Shopping

JM, Shopping, 9.30.07

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Back in Los Feliz for a spell. Navigating the triangle of destinations this period has been a pleasant release.

Mostly a weekend of shopping, sheets and nighties and a bathroom rug. More sundry items tomorrow, I think. Her hands are an assertive blur the whole time she shops.

Pizza at Palermo last night, the three of us, including Viv. 9 a.m. mass at the old church, the three of us, including Viv. The old church, where they are so glad to see us, because half the congregation has fled over the past five years (including, of course, us). Signed up to work the wine bar at the upcoming Festival; have now been doing it for years; I remember writing about it at joyrides, even at the Motley Fool.

The gardener came for a rare Sunday cleanup. We had the car washed and waxed.

We got home and opened a Robert Hess cabernet sauvignon (more Paso Robles fairy dust---a visit to a region makes you look for it until you visit another) and we sat in the freshly-clipped backyard. Comment: the roses are nearly ten years in the ground now, some are doing very well. Comment: it was a good idea to plant the bougainvillea where she did. "Those are mockingbirds?" she asks. Always in pairs, hopping on the grass: birds, see, are abundantly free but also abundantly loyal. These two had a nest this spring in Cruz's ivy.

Hunting through Bon Appetits for a recipe for spicy pecans for Ann. Chats with Ann both days, both of us.

Happy birthday to Kathleen. Had not much to offer her though beyond a wellwishing message. Very busy here indulging ourselves, with...

...a home meal tonight, top sirloin rare, chinese broccoli, aparagus, rice, the wine, white roses and a white candle. A rental, Sweet Land, a harmless sweet film with some harmless sweet actors. Our pleasures, our life.
~

The Overnighter

JM, Selves-portrait: Becoming-Imperceptible, Harbor Freeway, 9.29.07

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It's not my car. It's never my car. A nomad rides any horse she can.

In Hermosa, I've done almost nothing but read, write, sleep, tend to the cat, contemplate the immediate future, review the past, and eat and drink. (This is much the same as my life elsewhere, absent the cat.) A PCHey girl next door who loves watching the sunset each night from a hammock on her balcony has played a particular song a dozen times. I know from A Thousand Plateaus that using a song as a refrain in your life is a way to stave off fear or mask pain---a child in danger sings the same refrain over and over. From there it's guesswork as to what's going on with the girl next door, although I hear her lift her voice to a line, "Oh, what you do to me"---that may pinpoint a vulnerability.

And I have those. I'm a wreck; maybe a marvellous one. I have that queen's throat thing going again (I wish Koestenbaum wouldn't have restricted it to homosexuals, it goes on in many other stripes of sexuals all the time, but only homosexuals seem courageous enough to use it as currency), this time with Constant Craving, a song possibly no man of any sexual stripe has ever willfully listened to at home more than twice.

Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth

The wisdom text for refrains and becomings that life fed to me in youth is A Thousand Plateaus. This trip, in particular, I have studied the chapter "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible." A long and fretfully destabilizing chapter. There are horrifying pearls all over these quivering membranes: for instance, D&G say that girls are always late not because they are slow but because they are so speedy; they are late because they did too many things so quickly. For instance, men have secrets, and they are always discovered, and it's no big deal (Jocasta's terrifying phrase: "Really, it was not much...") but women appear secretive by ceaselessly disclosing everything. When nothing adds up, as of course it doesn't, it looks like there is even more mystery. That is me as well, I fear, I hope. All of literature too, in disclosing all, is a block of becoming-girl to Deleuze and Guattari.

D&G also note that Freud missed the becoming-animal completely; he always related animal psychoses or fetishes as symbols of human relationships, rather than as what they are: blocks of becoming-animal, not mere imitation but sincere attempts to be. I stopped to think about my own becomings-animal: certainly the largest one came early on when I read the line in the Sermon on the Mount...

Regard the birds of the air, who neither reap nor sow, nor gather into barns,
yet your heavenly father provides for them...

Becoming-bird, flying from perch to perch: that must be why it is always someone else's car, house, cat: I may neither reap nor sow, yet there are these heavenly providers the universe keeps flaunting as full plumage before me. This enables me to remain in the block of becoming-bird that has become most of my contemplative and even active life.

