Bead-maker, Sea-shell people: Chumash

Dear Inhabitants of this Land,

This is me at this time: a 57 year old white woman living far away from my ancestors (primarily Southern Italian, Syrian, a smattering of Scotch and English) on your land. I know only a small bit of how I got here and what twists of fate and circumstance and stardust and love brought me, but at present I feel lost and broken and confused and overwhelmed. I feel obligation to my family — obligation so heavy that you — inhabitants of this land — are just shadows on the periphery. 

Read the rest, if you'd like, on my Substack.

Notes on L.A.

photographer: Henry Beglinger

Just some thoughts and observations in no particular order and not meant to be tied together or have a lesson or moral:

We are learning that so much of what you've seen on the teevee the last few days about the "riots" in Los Angeles is not the whole truth. Yes, there has been looting and mayhem, businesses routed, property destroyed, and I don't condone it. We have had the constant sound of sirens and helicopters circling, the curfews and the buzz on neighborhood watches shots heard on 3rd and Orange, thousands marching towards 3rd and Beverly, people gathering on Melrose and Poinsettia to sweep and clean. But here, here in Los Angeles, here in my own neighborhood I've witnessed many thousands of people marching peacefully in protest against racism and more specifically police brutality.

I have heard countless accounts from people that I know, that were there, that the "rioting" and looting, that the mayhem in many of these places in Los Angeles was instigated and exacerbated by the police.

Please read this story, written by a good friend of mine who I've known since I moved to Los Angeles in 1998, who lives down the street from me and whose children grew up with mine. Zeke's story is an important one and deserves attention, so if you are so inclined, please share it. If you live in Los Angeles, please send it with a letter to your councilman or woman. The police are under the authority of the Los Angeles city council and the mayor, Eric Garcetti.

photo credit: the world wide webs

Here's the story: The LAPD Instigated a Riot, Falsely Arrested Me and Now I'm a #BLM Activist. I believe it's an account that should help you to pivot toward what we're protesting here: POLICE BRUTALITY AND RACISM. We don't need proof of it from a white man, but perhaps many of you dithering over looters and good cops vs. bad cops and fruit analogies might listen and pivot toward anti-racism action.






My friend Chris said this, "Nineteen percent of police forces in the country are former military. The 2009 Homeland Security report that was trashed warned of radicalized vets in police forces. This is frightening."






Last night, my son Henry joined the protestors marching toward the mayor's residence which is within a mile of our home. Henry is in a general state of upset these days, and he and I talk nearly continuously about everything that's going down. He came back an hour later, sweaty and red-faced. He told me that he'd taken a knee for nine minutes and was standing up when a large cop car pulled up and several heavily armored police jumped out. One huge one shoved Henry out of the way, shouting Get the fuck out of here. Henry came home breathless, red-faced and enraged, but he's alive and unhurt, and we know why.



Aside from the vandals and the opportunists and thoughtless idiots, as well as the clashes between a militarized police and citizens, we also know that there are groups out there targeting these peaceful protests -- groups of radicalized people and racists intent on violence. There's plenty online that you can read about these people and what they're doing to our country. The POSPOTUS is one of them.

Aerial view of my neighborhood
photo from local news agency

There's also this stuff.


And then there is everyone else. My friend Michael B said this on his Facebook post yesterday,

Between today and yesterday, thousands of protestors have marched in DTLA, Venice, WeHo, Hollywood, the mayor's residence, Van Nuys, Pasadena, Manhattan Beach. This morning, religious leaders lead a march downtown to police headquarters and prayed with the Mayor and police chief. The crowds keep growing in size and resolve. I have never been more proud of my city.

It's terrible that property is being destroyed, but killing black men and women has to stop.

