Despite my initial plan to stay in LA only through today, I’ve since rearranged my schedule, and will now be sticking it out in the smog capital of the world through December 20th. Which leaves me, first, in a bit of a bind from a clothing perspective – my Tumi rollaboard barely fits four or five days of clothing, so expanding the trip to fifteen will leave me recycling clothes at a rather alarming rate. (“Didn’t you wear that sweater yesterday? And Tuesday? And last Monday, Thursday and Saturday?”) Second, I fear sticking around for such an extended stretch may push me dangerously close to my absolute Los Angeles lethal overdose limit.

Sure, LA has its upsides. Warm weather. Beautiful beaches. Vacuous, surgically enhanced, bottle-blonde aspiring actresses (“Like, ohmygod, I was totally Juliet in my high school’s “Romeo and Juliet” too!”). But after a few days, the downsides begin to grate on me. A thirty minute minimum drive from anywhere to anywhere else. Monotonous, vaguely run down, bizarrely never-ending suburban sprawl. Really, really bad bagels. And a complete and total lack of cultural life. (“Why go to the symphony when so many films have great orchestral scores!”)

And, worst of all, film people, nothing but film people, as far as the eye can see. In New York, running an indie production company is quirkily cool. Sort of unusual. Here in LA, nothing could be more painfully run-of-the-mill. I get the sense that, say, a tax accountant could do tremendously well at bars here. (“You add long columns of numbers all day long? That’s so exciting!”) In fact, for the duration of my trip so far, I’ve been introducing myself as a forensic diver – you know, the guy who has to fish up the corpses whenever the cops or the FBI are investigating a death in the water. Business has been slow in the East River, I’ve been telling people, ever since Giuliani started cracking down on crime. Which is why I headed out to LA; jet ski accidents, I’m sure, are the future of the industry.

Of course, even the cachet of such an illustrious imaginary career can’t save me; it’s hard to schmooze it up an LA night club when you spend most of the evening huddled in the corner, clicking your heels, thinking of New York City, and chanting softly: “There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home.”

Today being the first real snow of the season, I did the only sensible thing: constructed snowballs from the snow on my windowsill, and pelted passersby on the street below.

Her: So, you always get what you want?
Him: Pretty much.

About a year back, I made the rather poor decision to purchase two custom-made suits. Actually, in most senses, the decision was quite a good one. Those two bespoke suits have since become my favorites, drawing frequent compliments and holding up better than any other suits I’ve owned. The problem, however, is that I’m now ruined for life; I’ll never be able to go back to buying suits off the rack.

In fact, I can no longer even really appreciate my other, previously seemingly fine, suits. While I’d love to toss them all and start again from scratch, the dictates of cost prevent me. Instead, I’ve simply been going through and upgrading those older suits slightly, adding to them the most important mark of hand workmanship: working sleeve buttons.

Sleeve buttons? I hear you ask. But it’s true. Ask any student of the sartorial and you’re likely to hear him wax on thusly (this particular waxing being taken from Tom Wolfe’s The Secret Vice):

Real buttonholes. That’s it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or – yes! – men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.

Strangely enough, though, adding that key touch isn’t at all a pricey endeavor. For less than fifty bucks a suit, your local tailor can operationalize your buttons, giving you a look that says “purchase Armani? How terribly plebeian!”

Now if only there were some similar sub-$100 trick to bump my one-bedroom apartment onto par with the Trump Tower’s penthouse suite.

That time of year has once again rolled around. Opening pitches have been thrown and fans everywhere have whipped out their calculators to figure the odds of the Yankee’s left-handed batters bunting off inside pitches when the team is down by three in the fourth inning and there are two outs.

Or something like that. From what I’ve observed, people who love baseball, who really love it, are numbers people, and the sport provides endless statistics to compute, consider and compare. Frankly, I don’t really care. I mean, I like baseball; I love to head out to the ballpark, and I’ll catch games on TV. But I can’t list the Yankee’s batting order, much less the ERAs of their top pitchers, and I suspect most Americans can’t either. Yet baseball remains, indisputably, our national pastime, as quintessentially American as Apple Pie and hating the French.

