I have made a tremendous mistake.

Moving from NYC to Los Angeles may not rank up there with, say, millions of Jews fleeing Russia into Germany after World War One to escape persecution (whoops!), but on a personal level, me moving to LA is much worse (hey, I didn’t know any of those Jews).

I honestly don’t even know where to start, how to express the anger and self-loathing that has built up in me over the past few weeks. So let’s just jump right in and try to make sense of it later. We’ll start with the least aggravating and move to the most aggravating.

My commute is homicide-inducing.

I am living in a lovely little beach community called Redondo Beach. I live in a house with two roommates, both people I knew before moving out here, Mark and Selena. My original plan was to move to LA and crash with friends until I found a place on craigslist, thinking that it would be easier to find a place here on the ground as opposed to over email and realizing that what very little I now owned could easily be stored in my Town Car. However, their third roommate, Chris, called me a week or two before I moved to LA and said he was moving out. I knew the area (a little bit), knew the roommates and the rent was ungodly cheap, so I decided to take his spot.

(Full disclosure: I’ve actually made out with Selena in the past, but so far we’ve passed through several weekends of me being drunk and living in the same house as her and I’ve yet to be removed from the premises in handcuffs. I am also pretty sure that I’m not being followed by detectives from SVU as they try to build a case on me, since for the most part my actions speak for themselves and no case-building is necessary. Rest assured that if anything should happen, Site Guy Brendan will let you know. Also, I’m innocent. Probably.)

Every other time I’ve visited Los Angeles I’ve worked New York hours; that is, 6:30am to 2:30pm LA time. Therefore, as long as I stuck to these hours, my commutes to and from work, no matter who I was crashing with and where they lived, were pretty easy. Also, the novelty of driving, something I’ve rarely done for that past eight years in NYC, made dealing with the commute possible. I was just happy to be in a car, listening to the radio, laughing at people who were honking at me while I drove slowly and confusedly through the streets of LA; me driving on these trips was not dissimilar to Balki driving through Los Angeles, straight off the boat from Mypos.

Now however I work LA hours, 9am to 5pm local time (read: the very peak traffic times). My office is 15.6 miles from my current home, not an unreasonable distance in the grand scheme of things; I would guess that the large majority of Americans commute farther every day. But in Los Angeles, at 9am and at 5pm, 15.6 miles is not so much a “reasonable commute” but rather a test of endurance and sanity and an exercise in pure white hot hate.

To travel those 15.6 miles in the morning, it takes me an average of 1 hour and 25 minutes. In the evening, the commute’s a little better – I can be home in about 1 hour 15 minutes. That’s 2 hours and 40 minutes to travel 31.2 miles every single day (well, five days a week). I start my work day with an hour and a half in the car, and I end my work day with an hour and a half in the car. Nearly 1/8th of my day is spent in traffic. Three hours of my life every day not only gone, but dissolved in a sea of metal, heat, and fumes; incompetent drivers, bad radio stations, and angry people.

It’s hard for me to quantify or qualify how slow and miserable my commute is, driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic, moving less than 10mph for 90% of the drive. I would like to invite all of you car-owners out there to take your car out for a spin, drive 12mph for 90 minutes, then report back about to whether you came home and beat your wife and kids or dumped your boyfriend/girlfriend. I’d really be interested to know, because after doing this commute for three weeks, I think I know why marriages fail and children grow up goth/sluts/theater majors – it is impossible for a rational, sane human being to sustain any reasonable level of happiness in such traffic. This unhappiness must then be deflected onto spouses or children and, long story short, this is a big part of the reason why we have "Girls Gone Wild" and 85% of all memoirs ever written.

(Not to mention, do you know how hard it is to change lanes in bumper-to-bumper traffic while driving a Lincoln Town Car? There are apartment buildings with better maneuverability than this car. The blindspots on it are so large that the sun itself could descend upon the earth and into the lane of traffic next to me, and if it wasn’t immediately to my left or right, I wouldn’t see it. When I do change lanes, I essentially look at the lane I’m going into, shrug and say “Meh”, and then blindly dart over. There is one point in the commute when I have to quickly pass over three lanes in only a short distance and I have so little idea if any cars are coming, I instinctively shut off my radio or iPod at this point, hoping as I blindly move the car to the right that if I’m going to hit anyone they’re going to honk, so their honking would alert me to either move back into my former lane, stop, or brace myself for impact. It is unquestionably only a matter of time before I kill a bicyclist. I’m so serious about this that for a moment I contemplated not writing that sentence, for fear that when it does actually happen, I’ll look even more like a monster. But you should know before it happens and hits the papers that it’s not my fault. Honest.)

In NYC, I used to walk to work. It would take me 28 minutes and I loved it – I got exercise, prepared for/unwound from a day at the office, and got to see the city coming to life in the morning and preparing for leisure in the evening. I loved each of those 28 minutes. Now, by the time I get to work I want to put my fist through my computer, and by the time I get home at night I want to jerk off, take a Xanax and go to bed. Los Angeles. Awesome. But even if I did want to do something when I came home from work, I couldn’t, because…

I am bored to shit.

