blast off!

Last Friday I mentioned that there was some big news coming, and now I am delivering on that news.  We are moving!  Yes, we are moving to Wordpress.com.  Blogspot was a great place to start, especially for someone like me who knew very little about blogging.  As the blog grew and my desires to expand the blog were realized, I began to understand the limits of what blogspot could do for me.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend blogspot to anyone just starting out.  But having investigated the capabilities and the customizations possible within wordpress they looked to be the best fit for the blog.

So what is changing?  Well, two major things; the first is the web address, you can now find us at www.secretlyimportant.wordpress.com.  The second major change is the general direction of the blog.

The old format was a Free-for-all of posts that could literally cover any topic that came to mind.  As we added more contributors I narrowed the range of topics a bit.  With the move comes a more specific topic range.  Here is a listing of topics that will be listed on the new blog.  Each section will have it’s own drop down menu a the top which you can navigate to and select from.

art:  visual arts, music, dance, theater, books, movies, television, comedy, etc.

community: events, restaurants, shows, sights, gardening, shopping, politics, sports, etc.

callings: articles concerning the struggle to reach the point in life where you can earn a living doing what you’re passionate about.

interviews: interviews with secretly important people.

contributor secrets: these posts can cover a broader range of topics that couldn’t be categorized but still fit with the themes of secretly important.

garden project: readers will be familiar with my documentation of my first gardening experiment.  all future posts on the topic will be found here.

We have a new mission statement as well:

Imagine there is a band you love, a book you read, a restaurant you frequent, or an opinion you have on a current event.  You may not think of these as important but here, they are.  They are secretly important.

What will set us apart from  the vast number of blogs already out there that cover the same ground as us?

What makes us different from your standard blog that reviews and informs on community events, options, people, and the arts, is that each post is written from the contributors distinct point of view.  How the topic effects the writer, how the writer relates to the topic, and what they mean to the writer are the most important factors to each post.

Even now as the new secretly important begins to take shape I am already looking ahead to the future and what we will be able to do. I have a laundry list of ideas but 

first and foremost will be another eventual shift to our first self hosted blog.

So for now please check out the new blog and all the great contributors, myself, eric, jaime, and jeanne, and stay turned for our shift into the world of self hosting.

Lastly please tell your friends about us, like us on facebook, repost our links... we could really use the help... i don’t mean to sound desperate.  I honestly appreciate all our readers.

5...4...3...2...1... ignition... blastoff!!!!!

posted by brian snider

dada

dada could be a harsh critic of my work

         Dada was my favorite, in the way that a child might be their parents favorite.  Not that they love one child more than the others but due to some experience they shared together which was special or unique they have memories that will cause them to to be closer.  His life ended tragically the day after Easter in 2008.

Not long after finishing our Junior year in college, Jaime and I kicked around the idea of getting a cat.  We called the Bellevue animal shelter and went down “just to take a look.”  The number of kittens was limited but there was one we locked eyes with.  He was completely black and sitting way in the back of his cage so that all you could see were his little yellow eyes.  He was scrawny, clearly the runt of the litter which is what drew Jaime and I to him.

We took him home named him Esteban and watched him grow.  We were the typical doting parents who loved him and worried about him like we were raising the Buddha reincarnate.  Much to Jaime’s joy Esteban loved to cuddle and often I could find Jaime asleep in bed her body curled around a black fuzzy ball.  Sadly just over a year later Jaime and I found ourselves driving to the Eastlake Veterinary Clinic with Esteban wrapped tightly in a blanket for the final time.  

For months Esteban had been having difficulty passing his stool.  You could see it lodged in his rectum as he would slink into his litter box trying to pass it, but nothing would happen.  Eventually the build up would become so great that he would crawl around the apartment crying out in pain.  The vet diagnosed him with mega colon a condition which caused a part of the intestine to become enlarged and the stool gathers until it becomes impassable.  We would take him to the clinic where they would give him an enema and keep him overnight for a fluid treatment.  On one such visit they took X-rays of him and showed them to us.  In the black and white image you could see that he was literally full of shit.

