Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

It's Carey Mulligan's birthday today; she's twenty nine years old. It's mine too. I'm, well, I'm older. I wish I'd known we shared the same May 28th birthday when I met her at the wrap party for Drive, we might have bonded. Twenty nine. It can be a tough year. The big 3—0 is approaching, fraught with expectations. It was a bit of a tough year for me but that was back in the day when being unmarried at twenty-nine was still a bit of a bummer. I can't imagine Carey with all her success, gives a damn. Still when I was working as a copywriter at Max Factor, while I loved my job coming up with lipstick shade names, writing package copy and sales brochures, there were still times when I wept over my love life. It was 1982 and the company was in the midst of launching the Le Jardin fragrance. I was in the middle of a bad romance, and even though An Officer and a Gentleman didn't come out until August of '82, part of me had to be wishing Richar...

Nobody walks in LA. Everybody knows that we leave the walking in LA to the weirdos, wackos and the homeless, sadly, all too often one and the same. They even write songs about it. 'Cept it ain't necessarily so. I live in a section of the city where people do walk. We sally forth, strut our stuff and occasionally sashay. That's because I live in a section of the city where it's often  easier to walk  than drive. Living close to major shopping and tourist destinations means that the streets round here are not only clogged with the usual dose of LA traffic—starving students and the permanently impoverished are the only people who partake of what passes for public transportation here in the City of the Angels, so our traffic problem is worse than most major cities—they're also filled with a steady stream of Starline's double decker Sightseeing buses, TMZ tour vans, taxis and Uber/Lyft drivers. Parking is at a premium so there's a world of stuff I j...

I read a piece not too long ago, bemoaning the fact that the digital age is ruining vacations. The writer, a young man, had been on holiday with his girlfriend, happily posing for pictures until he got a look at them, moments later, scrolling through the photos on her iPhone. Ew?! That's how I look? He'd sucked in his stomach and smiled, confident that the man he felt like inside was the man who appeared on the screen. Wrong. We lie to ourselves but the camera never does, and there he was, revealed in all his glory: flesh still white and while he wouldn't go so far as to say flabby, he didn't look like the college athlete he used to be. His chin, not exactly weak but no one would mistake him for Chris Hemsworth either. The poor guy's vacation was ruined. He said he wished he could have at least enjoyed his one lousy week away from the office with his illusions intact. Superficial? Sure. But I can relate. I rarely pose for vacation pictures anymo...

If you stopped by in April you might have read one of my posts for the A to Z Challenge , a little blogarooni post-writing fest I participated in, where we were challenged to write every day but Sunday, posting on a topic beginning with the day's letter. And you might have noticed I only made it from A to T; leaving U, V, W, X, Y and Z undone. That lack of completion is really nagging at me. Finish it, you loser! That's my inner voice screaming in my ear. I'll be taking my walk, zooming through my two mile and feeling pretty damn groovy and then somehow thought slithers in ... unwanted as those niggling thoughts often are ...  quitter . You know what they say, 'winners never quit, and quitters never win.' But it's not my fault my vacation interrupted the AtoZ Challenge , I hear myself whining back. What was I supposed to do, write on vacation? Wasn't I supposed to be having too much fun to find time to write? Wouldn't you all judge me for pounding...

Anyone else grow up wanting to be just like Sandra Dee? You might dig my #ThrowbackThursday post about Gidget over at Chapter1-Take1 , including a clip of James Darren AKA Moondoggie singing to Sandra Dee aka Gidget. SWOON!

I may have to bow out gracefully from the remainder of the #AtoZChallenge. I don't want to. I've been loving the excuse to write daily but we're taking a trip, leaving Saturday morning for the Florida keys, and I want to be as free from obligations as I can, better to blow where the balmy breeze takes me. I'm told that while Florida is mainly hot, sticky and buggy—sorry Floridians but that's what they tell me—I will have a chance to catch the balmy breeze in the Keys. This will be my first trip to southern Florida since we stopped off in Miami en route from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles when I was a teenager. We stayed at some little Best Western motel near the beach waiting for our car to arrive; my parents had it shipped over from San Juan. I'm sure it was a Best Western, my parents swore by Best Westerns. We drove across the entire country plotting the day's travel by the Best Western Motels with swimming pools.   I'm not interested in seeing Miami...

Still Life with Glasses and Tobacco, 1633 Willem Claesz. Heda (1594–1680) Writing in the memoir genre can make you feel less like you're retelling an authentic part of your story, and more like you're rewriting it. Or should I say it can make me feel that way.  Get out my red pen baby, cause we're doing some major editing tonight. There are times when that fine line between truth—yours, mine and ours—isn't straight but wavy. And undulating. Trying to grab onto, and hold it straight to the page, the line slips and slides through our hands, too fine to get a grip on, it flies through our fingers like fishing line spooling out from the reel, unstoppable, when a big one is dangling at the end of it. It's not that our personal stories are whoppers, tall tales a fisherman tells; it's just that our truths don't always match up because they never matched up to begin with. Like a meal we once shared, the fresh swordfish I raved about is what I recall, while you...