I am a writer living in LA. I perform at the UCB.
My friend and I created DEALBREAKER and we wrote a book about it. I make videos too. Oh, and I
Tweet. And if that wasn't enough, I'm on Vyou.
DEHorwitz@gmail.com
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Taking Control Of Your Life, One Organic Juice At A Time
Recently, I’ve started hiking several times a week and watching what I eat. I’m not lifting weights or running (I made a feeble attempt and hurt my grandpa knees), or even really dieting, I’m just suddenly incredibly conscious of what I’m putting into my body and how I’m treating it. It could be my age (I look incredibly well preserved for 46), but it could also be that after several years of living in Los Angeles and working in the entertainment industry, I’m just trying to regain some control.
That’s all anyone living here wants: some control! Almost every aspect of the professional lives of actors, writers, directors, musicians, and comedians (I guess I need some physicist friends, huh?) is out of their immediate control. So much of this business is waiting. You can write the funniest pilot of all time, but the lag time between finishing it and finding out if someone powerful likes it/wants to buy it can be an eternity. You can nail an audition, but then you have to kill your callback, and sometimes your second callback, and even then you have to bite your nails and hope the producers like you enough not to fire you. You can submit to direct a film, sign on the dotted line, complete a shot list, and pick out your favorite baseball cap (directors wear baseball caps a lot, right? I’m not just thinking of Ron Howard? I’m probably just thinking of Ron Howard), and THEN find out that financing fell through and the whole thing’s been put on hold. It’s totally out of your hands, and it happens all the time!
I was up for a really crazy writing job last year. I didn’t even know if I wanted it, but it paid so much money that all I could think about was my amazing new life and my soon to be unlimited pizza budget. The hours were weird, my sleep schedule would be completely disrupted, and the nature of the job seemed vague and only tangentially related to comedy. But, I submitted, and once I heard that I was a “favorite,” I started to really want it BAD. I came in for an interview, completed some sample work, was told I nailed it and everyone loved me, and then… nothing. A string of emails followed, which were answered each time with “still figuring some things out,” and, “just hammering out some details, but everything’s still great!” And then, several weeks later, I was told that the job was canceled. Not that I didn’t get it, that it didn’t actually exist. At all. They had decided to go with… no one. The position had vanished like so many zeroes in so many checking accounts.
So what did I do in those weeks between applying and finding out? A lot of noodle eating and hand wringing. But since then, I’ve started realizing that if I can’t control my professional life, I can attempt to go inward and control my personal life. I can set goals for myself and strive to meet them. I can make checklists and physically mark off the little boxes, and I can exercise. And I’m now realizing that a LOT of people do this out here. I don’t think I’d ever heard the terms “cleanse,” “juice fast,” “raw diet,” or “cacao” before moving to this place. I’d heard of yoga as a punch line in movies about LA (LA Story was probably the first, actually), but never as something people I actually knew engaged in. All these pretty, neurotic weirdos are just grasping at straws for a way to feel like they’re not completely powerless to an industry that could chew them up and spit them out just as easily as it could shoot them to the top.
So, that’s why your cousin who lives in Van Nuys and edits The Amazing Race goes to a Reiki healer. That’s why your neighbor’s brother, the guy who dances with a kangaroo in that beer commercial, is on a steady diet of kelp and placenta. That’s why anyone who lives here ever engages in lively, spirited conversations about kale chips. Seriously. I’ve heard many. So, does this mean that Los Angeles is making everyone insane, doomed to live a life of therapy sessions and repeating phrases like, “is this fair trade?” every time we open our mouths in exchange for the possibility of some huge opportunity we’ll have to wait months for? The answer, I guess, is… namaste.
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Just saw a comment on Instagram
The picture was of a friend of mine and you can sort of see her bra through her shirt and someone commented “sweet nips,” and in that moment I was REALLY hoping that the commenter was female. Nope. It was a guy. Now, I had/have no context for this comment. For all I know “sweet nips” could be an inside joke between these two people. They could be dating and that’s his pet name for her that she picked herself. Her shirt could be by a designer I’m not aware of named “Sweet Nips.” I doubt it though.
I guess I just got a gross image of some dumb dude/grown man refreshing his Instagram feed on his iPhone (*OR DROID, fine), and seeing a girl’s bra through her shirt and thinking “Heh, oh man! Bra time!!! You know I just GOTSTA say something about this! Because that’s something that I do! And that’s okay!” And then he did it. I don’t know. I think that everyone, regardless of gender, is pretty gross. We’re all weird animal people who get turned on by smells and want to bone almost everything, but the difference is that a lot of us can turn it off.
I hope sometime soon, a girl goes up to this sweet nips guy at a bar and says, “Cool shorts, I can see a tiny dong outline, bro,” and then flicks his nuts. Because you know that guy would laugh self consciously and play it off like a cool joke and then immediately sweat through all of his clothes and get really tongue tied and order a double Red Bull/Vodka to drink in a stall in the bathroom alone. That’s what I hope.
