Identity Crisis 101: Lipo

There are a lot of things I'd like to have removed. My ovaries, for one. The memory of my entire life between the ages of 8 and 28 for another. But here in SoCal, what's inside me--or not inside me--doesn't matter. What matters is my outsides.

A friend calls to say her cousin's husband's friend's doctor in Arizona will give free medspa treatments the third Sunday of November. Do I want to go get Botox or lipo or anything? Sure. Why not. When in Rome...

I may as well start looking and acting like a SoCal girl since I really don't want to move again. No sane, employed, heterosexual man will ever have me here unless I'm sporting a bulimia bib and a travel-sized botulism syringe.

Not so long ago, I picked up a bona fide SoCal hippy. We mocked polyamory together, ate cheap crappy tacos; he smoked pot and talked about loving MDMA while I drank my whiskies and talked about loving my Wheaten Terrier. It was a helluva lot of fun. I thought I'd found the one SoCal breed who wouldn't judge me. After all, he was quite vocal about being "totally not into judgment."

Alas. I was--again--mistaken. He was disgusted by the fact that I possess Dan Brown novels, seeing in them not that I am sentimental (my ex's wonderful father had given them to me), but that I have shamefully "mainstream" tastes.

He asked me to dress better when we went out--not that his awful Hawaiian shirt collection (often paired with corduroys, no less) was going to impress the local fashion police much. It's just that here in SoCal, men can be hideous and still expect to have perfect trophy girls on their arms. Just like on TV. After all, as my own SoCal uncle pointed out to me not long ago, "Here there are thousands of gorgeous, nearly naked women who'll fuck or blow anything that moves. That's a hard act to follow."

The hippy even mentioned--exactly as the rich Republican La Jolla lawyer had when I was roughly 4 sizes smaller--that all I'd have to do is work on my stomach flab and I'd be in great shape. Meanwhile, his massive gut, overflowing with the meat of a thousand sativa-engorged street tortas, was apparently a statement rather than an embarrassment.

Soon enough, the man who had brutally and without mercy mocked the polyamorous and "swinger" lifestyles started telling me he was going to need to have sex with other women. Turns out, in SoCal Hippy English, polyamory is referred to (and completely differentiated from) "Free Love." What of love there is in it can't be much. It's just another excuse for a grown man to act like an immature pig and justify it to his own conscience.

We split up. I asked him if we could please not stay friends.

And so, my purple darlings, it has come to this. I don't know or even care who I am or what I want anymore. I don't care what I have and what I lack of heart, of thought, of peace. I am, after all, nothing more than a mammal born to live in packs, possessed as we all are of an overdeveloped cortex. And the pack here in SoCal wants me to be maimed and twisted and bent into some creature from a Terry Gilliam movie. (Wait--is Terry Gilliam too "mainstream?" Am I merely exposing yet another facet of my indiscriminate lameness by referring to him?) So yes. Sign me up. I want Botox. I want lipo. Bleach my asshole. Put me under and hack off my hips, my thighs, my uterine bump. Saw off my labia, shrink my areolae. Take a couple of inches off my feet while you're at it. Remove every hair follicle from my eyebrows to my ankles. Give me the works.

Just don't forget the lobotomy and larynx removal so I never fuck up the perfection of my new being by thinking or speaking.

Postscript: I am now going to make myself barf up the red curry noodles I just ate, pop in a breath mint, and head to Rancho Santa Fe to score a sugar daddy who will at least buy me dinner in return for "free love," because free love is all a woman in SoCal can afford.

SoCal Singlehood: So Very Necessary

First posted to Facebook on August 3, 2010.

It is always sad to look back on the moment during which one realized one could not grow old with the man one has recently loved.

The moments themselves differ. Some are lights which dawn slowly, over months or years, and like the dawn one shields one's eyes so as to stay in bed a little while longer in the peace, in the night, in the past. Some strike like lightening, quick and deadly, making one run for cover. Others still are anti-climactic, a roar so dull one can go out afterwards and sit calmly in a bar with the man in question. One could even remain friendly with him if he weren't such a terrible bore.

And that's what I must have been looking for, all this while, despite my frequent insistence that my genetic makeup will never let me see 40, let alone a comfortable dotage of watercolors and early suppers. Someone I'd like to grow old with--"like" being the operative word. Someone who's there in the night not just to snore but to comfort. Someone who can move his lips now and then without lying, or boasting, or boring me to tears with orders, complaints, or idiocy. Someone whose mind broadens instead of narrowing with the years. Someone who is man enough to brave the unconditional.

Why haven't I found him yet, you may ask? I've been looking in the wrong place. In fact, I've found my way to the epicenter of wrong placedness. In the U.S., old age is the ugliest prospect imaginable. And Southern California was where the notion of old age as ugliness was born. Here men speak, shuddering in disgust, without any heart, in mixed company, of dried-up old-lady vaginas. They cheerfully suggest plastic surgery to minimize the sum of one's parts, maximize one's objectification, and make one younger. They consider one's natural state not just an imperfection to be corrected, but an affront to their delicate sensiblities, an insult to their friends, and an embarrassingly public sign that one does not really love them.

The ridiculousness of it is wholly ignored. Men themselves have begun to police their own beings with the same Puritanical fervor. Questions of grooming have taken on the import once reserved for matters of religion or of state. Small wonder that matters of religion and state now occupy such infinitessimal space in the minds of American men. Small wonder that matters of love can no longer exist.

One can try, once the future of one's love has been brought to its end by this means, to ignore it and enjoy the short while one remains young--new--in the eyes of one's lover. One can let the comments about this woman looking old and that woman not belonging in public roll off one's back. Sooner or later, though, it will strip all the skin off. It will leave worse scars than a hail of bullets, than a whip, than shrapnel. Because isn't it true that love between two people, romantic love, requires a future? The possibility of a future? Otherwise it is nostalgia, grief, or just another not-so-interesting night in the sack. In the present live all one's self-exaggerated imperfections, which, one fears, must necessarily become shameful, hideous, in just a matter of years--no! Of months.

For isn't he looking at you now the same way he looked at the woman he just took special care to insult? Doesn't he see you with the same arbitrary eyes which so harshly judge the size, shape, fashionability, coiffure, and general acceptability of all that is feminine? Doesn't he kiss you with the same lips from which spew a frightening vitriol against the audacity of ugly women? Then it is only the hands of the clock which hold him back from directing his poison at you. When they have moved, lightening will strike.

I, playing the fool, have managed to hang around several of these SoCal types long enough to feel that venom (A SoCal type is not limited to those unfortunates who were born here, but to all those who came here seeking Double F breasts on 18 year old 5'2" 90 pound blondes). It was at first a horrible experience, though now it seems more or less standard--and when abuse starts to feel like the norm, it's long past time to get yourself out of the storm.

It continues to shock me, not that men would feel this way, for clearly most of them have always and will forever hate women, but that they would be so impolite, so impolitic, so self-righteous about it. More shocking still is that no one has seen fit to point out to these men their utter hypocrisy, for in their terrible behavior they have rendered themselves the ugliest beings of all.