London № 2
London museum grindr profiles of yore.
Stopped at Present & Correct after maybe literally 13 years of following them online.
T-minus seven days until we’re back in the UK. A week in London with John before I take off for Wales by myself for a week-long immersive Welsh language program on the Llŷn peninsula. I will now do the thing you’re apparently not supposed to do and talk about my plans before hand to the invested scamming public lying in wait to theft my identity.
We’re starting in London, and eating our way through the better parts of everyone’s recommendations. Then, off to the Salisbury Plain, by train, not automobiles, to see a man about a henge. (Today I was at Aesop buying face-stuff and semi-precious soap, and at checkout the clerk magnanimously offered me a spritz of their latest fragrance, to be sprayed on my bag. She told me, with a straight face, that “Ouranon* has notes of frankincense and is reminiscent of ancient monoliths” so I guess we’ll fucking see, bitch.) After Stonehenge we’re back on the train over to Oxford and then bussing back to London. On Friday I will be tattooed by a person named Mouse, on my forearm and up onto my hand against literally everyone’s better judgement, after which we will go see Abba Voyage for the second time.
*She couldn’t have known, but another Aesop fragrance, Hwyl, would have been too on the nose, as it’s Welsh for “goodbye!”
At the end of the week John heads back to LA, while I board a train to Holyhead/Caergybi on Angelsey/Ynys Môn where I’ll spend a day so I can have a head start the following morning to take a train Bangor, then a bus to Pwllheli, then a cab to Llithfaen, then a 1.5 mile walk down the side of a mountain to the edge of the sea to stay for the next 6 days at Nant Gwrtheyrn. I’ll spend every day from 8-6, learning to speak Welsh and making little excursions to taverns and coffee roasters to talk to locals, and I’ll spend every night sleeping in a row of converted miner’s cottages from the 1800s. I am terrified and excited and cannot wait.
After that I’ll retrace my steps back up the peninsula to Caernarfon where I’ll crash for the night before taking a 6 hour bus ride down the Ceredigion coast to Cardigan/Aberteifi where my great great great grandparents lived. I’m spending a two day breather there in a bougie converted-maritime-warehouse inn, before heading by bus, then train, then subway back to the airport to fly home to LA.
On the otherhand, today while scoping out spots to grab coffee in Aberteifi, I saw that this ultra cute bakery and cafe was hiring full time baker positions, no experience required, so maybe I’m never actually coming home at all.
Books read in August. I give up on River Enchanted & London Seance Society about 100 pages in, both algorithmically recommended via Goodreads, the first and last time I’ll be trying that. The Salt Grows Heavy comes recommended from a friend with gushing praise and is the single worst thing I have read… ever? Absolute dreck, I persevere out of sheer hatred and incredulity and rage. Verbal gooning and bating from an author who surely had a formative sexual experience in a Hot Topic, after hours deep in the American McGee’s Alice merch section.
Recently chatting with my sister as her husband and I plan our upcoming falconry sessions and casually joke about us getting older and spontaneously getting into birds and she looks at me and says “Spontaneous? You’ve been a bird freak for… a while.” And a few things suddenly slap me in the face: I have a ten-inch tattoo of a magpie on my arm that is now about 10 years old, and based on my personal identification with the bird that goes back to my childhood. I see a turkey buzzard circling over head recently and remember camping under the oaks on center street in Provo for hours 17 years ago to watch their enormous committee hanging over the street, two dozen birds strong, annoying all my roommates with reports from my obsessive observation. And then there’s my eagle scout project, hanging ironically like a 26 year old albatross around my neck: sourcing, securing and spreading 12 tons of nesting material to establish a riparian preserve for 50+ species of migratory birds in Arizona that is now a major ornithological destination.
This is like when my psychiatrist asks if I consider myself an anxious person, or if I struggle with anxiety, and I truthfully and enthusiastically answer “No, not really! Anxiety’s never really been a problem!” and she looks at my medical history that I gave her not 10 minutes earlier and says “But you take Xanax anytime you fly to manage panic attacks, and have been hospitalized in the ER twice for anxiety episodes that manifested as full-blown cardiac events?” I guess if you put it that way.
