The Dream

I feel as though I am floating somewhere between dream and reality. So much of the dream is such a pleasant one, that it is a mild annoyance when I think this is not my reality. I love LA. I love being here. I love being with family and friends, How can it be that I love this city and these people with the passion I do? How was I blessed enough to grow up in a city with such privledge and promise? Where dreams are real possiblities and they are seemingly endless, if directed properly...

The dreamlike state is the part that includes meeting up with old friends and discovering their new babies, dining next to movie icons at Paramount studios, while enjoying the most elegant and delicious cuisine, picking up perfect berries from the Brentwood Farmers Market. Dreamlike when I am floating around the canyons in the X5, hugging the turns and loving that it performs like a race car, swimming laps with a view of the Pacific, or shopping in Santa Monica. The state I am living in, living the Malibu soccer mom life in a house that requires a housekeeper's attention more than 2 days a week, a collection of landscapers to maintain the property, wine specialists to harvest the vineyard, an indoor plant lady, a pool man, and various other professionals to deal with any maintence problem that may occur. This is what life is here. Laughable to me that the man from the Home Elevator Company had to come this week to deal with a glitch in the elevator. I love LA when people here have to have a home elevator for a three story house. I love all of the modern conveniences that come with living with everything at the touch of a button. Everything is within reach or a phone call away. Most all things are seemingly possible with the right connections and checking account.

There are still the responsibilities and perfunctory tasks, of course. The kids still have to eat (albeit mostly out as of late), the dog has to be cared for, the service guys need to be let in and out of the gate. But for the most part, the time here has been so carefree and unaccounted for, hampered only by the random appointment or obligatory luncheon. It is hard to imagine moving so far away from it. I ran through Pointe Dume yesterday, along the trails high above the buffs and thought of so many people from my childhood. I thought of elementary school and my buddies who grew up in that particular neighborhood and I wondered where they all are now? Are they happy? Are they successful? Are they married with kids? That is the funny thing about Malibu. For such a beautiful place with beautiful people, there seems to be a plastic sadness about it, too. Malibu has a way of breeding illusionists who look like they are so put together with their designer labels and expensive cars, but under the anorexic frame or behind the bloodshot eyes, there is a real emptiness, a longing. Home elevators or not, is this really happiness or is it us spinning our wheels? Is there something to be said for the fact that with money comes responsibility and sometimes even a hole in the soul? A void needing to be filled with more things? This is just my observation, of course. Not everyone turns to retail or implants as therapy. However, there is an underlying discontent, a stirring or unrest.

I feel that here, too. The empiness comes and goes in waves between the elation and excitment. There is a real shallow quality to a lifestyle that sometimes lacks the feeling of real purpose. So many kids here are detained for drug addition or killed in their brand new superfast sports cars they were prematurely given. Marriages are broken and schools influenced too much with the politics money brings. People have come to expect this as a tragic part of this lifestyle, as though it is the acceptable accesory to having wealth. Sometimes the relationships get in the way and there are casualties among us. Are these people living in a dream too? The one that is kind of a fog, a fleeting moment where we know something needs to change, but we cannot quite put the responsibility into motion? As if we are immune to mortality. Unbelievable to me is how so many of the guys I have seen on bicycles do not wear helmets around here. Call it European if you must, I call it ridiculous. I have a sickness inside everytime I see them. It is like they are above being hurt or killed, they are living the in the dream, too.

As I climbed into bed the other night, I thought about how the room I am sleeping in would be the absolute worst one to be in if an earthquake were to rattle through here. It is a room next to the wine cellar, that is so quiet on the bottom floor and it gets the most amazing ocean air though the windows. It is a room that is flooded with morning sunshine and cool summer air. Standing on the deck off that room, one can smell the summer sage and the salt of the sea. It is quite peaceful. I closed my eyes that night for what seemed like a minute when the next thing I registered, the whole house began to rock and sway. I looked at the clock to see the time was 1:00 am and the dog, who lay asleep next to my bed, raised his ears. Was I dreaming this? How could we really be having an earthquake? Not a chance, right? I was so delirious that I simply rolled back over and went to sleep again, in and out of a dreamlike state when I realized those were in fact aftershocks rolling through the house. It sounded like footsteps on the hardwood floors above me, as though an intruder were in the house. For a moment, I was scared and I took the dog with me upstairs to investigate. Alas, it was just another aftershock as a result of the earlier 4.5 on the Rictor Scale and nothing to be alarmed about. Just another minor detail that comes with living in LA. The quake was not a dream, but a blip on the radar. So is this time in LA. The dream of living here again any time soon seems to really be evading me now,