LALALANDIA; or, WHO THE HELL IS CARRIE BROWNSTEIN, part 2

it was a good thing that we didn’t run into each other during the couple of days i spent in portland between when the bus brought me back up from the lawless wilds and fire dangers of  josephine county and when i flew south a few days later. i made the decision to race that sunday in large part because it was sure to keep me out of harm’s way for the day in rainier. i did, however, flirt with potential disaster the next day in choosing the course of my ride, but lucky for the both of us -- and probably for the rest of the city -- the james john café is closed on mondays, and so i couldn’t stop to keep procrastinating there, even though i was having my flat fixed at the bike shop down the street. tuesday i either holed myself up in order to get back to work, or didn’t and did my best to get myself away from all of it and forget. needless to say i was happy to put and end to all of the panicked apprehension on wednesday morning by just switching her places. she could have the overdone (over and done) city that the aughts had essentially done for her so that all she had to do was show up and do it over. i was going to los angeles. it was sunny there. and hot, too, when i left the airport and stood in line for the parking lot c/city buses shuttle. by the time i got to silver lake where my big shot l.a. friend was waiting for me it had taken me more time to get between there and the aiport on the buses than it had to fly from portland. but i was enterprising and i’d already contacted a composer. i asked him if he could write me a song about a sweaty guy full of too much coffee on a two hour bus ride through culver city. of course, he said, so then i followed up with a question intended to confirm that he was famous, and he said seemed to be saying that he was working on it. (and i would have liked to have heard that song, too.) then he came back, with a rejoinder. and of course i was. the song was for my show, which was bound to be super popular because it was about me coming to l.a. and getting famous, so it was pretty much just an ifc serial comedy version of that new ben affleck movie, and there were already a million billboards up for that. it was also about a guy who goes to hollywood thinking that the idea of starry eyed midwestern kids moving to l.a. to make it in hollywood was just a popular myth that had been made up in hollywood. it was also about a guy who goes to hollywood and finds out that scientology was, apparently, a thing, and one of the episodes of the show centers a hilarious story that a starry eyed midwestern kid tells at a party about how he got mixed up and showed up to the church celebrity center in nothing but a pair of those mormon underwear hoping to ingratiate himself to some kind of kinky casting couch. but the thing is that it worked because that musical about the mormons was having such a great run at the pantages. also, guess what? someone had incepted me with the whole idea, and another one of the episodes would be about how the show was fake but the mission was real. meta-irony, like the bourgeois pig and the trashcan and all of the broke people faking it under the auspice of assumptions on the strip in franklin village -- only, like i said, the ifc version. could he write that song? but then i was on the strip and forgot about the soundtrack because there’s a sudden plot twist when the guy on the franklin strip selling the two principal characters a couple of last call cigarettes tells them that, yes, he will take a dollar because he’s more careful now about overdrafting his checking account. you see, his dad is a big money guy, and his brother does something with hedge funds. everyone watching will laugh when they find out that being sarcastically ironically poor is the new drunk (had been the new rich had been the new gay). in that episode, i tell the guy that the conversation is going to be in my show and he tells me that now i’m acting (which, in the show, the character playing me will be). the guy tells me that he actually has a script being looked at by someone that knows his dad, who is a big money guy, and his friend asks me in french if i can speak that. (not even on the show, i tell her.) but then everyone drops their lines because someone breaks a glass. cut. we should just shoot the episode where the jaded redhead bombshell is telling the story about when she rolled over in bed and crushed daddy’s cognac glass with her ass. then he kept drinking. there’s another episode in which i’m thinking about throwing it all in until an inopportune cloudy afternoon (another bus song) turns into an opportunity to walk across a deserted venice beach and frolic like a giddy toddler in a pacific ocean that i have entirely to myself. what? my show, i tell her. the french speaking oe. it’s kind of like that one that carrie brownstein does about portland, except that the overdoneness is exactly the point it’s making. so it’s actually eternally timely. or it can maybe ride some coattails and be the smart kid series for the people who live in portland and can’t stand that other show and won’t see the new ben affleck movie. or maybe it's just "girls" in franklin village. i don't fucking know. “but who the hell is carrie brownstein?” she asks me. um, duh. she’s a character in my show.