Lately.

Life has been interesting lately.

I tried for a while to think of a clever way to be coy and vague while still interesting, but I came up with nothing, so how about I just be short, and promise to explain later?

I'm starting another business, and my entire life has revolved around that lately.

I am without questions, addicted to my business right now. I eat, drink, sleep, and dream the new website I am trying to make from scratch with the help of my trusty nerd-friend Camdon.

You guys, making websites is legit. I had no idea how complicated it is, or how much effort goes into making even a simple website look good. If you're ever curious, go to your favorite website, and pick what seems like the simplest feature on it. Let's say, the little buttons at the bottom that let you go to the next page, ok? Right click on that bad boy and hit "inspect element". Look at how many lines of code it takes to make that ONE. LITTLE. THING. I will bet you dollars to donuts it's at least 10 lines of code to make that motherfucker.

Anyway, it's been pretty intense.

I feel like the deeper I sink into the addiction and boatloads of work that comes with a new venture, the more I check out of everything else going on in my life. 

I feel bad about it, but everybody's Facebook updates, and Instagrams, and text messages from people just to chat...I lack the attention span for it. 

I don't want to! I want to text back, I want to like your status, I want to comment on your Instagram and talk and hang out and fucking engage with you, but I can't seem to right now. 

I start to try, and then BAM logo ideas, business name options, and how to make a toggle menu in HTML take over my brain and I'm gone. The next thing I know it's five hours later and you're pissed I never answered your text.

I'm sorry, guys.

Maybe if it's ok that I just text you about CSS files and branding options, I'll get back to you a little sooner.

Just ask Camdon and Bill. 

Camdon's building my website with me {sorry Camdon}, and Bill is my never-ending resource for business advice {sorry Bill}, and I talk to them non fucking stop. In fact they would probably both love to pass me onto someone else for a while. 

Anyway, that's lately.

Hopefully we'll get the business named, the brand established, the website built and launched, soon, and I can be a human again.

Well, for like a day.

After six years of trying, Bill has finally found a way to turn me into a workaholic: giving me my own businesses.

I might not be normal again for a long time.

But, I really am having so much fun! And I think that's what matters.

If You Ever Go To Hollywood

If you're ever in Hollywood, walk down the boulevard. Think of all the once famous, once living, once bright and shining hopeful people, whose names are immortalized in the pavement in front of the Russian dry cleaners, the hot dog place with the dirty name, the strip club. 

Think about how James Dean is next to Woody Carmichael which is next to Jim Belushi which is next to Estelle Blatt. Realize that former fame is a great equalizer. 

Walk past the Scientology museum as big as a mansion.
Try hard not to think much about that. 

Turn left and stop in at Miceli's. Listen to the aging show girl play old songs on a huge piano. Sit in awe, a little drunk on wine and full from the 8 pound bread rolls, as your waiter who just brought you salad, gets up and sings an opera number that shakes the rafters. Split the lasagna with someone and leave a good tip. Wish there were more places like that. Think about how Frank Sinatra might have ate there, how Marilyn and Joe might've kissed in that very corner booth. 

Think about me.
Think about how this was one of the most romantic places I'd ever been to, and every time we came here I'd steal a book of matches, and wish I could just live there, with the smell of garlic and the wine bottles hanging from the ceiling, forever.

After you leave, walk back up the hill to Hollywood boulevard and go right. At the next corner make another right and walk down to Boardner's. Joke with the person you're with about the sign advertising the fetish club they run in the courtyard out back on Saturday nights. Go in anyway-relax, its Sunday. 

Sit in the black velvet booth and drink a Crooked Cop which is really just an old fashioned. Think about the black dahlia and how this was rumored to be the last bar she went to. Think about how flimsy life is, but then quickly think about something else. Kiss the girl you're with and feel strangely voyeuristic as you realize you can see everyone around you, but they'd have to struggle to see you. 

Go out back. If they have a comedy show that night, stay a while. Sit down on one of the long black leather couches amid so many white pillar candles there are actual mountains and valleys of melted wax all around the yard. Giggle about how everyone there looks like a vampire.
If they have live music instead, just leave.
At the end of the night walk down to Mel's Drive In. Take a booth and have some coffee. Think about how everything you love about Hollywood happened more than 60 years ago.
All the old studios are gone. A city that used to worship the silver screen either tore down all of it's classic old theaters, or rented them out to night club owners, strip clubs, and burger places.
The west coast never holds onto anything.
Think about the street vendors, the cigarette smoke, the bustling energy of every single inch of this place. The noise, and way that there's always something happening. Even on Monday night, there will be plenty of people to drink with at Tequila or St. Germain's.
Just don't order the corn tamale appetizer. It's actually just corn bread with salsa on it.
Go have one last drink in the lobby bar of The Roosevelt, for old time's sake.
Think about sitting on the couch in the furthest corner of the room together, whispering and laughing and making up code-meanings for the words Patron and Mojito.
Think about how we accidentally forgot to pay our bill before we left because the bartender was ignoring us, and we were just so done with being there.
Think about me.

Then come home.

It's my birthday and yes I would like tots with that, please.

Today I turn 27.

People keep asking me how I feel about it, like I'm supposed to feel something about this completely random age. I mean, I get having feelings about landmark birthdays, like 10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 21, 30, 40, etc.

But 27?

What happens at 27 that I don't know about, that people are so anxious to see me react to??

Is this the age when ordering tater tots on your cheeseburger officially becomes classified as making poor choices or something? 

I don't get it.

Honestly, I don't feel much about being another year older. 27 doesn't feel like that big of a deal to me, except for that 30 is now only 3 years away, and that's really only weird to me because the year I turn 30 is also the year Jackson turns 10 and Lainie turns 14, and I still haven't wrapped my head around having a high school age child when I turn 30.

