Monthly Archives: August 2022

today LAist launched their podcast about the neighborhoods of LA

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sound familiar?

well How to LA’s first episode was 10 minutes long

i’m not saying good things can’t happen in 10 minutes

but Hear in LA

goes deeper and longer.

dedicated twitter, FB, IG and youtube channels

and hour long episodes so you can

you know

get to know the most important part of the neighborhoods: the people.

anyways, welcome to the jungle, LAist

thank you for affirming that doing deep dives into each of the neighborhoods in LA

is a valuable and worthy venture.

glad you agree,

people don’t believe me when i say i love competition,

but it’s true, i do.

kicking ass alone is boring

wrong again, tesla_eth

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Uber bribes drivers w/ these 3:30am bonuses because
– 3:30am drunks puke in yr car
– 3:30am drunks want to fight you
– 3:30am drunk drivers are driving erratically
– 3:30am drunks ping you, pass out on a couch and type “Be Right Out”… but dont come out and you don’t get that bonus, you get $4 and miss that surge.

some usc kid left his vape pen in the back of my car

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I was deep in the hood when I saw that I’d received a voice mail. Turns out one of the students I dropped off near USC left his $100 vape and $75 cartridge in my back seat.

Because young ppl are young he didn’t leave his phone number and Uber doesn’t make it easy to contact passengers – for your safety.

But my Waze remembers the last couple of addresses I’ve plugged in and his was in there. So I headed back.

Got to the apt but it had a code box. Apparently the building houses many little apartments. A student smoking on the curb let me in. But inside was another door with a code box. So I knocked. Someone came out but didn’t know the kid I was looking for.

Finally Uber let me call the guy. He said his friend would come out to retrieve it. When he did he was shocked I returned the valuable Stizzy and cart and said omg thank you.

I said tell your buddy to tip me in the app.

Hours later: no tip.

Lesson: don’t do things for tips. Do things because it’s the right thing to do. Also who knows maybe he’ll tip in the morning.

sweet saturday

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I drove a couple less than 2 miles early this morning. It took 6 minutes and 57 seconds.

Because they had reserved a ride they were charged a premium, which I guess the driver keeps.

I was paid $37 to take them from one part of DTLA to another. They were not staying in a great hotel.
We talked about their child who they were visiting who had just graduated college.
An hour after I dropped them off in front of her building I received a notification that they tipped me an additional $10 and change, which meant I earned $47 in about 10 minutes.
This is not how things often go. On good days (which every day above ground is), I could be grinding from one side of town to the other for peanuts.
And weirdly even at 730am on a Saturday morning there’s traffic in LA. There’s ppl who will wear a mask but pull it down so as to not mess up their makeup.
There’s escorts wearing the most interesting stringed blouses sitting on their secrets tapping on their phone instead of talking to you.
And there’s people who will backseat drive you even though modern technology can tell you about an accident miles away.
After that fat ride I could have kept driving to see if the rest of the morning was going to continue to be fruitful. But at my age, and my cars age, and how sore my arms and hands are at the end of the week of driving, sometimes it’s good to call it a day at 8:30am,
plop on the couch next to the snoozing cats, and thank the Lord for the generosity of strangers and the concept of pure luck.

five grand

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Every time I take someone to LAX I take a picture of Encounter.

Today I went 3 times.
The first was a Black urban planner from Detroit.
The second was a woman living in swanky PV.
The third was a stripper who did not one bit look like a stripper, she looked like the head of the Babysitters Club, acne on her cheeks and jeans and not even an interesting top.
In fact: she’s already graduated from a UC in art history, grew up near Calabasas, has only been stripping for 6 months, entirely in Vegas so to keep a down low persona, lives by the beach, and I should have known when her passenger name said Onyx and her suitcase felt
empty.
Her biggest night: a handsome rich guy from DC paid her $4k to hang out with her in the back and chit chat all night and hold his hand. No monkey business. He tipped her and extra $1k at the end of the night.