They gave us some medicine which made the stool softer and passable.  Because it was a compound it had to be specially made for us and a thirty day supply cost us $60.  The medicine worked, unfortunately it made his stool so soft that it would literally leak out of him.  We were finding little puddles of gray matter in corners of the apartment.  (Gray because of the special food we had to feed him.)

We had to lower the dosage which unfortunately required us to go back for more enemas at about $300 a visit.  Our last resort was an expensive surgery where they would remove part of his colon, even still we were not guaranteed the procedure would be effective.  There was a slim chance that the whole thing might just clear up on its own.  We decided to keep him on the medicine and hope for the best.

On a cold week that following October we noticed a lack of stool in his litter box and we waited for the impending pain.  Jaime and I had never discussed euthanasia but I think we both had it in the back of our minds.  After about a week without a bowel movement Jaime and I knew we needed to make a decision.  We could not afford another enema nor could we afford the needed surgery.  Silently we decided to spend a quiet weekend at home with him watching TV and trying to forget anything was wrong.  By Monday morning he was howling in pain and we reluctantly wrapped him in his favorite blanket and drove to the Vet where they would put him to sleep.  Neither of us had ever made a decision like that before, part of me still feels that I was a bad owner because I did not try for the surgery.  We bawled throughout the entire process, and held him in our arms while they injected him with a fatal dose of Phenobarbital.  There is a strange moment one that I think of often, where while holding him I tried to understand when he ceased to be Esteban and instead became just an empty dead vessel.  We held his dead body until we realized it was time to move on, there is no harder feeling than watching a technician take away your cats body knowing you will never see him again.  We didn’t have enough money to cover the euthanasia so the Vet graciously allowed us to make payments.

A week later unable to fill the void in our seemingly empty apartment we went back to the Bellevue animal shelter “just to look” and adopted a small black and white kitten we named Addison.  She was the opposite of Esteban in almost every way, bright and bubbly she was mischievous and less likely to cuddle with you than nibble on your hand.  Now we were the parents who’d lost a child and were constantly afraid of something happening to her.  In the first week we had her we lost in the apartment three times and brought Jaime to tears each time.

That Christmas we began watching a cat for a friend who was having a difficult time.  Riley was a big cat who had a heart of gold, one of the sweetest you would ever meet.  He arrived at our apartment covered in flees and filled with worms.  I remember giving him a bath and watching as blood swirled down the drain.  He had a patch of fur right above his tail that he’d scratched bald and bloody.

Within a month the flees and worms were gone and the bald patch was covered in hair.  He became as much of the family as Addison and they spend most of their days cuddling together in the sun by the window.  Riley’s owner rarely came to visit him and two weeks before  our move to Los Angeles we debated what to do with him.  We wanted to take him with, not only because we’d become attached to him but also Addison was attached to him.

In an effort to save our friendship with Riley’s owner we tried to be as diplomatic as possible.  We told her that we would be leaving in two weeks and that we would be more than happy to keep Riley.  She took deep offense to our offer to took Riley back, I hoped not to become flea ridden and full of worms again.  I still truly believe that we should have kept Riley and dealt with the consequences later.

When we arrived in LA Addison began wandering the apartment at night holding a toy in her mouth and howling.  It was clear that she missed Riley and we did as well, it felt like he had died and all three of us were trying to get over the loss of him.  On our second week in the apartment Addison slipped out the door unnoticed, it took us two hours before we realized she was missing.  We started looking for her and when we concluded that she must have gone outside Jaime began to loose it going from door to door in the building crying big wet tears of loss.  After an hour of scouring the building and thinking that she was gone for good, Jaime found her tucked up inside an old broken Coke machine.  Afterwards we started talking about getting another cat to keep Addison company, deciding to wait till after Christmas.

