After being accused of breaking “HIPAA codes” for writing in my ever praised and well-known blog, I’ve been advised to privatize my thoughts on patient grievances and other such woeful dilemmas that are plaguing our hospital systems. I turn instead to the old carefree days of finding beauty in the world as an ever idealistic north campus English major at my alma mater and former journalist for my beloved UCLA Recreation Quarterly magazine.
Ah UCLA, my pride and joy. Have you really become a part of my past or can I revive you again as I look for beauty in the tragedies of my everyday life? I still recall the years of my nascent “adulthood” within your multifaceted walls. How I’ve grown in my ability to experience the world for all it’s worth while at the same time growing thick skin against the difficult academics you threw at me.
Above all, I still recall the afternoon teas spread over an auburn Stratford-upon-Avon sky, the excitement of another failed football season, midnight undie runs through horny frat row, the teasing orgasm of Diddy Riese cookies melting over my virgin palate, and the high strung tendencies to overachieve intermingling with the fervent desire to party all night only to “wake up in the morning feelin like P. Diddy.”
Can I still yet create such remnants of my youth away from your prestigious walls? A challenge, I presume, but one that I’m willing to take on as I am now equipped with the existential thinking that might perhaps allow me to always euPHAMize my life in a glass half full. Such a challenge, of course, can only be achieved through my eternal flask of ink and my everlasting rolls of film as I search for hidden beauty in the crevice of another life crisis.
Ah loyal non-existent reader, so you agree with my phamtastic purpose then? Well, “let us go then, you and I/where the evening is spread out against the sky.” I know you are dying to ask me some “overwhelming questions.” But! “Do not ask, ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit.”
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner/Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the City of Angels/As lonely as I am, together we cry.”
“the sun may rise in the east, but at least it’s settled in a final location.”- RHCP
yet, when direction is not a factor of consideration, one can always find that split second where the setting sun and the rising sun look exactly the same… the point where this globular mass of energy peers forth just above the water wherein the dawn is identical to the evening sky.
There is a thin line between coming and leaving.. giving and taking…fear and courage.. loving and hating. Sometimes they are intertwined like colliding lovers loving so much that the emotion turns into unbearable pain when the thought of you leaving poses another thin line between life and death. Would it be better to play it safe? But where else can we find such intense beauty if not in the miracle of the rising and setting sun? If not in this warmth that radiates love? If not in these fleeting moments we call happiness?
I never knew how much I love LA until I moved away. I miss meeting the sun each morning, the way that rich areas can turn into a melting pot of poverty in a split second (that’s anywhere), and driving my baby down streets of Hollywood palm trees. I think I will love San Francisco one day too. But LA will always be home.
I am swimming in a sea of hopes and expectations. Swimming and no longer drowning because I am focused on the prize. Soon, I will have my cake and eat it too.
Drifting in the April wind of uncertainty. I wish I could be as carefree as her. Freedom, I’m afraid, is of too chaotic a nature for me. Black Friar’s Bridge. London, Summer 2007
Still, I wait for their calls in a drunken stupor. Will I recite Robert Frost’s The Road Less Traveled when I am sixty-four? For now, I will just listen to the Beatles and have a Smirnoff or two with April. Smirnoff twist please!
St. Mary’s Church, on the grounds where Shakespeare is buried. Stratford Upon Avon, Summer 2007
At Starbucks. Damien Rice’s “Blower’s Daughter” comes on. I fixate on the whispered, “til I find someone new.” Will there always be a part of our minds that will focus on a distant past? I need to sleep.
