Leave LA? In this economy?

how teaching my son a joke revealed the Truth

One of the first things I taught my 2 year old son Wilder was how to ‘cheers.’

Cheersing, we showed him, need not be limited to the post-toast clinks of glasses. Cheersing could be done with any drink, sure, but cheersing could also be done with any food.

Just a second ago, I said “cheers” and bonked my turkey wrap against his. We both said "bing!" to imitate the sound of an all-purpose clink and bam, the cheers was done. 

Cheersing need not even involve food or drink. Like when I'm vacuuming and he's using his toddler-sized dustpan, I’ll say “cheers” and we’ll clank our two cleaning products against each other, say "bing!" and clean the house. Perfection.

Toddlers are the parrots of humanity. Whatever you say or do, they will say or do.

Like when I take Wilder on bike rides. One time I said “weeeee” while riding and then he said “weeeee” and now it’s all he says. This, of course, is adorable, and much better than, you know, teaching him to say "eat shit" whenever someone sneezes, which, to be clear, is something I’ve never tried not even that one time stop asking.

We laugh, we joke, yes, haha and haha but, friends, this is no haha matter.

Molding a young mind is playing with fire, red hot and wild. Wilder, even.

And you know what they say about fire…

“Aaaaahhhhhhhhh run! There’s a fire!!” 

My latest project, my opus, size magnum, so to speak, is teaching Wilder to say "in this economy?"

“In response to what?” I hear you asking.  

Everything.

Wilder, did you poop?

In this economy?

Wilder, I love you so much.

In this economy? 

Wilder, do you want to go and say sorry to the kid whose car you just stole? 

IN THIS ECONOMY?

Training 

Wilder showed promise in the initial training sessions. I would say “in this economy?” and he’d say “economy!” back to me. Progress, but no candy cigar. 

Then, he'd say “economy” as soon as I said "in this" so we were sort of both saying “economy” at the same time, but not in sync nor comedically out of sync.  

It was cute, sure, but cute isn’t gonna make you the youngest winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, is it?

Like every parent who forced their kid to do only one thing their entire childhood so they would become the world’s best at it even though it made them unhappy and fucked them up pretty good, I saw potential in my toddler when no one else did.

No one had ever even suggested I teach him 'in this economy' before I did it. They will talk about this in the biopic they make about his life and/or mine. Hey wouldn't that be fun? A double-biopic? A duobiopic? Never been done, not yet at least. But hey - in this economy? It's a good deal. 

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My economy

I started working when I was fifteen. 

First at a supermarket - Shaw’s - as a bagger and then cashier. I won the award for most improved cashier too, but who's keeping track (I did, once I improved as a cashier and learned how to keep track).

Everyone I knew told me THAT IT WAS IMPORTANT TO HAVE A GOOD CREDIT SCORE and the only way you could do that was to GET CREDIT CARDS. So, at age 16, I got my first one.

Credit cards are little plastic wallet-sized promise cards that you could give to anyone, anywhere, and basically say, “hey listen, I don't have the cash but these guys over at Chase - they vouch on my behalf and look, they're good guys Chase and Co. They'll give you the money now and then I just gotta pay for it later. And if I don't pay it all back, boy they're totally fine with that too, they are good guys!”

Later I learned that they were fine with it, but the vig! 

The vig is the amount you owe in interest according to every gangster movie ever. Mob guys say “vig” because they know the word “interest” is lame and not scary sounding.  

Because, let's be honest, interest is not really all that interesting. They oughta call it boring, am I right folks?? In the back left there eating the potato skins do you hear what I'm saying? Then move closer there are plenty of fucking seats down here I'll wait.  

Briefly and yet forever

There was a short period — ten or so days in March 2023 — when Wilder finally got it. I’d say “In this economy?” and he’d say “In this economy?!” and I was, for the first time in my life, truly happy.

But as renowned poet Adam Levine, a leading figure of the Maroon Five art movement, once said, “nothing lasts forever, but be honest babe. It hurts, but it may be the only way.”

