It's Not Tundra

I have to tell you that it's not paradise here. We have morons here, too. It's just that there aren't as many of them but those that we have are trying harder to be more annoying. There's also, I suppose, a certain freedom in knowing that you are blazing a new trail of douchebaggery, going where no asshat has gone before. I'm riding my bike home from the gym and I turn down a quiet street so that I can ride though the park. The school on the street, a church school, is letting out for the end of the year. If you look back at the stuff I've written, I should have learned by now that people can be especially dopey around schools. It should be no surprise. But every time I've gone by there and it was any kind of school event, it's a madhouse. 1/4 the madhouse as in Tarzana, but there are fewer folks around. So I'm tooling down the road on my bike. And here comes a woman holding hands with her son. Awwwww. Walking down the middle of the street. And by ...

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help... The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control. Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience. Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of...

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! [1] And we were off to the hospital. Which luckily was right around the corner. Except… There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full. Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room. [2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem. Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance. But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away...

About a week later we had another showing. Ingo was really excited about this. It was a guy we’ll call “Mr. Fifteen Percent” who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and child. Ingo was unsure about the details, but this seemed the perfect house. They were divorcing and they wanted to stay near the school down the block. Only two people were PERFECT [1] for this tiny house. And a little kid ---- how much time would they spend in the one bathroom! Hell, there would hardly be any pile up at all [2] ! He seemed REALLY interested, but… “He said it was priced fifteen percent too high for the current market.” Fifteen percent? Where do you come up with a number like that in conversation? Ten percent, twenty, sure. But fifteen? Does your coach tell you to give a hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifteen [3] ? “Should we talk about it?” “Not yet. It’s too early,” Ingo said. “We’ll let him think on it. But I really think he was ready to write and offer for five-fifty.” ...

If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country… AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket. Seriously. The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that. But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo . [1] To begin: We’re not freakin ’ Realtors . It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold. Now, more than a year later and able to watch ...

Understand: When I first moved to California, I was told that there was only one thing holy and that was the crosswalk under California law. You have to stop when there are people in the crosswalk. Even if there’s no light, if there are two parallel white lines on the pavement and they aren’t cocaine, you gotta stop. I’ve seen old ladies dragging shopping carts across Ventura Boulevard at 8:45 in the morning and cars, even cars carrying very important movie executives, stop to let her hobble across. Admittedly, this rule had become a little less firm in the popular consciousness than it was when I was first there. Pedestrians once beset me when I tried to make a legal-in-New York right on red and the people in the cross walk attacked like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Now cars creep into the cross walk, they wait until the pedestrian is out of their lane and gun it. But a SCHOOL? Crosswalks in a school SHOULD be sacrosanct. They’re not, but if you’re going to run your over...

FIFTEEN MONTHS EARLIER: The Honda Odyssey that was the FINAL indignity. Let me explain what a typical L.A. afternoon was for me and how it led to my personal physical contact with an American-Made Japanese vehicle. My son and daughter were in the highly gifted magnet program in the L.A. school system. This got them a smaller class size and a more demanding curriculum and, at least in elementary school, a school that we liked better. [1] But it also meant that after second grade they were no longer in the school that was two blocks down the street. They were bused to the magnet school. When you apply to the magnet program, you’re assigned to the first school that has an opening no matter where it is. My son’s elementary school was about eight miles away. My daughter’s middle school was about nine miles away. Every morning my son would have to be taken two blocks to the school down the street to get his elementary school bus. My daughter would have to be taken about four miles...