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Ignore This
So I don’t know if ADD is a thing. I mean, it’s clearly a thing, but how real of a thing? All I know is that I got up at 9 to write and I have spent literally three hours on the internet doing nothing. I watched some music videos. I picked up the smaller of the two cats that live in my apartment. I put her down because she bit me. I can’t get the fuck out of my own way today. I desperately want to get some stuff done. I used to write a long run on sentence to job my brain into getting ready to write, but I have decided that I like syntax too much to do that anymore. I’m struggling to keep typing but I really want to keep going so that I’ll eventually start writing the things I need to write. Here is a list of things:
- Ghostface Killah’s Ironman album is still amazing.
- Jokes about hipsters have reached critical mass. When was the last time you saw a trucker hat or a bandana anywhere but in a sketch video about hipsters?
- Irish Spring makes deodorant now. Get on that shit if you want to smell like a sex waterfall.
- An Anti-Valentines Day party is like the movie Valentines Day: Too many people acting atrociously, and you’ve got to get black out drunk to enjoy it.
- All older actors should be having as much late career fun as Liam Neeson.
- It’s funny to say Leslie Nielsen instead of Liam Neeson.
- I really miss playing the drums. I’m sorry that sometimes I drum on tables to deal with it. There truly is nothing more annoying.
- The sympathy card section of my local grocery store is really terrible. Sympathy cards in general are terrible. I would like to sell one with a flower on the front and the words, “Sucks, bro” on the inside.
- I wish Facebook would let you comment on a new friendship, because every time a guy and a girl became friends I’d write, “Hope this leads to sex!”
Okay, now I can start actually writing.
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“Forever Alone” Is Stupid
It’s like daring the universe to keep you from achieving happiness for the rest of your life. “If I say this out loud, there’s no way it’ll ACTUALLY come true, right?” Fuck you. The universe doesn’t owe you shit. You don’t have to go out and The Secret your way through life, loudly proclaiming, “I deserve to be happy” in the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods, but you also don’t have to take pictures of your Hot Pockets and write about how you’re in love with your TV.
Aloneness shouldn’t be a movement, or a meme. If you like being alone, fucking own it. Read all the books in the world, and do it without audibly saying that you’re doing it as a substitute for human companionship. That’s a cop out. Don’t get in a wedding dress (or tux) and get a marriage license for you and your cat. Unless the justice of the peace is a puppy, and then all bets are off.
Everyone spends time by themselves here and there. Some take a lot of time between relationships, some take a lot of time to start dating at all, and some never do. But most of them have the good sense not to define themselves via other people. And it might be funny to talk about all the “Pizza for One” you eat, or how you walk around with Cheez It crumbs in your cleavage because the only human you interact with all weekend is the delivery guy, but it’s really transparently covering up the fact that you are lonely. And you don’t have to make your whole life/persona/mental state into a sad sub-Liz Lemon joke because of it.
Also, go outside every now and then. That’s where a lot of the people are.
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On Sleep Paralysis, Nightmares, And Brain Tricks
It’s 1:30 AM. I just woke myself up. I tried very hard, and it finally worked. Trying to pry your eyes open in the middle of a dream (or nightmare, or any other kind of ambiguous mental state) is exceedingly difficult for reasons I don’t know.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had some form of sleep paralysis. It’s a sensation where you’re dreaming, and the setting of the dream resembles the room you’re in, even if only slightly, and usually it seems as though there’s a figure standing over you.
Just now, I was dreaming that I was reclined on a couch, staring at the blinking display of a VCR. I would drift in and out of feeling like I was actually awake, and soon I heard an alarm faintly going off. The next thing I knew, I was face to face with two figures, who were standing over me, holding an object a few inches from my face. I didn’t know what was happening, I just knew that I HAD to wake up.
Whenever this happens, I have to focus very hard. I have to just pretend like all I have to do is open my eyes, even though my eyelids feel like they’re being held together with superglue. It’s always a situation like this, where I feel like if I don’t pry my eyes open I’m going to die.
Except, I’m never in any danger and nothing is ever wrong. I experience a violent kind of full body vibration feeling that I can’t shake until I’m fully awake, but that’s as bad as it gets in the waking world. I’ve tried to read into this stuff and it mostly confuses me, but who knows, maybe there’s a book out there that makes more sense than my scrambled subconscious. The real story is that I’m writing this so I can be awake for a while before I go back to sleep. There’s usually less of a chance that this will happens again immediately if I can keep myself up for a few minutes.
Okay, back to weird, weird sleep.
