diary 1

escaping prison planet

1.

Hexie has trained me to play with her for one full hour upon waking. If I do not bounce her ball-on-a-string around the living room, she marches over to the fiddle leaf fig or false ocotillo and takes a bite of the aluminum foil that covers the base. Covering the dirt with aluminum foil is supposed to keep cats from digging, but it doesn’t stop her.

She’s always been a nature guhl

2.

The Costco in San Bernardino is a madhouse. Most of the time you can’t even find somewhere to park. A manic energy pervades in spite of the fact that people move tidally slow and with zero spatial awareness. I am only there to buy frozen blueberries and a certain cracker which costs 10x as much at Whole Foods. As I was leaving, I heard one employee shouting to another over the din at the register: “It depends on what kind of relationship you want to have with him. Do you want to be a hammer, or do you want to be a nail?”

3.

J took me to see Herbie Hancock at the Hollywood Bowl for my birthday. Walking in felt like going into an amusement park—it had that feel of the well-designed public space that leads you to An Experience. We were so stressed about being late because the director of the show J’s working on added all these scenes at the end of the day and we were rushing to find a parking garage in the middle of all the Hollywood tourist stuff and maybe figure out where to find the shuttle bus. There’s so much tension around new experiences because of the unknown, the minor unknown. Where to park? Where is the shuttle? Is it cash only? I think that internet-having has fucked us all up with regard to what we expect to know ahead of time, because you can look it all up. There’s always a mommy blog with a guide on how to have the smoothest experience. There’s always a picture of the inside of the restaurant so you can decide whether it’s the sort of place you want to go. But I’m glad I read the mommy blog about the Hollywood Bowl because I would not have believed that you could bring a whole picnic in with you, of whatever you want, because that is just too amazing. That, more than anything else, makes the Hollywood Bowl feel like it comes from another time.