There are many things I love about LA. But some days, I fear for us. Some days, it seems like we are simply a haven for broken angels, where:
...love of art, fame, and money have become the same thing. I almost wonder if I can even separate them anymore.
...love of self has become paramount.
...love of networking has replaced love for people. All that matters is "What have you done for me?" "What could you do for me?" and, most importantly, "What have you done for me lately?" (as I simply cannot remember past the insecurities of my own last 24 hours).
...alone is the new together. Every individual must own a car and drive it everywhere. Alone. Going across the street? Drive. It is state law! You may own a cell phone and talk on it incessantly, but you may not have meaningful conversations. (That is also state law.)
...California is god. We will sacrifice every spare cent we make to live in a city that is almost exactly like every other city on the world, but with more traffic, and an unusually high concentration of businessartists. We will pay outlandish costs for taxes, milk, gas, rent, heat, water, and everyothergodforsakenthing you can buy, simply because our zip codes start with a "9."
...everything can be bought. Everything.
I think we best pray to God that, unlike fashions, mentalities do not spread from the left coast.
//
Sometimes I hear people criticize a movie or a TV show for not being realistic. But the truth is, we don't really want realistic, do we? I mean, if we really wanted REAL real life, we'd set our lawn chairs outside the neighbors' house and watch them every night.
Hm.
No, I think want we really want are romanticized snapshots of what real life can be. We want those ideal moments when life is beautiful and good (or just more exciting). We want a glimpse out of the confines of our own lives, with our 40 hours of work and our 2 hour commute and our 5 minutes of bliss, into "that" -- that something else that is interesting and funny and magical and dramatic and adventurous.
Maybe what we're looking for is meaning. Maybe well-done TV shows and movies are just condensed, time-wise, to the point where it's easier to find purpose in them, and so we gladly lose ourselves for a couple hours for the fair trade of belonging. It does make sense, I suppose; our beautiful real life "moments" are often so spaced out, it's hard to connect the dots, to make stars into constellations.
Maybe we just want "friends," or for "everyone [to] love ME" (instead of just Raymond), or maybe we're even just looking for drama -- to live in "The OC" or to be a "Survivor" of something exciting.
Maybe filmmakers and TV writers are just packagers of purpose. If they're guilty of anything, perhaps it's creating some kind of thematic gravity that pulls us in and allows us to see life at its most simple and refined -- life that actually makes sense, most of the time.
Or maybe I'm a complete whack-a-doo who thinks too much.
I suppose it could be both.
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Ah, the car pool.
Now, I understand that "pool" has different meanings, but for me it just brings to mind an image of the old community swimming pool back home, lined with fading chipped baby-blue paint and car grills and headlights bobbing up through the water. The scaredy-cars are cowering near the edges, and a Honda Civic is doing a flip off the high-dive. If nothing else, it's entertaining.
I was driving this morning on a pretty major highway in Denver, going to meet a friend for breakfast. It's technically rush hour, and I hate traffic. I'm approaching a stretch of the highway with a car pool lane (See 'em swimming!? Ha! Cracks me up.), and I'm getting excited for the traffic to thin out, open up a bit -- you know, give me a little more elbow room, alleviate my claustro-roado-phobia. So I get to where the car pool lane starts and wait for all the cars to thankfully move the hell out of my lane.
But nobody moves.
It suddenly occurs to me that nobody is pooling. My next thought is, "Why would they?" I'm not, myself, currently, "pooling," and how many people do I know that actually would be able to go to work together? I start counting, and stop quickly because I can't think of anybody. Then I get sad, because the obvious implication is that every single person on the road in front of and behind me is alone in their car. I start wondering how much brighter their day would be if maybe they had a friend to ride with them on their way to work. Maybe home, too. I know I'd like it.
Being unemployed, I'm alone most all day, every day, at least during the day hours (because that's when everyone else works). I don't really like it, but what choice do I have? "None," I tell myself. And I'm not sure most of these people around me on the highway do, either.
But, you know, I bet our lives would seem a bit brighter if we could find a way to not be lonely.
//
I almost hit a college student with my car today.
I didn't, though, so don't worry (I knew you were worried).
Apparently, trying to get directions out of the (very) tiny screen of a Palm Pilot and driving are two things that the male brain should not attempt to do concurrently.
So, I'm in Boulder, Colorado. It's a beautiful day (sunny, about 65) and I'm driving past CU, so you'd think that I'd watch out for college students (especially college students in crosswalks), but noooo, I don't. So I almost hit this college girl, a relatively attractive female (if you're in to that kind of thing), and in that half a second between scouring my palm pilot, looking up, noticing the girl, and hitting my brakes I get a sickening feeling in my stomach... but not because I almost plowed her over.
My lack of moral standing notwithstanding, at that very moment, for whatever reason, I felt ill because I knew I would give almost anything to be a college student again.
I'm not sure why I thought that, really. When I was in school I couldn't wait to get out, move on with my life, not take any more finals, actually DO something, etc. But now that I'm out, it seems that I kind of want back in.
I suppose it could be the fact that this thing that naïve people tend to call the "real world" is really just a pretty big drag. It's just so much of a letdown. In college we're trained to be thinkers and dreamers, and we're told (or maybe it's just what I heard) that once we get that diploma we'll be free to mold the world as we see fit. But now I see, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the "real world" simply exists to feed itself. The vast majority of it isn't challenging, it isn't forward-thinking, it isn't revolutionary, and it panders to the lowest common denominator in a lame attempt to placate the masses with some deranged form of what we imagined real life to be.
I could be angry with the college I went to for the obvious setup for disillusionment they fashioned me with, but I'm really not. Somewhere (some days I have to dig pretty deep to find it) there seems to be this idealistic hope in me that refuses to die. Now, I realize that I'm only in my twenties and I've got a lot of years left for the world to try to kill it, but I do rather enjoy dreaming and hoping for a world that is just a bit more beautiful than the one I live in.
And that's why I love college students. They don't really know any better than to dream lofty, pie-in-the-sky dreams, and in my current "enlightened" state I think that bliss sometimes really might be ignorance.
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