To live in and leave LA
A few thoughts on why people leave Los Angeles (and why we stay)
Hello there, situation normies!
I loved the comments from last week’s story, Ask your doctor if David Lynch is right for you. Many of you leaned into the premise and shared your choices for directors to direct your dreams. I’m pleased to report that the Situation Normal community has excellent taste, but of course, I already knew that. Kudos go to
who chose Robert Rodriguez to direct his dreams and who picked Stanley Kubrick. Your subconscious better be fortified as fuck if either one of those auteurs is going to direct your dreams.I’m also pleased to report that my crime spree continues. I finished Juniper Song series, and now all I want is for Steph Cha to write three more books. I’m also deep into She Rides Shotgun. That book is about as dark as noir gets, but Jordan Harper’s voice is smooth like butter and sweet like syrup. Seriously, he’s one of the best writers working today.
Time for shout outs! As you know, Situation Normal stories are free, but some situation normies pay because they love this newsletter and they get their kicks underwriting joy for strangers. That’s pretty damn cool. A very big thank you to Tom H and Marcia P! You’re both amazing. I’m send you good vibes, Tom and Marcia, so look for them in the mail, then forward the good vibes to someone who needs them.
To support Situation Normal, please consider a subscription. Or, if you prefer PayPal, send any amount here. I’ll give you a shout out, send you good vibes, and add you to the list so you receive the annual stakeholder report.
OK, time for the story…
I went to a going away party this week. My friend
and his family are heading east. When Alex broke the news, he looked bashful, as if Angelenos weren’t supposed to talk about leaving Los Angeles. Or, maybe Alex felt bashful about breaking sad news. Both can be true, I suppose.I stopped counting going away parties a decade ago. It’s too depressing. Alex’s going away party was the first going away party of the year, but I have another one coming up in May. We don’t really do seasons in Los Angeles, but if we did, spring would be the going away season. Say Bon Voyage to the short winter days that never quite live up to the sunny Southern California promise, the atmospheric rivers that are the new lingo for rain, and your friends who have children. If they leave in the spring, they can sort out their shit over the summer, and have the kids in a new school for the fall.
Children aren’t the only reason people leave Los Angeles, but if leaving Los Angeles was a category on Family Feud, the survey would say, “the kids” are the number one answer. My sister and I figured that out when we were kids. I was ten and Allison was eight when our parents tried to move us to Indianapolis. That didn’t happen, but I learned later that Mom had tried to convince Dad to move to Chicago before we were born. She may have had dreams of Atlanta and Minneapolis, too. The calculus on leaving LA was simple: Mom and Dad could send us to excellent schools, buy a kickass home, and cut costs.
There are two concerns about raising children in Los Angeles. The first one, as I mentioned, is money. LA parents pay crazy sums to live near a good school, or even crazier sums for private schools. No matter where they live or what school they send their kids to, the jobs they need to afford that situation come with soul-crushing commutes. That’s just the law in Los Angeles. If there’s any money left over, and that’s a very big if, it’s not enough for a night out AND childcare. That’s another Los Angeles law. Between being stuck at home and stuck in their cars, LA parents have a lot of time to think about leaving LA. Eventually, they come to the conclusion my friend Todd came to when he and Andrea took their son, Cannonball, to Colorado. “Los Angeles hates children.” But I love LA. Just like Randy Newman.
The second concern parents have about raising children in Los Angeles is a matter of quality. To paraphrase my friend Stacey, most Americans think raising a child in Los Angeles is a recipe for creating a degenerate freak show star-fucker of a human paraquat, who spends their days hoodwinking tourists on Hollywood Boulevard to fund their cocaine habit, and their cocaine-fueled nights pitching a remake of Casablanca to dive bar denizens pretending to be producers. That person exists, but like I told Stacey, they probably came here from Iowa.
