I put in my vacate notice and rented a storage pod and bought a cat carrier for the car. I’m moving! Away! To Los Angeles!
I KNOW, RIGHT.
People ask me why I am moving. Austin is so nice, and there is so much good swimming, and I have such excellent friends, and the rent is cheap and nobody’s ever stuffed eight seagulls into a grocery bag and lit that bag on fire, which is something that happens on Tuesdays in L.A.
Here’s what I figure. Austin is like the oasis in zombie movies. I have written about this. Everybody loves the oasis and it never makes sense when they leave it but they do leave eventually and it’s because in the oasis, every need is so nicely filled. If I want to swim in some cool waters, I go to Barton Springs and give myself an ice cream headache when I jump in. If I want a cheap lunch, I go to TacoDeli and have a bison taco. If I’m feeling lonesome, I hang out with Lesley or Susan or Jess or Jon or Justin or Tim. If I don’t have anything on the freelance queue, I go get my nails done. I bake my scones and sweep my floors and live the oasis.
pick anywhere
The most seductive aspect of the oasis is that there is nothing boring about the oasis. I love my friends and long afternoons reading and good mornings writing and going to the gym etc. You know what it’s like when you find the love of your life? Yeah, me neither. But I think it’s like, you find someone that fits you so good, and you want to work as a team with that person for the rest of your life. And in the course of working as a team — as with all great teams — you find yourself specializing more in what you’re great at. You start cooking less and keeping the budget more, talking in public less and empathizing more. You used to muddle along doing all those things because you had to as a single person, but suddenly you don’t have to anymore. And the act of working in a team like that is so satisfying, but what you don’t notice is that these small skills start to atrophy; you forget how to file your taxes or start a conversation with a stranger or pick a good wine for dinner. As the years pass, those skills don’t come back. They’re gone.
That kind of paints a grim picture of lifelong partnership but I don’t mean to say atrophy like it’s necessarily a bad thing necessarily. In a partnership like that you’d get to focus on the things you’re really good at while the other person does their thing too. But in all this excellent pairing, the oasis of another person, you get a little less sharp (I won’t say dull, but you know, less sharp) on some of your corners.
This place doesn’t dull everyone — take Amanda Eyre Ward or Sarah Bird or Owen Egerton for some examples of people keeping their grind on. Also, as great as Austin is, it’s not really that great. (I started writing this because it’s 90 degrees at midnight and I said to myself, Jesus it’s 90 degrees at midnight, I need to write about why I’m getting out of here.) It is what it is, I yam what I yam, and a few weeks ago I woke up and realized that I’ve been in Texas for seven years and it’s time for a change. I have some friends in California and the weather is nice and I can freelance from anywhere and it’s time to go.
“There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it…” — Baudrillard, America
I’ll be out of here October 1 and hopefully settled in a place by mid-month. Austin locals, let’s go two-step and have a good time before I gotta go. L.A. locals, if you happen to know of an above-garage guest house with no roommates and wood floors and a place for a little garden where I can dig until I find my fortune, drop me a line.
Anyway, wish me luck.