On a mid December Sunday Jaime and I were driving up to Target, on our way we passed the Burbank animal shelter which was advertising a “Kitty fair.”  We vowed not to stop, but on our way back we agreed to stop by and “Just look.”

The room with the fair was held in a room separate from the cages, the kittens were kept in little pens.  People were taking turns holding them deciding if they were a good fit.  At first it seemed we would in fact just look but Jaime spied this small black and white cat with long disheveled hair.  Jaime held him for a while until she handed him to me while she talked to the staff about adoption procedures.  As I held him he proceeded to fall asleep in my arms purring like a tiny motor.  I remember thinking that this is what it must feel like for parents holding their newborn child.  Here was this kitten who didn’t even know me trusting me completely.  By the time Jaime came back there was no doubt we were adopting him.

We couldn’t take him home that night because he hadn’t been spayed yet, they told us we could pick him up the following Tuesday after the operation.  On the drive home we discussed names, concluding that he was a serious cat and thus needed a serious name.  Something distinguished, perhaps something after a distinguished writer.  I threw in Spalding, Kafka, and Mingus.  Jaime threw in Faulkner, Plath, and Hemingway.  None seemed to work until (and I don’t remember how) we settled on Dada.  Named for the 20th Century art movement, we chose it mainly because the Dada movement was started by serious artists who took themselves seriously but seemed to produce humorous results.

The night we brought him home we were unsure how Addison would react.  She’d never been around a kitten before and we hoped that she wouldn’t try to eat him.  Neither Jaime or I are ones to slowly introduce animals into a new environment so we just plopped Dada down in the middle of the living room/kitchen/dining room.  There was much admiring from a distance by Addison but when she started to get closer Dada began purring.  So loud we could hear him from across the room.

By the end of the week he and Addison were best friends.  Dada loved to cuddle with everyone all the time.  He was like a little dog who would follow you from room to room just wanting to be near you and know what you were doing, then cuddle up with you.  What I remember best about him was his love for the computer, he would spend hours just watching me type.  Occasionally batting at the cursor as it flew across the screen, and when he got tired he would lay down next to it and drift off to sleep.

Last Sunday while organizing paperwork in our filing cabinet deciding what should be recycled and what needed to be kept, Jaime came across Dada’s paperwork from the Burbank animal shelter.  I looked it over trying to remember what it was like to be that age, what it was like to live in that apartment in California, what it was like to have Dada.  I tried to remember what Dada was like, what he used to do, but all I could remember was sitting at my computer having a spectator basking in the bluish glow of the laptop.  We took the papers, then filed them away with the other animals paperwork.

new city

self explanatory

       Having never moved to a new city before I wasn’t exactly prepared for this moment, the moment that occurs right after you’ve unpacked all your boxes and put things in their proper place.  The moment after your new home begins to feel like your only home.  The moment that you realize you have nothing left to do but to introduce yourself to this new city.  

There is a picture that sums up how I best remember those first days in our new home, I was on the phone with my mom telling her about our new apartment and walking from room to room taking detailed pictures like I was a crime scene photographer.  While taking a picture of the living room I caught Jaime asleep on the couch a blanket covering her.  The reason I remember this image most from those days was because that was exactly how I felt, tired and overwhelmed.  We hardly knew Los Angeles and on more than a few occasions I would lay down and drift off to sleep and dream of being somewhere more recognizable and comfortable.  When you don’t know what your next move is sleeping is as good a way as any to put off making it.

We were officially settled in by Friday the week we arrived and though we would soon be burning through what little money we had we decided to give ourselves the weekend to just relax without looking for jobs.  This gave us time to try and get ourselves acquainted with the city, learn the layout a bit.  If you’ve been to LA then you know that knowing the layout of the city is practically impossible as it essentially is one massive urban sprawl.  Not like New York with tall skye scrapers and twelve story apartment buildings contained in a small space or like Seattle where there are simple land marks to help orient yourself.

