Land of the Beautiful (Squished Flat) People

A couple of days ago, I walked from the office where I'm temping to the Century City Mall.  It's warmed up in Los Angeles again, and it was about 90 degrees out. I had the iPod on, and that always has a strange effect on me when I walk. Usually, I walk in the city the way a city-smart person walks -- alert, aware of my surroundings, conscious of what the strangers around me are doing. When I'm wearing the iPod, I generally only pay attention to the city, not the people. The buildings, the street, any physical obstacles, walk/don't walk signals, automobiles (but not the people in them) -- these are the things that catch my eye in between the measures and the rests.

Two days ago, I noticed an inordinate number of dead things on the way to the Mall. There was something in the road that resembled a little hedgehog (probably a baby porcupine), prickly and crushed in the street. A few yards away, an earthworm that had gotten caught on a busy sidewalk in the searing Indian summer sun. And then a bit further down, a bird, fallen, crushed and decomposing in the carefully sculpted landscaping outside of the Sun America building.  All of these casualties can lead one to only one conclusion.

This city will run right over you, if you're not careful.

Today, I had occasion to drive through Beverly Hills on my way somewhere else. You can't mistake driving through Beverly Hills.  The people have a look about them.  Even the ones in their cars look different if they're coming from Beverly Hills.  Walking down Rodeo Drive, you see the most beautiful women. They're all wearing the same uniform -- tight ponytails, calculated to show off the work of their brilliant plastic surgeon (and the work is beautiful -- not that hideous, rubbery-lipped, pug-nosed atrocity one usually sees as L.A. plastic surgery), tight t-shirts to show off their hours in the Pilates studios, expensive, well-cut designer jeans to show off the hours of yoga and spinning. Big sunglasses, wildly expensive jewelry, wildly expensive shoes, all of them seemingly desperate to be looked at, yet all of them looking exactly the same.

And all of them looking just ever-so-slightly unhappy.

I'm wondering where I'm going to be living in a month or two. I'm fat, I'm getting old, a plastic surgeon hasn't been within miles of my face, my shoes are from DSW, my shirt and jeans are from Target, I'm driving a banged up Hyundai... and... I think I can safely say that I am miles happier than the vast majority of these women.

Why?

Because they failed to be careful, and this city ran right over them.

L.A. will poison you if you let it.  It's a beautiful place, full of beautiful people, and it runs on one of the most glamorous industries around. The most beautiful people come here and they work to make themselves even more beautiful, by Hollywood standards. This city tells you there is one standard only for Beauty -- the Hollywood kind.  And maybe, if you're a studio executive or an agent or an actress, you buy into that lie.  But there are a lot of us for whom Los Angeles isn't an entertainment mecca.  It's home. It's not home because we came here with a suitcase full of dreams and a heart full of hope.  It's home because we were born here, raised here, just like so many of the emigres here call Duluth, Minnesota or Syracuse, New York home.

We're not here for the glamour.  We're here because here is where we have always been. We know this city -- know it like the back of our hands.  This city can't lie to us.  It can try, but we'll see right through it. This isn't a mecca for anything. It's just a place where people come, hoping their lives will be better and happier and more affluent than the place from whence they came. Or it's a place where people stay because it's everything they've known or want to know. Or it's just a place they move to so they don't spend the better part of every winter digging their way out of 22 inches of snow.

It won't make you happy, and it won't make you forever young. If you are beautiful, it might make you more so (with the right trainer, the right aesthetician and the right plastic surgeon), but it won't care one way or the other. It will tell you what you have to do to make it love you, you'll do it, but it still won't love you.

Let's face it -- L.A. is a bad boyfriend. If you let it, if you show it you care what it thinks about you, it will use you and abuse you, then step on you and leave your decaying, surgically enhanced carcass on the sidewalk, just like that baby porcupine.

Those sad ladies in Beverly Hills, wearing their little Rodeo Drive uniforms, with their Botoxed foreheads and their tight ponytails, will never understand that. Those of us who are from here, who belong here, who can survive here... we already know.

Writing, Then & Now (Writer's Block Journal, 11-03-10)

I used to be able to write. I used to be able to really write. The desire to write would come over me, or I'd get an idea for a short story or an essay, I'd sit down, hoping to start it before I forgot the idea. Then, before I knew it, I'd have a finished first draft. And a lot of it was pretty solid writing, too. Stuff you could work on, could shape, could turn into something meaningful.

Hell, I used to be god-damned prolific.

Then, it stopped.

This happened sometime in 2006, shortly after two potentially life-changing events. The first was that I was accepted and began an MFA program I'd desperately wanted to attend for years.  The second was that I moved back into my father's house. 