Redondo is close to the beach. And the rent is cheap. So this is good.

But I am not a beach person. I am chubby, have no muscle mass to speak of, am so pale that parts of my body are actually see-through, and am approaching the time of my life when the hair on my back exceeds the hair on my head. So for me, living in Redondo to take advantage of the beach is the same thing as living near a poison factory to take advantage of the poison (“Well, at least you got the poison in Redondo, right?”).

But the cheap rent is key. A big reason why I moved out of NYC is that I simply couldn’t afford it any longer. I’m not poor – good lord, please don’t ever mistake me for a poor – but spending $2000 a month in rent and paying $1000 a month on top of that to live LA one week a month (flight, rental car, drinks for those letting me crash, occasional hotel room, etc) – is not going to allow for much savings. So now that I live in LA, my monthly “shelter” expenses have gone from $3000 to $700. This is a lot of extra money and I plan to save some in order to return to NYC and be able to afford a slave (wish me luck); the rest will go mostly to drugs and trinkets. In addition, I moved from a two-bedroom apartment in Little Italy/Chinatown that flooded with feces every six weeks to a three-bedroom, two bath home in Southern California with a yard. In theory, sounds great.

But you know what? It might turn out to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I could go on and on about how I live in the suburbs and it’s terrible, but here’s an attempt at being word-efficient (and name-droppy): Heath Ledger died one block from my old apartment; now, I can’t walk to a bar.

Look, I don’t think I’m very high-maintenance. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy. I basically need three things: meat, beer and music or sports (I would add boobies to this list, but we’ll get to that later). And much like your average house pet, it doesn’t take much to entertain me: some jangling keys will usually keep me occupied for hours. So really, I’m not asking for much here. Christ, one of my top five favorite activities is getting drunk on Amtrak trains, so you have to understand that I am a simple, simple man.

But I am bored to shit in LA. Absolutely, 100% bored to shit. I live smack in the middle of the suburbs. I shop at a supermarket. If I want a burger and a beer, I have to drive. Within one square mile of my place, there is nothing but houses – I mean this literally, no stores, no bars, not even any landmarks – just an endless sea of suburban houses. My closest friend is Brian, who is 12 miles away and – no joke – last time I was in his neighborhood, on his street, actually, I sideswiped a parked car so bad that I’m not sure I can ever go back (I’m not sure how many black 1996 Lincoln Town Cars with PA plates there are roaming around Venice). My favorite night in LA was a few weeks back when my friends had a welcome party for me at a bar in Santa Monica, which is 15 or so miles from my place. The cab there was $55, my bar tab was $170, and the cab back was $80 – I could have gone and fucked two black chicks in Vegas for about $40 more.

This is how bad it is: Since I have nothing to do during the week, I’ve been spending more time at work – just because I want to. I figure I could go home and do nothing, or I could get an hour or two closer to sleep at work and take care of some stuff. So what happened? I got a raise. I got a fucking raise that I didn’t even ask for, because since I moved to LA, I’m in the office at 8:30am every morning and never out before 7pm. While my bosses think this is because I’m working harder (and admittedly, I am doing more work), it’s really because I have so little to do at home that I prefer to be in my office – which is terribly, terribly sad for someone who used to start drinking red bull in his office at 4pm on every Friday so he could drink until 4am that night. And I got a raise because I’m just that bored and unhappy in LA. I don’t know if I’m proud of this raise or if I should immediately invest this extra money in a cock-fighting ring in my neighborhood or give the money to a local high school basketball star to shave some points just to make things a little more exciting. Honestly, it’s getting to the point that every time I pull into my driveway I’m hoping that someone is in the process of robbing my home – chasing Mexicans around my house would be a far better evening activity than another Will & Grace rerun on Lifetime.

(Hilarious show, by the way. That Karen is just too much!)

This boredom doesn’t end with the weekend, either. The bars in Redondo/Hermosa/Manhattan beach, well, they leave a little bit to be desired if you know how to pronounce “Dostoyevsky” and don’t know where your lat is. I really don’t think the people in these bars know if anyone’s making music besides Rhiannon and the Bravery and if the Pacific is the world’s largest ocean or just “Fucking awesome, bro. That ocean is fucking awesome. Seriously. Bro. Fag. Lat.” The most intellectually stimulating conversation I had was when me and Brian – a former Division I wrestler – were trying to decide under what conditions he could beat up Kobe Bryant (we decided that if given one year to train and provided with head gear and metal fangs he may just be able to take him – Brian’s a biter). I really feel like I’d be more at home in prison than in these bars, because at least I watch and enjoy prison shows; I’m not as well-versed in tan people high-fiving and doing shots of 180 bombs. So I actually prefer the work-week to the weekends, because on Saturday, I wake up, have nothing to do except for maybe getting an oil change, then just have to kill some time before going out and wondering what the hell I was thinking when I moved from NYC to this place.

