Category: Wyatt’s Words

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I have a…how shall we say this…Starbucks addiction.

Every day, at around the same time, I go to my local Starbucks and I purchase a Venti or Trenta iced black coffee, unsweetened, light ice.

The unsweetened is so they don’t put that ungodly, sickly syrup in the drink that ruins it.

The light ice is so they don’t cheat me on the amount of actual coffee that goes into my cup (Alfred Coffee has caught onto this and charges $0.50 more for light ice, so they’re dead to me).

The black coffee is because I enjoy the taste of stale liquid cigarettes.

And Starbucks is because it used to be my daily workspace but is close to a very pleasant neighborhood hike I take every morning.

Now that I’ve justified my existence, I’m going to head-off/anticipate some questions here:

Q:  Why don’t you just make iced coffee / cold brew / liquid meth at home?

A:  Like farting in an empty Target aisle: I have before and I will again.  I like the ritual of getting my morning coffee.

Q:  Aren’t you worried about all those plastic cups?!

A:  No.  I burn them afterwards so they don’t get end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch (one of the worse 90s one hit wonder bands)

Q:  Why don’t you just get the Starbucks Iced Coffee at the grocery store?

A:  It’s not the same.  Plus the baristas will probably think I’m dead.

The last answer is important – over the past decade or so, I’ve built up a rapport with the local baristas who see me LITERALLY every day.  I give them a heads up if I’m going out of town because I forgot to mention to them when I spent a week in New York last year and I’m they were just about ready to call in a wellness check.

It’s nice to have strong neighborhood bonds with people who you don’t share a wall with.

I lucked out that my local Starbucks also happens to be close to a studio, so there’s a wide variety of celebrities and notables who come through every morning like me – beleaguered, bleary-eyed, avoiding the paparazzi.

The most recent visitor was Jeff Probst – the Survivor Guy.  

I’ve seen him around a few times, and he’s apparently quite nice.

And I’m sure he’s pelted by thousands of people who ask him to vote them off the island.

He chilled in the corner in a “notice me but don’t notice me” kind of way.  It’s a common vibe and probably unavoidable if you’ve been on America’s TV screens since before they were flat.

Meanwhile, I was loudly bantering with my merry band of baristas, and Jeff looked at me like he’d wandered onto an island where I hosted Survivor and he was the busboy on The Island’s craft services table after filming.

In that brief, shining moment, I felt what it was to be an A-lister, at a Starbucks on Ventura Boulevard *tom petty voice*

And then the next morning I came in, a violent homeless dude was throwing trash cans, the following day I spilled my reservoir of iced coffee while trying to get a straw, and I was freefallin to the realization I’m just any old average Joe.

The greatest gift I’ve ever been given was by my friend Maggie (Michal), who asked Gilbert Gottfried to record a Cameo video after I’d gotten into a bad car accident (Armenian on Armenian crime).

in honor of the late, great gilbert gottfried – here’s a cameo my friend asked him to make right after i got into a car accident.

to this day, it’s the greatest gift i’ve ever been given.

rest in peace to an absolute legend pic.twitter.com/HEBnVLsUaM

— wyatt.today (@wyatttoday) April 12, 2022

It was exactly what I needed, and I treasure it to this day.

The day after she ordered the Cameo, my dear friend saw Gilbert in Studio City (he was a known pedestrian and cheapskate) and almost accidentally ran him over near the crosswalk.  

It would’ve made for one hell of a story arc, and I’d laugh over it visiting my friend in jail after her white sedan leveled a diminutive but loud American icon.

Thankfully Gilbert lived, and produced volumes more episodes of his podcast, a love letter to the golden era of Hollywood, so we have one hell of an archive of the little bastard.

Which is damn near what Shecky Greene called Gilbert after a notorious, legendary Friar’s Club joke that caused Shecky, a near-ancient Borscht belt comic and purveyor of similarly blue humor, to throw down his napkin and storm out of the room.

Like a true professional, Gilbert refused to repeat the joke, adding to the aura of what exactly he could’ve said that made even a comic blanche.

It was a celebrity feud for the books, Jew on Jew crime, Crawford and Davis style, culminating in a particularly heated podcast episode between ”the little Jew” and the formerly-relevant one.

