Burbank

It is quiet here, in Burbank. In our frenzied scratching and digging through craigslist, Tyler and I happened upon a community house for 450/month. A quiet neighborhood in which to get our feet wet? Check. The opportunity to meet fellow stereotypically disillusioned youths in a relaxed environment for such a low price? Check. Being within relative driving distance of most points of interest within the Los Angeles metropolitan region? Check. Cliche listing-and-checking blog introduction to keep you interested in Sticking With Me? Check. God.

And so it's just been us three for over a week. Tyler, myself, and Aries, the lady who's running the whole community show by posting ads on craigslist that one would think would appeal to stereotypically disillusioned youths, but so far the results would beg to differ. The first potential was a girl / lady / woman named Ashley, or in some circles, Crashley, who apparently wasn't aware of the fact she'd be sharing the place with ten other people despite the ad being pretty damn explicit about the fact, "community house" being in the heading and everything. She also found herself at odds with the two resident chihuahuas and promptly hightailed it back to Koreatown. So it goes.

Next up was Jolie, a fifty-something drifter whom we named Dust Lady, sub-rosa of course, due to her problems with the dust compounds evidently littered throughout the house, which had somehow escaped our (my, Tyler's Aries's) knowledge. To put her ongoing battles with psychosomatically-rendered "dust" and generally inescapable airborne bacterium into perspective, when she came to us she was mixed up with a lawsuit involving a festering "Black Mold", her old home, and her dastardly landlord. And, you know, she was like friendly and everything but we figured that what she was looking for was more like a bubble? and we did not have any quality bubbles on-hand. Los Angeles absolutely lives up to its notorious propensity to attract every kind of character you can imagine.

Finally, Gene aka Voodoo Gene aka Pallet Jack rolled in from Texas with stories of having attempts on her life a grandiose 65(!) times and the contingent need to sleep with a shotgun. When Aries sat down with her in all diplomacy and friendliness to talk about Gene potentially not fitting in too well with laid back college kids ("sat" being a vague term; Gene actually just sprawled on her back across the sofa with Aries sitting on a stool nearby), Gene simply threatened to not leave, but the problem was quickly alleviated when she was told that Burbank has its very own Little Police Department That Could!

Since then, it's been quiet. Eden, a twenty-something massage therapist(!) is planning on moving in tomorrow, with Robert the actor following closely. Maybe we'll stop exclusively attracting middle-aged women who have the quirkiest of needs and 65 assassination attempts under their belts. But it remains to be seen.

Burbank is a little too quiet and out of the loop for me, so I'm planning on making the move to Hollywood next month, especially if this job in West LA comes through.

Stay tuned!

Greetings from North Hollywood

Experiencing an existential crisis within two weeks of graduating from high school and within two hours of moving to Los Angeles is not exactly the most exhilarating avenue by which to jump into what they say is the quote real world unquote. You’d think it’s obvious that the reason so many people feel such brooding apprehension towards moving away from home and family and starting over is that it is So Fucking Difficult. That did not, however, occur to me until I was one thousand miles south of everything I knew, finally putting my true place on this planet into a sharp and painful perspective: I am nobody.

Where am I? Empirically speaking, I’m sitting on my bed in the Flamingo Motel, North Hollywood. There’s no wi-fi, so what you read now was first a Word document, copied and pasted into Blogspot. I’m going back and forth between writing here and reading Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I picked up from the Iliad bookshop on Vineland yesterday for three bucks and tax, along with Robert Altman’s screenplay for the movie Short Cuts which, if you haven’t seen it yet, I would suggest a fair viewing for some insight into part of what really drew me here in the first place. We pulled into Van Nuys at around 4:30 Tuesday afternoon. After checking out an apartment which turned out to sit outside of the loop of what we thought we were looking for, Tyler and I made our way into North Hollywood and booked a motel. Since then, we’ve been wrestling with our petty, unsexy existential crises and emotional conundrums while trying to find out what the hell we’re really looking for. I would say things got much better today. This is the first night in which I haven’t felt like falling asleep for the sake of escapism; hence, the ability to blog.

As a brief aside from what I hope will become more like a blog to keep track of meaningful experiences and to update friends and family on my exploits here in Los Angeles, I’ll pose a question: what makes you who you are? Had I asked addressed that question more thoroughly before leaving, things might not have been so difficult, because I realized that I placed the majority of my identity, my Tyler Webbness, in the roles that I took nearly two decades to establish: Son. Brother. Friend. Confidante. Classmate. Student. It was so easy to place my identity in the way people saw me and how I actively affected them on a day-to-day basis. And regardless of what I believed to be true, that it is my responsibility to create who I am, I neglected the fact that my identity was in fact not self-originated but rather almost an exclusive product of my history, my facticity, that which I had been born into, and those with whom I was associated by default. Even the stories I’d chosen to reject affected me in a way that did not occur to me until, honestly, yesterday. And so when I finally got here and looked around and realized that oh my god I don’t know anybody, raw, existential capital-A Angst – the kind which I’d read about but never experienced – took up residence in my head, permeating my consciousness, sitting on the forefront of my cognition, parasitic and tortuous. Simply put, having no identity is no barrel of monkeys.

And so but anyway, it’s been a couple of days now and I’ve simply said yes. I’ve said yes to Angst, yes to self-origination, yes to the anguish of utterly inescapable freedom. As Annie Ross wails so soulfully in Altman’s take on life in the City of Angels, “I’m a prisoner of life.” And that’s okay. I was all along. You are too. But it just comes down to acknowledging it. And it isn’t easy to ignore when you’re alone in a city of four million people after 18 years of the same routine. So I’ll stop preaching now and wrap this up.

What matters now is that from this moment on, the stories I choose to accept and those I choose to reject will play an active role in determining the kind of person I will be in months, years, decades. Now that freedom has been granted, so has responsibility. And so the pressure to make something of myself, something good, looms, alive and pulsing. I'm in for the long haul.