Atonement

Los Angeles, CA
May 31, 2020

It is bigger than everything and anything, what is going on. No question mark. On this beautiful Monday morning I sit in my dining room, my view an expanse of green and sunlight pouring in from the east. A spiderweb glistens, its threads loose, wavy, the air so clear I see gnats eluding it. We have so many hummingbirds this year, and I think they are the air's dolphins darting friendly so much that is good to sip. I'm thinking about atonement and whether this country our country will have the strength to work together as a collective to atone for the brutality upon which we were founded and continued through centuries all the way up to now with children in cages, the disabled having to beg for help, the elderly left to die alone, the dead bodies of children piling up, the dead bodies of black people piling up, the healers in dirty masks. Yet so much bounty. This country taken from those that lived here for thousands of years and then built on the backs of the enslaved. The delusion that is the American dream. The vast inequality. Age-old. The center cannot hold. There is something beyond intense watching hordes of young people break through glass only to grab boxes of shoes and luxury bags. The backs of their heads, their heads in hoodies. I can't get the white girl with the skinny legs and pink hair out of my head. Skateboards used to smash windows. The tank rolling down the street of pristine houses, men in riot gear hanging off, headed to where? I saw a man with a box on his shoulders, clothes wrapped in plastic dropping out of it as he ran while others watched. So much heaviness and anger and wildness in the scrawls of letters across buildings. So much desperation. How paltry in comparison to the plights of other countries, other peoples. Or is it?

The beauty of those who swept the glass and scrubbed away the ugliness. The Korean councilman, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the teenaged girl, the black man.

I want to write something funny. Something absurd. Something to tell the truth. Something to evade the truth.

Trauma in an Insane World

So yes, the world is broken. We have fallen from the Garden. But this is just a reflection of our own broken relations. Instead of obsessing over the fallen state of the world, it is incumbent upon each of us to take universal responsibility by looking within. It is only from that internal place of healing and strength that we will find the cure for what ails the world.

Zhiwa Woodbury, from Healing Our Trauma Together in an Insane World

When my Lyft pulled up to the intersection near the school where I work, a line of cars blocked the view, but it wasn't hard to see how many police cars were parked alongside the building. I got out of the car and walked toward the corner, my heart beginning to race. Yellow tape blocked the perimeter of the school, and traffic was being diverted. It was Valentine's Day and the one-year anniversary of the Parkland shooting. I spoke to a bystander who told me that there had been a shooting outside the school. It's a Jewish school and synagogue. You don't need to know much more than that to feel dread. I was allowed to go into the school in a private entrance and faced a sort of controlled chaos that I won't soon forget. This is what happened. A self-identified transgendered woman (I am loathe to write that out, but it has context as for the next few hours we spoke of "him," and "the guy" and evidently those hunkered down in the identity wars claim that it's a sign of persecution) had roamed about the school for nearly an hour, surveying it and taking photos and videos with a sophisticated camera. This alarmed the armed security guard, for obvious reasons. It's a Jewish school. All of this was monitored inside by women in the office who can see everything through security cameras. The security guard asked the woman to stop taking photos. They "got into it." The women inside called the police. They called the police several times. The guard went inside the locked gate, an open vestibule that protects the inner, also locked door. We don't know what was going on inside the guard's mind, but eventually he pulled his gun out of the holster  (live-streamed by the woman who, it turns out, is a You Tuber) and cradled the gun, insisting that the woman stop filming the school. We don't know what prompted him to, but he shot the gun toward the sidewalk where it evidently ricocheted and hit the woman in the leg. All of this is on the woman's live stream with narration, including constant profanity. Eventually, the police came. They arrested the security guard and took the woman to the hospital who walked out with what is called "a graze." Meanwhile, back in the school we spent the remaining periods talking through the drama and calming the girls. It was intense. Later, we learned that the woman has a history of provoking incident at government facilities. She claims to be protecting the 1st Amendment. She does all of this live and streams it o YouTube. The language. You Tube. Live-stream. Transgender. Self-identified. Hate. The guard has been charged with committing assault with a deadly weapon.

I know what I think. I think it's insane to carry a gun. I think the belief that you are protecting yourself with a gun is dumb. I think it's unfortunate that the security guard felt he had to fire it. I think it's insane to believe that the YouTubers identity as a transgendered woman should be an issue in this story -- on any side. I think it's terrible to walk around a Jewish school in Los Angeles and live-stream the recording. I think YouTubers are sick and disturbed people, their vocation useless. I think it's horrible that the LAPD didn't respond more quickly and that the security guard felt so much pressure to shoot. I think it's terrible that school shootings and hate crimes are so prevalent, our minds naturally go toward them at the slightest provocation. I think that you couldn't possibly make this shit up, and if you do, you are disturbed.