As our luck would have it the only two people we knew in the city were out of town the week we arrived, coincidentally in the Northwest.  It was up to us to get our bearings on our own.  We started small, with a trip to the Gelson’s kitty corner from our building.  At first we were excited to live so close to a grocery store but once we went inside we realized that we were living next to a grocery store priced like it was inside of an airport.  People often would ask us, what is Gelson’s like, and I would say “well it’s like any other grocery store accept add $2 to everything, so the celebrities can shop there.”

Our next big adventure out was to a Hollywood Bed Bath and Beyond and though it was less than two miles away we had to google map it and spent fifteen minutes looking for it.  By the time we got there I felt like an Alzheimer’s patient who didn’t really know where they were, how they got there or how to get home.  In fact we were so close to our apartment we could almost see it from the store.  By the time we arrived home there was a surprise, our first piece of mail.  It was a note from my mom noting that she was sending us our first piece of mail.

Aside from the grocery store we also lived across the street from what is called “Franklin Village” which is home to a series of restaurants, a very expensive cafe, a pet store, clothing store, used bookstore, wine store, a video Hut (more on that later) and finally the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.  That first month we spent nearly every night there, the shows were cheap (about $5 a person) and there was guaranteed to be someone that we admired performing that evening.  It was like our chance for a cheap night on the town, we would even get a little dressed up to go stand outside the theater to get our hands stamped and watch an hour to two hours of raunchy comedy.  We didn’t miss one show in particular which was performed every Wednesday evening, until one night when the girl in the box office recognized us.  This may not seem like a big deal however there was another guy who saw every show the theater performed, we’re talking 3-4 different shows a night 7 nights a week, you could not walk by that place without seeing him first in line for the next show.  Clearly this guy had no life and when the box office girl recognized us I had this vision of becoming best friends with that guy waiting in line with him before every show and as we walked outside past that guy he stopped us.

“Hey do I know you?” He asked Jaime.  “Are you on a TV show?”

This wasn’t unreasonable to ask because as I was well becoming aware, if you think someone is famous they probably are.  In this case however he was wrong he recognized us not because we were famous but because we’d been going to the same shows for the last fucking week.  That was the moment that made me realize that perhaps we needed to diversify our entertainment options.

This is when we discovered Video Hut.  If you haven’t been to one they’re mostly extinct now but imagine your local video store before Blockbuster and Hollywood video took over the brick and mortar video rental business.  Small spaces with small selections and movies released two years ago that were still on the “just in” shelf with sun faded covers.  You had to love it’s old world charm but the thing you really had to love is that they would rent out movies the week before they were released.  In order to keep ourselves from becoming that creepy fanatic waiting in line we supplemented our theater going with “officially”  unreleased movies from video hut.

Our first Sunday we spent the morning by venturing all the way out to IKEA in Burbank, a city which I had heard of many times but didn’t know what exactly could be found there.  As it turns out... nothing.  After we returned home we sat around trying to think of something not too far away or expensive that we could do.  Somehow we decided on driving over to the Kodak theater at the heart of Hollywood.  This was the only time in three years we ever spent time there just to visit.  The reason being that you only need to go once to realize that that place is a total nightmare.  A couple of boring landmarks, stores you could literally shop at in any mall in America, a bunch of assholes dressed up like super heros, shops full of stripper clothes, and a million disappointed tourists.  They came here expecting exciting photo opportunities but instead found something far more depressing.  A street of broken dreams.

Back at home we silently acknowledged to one another that we would not be returning there anytime soon.  In a few hours our grace period would be over, we would no longer be allowed to nap on the couch in the middle of the day without feeling guilty.  We could no longer ignore the balance of our shrinking checking account and live a carefree lifestyle.  We had to get jobs and become productive members of society.  I wasn’t stupid, I didn’t think that would come easy. 

It didn’t.

i've made a huge mistake

better outside than inside

      I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life.  Taking the 520 bridge instead of I-90.  Wearing only a sweater and not a coat.  Charging everything to my credit card instead of ordering another debit card, and hundreds of other similar mistakes made as a child all of which could easily be fixed without causing any major implications.  As I got older the mistakes I made became more serious and carried much more weight.

