WRITING TRUTH

I’m one of you. Adrift, without a direction, waiting on the shore for a wave to break and include us. It is not ho ho ho for us, it is whoa whoa whoa. I’ve learned my lesson; I will not repeat the dissonance, selfishness, and fear that prevent me from engagement with life. My cradle of friends is my family. They want everything to work out. For their patience and comfort, I will not let them down!

How much stronger must I be? Isn’t five years of punishment enough? My smile is feigned, my heart is sliced in two, and my spirit is spoiled. Today, the darkness outside and within shatters what could be a day different. I could be outdoors, and brave the cold, work out in the gym, window shop on a whim, and fill someone’s frown with smiles.

I have the hours to transform; it is eleven am, but I haven’t slept a night through in a week or more. I live a melodramatic life in my dreams; they are symbolic messages of my vulnerability, fragility, mistakes, and unrealistic expectations. My former self lived with all I wanted and needed. I woke with enthusiasm, direction, confidence, and exhilaration. I loved and was loved in return. You ask what happened? Betrayal, and then gaslighting, using callous actions, of destruction, emotionally, psychologically, and financially. What I cherished in him vanished, and a ghostly evil power, within another woman, chained him and locked me out.

Now I wait for the final curtain to close so that he will be a memory instead of a menace. Almost there, but will that liberation convert my stagnation into stimulation?

Hope, prayer, discipline, and forgiveness are the weights that build my strength. And of course writing. If I didn’t have this way of expression, I couldn’t have made it this far. My writing is my wand of magic, for me and I hope for you out there. I’m one of you, an outsider, an introverted extrovert, a dreamer, a risk taker, and at the starting gate of my triple crown. To be continued.

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EXCERT FROM GASLIGHTING GRETA MANUSCRIPT

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Aside from her legal phantazmorphia, the house has critical repairs, so she is meeting with contractors, plumbers, electricians, and masonry companies to tend to one thing after another. As she reflects on all these repairs and sees her savings account drop by fifty percent, her demeanor is not as she expected; she feels a sense of reward for taking responsibility for the house and her tenants.

“ I decided to eliminate debt by consolidating outstanding balances into one low-interest payment; I didn’t use the air-conditioner, buy favorite foods, go to my favorite tavern, or purchase anything that didn’t get categorized as home repair. I even quibbled with my Physician about an in-person visit and asked for a Telemed visit.”‘

‘No, there would be no frivolous spending. This new style of surviving she called Anorexic Finance. When she relayed this to me, I high-fived her because I’ve never been in that position and thought it was commendable.

ON THE HOTEL ROAD OF TRAVEL THOUGHTS

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The course we choose to study doesn’t begin in school; it begins the moment we recognize that life is our teacher. I chose the course of love between a man and a woman. Yet all I’ve learned from Anais Nin, Joan Didion, and Lawrence Durrell about love isn’t guiding me. I have to start over and develop wisdom from my own experiences.

I checked into the third hotel, the previous one was tedious and murky. This morning in a larger room, on a crisp as iceberg lettuce, a day of clarity and stillness surrounds me. Outside my hotel room, the light is intermittent, a peak a boo stage window, the light illuminates portions of the crispy autumn leaves just before they drop. On my side of the glass, there are shadows and dissonance. What events take place this week will be instrumental in my future and as piercing as the southwest sun when it shone in my eyes.

This hotel’s staff is exceptionally friendly, conversant, and engaged in their jobs. Every time I pass by the guest check-in, Rose stops what she’s doing.

“ How’s it going?”

“Too early to tell.” I’ve been here a week, and I unzipped my lawsuit story, so she is in the know. She is knowledgeable about the law, and living through times that are more threatening than usual.

“ Okay. What are you doing today?’

“ Researching moving companies. Critical thinking and planning. When I moved from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, I hired a broker, thinking it was the actual company. When the van arrived, half of my things were broken, boxes were opened, and some were stolen. So this time, no mistakes.

“ Mistakes are all about learning.”

“ Yes, and I learned!”

“ What did you do last night?” She said with a curious smile.

“ I was at the bar, Lizzie was there rousing all of us up with puzzles, a brouhaha like the old days, you know, not one of us looked at our phones.”

“ Please, don’t even start. So annoying when you’re talking to someone and they are staring down at their phones.”

“ When I was living in LA, at huge four-way intersections in the middle of traffic, pedestrians crossed without even looking up. It was the same everywhere, restaurants, shops, it struck me as a way of looking very significant.”

“ You’re so right!”

“ That reminds me, I need to go write a column.”