With all that in mind, I read this amazing article today about trauma and environmental catastrophe.

There is so much good in the world.

What Arundhati Roy Gave Me Last Night

I took an UberX last night down to the Aratani theater in Japantown to hear Arundhati Roy, the great Indian novelist. The driver was of indeterminate ethnicity and drove an immaculate Lexus sedan. I tend toward chatty, and he obliged by telling me that driving was his second job, his first being something to do with transferring people from health insurance to Medicaid or whatever whatever whatever.  He began mansplaining about the whole shebang so I jumped in with my own tiny little mother mind™ and explained the tiniest bit about Sophie and then he shut up and then I said a single payer plan was the only way to go and he shook his head and said it'd hurt a whole lot of people and then I asked why and he told me the story of his sister-in-law who came to this country from a very poor country and overstayed her visa and had a baby with a man and used Medi-Cal to pay for diapers and formula even though she's illegal and he and his wife both work hard and this is the problem because there are thousands if not millions of people doing what his sister is doing while he and his wife are doing the right thing. He said people like her should not have babies. So I asked, Why don't you offer to pay for your sister-in-law's diapers and formulas, then? And he said nothing. To be fair, he agreed that the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are a big racket, and I agreed that people shouldn't work the system and should take responsibility for their actions. We compromised on the need for everyone to do the right thing, but when I climbed out of the Lexus at my destination, I walked through the plaza straight to a little bar set up and ordered myself a cold dark beer and drank it, fast, along with a $2 taco from a kosher taco truck. Then I waited in line with my copy of Arundhati Roy's new novel and filed into the theater and sat in my second row center seat and had my tiny little mother mind™ blown.

It seemed fitting that Roy was framed on stage by a photo of Patti Smith, her arms reaching up toward the heavens. I imagined that Roy had descended from them to grace us, such was her luminosity for the next hour and a half. She talked with Hector Tobar about art and literature and the history of India, of Pakistan and Kashmir. She told us of the atrocities happening there, that the Kashmir has the highest military occupation of any country in the world, that you can't really write about the atrocities as reportage but that fiction is the only, the best way to write about them because you will write about everything, all angles, all human experience through fiction. Fiction is a prayer and an offering, she said at one point, and we all might have swooned. Her voice, her laugh, her gentleness and steel. She told us that she is returning to India this weekend to appear in court. Every few years or so, she is sued by five male lawyers over something or other, for daring to speak, to write, to protest. She has spent time in jail. At the end, a woman in the hijab told her what she meant to her, and her voice broke. I felt tiny, the ride in the Lexus, the driver and his sister-in-law, Medi-Cal, Trumpcare and all the rest peeled away, a transparent skin to shed. Naked.

I'm thinking what sorts of bullshit we are preoccupied with here in these Disunited States of Amerikkka. Bloody, plastic surgery faces, the National Enquirer, talking heads yammering, yammering, yammering with our acquiescence and participation. Our umbrage. I told a friend today that the latest diversion is worse than a soap opera. Stop the madness. It's a vomitorium. Bloody face lift had me howling at the moon, she replied, and I thought yes. Yes because it's so over the top horrible that a person in power would say it and also yes because it's all so tragically stupid. There's a $3.2 million dollar Mega-Mansion behind my bungalow that a family bought so that their 23 year old graduate student kid can live in it while attending USC. They are Korean. I walked by with Sophie yesterday and noticed a black Ferrari in the driveway with dealer plates on it. Just a block away, there's a small tent city growing of homeless people who look familiar to me now because they've been in the neighborhood so long. The giant Lenin statue that sat at the corner was removed the other day as the art gallery that put it there has gone bankrupt. For a couple of days only half of Lenin sat there, and I wondered whether he could house a homeless person. Here's a picture:

But I digress.


