As part of my living in LA duties, I subscribe to a daily email called Urban Daddy that tells me how to be cool. Yes, “Urban Daddy” is a really unbearably bad name. I would consider unsubscribing if it didn’t constantly provide me with invaluable information. Today’s revelation was so monumental that I had to share it with the world. Behold, the majesty of the Double-Wide:

A truly spectacular night of Hollywood revelry requires…a truly spectacular hangover cure.

And so it is with great pride (and great anticipation of all that preparatory revelry) that we unveil the launch of an off-the-menu secret remedy at The Waffle—an astounding fried chicken and waffle sandwich they’re calling The Double Wide.

Served only to those who know to ask for it (that would be you), the sandwich utilizes Applewood-Smoked Bacon Waffles for the enormous sandwich’s “bread.” (In a brilliant feat forever altering the future of the waffling industry, the bacon is actually baked into the waffle.) Inside: tender fried chicken, more applewood-smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato, sliced red onions and melted Tillamook sharp cheddar. In case this all seem a bit too restrained, the sandwich arrives with a side of sawmill white country gravy…and a bottle of the house-made maple syrup.

The Waffle, open 6:30-4:30am Fri-Sat, 6:30-2:30am Sun-Thurs, 6255 W. Sunset Blvd (E. of Vine), Hollywood, 323-465-6901

I’m at the airport right now, waiting for my friend Matt to arrive. I have been waiting for a long time. I mistakenly assumed that it would take me 2 hours to get to the airport, what with the scourge that is LA rush hour traffic. What I did not recognize was that people are not going in the direction of the airport during rush hour. So my 2 hour trip took me 35 minutes. Matt’s plane is 40 minutes late, which means that I technically just added 5 minutes to my life. I think. I’m not really into math.

This is the 1st post I’ve ever written on my phone, interestingly, even though I’ve had the iPhone for about 6 months. I am what is known in the industry as an “early adopter”. The network is slow and the input device is hopelessly flawed, but what do I want? I’m blogging from my phone. Can you imagine? The future is here! The future is slow and hopelessly flawed, but it’s here!

I was at a bar in LA with my college friends Shea and Drew the other day, and we were all poking around on our iPhones, because of course everyone in LA has iPhones. Not only that, but we also frequently have conversations about what our iPhones mean to us. I thought I would be ribald and said, “It’s really nice when I’m taking a shit.” Without hesitation, Shea replied, “Dude, the iPhone has revolutionized the act of taking a shit.” Are you reading this, Jobs? I smell ad campaign!

And there! Thanks to this slow-ass phone, I have just managed to waste half an hour!

My fine adopted state of California has raised a stiff middle finger to the rest of the country with this, the brilliant and much-needed 24 hour marijuana vending machine. It is official: every last need I could possibly have is now covered.

I have a few friends who have prescriptions for medical marijuana, all of whom are in perfect health (except for chronic coughs caused by smoking medical marijuana). Ironically, I had another friend who had cancer. That’s not the ironic part. The ironic part is that he went to his doctor because he was having trouble eating. The doctor tried to prescribe some crazy caplet that listed “long-lasting hallucinations” and “intense diarrhea” as possible side effects. He called me to ask if I knew anything about it … I guess because he fancied me some kind of drug expert. Don’t ask me what I’ve done to earn this reputation. I said it looked scary and he should just get a prescription for marijuana … after all, they legalized it for people who were in his exact situation, right?

The next day, he went back to his doctor and asked for the prescription. The doctor refused. He would rather have had my friend take this radioactive death-pill than smoke a little herb. The reason, of course, is that the federal government could potentially bust him for prescribing marijuana, since federal law trumps state law — whenever the government feels like enforcing it, that is. They generally don’t concern themselves when state laws are more conservative than federal laws. (Warning: I do not have any examples, and so this last statement should never be repeated to anyone who actually knows what he or she is talking about.)

Okay, so this doctor referred him to another doctor. The second doctor responded to my friend’s request by saying, “don’t you know someone who could get it for you?” After this, he gave up on the legitimate medical community and finally went to see one of the doctors who advertises in the back of LA Weekly with ads that look like this:

(I wonder if this has any medical legitimacy? Are there musician-only diseases? Is that some kind of code for syphilis?)

… or this …

(It’s funny: my doctor has a picture of himself in his office wearing this exact same outfit. Does that have something to do with the Hippocratic oath?)