Hear me out: I’m not saying that I was the King of New York or anything. It’s not like I was hanging out with Prince and banging various models after long nights of cocaine and clubbing. But NYC was perfect for me, precisely because I was lazy. I could sit at home, have a few beers with friends, and then go out to one of the 50 or so bars within a half-mile of my apartment. Or, I could drink alone, send a mass text message at 11:30pm, and then have at least three options of places to go, friends out in various parts of the city. Now, my social life is Brian or my (really quite wonderful) roommates; the rest of my friends are disqualified because they live too far away. And really, that’s about it.

(By the way, I really have no idea why I named Prince above. Just came to me. Seems like a guy that likes luxurious things and the like.)

I don’t even know if I necessarily need to cover this next point, but here goes…

I may never have sex again (for free).

There is nothing to be had for me in the boobie department in Los Angeles. The women here are so astoundingly hot, I’m speechless. I simply can’t describe it. Think of all the clichés that one might have heard about LA women, especially those who live in towns with names Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach, and they’re all true. There is so much blond and tan and boobie that I am at a loss for words (and this doesn’t happen often).

And none of it is for me. Absolutely none of these boobies are for me. After living here for two months, the only conditions under which I could ever see myself sleeping with any of the girls in these bars involves a chloroform-soaked hanky, a whole lotta bleach, and a sturdy shovel. Otherwise, it’s just not gonna happen.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I moved from New York to Los Angeles, I also went back to high school. See, in high school I was:

- reasonably smart

- relatively funny

- possessing a good knowledge of sports and music

I was also:

- quite overweight

- completely unathletic

- about as likely to find my way into a girl’s pants as a tampon made of shark teeth

Fortunately, as the years progressed, as alcohol became more available, and as women grew increasingly comfortable with the idea settling at the end of the night for the guy who might kinda look like a rapist but probably couldn’t overpower them, lo and behold, I began having sex – even (gasp!) fairly regularly. In college, and later in New York City, I learned that many a physical short-coming (pun intended) could be overcome with a few shots of SoCo and lime and a well-placed self-deprecating joke or mention of, you know, a book or a poem or something. These, I now refer to, as the Golden Years.

But now that I’ve moved to LA, things have reverted back to the old high school days. I am now:

- reasonably smart

- relatively funny

- possessing a good knowledge of sports and music

I am also:

- quite overweight

- completely unathletic

- about as likely to find my way into a girl’s pants as a tampon made of shark teeth

that is on fire and being carried by a werewolf

In Los Angeles, there is nothing that can overcome physical short-comings; no joke, no mention of something intelligent, nothing. If I actually did converse with these women, aside from me occasionally saying, “Excuse me, I’m just trying to get to the bathroom” and them replying, “Is that your penis you’re trying to show me, or do you have a baby in your jeans that’s trying to show me its penis?”, it would probably (hypothetically) go something like this:

Me: “About me? Well, let’s see…I spend my Saturday afternoons teaching Latin to inner-city African-American children. I started a non-profit devoted exclusively to saving and rehabilitating three-legged puppies. The most important person in my life is my mother. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2006 and wrote just about half of Cat Stevens’ catalogue (I have perfect pitch and can play several instruments). I like to cook, go to church, vote democrat and I can make women have multiple orgasms by staring at them, counting to three, and snapping my fingers.”

Girl: [staring at bartender/volleyball player/guy who can squat a higher number of pounds than points he scored on his SAT] “I’m sorry – I wasn’t really listening. How many push-ups can you do again? Did you say that already?”

Me: “Oh, I forgot one thing – do you know God? Long story short, I beat him in ‘Jeopardy’ about six years ago and now I’m immortal. Seriously, I can’t die. Subsequently, last year He and I bet on the Super Bowl and I won again, and now every time a woman gives me a blowjob, He deposits $5000 in her bank account. I can’t believe I forgot about that. He thought of that one.”

Girl: [looking at friend standing behind me mouthing, “Is that John Candy?”] “So…is it like more or less than 50 push-ups? Just give me a number here.”

[Girl mouthes “I think so” over my shoulder back to friend]

So like in high school, I can do nothing but wait and hope that girls eventually get lonely or desperate or want to get back at their ex-boyfriends and/or accept a dare from their friends. Until then, like back in high school, it’s back to stripping down, lying down on the bathroom floor, and masturbating like a goddamn mental patient (four-five times a day). We’re going old school-style.

******

Things will change for the better here in Los Angeles, if only because they have to. But I realize in order for me to make things better, I’m going to have to work on them. That is, I have to either move or find a better route to work, I have to put more effort into my friendships, and I have to start taking steroids and using less big words. But here’s a little something you should know about me: I don’t like working hard. While we’re here, another thing you should know about me: I’m a quitter. So if I know myself, I’m not going to change who I am or what I like to do to make my life out here more enjoyable. Instead, I’m more likely to shut it down, retreat inward, and treat this year in LA like I would a year in prison: keep to myself, read the Koran, and maybe dabble here and there in getting raped – all so that one year from now when I get back to NYC, I can look back on my time in Los Angeles and say, “No matter what happened, I survived. I endured and lived to tell about it. And that counts for something. Probably very little, but something.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with the bathroom floor.