A wreck too is always a becoming, whether noting ones' own personal wreckage in yet another car while speeding and slowing north on the Harbor, or safely perched somewhere. Lines of flight, literally: birds are apparently free, maybe the most apparently free of all animals. And what do they do? They fly in tight formation, roost in certain specific spots, and are amazingly loyal to each other, even to their flock. Also, reading = flying. And why is St. Francis of Assisi my favorite opera? Francis + Messaien---the Sermon to the Birds, the birdcalls, the lifelong Messaien obsession of birds, the becoming-bird composer. (Also, in my backyard, I am always becoming-Francis, giving talks to anyone with feathers.)
~

Off Ballona

JM, PDR: Off Ballona, 9.28.07

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Your nomadic scribe biked from Hermosa to Los Feliz yesterday, via: the strand, Ballona Creek, Sawtelle, Overland, Culver, Venice, La Brea, Sixth, and a hundred Hollywood sidestreets. A highlight and an indignity: a flashing speed sign informing the cyclist "Your speed is 10 miles per hour," on Sawtelle.

° ° ° ° °

Karen, to her book group, after The Kite Runner: "OK, guys, no more burka books!"

° ° ° ° °

Hey there Delilah it turns out is about one Delilah DiCrescenzo, a steeplechaser. Angelique next door in Hermosa plays this song all the time. Foto of Delilah also here. Song topped the Billboard 100 through July. Angelique watches the sunset from her hammock most nights.

° ° ° ° °

David, with Michael, and a refrigerator bungee-corded to the back of a truck: "Everytime we try to move something, we need plaster to repair some wall we've kicked in."
~

Brunch for one

JM, Brunch for One: Lamb chops, Harp, Hopeful Cat, 9.28.07

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402 John Jay

JM, Hiding place 9.25.07


Shuttling between three parts of town; sorry, I am mostly offline these days. However, it was a bit of a small comfort to see the old dorm where so much becoming-imperceptible happened, right on front page of both the NYTimes and LATimes yesterday morning.

FWIW, Lorca too.

The Overnighter

JM, Sunset, Franklin Hills, 9.22.07


JM, Broken Curb, Busted Hydrant, 9.22.07


Autumn is here as of 2:51 a.m. My summer was beautiful and my summer was awful, thanks for asking, and either way, thank god it's over. It was made beautiful by stealing away and writing a ton of novel (I'm now obliged to throw it all out, but so what, what mattered was the writing), by a spectacular dry spell away from spirits, by travel to the central coast and Big Sur, by fitness and especially swimming, and by the sanctity of the 11:06 postings, arriving as they did dependably as the bells of St. Clemens on the intervals that marked summer's commencing hour. It was made awful by some health anxiety resident to both of us, and especially by listening over and over to the same handful of contamination narratives and faux branching episodes, and watching them acted out ad infinitum, and feeling tortured and trapped by them even while helpless to intercede.

Contamination narratives make for good stories but awful living; and nearly just as bad, the people who employ them to explain their lives to themselves will insert nearly everyone they know willy-nilly into the various villian roles as they see fit. They are an occupational hazard of being obliged to listen, as writers are. If hell is other people, it turns out hell is mostly listening to what other people do to themselves, over and over, and how they'll blame anyone but themselves for what they do. There's no question: to live in relative health, you need relatively healthy people around you, at least some of the time. If you let your summer become overrrun with contamination narratives, you owe it to yourself to fill your autumn with more generative ones.

I have mentioned often on this kind of a day that I have made a habit since 1979 of watching the last sunset of summer---today's was a stunner. And also, today's sunset---there was no sun in it at all, it was all light banking off the clouds that covered the horizon. Such is the year, stunning but without its sun, its center; the year may be more beautiful than most but its true light is hidden.

So now it's autumn. An autumn I thought might see me much elsewhere---I still think it might. For starters, I'm going to Hermosa again for ten days, to keep the insensible Izzy company while Bev's away. I understand now Izzy's on a special kind of medicated food for allergies; she just went on this two days ago; I can already feel it, she's going to blame me for the diet change.

But if blame comes this autumn from felines rather than people, that will be a welcome new pattern.