Shecky problably thinks he got the last laugh by living, if he can still even remember who Gilbert is.

By all accounts, Gilbert was one hell of a guy.  It seems like he would be one of those people who would hang around forever, like the welcome version of a stale fart.

Then again, comics always seem that way.

I haven’t posted in awhile, and I’m sure people must think I’m dead.

I’ve, frankly, been away from my desk.

Now that we can leave the house, I’ve been to the East Coast and Pacific Northwest, gone on countless adventures with family and friends, gotten exercise every day, plenty of dinner and drinks and nights on the town, spent quality time with my special person, and all that horseshit we couldn’t do a year ago during the global panini.

And now that I’m not home, the one thing I’ve been neglecting has been, well, home.

My apartment has become a den of dust, bags of tagged clothes, open suitcases, and expired spices.

Recently, my person came to stay with me for a few days, and I was embarrassed.

If you really want to get your shit together, invite someone in your space for more than 24 hours – all of a sudden you’ll notice quiet horrors all around you.

So I’ve been on a cleaning binge.

Goodbye rooftop dance parties, hello swinging the Swiffer.

My friend moved to town recently and his Friday night date was postponed.

“I’m free as a bird tonight!” he texted, and normally we’d go grab drinks.

Unfortunately, my Friday night was completely booked – I had to rearrange my sock drawer.

I’ve been on a kick the past week or so getting my place together. When I moved in, it was my first place of my own. The upside is I can keep it as clean as I want.

The downside is it’s as clean as I keep it.

Over the past couple years I’ve added a bunch of stuff – a circular clothing rack, a squat rack, other racks, endless racks – but never really made additional space. On top of that, the person I was with wanted to surprise me after I moved in with some new paint and accessories – which was a nice gesture at the time, even though ostrich feathers and crystal lampshades were a bit much.

So it’s time for a fresh start.

Part of that is getting rid of the old, making the most use of existing storage, and upgrading from “temporary, disposable college furniture” to “hey, when I get a house someday, I can bring this with me” stuff.

My first acquisition was a drafting table for the kitchen, replacing a wall of just piled up shit.

Next was a new couch, which in my hubris I could lift into place myself.

Part of this process also means parting with the existing furnishings, so I texted another friend to give him a progress update and see if there was anything he wanted.

His response: “You’ve got the style tastes of an effete French Lord but the setups look good. Great desk area”

Of course, I reminded him of the furniture I did pick (chaotically painted moldings excepted:

His response: “More earthy classy steampunk vibe then. Okay that’s better”

To clarify, I helped him understand.

More this:

Less this:

Brando’s house is really cool actually, and where I saw a similar sofa to what I ended up with:

There’s something deeply satisfying about textured neutrals and white walls.

I almost typed “textured naturals” but that’s a whole other topic.

It feels so good to get my place in this direction, and not the one of the little lad who loves berries and cream.

I was a patient kid.

I know that may come as a shock to many of you, and it’s a startling admission I’d normally only make if the magazines paid the right price.

I remember being really good at waiting.

Waiting in the doctor’s office.

Waiting for certain shows to come on.

Waiting my turn.

Somewhere along the way I lost that ability and now I may well be the Most Impatient Person on Earth.

Like, I’m at New Yorker levels of “get it done”.

There’s ways I’ve found it can be really helpful – in a work context, things need to get done by certain times.

But when it comes to actually dealing with people, life is full of extenuating circumstances.

Today when I left the house to grab coffee and start my day, I knew something was off.

There was a funny smell in the air.

Los Angeles has lots of funny smells: smog, fire, ass, Chanel No 5, salt, fire’n’ass.

This was not one of those.

This was smoky, but a little sweet, which means it was a car, and if I’m smelling it, it means it was my car.

I pulled my late-90s BMW into the Ralph’s parking lot and smoke billowed out from under the hood, which is never a good sign.

This is not a surprise or a reason to be otherwise dismayed. I collect older cars and every 3-6 months something is bound to go down.

So I followed procedure – get it to the shop, give them the keys, move it along.

Procedure is something I’ve found that helps me from being anxious or impatient (aka weaponized anxiety). You calmly react because you’ve been here before, and anything that pops up you can learn from.