So anyway, my friend went to one of these back-alley doctors, paid him $200, got his prescription, and right away, his appetite returned. So, the results of our experiment teach us this: marijuana works as medicine. And my friend, who had cancer, could not get it. I really don’t know what argument you could raise that would convince me it should continue to be illegal. To me, one’s position on legalized marijuana is pretty much the dividing line between rational and irrational.

Since no one gave me any advice, I had a terrible time. We ended up sitting around my apartment, refreshing my browser every minute in the hopes that someone would post and tell us where to go. Thank god it’s over and I can go back to my normal routine of not writing anything.

Tomorrow is my Bachelor Party. Does anyone have any advice?

Hello, goblins. Yes, I still exist. I have spent the last three weeks globe-trotting and working my ass off for the man. They say that once you move to Los Angeles your life becomes a magical, obligation-free fairyland of lollipops and fairy elves, but they are wrong. We still have to work hard for our money out in these parts. Of course, working hard in Los Angeles means spending 2-3 hours per day thinking sort of deeply. Everything is relative.

Yesterday I had had enough of stress. “Enough of you, stress!” I screamed, until I was on the verge of passing out. I called up my new friends Adam and Michael and together we decided to hit the Korean spa.

I’m lying to you. This isn’t the way it happened at all. We had been planning it for weeks. It makes me sound cooler, though, if I set it up as though I had a flash of inspiration to hit the Korean spa. It was actually Michael’s idea.

I met Michael and Adam through Sarah. They are burgeoning LA art scene megalos. I can’t think of the word I want here but I’m positive it isn’t megalos. Megalos isn’t really a word. Basically, Michael and Adam are going to take the art world by storm sometime in the near future, but I can’t think of the word for what that sort of person would be called. I’m pretty sure it starts with an “m.”

A few weeks ago at one of the many posh art events I frequent, Michael relayed to me his grand scheme of creating a gang. I have been craving a solid group of friends in LA, so I leaped at the chance to become a member of this gang. From what I understood, they were accepting non-artists for the mascot position. Yesterday was my trial run, my first date.

On a good first date, you always get to see your date naked, and yesterday was no exception. We arrived at the spa at around 5:00. I’ve been sworn to secrecy on the location because we don’t want the place to become overrun with non-artists and/or non-artists’-mascots. After paying our $15 entry fee, we went to the back room where we grabbed towels and dropped our trouels. Haha, trouels isn’t a word, either.

(more…)

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.

I’m looking for a wedding band right now, and it’s a dismal affair. Not because there are no bands to choose from, but because EVERY WICKED COOL BAND NAME I’ve ever thought of is already taken! For the rest of you, please note that you can no longer give your band any of the following names, unless you want to be sued:

• RamFunkShus
• Soulicious
• The Funky Hipeez
• Kaos
• Phazze One! (who are described as a “unique and classy band”)
• Breez’n

. . . and my personal favorite:

• Mr. Bob and the Soul Collectors

My guess is that they originally tried to hit the wedding circuit under the name Soul Collectors but quickly found that people weren’t too keen on hiring a bunch of Satanists to play their wedding. Worried about the potential loss of income (not to mention the lack of souls to collect), they invited their wacky neighbor Mr. Bob to join the show, thus putting a goofy spin on their reign of evil and carnage.

I opened up the LA Times yesterday and breezed past this article on the sports page. Because I don’t know the first thing about sports. With just a cursory glance, I assumed that this picture was from a classic game from the 70s. I took a closer look and discovered that this is actually from Monday night’s game. It’s a little more obvious that this is a new photo when you see it in this context, but in the paper, the colors were a little bit washed out and Lamar Odom (on the left) was cropped in half.

There’s something really comforting about seeing athletes with badass afros and hippie beards. Through the 90s, it seemed like every athlete had exactly the same boring shaved-head and conservative style. Maybe it was the Michael Jordan influence. He had a sort of militaristic, highly-disciplined attitude that seemed to be adopted by everyone else in the game. I mean, there was Dennis Rodman, but he’d pretty much be an anomaly in any decade.

Last night our friends Rosten and Damon spent the night. They’re in town from New York. They are partners in an organization called CUP (the Center for Urban Pedagogy). They’re in town right now teaching a course at the Sundown Schoolhouse, where Sarah is a student.

All of this information is beside the point of my post. The point of my post is that Rosten and Damon were awakened this morning to hear the FBI staging a raid on one of the apartments in my building. As of this posting, they’re still up in the apartment, dusting for fingerprints or whatever it is that FBI do. I’m burning to find out what was going on up there. I will keep you posted.