Pre-Leaving L.A.
I don't know why I never moved to L.A., but in the end I got fed up with it and left first. Yeah, that's right, I left L.A. before I ever even got there. I was squirreling around on a dirt road in one of the dark twisting canyons somewhere to the west of Anderson when I figured this out. It was just as my rear end started to slide out towards the embankment over the creek.
I had been trying to work it out in my mind—with what little I could see of the angle of the sun and my best attempt at reconstructing how far I had turned to the right and left as I headed up the canyon—just what direction I was actually heading and so which way I needed to go to get on up to the ridgeline, when I dropped over a rise a little fast and found myself looking up close at a hard left and the canyon shadow just beyond it. So I hit the brakes and started to fishtail toward that either/or line we call the edge of the road, tried to negotiate a compromise between my truck's momentum and that aforesaid line and thought to myself that absolutely any point before this would have been just fine for stopping and switching into four-wheel drive.
The upshot of this was that my right rear wheel went over and I teetered to a stop at a pay attention angle. Since the wheel that was in the air was my power wheel, and since four-wheel wouldn't engage going forwards, I figured out that I was going to have to back up and cut my front wheels towards the cliff in order to bring that rear wheel closer to the bank and, hopefully, get some traction. So it was a question—would four-wheel engage and would I get traction in the rear and could I stop before going ass over teakettle into the gully? Where I was, way the hell up in the hills, it wasn't like there was going to be anybody passing by to help.
So anyway, it was then, as I started to roll slowly backward and the car started to tip, that I realized that I was having a wonderful time—and that no matter how good it might be for my career, I was not going to be moving to Los Angeles.
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