Gone Nomadlandin'
Life on the road, baby! I mean kind of. Actually not that much tbh
The above is an inaccurate title for an experience that, outside of treating your car like a storage unit, has almost nothing to do with the Oscar-winning ‘Nomadland’ or its depiction of pension-starved Americans living on the fringes of society. I was just out of my apartment for a month. But a sexy headline’s a sexy headline!
Let’s see if I can get through the backstory as quickly as possible: I was supposed to spend the month of May
in Montana. Some friends (Maddie and Steven, you’re reading this, hi!) had been working remotely there and invited me to come stay with them. It fell through, unfortunately, but not before I’d already agreed to sublet my LA apartment to a family friend moving to the city. Talk about a sitcom-ready pickle!
In one of the few instances of my life where I have been unabashedly good… I honored the sublet agreement. My friend and her boyfriend would take my Silver Lake studio for a month and I’d find some other place, or places, to hang my hat. That hat looks like this btw:
First I got it in my head that I’d kick off the month renting an honest-to-god treehouse like this little AirBnb number, spare no expense when it came to my bougie mental health. But these kinds of rentals are both 1) pricey as shit and 2) booked up through September, so your boi needed to regroup. After applying copious search filters, watching an episode of ‘Superstore’, wondering if I should just crash with my parents for a month, and making a sandwich, I finally found a solid fit: a cozy, light-filled little guest house in Inglewood. I see we have some questions, which I’ll answer now!
Did I feel silly spending American money to stay a mere 29 minutes from my apartment?
I’d feel a lot sillier three weeks later when I spent $200/night to stay at a yurt in Lincoln Heights so no, retroactively, this first rental did not feel that silly.
Does it count as “Nomadlanding” when you’re still hitting up largely the same coffeeshops and grocery stores, and have a home to return to at the end of a preset amount of time?
Fern in the movie ‘Nomadland’ would likely tell you that “Nomadlandin’” (we drop the “g” for more of a homespun quality) is… a state of mind more than it is a set of domestic requirements. I walked naked around a stranger’s apartment, which in LA is no different than bathing naked in a mountain stream.
Did you learn something about yourself, and the way you walk through the world?
I mean I gotta spend the rest of this newsletter writing about something.
Week one with my hosts Tricia and Nate (who gave me a glowing guest review that I’ll cherish forever) gave way to a second week house-sitting for some friends, a third week living with a friend, a fourth week living with multiple friends, and then the aforementioned yurt.
So what did it all mean? DJ Steve of Lifting Fog notoriety pointed out to me that this whole dislocated month actually doubled as social training, a baptism-by-fire back into the World of People. Which definitely feels true — five weeks ago I was talking to Tricia and Nate through a mask, saying stuff like
Since then, I’ve upgraded to A+ material like “I think we’ve all just learned to sit in stillness this past year, you know?” or “watching movies at home? Not the same,” both of which you’re free to use in your own social encounters.
More earnestly, though, a month away from your place — your HQ, your charging dock — highlights how important even the tiniest bit of discomfort can be at jostling you out of stasis.
DO THE LIMBO
I am not what you might call, by nature, “chill.” The very existence of this Substack proves it! But I stand by a certain, idk, let’s say “seat-of-my-pants” quality that emerges every so often — the ability to roll with uncertainty, or in this case literal extended dislocation, with gusto.
The last time I did this was probably June 2015, when I spent a spiritually actualizing month living with my buddy Avi in New York. So spiritually actualizing, in fact, that I felt the need to title it as such!
This came on the heels of six months writing the website for ‘American Idol’ season 15 (possibly some other season, I honestly can’t remember), highlights of which included an article titled “Who is Aretha Franklin?” and multiple interviews with a 19-year-old would-be Debbie Harry named “Jax,'“ like the Mortal Kombat kombatant. It was an incredibly well-paying, stupid job that made me want to start over as a yak farmer in Uzbekistan.
Instead of that, though, I took advantage of Avi’s boundless hospitality and familiarized myself with every coffeeshop in lower Manhattan, got a tattoo (I’ll never say where 😉), and traded Aretha Franklin primers for hyper-earnest journal entries with lines like “New York, man, she just spills her guts.” It was an honest-to-god spiritual high that lasted me a full three weeks once I got back to LA.
