Tag: california

where are my brains

My apprehension is on fire, reaching out to confuse my generally pragmatic self. Tonight I will get home, try to relax with David, have a brief panic, and eventually give in to a clockwork pattern of getting up every five minutes to try and make sure I remembered everything I made a mental note to pack. Then my mother will arrive, slightly late, while I am in the middle of tearing something apart, and drug me into amicability with chocolate. Our things will be put into her van, we may or may not stop somewhere for road food, and then we will go.

Ten blocks will go by before I remember that I have left either my plane ticket or required ID on top of a flat surface somewhere in my room, and another fifteen blocks will go by before I remember that I’ve forgotten something essential to do with either the camera or the laptop. After that, we will be like an arrow, off to Seattle in the dark. At the border we will make jokes about holding on to contraband, while hoping they don’t search the truck and find the Kinder Eggs we’re smuggling for Robin’s party. Around then I will remember that I’ve left Robin’s number at home, right next to where that pesky other thing had been. We will decide it’s probably just in my bag and continue on, but we’ll be wrong.

In Bellingham, it will rain so hard the roads will collapse, and I will miss my plane on Monday, recovering in an American hospital that charges me for the air I breathe.

Nonsense clear in my head, put there solidly by my worried, idiot heart. Nonsense and things that have happened before but are unlikely to ever happen again. I know this trip will completely different then the last time I went to California. It can’t not be. I will not be stranded. I will not be neglected. Nothing will flood. (Related to that, I will not get caught in another mud-slide.) I will not be attacked by yet another damned wild animal while camping. I will not be kidnapped by yet another dangerous religious fanatic. I will not get trapped on the train for seven hours because of a suicide. I will not accidentally walk into Compton on my first day in Los Angeles.

Not only will my trip by fun, it will be fine. This time I have friends there. I am connected. I have a network, a safety net, multiple places to stay. Tonight we will remember everything irreplaceable, get clean across the border, and collapse into our plans/friends in Seattle with joy. On Monday morning, I will be exhausted, but will make my early morning flight. I won’t get off the plane to find myself abandoned by a car crash, Lung and Natasha will meet me there. Vegas will be exotic yet completely familiar from television, terrific and fascinating. When we leave for the Salton Sea, our drive will be all sing-alongs to favourite songs, fruit juice, bad jokes, and photography in the desert. When it is time to go to sleep, we will lie down on the cold ground, miles away from anything, and the stars at night will be so clear as to make me catch my breath.

understated

I love that I can say either I’m borrowing a bedroll from a CSI novelist to go camping in the middle of a five-star desert dreamscape with an award winning photographer and a star-shiveringly good musician or that I’m borrowing a floppy foamy bed-thing out of Don’s garage so I can go camping in the middle of an ecological disaster with one of the most filthy minded friends I have and a wee skinny girl I don’t know as well as I should, and both statements are equally accurate and entirely true.

That said, I’m oddly terrified about my upcoming trip, and I sincerely do not know why.

on a scale of one to ten I’m terrified

It’s confirmed. I’m going to California next week. Work gave me the alright, and Lung bought the ticket to Vegas today. (Where he and Natasha pick me up, then bring me to the Salton Sea). My flight leaves Seattle first thing Monday morning. Today after work I’m hopefully picking up a wee foam mattress from Don, getting laundry done, and packing as best I can. After that, it’s a matter of working as many hours as I can until Friday evening, when David and I are catching a ride with my mother down to Seattle for Robin’s Saturday house-party.

Rent will be tight this month, as will everything else, but the chance is too good to pass up. I swore, awhile ago, that I will never again say no to free travel, no matter what, and this is it, this is exactly the sort of thing I promised myself I would do, no matter how risky or fiscally chancy, because if the offer is solid, then the correct answer is always Yes.

“She takes from life, eating its words and minutes and licking her lips, not wanting to waste any, “

Paintings: The Seduction of Oedipus


going hunting
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

It has been a struggle to sleep this week, and when I do, there has been no comfort in it. I dream of California, but not the California I had lived, full of bleak stories I tell now with terrible humour, but of the possibilities I could interpret from every building I walked past, their sunburnt lawns, every house a microcosm, every business an untold discovery, and the palm trees swaying almost shadowless to the sky, perfect emblems of hot modern fantasy lining every street.

I blame my current reading material.

Before I go to sleep at night, I read. Being a basic thing, there are variations, but it always the same pattern. Finishing with the computer, I turn off my lamp, plug in the ornamental lights, and snuggle in underneath them with my book. When I am done, I pull the plug. It is almost ritual, except that it carries no meaning. It is only the reputation of necessary movements, like washing dishes or putting on a shirt one sleeve at a time, that create the illusion of depth. Every day, the same ingredients.

This week I was reading White Oleander, a harsh book yet beautiful, set in Los Angeles. I am told it was turned into a film once, but I never thought to see it. Why are all my favourite books set in L.A.? Reminiscent of buying my fierce summer clothing on the boardwalk in Venice, they are almost always written by women, couched in some foreign manner of prose that still remains english, always reminding me so strongly of my own writing – as if I were to live there again, it would be my turn to write a book, something powerful and achingly frail, like the bones of the body that I miss so much. Visiting the wild beaches was like stepping into fairyland. A fairyland punctuated by stairs and people in cheap foam and plastic flip-flops.

Sweden opens embassy in Second Life.