A friend of mine at work just announced that he is leaving his job at the TV network we work for and moving with his partner to Palm Springs.
Who DOES that at our age? Who just quits their job and moves to a retirement community like Palm Springs? It’s like a driven, fortyish New York Jew moving to Boca. Is he also planning to start driving a ’72 land yacht and eating dinner at 4:15?
Don’t get me wrong – Palm Springs is awesome. In fact, it’s the ultimate goal for lots of us gay folk. It is often portrayed as nothing more than a hot, desert wasteland with a little taste, a sort of Hell with Architecture. But it’s actually a spectacularly beautiful resort community with small-town quaintness and an overlay of swank sophistication. I call it Gayberry (like the old Andy Griffith town of Mayberry, but with a lot more homos).
The thing is, it shouldn’t be someone’s ultimate goal in their early 40’s.
In our 40’s, we should all be working our way up the ladder, accumulating cars and houses and stuff to put in those cars and houses. We should all be stressed because we have to work insane hours in order to afford all those cars and houses and stuff to put in those cars and houses. We should live in large cities and require constant stimulation and wake up each morning wondering whether any of this has any meaning.
We should NOT be uprooting ourselves and moving to a quieter existence in a town where we actually have time to think. Nor should we be downscaling our monetary ambitions and finding ourselves satisfied with less. That is, as far as I’m concerned, just crazy talk.
What good can possibly come of such a life? He’ll be disconnected from the glamorous life in LA, where you can go to dinner at any one of a hundred five-star restaurants, assuming the traffic isn’t bad enough that you go on a shooting rampage (that often delays dinner). He won’t get invited to glitzy premiere parties, where you can eat artichoke-stuffed dates while you’re bum-rushed off the red carpet in favor of the latest hair-pulling reality star. He won’t have easy access to the beach that no one goes to unless they can’t afford air conditioning or they live on it.
In Palm Springs, he’ll be forced to go to the same restaurants over and over, where people will learn his name, which is clearly an invasion of privacy. He’ll have to deal with CostCo lines which, although quicker because there’s about 5% as many residents, will be filled with walker-laden geezers complaining about their bursitis while they fumble for coupons for what feels like minutes. And he’ll have to sit by his pool, where the sounds of nothing but the breeze and the spa waterfall will force him to think – really think about what he’s done.
And I hope that, when he realizes exactly what he’s done, he feels absolutely, unforgivably terrible – that he didn’t take me with him. Thoughtless bastard.