Five years before that, I spent a meandering seventeen days making my way to LA for the first time: a cross-country drive that took me from South Jersey to Chicago to New Orleans to Santa Fe to the very end of Route 66, aka the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. on the Santa Monica Pier.
I had places to stay throughout the trip, obviously; I wasn’t literally living out of my car. But the fact is… I think I could have kept it up for another three weeks, all my worldly possessions stuffed into Big Zippy’s ample bosom, and I would have been fine1. I like displacement! I like minimalism. The latter is deeply at odds with the side of me who literally, right now, has two plastic bins full of DVD boxes (not discs, which are in separate binders! Just boxes) in the back of his car and has saved every Christmas card he’s gotten these past ten years. But then maybe that’s the point of temporary excursions, domestic limbo: to throw those habits in sharp relief and realize you know what? I might actually be okay without them.
COOL, NOW UR GONNA LOSE UR JOB
Halfway through May, I lost my job2. This was neither unexpected (see this Deadline article) nor unwelcome (🤫) but it was… uncomfortable! For five years I’d been — by entertainment industry standards, anyway — exceptionally lucky, landing on a show that not only just kept going, but kept promoting me. I entered as a line producer’s assistant on a pilot that could have easily been passed on; I leave as a story editor3 on a syndicated network sitcom. It’s a regular Horatio Alger story, just with a shit-ton more Key Lime La Croix.
It’s naive in television to assume you’re ever truly stable. Some shows go on forever, some find second lives with new distributors; the vast majority, however do neither. A buddy of mine worked on like five different one-season shows in as many years, hopping from project to project without the tarmac to advance the way he should have. Most pilots don’t get picked up! Most pilot scripts don’t get shot! Etc. Instability is so ubiquitous to TV that it may as well be a long-running CBS sitcom starring Jason Ritter, probably.
All of which is to say… I don’t relish my current unemployment but it also feels cosmically perfect that it would happen in a month already marked by displacement. Here I am traipsing over half of Los Angeles, parked outside In-N-Out balancing animal-style fries on my lap, asking the Big Questions:
Was that even the right job?
What do I need to feel happy?
When I finally do get back my apartment, is it maybe time to toss the South Park Yaoi pillow?4
HOME AGAIN (2017, HALLIE MEYERS-SHYER)
It’s June. I’m back in my apartment now, once more surrounded by all the comforts of my Millennial existence. Episode two of ‘Loki’ plays on my 55” TCL 4 Series TV while Rostam’s “From the Back of a Cab” sounds from two Sonos One speakers. On my coffee table is an unopened copy of a new PS5 game intended largely for children, ‘Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’. Through it all, I’m taking pictures of the South Park Yaoi pillow that is still very much on this 35-year-old man’s bed.
So what in the fuck did any of this have to do with ‘Nomadland’5?
Short answer: nothing. Longer answer:
This May, I neither lived in a camper van nor had explosive diarrhea in a camper van. But I did — and please bear with the forced poetry for a second here — briefly step outside the machinery of my life and look at it, all the cogs and rotors and, umm, gizmos and shit from a different perspective. Work yields money. Money pays for Spectrum cable and my subscription vitamin service, Care/Of. Those things, and others (see: South Park Yaoi pillow), keep me tethered to this bigger thing called modern society, and its delicate dance between stasis and stability.
But Nomadlanding… it strips you down to your Birks and that one set of antique China you’d held onto until David Strathairn broke it and says keep your eyes glued to that sunset (whether in Nebraska or LA’s very made-up-sounding “Picfair Village,” geography is unimportant here), darlin’, it’s in those undulating oranges and purples that you’ll be able to divine your whole goddamn future.
Namaste.
This trip was also when I fell in love with my 2010 Honda Fit, Big Zippy, still the longest and healthiest relationship of my life. AMA
Homeless and unemployed? Talk about an absolute CATCH on the LA dating scene
If we’re putting this in karate belt terms: story editor is like a yellow belt, five rungs below black belt (executive producer). You can read all about karate belt levels here.
It’s a simple recipe: write two naked, vulnerable things, then undercut them with a joke so the people know you’re still casual AF
“‘American Honey’ for Boomers,” says Tim Goessling
Well done Henning