I have a friend who spent some time out in Los Angeles.

When he talked about how it was out there, he mentioned that he couldn’t get over how the weather was always the same.  He didn’t like the weather being perfect all the time.

I think I remember talking about the traffic.

I’m not really sure what else we talked about. It was a while ago.

Maybe we talked about an earthquake or something.  I don’t really remember.

One thing I do remember him mentioning was how many beautiful women there were out in Hollywood.

I remember that.

But he said that you couldn’t really talk to any of them.

I guess it only went skin deep out in Hollywood.

Maybe it goes even more “only skin deep” out in Hollywood than other places.

I guess the folks out there are pretty good at buffing the surface.

Botoxed and lifted, nipped and tucked…the folks out in Hollywood keep it together any way they can.

Polished until they rub off all the good parts.  Polished until we wonder if anything is real anymore.

And that becomes our standard…some Photoshopped image, airbrushed and re-digitalized to “perfection”…some icon that we can use as a yardstick for our own perceived shortcomings, wondering, “why don’t I measure up? Maybe that’s what people want?”

It’s kind of nuts, really.

Now, I don’t have any need to follow some “Hollywood trend”. I don’t need to wear shoes without shoelaces, or buy a better watch, or inject anything to make it smoother.

I don’t need to take a bunch of “selfies” in the bathroom mirror.

Those are Hollywood trends, right?

I may be a little behind on my trends.

I might be missing something.

When I think about “perfection”….or what we think perfection is supposed to be…I can’t help but think that it’s really the “burrs” that make us most interesting…and those are the things that we’re worried about getting rid of a lot of the time.

We need an honest happy accident in the beauty department.

We need someone like Marlo Thomas who’s “Free to be Me”.

(Remember that book?  “Free to be Me”?)

We need something that we can trust.

Between steroid fueled home run kings and all the nose jobbed and implanted fakes…and those are just the dudes…it’s hard to know what we can take at face value anymore.

It is kind of jarring to be confronted with physical reality now if it veers off from what we’ve come to expect.

If I could jump down out of the saddle that my “high horse” is wearing for a minute, I should mention that when I was watching the movie about the trapper that I wrote about a couple of days ago, I did notice that when the Asian lady who I think was playing an American Indian lady (why do they do that?) was in the right light… I noticed some wrinkles.

She lives in the frozen north…she’s going to have some wrinkles.

But I noticed.  It didn’t matter…but I noticed.

Of course, the trapper was a roadmap of wrinkles…but he was a dude so I cut him some slack.  I didn’t notice as much with him. It didn’t make me think, “Look at the wrinkles on that grizzled old dude!”

We suspect that things will be good when we get all the rough edges taken care of…but that’s what makes us interesting.

All these “burrs” are pretty fascinating.

Leave the burrs alone.