Single Dude Redux

There is an inherent problem with getting older, your actions have increasingly severe repercussions. And with the advent of social media everyone puts the version of their life on display that they think you have come to expect.

For the past few years this blog has been a projection of what I was when I was 22, a time that I equated with pure happiness, and a place I wanted to live mentally and emotionally forever. When I was 22 I was a misogynistic, womanizing, alcoholic, drug addicted frat guy that behaved in ways so reprehensible that it's amazing anyone would associate with me at all. And the worst part about all of it was that I thought it was "cool."

The next five years I would hide behind that monster of a persona to keep this blog up and running as "social satire." But the thing about satire, even of the darkest variety, is that it has to be so deeply planted in absurdity that there is no way to implicate the author in his own despicable content.

For example, the famous piece 'A Modest Proposal' is about the Irish potato famine and poverty in general, the author argues that if the Irish are so hungry, why don't they just eat their children. Now a few extremists might say "ya, fuck the Irish, eat your kids!" But any rational person would see through this immediately and feel the overarching message of social injustice. But the reason Swift is able to get away with this heavy handed  hyperbole is because he was never in fact a cannibal.

And while I never ate Irish children, I did live out the message of this blog for a long time, and it's hard to say "Oh no, I don't really think it's cool to degrade women, minorities and poor people, I just make fun of that shit now." It's disingenuous and furthermore cowardly. So from now on, nothing on this blog will be veiled in metaphor, nothing will be bullshit, it's going to be real. I came to the realization lately that not a whole lot of people actually know who I am. I'm this character that I have created by my own fault, and being fake is no way to go through life.

This doesn't mean that I won't do entries titled "Why You Should Go to Coachella and get Hammered for Three Days." I firmly believe you should and it's not because I think it will improve the music or it will be a good opportunity to go on a mid-spring vacation. I just think renting a house with some buds and keeping the liquor flowing sounds like a good time. You'll probably come back with some stories that you'll never forget…

And I cannot impress upon you the importance of a good story.

Every night when I send the call sheet out to the people on my tv show I tell a story or a fun fact. Obviously the hope is that the chairman of NBC reads one of these emails one day and thinks to himself "holy shit, this guy is hilarious, how do we keep him around."

But the chances of that are probably one in a million. What's more likely though is that everyone that reads these anecdotes will get to know me a little better. When you share your stories with someone, you share part of your soul as it is a little window into your life. And they don't always have to be flattering stories, in fact my favorite stories to tell are about me fucking up, because people love to be reminded that everyone is human once in a while.

I got fired for this blog once in Chicago because I senselessly berated a bucktoothed coworker for yapping about her daughter's head lice. And that will make for a great bit in a screenplay some day, but it also makes me feel like a colossal dick head.

I've grown up in the past 5 years, you just wouldn't know because I'm still making dickjokes and posting instagram photos of empty shot glasses.

No more.

I want this blog to be something I can be proud of, something that you don't have to be ashamed to laugh at. Sure I'm always going to be me, but maybe just me with a few less veiled drug references. I still go out pretty hard on the weekends, still pull all nighters in Vegas from time to time but there's a happy medium between having fun and being an asshole, that's the space I'm going to try to live. There is plenty of negativity in the world without me adding to it, so without further ado, welcome to the new SingleDudeinLA.

***

I still remember the summer after I graduated college like it was yesterday. I'm not sure if I've ever told this story before, so here it goes... I, like countless others, had failed to acquire the $65,000 starting salary in corporate America that had been promised to me by my school for 4 years, and in fact my career prospects looked pretty bleak in general. I had one job offer to sell Easy Mac in Fairfield, IL. Fairfield is a one stoplight town 2 hours from St. Louis, and one hour from Effingham (and as any Indy person that has ever driven to St. Louis can tell you GREAT Nike outlet in Effingham) Needless to say, I turned down the offer and decided to spend my summer drinking in Bloomington...or so I thought.

As everyone slowly moved away to begin their new lives, I began sleeping until about noon or whenever Big Red would open. I would go to Target and buy super soakers, the liquor store and buy beer and sit patiently on the porch waiting for summer school roommates to come home and play. After the first 6 weeks of summer I was left utterly alone, with zero life direction. So when Paul Bird swung into town one night, bought me a flatline and dared me to drive to New York with him, I did.

I had never in my life been to New York City, but my first taste of it was living with a cocaine dealer in a Sigma Pi live out on the Hofstra campus in West Hempstead, Long Island. Of course we made the most of it, I had an ex-girlfriend living close by and a bunch of recently graduated friends with big homes in Manhasset and not a lot else going on. We would spend our days at the beach in Port Washington and take the LIRR into Penn Station every night and get into trouble in Manhattan, I never wanted it to end.