After brief consideration, the reason becomes obvious: liquor. There are few other sports that you can follow as well as baseball when completely and thoroughly piss drunk. Cross a certain threshold and hockey, basketball or football games just move too fast. But in baseball, there are plenty of strikes, balls, crotch-scratches and tobacco-spits between anything exciting happening. Even once you’ve reached that precarious point of drunkenness in which, when you turn your head quickly, the world seems to lag a bit behind, you can still handle baseball.

Which is why the start of the baseball season is a happy and patriotic time for America, a time for us to reflect on the American way of life, at least as represented by pot-bellied guys running around a dirt square wearing stretch pants. A toast! Three rude cheers (hey ump, can I pet your seeing eye dog after the game?) and a big swig of Bud Light.

Or, an example of my semi-charmed life, wherein I essentially Ferris Bueller my way through and it all somehow works out in my favor.

Setting: A Duane Reade drug store in Midtown. I am at the counter, ready to purchase a can of shaving cream and a roll of paper towels. It is 7:08pm; the drugstore supposedly closed at 7:00pm.

Girl frantically runs up to the counter, sun tan lotion in hand.

Woman behind the counter: We’re closed.

Girl: But I leave on vacation tomorrow morning – couldn’t you ring in just one more thing?

Woman behind the counter: I said, we’re closed. [Gesturing towards me] He’s the last one.

Me: She can take my spot.

Woman behind the counter: [Momentarily stunned by the sight of a New Yorker acting kindly] Well…

Girl: [Profusely] Thank you!

Me: [Noticing girl is extremely attractive] Really, it’s not a problem.

Woman behind the counter: [Having regained composure] I guess I could check out both of you.

Me: [To hot girl, feebly attempting humor] We’re lucky; normally they turn into pumpkins at the stroke of seven.

Woman behind the counter: [Saving me from making further stupid Cinderella jokes] Hey, you two make a cute couple. I think it’s fate you both ended up here at the same time. [To me] You should ask her out.

Me: [Embarrassed laughter]

Hot Girl: [Expectant look]

Me: [Suddenly even more awkward] Actually, I would love to take you out for drinks…

Hot Girl: Absolutely! [Jotting down her phone number on a blank prescription form found discarded at the next register]

Me: [Still somewhat shocked by this turn of events] By the way, I’m Joshua…

[Girl and I converse further as we leave the Duane Reade and walk for a couple of blocks in the same direction. We have established a date for next week by the time our paths diverge. I spend the rest of the evening smiling like an idiot and walking on clouds.]

Fin.

I noticed this morning that my dress shirts were organized by color. Which is odd, because I’m the one who hangs up those shirts. And I certainly hadn’t intentionally been sorting through my dry cleaning to group blues and greens and purples. Just the other day, however, I similarly caught myself reordering the bills in my wallet by denomination. And for months I’ve taken guilty pleasure in categorizing and alphabetizing my CDs.

When did this happen? Why isn’t there anything on the floor of my apartment? Whatever happened to the younger me who, just five years ago, wasn’t even sure the color of the carpet in his room due to the wall-to-wall piles of clothing, books, papers, instruments, athletic gear and other possessions covering it? Somehow I’ve become anal retentive, and I’ve got to stop the dangerous progression now, before, one day, I awake to find I’ve arranged the spice rack by the potency and national origin of each spice.

I headed into San Francisco this morning for the meetings that had brought me out West, borrowing my mother’s car for the trip. On the way out the door, I grabbed a couple of CDs from my father’s collection – by and large, we have fairly similar musical tastes. Without looking, I threw the top CD in and turned up the volume. From the first strains, I new something wasn’t right – The Phantom of the Opera? I checked the pile – all musicals. Tossing down the CDs with disgust, I reached for the eject button. But something stopped me. The overture was vaguely soothing, I reasoned; I would just eject it at the end of the song. Or maybe the end of the next. By the third, I was singing along. I mean really singing along, belting it out like it was my job. I listened to The Music Man next, then Les Mis on the way back home.

Reason hit me as I walked back through the door of my parent’s house. I would just put back the CDs, return to New York, and never speak of it again. After all, what self-respecting guy likes musicals? And yet, apparently, I do. Bringing my masculinity into serious question as it may, I’m ready to own up to it: I like musicals. There should be a support group for this.