Goodbye Summer

JM, Fade Away, highly manipulatied pixilated image, 9.22.07

Summer ends 9.23.07 at 2:51 a.m. Pacific

Perfume

japan-
ese white flurry

one step rushing
forward to dot

herself
with it--her day

skin
has small morning touches

passing
through the barely

mist falls
as first fresh

love her crossed
forearms fragrant

of it--
recalling someone

thousands
of days these arms--nothing

a ceaseless preparation
a cold war of nothing

what did
these arms become

to be barely there in
a tiny spray of words

and all the stories were
atomized

what do we become
to become
just barely there?

The Overnighter

JM, Free Tibet / Big Sur / H3, 9.18.07

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We met Instant Karma at her inn+spa for our breakfast a few steps from the train station in SLO, even though we didn't spend the night at her inn nor utilize her spa nor take the train. She said, "Why don't you go upstairs and check out the place and then come down and pretend you're guests coming down for breakfast?" We did---we had missed her the preceding evening but on the strength of my pleading phone calls she was curious to meet us. We knew she was Instant Karma even before she put a Lennon album on her sound system during breakfast. There was a frozen strawberry in our orange juice. She made us an omelette filled with greek fixings and situated some lush ranch fruit on our plates and served the kind of coffee that is so good and uncorporate that it gives you a fever especially when you let it sit in a press for an hour. It's the kind of place you don't really talk about except to people who you are certain would like it. Then Lynn and she and I chatted through the morning, largely of our travels and the things that make up our lives and of Suzy's women's circle of Tuesday night artists and the way the double-sized bathtubs came via container from Morocco where she had them made and then Lynn was invited to check out the suite in the back and Instant Karma came on and Suzy said to me "I usually play this song in here a lot more loudly" and that sealed her.

° ° ° ° °

At the Henry Miller Library where we saw the Patti Smith photo and the aging tie-dyed hippies and the people on the patio angling their way through another reading, Lynn fingered two books. Lynn loves to make herself indecisive---she loves the gorgeousness of hanging on every decision as though it were irredeemably fateful---and she fingered the two books for half an hour. Both were $14 so the price points were not an issue. I told her everything, absolutely everything I knew about the two books, and finally how Gore Vidal didn't like the one and Lisa didn't like the other. She is currently halfway through the Kundera although Lisa Exit warns that she has read a couple of Kundera books with enthusiasm up to that certain point where you realize that there really will never be a denouement, and even though in Unbearable there is, it seemed too much like there shouldn't be, and that was a perfect reading of a man's life work.

° ° ° ° °

On checking in, our manager was Big Sur avuncular: her mother had seen The Sandpipers, said let's sell everything and move to Big Sur, and they did. She grew up wise to the ways of the place: she told us that while the men need to get drunk every day and do what they need to do for their egos, it's really the women who keep everything together, because Big Sur life is in truth rather hardscrabble and she told us how she made sure to outsource her own men from elsewhere.

° ° ° ° °

We went to the beach, the one I was last to thirty years ago, and I took the Westony photo of Lynn. It is one of the most unforgettable spots on earth; waves rush through two tunnels in enormous rocks just offshore. The last time I was there, way back with Steve Fine my first college roommate, you had to hike in, two thick miles, but now you can drive a narrow road. It is often blown out especially this time of year and maybe the fever I have today is from our moments out there. But it was majestic to see it blown out with the sand flattened except for our own footprints and a dead elephant seal gathering sand on one side, soon to be buried by elements as we all must be.

° ° ° ° °

The great ones all say to let yourself go insane, don't fight it. I haven't fought it I have since May run headlong towards it and maybe I am already and it is often more than a little scary but the clarity! You see everything, you see everything---everything---and you wonder: "Why do people do what they do to hold on, when letting go is what gets you to where you most want to go?" It's impossible to imagine an angry Yahweh, the politics of crucifixion, a merchant-prophet at Big Sur. Yet...I think it's also impossible to cotton much to dharma and Buddha there, even though you will see your basic Buddha lotus everywhere, even on a breakfast tableful of Norwegians at Deetjen's, and certainly in loads of literature generated by the people who cuddle up to the place. I also think the manager was right, that it's really prudent women who hold the place together---it's the men who don't understand that you just need to let it be, so they slop it into a mystical category they don't really understand at all, like zen or dharma. Henry Miller always landed in a woman's lap for support and Jack Kerouac borrowed from his mother until he died; men always imagine that life is bliss karma zen or some other kind of largely whiffleball spirituality when a woman is supporting them.

