Boy Talk, Part 468: On Inspiration

Quick, take a picture of that! I said to Oliver when we pulled up to a stoplight before entering the Target parking garage.

Why, Mom? he replied, Why do you need a photo of a homeless guy's stuff?

Well, to tell you the truth, I am inspired by the things that I see and then the photos that I take, I replied, I'll often take a photo and then look at it later and write off of it. 

I waxed inspirational, then, the kind of blather that I'm sure my boys tolerate only by the skin of their teeth. I think I mentioned the video of the homeless man that I'd watched last night, like tens of millions of other people -- the one where a homeless man on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles is shot dead while being "subdued" by six LAPD. I can't tell you, Reader, how frenzied I felt while watching that video last night. My heart was literally pounding, and while the boys watched over my shoulder, I might have even screamed how much I hated guns and cops and this whole country. I went on and on, basically freaking out about the fact that thousands of people, many of them mentally ill, live in squalor on the streets even as people drive past in cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, blather, blather, blather. I might have cried, openly, I was so upset. But that was last night, and when I saw crap strewn all over the street outside of Target, I immediately thought of the video and knew that I wanted to write about it, somehow, if only to struggle with my own ineffectual place in all of this. Because, really, who am I to hate this situation and have no real power and even, sometimes, inclination, to actually do something about it. To tell you the truth, I feel like an asshole for complaining without a means to really help.

Today, I didn't say any of that -- I just made the comment about inspiration and writing and creativity when Oliver asked me why I wanted a photo.

You're a creative person, I said, what gives you ideas and inspires you? He thought for a moment, and then turned the dial of the radio up nearly all the way as we drove underground into the parking garage. All the Single Ladies was blaring out of the speakers in my sexy white Mazda, and I instinctively turned it down as low as it had been turned up. Let's face it, Reader, I'm not a Beyonce fan.

Mom! Oliver cried out and turned the knob back up. You don't turn DOWN Beyonce, you turn her UP. THAT'S what inspires me! He started dancing and bobbing in the seat next to me, doing his moves, and I was inspired, Reader, to actually join him.

Armageddon and Cake

Salted Caramel Cake

I made one yesterday from a recipe in a magazine. It called for 8 yolks and 4 eggs, nearly four cups of sugar and 1/2 pound of salted butter for the cake alone. The icing was three cups of brown sugar and two cups of confectioner's sugar and more than a pound of salted butter. It had five layers with more than a cup of icing between each layer. I know -- that's not even sort of gross.  I felt guilty making it, especially given that it was for a crowd of fifty-somethings. I guess there's a case to be made that given the fires just to the south, the crude oil spillage in a nearby neighborhood (where, evidently an above-ground pipe burst and crude oil was knee-deep in some places), the outrageously dry and hot conditions here, the insistence by many that global warming is a liberal hoax, the Clippers fiasco, the rumors of Beyonce and Jay-Z having trouble -- well, why the hell not eat Salted Caramel Cake? And throw some rose petals on top that you've plucked off a wilting rosebush as a final devil-may-care gesture.

Let us eat cake.

Stunning the world (or an overuse of superlatives)

I woke up this morning with my head filled with cotton, and when I got out of bed I staggered, slanted across the room and into the boys' bedroom to wake Henry for school. After he left, I lay back down and wondered if I was having a stroke. I felt dramatic. It's been a long time coming, I imagined. You'd deserve it. I pecked a few times at my phone, read the ten warning signs, and texted a friend. Go smile at yourself in the mirror, she wrote. See if it's even. I stood up again and slanted toward the bathroom where I stood in front of the mirror and smiled. Both ends of my lips curled upward, and I looked old. It's an even smile, I think I texted back, and my friend reassured me that it was probably an inner ear thing. I went back to sleep. My head still feels like cotton, but I'm no longer staggering and my temper is short. On the way to Oliver's saxophone lesson, a song came on the radio, and we wondered if it was Beyonce. I'll look it up, Oliver said, and he grabbed my phone. Beyonce stuns the world with her new album, he read, and little tufts of cotton blew out of my ears and floated around the car.

The Semi-Annual Visit to the Dentist in Beverly Hills

So, yes, I stood across the street from that black sports car and took this photo while my boys went inside the building behind me for their semi-annual dental check-up. It's a Lamborghini, Mom, Henry said, dismissively, and it might cost $1,000, 000. I think he was serious, but don't quote me as you know I tend toward hyperbole, and certain apples actually don't fall far from the tree.

Anyhoo.

The fact that I'd just given him a hard time for wearing his gray, polyester gym shorts to the dentist that he picked out at Target despite my protestations (I despise athletic shorts when they're worn as clothes and not for athletics), made his dismissal of the million dollar car and the subsequent posturing of the various large men positioned everywhere, cameras hanging from their necks, seem even more jarring to me, still a bit of a star f**ker when it comes to celebrities. I might be reading War and Peace, but when it comes to star sightings, I'm as excited as the next moderately overweight middle-aged woman to perhaps glimpse Johnny Depp or, if lucky, Javier Bardem. Just the other night, I walked in front of Annette Bening at a local restaurant as she waited for her car, and I admit to a frisson of pleasure that I'd come full circle. It was just a few years back that I stood on the steps of Royce Hall during an intermission of King Lear, looked to my right and noticed that it was Warren Beatty standing right next to me. I nearly jumped into his pocket.

Reader, I imagine you're wondering whether a moon, worns as if it had been a shell  has lost its devotion to all things disability related and might be morphing into a gossip rag?

So be it.

After fifteen years in Los Angeles, a city that I never thought of as anywhere in particular other than the cover of an Eagles album when I was my sons' ages, I'm still a bit freaked out that I have two boys who are Angelenos. We're from LA, they say when we go back east, and I startle like I did when I took my first husband's last name and whenever I uttered Elizabeth Supercalifragilistic, saw the words in a cartoon bubble coming from my mouth. Being born in Los Angeles doesn't mean that you have blonde hair and skateboard in empty pools or even surf in Malibu before school, but it does lend a certain insouciance to the sighting of million dollar cars and people, and I guess that's a good thing.

I waited a bit outside the dental office and tried not to crane my middle-aged neck too far to notice who the paparazzi were waiting on, and after a few minutes someone came out from across the street, there was a bit of shouting and jockeying, the other big guys with the even bigger camera lenses pulled them up to their faces,  and some very large men pulled up right in front of the million dollar car and blocked it with their Exxon Valdeez cars so I really didn't see anyone or anything. For all I know, it was Beyonce getting a hair extension or buttock implants. I pretended to be a native, turned away and walked into the dentist's office to retrieve my sons who both got a good report -- no cavities, sparkly clean, and when Oliver asked why his teeth were sort of yellow despite brushing them all the time, the dentist told him that only million dollar teeth are that white. As reward for no cavities, I bought them each a cupcake from the fancy cupcake machine up the street, and then we walked up the stairs of the parking garage, got into our sexy white Mazda  and sped off.