Cosmopolitan Greetings

jada

And I am standing on top of the Hollymont Apartment building squinting across the mottled rooftops toward the Griffith Observatory. According to local legend John Lennon kept rooms here during his brief separation from Yoko Ono, but I’m not up here looking for his ghost or anything, I’m looking for my sunglasses which probably fell out here last night while I was going down on Jada. She’d had one wicked leg splayed recklessly up on the parkment and there was a sound like a cue in blue table chalk from the way her stiletto had dug into the plaster. Her dress had whipped the rungs as we climbed the fire escape, snapped taught like a flag by these lean Santa Anas - an explicit needle’s eye.

Our hands must’ve got sooted black from the old iron rungs, decades of nesting pollutants borne here on the air, and we were smoking cigarettes, I think, which we never did, and that was why I woke up with black fingerprint constellations on my neck and throat, and my mouth like college with the yellow no taste of smoke - the roaring salty savor of pussy in the summer.

But so I am watching the cars march down Vermont Avenue knowing that in 20 minutes I’ll be down there at the bus stop, waiting with that rot-gut feeling that today, uniquely because I am fighting a hangover the bus will not decide to come. I decide I need a break very badly, but I can’t call out. What I need is a holiday, like Labor Day, which was last weekend, and I guess that makes this the last week of summer. I find the spot where Jada’s heel bored the plaster, I stick my finger into the resulting wormhole. Fuck, I really liked those sunglasses.  

got him

Guy on the bus, my age, 25, holding this brown crayon baby saying
to his presumably wife
with the cheap folded stroller, “I mean let em,
all these rubberneckers, look, I’ll just throw the little guy out the window, actually
you’re the ones so pissed I’ll let you do it. No, but seriously,
like I was saying there’s 15 people in the whole world
you could put on a list and if we kill’d them, they’re so rich it’d be like water-balloons
you know, you just shoot them and money would go everywhere.
It’s like they got one of these guys last week
[Madoff]
who’d been laundering 15 billion for the government for years
but so anyway they got him,
Obama’s people did.” 

the good life

June 2010

It strikes me that someday we’ll probably have more money, we’ll be more important at our jobs and to a greater number of people etc., but I’ll bet you when that time comes we’ll only want to sit around and remember this one.

Maybe you have to entertain the possibility that you got what you wanted - your little outpost on the last coast of the continent where you can sit in the shade with bought coffee and bare feet and where your book cover flaps and postal mail quiver but don’t blow away under idle zephyrs. And in your mind it is quiet, a peace that settles down over the bridge of your nose, the kind where you’re sort of intuiting into, knowing as opposed to actively thinking. Knowing about things the way Hemingway sometimes wrote, in these big spacious platitudes at once simple and deep, like you might flatten your palm and trace the contour of the horizon - judging the land good that is spread out before you.

            This good land is California, and it’s a concept you understand through layers or remove the way people here think they understand about the Civil War. You were born in Winchester Virginia where they understand about the Civil War and you think how trite it is to be happy in California - what a perfect cliché to be happy in Los Angeles, like maybe somehow it’s intellectually lazy. But you shake it off. Time and continuity are the real enemies of this happiness; try to put a border, a context on it and it’s gone. You’re better to live into your life like a loose constellation of unspliced movie frames. Don’t choke on the industry metaphor, stay with it. No connective tissue between these slides, just one random image after another, little self-contained and immutable universes. Or maybe pictures hanging next to one another in a gallery, all by different artists in different periods, without even a shared medium between them. That’s not bad. 

The coffee is cold now but the heat is showing up - a roomy high-domed Southland bake – but forget the coffee, you think, stay with the gallery. You decide that where you got yourself into trouble was by trying to maintain consistency, trying to act the way the character would act based on what we know about the character’s past. You created a “we” is what you did, and it seems you can only arrive at the gallery if you aren’t paying attention – inserting the I: taking ownership - so that moment then is when you kind of come awake realizing: on your porch on Saturday morning in Los Angeles, with your postal mail quivering but not blowing away, that maybe this is what the good life looks like, and you’ve been having it for quite some time now. 

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” – EH

I think that writing is a muscle

I think that writing is a muscle, and I believe in momentum. I believe that best way to write is by not stopping to examine or judge, but just kind of going on knowing the next word until the thing disconnects itself. The first girl I ever loved sent me a letter once from North Carolina that said you had to start writing from the middle - from the part you really knew and could see - and work your way out. I believe that. I think it’s important also to have a willingness to be profoundly changed and impacted by what you read, a willingness to be awed and leveled and blown away.

But I think when some people begin to speak/write with an audience in mind they lose it. That invisible eye that Kundera talks about pokes a radioactive finger through the mood and everything they do after becomes watched and disingenuous. I also think the confessional culture of the internet creates a system that validates writing through the approval of others. I don’t think you can live that way as a writer. I think it’ll starve you slowly.

For writing to renew itself, I think you just have to personally know that it’s good and necessary and comes from some internal wellspring, some muscle that wants to be worked and fulfilled through it’s own action, that delights in it’s own use as the fullfilmment of it’s preordained function. So when you sit down to write in the morning you’re feeling your way back to a certain flow, a sort of pace, you’re doing it to tap into that fleeting pulse of being that’s always seemed to be there underneath things for you, and not to memorialize or tack importance to events which are probably ultimately too personal to ever hope to explain.