Life Serial

Smart Lines

A line in the latest entry at Dooce really resonated with me.  Wanted to snag it.

"...I am reminded that the reason kids are the way they are is to remind adults again and again, HEY, STOP GIVING A SHIT."

Yup.

Maria

This is Maria.  Say hi.

Maria doesn't know, but this is my go-to picture.  Whenever I need to be reminded that life is so much better than a shitty moment that I may be having, I pull up this photo.  I have other cues, songs that my fingers fumble around on my iPod for, things that return me to safety, keep me from crashing too fast and loud, hard.  'Maria' is one visual though; this image is a parachute, yellow and midnight blue.  It is an airbag.  I keep this in a folder somewhere on my computer.  Sometimes I even stumble across it.  It always has the same effect.  I wasn't there when it was taken.  I don't even know Maria that well (not as well as I might like), though I will always remember my Thanksgiving/birthday spent with her and others in a tiny, beautiful New York apartment. 

There is 'wow' in this photo.  Something perfectly captured, inherently right.  I look for these moments now in life.  They exist.  And I think we get caught blinking or taking another sip of our drink, turning the other way to see what's on the TV.   We miss them.  We take them for granted.  I reject that idea though.  I refuse it.  I don't want to take anything for granted.  It's part of being in a moment, suspended if you have to be, not looking forward or back.  I get more from that.  I don't have to manufacture it, either.  These moments, the real ones, happen everyday.  They even happen here in the most fake corner of the planet, Los Angeles.  Real life cannot be suppressed.  I love that.

Popsicle Reverb Bludgeonment

Oh, that?  That just came out. 

Sometimes I like the sounds of words together.  To say them over and over in my head, adding prefixes and suffixes and all the fixin's till I've made words that aren't words but just sounds and letters that roll around in the kitchen junk drawer, the one where you keep random decks of cards, maybe a tube of caulk, a few screws, a lonely placemat, and keys that unlock mysterious locks or locks that have already been changed.  It's the drawer beneath the microwave.

I am unmanageable.  Unruly, but kind.

Skinny Hits the Road

Hello, 400th post!  I'm totally tongue-kissing my Typepad right now.  Later we're going to get naked as heck.  It's how I celebrate. 

This weekend or—according to my apocalypse drinking clock—in about thirty minutes, I'm going to Ojai.  I have never been to Ojai.  It's about 75 miles north of Los Angeles though.  And that's what I know.  Not a whole lot.  Do they have sharks there?  Prolly not.  But I'm going for the weekend and that seems adventurous and adventureful and adventurelicious.  We rented a house, some of us.  It has a pool!

I'm going to make memories, or take stock of them, or become nostalgic and belligerent.

And, I don't know why, but I have even gotten very excited about the drive up there.  I vowed to do it by myself.  It could go awry and turn into a mixture of Jeepers Creepers, Wrong Turn and Crossroads.  Or, it could be me, the highway and good for the soul road trippin'.  I vote for plan B.  I really enjoy driving and doing this solo, while not exactly a cross country expedition, is a little independence assertion.  It's okay to be alone.

Dogblogit!

I am writing a review for Hulk and making cookie dough to bake this weekend.  What are you doing?

Same Themes, Different Tune

I would like to write to you, my past self, and let you know that I am doing very well.  We have lost touch, in a stomach rumbling way I never thought possible.  It's though I see my dust covered green car pulling away from the curb, windows down and a breeze gusting through.  It's though I see you, stark and shivering, beside that same curb.  In my rear view mirror, you grow smaller, you fade to a pin prick of white, like an apostrophe on a page.  I turn the corner and you blink into nothingness.

It's also as though I unlocked the door and allowed you inside, as though I buckled you in (you couldn't do it yourself) and pressed down on the accelerator till the needle body-slammed to the opposite side.  It's though I see us careening, a spiral and a blur, toward something hard that will break our stride.  I think then, if we crashed, we became billions of baby bits and when we were reassembled, because somehow we can always reassemble, like magic, there was just one of us.  There was just one me, with the tiniest baby bits, the leftovers of the other, the better leftovers of you. 

And I feel like I can open the door now, like I can allow the haze and the June fog and the unavoidable occasional blah to settle down over me, a cape and cowl of porridge and honey.  I can allow it that, the seep and coat.  Because it's no longer permanent.  It's no longer everything.  It's only ever just a little bit, the little bits of my former me, part of someone different and calmly happy.

Budding Romance

A month and 5 days later, my Growth Experiment is not yielding as much fruit as I had hoped.  Does it usually take this long?  Or am I guilty of some sort of bad parenting?

Still no flowers.  I have one strong viable bud though.  There were a few others, but just as they came through they fell over.  There is another little one there, to the left.  Hopefully he makes it.  I figured I'd have a full pot o' wildflowers by now.  No such thing. 

The big one I have named Miriam.

100 Things Worth Doing, IV

The final batch of good memories is not the end; it's just numbers 76-100:

76. Sleeping in scrubs I've had since senior year of high school
77. Driving the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu at midnight; Sia's "Don't Bring Me Down" and him asleep in the passenger seat
78. New Years Eve with family at a hotel in the parking lot of a strip mall
79. Seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar buy an Apple laptop on 3rd Street Promenade
80. Kool-Aid Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade in my apartment on Elm Street
81. Staying up late glued to a great book
82. Jumping in the pool after dinner
83. Steak dinner on a frozen Chicago night with Jackie, Pam and my mom
84. Crying, just because
85. Breakfasts with Patrick
86. Ice cream cones on the stone wall overlooking the ocean in Puerto Vallarta
87. Watching the segment I wrote and produced as it aired on national television
88. Hot tubs
89. A clear night at the Griffith Park Observatory
90. Solo drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the windows down and hot, dry air blowing through
91. Putting on a clean t-shirt
92. Singing all the songs all wrong and off-key
93. Learning to play Poker
94. Climbing rocks in Laguna Beach, sleeping at the B&B and hiding in the all-white covers
95. Napping after a long day in the sun
96. Seeing Ryan complete the L.A. Marathon, being in that mass of people all cheering for strangers
97. Holding hands
98. (Too much) wine with the boys at the house in Santa Barbara, Max on my lap
99. Making words out of my dad's snoring
100. Laughing so hard that no sound comes out

Memorial Weekend To-Do

Everyone I know seems to have broke for the L.A. exits yesterday.  The wind and the rain came through and it might as well have took them all with it.  Some even ditched on Thursday.  A long weekend and we don't wanna be here.  But I'm still hangin' around.  I'll be taking it easy, but I've been looking forward to catching up on some simple stuff and, whatever, taking some alone time.  I also might talk to myself.   

Crafts and books are on my list of fun things to occupy the weekend.  Should not be so bad.  Keep an eye on this list, if you're glued to the computer Saturday to Monday and care.  It's mostly for THE MEMORIES! of what I did with an entire weekend to myself.   I'll be adding to it  as things come up and crossing things off as I do them.   

1. Finish roll of film in Holga camera, develop
2. Complete After Lucy by Daniel Jones
3. Visit thrift store, buy old hardcover books
4. Make floating shelves out of books
5. Laundry
6. Buy frames for my two letterpress prints
7. Hang artwork
8. Flower pots
9. Paint canvas
10. Vacuum
11. ?

Midnight Plans

Switch off the lights.  Imma gonna roll onto my back, turn up the music comfortably loud in these headphones and just be here.  I'm not here enough.