everyone wants to know

this was how i got to work in los angeles

Everyone wants to know, they ask with such incredulity that I might have just told them that I ride a dinosaur to work.  “Why would you move from California to Seattle?”  There are so many answers that I choose one.  “We’re from Seattle.”  This only confuses them further because then they want to know, “You mean you lived in Seattle before, then you moved to California, then decided to move back here?”  I get what they’re saying, to them it just doesn’t make sense that having lived in Seattle, then California that I would choose to move back.

Sometimes I take it a step further.  “We lived in Los Angeles.”  I will say, and those who have spent a significant amount of time there understand everyone else does not.  At this point I usually stop because they will either be people who don’t understand why anyone would leave Los Angeles or can’t understand and nothing that I can say will change their mind.

It’s been six months since the move and every time I show my ID’s or change an address we have to answer this question.  Every time I answer it I mentally list all the reasons why we left.

Reasons for leaving;

-traffic

-self centered people

-distance from home

-career changes

-constant sunny weather

-smog

-loneliness

-expensive... everything

I am surprised that by the time I get to this part of the list I stop thinking about all the things that drove me crazy and start thinking about all the things I loved and miss.  I begin to get confused, why did I leave Los Angeles?

I’ve mentioned in the blog before how when we were in LA I longed for Seattle and took joy in the things that connected me to this wonderful city.  My Seattle Mariners license plate was a badge of honor that I displayed with pride.  I simply wanted to be reminded of the city I left at twenty four, for the lonely, smoggy, self-centered urban war zone of Los Angeles.

Now in Seattle I take an equal amount of pride in my California license plate, my Intelligentsia coffee mug embossed with the bear flag, and I watch television shows and listen to music that remind me of the places I spent my mid twenties.

Am I destined to long to be living somewhere other than where I currently am?  Or can I not as the Ram Dass professes Be Here Now?  I remember back to May of 2010, Jaime and I were finally going on our honeymoon to Maui.  Because airline tickets were cheaper from Seattle to Maui than from LA, we decided to drive home and spend an extra week then fly to Maui from there.

In all our previous trips out of LA, just before we left I began to identify on a communal level with everything around me.  As much as I tried to reject the city I had slipped right into her consciousness without realizing it.  To my utter disbelief I began to miss the city.  When we would return I was stunned to find that I felt like I had returned home.  It wasn’t my real home, but I began to feel more comfortable in Los Angeles than Seattle.

In departing for our honeymoon I didn’t feel any of that, I wanted to get out of LA county as fast as possible, leave nothing but a trail of dust settling behind me.  In Maui, like so many before me, I didn’t want to leave.  Yes I wanted to stay there because it was such a freeing place with immeasurable beauty and life, but also because I knew that once we left that island we would have to return to LA.  Over and over I imagined leaving everything we owned there and never going back, making a new life anywhere else.

On our return trip home our car got stuck in a freak snow storm and we spent the night in a hotel at Mt. Shasta City.  I had been planning on driving straight through but this snowstorm halted all that, in the hotel room I felt relieved to not have to return to LA for one more night.  I no longer felt like I belonged there, it wasn’t welcoming.  I hated my job, Jaime hated her job, our best friends had moved to Brooklyn while we were away and our other friends would be leaving in the next year as well.  Things felt empty.

Not long after we returned I concluded that I was ready to leave Los Angeles.  I didn’t need to pack up immediately (our lease wasn’t up until November).  In my heart I knew that when Jaime finally came to me and suggested that we should move home, I would not disagree.  I didn’t have to wait long, by June Jaime was no longer interested in becoming a Hollywood actor and in August we began talking about moving.  By the end of August we had a location and date; Seattle, October 31st.

I suppose I don’t really have an answer for those who ask why I would leave LA.  I could tell them that it’s not really the paradise that it seems so many imagine.  I could tell them the horror stories about what it is like to fall on hard times in a foreign place where the city is virtually made up of only rich or poor.

On the other hand it has many redeeming qualities.  Six months later I miss the consistent warm weather, the beautiful Summer evenings, walking with Jaime and our dog Olive in Griffith park, I miss Los Feliz and Silverlake, I miss the feeling of being in the middle of all the hustle of Hollywood, I miss all the little surprises that a city like LA has waiting around every corner.  

What it really comes down to however is the fact that I don’t believe that you should live in a city when you don’t want to be there.  We are free creatures who have the choice to live and be wherever we want, there may be factors that draw you to specific places but the choice is still yours.  I remind myself constantly that what is possessing me is not genuine love for LA but rather a nostalgic memory of the best times I had there and the feeling of being somewhere other than where I am.  I believe I will return many times in my life and I will be able to visit all the places I love and I won’t be hampered by the reality of living there.  In the end I would rather be miserable in Seattle than miserable in Los Angeles.

1,100 miles

last signs of beauty until you drive out of LA

It’s 1,100 miles from Seattle to Los Angeles and the directions are fairly simple.