° ° ° ° °

On the way back I gave Instant Karma a painting like this one; I did this painting for her, but Lynn said we have to keep that one, so I gave her another---really, I think it was even better, but Lynn always likes the one that is freer. And in the end of any visit there is PCH itself, maybe the only road in a Californian's life that is also a character in one's life. The road is a more dependable friend than the most dependable friend; the road is a lover that ever arouses you; the road is where you want to be all the time, even though---paradox!---you are moving along. The road rising high into the dramatic beyond-Amalfi bluffs and descending teasingly towards the water but never reaching it creating apparent saddles of land. It is the connective tissue of the Sur and all its incidental signage and hopeful kitchens, of all the drama and poetry and thunder and light. It works for the Posts and it works for the hippies and it works for the people in their H3s and for the people in their VW vans holding onto what must have been the very best year of their lives as long as they can; it works for the strangers and it works for the spellbindingly peaceful west coast girls and it works for the guy from St. Louis who drove straight there in his Firebird and asked us at Nepenthe "Is this the place where Orson Wells had the cabin?" and when I said yes he said, "Well, damn, then, I'm in the right place!" and he seemed to get it more than anyone else from out of here, and he parked his car and got out and hiked up his jeans and was all set, all ready to use his corner of Big Sur as what we natives who don't need it to be anything else at all use it for: nature's very best, very best roadhouse.
~

Sur Big Sur

JM, Sur Big Sur, Kelp Beds, watercolor, ink, and cabernet sauvignon, 9.17.07

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Windswept

JM, Lynn at Big Sur, 9.17.07

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Generative Narrative

JM, Illusory Branching Episode, 9.13.07

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I don't know how madness starts on the couch and drives itself downtown and ends up with Viv and Madamina in LisaExit's Echo Park flat, but it does. I don't know how it is that you finally get what you have been wanting for many months only after giving yourself permission to play games and break down, but you do. I don't know that Modelo and Lorazepam is always a good idea but sometimes it is. And I don't know why it is that by yelling at people, they may turn around and be nice towards you for a moment, but sometimes it happens. But I do know, however, that it is an enormous benefit to be able to stroll around the grounds until you feel at home without even leaving home.

Pathways

JM, Labyrinth/Funeral/Parasols, Forest Lawn Glendale, 9.13.07

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~

Knit blog vernacular

The LATimes opinion blog liked what I had to say about 9/11 yesterday, especially about its cultural side, about what I do to commemorate it and about the lack of a cogent national narrative, even a fictional one, surrounding it. So thanks much to the editors.

° ° ° ° °

Silver Strand encounters the Babylonian Barber Shop in Durrell: "We were lifted simultaneously and swung smoothly down into the ground wrapped like dead Pharoahs, only reappear at the same instant on the ceiling, spread out like specimens."

° ° ° ° °

Lisa Exit is reading great books about the nature and meaning of autobiography. "Sh*t, why don't therapists tell anyone about this stuff?" she wondered aloud today.

° ° ° ° °

In my own WIP, the characters set out to discover the true nature of somebody, and it turns out they inadvertently discover more about someone else.

A sentence you thought you'd never read: "I read a quite a few knitting blogs, and it seems that the abbreviation WIP (work in progress) is fairly common in knit blog vernacular."

° ° ° ° °

Steph calls to make sure not only one of us but both of us are OK (I had a little thing too). Perfectly timed calls, both of them. Steph: manages small details inordinately well.

° ° ° ° °

I'm on Hotsheet duty at MayorSam while the Mayor is away, in Iowa, where all longtime Angeleno relatives are (I even have a few there myself). But the bench at MayorSam is very deep, so fear not.

° ° ° ° °

Lunch with Joe Scott next week. Love that man.
~

Street Level No. 19

JM, Street Level No. 19, 9.12.03

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Vermont and Santa Monica

JM, Robert Millar: Metro Station, 9.11.07
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On nearly every 9/11 since 2001, I've commemorated the date by visiting one of the City's best public art installations: Robert Millar's Red line Metro station at Vermont and Santa Monica. It's but one stop south of my own.

