My Experience in Los Angeles

I left LA recently and even though I’m out of the city of angels, the angels live on through me. If you’re wondering what the hell that even means, then stop wondering now; I just said it for the sake of saying it. It should not be scrutinized deeply, for the sole fact that it came out of my mouth. And the only things that come out of my mouth are massive wads of saliva whenever I get close to people’s faces, and completely ridiculous things that should not be given any consideration. That’s right. I’m admitting that I do say ridiculous things. All of the time.

…Yeah fucking right! I don’t say ridiculous things, I spit TRUTH son! And if you think otherwise, you’re gonna have to answer to THIS! (*fires Nerf gun in air*)

Okay, so this was supposed to be a blog about reflecting on my time about living in Los Angeles, but then this happened. A “Darby” happened. You SEE WHAT I HAVE TO LIVE WITH GUYS? NOW DO YOU SYMPATHIZE WITH MY PLIGHT??

So without further ado, let’s get this motherfucking PARTY STARTED!! (*banner explodes, falls from the ceiling, lands on and kills a janitor, banner slowly unrolls to reveal written message “good job Jeremy, we always believed in you!”*)

I’ll break down my LA experience in three areas: the people, the comedy scene (and what I learned doing it), and working at NHK.  Strap in, and I’m not talking about condoms, because we don’t use those around here.

(And then we are stuck with herpes our whole lives wondering why we just didn’t wrap up with that one Thai prostitute we were dating for two whole months before we realized she gets down professionally.)

Ahem.

People in Los Angeles are weird, not because they act weird around you, but they exhibit weird behavioral patterns. You will see your best friend and you will have the fucking time of your lives, but you will only see that best friend three times every two lunar cycles. Hell, I saw my own sister less than 10 times over the 2 years and 3 months I lived there, and I don’t even hate her or anything. Well there was that one falling out after I wrote the mental institution blog, but…

Everyone in LA has their own agenda. That agenda is very frequently to maximize their twitter followers. Or no, not twitter. Instagram? IG? Which one’s IG? I’m pretty sure it’s Instagram. Or wait, is that an L? Is that an L, like in the TV company LG. Yeah the TV guys. Yo so they do the tweet things. Yeah. I love technology. (*looks bleemingly into the sunrise, eyes sparkle*)

Another thing in LA that I find weird is that people don’t know their neighbors. I lived next to one dude for 1 1/2 years, I don’t know if this nigga was white or asian or what. Because I never had any verbal communication with this guy—ever. All the while he was listening to me BANGING ASS from the other side of our shared wall. And that time I had the masochistic chick over and I was like RUINING HER LIFE SEXUALLY and the sounds that were coming out of her orifices, like UGH! Sorry for that neighbor no I’m not actually sorry one bit, what, do you think I cared? That that guy was in his living room watching his TV ALWAYS and I was trying to inspire him to get out of the house and not be such a couch potato anymore. That’s what I do guys. I’m a goodwill ambassador. My means of resolving conflict are always through sex. But yeah LA people don’t know their neighbors.

And then the big question. Are LA people fake? Well, what does fake even mean? It it like Game of Thrones fake, where it’s a story and everything but it’s people acting, or is it like WWE fake, where things are SCRIPTED and the fight is STAGED but with big beautiful beasts being beaten bloodily by badgered baddies. And if you thing I can’t keeping going with this b-word motif, bite bullets, bitch butter.

I think the dating culture in LA explains everything best: it’s all about them dating apps, bitches. And on the apps, nobody is selling themselves, but an IMAGE of themselves. Maybe she doesn’t look that hot in real life, or I don’t have abs this good and I photoshopped them on myself and uploaded them to a profile under the name Abmaster6ix9ine, but you know, people here really love to play a role. It’s that Hollywood mentality everywhere. A tryout, if you will. Dating in LA lends itself to being little more than a popularity contest.