-Get on 1-5 drive south for 1,100 miles

-Take Los Feliz blvd exit.

These deceptively simply directions can make the trip look shorter than feel longer.

The day after we returned from Los Angeles with a new lease I celebrated my 24th birthday.  Looking back on it now I can’t believe that my parents didn’t try to stop us from going.  At the time 24 seemed incredibly old I thought that having lived on my own for the last three years that I was prepared to live 1,100 miles from all my family and take on any of the challenges life could throw at me.  The 27 year old me could tell some stories that would scare the shit out of me.

The count down was on, we had one month to get our affairs in order before we left Washington what we thought was for good. I began taking boxes home from work and we started packing up our life which was akin to weeding a garden which had been growing untamed for three years.  Those weeds had grown deep roots and we had had to dig deep to get them up, then instead of throwing those weeds in the compost we packed them up into boxes.  A lot of boxes.

I have a problem with keeping things, I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder but I’m definitely one step below, I keep meaningful receipts, tickets to old baseball games and theater performances, bags from items I have bought as well as their tags.  Theses things all got packed up into boxes along with two full sets of silverware, three electric shavers, five boxes labeled keepsakes, and two boxes of unbuilt IKEA furniture.  When all was said and done we packed a 17 foot U-Haul to the brim and still managed to fill our car.  We even had a garage sale and were still over flowing with stuff.

Days away from our moving date and we were mostly packed.  Halloween was on Monday (our moving day) the Saturday before was my older brothers wedding.  It was enjoyable and afforded us the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to family before we were headed out.  I expected the goodbyes to feel bittersweet but they didn’t, they mostly just mad me excited for the future.  I know Jaime and I didn’t share the same feelings about this as me, I knew that as excited as she was to finally be leaving it was hard for her and I was anticipating many nights in LA where she would lay in bed with debilitating grief for her distant friends and family.

The night before we moved we slept in my parents basement on their fold out couch, a 17 foot U-Haul with a dolly hitched to the back and our car strapped in sat outside on the street containing every thing we owned.  The following morning we woke up at 5am, it was still dark outside and we forced a sedative down our cats throat.  We said goodbye to our parents and loaded up into the cab of the truck and as we started down I-5 the tears started for Jaime, big wet sad tears like little children cry when they are genuinely sad.

Then somewhere around Enchanted Village (about 15 miles down the road) our cat lost her fucking mind.  She whaled as if she was being jabbed with a hot poker and clawed at her carrier door so hard I thought she might rip her claws out.  We stopped the car to try and settle her down but she wouldn’t.  I couldn’t get her to relax or at the very least to be quiet, in turn I didn’t know what to do... we’d been away from home for 20 minutes and I already didn’t know what to do.  It hit me like an incoming tidal wave that I was jobless and homeless and all I wanted in that moment was to turn the truck around and unpack everything back into our apartment.  But somehow, don’t ask me how because I really don’t know the cat calmed down and we were able to get her into her carried, soon I calmed down too.

* * *

If you’ve made the drive from Seattle to LA there are three landscapes you experience.  The first is Washington/Oregon, full of small run down towns resting at the edge of an evergreen filled forrest, blue-green rivers slicing through them like they were cut by an unsteady knife.  The drive is easy the views are enjoyable and things seem to move by quickly, before I knew it we were stopping for lunch at a Taco Time in Eugene Oregon (those of you from Washington should note that the Taco Times in Oregon are not the same).

The second landscape begins in southern Oregon and continues down through the Siskiyous in northern California.  Giant snow capped mountains, rolling hills of fir trees.  Deep fjords with black glassy water and Mt. Shasta sitting like a big grandmother looking over her grandchildren.  This part of the drive you don’t want to end, there is so much to look at and be in awe of it takes everything inside me not to stop the car there and say, “I’ve gone far enough.”

We stopped right in the middle of this for the night in Redding California, a city which as far as I can tell contains a Motel 6 and a Super 8.  I’ve stayed in both and on this particular occasion we stayed in the Super 8.  Laying on that bed in the room watching Mythbusters for the first time, all the fear from earlier was far behind me and for a brief evening I didn’t have any worries or fears or stresses about anything.  Navigating a new city, finding a job and balancing a very tight budget would all come later but for me on that evening I watched superhero myths get busted in a giddy excited state.

The third landscape is mind numbing in its simplicity.  Mile after mile after mile after mile of brown flat nothing.  One could become a connoisseur of these little truck stop towns and billboards urging you to “stop at Auntie Ethels, Next two exits.”

The blandness of this drive stretches time out, sign post seem to go backwards and you feel like you’ll never get to your destination.  This doesn’t change until the Golden State Freeway splits off and you take the Hollywood freeway all the way right into the heart of LA LA land.  Right into the heart of our new home.  1,100 miles later we pull up in front of our building.