Neglect. Consider it done.

I am ending my neglectful run right now.  I'm starting to get into that mode where everything is happening so fast and furiously and I'm constantly grasping at it all as it flies by that I'm forgetting to stop for a fucking second and take it all in.  So that is what I will attempt to do.

I saw Jon Stewart on Saturday night.  Yes. It was packed and there was a line snaking around the gym.  Yes. It was expensive as hell, the direct result of him charging a ridiculous amount of money.  And YES.  It was JON STEWART.  Mainstream.  Predictable.  Blah blah blah.  He was HILARIOUS.  Hilarious.  Lewd and political and preachy and comfortable and brilliant and a riot.  He kept a couple thousand people laughing for almost two hours.  As we all baked in the heat of our collective bodies boiling in the barely ventilated Patrick Gym.  

I fell in love a little bit with the man.  But really, who isn't in love with him at least a little bit?  

A new kind of spring.

Back in Burlington.  Those three words have struck a deep, engulfing fear and dread in me since I took off for LA last week.  But.

The weather is welcoming me back.  It's 50 and sunny.  At least I'm not being slapped in my face with a snowstorm.  

The thaw is coming around here as well.  Even though it's that gross part at the beginning of spring when the snow melts and reveals all of the litter and frozen mud........all of the ugly means that something better is to come!  When spring starts to peek through the winter haze around here people emerge from houses like bears out of hibernation.  Squinting into the sun, stretching into the new air.  Joggers, bikers, and skateboarders seem to quadruple in the span of a weekend.  It's appreciation man.  The thaw is coming! Life will be restored to the barren wasteland that is Northern Vermont and the green will emerge and spread across the mountains until grass and leaves and flowers cease to be a novelty.  Something to be counted becomes something to be counted on.  

If I was to move to California, I think that cycle would be something I'd miss.  Although, not enough to make me want to run back here mid-January.  But there is something so satisfying in watching the Earth move and change and restore itself.  Temperate climates offer a type of dependable landscape that is stagnant.  Stagnant in a beautiful aesthetic, but 

I am a daughter of New England.  Dark and tortured, bright and content.  Cynical enough to believe that the only constant is constantly changing.

Back to the future.

A list of reasons why my week in LA was everything I needed:

1.  Three time zones, a six hour flight and the entire midwest.

2.  Dry sunshine that warmed my cheeks.

3.  Counting palm trees.

4.  Experiencing the wonder of self-serve frozen yogurt.

5.  Early-morning, car-ride, and late-night conversations with Christine

6.  A city that looked nothing like anything I've ever seen.

7.  Glasses of wine on cool nights.

8. Getting slipped a phone number without trying.

9.  A happy, afternoon buzz in the hills of the central coast.

10. All sorts of crazy that was Kristina Pika Allen.

11. Driving along a coast that wasn't my coast and watching an ocean that wasn't my ocean.

12. Being swept up in aesthetic.

13. Seeing through new eyes.

14. The colors of Santa Barbara.

15. Sunglasses, sun dresses and sunshine.

Wine-O

Chris and I spent the day driving up the coast yesterday into Santa Barbara and eventually settling the little town of Los Olivos to do some wine tasting.  It was absolutely beautiful, the drive took us through mountain passes with the Pacific on one side and steep cliff faces on the other.  Los Olivios itself as just a few stretches of road lined with little shops and littered with wine tasting rooms in the middle of endless vineyards.

I've decided I really love wine.  I was already well aware of this fact but my experience yesterday just solidified it even more for me.  I want to develop my palate so I can really taste all of the complexities in a really good class of wine.  How do you develop your palate without becoming a snob?  That will be a new goal of mine.  Wine expertise, minus the snobbery.  Because lets face it, I am in no financial position to be a snob. 

Yesterday was just one of those days though.  Idyllic and long and tiring.  The day that I'll point to on this trip that stands out from the others.  It was a good day.

A thought for the end of the night.

Self preservation can be hard, miserable work.  I think this is for many reasons, one of which is the capacity of the human mind to move only towards what it is we try to preserve ourselves from.   It is a cruel, cruel joke that I am perpetually the butt of as I wander around LA.  I read the flashing signs above store fronts and suddenly I'm taken through the maze--- layer upon layer of recalls until I end at the same place I'm trying to hard to ignore.  It's making me want to delete part of my brain.  Like in that movie.  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  

Man, they had a point there.  A twisted, debilitating, wonderful point.

Bro's and Ho's

Last night we went to a bar appropriately named "Q's" due to the excessive amount of pool tables there were around the place.  Sitting at the bar we both felt like eyes were on us, but in true Chris and Erin style, didn't actually say anything to each other until we were both bursting in all sorts of awkward.  Later we decided it had to have been because we were the only women in the place who were ACTUALLY in their early 20's.  The rest were posers, man.  Fake boobs, fake chins, fake nails.  It's like these women think that four more coats of mascara and another layer of spray tan will take off another 5 years.  

