Seven Years by Aaron Cometbus

the root of the matter

remembering

I spent a good weekend with miss s., as we had not seen each other in many years. It's so strange how so much time outside of the country seems to be as if no time had passed at all; was it all a dream? I still miss my Berlin friends a great deal, and photographs and e-mails are nothing compared to real-life conversations and hand-holding. Miss S. had been a series of e-mails and chats over the years, and it was so gratifying to see her in person again as she stayed at my house.

We ran around the city like little children, stuffing our faces at the Thai Temple with m. and feeling like we were in another country, and then lazing around in the Museum of Jurassic Technology to escape the intense summer heat. We were there for hours and hours. It's a place to get lost in, one of the true jewels of Los Angeles, full of renaissance theater dioramas and an exhibit dedicated to the mobile home of America. Yet another example of the L.A. David Lynch world.

We walked the long strip of boardwalk between Santa Monica and Venice Beach. It was at this point that we started talking about a common acquaintance, and she was shocked when I told her that he had passed away. It had been a tragic situation as well. Young men of our generation should not be going so quickly like this; I remember him as a genuinely good person but also very brilliant and moody. He was not so much a friend of mine as he was of hers; in fact, she was intending on mailing him back some movies next week when she got to her parents' house. She didn't believe me at first.

With so many years spent apart from the ones you love, living great distances, you get worried.
You have to hold the people who are important to you close. She was very sad, and we went on the swingsets, surrounded by European tourists and people babbling so many languages at once. It wasn't so much fun... You know, there are so many interesting people on the beach. I could just sit there and watch them until the end of time, but things shut down there at sunset.

Later, our feet blistered and overwhelmed by the sun, we made our way back to the car. "I can't believe it," she said. This is something we will all have to get used to as we get older, friends passing away.

I just can't imagine what it would be like to be left entirely alone, everyone from your past gone from the earth, like those hundred year olds. What is that like? People from your youth are so important, or at least that's what I think lately, and I am fortunate that there are so many of them here in Los Angeles, because they ground me.

jeans & heels

"Wow, everyone here is so conventionally attractive," I blurted out, and my friends laughed, because I know that it can be taken the wrong way, but it wasn't meant in any mean sense. We sat in a happy little circle in my first really West Hollywood goings-on place, and it was nice to just sink into the sofa watching all the pretty butterflies and birds go by.

It's fascinating to sit next to people blatantly on their first date. You overhear so much. The awkwardness is amazing, but some people are smooth hands at it. Sometimes I feel that if it really means anything, it's always going to be awkward. If you're smooth at falling in love and at saying the right thing at the right time all the time, perhaps you've been around the corner too much. Love is this uncontrollable, awful monster that needs to be reined in and controlled, sometimes even purposely destroyed, especially if it occurs at inappropriate times. But the more you try to push it back, the more it fights back, and then you're just left with this mess of an animal, and you just have to close your eyes and wish for it to go away soon!

The woman was so shy but she was so eager, offering herself up at the bat, her bosom overflowing in her dress, but she wasn't tacky. It was the kind of place where girls where heels with their jeans. She had this long straight pretty blonde hair that reminded me of the nice girls I went out with when I was in Hamburg, how they were always very proper and sexy about the way they dressed, they were nice girls going to art school or working at advertising agencies at their first jobs. She kept inching closer and closer to the guy, who seemed attracted but not too eager, and we couldn't help but listen in on their conversation, which was composed of nothing and completely insubtantial because it was all in the body language.

So we were a group of three, two girls and a boy, and the boy was also watching two women sitting at our table with their backs to us. One woman had a very interesting nose, or so he said, and we were trying to figure out a way for him to go up to her and talk to her. We had all had too many martinis (for me just one is enough--I can't handle alcohol and never will), and they had two or three each, but for some reason they maintained a strange calm.

"How are you going to talk to her without it being false or confusing or contrived?" I wondered.

"Just drink a lot and then go up to her," K. said. But that's the kind of thing girls always say to boys who are stepping upt ot he plate.

"That would be scary," I said.

"Oh no, it's not so bad. I'm good at it," he said, but at that moment when they say things like that, you know that they're not really that good at it and even when they don't show it they're prepping themselves up.

It was by far the place with the (conventionally) prettiest people I'd been to so far in Los Angeles. It was actually nice being at a place without boys in skinny jeans, although some of the women were so thin that their clavicles jutted and they looked a few years older than they probably were. Starvation does that to you. The men could get away with exposing less because they were all in dress shirts, but they had different sets of expectations from the women, as in being cute and charming at the same time but not too much, and being somewhat well off and promising, which meant earning a bit of money, but not waving it around too much.

This whole dating ritual mystifies me and continues to do so. My Belgian friend once said that she never does this kind of thing, it's such a weird American ritual. But then she got her impressions of dating from those MTV reality shows they air in Belgium, where women prance around in bikinis trying to get eligible bacehlors, or tv spots on speed dating.

I guess they do dating in europe too, because i knew a bunch of merry girls who worked on an online dating portal. There are many interesting things to say about that, but I wouldn't mention it here or anywhere really, because it's important to be discreet.

When we left the place the two girls were there, one of them miss nose. Our friend was still trying to figure out a way to speak to her. He chalked it up as a missed opportunity as we left, but he didn't seem to be in the mood to get his hopes up, and he didn't like her as much as he thought. I was wondering if I should go talk to miss nose for him.

But then it was also the case where one relationship had ruined his life forever and so on, and it had not so much to do with the girl herself as the particular time and place in which it happened. You can't really blame so much of your tragedy on most other people, not even your parents, but we all have one of those disastrous relationships which sends us into fits of depression for years down the road. I think it's always interesting that these kinds of peoples are the ones you should avoid for a while, but the ones who always try to get in touch with you at bad times.

You're just so horribly curious, and people who knew you when you were young are the ones to keep close to your side, isn't that what they say? Dorothy parker said, "Every love's the older love in a duller dress." She was such a horrible cynic though. She couldn't see the fun in Los Angeles, not like I can, although I think we can sense the darknesses, or she could and I can. It's the dark sides that make it so interesting though!

the curse of beauty

at this age, i realize how fortunate I am not to have been born beautiful. when i was younger it would have been a case of sour grapes if I had said something like this. but no, while i am happy with who i am, it's been really to my benefit that beauty hasn't encased itself around me and made me something i wouldn't want to be.

beauty is a wonderful thing, but it is also such a horrible curse. it attracts the wrong kind of attention from even the best kinds of people, and there is so much potential for it to go wrong. it's also after a certain point perpetually declining...

a male model told me recently that men are better suited for modelling because beauty in men is seen as an asset to other great qualities, while in women it's seen as the only thing.

On the other hand, I know quite a few women of worth and standing who are beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. Maybe they somehow avoided the pitfalls of beauty by being around the right kinds of people at the right time.