Thanksgiving Card 2024
Author notes on this year's poems
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.
The photo covers for the 2024 Thanksgiving card
There are four possible covers for this year's Thanksgiving card. All four images are of West Hollywood Park (or of its immediate environs, in the case of nightclub Rocco's), and were captured by me in October 2024.
View the four covers as a slideshow by clicking any image below:
The photo on back of the 2024 Thanksgiving card
This year, the back of my Thanksgiving card features a photograph too. In a nod to the "little dogs like woolen popcorn" referenced in the poem, you'll see an image from my ongoing project Dogs Of WeHo on back. The two fluffballs pictured are among the many, many dogs I've photographed at West Hollywood Park over the last twelve months (a project inspired by storyteller and animal-lover Patricia Kourt).
West Hollywood Park has two doggy play-pens: one for small dogs, and one for larger breeds. Perhaps because I'm small and yappy myself, I find myself favoring the former area. There, projectile fluffballs (hair way better than mine) yip and sniff and bitch back and forth among themselves while their owners Venmo their therapists. (I mean the dogs' therapists, obviously.) These little mutts are like Housewives Of Beverly Hills crossed with a thousand-dollar bathrobe. Capturing their antics has become an enormous joy of mine throughout 2024. (The larger dogs will get their shot at the limelight soon, I promise.)
Check out a selection of Dogs Of WeHo in this slideshow:
The Thanksgiving 2024 Cards: Author Notes
Zoe Marie Bel Newsletter
Get updates on novel 'After The Angels', short story collection 'Hard Place Rock', and poetry collection 'Passengers', as well as news about other projects by Zoe Marie Bel. Newsletter will tickle your inbox approximately every month (intense months of writing may be silent!).
Your email address will not be shared with Viagra merchants, personal injury lawyers or anyone, in fact. You can read more at the hi-octane Winter Bel Arts Privacy Policy.