And this isn’t just me ranting after being ghosted on my first TINDER DATE EVER (link here: http://explicitexploits.com/once-in-a-lifetime-tinder-date/) and it was like bitch what the fuck you was a pescatarian and I took you to that Mexican spot and PURPOSELY DIDN’T ORDER MEAT to make you uncomfortable and my food experience suffered for it, but yeah. I’m over it now. It just took a few months of therapy and over 28k, but I’m ok now. Seriously.

The next area I wanna discuss shit in is the LA comedy scene, and what I learned from doing standup. LA has the best standup comedy scene in the world, no dispute. Some people like New York out of preference, but the fact that you can just go and see a legend like Bill Burr do a comedy on a Wednesday night at The Comedy Store for 15 bucks, while Dave Chappelle does a surprise unannounced 5-HOUR comedy set upstairs, like get out of my face with that. I mean DO get in my face with that. Get it all over my face, bukkake style.

I knew with about 5 months of 2018 left that I would be moving to Spain after it ended. And in Spain, I did not want to have the regrets that I always had in Thailand, which were “god I have all of these comedy ideas, but I can’t do them in a city where people don’t speak English (what dummies!). So I knew this was my chance to make things right. And I started going to open mics, bars, comedy workshops… wherever there was an audience. Hell, I even went to a cookie shop one time! So over the course of 3 months I went probably… 20 times? Between that and 30. And I learned a few things:

Comedians are the worst audience.  They don’t laugh. That’s why it took me about 8 mics until I finally got my first laughs. And I was so used to silence that I just thought that’s how unfunny I was. Comedians do a million mics. That is their THING. They have heard so much. They are jaded and cynical bastards, and when I got them to laugh I was like ABOUT TIME BITCHES, I TOLD Y’ALL I WAS FUNNY.

One thing I saw a comedian do once was play a guitar and sing improvised love songs to girls. He was funny due in large part to his pseudo-“I wanna smell your pussy” sing-song voice. That’s when I realized the power of attraction a comedian could have over women. So I had this brilliant idea to take a girl on a date once and do comedy for her. And so I did.

…And NOBODY LAUGHED at all and I was like “I KNOW one of these jokes is funny.” But still nothing. Dry air. So as I’m walking off stage looking at the girl I’m thinking “I’m ruined” and then she said “tough crowd” and I was like “ya know what, it WAS all their fault, wasn’t it?” and she said “well no I didn’t say tha–” and I said “THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS THINK THEY ARE COOL WITH THEIR NON-LAUGHTER, I’LL SHOW THEM.” And then I went into the parking lot and drained the air on one of their car tires. And it ended up not being one of their cars, but it was my date’s car. And we were stuck there for 3 hours waiting for a tow truck. And I blamed it on the squirrels and she believed it because I fed them the tire cap in a raisin and when they were eating the raisin she saw them with the tire cap in their mouth and you were like “well gee I didn’t know that squirrels really do love chewing rubber. I guess your condom with the hole in it was caused by the squirrels, too!” And I was like “yup.”

Sadly the comedy-sphere is really sensitive right now, which means there’s a lot of people marking their t’s and dotting there r’s. I often did jokes that seemed just like normal comedy to me, but then people would approach me later and say “you went a little too far there Darby” and i was like what? Like my black girl joke. I said (more or less) that a black girl’s pussy smells like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, which, objectively, is just a brilliant correlation, and people were too scared to laugh.

In comedy, you have to develop a bit. You know. A thing. A character. A sketch. You have to do it many times over, and over, and over. You really have to perfect a comedy set. I went to The Comedy Store a ton of times and the one comedian who was always there was Chris D’Elia, who had a great set the first time I saw him. And the second. And the third. And the fourth…

Because it was all the EXACT SAME set. He always did the same material, the same jokes. About how he looks like he’s on drugs but never tried them. About how he stared down a baby and got caught by the mom. About how he is getting better as a comedian but worse as a person. See? I can remember all of this shit. That’s how many times I saw it. This rule was hard for me because I always wanted to try new material. I didn’t want to perfect a joke. I just wanted to go in there with fresh stuff always and test it on people. And it didn’t bring the most fruitful results. You have to be your own “Greatest Hits” album. Until the second greatest hits album comes out.

