VLVL2 (10) Your average suburban mom, 194

[joeallonby]

Dear Glenn,

This is the most coherent thing that you have ever posted here.

In fact, it is quite beautiful.

Thank you.

Peace,
Joe

on 12/16/03 7:37 PM, Glenn  Scheper at glenn_scheper at earthlink.net wrote:

>> Am I right to assume that Ventura Boulevard covers a wide social spectrum,
>> ie both rich and poor, commercial and residential? If so, the passage
> ("the
>> high-rent side") reminds us that rich and poor don't inhabit different
>> worlds. How much social mobility has Ditzah enjoyed?
> 
> I know a little of Ventura Blvd, braved the traffic
> twice last week, getting commercial quality strings
> of C9 Christmas lights at a light bulb store I had
> seen near where my wife used to take belly dancing.
> (I redirected both sides of the 220V, 20 amps each,
> from the spa.--Can't use it in winter in Palmdale.)
> 
> Further down the west end, we use to go to a cowboy
> style night club and ride the mechanical bull, when
> that was a fad. I recognized a distinctive hillside
> returning to that building years later, when it had
> become "The Mystic Eye", selling candles, eclectic
> books, and whispered psychic readings given in back.
> 
> In between those ends are every sort of strip mall:
> we've shopped for wallpaper and brass water ladies,
> overpriced carpets and odd furniture and home gyms;
> Dined and danced in an Italian restaurant, dipping
> bread in oil and garlic. Long wanted to go to Cafe
> Tango, but crowds and jealousies and valet parking
> all dissuaded.
> 
> When I returned from the Army and resumed living at
> home, an overgrown cuckoo in my parents apartment
> in Santa Monica, a very quiet seniors life-stifling
> beach community where nothing stirs but cold waves;
> I got a job in the valley-I was amazed at the heat,
> and the life: A threat of bees flying into the car.
> 
> And the people had life too! I rented a house with
> a co-worker and his friend, to whom the distinction
> of addresses north or south of Ventura blvd were an
> essential part of their acculturation. A stream of
> desirable people came and went, expressing liberal
> nonchalence and easy friendship beyond anything I'd
> seen; neither could I permit myself to tap into it.
> 
> That's the house where one of them, the one I recall
> who would bed a different girl every night, had put
> up a poster of a radiant sun face painted black. It
> seemed to be some deep condemnatory statement to me,
> so that I looked up the required current, and skin
> resistance, and plugged myself into the outlet. But
> then I wasn't very good, or half-hearted at suicide.
> 
> I'd bicycle the hills, and look at the pillars and
> trim yards -- mansions to me, or mansions in fact.
> 
> North of the Blvd, where it looks like God filled
> the valley all flat for our building convenience,
> are small to huge surburb homes. Flying into Burbank,
> it looks like a rich Monopoly board, with blue pools.
> 
> There's commerce and light manufacturing distributed
> throughout, many a place a vagrant can park his home
> for the night. Years later returning from San Jose,
> we lived in a trailer park just up from Balboa park,
> a basin that is allowed to flood during wet winters.
> 
> Years ago Balboa was always alive with roller skaters,
> a boon that we really enjoyed. My wife made a skating
> friend from the rich south side, a name that might be
> recognizable. Their house was just a grander version
> of them in the 'burbs, but the garage held his & hers
> Harleys, and a maid kept fresh bananas in the kitchen
> of their big motor home. They invited us to a private
> all-night skating party once. It was probably full of
> celebrities if I'd had an eye for that. One recognized
> name football player led a conga line around the floor.
> 
> Drive eastward, like North Hollywood, it's jam-packed
> with apartments. Once, fleeing, I rented an apartment
> so low class, a flood of cockroaches crawled over you
> while you slept. Rillly gross!
> 
> And, about Hollywood, when I still didn't know what I
> wanted to be, the Dept of Unemployment sent me that
> way for an interview, to some kind of a studio related
> operation, and I told the guy, "You don't have any
> electronics here of interest to me." And he told me,
> "You don't get into this line of work for the electronics.
> You get into it to be part of "the scene"."
> 
> Yours truly,
> Glenn Scheper
> http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
> glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
> Copyleft(!) Forward freely.
>