happy birthday, the busblog

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i love you.

youve given me everything.

im sorry i never go back and read old posts

im sorry i dont go back and fix broken links or add pictures or spell check it

its hard to call someone who has done something for 21 years lazy, but i am the laziest long time blogger there is

i used to do so many things on here.

anyways, glad you can drink now, blog.

my advice: only drink barefooted.

if you can’t be barefoot,

smoke weed

my wrists started hurting today

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coincidentally it was also a bad day for driving.

i did everything wrong. and i got trapped in the quicksand of South Central chasing surges and never quite making it.

so i quit the day early and headed home, in part to do a Zoom meeting for a little project im working on.

when that got cancelled i went back out and first got the owner of an Indian restaurant that’s taking Silver Lake by storm. i gave him my podcast card and said i wanna interview him for it. he said yes.

then i got these three law students, two from Italy and one from France who were looking at apartments in DTLA to be close to their school.

i told them they really should look at Echo Park and Los Feliz. i offered to drive them around for free but they were a bit put off by the overly generous offer.

so i gave them my card and put my phone number on it and i said, text me when you like a place and i’ll tell you if the neighborhood is ok.

they’re looking at a 3BD apt for $3k. seems steep to me.

drove 8 1/2 hours today, made my goal

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woke up at 6am because it’s been hot as balls.

got a bunch of requests for the airport but i didnt wanna go to the airport but everyones going to the airport at 6am

after a while i ran out of fuck yous so i said fine and took an airport ride

turned out it was two super cool lesbians, one who lived in chicago previously and one who was a great makeup artist.

around lunch i met someone from a notorious middle eastern country who told me not to believe everything i hear about her country.

VERY NEXT RIDE i got someone who worked in a mysterious branch of the government who told me she had lived in that very same country for two years and I SHOULD VERY MUCH BELIEVE EVERYTHING i had heard about that country

it was funny actually.

then my second to last ride was a dude in a Dead tshirt coming out of Canters who now lives in a neighboring country of said middle eastern country who teaches English there with his wife. They each make $50k doing it and renting their 3 BD house there only costs $600 a month.

Great, right? Beer costs $20 a six pack. PBR. and theres no weed, only hash.

he and i had a great conversation.

today i love life very much and i am going to try to forget about a Croatian 30 year old woman i picked up at a fleabag motel who i drove to a Public Storage near Compton who said she was homeless. who might have been plotting to roll me but who knows.

half hour later she tipped me on the app.

what?

i had a very good day

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i drove for 8 hours.

picked up a lady with a walker

and her husband.

it took forever and it was really hot

so my car runs a little slower when im running the AC

but got them to East LA

to see a doctor

hope alls well

and it was just a check up

today i removed the Hear in LA paywall

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for a year i forgot i hate paywalls – in part because it was a soft one

you could go to 5 articles a month for free

and on social i always included a Friend link that wouldn’t subtract from your 5

but the interesting thing with having a 79 year old mom is

if i can make things foolproof for her, then i know they’ll be foolproof for anyone

and she was always getting stuck at the paywall.

thats not good.

behind the scenes i am trying to work on a proper website for the thing instead of having it hosted on Medium

but the problem is it’s a lot of work and weirdly i dont have a lot of time and i have even less money to throw at it

speaking of money, the only reason i was having Hear in LA be behind a paywall is in hopes that if something took off, Medium would pay me a handsome sum.

i did have a few things take off, but i was paid a fugly sum.

worse: any time i wrote something non-Hear In LA related, something topical and slightly click baity i would have pretty big traffic numbers and still only make $5-$10.

is it worth $10 to have my pride and joy behind a wall that even my dear mother can’t get to easily? of course not.

so now it’s down and hopefully that will bring more people

and then all will be well

even though i am not doing this for huge traffic

im doing it because it’s the right thing for me to do right now.