I took an Uber home. My driver was African American and drove a Toyota Corolla. As is my wont, I was chatty but he was surly so I let up and we drove through the lit up shitty in silence. When he pulled in front of my house, I said Have a nice night and stay safe and he looked up and said Yeah. Thanks. No one has ever said that to me before.

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist --continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn't run, we'll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness 

** The irony of me buying a ticket to hear a writer and taking Ubers down there and back, drinking a beer and eating a taco and otherwise living this luxurious life in the beginning years of the twenty-first century is not lost on me. Privilege. Just in case you wondered.

WOMEN #resist

I am completely undone by the beauty of the day -- the achingly blue skies, the hundreds of thousands of peaceful marchers, the brilliant signs, my spectacular friends, the power of peace and love, the exhilaration of Truth staring you in the face.

That was the easy part. Now the real work begins.

May we all feel constant courage in our resistance to what was unleashed in our country.

May we all be strengthened and nourished by what we experienced today and saw all over the planet.


#Resist
#ILoveLosAngeles

Like Shining From Shook Foil

We've had a lot of rain here in Los Angeles the last month or so, and everything is greener than it's been in over five years. The sun glints off of green. I almost fell down into this patch of grass when I was out walking our dog this afternoon. I imagined myself face down and buried, lush. Lush. That's one of my favorite words. There's something sexy about it, about lushness. Something that gives me a frisson.

Love never dies. It just goes underground, a boy I loved a long time ago told me.



Grass. Green. Lush. Frisson




God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil 

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent; 

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

And though the last lights off the black West went 

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Ode to

I know, I know, I know, I know. I am barely coming round the mountain these days, much less here on the old blog. I'm writing, though, quite a bit offline, so don't leave me. I might be asking you to buy my book one day. I might also ask you to find me the perfect job -- one that I can do at home while tending to Sophie as she goes through her ups and downs, pays hooky from school, gets hives, has her medications reduced, gets her THC and CBD dosages tinkered with -- you know the drill. I think.

Last night, as evidenced above, I went to the downtown library to hear the magnificent poets Robin Coste Lewis and Sharon Olds read from their books and then have an inspiring conversation with the moderator and writer Louise Steinman (she actually has my dream job as curator of the ALOUD program). I don't even know what to say about how fantastic Robin and Sharon were -- how inspiring and funny and moving and strong. It was one of those nights when I felt exhilarated to live in this city, to be a woman and a writer and feminist. It was especially cleansing after the clusterf*&k Presidential debate the night before.

Good Lord, ya'll. My status update on Facebook got about five million silly "likes" and as many shares and comments, and all I said was:

It makes me want to weep that our first female candidate for President has to debate this colossal piece of shit.

That's all I'll say about that -- oh, except that if you're still "on the fence" or "voting for the lesser of two evils" or any of that balderdash, I hope you spontaneously combust.

I'd post one of the poems that Sharon Olds read aloud last night called Ode to the Clitoris, but I haven't gotten my copy of her new books, so here's one of my favorites from an earlier collection. Prepare yourself.


I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, 

I see my father strolling out 

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent 

plates of blood behind his head, I 

see my mother with a few light books at her hip 

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, 

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its 

sword-tips aglow in the May air, 

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things 

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children, 

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, 

you are going to want to die. I want to go 

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, 

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body, 

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say 

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Sharon Olds

Shedding Skin

Any street in Los Angeles, CA

The numbing regularity of tent cities and my half sandwich (pastrami and coleslaw with Russian dressing on rye) wrapped in white paper, a grim and stupid offering that shreds the heart.

A Korean woman in a black bra and waist-high underpants scrubbed every inch (literal) of my body the other day. Face down, she said and shoved a folded-up towel under my cheek. Turn on side, she said and lay a steadying hand on my naked hip. I opened my eyes, ran my finger over the tiny gray balls and shreds on the table. She didn't say it but I knew it. Skin. My skin. Dead skin. I was a baby lying there, tended. My skin is olive and free of wrinkles, speckled with moles (I hate that word) yet soft, smooth, a place where a heart can slip out of its hiding and rest. I open doors and windows. I risk everything.

In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in-between there are doors. William Blake said that. He also said Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. 