Stacey decided to raise her boys, Tyler and Wesley, in Los Angeles. The fact that Allison and I were basically normal, upstanding citizens who grew up here gave Stacey reason put aside the fears and misconceptions most Americans have about people from LA. Not that Stacey had a choice. Her husband, Adam, works in entertainment. If staying in Los Angeles, despite a myriad of good reasons to leave, was a category on Family Feud, the survey would say, “entertainment industry” is the number one answer. That’s why Adam and Stacey stayed. But then one day they decamped to St. Louis, where the schools are great, Stacey’s family could help with childcare, and they could buy a house that looked like the one from Father of the Bride for the price of Prius. Adam figured he’d have to quit the entertainment business, but Adam is that rare producer who is a genuinely decent person. Maybe his good karma is how Adam found an entertainment job that allows him to live in St. Louis. He comes back to Hollywood a couple time a year to sell television shows to networks and streamers. He is an LA Legend—the man who had his Hollywood cake and ate it on a St. Louis budget.
My sister is another kind of LA Legend. As an LA kid who grew up around the entertainment industry, Allison had an inside track to a Hollywood career. But maybe her formative years taught Allison to see something a lot of people miss. After spinning her wheels in the land of palm trees, where nine out of then projects turn out to be mirages, Allison had the foresight to move to New York. That’s where she broke into the business and eventually became an Emmy-nominated BFD. Allison is smart, although perhaps she only has enough karma to eat her Hollywood cake on a New York budget.
But Allison and Adam are Hollywood outliers, geographically and metaphorically. For most Angelenos I know, the entertainment industry is a cross between the tractor beam that reeled in the Millennium Falcon and the Sirens who drove Odysseus bat-shit crazy. The tractor beam is the Hollywood dream that lured them to Los Angeles. Somehow, they survived the garbage compactor on the Death Star and landed a job with the Empire (a studio or network career), or got a gig with the rebels (cast and crew). Regardless, they stay in Los Angeles, even though the costs only go up, the traffic only gets worse, and the city is always in danger of either falling into the ocean or being swallowed by the desert. It’s the kind of bat-shit crazy only Odysseus, a super-fan of the Sirens, could understand.
Whenever we travel, Christina and I think about leaving Los Angeles. We look at houses and try to imagine ourselves living somewhere else. In recent years, we’ve dreamed up alternate versions of our lives in Colorado, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. Pilots for shows that will probably never get picked up.
When we visited our friend Bridget, who left LA for Cleveland, we nearly bought a house. The idea of selling our place in LA, paying cash for a better place in Cleveland, and investing the leftover money seemed like a no-brainer. Life without traffic sounded like heaven. Christina even let herself fantasize about a career outside of entertainment. What would that be? Did Cleveland need a funky hair salon / coffee shop that also sold used books and records? You bet it did, and maybe Christina was just the woman to make it happen. As for me, I could write anywhere, couldn’t I? The money I make freelancing would go a lot further in Ohio, which means I’d have more time to focus on Situation Normal and write my next novel. Fleeing to the Cleve wasn’t just a matter of living Liz Lemon’s 30 Rock Dream, it was a win-win.
But we didn’t do it.
Maybe we don’t feel the same pressure to leave Los Angeles because we don’t have children. Maybe Christina can’t imagine a career outside of entertainment. Maybe it’s not a good idea to remove a writer from his natural habitat.
Or maybe we’re nuts, like Odysseus, Randy Newman, and the ten million people who call Los Angeles County home.
When our flight back from Cleveland landed, LAX tried warn us. The Los Angeles International Airport is always a clusterfuck, but on that particular day, the DEA was searching LAX for a dope-smuggler who had given them the slip. In my book, that’s a clusterfuck double-whammy, or what we call Tuesday in Los Angeles.
The LAX baggage carousel, like a lot of things in LA, only offered the illusion of functionality. It creaked and groaned. A swarm of dip-shits, assholes, and clueless motherfuckers compounded the situation by crowding around the baggage carousel. Each one clung to the false belief that they were entitled to the star treatment: a white-gloved porter to bring them their bags and an apology so that they could turn up their noses and leave the riff-raff behind.
