Resist This

So, yesterday evening after Barry and I hung out at SHLA watching yet another spectacular sunset we drove into Venice for dinner.

We ate at one of the food trucks parked on Abbott Kinney then decided to have desert and coffee at the legendary Gjelina’s.  Of course we ate all over again when we got in…the pork was particularly delicious.

The deserts are a little mundane but who cares eh?

The best and most unexpected thing happened as we were going in..on the pavement waiting for their table were Maia Norman and Simon Brown.

Simon cooked the first ever meal at the Oyster Company before it was even a restaurant.

These people are old friends and I was really pleased to see them.  We ended up having lunch together today in Malibu.  It was sublime.

I am really resisting writing about the conversation we had at dinner or at lunch.   There is no part of it what so ever that I want to divulge.  No indiscretion, no detail no nothing and the reason is this:  they are my friends. Even though I don’t see then very often.  Even though we never call.  Even though we seldom give a thought to what the other may or may not be doing…They are OLD FRIENDS.

Whilst I had no problem writing every gory, painful detail of my relationship with JB and with the same verve describe the inclement and the triumphant situations I find myself here in LA (with obvious negative consequences) all I can tell you today, to say my heart was brimming when we finally said our goodbyes.

I thought long and hard about why:  I don’t take anything I do here very seriously.  I don’t take the people I know or the relationships I have or the politics I engage in or the landscape I live in seriously at all.

I am a transient in a foreign land and therefore removed from the actual life and heart of the people who live here.  This is a wonderland, a delight, a fiction to be reported..like the past. The past where enough time may have elapsed for me to romanticise how it felt, what it looked like and make it mine.

I CANNOT betray my own.   That’s what it would feel like..a betrayal.  I guess that Jake might think that my writing about him here betrays his memory but (and this may shock you) I don’t care.

Jake isn’t real.

The only time he became real was when we were in the England.  When we were on the beach in Whitstable…when we walked up the King’s Road.  I wanted him in the world I had left behind so that I could get the measure of him, to see whether he was as substantial as I guessed.  The answer was of course a resounding yes absolutely which is why I fell so totally in love.

I don’t know the people I meet here in the same way I know my friends at home.  Therefore, they simply become part of what feels like a narrative fiction.  With old friends, our connections, our shared stories and obvious affection I become resolutely loyal and unshakably discreet.

Look at what has happened to me whilst I have lived here:  the TV show, the house, the ‘love’ affair…the life I have in AA.  None of it seems real.  Every tantrum, every assignation, every dinner, every lunch or breakfast just feels like a scenes written for some absurd Periclean phallic procession.

I reverentially adore those I have known all my life.  I have no expectations, no dissapointment…I am describing the only love affair I have ever maintained: with my home and my home is not here.  It is on the wet and windy streets.  In the ornate drawing rooms of Belgravia.  The galleries, the libraries, the train stations of my pseudo capitalist/socialist home.

This is why I have elected to go to England and have my operation because it feels REAL.  I don’t give a fuck if they are the worst doctors in the world (they are not) they are my own and I trust them with my life.

Good God.  What happened to me these past few months?  What price was I prepared to pay to feel like I was in a relationship?  What insane compromises did I make?  I feel sick just thinking about it.  I Am Pathetic.

P.S.  I had acupuncture this evening to help heal my angry heart.   As I was laying there with the needles sticking out of me I began remembering our trip to France.  I remembered it as if I were alone.  He was erased from every memory.  Watching the fireworks on my own.  Buying peaches on  my own.  Laying on the beach.  Driving.   Loving every moment of my very own road trip.   Just me and The Little Dog.