I read past my bedtime, closing doors and windows, deep into Trollope, the tedium of it, then silence, the heart's slow beat, sleep.

Jake Gyllenhaal Just Fixed My Internet

The view from the rooftop of my CVS buiilding
Hollywood sign in upper left corner
my sexy, white Mazda at right

I haven't been around these parts the last few days because  the internets went down. We had to get all read books, do jigsaw puzzles and try to navigate the world without wifi, and good Lord, ya'll. I hate typing anything on my phone, and god forbid I should write anything long-hand like days of old, so I actually caught up last night with my chapter-a-day in War and Peace. I'd fallen behind about a week, and just like it goes with exercise, I was afraid that I'd never get back on the wagon. Now, I'm about caught up with the reading, and I'm thinking I should finally go to this Pilates class that I visited the other day and get back on that wagon.

This morning, after dropping Sophalonio off at school, I stopped at one of my favorite little restaurants and had avocado toast with poached eggs on top and a latte, made with whole milk. There were only a few people in the place, at a couple of tables, but each of them was talking about a script or lines or production. I've lived here for eighteen years, and it still strikes me in the funny bone that people are just so LA, that they don't have regular jobs but talk about movies and television no matter where you go. Yesterday, I went over to the CVS to pick up some of Sophie's poisons and took the above panoramic shot of part of my neighborhood and the Hollywood hills. That might look pretty urban, but when I drove down to Irvine for My New Job, all I could see were snow-capped mountains ringing the iconic skyscrapers of downtown. Again, it's weird to me that I actually live here, and I do love it so.

Speaking of Hollywood, the AT&T guy who came to fix my internets strolled into the house in a pair of cowboy boots looking exactly like a combination of Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise and Jake Gyllenhaal. His ridiculous beauty reminded me of the time Sophie was in the hospital at UCLA back in the days when I actually thought bringing her to the hospital would help the SIT U AH SEE ON, and the attending pediatrician walked in, a tall, long-haired woman about nineteen years old with super tight blue scrubs on and a nipped in the waist lab coat. I remember looking at her haggardly, wondering if we were actually caught in an episode of ER because there is just no way that any doctor should look like that on a children's ward.

Anyhoo.

The AT&T guy must have been a big smoker, something that I would generally be disgusted by, but damn. I generally don't even like cowboy boots because they remind me of Texas and certain conservatives, but this guy was so cute that I thought about calling all my matron friends and inviting them over. It was almost embarrassing showing him my router that happens to be in my bedroom. I think the way to deal with a younger man in the South is to say, I bet your mama loves you. I didn't say that, but when he left, I told him how much he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal and that I was going to invite all my friends over to meet him, and he smiled and said, Thank you, ma'am.

The Edge

Sunrise, this morning

Sunset, a few weeks ago

I'm a bit obsessed these days with Los Angeles winter sunsets and rises. I'm wondering about the edges of days and nights, why they come in with such glory and go out the same. There's something significant about day disappearing with such drama and then appearing again, aflame, here on the edge of the continent.

I was up off and on all night with Sophie as she struggled with seizures, with agitation, with who knows what. Was it a cold coming on? Was it the weird weather? Withdrawal effects? Was it the fracture in our family? CBD saturation? Something wrong with the new bottle? A stroke? A brain tumor? A virus? In the morning, she had four tonic-clonic seizures within forty-five minutes, broken only by bouts of collapse/sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her. I put it off and finally caved to Diastat, an emergency medication that I haven't used for nearly two years. Making the call to use Diastat is always difficult because while it has an immediate and blessed effect, it's also in and then out of the system in a matter of days, and that is a type withdrawal for Sophie. She'll be sluggish, maybe irritable, maybe jumpy from residuals. At no time did I consider calling The Neurologist or any doctor, for that matter, other than the one who helps us with all things cannabis-related. I didn't panic beyond the questions I listed above, the questions that have no answer. We live the questions, here on the edge. Nor did I think that something was going to happen and that something would be really bad if I didn't get "help." It crossed my mind that something could happen, but I felt no urgency. I didn't pray for mercy like I might have done in olden times, although the word mercy crossed my mind, was on my lips with please and please stop and guide me. I'm not sure how to get across these edges of things, this feeling that I have after "dealing" for over twenty years, this sort of existential dread that there's no one to consult. This edge, with one side resignation and the other acceptance. Perhaps you think me jaded, over-confident. Or you know exactly what I'm talking about because you, too, have done and thought the same with your own child or young adult. Do you have a way to describe it beyond that?