Once we got outside the terminal, it took an hour to make our way through the traffic jam inside the airport. It turned out that traffic jam was the prequel for an even bigger traffic jam that stood between us and our house. What I’m saying is, LAX tried to warn us. It really did.
But it’s not like LAX was the only warning. The 405 parking lot tried to warn us too. As we crawled along the freeway, we spotted a plume of black smoke up ahead. At first, it looked like the 405 was on fire—a terrifying thought since, you know, we were on the 405 and inching toward the flames. But it turned out that the fire was a high-rise next to the 405. News helicopters circled overhead. Maybe we’d be on TV that night! We heard sirens in the distance. The drivers in the cars all around us looked indifferent and impatient. Between the dark sky and a fire that looked like it might swallow the building, the freeway, and maybe even the city, the scene felt apocalyptic.
A normal person would’ve run for the hills. Actually, we were heading toward the hills because that’s just how Los Angeles geography works. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that a normal person would’ve run away from the hills, back to the airport, back to somewhere that made sense. Like the Millennium Falcon and Odysseus, we were clearly going the wrong way, but that was sort of the plan, wasn’t it? And that’s when a funny thing happened. At the same time, Christina and I turned to each other and said the exact same thing: “We’re home.”
The people who leave Los Angeles strike me as sane, smart, and fortunate. I envy them. I fantasize about doing what they did. I attend their going away parties and wonder, why not us?
But Christina and I are nuts. Our friends who stay are nuts. The the nuttiest people we know are Todd, Andrea, and Cannonball. They left Los Angeles. We went to their going away party. Then a few years later, they came back. They missed LA, and LA missed them too.
“Why didn’t we have a coming back to LA party?” Todd asked recently.
“I dunno, dude. Everyone we know either leaves LA, or talks about leaving LA. You guys are the only people who came back. What the fuck!?”
Want more Michael Estrin stories? I’ve got books!
Ride/Share: Micro Stories of Soul, Wit and Wisdom from the Backseat is a collection of my Lyft driver stories🚗🗣
Not Safe for Work is an amateur detective novel based on my experiences covering the adult entertainment industry💋🍑🍆🕵️♂️
The ebook versions of my books are priced between 99 cents and $2.99, so if you don’t have the budget for a Situation Normal subscription, buying an ebook is a great way to support my work. Bonus: you’ll laugh your butt off!
Stick around and chat!
You know the drill. I’ve got questions, you’ve got answers.
What’s the best movie about Los Angeles? Point Break and LA Story are acceptable answers, but the correct answer is The Big Lebowski.
Hypothetically, if someone were to leave LA, where should they go? Make your pitch!
Hollywood shouldn’t remake Casablanca, but if they did, who should play Rick? No bad ideas in a brainstorm!
Todd and Andrea are nuts, but they actually named their son Rhett. Cannonball is a nickname I gave him. Have you ever given someone a nickname? Spill!
What’s the worst airport in America? Hint: it’s LAX.
Sounds like I could never live in LA. I live in a small town in NH, which (sadly) is the grouchy conservative in a cluster of more progressive states but also where I grew up. Not a lot of us seem to leave. I joke it's the gravity of all the granite. If I feel like going to "the big city" I spend a day in Boston and am satisfied. The rest of the time I enjoy my lawn and my back woods on my little cul de sac where the only cars I hear are my neighbors coming and going and the only traffic is when the high school lets out.
1. "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs."
2. Many great choices, but Chitown offers the most affordable big city living in the U.S. It's why we decamped from San Francisco.
3. Hollywood would blow the remake no matter what, but I'd argue an unknown would have the best chance to inhabit the role (e.g., stage actor).
4. Never really been in the nickname giving business, though I'm in the nickname using business.
5. ATL and EWR have joined the chat.