slug life

the waiting room, the hall in the karaoke parlor

Eating out of a bag in front of the TV—somehow the bag is the important part here. I try to remove the bag from the equation by putting the chips on a plate. But I guess you could say that I’m eating out of a bag in front of the TV in a spiritual sense.

Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash

It has been a weird time. A kind of slug life. Lots of things are halfway to somewhere. My novel revision is halfway done. My house is halfway sold (but closing soon, thank god). J is in California, working on getting in the film & TV union out there, and I won’t be able to join him until the house is buttoned up and our current roster of AirBnb bookings is complete. On Easter Sunday, he was in a head-on collision on a winding mountain road; the guy in the other lane swerved directly in front of J’s truck for no reason just as they were passing each other. (And he’s back to 100%, like a true John Wayne type.) The scariest thing about it is the randomness. The other driver didn’t have a stroke, he wasn’t stung by a bee, there wasn’t some bizarre malfunction. J asked the CHP officers if they could explain what happened and they said, Well, a lot of people are wondering that right now.

And it kills me that I haven’t been there for any of it. Instead I ask: how’s your chest (seatbelt bruised), how are your toes (at least a few broken on impact), and I ask over and over again because it feels like that’s all I’ve got.

Meanwhile, I’m here, steering this novel toward its final form. It’s almost done, although I kind of hate telling people that because the next time they ask me what I’m up to, I have the same answer. I have been accused of being secretive about things, even my successes, and I guess that’s true, but it’s at least partially because I hate feeling like I’m disappointing people. Even when people are very sweet and excited, they expect a certain kind of progress. The further someone is from publishing, the less they understand the timetable, and I know more than a handful of truly well-meaning people who love to scold me: Where’s that second book, girl?

I guess all of this would be fine if I felt patient or satisfied by it. That kind of contentment is possible. But it doesn’t belong to this era of slug life for some reason. I feel like I’m just on the other side of something. I’m in the waiting room. I’m in the hallway of the karaoke parlor, where the wall of sonic bleed from each room mixes ten people singing their favorite song and singing it all the way. I am right there next to the heat and the action. But I don’t know what it takes to get me there.

I keep thinking about the dimension-jumping mechanism in Everything Everywhere All at Once: you have to initiate it by doing the statistically least likely next thing, which creates a brief field of unimagined potentiality in your world—like giving yourself four paper cuts between your fingers or telling the IRS examiner you love her. And it feels exactly like that. Exactly. Like I need to move in a new way before the path will open up.

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some things I’m grateful for, 5/19/22

early summer cool nights
Valleyesque by Fernando Flores
oats. Just oats.
I got off of coffee—all the way off—and I know it because I had three days of psychedelic headaches over the weekend. When I wake up, I feel like I somehow got a massage overnight. It’s crazy. And even crazier that I know I’m eventually going back to the bean. Or as I call it: the devil’s dookie water. But for now, I am free.