We rolled into Hollywood in our 17 foot U-Haul at approximately 4:30 pm, taking the Gower street exit off the 101 freeway, turning right onto Franklin Avenue and another right onto Tamarind Avenue.  Then there we were, this cream colored dirty stucco building with pink railings on the balconies.  From the street I could see into our apartment on the third floor and the sight was not promising.  I could just make out people moving around, and a second later a crash and the sound of glass breaking.  Jaime and I turned and looked at each other our eyes saying, “I hope that’s not our apartment.”  I convinced myself that it’s wasn’t our apartment, it was another apartment.  The reality was that I knew that that breath shortening sound of shattering glass came directly from our apartment and the look that Jaime and I exchanged was actually saying “what have we got ourselves into?”

We walked up to the secure front door entrance which was wide open and made our way up the three flights of stairs to our unit.  One word you might use to describe this building was... dilapidated or you might have described it as a crack house.  The craigslist listing chose to use, “Art deco” and “the kind of place Quentin Tarantino might have lived” (I still don’t know what that means.)  The open air courtyard of the building contained a long rectangular planter box with six dead plants, and a 15X15 foot dirt patch.  On the wall of the first floor landing you could find the word “FUCK” written on the wall in what looked like feces.

When we got up to the third floor and walked through the open door my immediate reaction was to panic.  In fact over and over in my head I kept saying “Oh shit this was a huge mistake, oh shit this was a huge mistake, oh shit this was a huge mistake.”  To start with there were about a dozen people in the apartment busily trying to finish it despite the fact that it was supposed to be completed fifteen days before.  They were putting up light fixtures (the first one came crashing down minutes earlier), mopping the floors and there was a plumber working like mad to get the shower finished which as it turns out wouldn’t be ready for another day.  

What got me most panicked was that I realized in the month that we’d been in Seattle preparing I begun to imagine the apartment quite differently.  In my mind I put windows where there were no windows, extended the length of walls and most of all completely overestimated the square footage of the apartment.  It could not have totaled more than 500 square feet but I was imagining something more like 700 and standing in the middle of the living room/dining room/kitchen all I could think about was the 17 foot U-Haul outside bursting at the seems.

I’ve tried thinking of an appropriate analogy to properly explain why this felt like such an utter disaster however I’m not sure that there is another feeling like this, so let me tell you exactly how it felt.  We were 24 year old kids without jobs and limited funds, only two friends who were out of town at the moment and no family to lean on.  The apartment was almost half the size I had imagined and I had enough furniture and boxes in the truck to make this apartment unlivable.  The only thing that kept me from running down the stairs and getting in the truck and driving home was that when I looked at Jaime she didn’t seem nearly as afraid as I was... she was but she wasn’t showing it.

After the walkthrough where we pointed out the unfinished kitchen counter tops, the sliding door which didn’t lock, the cracked windows and the obviously rushed paint job where they painted right over everything, including a mosquito hawk on the wall in the kitchen.  Jaime and I had nothing left to do but pull the U-Haul around back and unload what now felt like 17 feet of garbage.  This was easier said than done as the truck could barely squeeze through the driveway and into the rear parking lot.  I’m a terrible driver so I left this up to Jaime to do and as it turns out I’m also terrible at directing drivers because turning the corner into the parking lot she took out an overhanging corner of the building which rained concrete and stucco down on top of the truck.

We began unloading the U-Haul and it was only fitting that our apartment was furthest from the parking lot so everything had to be carried all the way across the courtyard then up three flights of stairs.  By 7:00 we were less than a third of a way through and were about to die, in my mind the mantra of “I’ve made a huge mistake” was not helping me get the furniture up the stairs.  With every step I was becoming more and more convinced that living in LA was going to be horrible. 