The concrete panels that comprise the Piranesian (all LA Metro stations are Piranesian) north entrance of the station are etched with hundreds of questions meant to prompt thoughts about art, architecture, power, control, economics, politics. Roughly half the questions are specific to art and architecture, but many are also specific to other disciplines, and even to decision-making in general. All of them are provocative and worthy of contemplation.


JM, How do we desire architecture? (Robert Millar: Metro Station), 9.11.07

For me, even though this artwork was installed before 9/11, it's one of the best possible artworks by which to commemorate the day; for so many of the questions raised by the day and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in particular are the precise kinds of questions that New York City especially has been engaged with in not only replacing the towers but examining the broader meanings of American life.

I especially appreciate the way the walls have "eroded" in a very short time, generating the feel of a ruin. This deliberate (?) archaizing even goes so far as to suggest to me the ruin of NYC subway stations in particular. If you were ever there, it's hard to look at the walls of this station, in fact, without thinking not only of a NYC station, but of the ruin of the Chambers Street Station under the WTC.

° ° ° ° °

Another good way to commemorate something painful is to leave a rose somewhere.


JM, No roses, 9.11.07

Ordinarily I take a rose from my rose garden to Millar's Metro station and leave it in the corner of the walls featured in the top photograph; but today for the first time ever on this date there were none. It's been an exceptionally hot and dry late August and early September. No roses: appropriate today.
~

9/11 Fiction Falls Flat

~
A few novelists knew what to do subsequent to 9/11; they wrote novels about 9/11 and the months immediately after.

These novelists generally recognized in the moment and the subsequent months an unmooring; they recognized the drifting of the country towards forfeited rights and a counterfeit war.

They felt it important to confront our own national leadership for using 9/11 as an excuse to implement an agenda that subsequently disgraced the nation internationally and embarrassed nearly its entire intelligentsia domestically.

Some novelists did all this. Most novelists, however, did none of these things. Most novelists did not write 9/11 or post-9/11 novels.

° ° ° ° °

Though at the top of the hill there have been unflinching attempts to tell the period's story, I'm still stunned that the subject of post-9/11 political America has largely been ignored by so many our more usual writers of fiction. The abundant and tragic political mistakes made in the time immediately subsequent to 9/11 and up to the War Resolution have been mistakes from which America has yet to extract itself. Certainly, this is the kind of period that is mandatory for any novelist who would remain relevant as a voice of conscience to engage head-on. Nobody remembers apolitical novels from, say, the Vichy years.

° ° ° ° °

What is surprising to me also is that no single fictive narrative has emerged as standout or even memorable regarding post 9/11 America. Maybe DeLillo indeed came closest: his 9/11 novel is mostly about paranoia. But DeLillo didn't need 9/11 to find that topic; it has always been in his work.

DeLillo is both too graphic and too plainwrap for my taste. You can also read 9/11 novels by Updike, McEwan, Pynchon, Roth, Rushdie. All those top-drawer (and decidedly male) names were quick to take to the smouldering ground and stake a claim. I don't think any of them produced anything truly memorable, alas.

[You can read mine too if you like---which is especially about paranoia, equally spread among all political groups, left and right alike---it's only about 150 pages, a very quick read; it owes a debt to French thinkers, especially Baudrillard, who had been thinking about terror for many years prior to 9/11.]

Six years after 9/11, still missing is a recognizably standout post-9/11 national narrative.
~

Abstract and concrete

JM, Color/B&W, 9.10.07

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this one might be getting a little too comfy on the patio...

Pin-ups

Bev, Izzy, 9.1.07

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I hear Thich Nhat Hanh will organize for peace in MacArthur Park September 29.

Notes on Sunday: church circle chat in lieu of Mass. A couple of acquaintences wearing Ordain Women Now buttons. Get a scoop from them: there will be a female presider at a Mass in Claremont School of Theology September 30. Also noted: a legit current path is available for female priests: female Episcopal defectors.

Also: LAUSD payroll scandal was set up by bad consulting from Deloitte & Touche, a fact recent journalism has neglected. Now the same consultant is being asked to fix. Amazing.

