There’s a huge movie shoot going on next to my office today. I don’t know what the movie is. Movie shoots all have the same signs that say the name of the movie upright no matter which direction you point them in. This is what they look like:

People in Hollywood lack the gene that allows them to recognize letters when they are upside down, so the invention of this sign saved a lot of people a lot of worry. You can tell a movie is fancy if the sign has an acronym on it. The DIRL sign above is for a movie called Dave in Real Life that was shooting in my friend Matt’s neighborhood. It stars Steve Carrell, who, in case you didn’t know, is fancy.

The movie that is shooting behind me has an acronym on its signs, too: PYTEK. I guess its possible that the name of the movie is actually PYTEK … I can’t say for certain. I’m assuming it’s an acronym.

You might think it would be cool to be surrounded by movie shoots, but you would be wrong. Movie shoots suck, because movie shooters are total dicks to people who are not working on the movie. They hire dudes who have no official capacity to stand on street corners and tell you, the normal person who is trying to go about your business, where you can and cannot walk.

One day I was walking to work and there was a cabal of these guys sitting on the corner that separates our residential part of Los Feliz from the business part of Los Feliz. This corner is located 3 blocks away from our apartment. I was the only one walking down this street at the time, because I am the only person who walks in Los Angeles. (I won an award from the mayor!) Perched at the corner were like 5 of these burly union he-men whose job it is to tell people where they can and cannot walk, staring at me and pointing as I walked down my own street. I looked behind me to see if there was possibly something else they could be staring and pointing at, but I came up blank. I kept waiting for them to shout something at me about how they now controlled the street and I was not allowed to walk on it anymore, and also that it would be best if I moved out of my apartment for a few weeks and let them sleep with my girlfriend, but they never shouted anything of the sort, and as I walked past them, I realized that they were not pointing at me, they were pointing at the non-thing behind me that I couldn’t see.

So now these same guys (or at least a reasonable facsimile of) are standing behind my office, smoking. I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to shoot my way out of here.