The woman at the dry cleaners looked horrified to see me sitting behind the wheel of a car looking like it was ready to decimate a block of Sarajevo, and luckily the shop’s down the street.  For her, procedure was probably “get the fuck away from that thing” but I don’t judge and moved it along.

The car was drivable enough to the shop down the street, so I pulled in, parked, and stepped out to see that my beloved shop was no longer there and had moved.

There was no way in hell I was going to drive a smoking car back over the Cahuenga Pass, so I downloaded my insurance app and requested a tow, downloaded Lyft so I could go pick up my truck, collected what I needed, and got out of the car once the tow was confirmed.

Again, PROCEDURE.

This was not the time my beater pre-early-90s Mercedes lost a wheel on the 5 freeway by Pyramid Lake and shot off sparks.

This was not the time my discount 90s Jaguar billowed smoke on the 99 near Tulare and I had to limp it off a quarter mile into a neighborhood.

This was like a 2 on the “Wyatt’s Car Disasters” Richter scale – a fart in a whirlwind.

As I walked to my Lyft, an angry mechanic from the neighboring shop ran over and started gesturing.

“You can’t just leave this here!” 

No, I explained, coolant leak. Truck will be here in 45 minutes.

“Can’t you move it out into the street?!”

No, I explained again – coolant leak. Truck will be here in 45 minutes.  Isn’t this guy supposed to be a mechanic?

“Who’s gonna clean up this mess?!”

I’ll send someone, I said.  I don’t know why that’s what came to mind first, like I’m gonna call Ghostbusters to clean up green shit, but why was he throwing such a fit about a car parked in front of a completely different business than the one where he works?

He was gearing up for a fourth round of the dipshit tango before I sternly told him “LOOK. 45 minutes. I’ll be back.”

I got into the bewildered Lyft driver’s car and off we went.

I picked up my truck, got an iced coffee to deal with the impending ridiculousness, and returned to the scene of the car-ime.

I parked right in front waiting for the tow truck, which did not arrive. I caught the mechanic hurriedly running out and taking pictures of my car while another one of his fellow mechanics rode a fixie bike around the neighboring businesses, so it clearly was a busy day at the Toyota repair shop.

Minutes, then hours passed. “They’re 15 minutes away!” the cheerful insurance operator told me. All the tracking apps and texts and updates in the world and it didn’t matter one whit.  Finally, the exhausted operator said “well, I tried to get ahold of them…and they hung up on me.” 

Normally this would be reason to just absolutely lose it. What a waste of a morning – here this whole mess started at nine and now we were past noon.

But what use was it getting angry? The insurance company roadside assistance lady was doing her best. It’s not her fault the towing people sucked. 

Besides, what could I actually do about the situation? Nothing worth panicking over. Went back to looking for sunglasses online. 

do we like these y/n

At last (past lunch) she was able to dispatch another tow truck driver who said he’d be there in 45 minutes, which was how long it took for him to show up, pick up the car, and get to the mechanic’s shop with the car.

After all, when you have no expectations, people can impress you!

My wonderful mechanic called me a few minutes later when I was at the gym to inform me that there was a shooting at the gas station behind Hollywood and Highland and they couldn’t drop off the car because the police blocked off everything. 

He apologized and was able to wave the car in through the war zone to get fixed. Water pump. Easy job.

On the way home I had…well I’ll just share the text I sent to my friend:

The bros were really sweet. They complimented my car, showed me the slip where they bought the equipment to show that it wasn’t stolen, got thrilled when I told them about gaming PCs (“HES A GAMER!!!”) and then were left disappointed when I hustled out of the conversation saying I just bought a setup like what they were trying to sell the week before.

And now I’m home, eating chicken tenders, watching 90s talk show and Sopranos clips on YouTube.

No one got screamed at today, so it was a good day.

Really, the only thing I’ve ever wanted in life is to return to the 90s.

And it seems if I’m patient, we’ll get there soon enough.

There’s a haunting about, and it’s not even Halloween.

It’s the ghost of self-pity, better known as “Why Me?”

It creeps up even among the strongest of us, and hits when you least expect it.

