Why I Am a Perpetrator of Blog Neglect OR On Dead Things

While standing in line at Trader Joe’s today, it occurred to me that every Orange County woman I see in public, not counting the women that I know personally, has an element of Fake. I will try not to be too judgmental and hope that readers will merely take this as an observation. So, maybe I ought to rephrase to be kinder: “It seems that every Orange County woman I see in public, not counting the women that I know personally, has an element of physical enhancement with which she was not born.”

Since the 1970’s, the world has not seen so many fake eyelashes. At Panera, one of the girl cashiers always brings me back to the Mary Tyler Moore Show re-runs. Just about everyone has plastic fingernails, which reminds me of that episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where Will Smith keeps trying to compliment his girlfriend, only to find out that everything he likes about her is attached cosmetically. She gets angry, and with every retort rips something off her body and says, “HERE!” and when she’s snapping off all her fingernails, she says, “Here, Here, Here, Here, and HERE!” Ah, the things we remember from our youth… I have never seen so many boob jobs nor lip plump-ings gone awry in my life. Baby, we’re not in Minnesota anymore. I would be concerned that breast implants in Minnesota would freeze during particularly cold winters. Also, epic lip chappings.

The differences between L.A. and Orange County definitely abound. When I was telling an L.A. friend that we have a canal in our backyard, I expected her to be impressed at the dock and ducks and water flowing just beyond our fence. She said, “You have a backyard?!?!” There are spotlights on the palm trees right outside my house. Swans swim in the canal. The ocean is just three blocks away. Neighbors walk their little dogs, carrying baggies to clean up excrement. People talk to one another and call out, “Good morning!” from across the road. Children play in the streets. Sometimes it is as if I live at a resort, and though it is nice, I am not altogether comfortable with the idea.

This blog originally began as a chronicle of my life moving to Los Angeles. Though I love my life in Orange County and believe strongly that this is where I am supposed to be right now, part of me feels a sense of loss. I worked so hard to live in L.A. I conquered a lot of discouragement and learned and changed so much. I just miss the city. I miss the bustle and the crazy and the helicopters hovering over my neighborhood while I rush to lock all the doors. I miss that feeling of exiting off the freeway after all the chaos and traffic and honking, only to turn onto my quiet, peaceful street. A return to the familiar, to a place I was fighting to call home. I miss my friends. Oh, man. I miss them. A few have come down to visit, however, and that has been so kind. Friend K calls L.A. her abusive lover. I pine for my abusive lover, even as I smell the ocean through my bedroom window and slow down to appreciate the amazing panorama of the ocean on my 5-minute commute home from work.

Once, on a walk to the grocery store from my home in L.A., I walked underneath an underpass for the 10 Freeway and encountered the decaying carcass of a kitten, bulging in a yellow plastic bag, with fluid dripping out from it and into the gutter, Baudelaire-like. If any of you know me well, you know that I have a very hard time being around dead things, that I just want everything to breathe and have a life and blink and meow and be warm and all that. The departure of life from a body startles me… here are the remains of something that once was and will never be again. Though I will never be as obsessive about death as Tolstoy was, it intrigues me because of the dramatic and unconscious recoil I have when faced with it. I do not think about the logic behind running away from a stuffed moose head on the wall. I do not think about how crazy that former boyfriend must have thought I was when I asked him to remove the deer heads in his house before I got there because I preferred not to have them watching me. As a child, sporting goods stores would make me cry. Mom would walk me through, guiding me with her hands over my eyes. It is one of my favorite memories of childhood, probably because I felt the fear so intensely, and I still know the warmth and the dish-soap smell and the rough dryness of Mom’s hands on my closed eyelids. The hardest part about Los Angeles was that I felt like I was walking blindly much of the time, without hands to guide me, and with all these logical and illogical fears protruding from the walls and hovering over me, staring. I felt that D’s hands should have been there, perhaps not covering my eyes because I’m a little old for that now, but maybe just at his sides, walking beside me. There is this deep loneliness, this neglected void in me right now. I keep praying that God will show me how to fill it up. And perhaps that I can find someone who will again walk with me through all the dead things. I have plenty of friends who would do this, but let’s be honest, I’d like to be able to walk through the dead things with someone with whom I could procreate. After marriage, of course.

It is hard for me to blog right now. Part of me wants to join the trend of starting a secret blog, just so I can be motivated to write, but so I don’t have a name attached to all the stuff that’s happening right now. It’s just too much. It’s so hard to write about anything when I can’t write about the Thing that is constantly there, the nagging guilt, the incredible sorrow, the second-guessing, the fleeting relief… the void that is a breakup.

I hate it that so much of my self-confidence was wrapped up in him. Epic fail. Now I am bordering on Contents For a Secret Blog and will kindly back down. Oh, the anger. Oh, the hurt. Oh, the frustration and confusion and sorrow. It feels as though, this week, I should go to the ocean and do something dramatic, hoping that someone, somewhere, is filming it for the Academy Awards. For all the movies I’ve watched, I haven’t really learned much more than that on how to handle grief. Perhaps there is a “For Dummies” book on the subject. It would make a lovely funeral gift, all wrapped in black paper.