And lastly but not leastly let me talk about my job in LA for Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK. Before I started working there, I always liked them and their programing for the reasons that: they are curious, exploratory, honest, humorous, hardworking, show no ads, and are filled with personality. So I had already considered working for them years ago. The fact that they turned me into a producer for their news channel just made sense. I had pictured the adventures, and my vision had been spot on. Each time we took the cameras out to roll footage, adventures ensued. It was the most unpredictable job ever, and as someone who knows me knows well: I am unpredictable as fuck, and you can (*throws paint can through police car window, immediately gets tazed*) count on that.

Anytime there was news, me, “my” reporter Masa, and the cameraman Taka would go out wherever the news was, via plane or driving, and create as exciting of a story as we could. Taka was the only cameraman there so we had to hire a freelance cameraman whenever there were two newsworthy events happening simultaneously. There was the new boss who came middle of my first year and took over, a God-Tier reporter and the next likely president for NHK in the US. Then we had an office manager and another producer to help the new boss with her stories. She focused on tech stories, economic ones, and Silicon Valley shit. Me and my reporter Masa did feature (longer, more developed) stories but also all of the breaking news stories. And that was it. Small office, compared to the ones in Washington DC (which have to cover all of the Trump stories, HAH!) and the HQ in New York where there’s like 200 people working. We were a small yet powerful little news bureau, in Santa Monica, probably the best place in LA to work.

The job was cake. Literally, cake. We had so many fucking cakes over the years. Like, hey, it’s Masa’s son’s birthday. Let’s all have a Japanese cake together at the office even though the son is at home with his mom. Japanese people love cake. Fifteen years learning the language and I never had any clue.

So much memorable shit happened during this job. Here’s a few of the things they paid me to do:

-Sit at a bar and pound cocktails non-stop to appease the bartender who was seemingly upset with our cameras and shit all over the restaurant (she wasn’t even mad!)

-Interview various people, in various languages, including a doctor in Guatemala telling me about the hundreds of people who just died in a volcano eruption and how they were recovering the victims bodies in little fragments of stone. Or the Mexican mayoral candidate in Guanajuato, whose husband (the original candidate) was just assassinated two weeks ago but she chose to run in his stead with just days left in the election, no political experience, and WON

-Going to my childhood dream destination, E3 (the biggest video game convention in the world) and playing video games and cutting lines to play games because I had a Japanese PRESS PASS

-Using that same press pass to cheat the law, access places off-limits to everyone except medical personnel, and drive in the “can’t-drive-in-this-lane” lane to circumvent traffic

-Getting various phone calls from my boss while I was high or drunk and him giving me an assignment to do, in a very impaired state, that would be displayed to millions of people on national TV in Japan leaving NO ROOM FOR FUCKUPS

-Making a huge FUCKUP when I reported that LA had changed Columbus Day to “Indigenous People’s Day” and they had not in fact done that, and realizing this only as the story was airing all over Japan. And then the reporter’s subsequent explosion and him expressing his intent to annihilate me

-The countless dangerous situations I would find myself in. Like standing smack dab in the middle of the Berkley police and the Antifa anarchists, who were throwing paint bombs and smoke grenades at the police and begging for retaliation. And on top of an active volcano that had just erupted twice. And in Mexico’s most deadly state to be a journalist, AS a journalist, doing a story ABOUT dead journalists. And choking on smoke and chasing fires as they ravaged through mountains and swallowed up houses. And in a room with John “don’t taze me bro!” Kerry.

There’s a ton more. I’m sure you’ve read about the others. “Getting scammed by Guatemalan hookers” comes to mind (link here: http://explicitexploits.com/volcan-de-fuego/ ). But yes… it was a job that filled me with memories, and it filled me with warmth being able to talk to people and share their stories with the world. Through the bad and the good. News is an interesting business, and making news stories for the national broadcaster of Japan never had a dull moment. So I guess I should say to those guys, arigato.

And that’s it: my experience in Los Angeles. I consider LA the best overall city in the US and I think it’s a place that has something for everyone. Except fans of good pizza. Thanks for reading.