Whenever I try to get Wilder to say it now, he screams, “NO ECONOMY” with the disdain of a teenager who is under the insane impression that this obsession with “this economy” is the root cause of our culture’s downfall. Wait -

It angers him, this phrase, either because he was sick of his dad laser focusing on a single joke for about six months during the most formative years of his little brain's development, or because he simply was sick of me attributing everything in this world to the economy.

What about weeeeeee?? He said, with his eyes.

There’d be no weeeee without this economeeeeee, I say back, with my eyes.

Dear son, don’t you see? Everything IS about the economy!

And yes, an out of context joke that’s mid-at-best may not be the best way to teach you, but what choice do I have?

Would you rather learn about dad’s patent-pending “Alex’s get the fuck out of debt plan” which consisted of me, a grown man in my late twenties, writing the words “get the fuck out of debt” on a piece of paper and taping it up against the wall along with the amount of debt I was in?

How else do I teach you, my sun my son my sauna (bc you keep me warm) about this actual economy we find ourselves in, the one with recessions worse than dada’s hairline and the home prices so high that are pushing even bridge trolls out of the market?

Take this literal 460 sq ft. home atop a bridge in Los Angeles.

From an NBC piece that quoted a human named MsModernity — “Actually, it's a nice community, great restaurants and parks, good schools, and this is probably one of the few affordable places in the area,” said MsModernity.

It went on the market earlier this year for a cool quarter of a million dollars.

That’s impossible you say. No way it sold for that.

Correct.

It sold for $430k !!!!

$430,000. For that same price you can buy a 23 bedroom, 7 bathroom 9 THOUSAND square-foot village in Eldred, PA and till have 20k to play around with just for fucks.

this place looks like its set up for anytime weddings between people that live on either side of the town

Suffice it to say, we cannot afford diddly doo here in Los Angeles.

Correction — we cannot afford diddly doo in Los Angeles yet. One more big job and a screenplay followed by us grinding for 15-20 years minimum working long hours, a couple lucky breaks on residuals for some commercials that dada does and BAM, we're made in the palm tree shade.

If LA was a tree, it’d be a palm tree. Transplanted from elsewhere, the tree provides no benefit besides looking good, each one competing with those around it to see who can rise above the rest..

One thing they do not do, is provide shade.

And staying in LA with a family?

In this economy?? Get outta town. 

Literally, get outta town. 

LAter

We're thinking of leaving LA. Well, no, we *are* leaving LA. Well…it’s complicated.

You see, my heir my air my hair (bc dna), things have changed since you were born. Mama no longer wants to work 16 hour days on set and miss seeing you for three plus straight days because she leaves before you get up and comes back after you go to sleep. Dada can’t keep not booking auditions for Russian bad guy roles because it makes him question both his acting and Russian bad guy heritage.

Oh also — remember that day when you all of a sudden started playing with a baby doll and taking care of it for the first time in your life? You put it to sleep and woke it up from a nap and gave it milk? That same day, I shit you not dear boy, mama and I found out that she’s pregnant. You will soon be, as Kendall Roy once said in Succession, THE ELDEST BOY. 

Hollywood

I made up a super scientific system to tell how well I’m doing in the entertainment biz — while driving, I check to see how well I can see the Hollywood sign. The closer and clearer it is, the more success I’ll have that day.

Most days, I can’t see it at all.

Sometimes, though, once in a two-month, driving to an audition for KFC, I can see it — far, far away through the haze of smog and mog and movie magic fog. A glimmer of possibility amidst a sea of spec scripts.

What scares me most about leaving, I think, is no longer having the faint hope of that story. I can see it today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see it again. Maybe soon this is all gonna work out.

And if that story is gone, what’s left?

There's nothing worse than not having a story.

Vulnerability is en vogue these days – we are told to let 'er rip and bleed our woes onto the page, tear apart the trauma from which we come.

But for many, myself included, the language of vulnerability – itself a story – becomes a performative mask to hide behind.

I can rattle off the story of being an immigrant for you, and I can have it explain just about anything that's happening to me, and it is true, but it isn't alive in the sense that it’s not really what’s going on with me, what I can’t stand about my life, what shapes how I think. 

what the hollywood sign is really saying

But this story – leaving LA because we can't hack it? Because I can't hack it? Settling for a second act of life built around soccer practice and block parties and fuck I can't do it. And yet, the Hollywood Sign is fading in the rear view.