As if he could feel my hopelessness our next door neighbor appeared and offered his assistance, I don’t think he spoke much english and he said almost nothing to us the entire time he help us move.  I was embarrassed at how much junk we had and constructed all of these thoughts that must have been running through his head as he looked at these two stupid kids with way to much stuff.  By 10:00 my legs and my embarrassment couldn’t take it anymore and we thanked him for his help and told him that we would finish the last bit in the morning.  

Without eating dinner we flopped the mattress onto the floor of the bedroom and lay there.  I felt like I had been in a brawl where everyone else had clubs and knives and I had only fists, every inch of my body ached, I felt swollen.  I was the definition of exhausted and yet I couldn’t go to sleep because my mind was running on overdrive.

I wanted to get rid of that U-haul, I wanted to get this apartment unpacked, I wanted to have a job.  At that moment all I could imagine was how hard and awful LA was going to be.  What I couldn’t imagine was all the great times we would have there, all the friends we would make, all the places we would visit, all the things we would do.  It was in that apartment that we would decide to get married and that we would get our first dog.  We would adopt a second cat and then have to put that cat to sleep then adopt another.  We would become adults in this apartment and eventually have to leave it under threat of eviction.   That was all a long ways down the road and finally I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning we would unload the last boxes from the truck and I would finally be rid of that 17 foot albatross.  By Thursday we would have the apartment unpacked and everything in its place and that negative voice in my head which kept telling me that I’d made a huge mistake would be silenced.  Sure there would be times when I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of Los Angeles and sure it was going to be tough but those would be mixed with all the truly wonderful experiences we would have. 

If nothing else we were just beginning this fucking adventure.

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.

4 days in LA

not my neighbors 

         If I’ve learned only one thing from my wife it’s that when she has her heart set on doing something it will eventually happen.  Maybe not right away, it may take years but I’ve come to accept grudgingly that it will happen somehow some way.

Eight years ago when my wife and I first met she told me that when she graduated from college she wanted to move to Los Angeles.  At the time I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Seattle and my answer to her was “We’ll see.  That’s three years away, anything can happen.”  A year later we moved into our first apartment together and a year after that we adopted a cat together and the following year we graduated college.  Not long after that she began discussing Los Angeles again and I did my best to ignore it and hope that I could put off the discussion for another year.

The July after we graduated I had a three week internship with the Sundance Theater Institute in Utah which would be the longest we’d spent apart in three years.  After a week and a half she called me up and told me that she and her friend would be renting a car and driving down to spend a day with me.  This was that moment that I realized that we were bonded closer than I thought, if she couldn’t spend three weeks away from me then if she was going to LA I was going to LA too. 

For the next year it was brought up and ignored a dozen times until the spring of 2007 when our college friends Joel and Annika moved to Los Angeles and at their going away party my wife Jaime expressed to them her desire to move there as well and in return they urged her and me to do the same.  I resisted and I resisted and then in July something changed I can’t pinpoint exactly what day or why, if I’d kept an honest journal I may have been able to determine what it was that changed in me but looking back on it now nearly four years later it is still a mystery to me.

By August we were definitely moving and were beginning to plan a trip to Los Angeles to look at apartments and figure out how exactly we would move our lives from the only city we’d ever known to one we’d collectively spent less than 72 hours in.  Then in September the weekend of my 24th birthday we took a trip down to LA to get a layout of the city and find an apartment.

We flew out of Seattle early on a Wednesday morning and upon arriving at LAX we rented a car and drove from the airport to Los Feliz a little area just east of Hollywood.  We avoided the freeways and instead took Western avenue all the way and looking out the window of the car at this old dirty city I wondered what exactly we were getting ourselves into.  The rumors are absolutely true, LA is a dirty, dirty city.  Driving up Western you pass dozens of oil wells, dilapidated buildings and Mexican dollar stores.  Litter clogs gutters and dots the hills, grass has been replaced by dirt, and there are no trees.  Seattle is by far the most beautiful city in the continental United States if you stand in the middle of downtown you have Mt. Baker to the North, the Cascades Mountains to the East, Mr. Rainer to the South, and the Olympic mountains to the west.  Then You have Puget sound Elliot Bay, Lake Union and Lake Washington surrounding you as well, the beauty is staggering but surprisingly easy to overlook that is until you lay your eyes upon the dirty smoggy city of LA.