This ghost presents itself in some distinct, wild forms:

Guilt: I did X, and then Y happened.
Example; I called Sheela fat, and then she slapped me with her fat hand.
To avert from the pain of Sheela’s embiggened palm, you can hurt yourself a little more by being upset that you hurt someone else with your comments.
From there you have a choice: revel in misery (boo), vow to do worse next time because Sheela deserved it (also boo), or apologize and try to do better next time (yay).

Manipulation: Bad things happened to me, therefore can you give me something?

Example: Sheela is making others feel bad in exchange for free cookies.
This one isn’t very common outside of mental illness, but it’s still one to watch out for. It can happen in ways big and small though, because this form of self-pity is like Drakkar Noir – it spreads.

Fatalism: everything bad always happens to me, I belong in Eeyore’s gloomy place.

Example: Sheela is moping in the break room, eating cookies, because her car battery went dead this morning when she was already late to work.
This one isn’t quite manipulative, but can easily be. It’s pattern recognition overdrive, where everything from the rain to a parking ticket to your boss yelling at you all in the same morning is reason for self pity.

Random: something happened among the absolute randomness of life to me.

Example: The Goodyear Blimp crashed into Sheela while she took out the garbage. The vagaries of life are completely random and bad things do happen, as do good things. A Mario Kart sized banana peel can sneak up on you in the produce aisle. You can receive a medical diagnosis that you’re terminally thicc.

You don’t have to be haunted by the specter of these examples or Sheela, who murdered a perfectly nice blimp pilot.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

—DH Lawrence

Self-pity isn’t a scary ghost. It’s an awareness of our own existence, of our own mortality, of an attempt to understand some type of pattern in the way that things happen. Our brains are wired to search for this type of causality, even when none exists, and sometimes our sense of identity becomes warped with events entirely unrelated to us.

When you realize it’s just an attempt to understand, self-pity isn’t a scary ghost, it’s more of a Casper – childish, inquisitive, and ultimately harmless.

In an attempt to understand “Why”, let “Why Me?” become “Why Not?”

Anything can happen, and that’s good or bad depending on your mood and proximity to Sheela.

You don’t have to be scared of self-pity.

Or even let it in at all.

There’s a haunting about, and it’s not even Halloween.

It’s the ghost of self-pity, better known as “Why Me?”

It creeps up even among the strongest of us, and hits when you least expect it.

This ghost presents itself in some distinct, wild forms:

Guilt: I did X, and then Y happened.
Example; I called Sheela fat, and then she slapped me with her fat hand.
To avert from the pain of Sheela’s embiggened palm, you can hurt yourself a little more by being upset that you hurt someone else with your comments.
From there you have a choice: revel in misery (boo), vow to do worse next time because Sheela deserved it (also boo), or apologize and try to do better next time (yay).

Manipulation: Bad things happened to me, therefore can you give me something?

Example: Sheela is making others feel bad in exchange for free cookies.
This one isn’t very common outside of mental illness, but it’s still one to watch out for. It can happen in ways big and small though, because this form of self-pity is like Drakkar Noir – it spreads.

Fatalism: everything bad always happens to me, I belong in Eeyore’s gloomy place.

Example: Sheela is moping in the break room, eating cookies, because her car battery went dead this morning when she was already late to work.
This one isn’t quite manipulative, but can easily be. It’s pattern recognition overdrive, where everything from the rain to a parking ticket to your boss yelling at you all in the same morning is reason for self pity.

Random: something happened among the absolute randomness of life to me.

Example: The Goodyear Blimp crashed into Sheela while she took out the garbage. The vagaries of life are completely random and bad things do happen, as do good things. A Mario Kart sized banana peel can sneak up on you in the produce aisle. You can receive a medical diagnosis that you’re terminally thicc.

You don’t have to be haunted by the specter of these examples or Sheela, who murdered a perfectly nice blimp pilot.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

—DH Lawrence

Self-pity isn’t a scary ghost. It’s an awareness of our own existence, of our own mortality, of an attempt to understand some type of pattern in the way that things happen. Our brains are wired to search for this type of causality, even when none exists, and sometimes our sense of identity becomes warped with events entirely unrelated to us.

