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denied three consecutive winters
Tuesday, May 22 2001
I've been denied three consecutive winters in my life. 1998 was the last one for me. Since then, the days have come rolling off the big toilet paper roll of time with little to differentiate one from the next. The two times I went back east, even in the springtime, I found the east was maintaining winter for my return.
Lots of things have happened in those past three years, but those things are difficult to pin to any sort of mental timeline; they're all jumbled together, bits of driftwood on the surface of a stagnant ocean slammed by the tsunami of the e-commerce gold rush. I was in the right place at the right time for all of it, and I didn't do too badly. I never made out like a bandit, but I did well, and directed most of the little windfall I received directly into the safe harbor of real estate.
Now it seems as if the forces in my life are all conspiring to chase me from this place. Gretchen wants to know what exactly it is that keeps me here and I have nothing to point to except glorious, comfortable inertia. Life isn't too exciting in West LA, but this is an easy place to live. I get up, ride a bicycle to work, sit in front of a computer all day, earn several hundred dollars of take home pay, and then go home. If I wasn't earning any money I'd likewise be sitting in front of a computer all day, it makes no difference. Yes, life is easy. Even my housemate John agrees, but still he wants to know, what are my plans? Should he take that job as a teacher in the Santa Monica school district? Or should he plan to head back east? He sure as hell doesn't want to stay in Los Angeles if it means living somewhere other than this place.
What's left to keep me here except inertia? Even my job, the most common reason for staying in a town, is flaky at best. If I don't get culled in the next round of layoffs I probably won't survive the round after that. And what's left for me after that? The job market here in Los Angeles is pathetic. I have a super high-power recruiter busting his ass for me (or so he says) but he's not sent me to a single interview yet. (I accidentally clicked on a banner at Salon.com just now and it launched a window that took over all 1600 X 1200 pixels of my screen. Everybody is fucking desperate these days.)
So I'm depressed. I'm miserable. I like living in West LA. I like my house. I'm not excited by my social/sexual life (or lack thereof), but at least it doesn't get in my way. I don't much enjoy the things my taskmasters have me doing at work, but it's not much of drag either and they seem happy with what they get from me.
At this stage of my life I don't want to start packing boxes and deciding what to keep and what to throw away. I'm not ready to see this state receding in my rearview mirror. I still feel like I never gave California a chance and, likewise, I feel like it's never given me a chance. In nostalgic conversations of the future I don't want to talk about California like it was a big missed opportunity or lost cause. I keep feeling like I could be happy with this place if I just directed my efforts in the correct direction.
But then there are those things that constantly remind me how horrible this place and its residents can be. John was telling me last night about a conversation he'd had with some of Maria's friends a couple weeks ago. They'd asked him how he liked living with me and he'd told them that it was the best living arrangement he'd ever had. They proceeded to wrinkle their brows and wonder aloud how he could ever live with someone who's feet are as ugly as mine. That's typical of the way people in Los Angeles think. It all comes down to the most trivial of superficial details. Mind you, I'll be the first to admit that my feet are no marvels of æsthetic perfection, but then again, whose feet are? Feet are nothing but deformed hands, specialized for the task of handling the ground. I think the problem that Maria's friends had with my feet was that I was barefoot at all (in my own home!) and they couldn't use my shoes as a key parameter by which to judge me. Remember, dear readers, in Los Angeles the measure of a man boils down to four parameters: the shoes he wears, the car he drives, the house he lives in and the girlfriend who lets him fuck her.
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