LONG-ANTICIPATED RESPONSE TO EDITHVED

I've neglected to answer your 'East vs. West' question, so as penance I’m writing an open response so that your (predominantly East coast) blog community (‘blogmunity’) can have the opportunity to weigh in on my comments…

Or call me an ‘ass-head.’

In an case, I’ll start by telling you that no one can be told about life in Los Angeles. One can only be shown life in Los Angeles. Anyone who has lived in LA for any appreciable amount of time will tell you the dirty, rotten secret about the fair city of angels: it’s not actually a city in California, it is a different planet altogether, on a different plane of existence, in a separate dimension from our own, in a galaxy far, far away, etc., etc.

If you take the 405 into LA (because there you get to say, ‘I took THE 405’), you’ll pass through an invisible wormhole portal—not far from the Will Rogers State Historic Park, appropriately—into a magical land where just around each and every corner exists the thrillingly supernatural possibility that maybe, just maybe, you’ll bump into Prince Harry doing bumps of coke off some hooker’s ass.*

And speaking of blow, you might find Angeleans railing a line or two and re-working the age-old ‘Real vs. Fake’ discussion, while (with the gross exception of H-bomb writers and editors… yech), Bostonians seldom discuss cocaine. Boston is a stoic town (thankfully), and the vast majority of conversation can be distilled into the following topics:

1. Red Sox (the Pats get their 3 months of due regard per year)
2. How much beer he/she/it drank last night (‘wicked pissed’)
3. Public transportation (i.e. ‘did you hear some kid got shot on the Orange line last night?’ ‘no! Wake pitched a complete game yesterday, and Sean got wicked pissed, so we had to take the Night Owl back from Dorchester’)
4. How good Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is. Seriously, that shit’s like crack-rock.

These, plus any derivation thereof, simple rules for ‘talking the talk’ do not apply in southern California. It would be a fool’s errand to itemize LA conversation in a similar fashion, not simply because of the vast and colorful diversity of topics, but because I’m loathe to decide whether ‘I bumped into Peter North this afternoon buying a burrito in Laguna’ should come before ‘Fucking Rick Moranis just stole my grocery cart!’ Alas, greater men than I shall resolve that one.

However, in its defense, I have never tried to hold a parking space with two folding chairs and a broom while living in California. Water tends to run off the streets in California. I can walk into a bookstore without accidentally getting to third base with the other patrons in California. It’s the little things I guess.

In closing I will say that, like men and women, the East Coast and West Coast bow to their own respective gods, but replace Mars and Venus with… like… Roger Clemens and Lindsay Lohan… or… um… James Taylor if you live north of Monterrey… or… like Clint Eastwood and adult film superstar, Jenna Jameson… but… I suppose… you’d have to be pretty fucked up to think of Jenna as a ‘goddess’… unless, of course, you meant ‘Anal Goddess,’ or ‘Goddess of the Cumshot’…which I do, but… Oh geez…

Well, this should pretty much sum it up.


*until now I have failed to give credit for this oft-repeated statement where, indeed, credit is due. The phrase came into existence during the epic road trip that spawned this very blog. Truly, the cosmos that day, in their endless journey towards their mystical, permutative equilibria, aligned in such a way as to unleash some tiny fraction of the Great Creative Energy that self-propelled the universe into existence and perhaps even connects each and every one of us through some incontrovertible organic bond (17 right, 28 left, 4 right perhaps?). Alternatively, we may have just been really hungover that day. Who am I to decide the truths of this lifetime?

Pete: wow, look at all the surfers in Malibu today!
Me: yea, I’ll bet the water’s ni… holy fuck?!
Pete: was that…?
Me: did you just see what I…
Pete: honest to god I just saw Prince William with a surfboard over there
Me: I just saw the same thing, and that is hands-down, no bullshit, the goddamndest thing I have ever seen… I wonder what Prince Harry’s up to…
Pete: probably doing bumps of coke off some hooker’s ass up in the hills.

…and that pretty much sums up the most hilarious fucking thing I have ever heard in my entire life.