“ Write about your lawsuit.”

“ No! I’m in witness protection writing.”

“ They may read it right?”

“ You New Yorkers are always on the right key.”

“ Gotta be, it’s New York.”

” I’m California”.

” That’s okay, I still love you, and your day is coming, and so is a new man.”

”

ON THE HOTEL ROAD OF TRAVEL

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THE GYPSY CHRONICLES – Thursday, October 23, 2025

“ You have to be out today by 11 am. ” I gasped and looked at the time, 10 am.

“ Scooter told me he extended it until Sunday the 26th.”

“ He didn’t call us. He has to call us. We need the room for the monster ball. Get a hold of him.

I was shaken. I had one hour to reach Scooter. I called in a panic from the lobby and left a message. Then upstairs, I desperately looked for a hotel to take me in, in case Scooter didn’t call. They were booked tonight, but could take me tomorrow. The hotel was a two-star, no Mortons, no restaurant, no gardens, but it looked clean and was only a mile away.

At 11:00, Scooter texted, “I called, you have until Saturday. Is that okay?”

“ Yes, fantastic, thank you!” Scooter has an arrangement with the hotel that earns him points, and he has gifted me many of them!

I returned to the other conundrum of the day —my lawsuit —with very unexpected news. Tammy, the Top Drawer Housekeeping Manager, stopped me in the hallway.

“ What’s wrong, Loulou. She leaned against the cart and listened attentively.

I updated her on the event, and she tilted her head to one side.

“ Bastard! Take a break today, let the process begin, and tomorrow you’ll regain your strength.”

“ It’ll take a few tomorrows, I’m emotionally fragile.”

“ I know you are, I’m the same!”

She patted me on the shoulder, and just that little gesture, of care, was a band-aid to the wound.

Walking into the next hotel was a pinch of pathos I was not prepared for until the front-desk gent helped me with my five suitcases.

“ You’re from Santa Fe? He said, eyeing my license plate.

“ Was, for eleven years.”

“ I moved recently from Ranchos de Taos.”

“You’re kidding! That’s where I lived for several years. I had a gallery there!”

“ That’s crazy. I’ve never met anyone here who knows Ranchos or even New Mexico.” I laughed, cause a lot of people think it’s in Mexico.

He opened my door, and I feigned disappointment and thanked him.

Okay, here it is, a bland room without the flair or fancy, but the price is right. I opened the suitcases and did not unpack. The sun was out like a neon sign, beckoning me to go outdoors.

No elevator, on the first floor, I passed the laundry room—a lot of conversation and a sort of cheerful vibe. I walked outside, sat in a chair facing the sun, let my arms droop, and closed my eyes. I heard someone walking and then sitting next to me.

“ Hello, did you just check in?”

“ Yes, the sun is marvelous, isn’t it?”

“You bet it is. I’m Loulou.”

“ What! My name is Loulou, a nickname.”

She moved around, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and her long white hair was halfway clipped, and the rest fell on her shoulders. I could see she was once beautiful.

“ Isn’t that something else. How long are you here for?”

“ Not sure yet.”

“ I’ve been there. Not knowing.

“ People don’t understand, they feel I’m unstable or something. I can feel it, and see it in their eyes.”

“ Screw that, just ignore those people. I do.”

“ You’re right, too much to handle without that.”

“ Everything is upside down, and no accountability. “

“ So true”, and then she dropped her head, and I could see her emotions rise as if she had been led somewhere else.

“ My grandson was killed in a motorcycle accident, hit, and then died right there. I didn’t get to say goodbye. It was by an illegal immigrant.” Then she cried uncontrollably, and I just about got up and hugged her.

“ Oh, sweetie, I am so very sorry for you.” This was all genuine, and she was sober and all of that, so I listened.

“ I wrote to all of them, Bondi, Patel, Trump, Noem, nothing.” Something like this doesn’t happen in a five-star hotel, only in a two-star. We sat there awhile, and I tried to console her or offer some options, like a news alert to the stations and local media.

She was on the cliff of catastrophe, and my minutiae of disappointment disappeared.

TO BE CONTINUED.

ADVENTURES IN TRAVEL

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I’ve been staying in a hotel during a short interim while I decide where to move.

