Mets at Angels
Literally, hi
Advance praise feedback for Available for Parties:
“I’d subscribe. You’re nuts.” - Gabi Stephens, UNCW
“I really hope you won’t be mad, but it reminds me of—do you know that show Girls?” - Tinder acquaintance, internet
“The word that comes to mind is ‘disturbing’.” - Chipper Steve, aka my dad
Trouble Got in Alex
It’s been fifteen years since I wrote about personal shit in a public and protracted way. Since then, I’ve accidentally joined a cult, fallen in love with a stripper1, and held three secret jobs2—one of which required infiltrating the Colombian cosmetology community of Miami armed only with my Fisher-Price grasp of Spanish. I’d like to tell you about these things and others. It’s the only way I know how to make them make sense.
Joan Didion wrote that extremity is drawn, as if magnetically, to writers3; while my exes and therapists and, especially, exes’ therapists might not agree with the diagnosis of “writer,” Didion’s dictum reflects my experience.
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Borrowing a phrase, I’ve succumbed to the imperious urge… to blog.
You, my beloved and, if I may say, even better-looking than I remember—and I remember you as luminous—reader, will learn, too, why I sought to become “strategically homeless” in 2015, why I was laughed out of a pawn shop on Sunset Boulevard in 2019, why my former colleagues (from a non-secret job) call me Mister 9/114, and so on.
I’d like to start, though, last month in L.A., at a birthday party.
Have Blog, Will Travel
Los Angeles, like Alcoholics Anonymous, has a long-ass-name to say out loud—and a perfectly serviceable acronym for saving time. Paradoxically, the more time people spend there, the less frequently they use the acronym. (Presumably, at A.A. meetings in L.A., people say every letter of every word one by one, like parents who think they’re keeping a secret from their toddler and also that their kid can’t spell.)
It’s true that the pace of life is slower in Los Angeles. People are, for real, largely Relaxed And Nice, especially when you’re used to New York. What surprised me is that, when you’ve been there too long, time in L.A. actually begins flowing in reverse.
How else to explain the people at the party who, far from being unaware of the latest developments in the war in Ukraine, hadn’t heard that a war in Ukraine had occurred? If ignorance is bliss, Los Angeles really is the happiest place on Earth.
…Says the embittered once-and-future New Yorker. The funniest part of the New-York-versus-L.A. thing is that the enmity is asymmetrical; when I briefly moved from Brooklyn to Los Feliz in 2019, I’d mention New Yorkers’ casual hatred of Los Angeles to Angelenos, expecting them, at a minimum, to participate in the debate. Instead, I’d get responses like, “You hate us? Why? New York is amazing, L.A. is amazing… Do they really hate us?” It’s just another war they don’t feel they need to be aware of. The worst part is, I’m not sure they’re wrong.
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Is it possible New Yorkers are simply jealous of Southern California’s weather, absence of rats, relative paucity of daily trash-hurdling, etc.? Possible to probable. On a bad day, sure, Los Angeles is a city of idiots—and even on its best day, L.A. is one big strip mall from Century City to East Hollywood. But for New Yorkers, even when the 5 train is running local, cognitive dissonance can only stay underground for so long.
“Certainly whatever funny happens to you / Is OK” - John Ashbery
I like to strike the pose of the worldly skeptic, but the truth is that L.A.’s L.A.-ness starts seeping into me the moment I arrive. I had been living there for a few months pre-pandemic when a truck slowed to let me through the crosswalk on La Brea; I watched myself turn towards the truck and, mid-stride, do that white-person pseudo-Buddhist bow-prayer gesture to thank the driver. Total insanity. (Meanwhile in New York, people are wound so tight that one of the most important social lubricants is The Double Sorry: on the sidewalk or the subway, when you accidentally collide with a stranger—this is in the peaceful and successful scenario, i.e., nearly every time—both parties instantly apologize regardless of how it happened. In all likelihood, neither of you are paying enough attention to know whose fault it is anyway.)
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I’d been in L.A. not three days this time when my friend Jamie said a word I didn’t understand. Trying to describe someone’s personality, she settled on a detail—her delivery of which indicated that it spoke for itself: “I mean, they’re really into vinhuff, so.” Vinhuff was mentioned a second time before I asked what the fuck vinhuff is. Jamie said, “Do you really not know who Wim Hof is?”
The two of us are quickly enraptured by a 40-minute Vice documentary on this man, which we watched in its entirety. This is striking for two reasons: one, not a minute of it was devoted to his tremendously weird fucking name; two, neither of us had taken any drugs.
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At the risk of preaching to the choir—I don’t entirely know what you people are into—Wim Hof is a Dutch daredevil who hyperventilates on purpose and who, in the inexplicably hilarious words of Wikipedia, is “noted for his ability to withstand very low temperatures.” More importantly, Hof discovered that by immersing himself in freezing5 water at incautious length and, you know, climbing Mt. Everest shirtless, he wasn’t merely spiritually cucking all the other alive people. It seemed to Hof that his health, body and mind, benefitted tremendously from these activities. Vice even found A Scientist to say that Hof’s habits of breathing unusually and being freezing potentially enable him to control aspects of his immune system previously thought to be autonomous—analogous to if one of those haunted-ass internet ads about One Weird Trick To Burn Belly Fat actually worked.
Look who’s into Wim Hof now. Welcome to Los Angeles.
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Next thing I know, Jamie lends me her Subaru to go buy ice so we can try the Wim Hof Method in her bathtub. Heart full of purpose, I immediately become lost and nervous trying to find the North Hollywood Ralph’s, then more nervous and lost trying to find my way back to Jamie’s. (I was attempting to navigate raw, having thrown my iPhone into the Gowanus canal six months into the pandemic. More on that later.) Jamie accepted my failure graciously, and anyway had a shift coming up as an apprentice doula.
I was crashing on Jamie’s couch; my original couch-possessing friend had tested positive for Covid. With her off doula-ing and only a regular amount of ice in the apartment, I contented myself with the available reading: a shockingly fascinating coffee table book about cacti and something New Age-y and Jungian about healthy-yet-robust masculinity.6 I was a long way from Brooklyn—and one night of couch-sleep away from the birthday party I’d come to town for.
Available for Parties: Fridays
Thank you for coming. To say that I’m excited would be a gruesome understatement. And when I say that I want you to enjoy your weekend, I don’t mean it like the cashier at Panera means it. I mean it like the clouds mean rain. SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
Like, in her professional capacity.
If you’re thinking, “Who would hire this man to do something less than attention-seeking, to say nothing of unobtrusive?,” dear reader: buckle up, lol. (I can say only—I did not then possess A Blog.)
There’s a 5% chance I’m confusing this with a Sontag quote, just to get my cancellation out of the way.
It’s fine. It’s mostly, mostly it’s fine.
Illegal post-hoc editorial comment 6/4/22: This fucking word should have been “icy,” there’s already a “freezing” so close and “icy” would work fine. CHRIST
And can’t each book learn from the other? Men—look to the cactus: independent, assertive, yet part of its environment. No longer certain if I’m kidding about this one.
oh hell yeah
I read the whole thing!