This morning, Oliver asked, worried, What's happening with Sophie? Is she going to be all right? I told him that she was having a rough spot, that she'd be ok. A few minutes later, he exclaimed over the sunrise, ran outside and took the photo above. It's only for a few minutes that the sky is on fire, before the edges of clouds bleed into blue. Sophie seems none the worse for the wear given the last twelve hours. She's resting, a little congested, but eating and drinking and sitting up, looking around. My edges feel blurred. I'm tired.

After Carol

LA skies at sunset after storms, baby.

I went to see the movie Carol this morning while The Teenagers spent some time with their father. Most of you know that the movie is based on a novel by the great and creepy Patricia Highsmith, and that it's about the love affair between two women in the 1950s. The movie isn't creepy at all, though -- it's gorgeous, smart and very erotic. I'd write a three-line movie review, but I don't think I could be that economical in my rapture. I felt as if I were in a trance when I left the theater.

I think right now, as I type, the Golden Globes are starting. I don't have cable anymore so I guess I won't be watching, but to tell you the truth I can't bear Ricky Gervais, and he's evidently the host. Several years ago, he made the lazy stand-up comedian's mistake of using the word retard in one of his routines. He was defiant about it and didn't apologize. He continues to use it. Evidently, he's also quite fond of the word mong. Cognizant of the risk of sounding terribly politically correct, I just decided that I'm not going to watch anything that he's in or does. Here's my three-word review of Ricky Gervais: Lazy. Not funny. Now I'll get off my mini soapbox and take a wee nap.

Tell me what you're doing.

Sneak Peak on Xeriscaping Project

We've ripped up our front and back yards and replaced the grass with planting beds, California native plants and mulch. It's been four weeks of work, and it's starting to come together and look really great. I bought a small fire pit and some funky chairs for that back right corner and hope that The Brothers will invite their friends over to roast marshmallows, toast weiners and drink lemonade rather than cavort around the big shitty in low-riders, eating pot brownies and drinking beer. Maybe I'll put in a chocolate fountain to ensure they prefer the pleasures of home to carousing.

A mother can dream.

The front yard is just a big pile of dirt and manure right now with millions of small bugs buzzing around, so I won't take a photo until it's all done.

Now, we're going to hunker down and wait for the big rains that are due to come in January. I suppose I could have left the grass and hoped for revival for at least another year before the drought begins again, but now I'm thinking I have a number of swimming pools should we be flooded with water.

I Wonder if Slava is Looking for a Room-mate

Photographer: Evgenia Arbugaeva

Slava Korotki is described as the most cut-off man in the universe. Except for the  problem (for me) of the extreme northern position of his home on the edge of Russia and the Arctic, and those frightfully short winter days, I've a hankering to join him. I thought about it even as I dragged myself to Trader Joe's today and joined the literal throngs of people waiting in line to buy stuff. I imagine I could make a pretty decent matchstick house or two, maybe a castle or one of those lonely wooden towers that Van Morrison crooned of in Purple Heather. You can't go anywhere in Los Angeles, and I mean anywhere, without seeing some of the most destitute people living on the streets, under bridges, in shopping cart villages. The other day, as I pulled out of a gas station and waited at a light, I found myself staring at a man trying to light a match to the contents of a tin can. It was the first chilly morning in forever, my car sat idling. At home, a house rich in the accoutrements of 2015, the buzz of workers creating a drought-tolerant landscape, a saint who helps to tend Sophie yet is desperate for more work.  I closed my eyes and imagined myself stopping the car, stepping out, closing the door behind me and oblivious to the honks and shouts of the others, walking toward him, abiding there. City of Angels. Slava is a weatherman, and according to the woman who wrote the article, he  doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.