When you realize it’s just an attempt to understand, self-pity isn’t a scary ghost, it’s more of a Casper – childish, inquisitive, and ultimately harmless.

In an attempt to understand “Why”, let “Why Me?” become “Why Not?”

Anything can happen, and that’s good or bad depending on your mood and proximity to Sheela.

You don’t have to be scared of self-pity.

Or even let it in at all.

I don’t know if you have them on your March Madness bracket, but there’s a little known school called The University of Flow State.

They’re as elusive as they are effective, coming out of nowhere to surprise you and then vanishing seemingly without a trace.

What’s Flow State you ask?

good video when you have time to watch of a fighter describing his career setbacks and how he learned about the importance of getting into flow state

The concept is to get into a mode where you can simply execute effectively – pushing yourself but not focusing on perfection, only on success.

It’s much easier said than done.

Imagine a day where things just seem to go right. You feel productive. Something made you laugh. You had a good lunch. The lights all seem to be hitting green.

For me, that seems to happen about once per month, on average.

One day where it’s like “oh hell yes, everything’s coming up Milhouse!”

The rest of the month is a mix of the good with the bad, some bursts of excitement, some setbacks, that usual cycle of expectation and anxiety that’s easy to get caught on.

One thing I’ve learned recently is “flow state” isn’t necessarily a random state of mind or just a product of happenstance – it’s a practice.

The biggest reframing was that it isn’t something that just happens – it’s something that you do.

In the Rogan video, the fighter talks about the difference between pushing yourself hard vs working smart. Pushing yourself hard can get results, and you can achieve a lot, but without internally supporting yourself, you can set yourself up to be unable to bounce or build back from setbacks.

Working smart is making incremental improvements, taking in feedback from trusted sources, breaking down big actions into small movements and opportunities to succeed, and cultivating many examples of flow state.

I’ll give you an example:

Let’s say it’s a typical Monday. You’ve got emails, errands, stuff that was supposed to get done last week, stuff that needs to get done this week, and that doesn’t even count all the potential disasters that can happen along the way.

You push the hell out of yourself to get everything done today, exhausting your resources to the point where you slug through Tuesday and by the time Wednesday rolls around, the only thing that makes you smile is you’ve at least reached the halfway point of this godforsaken week.

In an alternate reality – you chunked out and took your time with tasks Monday, allowing yourself to get things done at a reasonable and measured pace so you could build yourself into a flow state. You took care of yourself, drank water, ate well, rested, and started Tuesday in a positive way, covering any remaining items at a similar pace and left yourself room to sort out any potential roadblocks along the way. Wednesday rolls around and you face the day with similar gusto, and you continue that good momentum throughout the week.

In the first example, you tried to force productivity at your own detriment. In the second, you treated your body like a tool to get what you needed done, tapping into flow state, and making time to support yourself and your goals.

Both took the same amount of time on paper, but one was sustainable. That was the one where you cultivated flow state.

It’s a mentality you can take to every aspect of life, giving yourself the ability to push through one more set, one more rep (both metaphorically and physically) and be happy that you did.

Crucially, you give yourself grace while giving yourself room to grow. Over time, this habit building affects not just your mood, or your outlook, but your trajectory.

When you look back at life, do you want a highlight reel of struggle? Or one of accomplishment?

I don’t know if you have them on your March Madness bracket, but there’s a little known school called The University of Flow State.

They’re as elusive as they are effective, coming out of nowhere to surprise you and then vanishing seemingly without a trace.

What’s Flow State you ask?

good video when you have time to watch of a fighter describing his career setbacks and how he learned about the importance of getting into flow state

The concept is to get into a mode where you can simply execute effectively – pushing yourself but not focusing on perfection, only on success.

It’s much easier said than done.

Imagine a day where things just seem to go right. You feel productive. Something made you laugh. You had a good lunch. The lights all seem to be hitting green.

For me, that seems to happen about once per month, on average.

One day where it’s like “oh hell yes, everything’s coming up Milhouse!”

The rest of the month is a mix of the good with the bad, some bursts of excitement, some setbacks, that usual cycle of expectation and anxiety that’s easy to get caught on.

One thing I’ve learned recently is “flow state” isn’t necessarily a random state of mind or just a product of happenstance – it’s a practice.

