City of Wet Angels

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Cats and dogs.

That's one of the first cliches I heard as a little kid. My mom used it to describe really bad, hard, fast rain that we'd get from time to time in the NYC area.

Cats and dogs.

Dogs and cats.

It never rains like cats-n-dogs in LA, but it's pouring right now in an torrential manner that would be considered cats-n-dogs territory.

Raining on and off last couple of days. Sunny SoCal is getting dumped on by Mama Nature. More like getting pissed on. Crazy shit, only crazy because it's rare to hear one of those emergency messages pop up on the TV suggesting we move to higher ground because of the rain. I live in the slums of Beverly Hills... so the higher ground is implied. It's the flash flooding and landslides you have to cope with. Heck, our alley had poor drainage and flooded a few inches in a manner of minutes.

California needed the rain. The state suffered from a terrible drought. Worst in decades. It's the first bad one since I moved out West.

Hollywood is a magical place where dreams are manufactured. Winters are non existent in paradise. The amazing (near-perfect) ubiquitous weather spoils so many denizens of Los Angeles, so anytime there's a hint of precipitation falling out of the sky, everyone FREAKS THE FUCK OUT for no reason whatsoever. All because little droplets of the water fall from the sky.

Sweet Jesus, Los Angeles freaks are fucking freaks for freaking the fuck out about fucking water, man. What the fuck?

Those Hollywood Freaks cancel plans when it rains. Seriously. They stay home and grind social media and whine incessantly about how it is raining, meanwhile everyone else in the country mocks them for being a bunch of wussies for getting all bent out of shape because of a little water coming from the sky.

LA Freaks stay home from work and they don't go out and watch local TV news delivered by spray-tanned, botox talking heads spewing fear and paranoia about the dangerous water falling from the sky.

The collective anxiety about the dangerous rain forces people inside and they order in take out food, so if you try to order food it will take three to five hours for your delivery to arrive. Sure, the roads are somewhat empty except tourists, drug couriers, rent-a-hookers, and other delivery drivers. But even the empty roads cannot overcome the redonk backlog of take out orders. Drivers are swamped with deliveries. To complicate matters, half of the delivery force is also freaked out and called in sick, because they're afraid of driving in the rai.

The city of wet angels grinds to a halt.

Those Real-Plastic-Franken-House-Wives of Beverly Hills are morbidly afraid of the rain. Those vapid ditzes cancel everything. Nuking their social schedule: cocktail-drenched lunches, purse-dog grooming, shrink tune-ups, spinning classes, spa day or mani/pedi day. Everything. Cancelled.

Those Hollyweird douchenozzles and sleazebuckets? They cancelled all their meetings and screenings and rub-n-tugs in Koreatown. All because of a little water. Maybe their souls are so marinated in evil that those greedy fuck-stains will shrivel up and die from those tears from heaven?

Rain days. Yes, that's what LA freaks do. They take rain days. Similar to taking a day off back east or in the Midwest when it's snowing (moderately). There is some legitimate concern and public safety issue when it rains for the first time in months with slick, slick freeways. So many accidents in the first few hours after a storm. Truly dangerous with oil and gunk accumulation.

Winter in LA is a joke according to my East Coast standards. There's really two seasons... the "winter" and the rest of the year. Nicky gets bundled up anytime the temps dips under 60. The winters in SoCal are super mild.

At worst, it's in the mid-50s and rains a bit in January and February. LA gets roughly 50% of it's rain (14.2 inches per year) in the first two months of the year. The actual rainy season is four months (Dec thru March) and LA gets 85% of its rainfall in the four month span.

Shit, it's been dry the last few months. That's bad news for farmers in the central valley. It's dangerous for potential brush fires up and down all those hills scattered about... all that prime real estate can go up in a flash. The reservoirs were low. SoCal's water problems have been well documented in Hollywood. Just watch Chinatown with Jack Nicholson.

Nicky gazes out her office window and sees the LA River (actually more like the viaduct you see in so many movies like Terminator 2). The good-old LA River was barely a trickle the last few months... until now.

The rain arrived. The freaks got more and more nervous and paranoid with each droplet. Hard. Rain. Hard. Buckets. Cats-n-dogs. Stream in my alley. It never rains that hard in SoCal. Yet... it happened.

