Turn Down for What

Here's a juxtaposition of my two lives.

Saturday night I am at a rooftop party staring at a baby. A loud rock band is playing extremely loud, 350 of the 400 people on this roof are smoking cigarettes and actively doing key bumps. Party baby doesn't care. Party baby is riding on his dad's shoulders as they inch closer and closer to the front row.

I'd like to imagine the events leading up to this scene were as follows. This 29 year old father heard about a blowout party down the street and he really wanted to go. But fuck...he has a kid. His options are clearly to scramble for a baby sitter or you know be a responsible adult and raise his fucking kid.
But then party baby enters and says "Let's both go! I'll help you pick up chicks, it will be great! Don't leave me here with a fucking stranger, it's Saturday night I'm ready to rage!"

So party baby and his father ended up at a rooftop party in Venice with enough booze to intoxicate the USC Greek System and enough drugs to keep the Avalon in business for a year. And you may immediately assume that I just hang out with scumbags because well, I never met a vice I didn't like, but the truth is, no one was surprised by this. Venice is just the type of community where everyone goes to the neighborhood party. The bros drink fireball and do blow downstairs, the babies ride on their father's shoulders and watch the band.

When the riot police came to shut down the party, I would like to think party baby had scouted out a back door escape route so he and his father could disappear down the alley and get home in time to pound a couple eps of sponge bob before bed.

Flash forward to Tuesday, in my catatonic state from the weekend I lean against the sink while I fill a comically oversized water bottle with tap water. See we have a water cooler, but it doesn't pour at a fast enough rate for me, so I turn on the sink full blast so I can fill my water bottle and sit back down as quickly as possible. Then this happened.

Art Department Girl: Oh my god, what the hell are you doing?

Me: I'm hungover.

Her: Do NOT drink that shit. LA has the most disgusting water in the world.

Me: I strongly doubt that, this is America, the leaders of the free world. In Africa the tap water has maggots. In Brazil it has dick parasites.

Her: Seriously you should NOT be drinking that ever, or cooking with it. Definitely don't brush your teeth with it, if you MUST shower in it, turn the shower off while you lather up.

Me: What do you mean, IF you must shower. I shower like 3 times a day.

Her: Three times a day?? WHY!?!?!?!

Me: Well when I wake up, after a workout and before bed.

Her: But we're in a drought.

Me: Well I don't really give a fuck, if LA runs out of water it will probably only affect the poor people.

Her: You really are a terrible person aren't you.

Me: Honest.

Her: Well still, if you drink that shit you will die.

Of course I wanted to get into the fact that she has NO fucking idea. I eat like a 400 pound computer hacker, I drink like a sailor and that's just the tip of the iceberg. If the worst thing going into my body is the dreaded Los Angeles county poison water, I think I'm doing, JUST fine.

That would be the sweet irony though wouldn't it? Like when you hear your favorite rock star has just died and you're like oh, heroin? Naw, he stepped on an old land mine while doing charity work in Africa. But I suppose if I died of LA tap water, at least the positive things would be remembered as opposed to the negatives. Philip Seymour Hoffman overdoses and he's a junkie, Michael Jackson gets poisoned by his doctor he's a saint. That old thing.

Or there is the extreme likelihood that I am killed when my car explodes in the next few days. See my car has a broken radiator, a blown strut, several leaking hoses and a hole in the gas tank. It straight up leaks gas, and some of the leaking gas fumes enter my venting system. To rephrase this, people often commit suicide by this method, only there is slightly more intent. I drive around with my windows down to decrease the toxicity of these fumes.

Now to a normal person this sounds insane on several levels. One, it cannot be healthy...at all. The second being that my gas tank literally leaks all day, it is a colossal waste of money. But if I put 2 gallons in the car in the morning and 2 gallons in after work I can physically make it to work and back without dying. And the truth is, that's really only what matters to me. If I can figure out some cheap band-aid to get me to the next weekend, I will ALWAYS take that over a permanent solution.

So why don't I just take my car to get fixed on a weekend, you know and stop living in perpetual fear of exploding? Well that would require me to spend more than one second on a weekend doing something that I do not want to do.

See, I am capable of waking up on Saturday morning, driving my car to Culver City, ubering home and sending my dad the invoice. Those are all things I can do, but the thing is...the beer fridge is closer to the couch. It's kind of just how I live my life, I live on a razor thin edge that could just collapse at any moment. You know if I would have just gone to that alcohol class in college there wouldn't have been a warrant out for my arrest in Indiana for 4 years. But that alcohol class would have robbed me of one evening in which I made a pledge run naked through a sorority with the words "Will you go to formal with me?" and it would have robbed me of a night where I took a thousand jagerbombs with said sorority girl and had a sloppy hook up on a frat couch.

And yes, when I inevitably pull a Paul Walker and die in a firey blaze or some girl refuses to give me road head because the gas fumes are giving her a headache, at that point I will be full of regret. But the path of least resistance has led me here thus far, and right now life isn't that bad.

I also have just an irrational faith that everything will always be fine. For example, I have a flight to Park City in 48 hours and I have nothing. All of my winter clothing is probably in a box in Indianapolis. I haven't done laundry since my birthday, my house is in such a state of disarray that I am sure I will come back from Park City to a massive insect infestation and yet I don't really care.

I'll probably get on my flight Friday, drink heavily all weekend and find a way to ski a couple days. Somehow I'll make it from Park City to the Salt Lake City airport Monday morning and show up for work...and when I get home Monday night, I'll probably still have a house. My car probably will not explode, and I'll still have this long laundry list of problems. But the thing is, I WILL ALWAYS have a laundry list of problems.

Do your laundry, clean your house, fix your car...then you start worrying about shit like when am I going to get married and am I fulfilled by my job. What am I going to do about my unfortunate credit score. 'Tis better to have more immediate short term problems to get in the way of larger more real things. Because at the end of the day it's much easier to say fuck it to some laundry and go get drunk than it is to say fuck it to having non-elective surgery.

So yes, every weekend that you say you are doing some laundry or getting some personal shit done, I just cannot relate to you, at all. Unless you just use that as a bullshit reply because you don't want your coworkers to know what you're really about (which I totally get, it's easier to say cleaning the house than I'm going to a music festival at which point I will embark on a 48 hour acid trip) we're probably just not the same. See my weekends are reserved for spending quality time with quality people, 50 mile bike rides, sky diving, surfing, going to the gun range, playing golf, building potato cannons and yes...lots and lots of excessive drinking. And I'm not fucking sorry for it. Maybe some day I'll be a sad allegory of a kid that refused to grow up and tragedy befell him.

But this Saturday I'll be sipping some hot damn at 10,000 feet shredding the gnar while you get your car fixed. Turn down for what.