Fear was filling me up as we drove to Los Feliz and I was afraid to see what our future home might look like.  However as soon as we crossed Franklin avenue and Western turned into Los Feliz boulevard everything changed suddenly there was grass and the streets were clean and to the north was Griffith park and it was green and full of trees.  This is a trademark of LA where one street will look like a third world country and the next will look like a lush tropical garden, without warning everything changes at the turn of a corner.

We were staying with Joel and Annika and upon first seeing their apartment our great search began.  Their apartment was the envy of our eye until the day we moved away from LA.  It was large about 1,000 spare feet with a large kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom, even a place for a dining room.  Immediately we were imagining what our life would be like there, to top it all off they only paid $1,000 a month in rent.  In my mind I though that surely if they were able to find this great apartment then we should be able to find something similar and if they pay $1,000 then something smaller should go for less.

Immediately lessons were learned, to start with this was the end of September and we weren’t moving in until November first.  In Seattle this is not a problem as apartments can stay on the market for moths and often landlords will often be aware of a tenants departure a month in advance.  This is not the case is Los Angeles where we were told that it was going to be nearly impossible to find an apartment a month before we were willing to move in and it also became apparent that Joel and Annika were getting a steal on their apartment and that unless we got incredibly lucky we were definitely going to be paying more than $1,000 a month.

That night we looked at our first LA apartment, a older little unit which cost considerably more than $1,000 a month.  The building featured a pool and according to the sign posted on the fence surrounding it had been closed for hygienic reasons by the city. The building included such tenants as the Dury, Benson and Eat Shit residence.  We didn’t even fill out a application hoping that in the light of day things might get a little better.  Afterwards Joel and Annika to us to a show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and then to dinner for our first In-N-Out burger.

We woke up early the following morning rejuvenated and looking to put the miserable apartment from the night before us far behind us.  The first place we looked at was on Tamarind avenue across the street from the Manor Hotel and the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre. The apartment was small and the rent was over $1200 a month but boasted a view of the Hollywood sign and hideous carpeting the color of dried blood.  We also visited an apartment listed as Los Feliz adjacent but in actuality they should have just said “located in Mexico city” as the local grocery store and street signs were all in Spanish.  We saw the exteriour of an apartment in Silverlake which seemed incredibly far away even though it was less then two miles from where we were staying, we never even saw that apartment as the manager was late to show it to us and when we called to check that we were at the right place it seemed that we were inconveniencing her by wanting to fill her vacant apartment with warm bodies.  We went to bed that night feeling that we had gotten in way over our heads and that we were never going to find anything and after making this trip down all that was left was to go home and write the whole thing off.

That following day we went to see another apartment very near by and after looking at it it seemed that we’d found some place both nice and affordable but during the application process things began to get strange.  The landlord informed us that the building did not accept pets but that we should just lie on the application, we’d not expected to find anyplace so close and did not have our information on us and left large portions of the paperwork blank.  About two-thirds of the way through I decided that I didn’t care how nice and affordable this place was something just was not right about this place and that in the end things possibly would go horribly wrong.  We finished the application and handed it to the landlord knowing that we did not want the apartment even if we got it, as it turns out we never heard from the landlord again and I still feel confident that it would have been a horrible mistake.

