I parked my car at a meter yesterday and got outside into the sun and happily and blissfully walked away without putting any money in the meter. I do this quite a lot but yesterday I didn’t catch myself and got my first parking ticket ($63) in about eight years. In my first year in Los Angeles (1994), I racked up about $1000 in traffic tickets, but in all the years subsequent, my parking tickets wouldn’t add up to that. The number of women I got to know well in my first year in LA also exceed all women since. I’m a bloke who can make a great first impression.
I have a friend who’s lived in LA most of his life and he’s never gotten a parking ticket nor a moving violation. He inspires me. When I told him about my credit card debt (it was about $42,000 at the time), he said I should know to the day that I’ll have it all paid off.
I’ve never been a detail person. I don’t usually mention this in job interviews. Once I get a job, I find myself saying, “This will still work” about my typically shoddy output. And I’ll usually get a reply to the effect, “We don’t do things this way. That crap might be how things are in the Seventh-Day Adventist world, but in Jewish Hollywood, we spell names correctly.”
