An ode to West Hollywood Park

Over the years, I have spent many hours hunched over a yellow legal pad at West Hollywood Park.

To be clear, this is not typically what is done there.

There might be glitter boys to the left of me, practising vogue moves on the lawn. To the right, an acoustic guitarist in bell bottoms and wife beater, tossing approximate chords and half-baked lyrics onto the breeze (or totally baked lyrics... marijuana legal here).

There is generally a toddler wobble-stomping across the grass, until brought to a halt by an equally tiny and cute (and expensive) English toy spaniel. Now it's a fascination face-off. Couples of every possible combination will be sun-bathing on goofy towels, hands digging groggily into a box of pumpkin seed granola. Meanwhile, fresh starts in never-used running shoes are doing laps around the lawn, while bare-chested muscle kings with their crown in their gym shorts eye each other up at the work-out bars. (Almost half of the population of West Hollywood identifies as not straight.)

Some kind of petition will be circulating: sign here for local stray-cat neutering; sign here against the bike lane/billboard; sign this super-fan birthday card for Dolly Parton. There is always at least one person who is homeless, and several more who don't seem to have anyplace they want to go. Neither group particularly glum about it.

The way I experience West Hollywood Park – and, more broadly, West Hollywood itself – is as a relentless and relentlessly upbeat menagerie. Its energy is "bounce back" energy: get up, dust down, and glow, bitch, glow. I associate this particular energy with communities that have known rejection, perhaps for a very long time, but through that rejection have formed an unbreakable sense of who they are. Because that is the thing about attempting to edit and control the identities of others: it's a stupid waste of your life, and of theirs. People are who they are. We all live in the gravity of our truths and there is no worthwhile defiance of that.

Like most writers, I have known a great deal of rejection. Perhaps that's why I sit at the picnic tables of West Hollywood Park and feel inexorably, often inconveniently, inspired. (I mean, I'm officially there to play tennis or eat my lunch, ffs.) Out the legal pad comes to catch my mind-crackle this time.

The poem that became this year's Thanksgiving card began exactly that way: as scrawl on a legal pad in West Hollywood Park. The opening lines came out just as you read them now, but the rest of it took several reboots to get right. The words only came easily once I recognized what the poem wanted to be: an observational piece on exactly where I was and what it means to me.

I should note that I have blended my many years of people-watching into fictionalized generalizations and sometimes outright falsehoods. "Bitches Love Bubbles", for example, is not really spraypaint by the park. It's wheatpaste art six blocks away. Don't sue me.

Finally, I'd like to thank the surfers of Solana Beach who waved to the Pacific Surfliner train on my return trip from San Diego in the spring. Young studs, their second skins peeled off halfway down their torsos, waving at a passing train like almanac dorks. It made me love life massively, for just a little while.