The biggest reframing was that it isn’t something that just happens – it’s something that you do.

In the Rogan video, the fighter talks about the difference between pushing yourself hard vs working smart. Pushing yourself hard can get results, and you can achieve a lot, but without internally supporting yourself, you can set yourself up to be unable to bounce or build back from setbacks.

Working smart is making incremental improvements, taking in feedback from trusted sources, breaking down big actions into small movements and opportunities to succeed, and cultivating many examples of flow state.

I’ll give you an example:

Let’s say it’s a typical Monday. You’ve got emails, errands, stuff that was supposed to get done last week, stuff that needs to get done this week, and that doesn’t even count all the potential disasters that can happen along the way.

You push the hell out of yourself to get everything done today, exhausting your resources to the point where you slug through Tuesday and by the time Wednesday rolls around, the only thing that makes you smile is you’ve at least reached the halfway point of this godforsaken week.

In an alternate reality – you chunked out and took your time with tasks Monday, allowing yourself to get things done at a reasonable and measured pace so you could build yourself into a flow state. You took care of yourself, drank water, ate well, rested, and started Tuesday in a positive way, covering any remaining items at a similar pace and left yourself room to sort out any potential roadblocks along the way. Wednesday rolls around and you face the day with similar gusto, and you continue that good momentum throughout the week.

In the first example, you tried to force productivity at your own detriment. In the second, you treated your body like a tool to get what you needed done, tapping into flow state, and making time to support yourself and your goals.

Both took the same amount of time on paper, but one was sustainable. That was the one where you cultivated flow state.

It’s a mentality you can take to every aspect of life, giving yourself the ability to push through one more set, one more rep (both metaphorically and physically) and be happy that you did.

Crucially, you give yourself grace while giving yourself room to grow. Over time, this habit building affects not just your mood, or your outlook, but your trajectory.

When you look back at life, do you want a highlight reel of struggle? Or one of accomplishment?

Motivation is one of those elusive concepts in life – a feeling without description, an action that parades as a concept.

It’s black and white – you’re motivated, or not motivated. Being unmotivated leads to all kinds of bad feelings: anxiety, depression, fatigue, restlessness, and whatever else they tell you really quickly as a side effect at the end of pill ads.

Obviously we want to avoid that, so the only other option is to be motivated.

Usually this comes from coffee, having bills to pay, trying to impress friends and family, and enough guilt and shame to power a small electrical grid.

We spend a great deal of effort on how to motivate ourselves and not on why our motivations are what they are.

Funny enough, the first step of character development for a book/show/movie/cold case your mother is determined to solve after one episode of “investigation discovery” is to determine a character’s motivation. What drives them? Impressing others? Insecurity? Some hot under-the-table action during 2-for-1 appetizer night at Elephant Bar?

Why don’t we do this same kind of understanding of ourselves?

I think people would be a little scared to find that insecurity is one of our greatest motivators.

Look no further than pyramid schemes: they promise you’ll become wealthy overnight, you’ll have the opportunity to work for yourself, and you’ll be part of a growing movement.

It hits at three core insecurities:

Money – which represents accomplishment

Work – which represents the desire for independence

Community – which represents safety and esteem from others.

Nobody likes being poor, having a boss, or feeling isolated. All represent a core insecurity of powerlessness.

Pyramid schemes are an extreme example of marketing, an industry which is designed to exploit those insecurities.

So what’s the workaround here? Why do we punish ourselves in the name of motivation, and how do we motivate ourselves in a healthy way?

Understand your motivations – who are you trying to impress and why? Coworkers? Friends? Family? Do these people accept you as you – including your faults – or are they just enamored with the best version of you or stuck on a past version of you?

Align your work with your goals – what is it you’d like to be doing? Are you doing it? If not, why? If so, how can you get really good at it?

Who do you want to be? – it’s a decade from now and you look back at your life in the preceding years. Did you do things to please others, or did you do them for you?

Incentivizing yourself to be the best version of you, for you, is the key to limitless motivation.

By being the best version of you, you’re not showing up others – you’re showing up for others. You’re giving yourself the greatest shot possible.

And who knows? You can go on to create the pyramid scheme of your dreams!