The Weather In Neverland

As obvious a metaphor as ever there was: Los Angeles is Neverland.

Adults dress like children, grown men rise at 11, breakfast food is as ubiquitous as oxygen. (More so, on some days.) Velcro shoes are acceptable footwear for first dates, a two-hour trip to the coffee shop counts as work, dreaming replaces doing.

All of this, in part, because Los Angeles is the breeding ground for all things Pretend.

But there’s another factor at work. The topic with which all Midwestern parents begin every phone conversation that doesn’t center around the death of a relative: the weather.

I spent this winter’s first six weeks in Kansas City. (Where winter is taken to mean the empirical winter of When It’s Cold, as opposed to the theoretical winter of After December 21.) When I returned to Los Angeles, my spring had sprung. It was 70 and sunny and the six deciduous trees in the city looked exactly like they did when I left. (Stunted, sickly, and like they’d rather be in Charlotte.)

This seasonal time warp had a predictable effect: I began to think it was time for the bloom of jonquils, time to get the hose out of the garage, time to break up with the girlfriend I don’t have so I can watch other people pursue adorable summer flings.

My brain, though, wasn’t ready for what my other senses were telling it. My brain is used to January’s Seasonal Affect Disorder. Needs it, almost. (Or this is what I tell myself. And even then it is still my brain telling myself what to tell myself.)

An uncomfortable duality was established: my body said bubble-gum pop; my brain said Elliott Smith.

As I looked around, I realized that I was the only one with this problem. Most Angelinos don’t deal with this climatological dissonance because most Angelinos aren’t splitting their time between Kansas City and Los Angeles. And this, it occurred to me, is why no one in Los Angeles grows up. Everyone is as old as the day they came here.

Part of the reason we age, I think, is that we convince ourselves that we should age. We take cues signaling the passage of time from our peers: my long-single friend Jan just got engaged, so maybe I should think about ditching the Xbox and speaking to someone with Fallopian tubes and a soft spot for The Hunger Games. Stacey had a baby; I guess I could dig up the business card for that sperm donation center. Steve finally got his Ph. D in Swedish literature; perhaps I should finish my associate’s in applied wooden bucket construction (softwoods only).

These are the long-term cues that everyone receives. There are other, more subtle, shorter-term cues. The one that suggests I get out my glow-in-the-dark skeleton. The one that makes me think I ought to hack down a Douglas Fir and install it in my living room. The one that reminds me that it’s time to buy a bag of Pepto-flavored hearts and watch Love Actually by myself.

Thanks to a lack of meteorological indicators, the citizens of Los Angeles miss these cues. Sure, we all have calendars on our phones and inside our kitchen cabinets. But these aren’t enough; our senses — smart as they are — tell us that nothing has changed, that it’s still Spring 2007, when I moved here from La Crosse to follow that boy who was working for Paramount.

This, I suppose, could be taken as a very pleasant finding indeed. Proof of the placebo effect the weather has on all of us. We can, it turns out, stymie the aging process, just by failing to notice that we should be participating in it.

The problem with this approach to existence is that the façade only holds up if you stay inside the bubble. If you leave Biodome, you’ll quickly notice that, while you were debating the merits of wheatgrass and cultural impact of Boba, everyone you used to know bought Highlanders and got bifocals and had those mucous and diarrhea factories known as “children.” (Mucous and diarrhea factories with whom you now have more in common than their parents.)

So what’s the answer? It’s probably not for everyone in LA to marry their high school sweethearts so they can ride the Slip ‘N Slide of life into the mud puddle of middle age. Nor would I suggest that the fine citizens of the Midwest build city-sized Metrodomes so everyone can pretend that yesterday is today is tomorrow.

Instead, a compromise; a taking of the best of both. For the Midwest, the lesson that we aren’t necessarily as old as our years want us to be. There’s no reason to get old if you don’t want to. You’re only as old as you feel, and all that triteness.

Lessons for LA, too: that you can’t put off your mortality forever. That there’s dignity in aging: you become wise. People open doors for you. No one expects you to replicate a sexual circus in your bedroom.

And the most important lesson of all — that, if you don’t want to be jarred loose from your idyllic existence — if you don’t want to be faced with the spectre of a grim, lonely death (or a loveless marriage and a house in the suburbs of Oklahoma City)*…in that case, don’t fall for Wendy’s charms.

Don’t ever leave Neverland.

*Potaeto/Potawto.

Originally published at www.flipcollective.com on January 24, 2012.