While I am in the hotel observing guests, their mannerisms, conversations, and facial expressions, I have come to the conclusion that we are not only on a fiscal cliff, we are on a sinking shore of wet sand. I see guests who’ve come for gambling, visiting relatives, exploring Upstate NY, and lapping up a vacation as if it were their first. They are thirsty for living the essence of comfort, congeniality, and the aspirations of autumn. Shed the withered and welcome the wild. I see giddy faces and sluggish bodies weighted down by heavy tote bags. Some seem to shuffle like the very old or weak, from the pathway to the lobby. I was not excluded; by the time I checked into the hotel, my body was withered from having to move out of my home of twenty-five years. All I wanted to do was sink into a bed and hang the Do Not Disturb notice on the door. Several guests are annoyed by too much information, too many alerts, too many scandals, and too much uncertainty. The adventure of livingness has a trajectory marked by misadventures.

In reading the WordPress posts, I’ve discovered the Travel blogs are the ones that revive my interest in the world I haven’t seen. These are the ones I read because they spark my passion for travel, rather than comfort and complacency. The Mediterranean has been stirring in my imagination ever since I researched the coastal splendor of all those portside villages. Thanks to you, travel bloggers, I made the decision. This is the year for Italy. Now that it’s written, I must follow my word.

https://www.facebook.com/adventureress

RELOCATION REALITY

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“Young woman sitting on the books and typing, toned image”

The world we are living is not familiar; everyday it erupts with an inconceivable corruption, acts of violence, and viciousness against humanity. It’s not the Italian roast coffee that wakes me up, it’s world news. I feel less and less a part of humanity and more like a wild creature chewing on an old bone. My outlook on social clubs, synagogue and church congregations, membership clubs, group classes, and let’s meet up organizing makes a lot of sense now. Especially if you don’t have children or a life mate. The temptation to retreat into a decorous world of fantasy is irresistible. Experience taught me that losing it, giving up, hugging the pillow with film noir on the screen will revive me. It may take two days or more, permitting freedom to indulge in the abstract absurdity, tragedy, and comedy of life available to me. Two days are up: six noir films: Sleeping Tiger, Dangerous Crossing, Ruthless, Finger of Guilt, Wicked, and Cast a Dark Shadow. All suspenseful meandering around themes of greed, deception, romance, uneven love, and forgiveness.

It’s a great big wide wide world if you leave the doors open. Now that the house has sold, I am fortunate that all those years studying real estate and proving myself by placing money in the boss’s pocket, trickled into my life. The first triplex I bought was in 2002, the one that sold, The Follies House. The rent provided income and paid the mortgage. For my Gen X and Millennial pals, I say this: buy a duplex somewhere you want to live.

I’m feeling overwhelmed as I go through this four-story unit and decide what to keep, give away, and sell. Perplexed as I go through boxes of journals dating back to 1996. I assume I won’t live to preview them for new stories, but I sill feel a sense of belonging to them. I have learned after selling a dozen furnishings that once they are gone, it takes about a week to stop lamenting the loss.

THE MIND HIKE

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ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS IS ON A HIKE. Not the physical kind that was once a weekly episode in New Mexico, these days I hike in my head, it’s as wobbly, uneven, rocky, and dangerous as a hike down the Gorge in Taos, NM.

The path I’m hiking is set off by relocation, once the house sells, which is on the fingernail of being sold. Each morning as I wake to my dreamy bedroom, I am deranged by the thought of leaving twenty-five hundred square feet of Victorian victorious comfort.I will be downsizing to a six-hundred-square-foot studio. I used to love studios, but this house has drained that love, and now reality is staring me in the face, a word I despise as an admitted non-realist and dreamer. The path that follows this is where I am relocating to? Relocation is a trend, according to some minor research. Boomers move closer to their children. If you don’t have children or a partner to bring out the compass and use a methodical ruler to figure this equation out, it comes down to finance. That’s the ticker that keeps bringing me back to reality. I should not have left Del Mar, CA. Have you ever said that? It’s the inkblot on decisions when I thought everything I did would work out until it didn’t. And I’d turn the steering wheel back to where I belong. I do not belong here, and that’s not because of aversion or harsh judgment. It’s a marvel if you like three courses of simple conversation, activity, and entertainment. The weather and I do not get along, the summer is sticky, humid, and last week we were in double digits, one hundred. I spent a few days next to a non-effective window air conditioner with an ice washcloth on my head. In the winter, I’m in battle gear with four sweaters and shawls and all of that, not to mention the ice and snow that kept me frosty for months. You can take a girl out of Southern California, but she’ll come back.

Borrowing from a post on FB, you spend the first thirty years of your life gathering possessions, and the next thirty years eliminating. I’m eliminating, sort of, I cruise by my ten boxes of books, and every day it’s on the list to tape them closed. Then there are all the antique figurines, gambling paraphernalia, décor from the vacation rental days, and I think at last count, fifty hanging prints. I don’t need to measure anything, this will not fit in a studio. Plus, I still have a storage unit in Santa Fe, filled with items I cannot remember. Is there such a thing as relocation therapy?