Later, simple dinner at Bev's. (Had a great foto of Madamina on Sunset, getting gelato---neglected to save it---damn!) Some talk of Sharkeez, the hotspot that burned down; I hear an old guy in the community is trying to obstruct redevelopment. Listening to both sides, I say: good for him.

Almond fig gelato may be best flavor. Too sweet for Madamina means perfection for everyone else.

Unlocked

JM, Parking No. 1 (Ambrose), 9.9.07


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JM (text version): Sunday Morning Mimosa

Lazy day

JM, Watering the backyard, 9.5.07


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~

Tuli and Latus

~
Sometimes when you write at one of these you have an enormous amount going on and therefore an enormous amount to relate. Other times you have an enormous amount going on and can't write a single thing about any of it. And of course there are those times when there isn't a lot going on at all.

But rarely do you have one of those spells where you can't tell if you have an enormous amount going on. I'm in one of those rare spells now---everything feels fluid, natural, dangerous---and because life itself so often feels precisely that way, who can say if anything's really important, pivotal, transforming?

To be seeking transformation is almost an acknowledgment that all is not well; to be seeking transformation always gives one pause after a good amount of philosophy or spirit has already entered the psyche. I'm having a circumspect relationship to transformation; I generally like where I am; but there are these autumn forces at work, already; they arrived early, the way only relatives do.

Everyone's favorite Latin verb to conjugate is fero, ferre, tuli, latus, to bring, bear, carry. (You know: translate, transfer, ferry, etc.) There's genius in making all the perfect tenses so different from the infinitive: once change has happened, you are no longer in the same realm---and when you slip into the passive, and change has happened to you, you are in another realm entirely. The subtle distinctions between effectuating change and having it imposed on you; the subtle conditions of being about to be changed and having been changed---all these deserve vastly different versions of what really is the same word, and Latin provides.

Notes to myself

Lynn says photos are nice but people know you as a scribe so stop confusing people, and make the reservations for Big Sur already.

Lisa's going to San Francisco this weekend to see the Matisse show before it closes.

Cousin says call me on my cell.

Stephanie's working hard as usual even well into the night.

Silver Strand took five days around Labor Day and hasn't talked about one of them yet.

Lisa Exit gearing up for fall has a very good syllabus on the topic of autobiography, filled with books I'd like to read.

Michael's going to the Toronto market next week.

I'm downtown checking out the new City Hall south lawn Thursday farmer's market, which seems like such a good place to plot and stage a palace revolt that I just can't resist casing it.

fireworks

JM, My Papyrus, 9.5.07

Foot of Longfellow

JM, After Sunset, Foot of Longfellow, Hermosa Beach, 9.3.07

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Navy Street

JM, Navy Street Lifeguard Stand, 9.2.07

Last Day

au revoir white shoes---see you 5.30.08

Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!

~
Workers of the world, unite! at wikipedia.

Sliding along Sunset (98°)

Viv comes by to cool off; but her car is the coolest place in town: 74°. It's a thought: go to Olvera Street for dinner. It's something to do.

Riverside, the back way downtown. Parking at Phillipe's. Sampling restaurants for coolness. Settle on one (81°) where some mariachis are serenading an octagen with large ears. A single Negro Modelo for me, and the two girls split one.

Sliding along Sunset; agreeing to stop for gelato in our Silver Lake place (94°). Recognize the Pasquini family; Italian LA faces, Madamina's specialty. They have a machine at the gelato place. Now they have a badly behaved young lab too. I'm having an espresso with coffee, not fussy for it though.

A man asks for a chair of ours. Lynn says andiamo, suddenly; we go. Nothing makes sense in the heat. Come home (79°); looks like more power outages along the way. Write the first Overnighter in months (98.6°). Go to sleep, wake up, write it again. Everything makes sense in the heat.

The Overnighter

JM, Adjustment: Three Tacos, Atwater, 10.16.07

~
...Yet, to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask.--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse


The other day I was explaining something to a student.

She detached from what I was saying and she suddenly said:

"You look famous."

I ignored it and went on with what I was saying.

But she stared at me and added:

"You know why you look famous? Because you're always hiding."

