the good life
June 2010
It strikes me that someday we’ll probably have more money, we’ll be more important at our jobs and to a greater number of people etc., but I’ll bet you when that time comes we’ll only want to sit around and remember this one.
Maybe you have to entertain the possibility that you got what you wanted - your little outpost on the last coast of the continent where you can sit in the shade with bought coffee and bare feet and where your book cover flaps and postal mail quiver but don’t blow away under idle zephyrs. And in your mind it is quiet, a peace that settles down over the bridge of your nose, the kind where you’re sort of intuiting into, knowing as opposed to actively thinking. Knowing about things the way Hemingway sometimes wrote, in these big spacious platitudes at once simple and deep, like you might flatten your palm and trace the contour of the horizon - judging the land good that is spread out before you.
This good land is California, and it’s a concept you understand through layers or remove the way people here think they understand about the Civil War. You were born in Winchester Virginia where they understand about the Civil War and you think how trite it is to be happy in California - what a perfect cliché to be happy in Los Angeles, like maybe somehow it’s intellectually lazy. But you shake it off. Time and continuity are the real enemies of this happiness; try to put a border, a context on it and it’s gone. You’re better to live into your life like a loose constellation of unspliced movie frames. Don’t choke on the industry metaphor, stay with it. No connective tissue between these slides, just one random image after another, little self-contained and immutable universes. Or maybe pictures hanging next to one another in a gallery, all by different artists in different periods, without even a shared medium between them. That’s not bad.
The coffee is cold now but the heat is showing up - a roomy high-domed Southland bake – but forget the coffee, you think, stay with the gallery. You decide that where you got yourself into trouble was by trying to maintain consistency, trying to act the way the character would act based on what we know about the character’s past. You created a “we” is what you did, and it seems you can only arrive at the gallery if you aren’t paying attention – inserting the I: taking ownership - so that moment then is when you kind of come awake realizing: on your porch on Saturday morning in Los Angeles, with your postal mail quivering but not blowing away, that maybe this is what the good life looks like, and you’ve been having it for quite some time now.