MOODY BLUES TUESDAY

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MATISSE

Writing somberly is parallel to writer’s block. It’s not a block, really, more like a resistance to engaging feelings. If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions, and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover! I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays, I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, shoveling snow, and researching acronyms because the news uses them so often.

The vortex of discontent is a punctured life. The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter. I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. My collection of records and CDs accompanies the scenery. When I’m sorrowful, I listen to Ennio Morricone; when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it is Turandot or some other Opera. When I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa, or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Annie Lenox.

I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow, the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks. Everything I’ve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin, I will listen to Begin the Beguine.

“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theater.

Henry miller writes in his book, “ Henry Miller on Writing” “Whoever greatly suffers must be, I suppose a sublime combination of a sadist and masochist.’ I suppose that a few of my friends have aligned me as such, and now that I write this, as in all writing, answers blink at you, and then the soul receives them like a wafer of wonder. Perhaps I am, but where that evolved and manifested, I have no time to think about it because the sun is out. I must sit in my newly designed sunroom, a small book library alcove that receives the sun at noon. When I returned with my phone to snap a photograph, the sun disappeared like a footprint in the sky. Every moment needs attention. It’s twenty degrees outdoors. I am modestly adjusted and receive a thousand weekly warnings to get a flu shot. My doctor has tried persuading me to get a flu shot for three years. I responded that I’d never had the flu and that my last cold was in 2012. He chuckled and asked the next question.

CHANGE IS COMING

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Some of us are not rushing to wave the I made it flag. Some favor holding back until the other elements of our character life are solid; our fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb. I have to trust in the pattern of our lives; the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. I am discovering the shame and greed, the absolute indifference to my security, and finances.

Gravity has dropped, and so has my sense of structure, health, and self-discipline. Making a bed was too tedious, and grocery shopping was needless because I didn’t care about food; I like tuna sandwiches with avocado and bananas for breakfast. The comfort comes from writing, cloud watching, and phone calls with friends.

The loss of direction and ambiguity lurking in the future is a place any person can find themselves in, especially those sensitive and artistic, without a map, familiar signs, and a plan. You have to ride it all the way to a new horizon.

It is a day later; the sky is unchanged, and the cloud cover is still nailed to the sky. In random conversations, I have heard of people’s hardships, sacrifices, and compromises. I tell myself not to be too sentimental , but it’s a useless force, I am sentiment. Don’t open those links to real estate values, how much money you need to retire. Open the link to redesign my interior life using new colors, textures, and backgrounds.

MALIBU PARADISE BLUES

January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

In a current of unexpected life moves, I floated towards the Pacific Ocean and landed along the fragile, factious Santa Monica Mountains to Malibu.

The salty seaweed smell of the ocean streams through my car, driving down the Pacific Coast highway on my way to buy groceries. Vintage Market is new to Malibu, and clerks are giddy about their jobs. They may be aspiring actors or former actors.

I walk in and get a phone call that I’d been waiting for so, I set my cart down on a shelf and took the call. During the half-hour conversation, my eyes were fluttering through the scene: tanned surfers, affluent college students, and diamond-rich men and women of age that don’t check their bank balances. Because of this, expressions are chilled as fine wines, and smiles are sublime or radiating. They are a mostly content population of 13,000. The median home price is $901,000, and the median income household is $127,000. Here in Malibu every thing looks different from Santa Fe: The staging of ‘was in the business, am in the business, or want to be in the business,’ surfaces and dominates the scenery.

They are beautiful-the young teenagers who surf and paddle are true blondes, the blue eyes scintillating pools of water, young women are saddled onto 6” platforms, and then there are the stand-out power people, who will not acknowledge anyone, and expect everyone to acknowledge them. Tucked in the mountains, are extraordinary artists who live off the grid the way most people prefer to live in Santa Fe.
I am learning slowly and still hiding out at Chantal’s, where I am living, two miles up from PCH off Malibu Canyon Road, behind a gate. Bohemians, artists, home-office screenwriters, producers, and famous heirs of recognizable movie stars live there.

