This piece is offered to you mostly unedited and unfinished.  I want to do a piece on all of the Cities that have formed an impression on me in some way or another.  Right now, time is crucial and I unfortunately have to make time to write which is a reality I am happy with.  This blog is an outlet for me and a platform for me.  One day, I will be able to get paid for my writing but that day seems forever away. 

The quiet sunrise takes me home.  I was running and running away from the storm of living.  I miss Palm Desert in the great open morning.  I miss the sense of cool, quiet air while I sit and think about tomorrows.  Here I am today and every move I had ever contemplated as an eighteen-year old in Palm Desert has worked out in some odd way.  These moves have worked but never how I imagined they would.  I feel like Palm Desert has always been my battleground.  I play chess with Palm Desert.  The City has always felt at once like the coldest punishment and a quiet, brilliant escape.  Palm Desert is where I graduated from High School and where I began my college education.  Palm Desert is where I discovered new love and new friendships.  Palm Desert is also where I discovered that I would always be fighting myself.  I hope everyday that Palm Desert does not reveal my secret: I became ill, I was a wild child, I am still fighting it.

Palm Desert's population grows and diminishes as the weather heats up.  The City is located near the center of the Coachella Valley bordered by Rancho Mirage to the west and Indian Wells and La Quinta to the east.  In 1993, I moved with my mother, sister, and brother to Silver Spur Park located south of the Palm Desert Mall on Highway 74 next to Big Horn Country Club.  Big Horn to me is still shrouded in mystery although I lived nine years by its footsteps.  I never was able to penetrate its guarded, heavy walls.  In my mind, it barely existed.  It existed to me as a place where moneyed elderly played Golf, wasted their retirement days,  and locked their doors from me.  

Silver Spur Park is a quiet community of mobile home parks designed for elderly people and housing many.  As a fourteen-year old boy beginning to experience dating for the first time, this place did not present many prospects.  Our home was a two-story mobile home and our roof patio overlooked the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets.  It was also the place that I discovered smoking at seventeen.  Cigarettes were especially nice at 5 in the morning when the sun would peak from the sky and the mountains in the horizon stood majestically.  My brother and I shared the upstairs bedroom.  My stuff lined one side and my brother's stuff the other side.  I loved Hip Hop, Graffiti and Sports and he loved Art, Comic Books and Punk Rock and our bedroom walls would represent our passions.  We spent as much time as we could every summer inside the community swimming pool.  This was instrumental for us to survive the blazing heat.  My mom had the master bedroom where my father would crash once a week when he had a day off from his work in Los Angeles.  My sister had her own room which was very small.  Life slowed down in this big mobile home and I enjoyed the break from hectic Los Angeles and the east San Fernando Valley. 

I will always see the appeal of Palm Desert although I never felt welcomed as a young man.  I discovered this part of my personality.  I'm a social butterfly at times and I'm a closed-off anti-social lug at others.  Palm Desert made me want to break away from humanity because I didn't fit in.  I started High School as a sophomore although I was only fourteen.  I moved from Arleta, California where I had established a hardcore group of friends whom I never wanted to leave.  Here I was in Palm Desert and the kids did not speak the same language of "cool".  To me, "cool" was Rap, raves, tagging and big, flowing baggy pants.  To them, I was an anomaly from L.A.  I decided at fourteen that I would never have anything to speak of value to these kids with nice cars and different life stories.  I went to Palm Desert High School taking that long, treacherous ride on the school bus.  I came home and my mom was utterly bored and disinterested with our new home.  My sister and brother were better able to adapt socially making friends everyday.  I'm very shy and quiet but warm up and show my personality as I get to know somebody.  I spent the first month or so sitting quietly in a corner eating my little pizza and drinking my little chocolate milk.  I felt utterly alone.  


One day, a boy named Bobby walked up to me and introduced himself.  We became close friends from that day on.  He was from Orange and was just a nice guy: funny and mellow.  We formed a click of kids that were also new to the Palm Desert area: there was Christian from Fresno, Ruben from Brawley, Dave from Upland and a few other kids we met from the area.  It was nice to have a place to hang out on Fridays as we would look for things to do in the small desert.  We watched movies and played my friend's brilliant RPG game that our friend Christian created out of possibly shear boredom.  It was brilliant and we were pretty much not popular.  

One day, my sister met a boy from Pacoima named Robert and I broke away from my new friends.  Robert was an interesting story and I hung with him because he reminded me of home.  We liked similar music and he knew a bunch of people.  I met my first girlfriend through him.  She was a beautiful girl named Carol who was pretty mean.  Through Robert, I met a kid named Ray who liked baggy clothes and was the funniest kid I had ever met.  He loved to write graffiti so we became fast friends.  I decided at this point that I wanted to take up graffiti writing again as I had decided to retire when I was thirteen.  I started a crew, "No Limits" and that was all she wrote.  I never felt lonely again meeting one graffiti writer after another and forming long-lasting bonds in the desert from Indio to Palm Springs.


 
 




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    Author

    Selim Bouhamidi Sketches: Selim's blog. 
     
    Who am I?  
    Writer and thinker, Urban Planner and Anthropologist.  Lover of sports, movies, and music.  Had to get lost a couple of times to find my way but I am home every step I take.    

    What are sketches?
    These are sketches, portraits, graceful words about the grace all around us.  I want to show you this world through my eyes.  These are all working pieces because I am a work in progress or constantly working.  These aren't meant to be perfect.  Sometimes I write out every emotion I have even if they mess with my readers.  I am who I am.  These are the thoughts that keep me up at night.

    I love Magpie and J.

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