Someone recently described where I’m living as halfway between the mountains and the ocean which sounds a little too like psychedelia lyrics or Frostian poetry or an affirmation about Jesus except it’s entirely apt in a way that reveals more than the desert cold that’s been eating my bones every night. Which is all to say your second month in LA is obviously when you’re issued intense introspection on how you ended up here from wherever the fuck it is you came from and what you’re doing now that the dust is settling and your jaw’s stopped rattling from impact.

This dispatch is even later in posting than the last one. The past two weeks have been all about the grind. I’m finding a groove. I’ve pared it down to workhorse weekdays and wild weekends (or at least unwinding weekends). I’ve also been aching to get back into blogging regularly. I had a good roll going there before I hit the coast, and while I’m all about prioritizing I’m always liquored up and pissed off about something and venting on Twitter in 140 character pants of breath just doesn’t shuck those mental/emotional exhaust fumes.

It’s less an issue of time management and more an issue of maximizing my time, period. I’m on the clock in a way I haven’t been in the past couple of years and I need to produce and I need to earn. Writing time is now at a higher premium than Gulf Coast gasoline.

Instead of blogging I banged out a 36-page treatment for a screenplay with a co-writer and a good friend of mine for a supernatural action blockbuster extravaganza that should probably remain nameless for now. It’s currently making a path from agent to interested producer to who-the-fuck-knows. But so far it’s being well received and that’s progress. Meanwhile I’ve been busting my ass on a spec script of my own I started before I left Nashville. I’m hesitant, always hesitant, to call anything “sci-fi” these days, so I’ll cop out and use prototypical “industry speak” and say it’s somewhere between The Four Feathers and The Matrix IN SPACE.

Oh, and the story meetings. Which, despite only recently arriving in LA as an adult, are nothing new to me. Over the past few years I’ve spent a good amount of time in such meetings with producers who want to hear what you’ll do with their brilliant idea before they actually hire you to write it. Of course, they never do. Because the project never materializes beyond the talking phase, when words have to turn to money for anything to happen and somehow no one ever seems to have any. It’s frustrating, but necessary. You never know which project is going to pop so you have to dance like a monkey in Lederhosen on that fucking bubble until you’re sure.

The goal, of course, is to stop slinging words for others and start getting paid and rewarded exorbitantly for your own original work.

We’re getting there.

Recreational accountability, the weekend before last: Saturday night I had dinner with Dave Grohl (he was five feet away from me, which counts) and then hooked up with an actual according to Hoyle fangirl of mine and her film school classmates. I was branded with my first LA club hand stamp. It was either a fucked up smiley face or just looked that way on my war-torn skin. I tried to end the night with some ice cream and ended up in an anti-climactic one-way slap fight with a pack of 99-percenters polishing their crotch rockets in front of Starbucks. Sunday I hit Griffith Park with my favorite weekend date Christa Faust and explored the actual Batcave.

That night I got to partake of an evening at Noir City, the noir film festival hosted yearly at the Egyptian Theater. It was a double bill featuring Mickey Rooney with some shockingly deft acting chops in Drive a Crooked Mile and the fantastically latently homoerotic atomic thriller Walk a Crooked Road. Leonard Maltin was in the house, looking like Santa Claus in a vintage baseball jacket. I wanted to tell him I loved him on South Park, but refrained.

It was my first time at the Egyptian. It was a hell of a thing, walking the palm-and-sandstone courtyard, staring up at the opulence of the ceilings. It was something I’m going to remember for a very long time.

This past weekend I spent some quality time with my Hollywood co-conspirator and co-commander of HQ, Earl Newton, and our new Norwegian bodyguard. We’ve become so big so quickly out here it necessitated the hire. Like all Norwegians she is a socialist killing machine who, owing to that nation’s healthcare system, is nigh-indestructible in battle. Which is good, because I’m getting too old and my body is too fucking broken down to defend this place myself. We saw Kick Ass in a theater that does not charge fourteen dollars a ticket. Matthew Vaughn has undeniable skill as a filmmaker, but I’m still waiting for him to make a flick that sings something other than “competent and amusing.”

Summation: There are an endless number of words left to write and we’re planning a throwdown for Earl’s 29th birthday next week. I’ve been out of the party-throwing game for a while. The last time I hosted a shindig it ended in a bonfire on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Choppers were deployed. Fines were levied. Eviction notices were served. It was a good time.