Things were going horribly we had a day left in which to find a place to live and we were not any closer to find that then when we first arrived.  We were just getting in the car and leaving the apartment we didn’t want when the rental agent who showed us the apartment with the view called us and told us that there was another unit in the building on the opposite side which did not have a view but did have a balcony and even better it wouldn’t be ready until November 1st.  We met her at the building again and she took us up the three fights of stairs and showed us into the apartment which was being remodeled.  When I say it was being remodeled what I mean is that the only thing in the apartment was the walls, the floor had been torn up and gathered into a heaping pile in the middle of the living room.  There was no plumbing or appliances but as was explained to us they were going to be putting in new hardwood floors a glass shower and all new appliances.  The apartment was within our price range and would be ready on the exact date we planned to move, so we filled out an application.

It was late in the day and we had no other leads and so putting all our eggs in this basket we headed off to the grocery store to buy dinner.  That evening we got the call that we did get the apartment and that we could sign the lease the following day just hours before heading  back to Seattle.  Over the last three days despite all the horrible apartments we’d seen we fell in love with this little corner of Los Angeles and couldn’t wait to pack up our life and begin again in a whole new city. 

On our last day in LA we woke up and had breakfast at what would become our favorite breakfast spot, the Mustard Seed where we had our first celebrity sighting Adrian Grenier.  It was fitting for me as Los Angeles had seemed like an enormous mystery to before I began watching Entourage and after watching the first three seasons I began to see the city differently it became a little more tangible to me, more of a possibility maybe not exactly as they lived in it through the show but a general idea of the landscape.

       We left Los Feliz and dove back down Western through this dirty city that now I couldn’t wait to move to.  Just as we were getting on the airplane I sat back in the window seat my hand gripping Jaime’s tightly and I looked out the window my heart pounding as I looked at this enormous city before more.  As we took off I looked back and thought how impossible it all seemed that I would ever find my way through this city that I would ever get my bearings but mostly that November 1st would ever get here.

the end of LA LA land

On Halloween of 2007 I was awake at 5:30 am loading my girlfriend, myself and a wailing cat into the cab of a seventeen foot U-haul bound for Los Angeles, just like the millions of naive 24 year olds before me.  On Halloween 2010 I was again awake at 5:30 am a 10 foot U-haul parked in the driveway of my apartment stuffed with boxes a few pieces of furniture and random treasures like a Millenium Falcon, a stuffed Pink Panther and the head of a bull Pinata from my 27th birthday party.  I my wife, my two cats and my dog loaded up bound for Seattle.

The trip is 1,100 miles and takes around 21 hours depending if I or my wife is driving.  When we were moving to LA it seemed like 11,000 miles and 41 hours,  I spent the whole time bouncing in my chair my hands tightly gripping the steering wheel trying to control this 17 foot behemoth behind me I couldn’t wait for this incredible unknown before me, I would have driven straight through to LA if I could have.  A new apartment, a new city I’d spent less than seventy-two hours in, no job, no family and everything was an exciting mystery.

Now moving back to Seattle things could hardly have been less similar, the trip seemed like a handful of hours and felt like we were just driving to Santa Barbara.  I was full of reservations and I spent the entire drive looking back at where I spent exactly three years of my life where I spent the bulk of my non college  adult life.  It was where I learned to live without family and all the ways in which they can be there to protect you.  It was in LA where I learned how to make new friends from scratch and make them my family away from my family.

 
I’m a nostalgic person and as we left Los Feliz (definitely the coolest place in Los Angeles) and drove through Glendale and Burbank and Valencia our truck pointed due north on I-5 a course we would not deviate from until we reached a crossroads in the Kent Valley and take the 405 for the last 10 miles of our trek home.  I found it surprisingly easy to forget things like the shitty overpriced food, the insane drivers, the completely narcissistic culture and smog.  Instead I lamented the loss of my neighborhood, the sun, my friends and the thought that just around the next corner could be something completely new and surprising.

  Seattle is still full of unknowns but they are less thrilling and honestly a little less unknown.  Seattle is home and is full of friends and family and despite having no jobs it was safe and quaint.  

I lived in Seattle for 26 years before I packed up and left it for three and a new beginning in Los Angeles, now I am moving back to Seattle for a new beginning again.  There were plans and there were goals I’m finding that rarely I follow either.