year and fell in love with a sexy new city, while simultaneously falling out of love with my frumpy long-term locale. If I was Chevy Chase in VACATION, New York would be my Christie Brinkley; LA my Beverly D'Angelo.

Now, I could tick off all the reasons why I feel this way - the traffic I mentioned earlier is a good starting point. But that's not what I'm here to kvetch about. What bothers me is that this is yet another development in my inevitable march towards becoming someone I hate. Man, did I used to loathe all those people who pontificated to me about how wonderful New York is, sneering down with pity upon those of us who had yet to be enlightened.

And yet, here I am. I wish things had turned out differently, I really do. I wish I had come back here and thought, "Yeah New York was fun, but I'm a California boy, and this is where I belong." I tried for awhile, but I have to admit truthfully how I feel: I may not be long for this town.

Or maybe next time I'll just take Fairfax.

My Tangled Web

I went downstairs to use the gym in my building today. On the elevator ride/walk down the hall, I spent about ten times as much time as I would have liked untangling my earbuds wires, to the point where I was in a bad mood by the time I got there.

Then, on the treadmill, about seven minutes in, my left shoelaces loosened and eventually untied themselves, and I had to pause the machine to retie my shoe.

Is there some sort of metamessage I should be taking away from this sequence? Or do I just suck with knots?

Guess I'm Not as Original as I Thought

I'd like to take a moment and personally apologize to Chuck Klosterman.

Apparently, and much to my freaked-out consternation, I have been unwittingly plagiarizing the pop culture writer for years, right here on this very blog. Visiting for the week, my NYC compatriot showed me a couple passages from Klosterman's 2003 book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - a book I kind of always meant to read when I saw it in the store, but just never got around to. Here's one of them:

"Apples and oranges aren't that different, really. I mean, they're both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They're both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can't think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and - while I was looking away - he replaced that apple with an orange, I doubt I'd even notice. So how is this a metaphor for difference? I could understand if you said, 'That's like comparing apples and uranium,' or 'That's like comparing apples with baby wolverines,' or 'That's like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver,' or 'That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.' Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity. But not apples and oranges. In every meaningful way, they're virtually identical."

Back in 2009, I wrote a post titled Apples & Orangutans, which was remarkably, almost eerily, similar to Klosterman's essay. But that's not all. In the same book, he also wrote about his experience eating at a KFC, and his being vexed by a beggar who asked him twice to buy her some chicken - once while he was eating inside, and once after he left. This is an almost identical experience to one which I complained about here in 2010.

I must admit, this is a little embarrassing. I would just like to state for the record that, while I enjoy Klosterman's work in Esquire, I had never previously read SD&CP, or any of his other books, for that matter, and would never intentionally rip off someone else's writing. 

I will also make a mental note to get less enraged whenever I see another screenplay selling based on an idea I once had.

Anyway: sorry, Chuck. I'll try not to let it happen again.