five new year's postcards from California
going places
Huntington Gardens
Families go in and out of the bamboo grove. They are families because they are people together. From a distance, that’s all it takes.
They point at the koi. Lazy, lingering right at the surface, lipping a bit of husk from someone’s tamale. Do not feed them, it says all over. But it looks very much like the fish would disagree.
In summer, J and I sat a long time by the koi, diagnosing their personalities. The white-and-black cow-spotted one was shy. The pearl one with the fin that came up out of the water was bossy. The orange one with a dark blot on its mouth was looking for someone who wasn’t there anymore. In winter, there are so many people trying to sit with the koi that I have to concede I will not get to visit them, and instead take up under a willow.
Isn’t it beautiful that people want to go and look at trees?
midnight on the 110
J flies into LAX on New Year’s Eve. I pick him up, and the air is hazy. People everywhere are shooting off fireworks. Not the little ones that you set off in the middle of the street on the Fourth of July—large, municipal, professional fireworks. Just exploding out of random street grid, everywhere. At midnight, we’re on the 110 heading downtown and the fireworks are going up everywhere, on both sides of the freeway, so close that it seems like at least half of a bad idea. But if everybody has half of the same bad idea, what does it become?
simulacra
In California, all the parking lot tree markets offer “flocking,” a spray of insulation-esque white fuzz to make your tree seem snowed upon. Have they started doing this back in the colder parts of the country? I like to imagine otherwise. I like it when California turns normal things into costumes. It injects the emptiness of unreality like resin. The sunsets look like murals in strip mall restaurants.
confession
I was in a cult for ten years. I don’t want to say that and I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want anyone to know how completely taken apart I am now that I have left it. I don’t want anyone to know about these tides of exhaustion and pointlessness and anger and fuck everyone. It’s 5am, it’s 2pm, it’s midnight. I don’t want to cast myself as the victim of something enormous. I don’t want to spend another ten years railing against it. But I think I need to air it out more than I have. And if I don’t tell you about it, it might make absolutely no sense what is happening to me over here. Why I can’t return a text to save my life, why I make plans at the expense of a dizzying internal logic. I keep going to the grocery store looking for the snack that will save my life by placing me at a short distance outside of myself. I want to be believed, but I can barely believe myself.
What do I mean by that? I mean that my mind is full of trap doors. If I land on a certain thought in a certain way, I end up pulled out to sea by the invisible riptide of a belief which was laid down over and over in the voices of others, and eventually my own. You’re just being willful. You need to surrender your will. You’re isolating. You’re as sick as your secrets. If you got what you deserved, you’d be dead, so stop complaining.
Saint Fear
Spotify wrapped is stupid, and we were all better off when we had IKEA towers of CDs and pleather binders in our cars and mix CDs covered in glittery nail polish. But the data does have some value. You can’t hide from the song you listened to more than any other. It’s not tea leaves. It’s the state you chose to live in over and over again. Sometimes a song becomes the soundtrack. It demands it. It just sinks down into your life like an explanation. And lately for me that song has been John Cale’s “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend.” It started last summer when I put it on my “I guess I live in California now?” playlist.
The chorus goes: “Say fear’s a man’s best friend.”
The chorus I heard goes: “Saint Fear is a man’s best friend.”
Thank you for being here and reading this! It really means a lot. Happy New Year, and it’s not too late to eat your lucky food, and it isn’t too early to take it easy on yourself. <3
this hits
Would love to listen to the playlist if you're willing to share!