on LA: What I Imagine a Typical Day Would Be Like if I Lived in LA

6:00 am

I wake to the sound of Anderson .Paak playing faintly down in the street. Also salsa, from the apartment next door. The woman who lives above me is picking at her acoustic guitar. Someone down the block is a playing some Tame Impala tune. Plus there’s like four hundred cars honking their horns directly outside, and my roommates are having a screaming argument over which one of them stole the other’s idea for a screenplay about a successful comedian who returns to his small-town home to spend time with his sick father. I drink a LaCroix and head to yoga.

7:15 am

During yoga, I offer this very famous literary author named Amy an adjustment on her Warrior Pose and during the mid-class LaCroix break she asks me if I’ve ever read anything by Philip Roth. I say that I have. Then she asks me if I’d be interested in reading a draft of an essay she’s writing. I tell her I’m in a rush, but we exchange numbers. I make a mental note to check out how her latest release is selling before deciding whether I’ll call her back.

8:00 am

For breakfast, I swing by a new eatery called Baconslut and pick up a LaCroix and a banana that’s been held over a skillet where bacon is frying for two minutes. Delicious.

8:30 am

I accidentally make eye contact with a guy on the train and he reads me a scene from his pilot script about a successful actor forced to return to the small town where he grew up when his father gets sick. When he’s done he asks me if I found the dialogue believable and I say I did. Then a man standing nearby yells to the whole train, “Hey, there’s a guy giving feedback down here!” and suddenly everyone on the train is shouting scenes from their pilot scripts at me. They’re all about either successful actors or comedians returning to the small towns where they grew up when their father’s get sick. It’s all super cliché and makes me feel pretty good about the pilot script I’ve been working on, where a successful author returns to a mid-sized suburb to confront his mother.

9:00 am

I arrive at Computech Media, a digital marketing agency, in time to begin the workday. Everyone looks like they just came from Coachella, which makes my little J. Crew ensemble stand out in a bad way. There are vases of orchids all over the place, also vintage pinball machines and Betty Page pin-up posters with Che Guevara heads pasted over her breasts. Truly a spectacle. During the morning staff meeting, a woman wearing a camouflage jacket over a tiger print bikini, smelling of weed and rosé, reads a found poem made up of death row inmate’s last words. When she’s done the CEO, Bryce, asks everyone to pitch him nine ideas on how the imagery in the poem can be translated into GIFs that Lorde can project onstage during her summer tour. I think how crazy it is that an hour-long meeting can go by so quickly when you have no idea what the fuck is going on.

12:00 pm

Today is my performance review. Bryce walks to my desk and maintains direct eye contact while telling me an extremely graphic story about having sex with his secretary’s aunt at a funeral. When he’s done he says I cringed seven times while he was talking, and asks if I think I can get down to three cringes by my next review in six months. I tell Bryce I’ll do my best, and crack another LaCroix as soon as he walks out of my office.

6:00 pm

I spend the rest of my day teaching our newest influencer signee, a Korean rapper, American slang terms for marijuana. For dinner, I decide to go to Wolfgang Puck’s latest restaurant, an Asian fusion joint. As I inspect the menu, all I can see is variations of Puck’s signature caviar-topped pizza. I ask my server what makes this place Asian fusion, and she reminds me that I can add bean sprouts, peanut sauce, or julienned carrots to my pie.

6:55 pm

Leaving the restaurant, I bump into that author, Amy. She asks if I’m still interested in reading a draft of her essay. I tell her I’ll call her when I have time. Before she walks away she asks me if I think gentrification is bad. I say I do. Then she asks me if I know who François Truffaut is. I say I do. She says she had a feeling I would, and winks.

7:05 pm

The clerk at the bodega says they’re all out of LaCroix and I suddenly become aware that within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is theirs and theirs alone, and that nothing I accomplish can save me from one day dying and having my corpse lowered down into their domain. But then the clerk tells me that there’s LaCroix at this vegan grocery store down the street, so I head over there.

7:20 pm

In search of the store, I stumble into a clash between feuding improv teams. A guy in a flannel shirt says to another guy in a flannel shirt, “Here’s a suggestion: Go fuck yourself.” That guy starts writhing around, pretending to fuck himself, and then a third guy in a flannel shirt criticizes his decision to contort his body around and says that if he were working from the top of his intelligence he would have simply mimed masturbating. Then they all start arguing about what ‘working from the top of your intelligence’ means. As I watch, something strikes my head from behind, and everything goes black…

8:00 pm

Briefly regain consciousness, tied and gagged in the trunk of a moving car. My head swims, and for a moment I almost grasp what “working from the top of your intelligence” means before passing out again.

10:10 pm

Wake up tied to a chair in a cheap hotel room. Amy is watching me from the bed. She asks if I was ever planning to read her essay and I admit that I probably wasn’t. She starts crying. “People think I’ve got it made,” she says. “Endowment money. These rad frames for my glasses. Blurbs from Kakutani. But sometimes I feel like, within the walls and beneath the streets of this city there are seething legions of vermin all tearing at one another in an endless, seething orgy of unimaginable horror, and that really the city is…”

I stop her. “Amy,” I say, “I’d love to read the essay.” Amy smiles.