Of course that is not a sustainable lifestyle when you're broke and unemployed, so I booked a one way flight back to Indianapolis out of Westchester and prepared for my impending doom. By some miracle, when I landed penniless in Indianapolis, I saw a friendly face, who was in fact heading back to Bloomington...a place where I still had a home...so in lieu of calling my mother and dealing with the beginning of life in my parents' basement, I ran away to college one more time...a permanent pausing mechanism on reality.

The next day however, my whole life changed. My buddy Jack, whom I had been living with for roughly the past 4 years needed a wing man to drive to LA with. Being a safety issue, his parents agreed to finance the trip and stake us for a bit while we looked for jobs and a place for him to live.

It was the roadtrip of a lifetime. We drove from Chicago to Lincoln, which during the College World Series, is one of the biggest party towns in the country. The Brothers Bar in Lincoln sold $5 64 ounce buckets of screwdriver. Needless to say, Cornhusker fan for life. Next we drove from Lincoln to Aspen where my trusty friend Jake was vacationing and so of course we stormed Belly Up/Eric's/Caribou Club and had arguably the best night of the summer. From Aspen we traveled west toward Vegas, somewhere around Utah Michael Jackson died, and we miracuously made it into Los Angeles 3 days later with some slight winnings.

It was my second time in LA, I had previously come out for a 'Networking trip.' During the trip we had meetings at UTA, William Morris, Endeavor, Fox, HBO, Paramount, 42 West, 2929, Benderspink and they all said roughly the same thing. When you get here, you'll get a job in the mailroom at CAA and from there you'll figure everything out. My immediate thought was, I'll never make it in LA because people that work in agencies wear suits, even in the summer and I am a heavy sweater.

So with that my LA dream was basically dead. At this point, it still hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to make a living as a writer. My dream was to be a development exec at a big production company, be the guy to green light $2 million dollar coming of age indies. But first thing's first, find a job, find a place to live.

Actually, first thing's first...find a place to crash tonight and go get drunk. We threw our bags at my friend Michael's house and marched directly to Happy Endings where we spent all of our Vegas winnings in that stupid crane game trying to catch a live lobster.

The rest of the summer was more of the same, Jack would interview for jobs, I would walk around Hollywood taking it all in. We had no money, nowhere to live, every day it was my job to try to acquire us housing for the night. We stayed at various fraternities at both USC and UCLA. We stayed with a then struggling actor who now appears on the Lindsay Lohan fuck list. We stayed on the floor of any IU grad we met, we slept in an old Acura RL, $40 hotel rooms, we slept on the beach.

But despite being broke and unemployed, we managed to take LA for all it was worth. We squeezed in a 3 day trip to Newport for Fourth of July, we did a birthday party in Vegas, we partied in the hills, we tricked film financing companies to give us job interviews...

But then it was over. One day, Jack signed a lease on an apartment and got a job at UTA and even though I had undergone a summer's worth of LA hazing, I would not be getting initiated. It was time to go home, for real this time.

The saddest day of my life was when I got on board that airplane at LAX heading back to Indianapolis, it was like the end of a great dream, that you know you will never have back. After you wake up, you can try to go back to sleep and recapture it, but it's gone. I knew I would likely never have the balls to come back, life gets in the way of dreams sometimes, and it will always be something I talked about, but never did...get back to LA.

But then after two years of trying to rebuild my collegiate utopia in Chicago, a miracle happened. A 7 year old girl at Vernon Hills Elementary School got headlice. And her mom told fucking everyone about it at work, and I took a break from talking about how many shots I took on a Wednesday night at Kincade's to bitch and moan about how repulsive I found this entire family...and I got fired for it, which will likely go down as the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

Because in order for me to get staffed, in order for me to sell my own show, in order for me to ever win an award for writing, I had to be fired from CDW for trashing a coworker about her hygiene.

And maybe none of that will ever happen, but I made it back, and to me that was always going to be the ultimate longshot.

So I'm here now...things are going pretty well so far, and I'm never leaving again. And sure, it kicks ass to live in Venice now, stroll Abbot Kinney on the weekends, occasionally splurge on a $8 coffee from Intelligentsia. But every now and then, I close my eyes and remember sleeping on Venice Beach, looking at the stars in the August of 2011 wondering when the dream would end.

Well it hasn't yet and I hope it never does.