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I took this picture with my phone. My fucking phone! My new iPhone. I have a new iPhone. And I have a new apartment and a new bed and it’s not a fancy bed but it’s comfortable and it’s new and that means I’m it’s first owner. And I have some great friends and I had a good year of work and I got to write for a television show and I got to find out that that’s what I want to do with my life and I still have other projects I’m working on/excited about.
And I have Louis CK’s new special on my desktop and I’ve watched it twice and I’m so happy that he exists and I’ll never forget the time that my friend Zeph and I saw him at the same club I started at and we had to stand and he did an hour and half and my sides and stomach hurt the next day from laughing. He was so funny he HURT me. And I remember he said something incendiary about God and someone gasped and he looked at them, then he looked up to the sky with his middle finger up and said “Fuck you, God, you can’t hurt me.” And that memory was so great and so vibrant and bright that even after probably 7 or 8 years I still remember it even thought I can’t remember my parents anniversary. I’m happy I have that memory.
I’m happy about so many things that they all gang up against the things I am unhappy about, like being unemployed for the first time in a while even though I know it’s temporary. Like being worried that I might be allergic to cats, after having just moved into an apartment with two of them. I am 28, I’ve never felt sick around cats, but now I sneeze in my own house. But you know what? They make Claritin and Allegra and vacuum cleaners and I have a HOME.
Any time I get sad or worried about this stuff I’m going to think about being at the Unemployment office yesterday, in the rain, trying to re-open my old claim. As I waited there on one of their greasy old phones, I watched a woman with a Disney Adventures backpack (probably free from the magazine they sold at supermarkets when I was in 6th grade) and the most beat up purse I’ve ever seen. She was BAWLING her eyes out because she left the purse in the bathroom and someone stole all the money she had in the world. It sounded like it was around $100. Everything rattling around in my brain felt so small.
Everything is fine. Everything’s going to be okay. Because the zit on my forehead and the saltwater in my eyes from a possible cat allergy will be gone eventually. In 10 years, none of this is going to mean anything. I hope I don’t remember writing this in a decade, but I hope I remember Louis CK flipping God the bird until the day I die.
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The State Of My Brain, 3/9/11: I Blame Sheen
Is that okay? I needed a scapegoat, and Charlie Sheen seems like the perfect mark. He’s front and center in terms of public consciousness, he’s totally unavoidable, and he’s taking up more space in most people’s brains than they’re probably all willing to admit. Maybe he’s the reason why everything’s felt a little off lately. If America wants to make him their new bad boy (bad old man?) role model, then I can make him my permanent scapegoat.
He’s my excuse for not writing more this past week or two. Is that fair? Probably not. You know what? Definitely not. But I’m doing it anyway. If that makes me a coward, so be it, but don’t think I’m going to write about warlocks and tigers. That’s not the point. That stuff doesn’t interest me right now. I mean, it does, and it doesn’t. And yes, that was a subtle movie reference. The point is, I’ve got a lot on my mind lately, and a rich asshole is taking up valuable space in my brain, and I don’t like it.
I don’t like that someone I’ve spent nine years avoiding on my TV is now somehow more famous than ever for an all-too-public flame out. I don’t like the notion that a person so devoid of morality, sanity, or objectivity can treat women, the public, and himself so badly that he’d rather completely implode in front of our eyes than seek any kind of treatment. I don’t like that two months ago, I stood next to the adult film actress who you’ve dubbed a “goddess” while she fawned over my roommate and told her what a fan she was of her. I don’t like that she seemed more like a sweet, star struck teenager, and less like the kind of girl who gets paid to be the for-hire girlfriend/on-call sex worker of a lunatic who beats women.
I don’t like that coincidentally (or not), I’ve been getting more frequent headaches lately. It could be from stress, it could be from mold that may or may not be growing on my roommate’s ceiling (the landlord’s “taking care of it”), or it could be from Charlie Sheen. He could be using so much of his superpowered brain that it’s doing wonky things to the rest of us mortal Angelenos (IE: I would never have said “Angelenos” two weeks ago). I blame a 45 year old actor who lives in a fantasy world where women act like he’s desirable, men act like he’s hilarious, and where TV producers act like he’s a “comedian” for my not exercising enough and not eating nearly enough produce. Fuck you, rich man! Why won’t you let me eat kale?
I think that’s good. I feel better, and I think I’ve got it out of my system. Let’s see, is there anything else that needs blame assigned to it? Hmm… maybe a few more:
- That tax letter I let sit on my desk since September before addressing last week.
- When I only half clean my bathroom because “I can do the rest tomorrow.”
- If the check engine light comes on in my car, and I yell “YOU’RE BLUFFING!”
- Any time I’ve gotten way too drunk and done nothing to prevent a hangover.
- When I saw someone I knew last week and I waited in my car to avoid them.
- Leaving my car parked on the street cleaning side out of pure laziness.
- Any article of clothing I wore in High School.
That’ll just about do it. Thanks for being there for me, Chuck. I owe you one (mountain of cocaine).
