Flyover County
C and I drove to Rancho Cucamonga for a Facebook Marketplace meet-up (gone wrong). I told him later I “had a bad feeling,” before he agreed to go with me, but I always have a bad feeling. We got there and the address the guy had given belonged to a stranger. She didn’t know him. We stood outside the car like hares in the lens of a shotgun, fixed at the point of the cross. C said “this guy’s an idiot,” but I felt it was something else; he had been concealed somewhere, watching us shift nervously by the car. After we waited for a while, he said he was at Walmart, so we went there. Then he left the chat, and it became clear that we’d driven all that way for nothing. The drive back was silent, and took much longer than the drive there, despite being five minutes shorter. I dreamt I was in an endless loop of driving, passing the on-ramp to the 10, and then passing it again fifteen minutes later. An ouroboros of dense, tan buildings: LA Fitness, Chipotle, car dealership, billboard, billboard, billboard, palm trees sagging under their own weight. The smog and marine layer creeping in from the coast. I wonder who all these things are for, in a place that’s designed to be passed through. A place only partially rendered. It’s related to another dream I keep having, where I’m driving with the directions on, and they keep rerouting me. Sending me down streets, and then turning me around until I recognize nothing. The billboard logos alone are familiar, rising like tiny air bubbles from the pineal gland. There’s nowhere in this web called home. When I woke I had the epiphany. How much better it could have gone. How much worse.
Frogtown
The moon is a sliver, and the sun is glaring orange from a pool of glass on Mount Washington. J and I walk back through Frogtown, and we stretch our spines on a snake. The whole time I’m thinking “it’s not too far to walk” and then it is. At Whole Foods we buy a big brioche loaf and pull chunks out of it in the parking lot. I get excited thinking about how many more people in the world there are to meet.
Art is a kind of compulsion. A knee-jerk from the heavens. The part of falling asleep that’s the same as falling out of a tree. As a kid, I climbed trees with a helmet. I’d get to the top and look at the Sandias, and I was light enough to just sway up there in the branches. There was one day when I climbed the tree in my backyard without a shirt, and I lay with my back against the branch facing the sun. I’d never felt older. My mom came outside and told me to put a shirt on; the neighbors might be out. That was the last day I was a boy.
Laying with my spine on the snake is like that feeling. Swallowed up in one moment. Looking at the stars and pulling my shirt up to release my chest into the cool night air. What if I did? Nothing like the pleasure of a breeze.
Who Gets to be Lucky?
Making a tuna sandwich. Opening the cupboard and clattering a plate. Burning a candle and sitting in the sunset as it glows off the driveway. Joy doesn’t concern itself with deserving. I’m moving in time with my limbs. I told R once that I like to “pretend I’m my own doll” and operate myself with a pulley system. It’s an easy way of staying in the moment. Sometimes, it even stops my mind from moving. While I’m making the tuna sandwich I pretend I’m my own doll, and lift my arms like a marionette. Just a puppet for the flesh thing1.
Why me? Why now? I used to think any other century would have killed me quickly. Childhood alone would have been unbearable. For most of history, there was no word for panic. All fear was warranted. We used to be a real country. Full-up with terror. Now, we just inflict it. How is it allowed that I sit, and fuck, and loaf, and think nothing? Sometimes, when I’m scrolling a video pops up that asks me not to scroll, so instead of scrolling I just close the app. I look outside at the blue sky, the palm trees blooming in the afternoon as the smog finally dissipates, and I think how it is all so outrageously unfair. The gap between worlds. My worries about the one side of my ribcage that juts out, that my boyfriend will leave me, that I’ll have to get out of bed and make dinner. My worries that I’m not a real writer because most of the time I hate writing. All of it useless. Last year, I worked to make a bomb. I read and it makes me tired. Nothing I do will change the fact that I’m guilty.
In Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse Anahid Nersessian offers an interpretation of Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn,’ written in 1819 just a few weeks after the devastating Peterloo Massacre. The tragedy is conspicuously absent in ‘Ode to Autumn’, leading Nersessian to describe the poem as “perfect and unforgivable.” The structure of the poem — and the work of poetry itself — aims to take on the shape of the natural world through language. But how can a work contend with that world if it neglects suffering? Nersessian seems to think Keats is aware of this omission, and that the feeling it produces — of an incomplete truth — is central to its honesty. She writes:
The problem with beauty is not that it is so fragile but that it is durable. It is there and true even in an avalanche of shit and despair.
This quote comes back to me as I watch the hills turn gold at the top of Elysian. The sky melts pink, streaked with contrails, dripping down on the billboards, the empty high rises, and street corners reeking of piss. I spot the observatory through the haze, stately and delicate, and think what a lovely ruin it will make. The sunset is astonishing; the durability of its beauty makes it cruel. Or perhaps, simply indifferent. Beauty is indifferent to us. It doesn’t care to be witnessed. It doesn’t care about what we do to each other. Maybe cruelty is the wrong word because it is too human. My joy, my pleasure, preserved and complicit, safe in this shell. A one-way mirror that exposes and erases me in equal time. Guilt as gift.
Kale and Spinach
M and I walk down the mountain. The city is hungry and furious, aglow in withdrawing sun. Back inside, we test scents for oil diffusers. M is The Nose. They approve the scents, send back notes on the first drafts. One little bottle holds a bird’s nest, swell and saccharine. Another holds the jungle room at the Albuquerque Zoo. The smell of sap stuck to fingers2, Queen Ann’s Lace, a stairwell in an art gallery I visited at age seven, ripe with paint. [I stood in the hallway and ate too many Costco lemon cakes, and then I got locked outside on a fire escape and waited to be found.] I think these bottles are the closest thing we’ve got to time travel, and you can trust me, I’ve been looking for some time.
Settled at the point of joy, where two roads diverge in a wood. Joy doesn’t concern itself with deserving; it swells up like the tide, innate as eating or sleeping. Walking home, the palm trees are stamped against the night sky. I think that joy, like beauty, is durable. A drive through nowhere that moves in the shape of a circle. A snake eating its own tail. Unlike beauty, it requires our participation, and becoming its conduit releases guilt and turns it into something else. Joy is mobilizing. Ships in the night, passing from my body to yours through the skin. From one city to another. From this world to the next. ☞
(brain)
pulling them apart like ripping Velcro.
Sorry I got to the reading late - so happy you wrote it all down! These made me feel so lucky.
Beautiful, all of these have such a mood.