Conversations with Special Ed Bus Drivers

The weather has turned here in Los Angeles to crisper temperatures (meaning around 55 at night and 65 in the day), and we've even had a few drops of rain here and there, probably nature's easing us into what promises to be a brutal El Nino rainy season with apocalyptic flooding and slides. Oy. The light right now is indescribable -- although shortly after I moved to Los Angeles eighteen years ago, I read an article about it in The New Yorker that did perfect justice to its luminescence.  Interestingly, I had only lived in Los Angeles for a few months, was pregnant with Henry and already noticed the light. The last truly huge El Nino winter storms happened that winter as well -- so much rain and craziness that I remember wondering what everyone talked about when they said it never rained in southern California! Unfortunately, the article is available only to subscribers, but here's a brief excerpt from Lawrence Weschler's L.A. Glows in the February, 1998 issue.

I was recalling McWilliams' comments one morning while breakfasting with the architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light, and he concurred. "It's an incredibly loaded subject -- this diaphanous soup we live in," he said, "It feels primeval -- there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non-hierarchical. It's not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, 'dramatic' is exactly what it's not. If anything, it's meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it. In places where you get a crisp, sharp light with deep, clean shadows -- which we do get here sometimes -- you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we get here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity -- not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows, and the opacity melts away into translucency and even transparency."

I wasn't quite getting it, so Howard tried again.

"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -- the object -- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say, and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and the wave comes in, splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here -- the air, the atmosphere, the light -- that makes everything shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world -- diaphanous soup I was talking about -- which, in turn, grounds a magic - meditative presence." 

This afternoon, while busy working I heard the familiar screech of Sophie's bus come round the corner, and when I emerged from my writing cave, I blinked in the sun and shivered -- both from the chill in the air and the warm sun on my skin. The bus driver got busy letting down the wheelchair ramp, turning to me afterward with a huge smile on his face.

Isn't it beautiful, today? he said, The day, the light reminds me of when I was five years old, running through the fields of my country, El Salvador. Free.

Reader, I don't know why that brought tears to my eyes, but I felt them prick there and could only tell him what a wonderful memory that was and thank you for telling me. Then we both turned to Sophie, busying ourselves with the straps and levers that assured her safety as she descended.

This place I live sustains me.

Sunday

Silk floss tree is blooming

It's hot.
I'm not.

Blue Heaven, LA-Style, With A Series of Admissions

What was blue heaven to me, back in the day, was my years as a Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blue heaven to Oliver, though, is Dodger Stadium. I went with him to a game tonight and admit that I had a great time. I used the hashtag motheroftheyearwhohatessports when I posted some pictures from the game. Oliver and Henry received a whole series of tickets from Uncle Tony last Christmas, all in the outfield section where there's an All You Can Eat theme.


Lila Downs sang the National Anthem, and I will admit to shedding tears.


I ate a Dodger dog with ketchup, spicy mustard and sweet relish. Although I'll maintain that they look nasty, I'll admit that they taste damn good.

I ate some tortilla chips and nacho cheese. I admit that I like this disgusting fake food.

I shared an ice-cream cookie sandwich with Oliver that cost $4,987,632 and was thankfully not in the all you can eat category. I admit that I really didn't need to eat it.

I drank a Diet Coke.

I did not drink beer although it looked tasty despite the plastic cups that I, admittedly, drank too much out of back in my blue heaven and thus feel a gentle snobbery toward --

The guy at the end of our row kept standing up and shouting insults at the opposing team's outfielder. When I expressed dismay, Oliver reassured me that they are "trained" to deal with the insults, that they don't care about it, and that they are making millions of dollars to stand out there so I shouldn't feel sorry for them. I admit that he had a point, so I texted with my friend Lisa a bit as a distraction.

One of the rookies is a guy that looked pretty darn cute, and when I asked Oliver who it was and said how cute he was, Oliver told me that he was twenty years old and that I was weird. Whatevs, as the youngsters say. I admit to a boy crush.

I have to wear my glasses for another ten days because I have some sort of inflammation under my eyelids. I can't believe that I wasn't picked to appear on the GLAM CAM, although the prospect of appearing on those giant cameras that hang in the LA skyline rivals the archetypal nightmare of walking down your middle school hallway nude. I admit to my vanity, particularly when it comes to glasses.

