Category Archives: Hollywood

Northern Migration

27 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Brother, Family & Friends, Hollywood, Living, Uncategorized

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moving photogoodbye la

When we loaded the trailers sky high in a modern day version of the grapes of wrath and drove north in our mass exodus from wild, smoggy, youthful and vicious L.A., we knew life was changing. Of course we did, we were moving after all. But really we had no idea. Even Zelda (the cat) was destined for change.

The move was a battle from the beginning to end…one of those things that later you look upon and say, “If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth it.” And of course it would be worth it if it had been easy—we just may have had a bit more fun and money in the end. Alas!

We packed in a wild mess and left piles of shit in the alley outside our apartment—most of which was squirreled across the drive to the neighbors compound. I doled out plants and made my friends promise to care for them in all their greenness. The neighbors across the hall snagged a couch. And still we were overloaded. To the max. Heaps and heaps of belongings that would be carted from LA thru Vegas and eventually home to Lake Wenatchee, WA.

My mom and brother Drew were there like cursing angels—spackling walls and hauling boxes. Bringing humor (as always) and the help that we so desperately needed.

And finally we fit all we could and said goodbye to LA on a Saturday night. It’d been seven and a half long years. It had been the city where I grew up and where Derek and I fell in love. It had been a lot of things to me. And now it was time for me to move on.

We contended with flat tires, flat spare tires, burnt wheel bearings, broken axels, skeezy motels, desolate roads, and hot, hot sun. We wrestled shorted wiring, hail falling from a grey sky and an angry cat pissing in the car. We threw all our money at the problems and crossed our fingers that we would make it home.

But we also laughed and soaked up family. We kept our dreams close.

We are here now. And we are tough and ready and eager. We planted some flowers the other day and I can’t wait to see them bloom. Zelda’s even killing mice. So it turns out, we all three seem to be settling in to country life fairly well.

Summer in Southern California

14 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Hollywood, Living

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This is Southern California. This is summer. This is summer in Southern California. And it’s fucking brutal.

It crept up slowly. In fact, I was beginning to believe that we might get lucky—that we may get to enjoy a mild season under the sun.  Afternoons were warm during our hikes to Eaton Canyon (where we took glorious refuge in splashing our feet around in the populated water under the falls there) but it felt nice. And it felt even better as the sun began to sink and a cool breeze descended upon Los Angeles and its neighbors.

But then, the breeze went away and the heat grew stronger. It beat down on our house—baking the walls, sucking the life from our tomatoes & strawberries & herbs. Sucking the life right out of us.

We lay around like sunburnt slugs, dripping. We flop between couches and the floor—growing angry and despondent; occasionally throwing the middle finger and a few FUCK!’s in the sun’s general direction.  What else is there to do?

I’ve taken to filling the bathtub with the coldest water the old pipes in our building can muster and I crawl in and splash around. I close my eyes and dive my face into the water and create little air bubbles.  I’ve also grown quite close with our freezer—stuffing my face inside and pulling the door closed. The ice-cube trays and I have gotten a lot of face time lately.

We’ve thrown a mattress on the floor in hopes of getting nearer to the window (and coincidently, nearer to the fan). I think that it gets us closer to a good nights sleep. We eat ice cream for every meal and drink water faster than our Brita can filter it.

It’s hard.  I think that it may be harder owning to the fact that I am a super pale skinned (some say fair & porcelain—others liken me to Casper) girl from the mountains of Washington State.

But this is summer in Southern California and despite what they might tell you, the beaches are far & palm trees only look good in pictures. And it’s fucking brutal.

A land chosen by the Sun, until the light runs out

04 Monday Jun 2012

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It occurred to me that romanticism dies the second we accept reality.

To live in this world where idealism is raw fantasy could be the end of you. Some say, it could turn out to be sheer blindness; the will to only give in to apathy. I disagree. Like I do much too often.

What is this will to give in to hopelessness when all you have to hold on to is the truer root of all that is but a fantasy? The all-knowing share of your being that denies a kind of reality only meant to drag you to the abyss of all that you fear.

I walk these streets and I hear its sounds. The sun burns the thin and pale surface of my flesh with fierce cruelty. I accept it like I did once, when I first learned to let it burn without giving it too much thought and I remember,

The first time I went to a movie theater in this land I saw “Sunshine”. The first boulevard I ever walked through was Sunset. The first treetops that sheltered me stood sadly off its shoulders. I soon learned that it’s always sunny here, even when it rains. Rainbows are welcome every time the skies open broadly and pour some of its contents over this city’s dirty wounds.

The first time I learned a city never heals was when I first lived here.

Romanticism never died, it took on different names. The vein that pumps blood from my heart into these lines are no longer romantic nor realistic; they shelter the storm it seldom experiences in a bottle of wine, inside of an imaginary cellar built in the darkness of my belly.

The bottom of all truths is the kind heart few of us know but I, I know it so well.

I know its name; by heart.

Grumbling Under the Hood

22 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Hollywood, Living, Reality check?

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I do not drive a derby car. I am not a member of a motorcycle gang. And yet, this morning after happily skipping to my Toyota 4runner, the sun already high and bouncing off the ol’girls black hood and freckling my skin, I turned the key in the ignition and was startled by the rumbling grumbling loud gurgling noise that spout out in force. It roared like a lion.  It chortled like some massive hyena.

In a panic, I shut my car off. My eyes wide. My nose twitching. My ears still reverberating from that great growl of my engine.  What the fuck was that?

