I include a Joyce Carol Oates reference only because it rolls off the tongue. There’s nothing horrifying behind this entry except that it doesn’t know where it’s going, and it rarely knows where it has been. But it will identify that it has been somewhere. Was it meaningful? Was it worth it? Was the food good?

Maybe the uncertainty is the most horrifying part.

One thing I’ve learned while living in LA is that you need to know where to direct your feet/car/steps/purpose/path. Without a magnetic pull, you could get lost forever on the endless streets, in the endless traffic, and (pause for dramatic effect!) an endless city. Eh. Scratch that last part. That was too cliche. Let’s rewind and start back at the beginning.

There are so many things to talk about in the city of angels. There’s politics, fashion, art, crime, stupidity, persons, places, subjects, nouns! But, with no direction, it’s easy to wander aimlessly, wasting the moments of your life as if you were stuck in traffic. You really were going somewhere, but so much of the time you spent getting there was just yadayadayada.

Hmmm, rewind?

Where is this entry going?

Start: The weekend. Hot. A girl drives south on the 405 to hang out with friends. She arrives. They get in a car and drive westward to the ocean to eat at a franchise. The food is only what they can rely on –tasty, satisfying and wholly unremarkable. They get back in their car and drive. They go shopping. Shop. Shop. Shop. There’s really nothing but unsatisfied impulses–discussions of colors, textures, tones, patterns and concord among the styles of dresses rather than among the feminine minds for one dress (singular). The girl and her girlfriends are similar today only in that they are girls out shopping in Los Angeles. They wear flipflops, jeans, summer dresses and skirts and, of course, sunglasses. They are dissimilar in that they can’t agree on what not to wear and what to wear. They’re shopping has a purpose ( that singular dress), but it is totally without purpose for the three minds buck and tumble about the idea and shy away from a conclusion. They come to know no conclusion. They get in the car. They drive back to their meeting point. They separate. The girl drives north on the 405, back to her beginning.

The end.

Where was I going? I really wanted to find a beginning.

 DZ