This is part one of San Diego, but it all started in Austin. To go to the beginning click here
I don’t really like change, but it was 2002 and I was just saying fuck it…I was going to move to San Diego and start a new life there. I had a friend who started to work at the Comedy Store in La Jolla and had been telling Man-Boobs and I about it. Yeah, Man-Boobs from the KLBG Morning show “Dave and Chad with Katie in the Morning” and Man-Boobs was their intern. He was heading out to San Diego with me since we really didn’t have much better going on in Austin at the time and Austin hadn’t quite blown up yet. We were both working at a telephone survey job trying to save money to just get the fuck out of Austin, out of Texas… just to try something else, anything else.
My anxiety had become so bad though at that point that I remember thinking how nice it would be to be able to go to Tijuana and buy some valium. Like a big bottle… just like the bottles that my friend Art used to bring back and then make a pyramid gluing the bottles together in order to display the valium bottle pyramid on his kitchen table when we were doing lines and pills. I figured that I’d buy valium cheap and relax on the beach. Weird thing is I never even went to Tijuana for any narcotic at all. Not even once in the nine years that I lived in Ocean Beach.
Ocean Beach, San Diego is or was at the time an amazing little hippie town on the coast of southern California. It’s a magical, amazing place full of amazing people, assholes, beautiful beaches, broken glass, bikini clad women, tweakers, kind locals, mean addicts, nice drunks, drum circles, circling helicopters looking for the murder, 2pm… go grab the Hodad burger.
I feel an instant connection with any person that has lived in Ocean Beach. It’s just that type of place, but that being said I didn’t know that at the time and I was crying in my apartment on my first night there in paradise. Crying and shaking with my anxiety wrapping around my body as my arms grab my folded legs… I just keep rocking back and forth and fall asleep. Man-Boobs had already woken up and was out exploring. I woke up in a sweat induced panic attack and began to swan dive into an anxious moment just rocking to the beat of my own anxious mind band as Man-Boobs opened the door. “Dude! WTF? It’s amazing outside!… You ok?”
No, I wasn’t ok. I had just traveled from Austin to San Diego and I woke up… still a fuck up. No, motherfucker, I’m not ok.
Why did I leave Austin? I had to. Too many people knew me and for the wrong reasons. I owed a couple of dealers money etc. But I’ll get to that next.
Drop Out, Smoke Crack, Get MBA 