Was it ever there at all?

In this -NO ECONOMY DADA.

Wilder’s right to stop me. Even that story — the one about being afraid of settling down and being normal — though true, and perhaps vulnerable, isn’t the deepest truth.

So what’s the story?

C’est la vie 

We recently traveled across the country to see my parents who, believe it or not, are very excited about a possible move. Over dinner, we each took turns toasting someone else at the table. Sometimes you’d get a toast as a unit — me and Lauren, the best parents ever, — and sometimes they were for one person alone (one for my mom, the best mom in the world, one for my dad, the best dad in the world). During all this, my parents try to reassure us that even though everything feels scary, it would be okay. That moving might actually be good.

Except I don’t want to be reassured. I want to be sad.

“C’est la vie” my dad says.

“C’est la vie” Wilder says with the grace of a lifelong Parisian.

My dad and him have been working on the phrase for the last few days – it's a good one, a sort of 'life blows, but hey, that's okay.'

That’s the usual way the phrase is said, like “C’est la vie (sad),”, but there’s another way of saying it too — a jwah de vie YES! LIFE! This is life! 

“Ces't la vie (with gusto).”

Maybe that's the attitude I need to bring to “in this economy?”

In this economy? Nay, my dear son – In this economy! 

In this economy, we don’t have to leave LA, we GET to leave LA. What a joy and privilege like literally a privilege to move and maybe buy a house and experience a life that is not as hard as the one we are living now. 

In this economy, we can both possibly work from home and be around our kids.

In this economy, We might just be able to live the life that old people say they regret not living!  

In this economy, my boy, there are…not one, but two strikes in Hollywood.

In this economy (sad turn), Lauren can’t work, which puts our health insurance at risk after the middle of next year and, what’s this? The full time job I had, I no longer have, and while that job ending was for the best, I believe, it appears that without a W2 salaried job, we can’t even try to get a loan to buy a house because, and this I do find strange, the bank people say that me promising to write a glowing review of their services in Both Are True, a hit Substack publication that’s growing by the day, is not, nor has it ever been, worthwhile collateral.

C’est la vie, in this economeee.

my latest attempt at teaching Wilder about how the economy works

My efforts to teach Wilder about both comedy and the economy have been a complete and utter disaster. If anything, I’ve created in him a lifelong, almost-pavlovian aversion to anything economy related.

I played with fire, and it burned the whole house down.

How can I teach him about stories that I don’t myself yet understand? Am I even supposed to?

Or perhaps, and god I hope this is true, all I have to do is live them. He’s a sponge of a parrot who will pick up on the good stuff.

It’s what I did with cheersing. I took the toasting-every human-at-the-table thing from my family and put my own spin on it, and now Wilder believes that cheers exists between any two objects in physical spacetime.

The good stuff makes its way down the generations, it seems, rarely because of what we say, and often because of what we do.

When my parents say it’s going to be okay, I bristle, but that’s because I know that it’s going to be okay. I’ve seen them go through shit 100 times as hard when we came here from Ukraine, my dad making bagels and delivering pizza illegally while my mom learned English and took care of dumb little me.

So then what’s the story?

I don’t know.

I picture my dad, Wilder and me all sitting there, Wilder holding a toy broom, me a homemade turkey wrap, and my dad the glass of wine he only drinks when his family is visiting from home.

We bonk them all together.

Weeeeee Wilder says.

In this economeeeee I say.

C’est la vie my dad says.

C’est la vie.

“Funniest writer on Substack. Cheers my day.” — Ian Brodie

In this economy, we get to cheers! And BAT cheers our days.

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*bonks foreheads together* Cheers.

Comments!

1. in this economy?

2. have you ever moved somewhere to Pursue Your Dreams and then left? how?

4. what’s the best joke you’ve taught a toddler (or would want to hypothetically teach a toddler)?

6. for real though, they just ‘hiked’ interest rates (such a weird word to say ‘increased’, btw) — what the heck is the economy even and how do you manage its turbulent realities?

7. what really matters in life?