But back to my point.

It's another year.

I'm excited because I love birthdays, but outside of that it's really not something I haven't seen coming for like...the last 11 months.

Most of the time when I say "I can't believe it's my birthday already", what I really mean is not that I'm freaking out about getting older, or that I can't believe I'm X age, it's just that I can't believe the current year is already in the month of August, and now Christmas is only 4 months away.

In truth I probably spend more time thinking about Christmas than I do about growing up, or aging.

For my birthday, I'm going tonight to see Fall Out Boy play live with Bill - a band that has been in my top five bands to see live list since I was 17 years old - and then tomorrow morning I'm having birthday brunch with my best friends.

I'm not going out and getting hammered.

I'm not drinking alcohol out of a plunger, skinny dipping in someone else's apartment pool, or getting kissed by any Hawaiian US Airways baggage handlers that I don't know.

I'm just going to do fun stuff with people that love me, and that's really all I care about.

Even if I am almost 30.

Even if I am getting crows feet, and shouldn't be ordering tots on my burgers anymore.

It's my birthday, and I'll eat whatever the fuck I want.

Happy Friday.

Flashes

Memory is a curious thing.

Of all the days and nights we live in our lives, how does our heart choose which ones stay, and which are washed over?

Why can I remember the most random day of second grade in it's entirety, but the first time I fell in love, my first kiss, and the births of my children are only flashes? Images zipping by like the countryside from the window of a train.

You and I are like that for me.

There are whole conversations about nothing that I can recite word for word, 

And there is also Big Bear in the Spring with the last of the snow clinging to the ground, walking to dinner, wind in my face, your arm around my neck, laughing into the night and headlights of oncoming cars.

There is Sedona in the fall getting lost on the grounds of our hotel, stopping to look up at the sky as the clouds suddenly parted, asking what you were thinking and I remember exactly what you said.

There is a morning - some dateless, unknown morning - we sat on your back porch and had breakfast and you said it was such a nice day, right before you kissed me.

Our love is like that.

Flashes of images, pieces of moments, that together make up the most intense, complicated, beautiful years of my life, that before I knew it had passed like that countryside I was watching from the train window: just as soon as it had come into focus, it vanished.

On regret

As a rule, I try not to regret too many things.

It's not that I try to be perfect, or to make no mistakes. It's more that I don't let myself go too far down the road of thinking about what I would've done differently, long enough to start to feel real regret.

If I did, I think the majority of the years between 17 and 19 would be blacked out in inky, dark, regret for me.

In the moments when all of the cringe worthy shit I've done comes creeping up over the side of my bed to try and lay with me at night, I try my best to just stop there and think what's done is done, or it was the right thing to do at the time, or supposedly I'll laugh about that one day.

But there is an exception to every rule.

Of course I have things I wish I could take back. Mistakes or missed opportunities that no amount of positive thinking or repetition of trite slogans can wash away.

And ultimately all of those things come down to one mistake in common:

believing I had more time.

Believing that there would always be more time to fix a relationship, and not believing that even with the presence of love, there are lines that can be crossed that will forever be the definitive border between with, and without. 

Believing that there would always be more time to get my shit together, to stop obsessing, stop worrying, stop harping on the little things. Stop putting so much weight on a fragile thing, just because I believed that there was still time. 

Believing that there would always be time to say things and do things for people I loved. People I didn't know were not long for this world.

People who left, disappeared, passed away, too soon.

Believing that there would always be more time to savor each stage of the kids lives as they grew. That I wasn't really that close to the end of the baby years, the toddler years, the little itty bitty kid years, and so on.

My greatest regret will always be my faith in the future.

One day I was at breakfast with a friend, and there was a couple at the table across from us. Suddenly, and by accident, one of them spilled his glass of water all over the table, and it of course ran off the edge and got his partner wet. I watched, and thought "that sucks. I've done that sooo many times." 

If you know me in real life you know that I - and my kids - are spillers.

Afterwards I sat there and watched in some kind of horror as the poor guy's partner chastised him mercilessly for spilling his water. Glaring, cussing, raising his voice. Telling him he was stupid, ordering him to sit at a different part of the table, and muttering that he did not want to know what would happen to him if he spilled his water again, so help me god.

Of course, this was way, way over the line for such a stupid accident. It really wasn't that big of a deal.

I sat there though, thinking only that this person had no idea what regret is, clearly.

This person thought they had more time.

They thought that they had an infinity with this person, and that over reacting about a little water ultimately wouldn't be a big deal, and maybe it wouldn't be, but I couldn't help but want to jump up and scream in their face "WHAT IF IT IS?! What if this person is so close to that line, that horrible, invisible line between loving you, and falling irreparably out of love with you, and this is how you're choosing to spend the time you have left with him! What if he fucking died tomorrow? STOP IT."

Granted, wanting to yell at strangers isn't normal, so I didn't. 

But in the pissy little face of that total stranger who was effectively crying over spilled water, I saw all of the little, stupid, unimportant things that I had cried over, that I had saddled my relationships with, that I had regretted caring about when the other shoe dropped, and I heard the words 

"I'm not in love with you anymore"

As much as I wanted to scream at this person I didn't even know, I wanted even more to look him in the eyes and say

"You have someone who right now, right this second, loves you and knows he wants to be with you. You have someone you can leave this restaurant hand in hand with. You have someone who misses you when you're gone. That might not last forever. Don't be so sure of the future. Don't have so much faith that love and life and happiness last forever. Don't do this. Don't be me."

But people who interject into the fights and business of strangers usually either end up in jail or the hospital, so instead I finished my coffee and left, hoping that someday I'd have the chance to try again.

And if I ever did, I wouldn't believe in the lie that is tomorrow, for anything.