March 10, 2014

WTF is this blog? And why?

Take your pick:
a. A search for sanity
b. A reaching out by a shy person tired of over-compensating
c. An easy forum for A Statement by someone brainwashed to believe
        one person’s opinion matters (see: Invites for opinion on local news —
        the news! – and almost everywhere else, online and on the air)
d. All of the above

Correct answer: d.

Probably.

Enough wading through the wetlands of Life’s Big Questions. Is it too much to ask for a high and dry, sensical and sensible real life? With no more multiple choices. Gimme some straight answers!

Like to this question:

How did I go directly from being a woman too young to know anything (my twenties) to being too old to be relevant (that one landed at 35). And nothing – zero, zilch, nada, bupkis, infinity minus infinity – in between.

That is no lie.

And how is it the younger members of the family have a completely different DNA? Think digital, just for starters.

Almost makes you believe those alien abduction/implant stories. (“Let us know what you think at hash tag are UFOs real.”)

(For what at that hash tag? Does a simple majority of viewers who believe their opinions matter get to decide if UFOs are real? Or not?)

Forget the To Be Or Not To Be question. Here’s the riddle that needs solving: What have we come to? And where in the hell are we going?

No lie.

Well, crap. This is supposed to be a Who Am I Bit, a self-definition, an identifier, a pigeon hole to call my own. A Let’s-Get-Acquainted scribble. Missed the boat yet again. Let’s give it a try.

In the mirror there is a brave and germaphobic, sometimes witty and more often dumb hypochondriac who believes that anything short of a compound comminuted fracture of the femur can be healed by organic supplements and rain forest herbs. A cynic who still believes dreams can come true. A human being who has toiled hard, stayed out of jail, raised a kid as a single parent like thirty-one percent of the people in America. In short, pretty much like you, I bet. (Unless you’re in the fifty-one percent of Americans that are married, and I’d bet we still have a lot in common.)

No doubt we live in troubled times. Global tables are being topsy-turvied – so there’s that stress – and market economy has become code for a game of whack-a-worker – another biiiig stress – and poverty and pollution proliferate – unrelenting stress – but can stress be blamed for such blatant acceptance of the bizarre as the New Normal?

Lifestyles and concepts floating around nowadays would have been labeled totally nutso not that long ago. Not talking George Orwell here. Talking body piercings that would have done Frankenstein proud. Talking all-over tattoos that would signify in some tribe somewhere in the world that s/he is the most fertile of the fertile. Talking fashion favored by young media millionaires. And not-so-young ganstas. (Often the same look.)

There is so much that makes no sense at all.

Like I’m at the laundromat, wondering how I went from solidly middle class to worrying about making the rent. WTF.

The writing career has stalled, the day job is drying up, and downtown L.A. is becoming wildly popular, which doesn’t bode well for loftdwellers here before it was hip. WTFsquared.

Watching the porthole of sudsy sloshing leads to either complete numbness or a sharpened mental picture of current conditions – the exact kind of perplexing events I’m talking about here

Such as two days ago in Little Tokyo, lunchtime, on the sidewalk.

A woman plods back and forth along a line of food trucks with her four-year-old, who will not make a decision. Exasperated, she says: You have to tell me what you want to eat. Because I don’t have ESP.

Her ten-year-old tripping behind them pipes up: Isn’t there an app for that?

WTF is that?

Or it was raining a couple nights ago. I dash down the stairs and out of the building to the trashroom, and fling open the door.

There is a homeless person standing in the dumpster, arranging the trash bags into a bedding platform.

Startled, we stare at each other.

I cautiously reach through the door and toss my sack in the recycle bin and
step backwards.

He says in a voice graveled by hard miles, “Have a good evening.”

“Yeah. You, too.”

I leave the door open a crack – it’s dark in there – and dash back upstairs.

You, too!?! WTF is that?

Probably I’m simply way off the beam to think these two occurrences were weird.

(Don’t really mean that. Pretending to be rational and reasonable.)

Are they aberrations? Or markers of approaching collapse of a society? Or am I crazy to even notice? Am I the only one who finds these bizarre?

From time to time, will post random events – all of them true, I promise – that call our collective sanity into question. (And also maybe my individual sanity.)

All thoughts welcome.

Because on the sliding scale of saneness, your opinion really does matter.

And that is no lie.

Tags: WTF, sanity, insanity, downtown LA, George Orwell, true life, Frankenstein, contemporary culture, new normal, loftdweller, modern collapse, gansta, UFO, crazed brilliance, humble writer, pissing in the wind, tragic lack of self awareness, screenwriter, failed, ESP, crazy, must-read, modest, s**t I coulda wrote, didn’t, fool always, hipster never, gargantuan intellect, simple