It had become clear over the past year that he was becoming increasingly incapable of living alone and caring for himself.  At first, the diagnosis was a damaged spinal nerve. We were told the prognosis was not great, that he would not regain what he'd lost, but that he might stabilize at some point. He did not. Nine months after I moved in to care for him (and had moved out for fear I'd kill him, or myself, or both of us -- out of sheer frustration and desperation), we received a new diagnosis -- Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS. Lou Gehrig's Disease.  There would be no stabilizing, no recovery.  He'd already been symptomatic for nearly five years before the diagnosis and the average life expectancy of ALS patients is about five years following diagnosis.  

To this day, I still get pats on the back for moving in with my father. Those who have known me well, especially those who also know him, and know of our history, see the move as nothing short of heroic. To say that my father and I had a tumultuous relationship would be understating the case.  The reason I didn't see his illness for at least two years into it was that I rarely spent time in his company. It was easier that way, for both of us, I think.  Let's just say that, of the three daughters, I was not his favorite.  I'm not sure if he had a favorite, truthfully, but if he did, I wasn't it. 

There was nothing heroic in the move. It was a job that needed to be done. Yes, I could have said "no." Yes, I could have begged off. There were times -- still are times, in fact -- I think I probably should have, for a number of very sound reasons. But the truth is, I know me well enough to know that, with all the regrets I have over what I lost that year, I'd have much more not going. Of the three of us, at the time he first became unable to live alone, I happened to be in the best position to care for him. One sister lived out of state, the other had a small child. By contrast, I lived only a few miles from him, and my only child had already moved out of the house, for the most part.  So, I gave up my rent-controlled, two-bedroom, two bath apartment in Encino, where I had lived longer than in any home in my life, and moved into the one house on the planet where I did not want to go.  My father's diminishing health had caused him to neglect his home completely, and the room where I was expected to live was barely habitable.  Thanks to the efforts and contributions of a few very close friends, the room was spiffed up sufficiently that the years of cigarette smoke and the tiny specks of burgeoning black mold were bleached and scrubbed and painted over. I went from 930 square feet down to about 30, my stuff went into storage, I turned in the keys to my lovely patio apartment, and I went into the darkness of my father's making.

At the time I moved, I was already one semester in to the MFA program.  It was a low-residency program, where students spend ten days, deeply ensconced in workshops, seminars, and readings, writing, talking about writing, reading about writing and generally being writers, 24/7, then run off to write for several months, receiving feedback from mentors via post or e-mail. That first semester was heavenly.  I have never been so happy at school in my entire life.  That semester proved wildly productive and fruitful, writing-wise. I couldn't stop myself from writing.

But after the move, I felt each passing semester less prolific than the previous one. Every semester that went by, though I loved and was inspired by my mentors and my fellow students, I felt less and less creative -- less and less like a writer.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my writer's block was all my father's fault.  

I'm kidding, of course. I would never say he "caused" the block. But the events that precipitated this long and continuing dry spell were triggered by him -- not only by his illness, but by his nature, and by the strange and unhealthy nature of our relationship, which had less to do with how he felt about me, then with how he felt about my long-dead mother.  

To be continued.....

Four Days Late

Okay, so NaBloPoMo started on November 1st, and I missed it.  I can't possibly take part in NaNoWriMo this month, seeing as how my life is collapsing in around me, financially speaking.  But the blog? The blog I can write.  A post a day, I should be able to accomplished.  I didn't find out about NaBloPoMo until a day and a half ago, and I was caught totally unawares.

I have hideous writer's block at the moment. Oh, how I used to scoff at writer's block. My old, prolifically productive self used to roll her eyes at writers who said they'd lost their mojo and couldn't write.  How can you not write? If I didn't write back then, my head felt as if it would explode.

Now... actually writing makes me feel that way.

So I've been writing -- not at the computer, but by hand, with a pen, on paper -- about not writing.  How it used to be.  How it is now.  How it started. Why it goes on. And on. And fucking on... forever into goddamned infinity.

For my birthday, my daughter and her boyfriend's mother, Stephanie (the other grandmother to Sylas), made me a gorgeous copper necklace with glass and copper beads and a beautiful copper and malachite pendant.  I've been wearing it ever since.  I looked up the gemology of malachite, and it's supposed to be good for unburying secret fears and guilts, even if you don't remember what's caused them, and sending the away.  It's also supposed to be good removing blockages.  Savannah didn't know about these properties when she and Stephanie put the necklace together.  But the Universe is wise and guides us with unseen hands, I guess.

The long and the short of it is that I owe The Chron three posts after this in order to do right by her.  She's been good to me over the years -- introduced me to some great friends, gotten me into some wicked hot arguments, made me think and given me a place to rant and rave and tell my story.  I owe her.  Three more blog posts, to be exact.  So I'm going to try and post a couple a day, until I'm caught up.

Then, I'll go on posting.  I'll write what I've written about in the journal on my writer's block.  Write it down, then let it go.

Welcome to November.