Rapture in a Strip Mall

I was just about to combust when I received one of three daily phone calls from Sophie's school with an ever cheerful robot voice letting me know the latest salient facts regarding SENIORS. New readers might not be aware that Sophie, as a 20 year old, is still eligible to attend the great LAUSD, a mixed benefit that I am grateful for, I am, but that this is her third year as a SENIOR thus we are subject to all the excitement and responsibility that is due a SENIOR, all excitement that she is distinctly not a part of in any way but this robo call daily, until May of 2016 when she will not graduate but go on to her last and final SENIOR year. There will be no SENIOR portrait or cap and gown or prom or even a visit from the United States of America Marine Corps Recruiters (yes, they still call), and with the exception of the last, it makes me a bit bitter, a bit -- well -- combustible.

I didn't combust, though, because I left to have the most amazing lunch I've had in years and ended up in a near rapture. There's my hipster Instagram photo of homemade celeriac pasta with celery root, celery crudite with pickled mustard seeds, celery ash, and crispy Jerusalem artichoke. I ate this in about 3 seconds flat and then licked the plate. It's from a new little restaurant in a strip mall on Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood. The restaurant is called Baroo, but I will henceforth call it Rapture in a Strip Mall. Don't get your panties in the proverbial Biblical wad. The dish cost $9. The chefs are Korean, and I think the fanciest, most prestigious restaurants in the world might be missing a chef or two, and they're right here in the big shitty in a tiny place in a tiny strip mall. Seriously. Don't tell anyone.

Here's the dish that my friend ordered:

It was called the seaweed something or other and had grains and berries and horseradish and each flavor just hid, all subtle, and then jumped out at you as you chewed and then swallowed and then broke into tears. I won't even tell you about the shortbread, two tiny rectangles with some kind of little giblets of something or other on the top. My friend and I ate those standing up, outside the car, and it was sort of obscene given how high the temperature is today anyway.

This is why we live in the shitty, folks, even if God is still using the blowdryer on us, the humidity is rising, it's 104 degrees in the shade and we're praying that when El Nino comes, we don't return to the mud from whence we emerged.

52 and Hot (not THAT way)

So far, I've had a lovely birthday. I had an early breakfast with my astral twin Debra (we have same exact birthday) and then a little later breakfast with my oldest friend Moye. I've received texts and telephone calls and Facebook greetings. We are waiting until 5:30 when The Air-Conditioner Man comes and replaces our air-conditioner with a brand-spanking new one. I am hoping that he gives it to us, out of pity for it being my birthday and 95 degrees in the house and all. If there's anything I've learned in my 52 years of life on the planet, all you have to do is ask and ye shall receive. In the meantime, the boys have built what you see above -- a sort of hacked air-conditioner that my friend Mary Beth directed me to the other night on Youtube. It kind of works. That's a cooler filled with ice, with holes cut into it for an insulation tube (the silver thing) and a fan. The video claimed it cost $8 to make, but we spent closer to $17. It blows surprisingly cool air, and I guess it's as good a day as any to remember the days of my youth, nearly thirty-five years ago or so when I lived in a dorm at UNC with no air-conditioning. Since we started school in mid-August, I spent my birthday there for four years, and the dog days of summer in North Carolina were brutal. We would take a cold shower, soak the towel in cold water and wrap our heads, then sit in front of the window fan to cool off. We've put the hacked AC in Sophie's room since seizures and heat are no good. I am waiting for her bus to get here and then will move out of the way and plant her in front of it. in the meantime, I'm reminiscing about some of the best years of my life and those left to come. Thank you for helping me to celebrate!

Another Day in Paradise

I took Oliver and Sophie to the beach in the late afternoon yesterday so that we could walk for a bit, eat dinner at our favorite beachside cafe and then watch the sunset.

The sky turned pinker and pinker as we left, but since I was driving I couldn't get a good shot. Here's one I took at a stoplight before Oliver screamed at me to not text and drive. Even though I wasn't texting and driving, he was right that I shouldn't have been so distracted.