Whither My Blogging Habit

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placard at Sunnyvale’s Baylands Park, pictured below

Last night, as I lay falling asleep, I had this crazy notion that I needed to start blogging again, like, right now, like, at least tomorrow, because if I put it off until Monday, it wouldn’t happen, and my beautiful blog would just keep sitting here, unused, embarrassing me with its aging.

Yes, it’s been since August. You know the feeling when you’ve been meaning to call someone, and the longer you put it off, the more ashamed you feel at how long it’s been, and the less likely you are every day to call, until that person sees you’re in their city on Facebook and THEY call YOU? Or, like, you just stop being friends with them?

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Part II, Chapter 2

Lakewood Park, ca 1952, by William A. Garnet. via designobserver.com

Lakewood Park, ca 1952, by William A. Garnet. via designobserver.com

I am shouldering my way through this discombobulating book of essays by Joan Didion, Where I Was From, reading it with a dedication dedicated to trying to understand this discombobulated place I moved to, California (which is, incidentally, Where She Was From), when finally, in Part II, Chapter 2, it all clicks in: Lakewood. Lakewood, a planned city of 17,500 homes south of Orange County, surrounded by defense contractors on all sides, a town built around a mall, supported by income flowing from the military-industrial complex, a happy town which as the defense jobs shuttered in the early 90s found itself on the national media stage for the vagrancy and alleged rapes committed by a clique of its post-adolescent males, the Spurs.

And I think, this essay is so good. Continue reading