In his gallant steed (his Rubicon), Derek arrived to save me; to conquer this beast that my sweet car had grown to be overnight.  He tossed me his keys (and a kiss) and sent me on my way. He would stay and fight this fight.

Hours later and on the other side of town, as I sat reading monster stories to two less furry monsters, I was told that he had diagnosed the problem: In the night, as I lay dreaming, some asshole took a sawzall to the underbelly of my Runner and hijacked the catalytic converter and two feet of my exhaust.

Five hundred dollars later, my car will be restored but my security isn’t quite such an easy fix. I’m scouring the neighborhood looking for other 4Runners that someone may be working on. Do I trust my car on the street? Or even in my driveway? But more than that, it has me questioning humanity. What kind of rat crawls thru this city, trying to eek out a living off of catalytic converters? What kind of city is this that there is nothing to be done but to put my money down on O’Reily’s countertop and keep my eyes peered for bottom feeders?

Save twilight

26 Monday Mar 2012

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…and let the pleasure we invent together/ be one more sign of freedom.

While I was gone, the rain cleaned my city.

The city of angels sometimes needs some cleansing. My city, a place where a couple of tourist guides, zip cars, celebrity home tours and tap cards won’t quench one’s thirst for grandeur, didn’t miss me… still I could hear the rain pouring down my streets from the golden gate bridge.

I can’t stop myself from thinking that while I was gone the city didn’t feel I had been gone at all, partially because I’m never truly gone but mostly because my presence is nothing but a type of sub-existence.

Living as any one might live, not doing more than one could and not doing less than one should. That’s the type of sub-existence I speak of. Always afraid of proving myself so I will never prove myself wrong and then, when I surely do prove myself wrong, the city understands and those gates of tinsel are open again, whispering ‘this is home’. This is home.

The roughness never frightened me, the stories never deceived me but I, I have disappointed myself. I hurt myself greatly but that surely doesn’t change much of anything. Life is a drag but it can also be the stuff of wander… and wandering is something I could never leave behind for it is part of the type of person I am. So,

I pack up my bag, fix up my mascara, put on my high-heeled boots and walk determinately to that flying machine that will take me home. A home where not money but aspiration is the currency that speaks the loudest.

Where dreams are usually put down to sleep before they get a chance to check the sunset in Malibu.

 

*quote from “A Love Letter” by Julio Cortázar.

Moses supposes…

30 Monday Jan 2012

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Moses supposes his toeses are Roses,
But Moses supposes Erroneously,
Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses,
As Moses supposes his toeses to be!

I guess I learned it the hard way: by never learning at all.

I never got this need I’ve always so desperately urged to feed, this need for words, for talks and a particularly intellectually stimulating exchange with others; I simply thought it to be a human thing.

I guess it’s not only human as it is inherent in any living thing, i.e. any sort of thing/object/animal that is an active part of an environment or a system needs to be in constant exchange.

I finally see that exchange is the stuff of life.

I guess.

This absolutely unnerving need to discourse about whatever until I’ve exhausted any and every possibility to understand it drives me insane. What is it? This depression I experience every time I feel I’m being under inspired by the lack of interest I so dreadfully despise in others and yet engage in embracing the same attitude fully as if everybody else’s need for exchange was just a laughable attempt to seem smart enough to hang around me…

Oh lord!  What was that?

I answer: just another lovely and frustrating day in the land of tinsel.

The Downside of Contentment

05 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Hollywood, Reality check?

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The other day, the delivery driver at my illustrious Italian pizzeria asked me why I worked there.  Or to be more precise, why I had settled for working at a place which was so obviously below my personal ambitions and coolness standards.

The short answer was that I had a mortgage to pay..but was that really it?? Or had I become lazy? Complacent? Content enough with the mundane tasks laid out before me? Or perhaps it was something else all together; a thing so typical & ugly, I shuddered to think it.  Was I afraid of succeeding? Of achieving something other than simple survival?

As Donna Summers belted out “MaCarthur Park” on our cheap surround sound stereo, I realized that it was a bit of everything. The mortgage part was true enough but there was perhaps a bigger slice of fear than I’d care to admit.

Welcome Back

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

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I’ve been out of Hollywood for a while and my feet know this—they feel the dirt of the sidewalks. My lungs noticeably breathe in the car exhaust. I even flinch when men too tall or too burly casually walk toward me, heading down Vine, knowing what they must know, going where they must go; not giving a shit about me. But I give a shit. I notice. I’ve been gone too long. I care. I worry. Every bout of Tourette’s throws me into a minor frenzy of fear.  Oh Hollywood. Oh Hollywood, you crazy, wild beast of a city.

It’s been nearly six months and new restaurants have sprouted as if someone dumped a gallon of fertilizer upon them. Bookstores have died. I’m not sure where Bob is—perhaps he moved from Franklin to Ivar near the Library. Perhaps he packed up his grocery cart and scooted off to somewhere that I can’t even imagine. I noticed that the newsstand shrank and that Japanese place closed its doors for good. My sister will be sad (she had her first date with her husband there). But things change.  She packed up all of her little boxes and labeled them with words like “Bathroom”, “Kitchen” and “Breakables” and she moved home. Oleg moved across town, Matt to Ohio, Meg to the country. Friendships have fizzled. Things change.

But today I am meeting Alice who still lives on Yucca. We are going to see a movie that will make us weep aloud inside of the theatre. We are going to eat chocolate and drink coffee.  So we are walking down Cahuenga and I see Steve and that one guy that use to order a double cappuccino. So maybe things aren’t too different. Maybe, just maybe, I can still call it home after all.