° ° ° ° °

What a statement for anyone who knows me, let alone a nineteen-year-old, to make.

I didn't really care about the looking famous part; it was flattery, it was welcome and meaningless. But the always hiding part...that was gold. I couldn't explain it to her. I first needed to explain it to myself.

° ° ° ° °

It might be more visible of late---if hiding can be more visible.

After some fallings out with people this spring and early summer, especially with some men I had known for a long time---in two instances, over thirty-five years---I began a surprisingly swift transformation. I think I've safely passed through it now. I'm sure it's not a summer fling; I'm sure it's here to say.

It has been a transformation that re-acquainted me with an old self of mine---a self that this native Angeleno left on a hanger in some Port Authority locker in New York City about thirty years ago. A self that does indeed hide. A self that likes to hide.

About that old self of mine. I had a funny thing happen to me at the end of high school but especially when I started college: nearly everyone who knew me thought I was too much on the soft side, not nearly masculine enough.

° ° ° ° °

It shouldn't have mattered; after all, we were in the middle of New York City. But it was immediate on entering college, and it was all-pervasive. And I mean---nearly everyone felt this about me. Profs, administrators, taxi drivers, the people in the cafeteria, the clerks at Mama Joy's...dad...but not mom. (Not my three closest friends in college, either---my first two roommates and one other guy were an enormous part of enabling the fruition of soft side, which had obviously already been in formation from childhood, and pushed along by a couple of legendary high school teachers).

The college even ultimately assigned me to an all-gay floor. And I could have played a variety of sports, but after athletic testing, the school ushered me into...fencing. Even my therapist---and of course everyone was telling me I needed one---tried to convince me that there were reasons for all of this---the soft-side, no girlfriend thing---that I wasn't allowing myself to identify.

Indeed, I had quite a few soft-side markers: no girlfriend in high school seemed to bug people the most. But also: early ballet as a child, way too close to mom as a child, with a very remote father; way too many recognizably girlish emotional spinouts; way too many covers.

But beyond this much, and despite the mistaken identity crisis---I liked who I was in high school and especially in New York City. I was fine with it. When I was on my own for the first time, alone among strangers for the first time, in touch with myself for the first time, that was me being just the way I was: male but soft-sidey.

° ° ° ° °

But in between it all, things happened, and I came back out here to LA, and tried to live the life that I lived in New York and felt I should be living anywhere. I made it through Proust and Barthes, quite noisily. I made it through Paul Monette a little more quietly. I wrote poetry (I still do) in addition to fiction and opinion pieces. I favored classical music and jazz but attended gender-imprecise live acts like Iggy, Patti Smith and Tom Robinson. I wore a beloved llama sweater all through winter, scarves and turtlenecks in the fall, felt the Queen's throat phenomenon for certain female voices, stayed way close to mom, even took a couple of fashion drawing classes. Oh: I was finicky thin, and by the way, not one, not two, but three pairs of Calvins. Oh too: a subscription to Vogue.

These kinds of cultural backdrops always made some of my better and closer male friends out here...uncomfortable.

[Perhaps the most exemplary instance in which I suffered indignity for being myself was with couple of cinemaphile friends circa age 21. The friends were drawing up lists of their favorite movies. When mine was done, I announced that Children of Paradise was my favorite film of all time. One of them---I'm not kidding---didn't speak to me for over a year because I so warmed up to a film about two French mimes. Another squealed, "French mimes!"---for decades!---whenever he found anything in my own taste pretentious or suspect.]

Though I was fairly fearless in a lot of other ways, in this way I wasn't: I generally lacked the courage or the resolve to stand up to friends who wanted me to be some other way than the way I was. I suppose I wasn't anxious to cut loose close friendships because I had so little family beyond my parents in my life. They had their way; I often distanced myself from this side of me.

° ° ° ° °

I distanced myself from my soft-side nature mostly by drinking, often to excess. With me, drinking to excess has always been about mounting the fortitude simply to be more like your basic guy, a guy to meet your expectations of what a basic guy should be: insensitive, aggressive, controlling, statistical. Drinking to excess, of course, is almost always a mask, and this was my mask of overt maleness.

