Westward, Backward Ho!

Getting right back to where we started from

The idea of Westward Expansion, if I’ve retained anything from playing Oregon Trail and living at the end of the Oregon Trail for much of my life, is to leave St. Louis so you can start over without the constraints of the East Coast establishment hemming you in. (Of course, the video game—and my education—skipped lightly over the genocide that led to this new life even though they were capable of implementing other hard truths, which is why I know what dysentery is.) The great Western myth is that this is where you come to start over. Here you may render the garment of society from entirely new cloth.

So it’s funny when the things we thought we left behind follow us here. When I moved West, I was still carrying bits and pieces of my old life with me. Some might say in starting a weekly reflection on how I often dislike life here that I’m still carrying it with me. It’s hard to forget who we are.

I took my sister to the airport the other day. Pathologically I cannot allow myself to “waste” a trip across town so I decided to treat myself to lunch. “Treating myself to lunch” is a time-honored personal method of procrastination which I don’t recommend if only because the not working guilt involved never makes it the joyful indulgence you want it to be.

Unfortunately, I put the wrong restaurant in my GPS and ended up smack dab in the middle of the Venice Boardwalk, which blends the charm of a Victorian beach resort with the horror of late-stage capitalism. Case in point: a pregnant woman smoking a cigarette and drinking a coke outside of a stall selling novelty t-shirts. All of the food available looked horrendous except for one place that, bafflingly, served fresh pasta. It was 90 degrees out so I retrieved a protein bar from my purse.

I made my way past amateur bikers and expert roller skaters to the sand, keeping my shoes on as long as possible. If I learned one thing from the Catholic school I attended next to a freeway it’s that hypodermic needles can be found everywhere. Unfortunately, I also learned that life began and conception and animals don’t have souls.

I reached the end of the sand, where it dead ends into a little shelf and then becomes the sea. I plopped down and stared at the water. It was warm enough that people were laying out in their actual swimsuits, while I was attired in my normal warm weather gear, which basically boils down to “hide every piece of skin from the sun.”

As I sat there, a man ran down to the waves, throwing off his baseball hat and shirt. He left his long pants on. It was clear that he was temporarily or permanently existing on a different mental plane. He threw himself towards the water and then seemed surprised, when hit by a wave, that the wave was wet. He looked frantically around the shore. His eyes landed on a woman in a bikini. He ran towards her, hovered in her space, and attempted a conversation. The woman walked away as soon as she realized what was happening. He stared at her butt as she left. This happened several times—like a bloodhound, he’d catch wind of a flash of skin, and be off to chase it down.

I watched him as he darted along, Family Circus style. I, of course, was safely ensconced in my usual beachwear—yards of fabric to hide every conceivable inch of my skin from the sun. On this day it felt like camouflage.

The man seemed fairly harmless as far as these things go, I write with a defeated sigh. Once he had pursued every bikini lead on our stretch of sand he collected his things and headed north, off to conquer new territory, i.e. the Santa Monica pier.

As often happens in these cases, I had gone to stare at the ocean to forget about the world for a while, but the world bumped right up against me anyway. We’ve westward expanded ourselves right back where we started. It turns out that if you don’t fundamentally change, your problems will follow you wherever you go! Society included!

Perhaps it’s finally time to walk into the sea. Things will be different down there.