making sense
want 2 make U feel
I want blue things. A blue bowl to put a prayer plant in. A blue stone. A blue rug, but the woman won't sell it to me until Tuesday, and she “can't hold it without a deposit.” So it won't live with me. Los Angeles: I drive to places and look at rugs. I meet people in the middle of the day and they are showing me rugs. I say, “Sixty?” I say, “Forty-five?” and I put the rug in the trunk of my car and take a picture of it.
We tend toward orange things. Orange chairs from a garage in Costa Mesa. Later we went to Sephora. It was raining. I saw my reflection in the window of a candy store in the mall and I was shocked by how wild my hair looked. A few months before that, I bought a sandwich at a grocery store from a woman with the most untidy braid I've ever seen. She smiled hugely at me, and I didn't know why. But now I wonder if she saw a fellow non-brusher.
But actually, actually, this week I got a haircut for the first time in a year. Something had begun to go wrong with my hair. It was heavy, it hung in ropes. I brushed it with boar bristles and the hairbrush turned schmutzy. The ends were constantly getting spidered together. I had been cutting my own bangs in the mountains. I don't really know how to do it without making it dorky so I just trim the middle shorter and shorter. The point of my part migrates forward. I am behind a lanky curtain. The unbrushedness and untidiness gets into everything I'm doing and the clothes I choose. To frump out everywhere.
You know, sometimes you become aware of a thing that needs to change, and you can't change it fast enough? Something that you've been afraid of doing. When it's time, it's really time.
Weird small talk with the hair stylist. We mainly talked about Covid. The early days, the first two weeks. I remember I had read somewhere that you could determine you had covid if you couldn't hold your breath for 15 seconds. Jason and I were playing Monopoly Deal, we had just gotten back from California, and when either one of us coughed for a second, we got scared. We nodded at each other and began holding our breath, and counting.
My hair gets tangled even while I'm sitting there in the salon. That's how bad it is. It got so bad that I was afraid of what the stylist would say. Like I had to fix it myself at least 50% before I could let anyone else see it. I make that mistake a lot. I think, god, no, please, you can't tell anyone this. You have to fix it at least 50%. “I'm actually a little ashamed it took me so long to get my hair cut,” I say to the stylist. “I think a lot of people feel that way,” she says, “although people don't usually say it.”
I will spend the rest of the week wondering if that's good—being the person who says what others are secretly feeling. I guess it is, but it feels weird at the same time.
What if the point of a piece of writing is to get someone to feel good feelings in their body? The same thing as a nice haircut or a massage or a song that you start to shake your body to?
What if making sense is an illusion? When did sense the logical good mind take over sense, the haptic pulses? Make sense actually means make me feel something. Not prove that you're right. I’m envious of how music doesn’t have to make logic sense. (But of course if it doesn’t make you move, it’s not good.)
This is a lesson I think I just learned. After a certain point, the really good lessons feel so obvious that they almost seem stupid to say.
Blue keeps coming up in the novel. Cesium salts from the Goiana cesium containment incident, a blue movie playing in the back room of a party. Apparently I reached for it when something had to seem deadly and beautiful. To feel that way.