Years and decades passed. A pattern emerged: I'd drink to the point of crashing (usually it would take about seven years), go off drinking for a few months or even a year or so, recover but again start to lose the mask of my more overt masculinity even while recovering, and start drinking again to recover that more comfortable social mask.

° ° ° ° °

As I have so often before, I gave up drinking this summer, and then started drinking again last week. But this time, something was different at both ends of the journey.

The difference, this time around: there was nothing to prove, nothing to heal, nothing to run from. There was no point to drink to excess; there was no point not to drink either. It meant nothing, neither way. There was no mask attached to it.

Disenfranchised from some insensitive, overly combattive, overtly male acquaintances at last, I was once again myself, myself circa 1977 again; I was reading Durrell, wandering around Hermosa amidst strangers (what a blessing that has been, to be able to connect to the place in which I was a toddler and also spent the private part of my adolescence, and it looks like it's happening again in a couple of weeks), laying in the sun, taking another summer largely away.

I don't precisely know how I found the will to shed all the overt male effrontery at this particular lifestage. I do know that it all began to happen so quickly, right after I turned fifty in February.

° ° ° ° °

Sure, some of it involved the old blog fallout---for the longest time, I wanted to sensitize that place, to make it safer for female readers, especially those who were friends of mine; I wanted to tailor it more towards the people, all of them female, who were increasingly becoming more important to me (I think if you're reading here you know that story already). Some of it involved me finally realizing how very very tired I was of drinking simply to stay tough and snarky and overtly masculine in an insensitive way. A lot of it involved the sheer resentment I've cultivated over the years of always being the social ambassador, communicator, dependably sensitive one between myself and most other male friends of mine; the one who always makes the contact, the one who always issues the invites, the one who always throws the party. And a lot of it involved the contemplation attendant to reaching an age that one might consider adult, and wishing to explore a truer self---which for me involved a return to a younger self, a self I had been given a grand glimpse of in my late teens and early twenties.

° ° ° ° °

So by this point I've largely ditched the main men in my life who sneered all those years at my soft side. Now I mostly pal around with a handful of great, great women, women I respect, women I am completely in awe of. It feels natural to do this; it feels like me.

The new guy, this guy in touch with the long-ago guy, who liked himself way back when despite it all, and who loves his life immensely of late, lives all on the soft side these days. I let myself feel pain and hurt more deeply and more readily, but the pain is more exquisite and formative and creative. I let myself be honest about the way I relate to men: I don't like most of them, I find most of them pointlessly aggressive or downright loutish and too sex-as-conquest driven, with far too little concern for tenderness; and I find most of them especially emotionally unavailable, too busy with work or money or the illusion of getting somewhere to do any real thinking about life. (My complaints about them, in fact, are nearly identical to the complaints women of my age have about them). I have always been glib and emotionally wide open, but now I am even far moreso. I exercise far more, even work on my body as best I can; I've lost 25 pounds in two months, in fact. I write highly-detailed 3,000 word missives to friends and could care less if they might seem neurotic or obsessive; I know they are plain and simple honesty, and that's enough. I have no patience to indulge people I don't see the point of indulging. I tell people I love them when I recognize that I love them. I do indeed, as the student said, hide a lot more; I should, I owe it to people, because I know people find me more intense than ever. (A Brazilian woman I've known for about a decade recently told me, "You are both calm and like a volcano," and I thought that was very good, because that's precisely the way I feel, almost always.) I warm up to yin-side of spirituality, ideas, and culture: art, literature, watercolors, poetry, Mary, Tao, gardening, etc. I talk to men for minutes but women for hours. I like being behind the scenes; I like domesticity; I like becoming-imperceptible.

As the student said, I am always hiding, but especially these days; I enjoy hiding, in fact. I hide on busses; I hide while driving cars that don't belong to me; I hide at home, especially in the kitchen; I hide in Playa del Rey, in Hermosa, on PCH; I hide in my novels. I am used to hiding; it has been a dependable way for me to remain in touch with me over the decades. Now that I am more in touch with me than ever, I am hiding more than ever.

It all feels far more like me than at any point in the past three decades. How I missed it for so long? I don't know, but---no regrets.
~

September

~
In re
the boys of summer,
the man your father was,
the sons of flint and pitch.

more about Dylan Thomas