Karl Rove's weather machine has been working overtime in 2014. I got fucked during the polar vortex at the start of the year and stuck in NYC for 10 days until I could finally get back to balmy LA. But no complaints right now. That rain freaks out my neighbors, but I love it. We needed it.

I crank out some of my best work when it rains. That's why I missed living in Seattle. It was always the absolute perfect writing weather in the 206. Something about the sounds of the keys on the keyboard meshing with the rain sounds. Fleeting moments of harmony. Rhythms of nature and that kind of stuff.

Noah Baumbach made a movie about me with his film Greenberg. Seriously. I'm fucking Greenberg... a moody New Yorker who is a fish out of water in LA, oh plus he doesn't drive. In Greenberg, the main character "Greenberg" plays a song for his brother's assistant Florence. He mentioned that LA-area DJs only played that song when it was raining. But at the time, the weather was its usual sunny self, yet Greenberg played the rain song anyway. Pretty obvious what's going on inside his twisted noggin. Although pleasant and sunny in real life, in Greenberg's universe, it's raining, which is why he's playing the certain rain song that ONLY gets played by well-adjusted disc jockeys when it's raining outside.

Sunny outside. Sunny inside. That's the ultimate goal (pursuit of happiness).

Rainy outside. Sunny inside. That's the type of people I like to be around.

Sunny outside. Rainy inside. Well, that's Greenberg. I am Greenberg. I am rain.

Rainy outside. Rainy inside. Rainy all the time. I like to make my own rain. Makes me appreciate the sunny days... whenever they return.

Here is that little number by Albert Hammond... It Never Rains In Southern California....

Story of My Life

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

This scene from Greenberg sums up me in LA...

For more about my fascination with Greenberg, check out Whiskey and Ice Cream.

Whiskey and Ice Cream

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

"I have to stop watching this movie," Nicky screamed. "Why am I watching Greenberg when I fucking live it? I am the Florence character. All I do is drive your grumpy ass around L.A. and run errands like fetching you whiskey and ice cream sandwiches."

For the record, I like ice cream sandwiches but I don't drink whiskey anymore. To quote that Widespread Panic song, "Whiskey makes my eyes look mean."

I have Irish blood pumping through my veins, well, at least 50% of it. The last thing I'm going to do is get loaded on liquid plutonium every night and hope I don't set off a nuclear implosion with my fiery temper.  Whiskey escalates it; marijuana sedates it.

Booze and cocaine destroyed some of my favorite writers. I actively avoid both because I still cherish life and have a couple of more things I have to write before I die, which I won't be able to do if I crawl inside a bottle or collapse my nostrils by snorting Bolivian marching powder.

The older I get, the more I adhere to the main key to life by Johnny Hughes (former rock-n-roll manager, gambler, and author): "You only need one girl, one vice, and one drug. Anything more than one is instant trouble."

Now, that's some deep shit from a true wise man that has lived the hard live on the road. It's not an easy life, but most of the time we fuck stuff up because we make things more complicated than they really are. If you're not getting suffocated by your own neurosis, then you'll drown in your own self-loathing.

Director Noah Baumbach (Squid and the Whale and Greenberg) and I have a lot in common, mostly because we grew up roughly the same era in NYC. Yet, we also had a totally different experience because he had bohemian/intellectual parents supporting his pursuit of the arts. I only went to Wall Street because 1) I like to gamble, and 2) it would get my family off my back. I fell into that role at two different times. And in both instances, one day I woke up and realized I was living in someone else's movie. I was living someone else's idealized life. It wasn't mine. One day you're numb to everything and the next you're sitting on a subway wondering why you are wearing someone else's clothes.

Every once in a while, you get to break out of that song you're imprisoned in, or bust out of that glossy Hollywood film where you were only a mere actor (and you're dreaded parents the cantankerous director and duplicitous producer). The most exhilarating moments in life occur when you improvise and go off the script. It drives purists berserk, but it's what makes life worth living.

