Beverly Hills

--------------------------

I'm at a coffee shop in Beverly Hills.

I don't like this place... so full of excess and fake people with fake passions. My daughter wanted to come here for her birthday to shop with two of her friends. She likes the excess, she likes the gloss. But I hope that she also sees the shallowness.

I don't know that she will. But I have to take the chance. I have to bring her here. Show her this.

I grew up surrounded by Hollywood and Beverly Hills and Los Angeles...I looked up to the people and their lives. How wonderful their environment was. How I admired their cars and toys and clothes.

Slowly, very slowly, the admiration turned to distrust, and later to hate.

Perhaps the hate is simply a protection from the discovery that I wouldn't be included in that dream. I didn't have the talent or luck, or tenacity to break down the right walls.

What in life is your environment? 

I was 10 when I realized it was impossible to feel any better than in Jessie's arms. As he held me I wondered why people feel the need to stretch that "environment" past those arms. Shall I push it out to include the carpet I was standing on? The quality of the paint on the walls? The size of the house that held those walls? The car in the driveway? The average annual earnings of the people who walked past the house, unaware of the color of the skin on the arms that held the child?

I don't know when I first recognized that it is up to me to find my own depth, and to recognize the facade of life. I also learned that the true way to fight it is not to tear it down, but rather to hold it up for inspection... LOOK at it, let it sicken me, let it try and destroy me.

Because in it's attempt, I find my strength... and that strength won't be used to destroy anymore.

But it will be used to wrap my thin arms around someone who needs the strength that all the love, and all the hate has given me.

So I walk these streets of excess, and I smile.

Smile with me.

-----------------------