In the last hour, I walked down the road in the hands of sloping hillsides, horse ranches, and signature homes behind walls as high as the palm trees, built to withstand the typhoons of nature and mankind. In the daylight a swirl of rain and clouds, it was as if I was in Ireland, walking along a road in Kilkenny. I roped in my imagination and returned to the mountains, which will teach me how far to go, how to duck a racing motorcycle car, or confront a coyote or a snake.
A full transcendental moon dipped into the black-out mountain evening, and has cured me of interior turmoil for the time being. This is part of adventures in livingness in what locals call the bu. Chantal’s artistic compound of eight cottages and seventeen acres burned to chips in the Woolsey Fire. One night with Chantal and Neighbors.

Today, as the Bu, Palisades, and five other fires demolish humanity’s lives, I am grateful I was able to return to my childhood memories in Malibu for one summer in 2017. My family home burned in the Bel Air fire in 1961… No WATER. SAVE THEM THIS TIME, LA, AND DON’T LIE TO THEM.

FRIENDS of FOLLIES

August 5, 2024August 9, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Saturday, a heavy clog of humidity tries to zap my energy. I slept six hours, so I fight, do laundry, do a bit of weight lifting, go up and down the twenty stairs twelve times, and wander in my mind. I answer the first phone call of the day.

” Hi, how are you? ?” I pause to answer with some amusing honesty.

” I’m cleaning my brain?

” How do you do that? You’re funny.”

” “I sweep away all the repetitive scary thoughts.”

” What about you? My friend sighed and then zigzagged into her struggles, taking care of her ninety-six-year-old mother, who does not speak English; my friend is Armenian. She works full-time as a court translator, has two children, a husband, and about fifty friends she continually connects to.

“You are four people in one. I don’t know how you do it?” Is your Mom still living with you?”

“ Yes, she can’t walk. She sleeps in the living room because the bedrooms are upstairs. It’s difficult. I have to feed her as she’s now refusing to eat.”

” Please try and get a nurse’s aide to come in and help you.”

“She won’t let anyone touch her but me.”

“I find that selfish, not to be critical, but you will wear yourself down.”

” She’s always been like that; in my culture, you never abandon a parent, no matter what. Her mind is sharp, so that is good.“

” Heaven isn’t good enough for you,” she chuckled. I often improvise to be amusing because her laughter is boisterous, and we all need more injections of humor.

” Have you decided where to move when it sells?” She asked again.

” Yes, I was looking at my book on Italy, all the different regions, and I think Anacapri is a good choice.”

” Oh, Greta… that is so expensive; what are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking I’m daydreaming.”

” I have an idea for you. There is a new trend, something like Boomermates, a group of people who share a house, and you don’t have to sign a lease. Go look in San Diego and find something.

“Roommates, strangers, you mean?”

“Yes, why not?”

” Would you do that?”

” Probably not. A studio anywhere in San Diego is two thousand at least, and don’t use the proceeds from the house.

“Now you’re daydreaming. I’ll have to use some without the rental income until I find employment. Are you home now?”

“No, I’m driving to San Diego for a court appointment

“It’s what, six in the morning?“

“Yes, I wake up at five.”

” Every time I come here, I think of you. You were a great leasing agent. You leased about fifty of my units. You can get a job leasing in a nice project. Oh, you should have bought that unit. I remember G4 when we converted to condominiums.“

“Yes, you’ve told me that a hundred times.”

” I made the same mistake. What can you do?”

” Complain and then accept what you can’t accept. Like selling my home.” I went through my steamer trunk and found my marketing portfolio when I opened Follies as an artist retreat. It was nonstop theatrics. One time, I hosted a theater group of six young actors; they were so much fun. Ah, memories.

” You will make it; look what you accomplished, winning a foreclosure, Greta; that is something big.”

” So is my glass of wine.”

“I’d be doing the same in your situation.”

” Another showing, a really nice family. They’ll make an offer. They commented that the exterior paint is their issue, so did I tell you already? I found a marvelous painter from Albania, and he’s given me a very reasonable price to paint the entrance, balisters, and overhang. You know that curb appeal is critical.”

” You shouldn’t spend your money, Greta, how much?”

” Three thousand, and it’s a lot of scraping and ladder work. It’s the right decision if I may disagree with my real estate guru.”

” That is reasonable. Keep me posted. I’m in San Diego now, so I will speak to you soon.”

” Heaven isn’t good enough for you.” And I’m leaving Follies in the best I can because she was so good to me.

63 E High St – Dropbox

July 6, 2024July 28, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

My Favorite home must be sold. After twenty-four years, Letting go is going slow, packing, and viewing my possessions and antiques. Today, I found a matchbook in perfect condition from the Stork Club, playbills, and musical sheets. I wish I hadn’t opened my steamer trunk; it’s like looking at another woman.