Breaking out of someone else's narrative isn't easy. Literature, art, film, music is filled with the heartache surrounding that disconnect. Walking away from someone else's scripted life is painful. Miserable. But once you go your own way... the relief is immense and the freedom is intoxicating.... until all of those lofty and fleeting feelings pass, you're still wrought with anxiety and fearful of the future. But heck, at least it's your choice and you're not filling the roles of one-dimensional characters that you're parental units and society wanted to thrust you in. That's why they (they = parents, teachers, society et al) make rebellion as insufferable as possible. Blazing a new path is a lonely pursuit as an individual. But as a group and collective, a rebellious pursuit can bring the system to its knees. That's the real reason why the government outlawed LSD. They originally thought dosing the public would turn the masses into sheeple, but instead it enlightened the masses and turned them against the machine.

The kids today are rebelling, but it's not like what happened in the 60s with massive protests and flower power. Today's revolution is happening on the internet. Millennials refuse to pay for anything. They indirectly have crashed Hollywood and the recording industry and the publishing industry. It wasn't a noble pursuit like their hippie parents who wanted the throw a monkey wrench into the gears of capitalism. Rather, these e-kids are simply too pampered coddled,and entitled, and that acute selfishness has fueled the current revolution, which has brought major institutions to their knees. The paradigm has shifted so quick and so fast that the white-bred dinosaurs got caught with their pants down. The old guard can no longer control the new guard, so now they'll rush to those used car salesmen in DC and beg them to shut down the internet, or reform the internet, or do something to keep those meddling kids from fucking up their rackets.

Sorry for the tangent. Back to Greenberg.

If you haven't seen it (trailer is here), it's on HBO a lot these days Greenberg is about a morose New Yorker who doesn't drive and he moves to L.A. for six weeks to house sit for his uber-rich brother. He fails to reconnect with a group of friends he knew in his 20s. And to complicate matters, he screws up a relationship with his brother's assistant. All the while, he doesn't drive and feels like an alien visiting another planet.

Several scenes from Greenberg hit home. They hit home too hard for Nicky, which is why she couldn't keep watching it. Sure, I'm an exaggerated version of Greenberg, but there are moments he says things that I've actually said, or thought. The best dialogue is not some smarmy Sorkin dialogue, or a witty repartee by Mamet, but it's the matter of fact lines that match the internal chatter running inside my head. That's why I dig Noah Baumbach so much because he's able to write simple lines that are embedded with complex internal issues. So whenever Greenberg talks, it's sort of like hearing myself think out loud.

No wonder Nicky was freaked out.

The other day I woke up and realized I was Greenberg from Greenberg. This scene from the film is the perfect way to describe me in Los Angeles... a lonely march uphill.

Everyone at some point, most men my age wake up in the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime. "You may ask yourself, 'how did I get here?'"

It's at that precise point you question the cliche of a life you're living. Most of the time, you accept that's what your role is. "Same as it ever was." If you don't, well then you're ensconced in a mid-life crisis. I never had a mid-life crisis, because I have weekly existential skirmishes with myself, so all of that angst doesn't build up and result in a destructive Vesuvius-like explosion. I liken my weekly bouts with existentialism like that scene in Fight Club when Ed Norton is beating the shit out of himself. That's me. Whaling away on my own dense skull. I lived so hard and fast in my 20s that I never thought I'd make it to 30, and frankly, I didn't care. And then in my 30s, I caught a big break and finally had a shot to do something as a writer, and that's all I focused on was not fucking up that opportunity. But along the way, I lost sight of everything I originally set out to do.

Last year, I woke up one morning in San Francisco, and I was in a Talking Heads song with a beautiful wife in a beautiful house, wondering how the fuck did I get there and cognizant that 40 is just around the corner?

I first enjoyed Greenberg as a dark comedy because it was about a New Yorker who lived in L.A. and didn't drive anywhere. I mean, that's totally my next novel. But the more I watch the film, the more I begin to understand how the film is a neat parallel for my relationship with Los Angeles. One of the opening parts of the film is Florence driving in her car, and you get to see L.A. like everyone else sees it... from inside a car. The first dialogue is a skiddish Florence asking if she could merge into a lane. That's so fucking L.A. that I missed it the first time I saw the flick. For me, that's the quintessential L.A. experience because I'm sitting in the passenger seat while Nicky drives around. The bulk of my L.A. experience that opening scene. Trapped inside an insular bubble as daily life whizzes by.

It's days like today when I miss riding the Muni in San Francisco, which smelled like cheap old-lady perfume, urine, BO, weed, and Chinese herbs.