L.A. survival guide

For Marc Porter Zasada, living in Los Angeles is a vast and gangly attempt at “perfect nonsense.” Don’t get him wrong -- it’s not nonsense of a bad sort. It’s more like being in the audience at a play. You’re not there to shout at the players to change course so they don’t fall deeper into the abyss the playwright has crafted for them. You’ve paid good money for those seats. So you put your cell on vibrate, laugh at the right moments and beat the crowd to the exit when it’s over.

You play the game. Welcome to life in L.A.

For Zasada, who holds court on KCRW-FM (89.9) Monday evenings and at theurbanman.com, it’s not about reality, as it might or might not be in the rest of the world. It’s about ordering the right entree, as he makes clear in his collection of commentaries, “The Urban Man: Staying Human in L.A.” (Upper Story Press: 200 pp., $15.95 paper). Oh, sure, we try to have our sparks of madness, but as Zasada notes, it’s really up to the celebrities among us to wig out, since we “pay them to act crazy on our behalf.” This is Hollywood, even for those of us not remotely attached to the business. This is the town of the do-over, “of remakes and rewrites, third wives and serial bankruptcy, young religions and redemptive last scenes.”

It takes some creative mental accounting to set things right. Scarcely making rent on your bare-bones apartment? You are living on a higher plane than those mere mortals struggling with private-school tuition and fancy orthodontist bills. “Maybe,” Zasada writes, “you’ve achieved Taoist detachment right here in the beating heart of America.” -- Orli Low

orli.low@latimes.com