LA in Life in General

We just got back from our trip to LA yesterday. Honestly, most of the trip was really nice and not a whole lot went wrong, except for like 2 things.

First of all, I flew separately from Jessica because she booked her flight before mine out of Tulsa, and when I decided to go with her, it made more sense for me to drive down to Dallas so I could drop Bear off with her parents. I asked her to change her flight to Dallas but for some reason she didn’t want to change anything. I never really got a clear answer on that but I imagine she thought that would be more difficult than it actually was.

Anyways so Saturday I dropped Jessica off at Tulsa to fly out and then I immediately made the 4.5 hour drive down to Dallas. I’m from Texas so long drives aren’t a big deal to me honestly (that will come up again later). Also my in-laws live really close to DFW so it wasn’t a big deal for them to drop me off at the airport. I’m glad I parked my car in a good spot at their house because I forgot to leave a key with them haha. I offered to overnight the keys to them but they recently had their driveway paved and had a ton of room for cars so I guess it wasn’t in the way!

Anyway, Jessica lands like 3 hours before me (I dropped her off about 2 hours early for her flight to make sure I made it to mine with plenty of time) and she was a bit out of her element in LAX (I’ve been to LAX more time than I can count and understand how crazy that airport is), so she decided to wait for me instead of going to pick up our car rental alone. I was fine with that, it seemed kind of lame to sit in a baggage claim for 3 hours waiting for me, but if she prefers that I got no issue with it.

So I get there, we meet up, and we go outside to wait for our car rental shuttle. It was the generic LAX metro line that takes us to a bus stop where the car rental place sends an unmarked black van to pick us up. Definitely very creepy but it’s right on their website so if they were doing some weird human trafficking thing it’d be weird to be so obvious about it haha.

Well we get dropped off at the bus stop and start waiting for the van. After like 20 minutes of waiting we decide to double check the instructions and that’s when I realized the car rental place had closed while she was waiting for me.

Listen… I don’t expect every business to be open 24/7 but if you’re a car rental place near LAX (one of the busiest airports in the world) why tf would you close at 9pm? That seems like a shitty business decision.... but maybe that’s why they were one of the cheaper rental places.

Anyway I was super tired and hungry and Jessica and I fought about it a bit because if she had gone straight to the rental place she would have been able to pick it up. But in hindsight I can see why she wouldn’t want to hop on an unmarked black van in the dark at a random bus stop hahha. Anyway very luckily there was a budget car rental place (open 24/7… go fucking figure) within walking distance of the bus stop. That was very lucky because no Uber would want to drive us less than a mile anywhere and we had these huge heavy roller bags with us so walking was extremely difficult.

We get to the rental place and they offered us an electric car for not much more money.

Idk if you know this about me, but I’m a fucking nerd and love electric cars. I’ve always said that my next car purchase is going to be a fully electric car. But I don’t drive a lot and can’t justify a new car right now so I’m waiting until I get a normal job again or something like that.

Anyways, so that was actually kind of exciting for me. We reserved a Tesla but they actually gave us a Mustang Mach-E which I was disappointed with at first, but honestly, I’m very glad that happened.

That fucking car was a dream. So smooth to drive and had like really really good range. It worked with carplay (something Tesla doesn’t do god knows why) and has some of the nicest cruise control I’ve ever seen. Legitimately y’all, at one point I got stuck in LA traffic for 40 minutes and I didn’t care at all because in stop-go traffic the car basically does all the driving for you. All you need to do is keep one hand on the wheel and it does everything else. You can basically zone out and scroll tiktok and wait for traffic to get better. I loved it.

Honestly it made me want to be like a youtube car reviewer. I really enjoyed the process of driving it and noting which things I liked/disliked. Could be a new avenue for a job? who knows I’ve always had weird income.

Anyways other than that little snag the trip went pretty well. I met with another content creator scumbagdad who is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. Man is an orthodontist, a new dad, and makes the most deranged tiktoks lol. He mostly makes fun of other creators who make staged content, whether it’s “kindness” content or “social experiments”. It was great because I got to see his creative process and pick his brain. It’s really nice talking to other creators who “get it”. Of course I can talk to people like my wife about content creation but you don’t truly understand things unless you’re doing it.

After he and I met he immediately puts me in a body suit and has me act in some attack on titan skit. And then after we finish that he takes us all to lunch at this spicy asian chicken place. Really good actually.

Then he asks if I want to tag along to his next meet up at a tattoo shop, of course I say yes and we all hop in my car and head over. Holy crap, was this place in the sketchiest location ever. I had to drive down some random alley and pull into a weird gated parking lot. Then the tattoo shop was down a dark hallway and boom there it is. No signs, nothing.... haha.

But everyone was really nice. Definitely not my usual crowd but I can typically get along with anyone. Most of them were models or Onlyfans creators. I got to act in a couple of their skits and chat with people. They said they didn’t really recognize me until I did my little tiktok dance for one of the skits and then suddenly everyone knew who I was haha.

Well anyway we ended the night at a sushi restaurant and some bougie grocery store for a smoothie. I got the pumpkin smoothie, thinking it was gonna taste like pumpkin spice. NOPE. Tasted like someone dumped a can of pumpkin puree into a cup and put a little whipped cream on top. LIke… no sugar no spice…nothing. 18 dollars for the worlds most bland smoothie. I told him I liked it because he bought it for me which was really nice and he was very excited to show me the place but honestly it was fucking horrible.

Anyway a very successful first collab.

Next I met with tnybeats, another creator who specializes in VR content. I got to see her studio and we played the “stay” song in VR and did some interesting effects with it that I’m excited to mess with soon.

I also met with another creator the first day I was there and we went to dinner at a curry place. That dinner reminded me of why I hate driving in big cities. Parking is a nightmare in LA. I pulled into the lot near the restaurant and someone started tapping on my windshield and told me to leave because it’s valet only parking. He pointed to the sign (which was the worlds smallest sign, like the size of a wet floor sign) and was basically acting like I was an idiot for assuming I car park my car, in a fucking normal parking lot. It wasn’t like other lots where there is a clear area where they are parking cars super compact (like valets do ya know), nah this normal lot… I should have just assumed it. But LA is full of assholes so you gotta take it in stride otherwise you’ll be fighting with everyone.

Anyway I had some other collabs laid out but they all kind of ghosted me so I basically only met with 3 people while I was there which was a bit of a letdown but it is what it is.

This entry has gone on way too long already and I didn’t even talk about the hotel or going to Disneyland so I’ll do that next time! But soon because I have horrible memory and if I wait too long before writing I’ll probably forget a lot of details. That’s one of my motivators for writing in here so often, because I feel like a lot of details are lost if I don’t write them down. It’s fun to go back to older entries and be like “OH YEAH I forgot all about that”.

Anyways, next time!