Not so much.

I've decided that I'm going to bask in my youth as long as I can and then do everything in my power to age gracefully.  Three days in LA have made me fear cosmetic surgery in a deep and powerful way.  Deep and powerful.

Anyway.  Post-gawker friendly bar experience we hit up an In-N-Out Burger which made my night because 1.  I've never been to an In-N-Out Burger and 2. the burgers were cheap and delicious.  The whole place was decked out in 1950's class, from the worker's outfits to the red and white everything to the menu with three options....hamburger, cheeseburger, or double cheeseburger.   Class man.  They don't do those fake-fish sandwiches or rat-meat mcnuggets.  I dug the In-N-Out.  Well done.

A picture sometimes means more.

How I'm beginning to feel.

Wake up call.

It's 7 am Pacific time.  I can't seem to force myself to sleep any later.  Which is fine, except that I crash at night.  I'm going to make it my mission to force myself to last tonight.  Stamina! I'll do something drastic, take a nap or chug some coffee at 9 pm.  

After spending an entire day here, I think I'm being played.  How much I like LA as a city, or a place, I really couldn't accurately say because the weather is keeping me in this happy state of mind.  Dry sun makes the ocean sparkle and the green pop and the flowers bloom and I just keep noticing all of the beauty. The endless freeways and traffic we were stuck in yesterday bringing Nate south was nothing!  I watched the hills change colors, green to yellow to fire-orange and back again.  Snow-capped mountains appeared in the sky, their bases masked by low hanging clouds.  Everything we passed was a strip mall, but for some reason it didn't bother me as much as it would have at home.  The buildings were all a neat tan- stucco.  Mixing into the background.  Lacking that industrial quality of big shopping plazas on the East Coast. 

I've decided this trip is going to be subtitled: an exercise in self-preservation.  With middle America separating me from all that I know, this giant leap back is letting me retreat.  Build up some much needed defenses, so that I can return.  Preserved.  

We saw Watchmen yesterday in an IMAX theatre.  Everything about it was gratuitous.  

Hello Sunshine.

Los Angeles is an anomaly to my East Coast sensibilities.  The sun shines all the time around here.  Every street corner seems to be a strip mall with a palm tree entrance.  The cars are so shiny!  Luxury models in shades of metallic.   The Pacific Ocean stretches along, reaching in towards the coastal highways that weave up and down the shore.  

I think I need to digest.  I am overwhelmed and enamored and repulsed all at the same time. 

America.

I'm watching the John Adams mini series right now.  I keep choking up when wounded militia are shown.  It made me think.  I have no connection to these events in reality.  My people came much later.   My people.  The poor Irish.  The impoverished Sicilians.  

John Adams.  Thomas Jefferson.  Bunker Hill.  July 4th.  People, events, dates that mean nothing in my own heritage.

Yet I choke up?  Maybe it's the full orchestra in the back ground, pulling at my heart strings. 

Wifi at 35,000 Feet. Thanks Richard Branson.

Coffee stains dot my things.  I am incapable of keeping the liquid from spilling out of the tiny hole on the top of the to-go cups they give me.  Pages of my journal stick together from the top, my white MacBook keyboard is only clean because I am obsessively wiping it off.  This is only one of the examples that weave through my everyday screaming – GET IT TOGETHER. 

Got it.

 

Why is that flying to Los Angeles seems like such a….light at the end of the tunnel experience?  Like LA will offer something more than sunshine and overpriced drinks.  Maybe it will.  It probably won’t.  But right now my skin is pale from being layered with sweaters and jackets for months.  And my head feels like it's filled with cold air that permeates into everything I'm thinking, freezing it all into one place.  I’m looking for a thaw.   To free my thoughts, melt my memories that right now are running on a tormenting loop. I don’t want to remember everything right now.  I want movement.  Space to move.  A thawing out.

A part of me hates Vermont.  It represents my settling.  I don’t fit in with the super-outdoor enthusiasts, or the soy milk chugging neo-hippies.  I don’t even fit in with the stoners or the laced straight bookworms.  Not that everyone fits neatly in categories.  It's just that the hipsters in Vermont make me want to scream because they’re in VERMONT.  If you want to be a hipster move to Brooklyn and do it up right.  Vermont represents a shift in myself that happened when I was 18.  When I decided to stick it out, around here.  I left New York, I gave up on London.  I settled in Burlington.  Not that I want to harp on that now.  Because.  Really, what's the fucking use? 

18 and 22.  It seems like I’ve lived an age.  My chest hurts when I think about it, so I won’t.  I’m going to LA. To sit in sunshine, to look for a thaw.