I’m sitting on the bed in curlers. The apartment is reasonably clean except for the dishes, which were crusting until I filled them with hot water, and now they are “soaking”. Last week a smudge of blue paint appeared on the bed, mysteriously indelible after a wash cycle. We pretend that it’s from Tobias Fünke.
Text message from mom reads:
Pls do not eat gummy rats they must be hugely contaminated if wholesalers threw them out.
Look at these gummy rats I found in the trash! (Box was unopened. I live next door to a candy wholesaler.)
For a few minutes each day—the exact hour varies seasonally—the light enters my apartment in a way that replicates the light in California.
Those who’ve lived on both coasts may stake their allegiance here or there, but the quality of light is incontestably more beautiful on the West Coast. It just is. There is no arguing that point.
I try to be at home when the light thing happens, if only because it spikes my moods in a way that might have something to do with nostalgia or brain chemistry. A specialist in color might be able to describe why the tone does what it does; a specialist in memory or perception might be able to describe why I’m attributing a certain emotion to the phenomenon.
Meanwhile, I like thinking that the circumstance is an objective one—that conditions align once a day to produce California-type light—and that I’m just picking up on it like anyone would.
Mostly what I think about at art fairs is what an aerial view of the space would look like. As a child there was a certain shape I liked to draw in my mind—a sort of bisected heart—that I could never replicate on paper. Walking an art fair and trying to map the area in my head produces a similar disjunction.
Sasha Grey was part of a cast reading Neuromancer at the New Museum. It was not good. They made a great book bloodless.
Was in such a poor mood this afternoon that I outraged myself and went on a walk. I walked West to 6th Avenue, up to 75th, ate a big lunch, crossed the park and walked back downtown. It was about ten miles.
I was not happy when I got home but I was also not outraged, and the point of the walk was to kill time, anyway, that would have been spent in an actively bad mood.
Actually a facelift appeals to me. Not now, but later. The fact of having your facial expression determined by a single external event—the surgery—is completely liberating!
Beautiful beautiful Central Park!
In 6th and 7th grade I read a zine called 20 Bus, which focused entirely on public transportation in San Francisco. It was an excellent zine written by a girl named Kelli who traveled often on Muni, the SF bus line, and collected interesting stories along the way.
When she wrote about the 38, 22, 43 and 1 buses in particular I felt a pleasurable identification. Tales of other buses, like the exotic 36 Teresita or 21 Hayes, were more exotic.
My own experiences of being screamed at by drivers or shoved out the backdoor made more sense in the context of a body of San Francisco lore, or, in more concrete terms, made me see the experiences as adding up to a type of childhood that I was happy to have had.
•If you like minor James and novels that center entirely around furniture disputes (*broadly overlapping demographics) check out The Spoils of Poynton
•If you like wrenching novels about the Raj, cholera, and corpse-eating dogs, check out J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur
•If you like horticulture and inequality, check out Andrew Jackson Downing’s Gardening For Ladies
•If you like realpolitik and precocity, check out Nick McDonnell’s An Expensive Education
Weighs more than a butchering hog
When it’s not lonely or yearning, the act of waiting for someone can be exquisite. I guess this would be called ‘anticipation’, but that doesn’t quite nail it.
It’s a feeling of suspended animation but with the addition of consciousness. Like freezing the entire world but leaving your eyeballs free to toggle like a Kit-Cat clock. That is exactly how it feels.