Anyway, all this to say that I’m very excited that the crows and ravens are finally back. In January I had a good thing going: daily trips to the river at 3 to feed the birds, where they’d all but eat out of my hands. I got them to come when I called and could pick out individuals, and when I showed up they’d come congregate. I was living high on the fucking hog, and then suddenly… mating season, nesting, and they all vanished.
Seven long months later and the pink-mouthed fledglings are out making a racket, and their folks are taking them down to the river to scrounge and learn the ropes. I’m heading back out semi-regularly now to start to make their acquaintance. My goal this year is to get them taking food from my hands (as they’ve been doing for 30,000 years, calm down.)
So much mental chatter. I wonder what I am doing, I wonder what I want to be doing, I wonder what I want to want to be doing. This is a mid-life crisis unmoored from the props and set-dressing of good old' fashioned heterosexuality. Where does the panic go when it doesn’t have a red porsche or a secretary to lose itself in? I’m just supposed to be afraid of death and look at course options at the Berkeley extension and wonder if it’s too late to get a bachelor’s in Celtic studies on my own? Look at metalworking residencies at the Penland school of craft and know I could afford it but am maybe still too scared of that kind of confirmation of insipidity this late in life? What fun.
There’s a moment before each time we go out now where I briefly… I dunno, full body panic. I look in the mirror and am like… what? Why would this go to that party? This is an old person. I don’t feel old, the I that sits behind my eyes, the I that cannot shut up inside not for one goddamn minute, the I that is excited by birds and learning languages and the Book of Taliesin. But the him in front of me looks tired. Looks like he has not, cannot, and will not never develop a commanding set of pecs. Destined to be… sort of soft, shapeless… forever? The him in front of me is graying at an alarming rate, the him in front of me has eyelids that are beginning to wander, the him in front of me has to shave his fucking earlobes three times a week. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another, I’m afraid. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another = I’m afraid. What! fun!
We are about to leave for a birthday double header, first to Adam’s then to Ted’s, I try to pick and earring and think… an earring? Do you think you are 12? I look in the mirror and it becomes this funhouse mirror, from the front, fine, and I start to turn and begin to see… my sister? an old man? Have I always been this… deep? My head looks like it goes too far back? When did these wrinkles on my neck appear? Am I shaped like a trapezoid? It goes on. I push past it. We go to the parties and its fine. Or is it. Who knows. I’m haunted by this thing I read where a woman says she always asks “how do other people perceive you?” in job interviews because it’s the make or break question: self-awareness is a key component in wanting to work with someone. “But it’s IMPOSSIBLE to actually know that” I think. And boy do I think. “I cannot actually stop thinking,” I think.
I’m drawing a lot of shit lately, little graphic explorations. Trying to have something for a show in September. I read blurb in a course description about the opportunity collage gives to expand past the limitations of printing capabilities and have a huge epiphany, suddenly invigorated. But then I realize it’s a revelation I actually had months ago, I just never did anything with it. Worried this is what it’ll be forever. Breakthroughs un-acted upon. John and I have this big, knock down drag out emotional come to jesus. Not directed at each other, just both of us losing it at all of it. I tell him that I've been fixated on this lyric from Fever Ray’s song “Kandy” — “what if I die with a song inside?” And I realize that’s what all of this is — the realization that life is probably more than half way over and that if I don’t start drawing now, really drawing, really making, really doing, then I simply will find myself at the end of the track. The I desperate, the me expiring, and time. is. up.
What fun!
Here are the books I read in July.
Books read in June.
Books read in May.
Books read (and re-read) in April
I open my front door and the air is thick with the scent of citrus blossoms. The hills outside the house are shrouded in mist and it's cold again. Rainy today, suddenly cold again - I miss my morning meetings because, reluctant to get out of bed (it being around 55 in the house when I wake up), I fall back asleep after I cancel my alarm. At the river, trees lie capsized in the now-shallow flow after weeks of flooding and birds have returned to the riverbanks. Every tree in bud, soft lime-green leaves showing out while drenched roses bloom.
New baristas at the neighborhood shop, a twinkish boy with a chain of organic pearls, and another with impossibly smooth skin. Today the latter sings along under his breath with the Smiths while making my coffee. Hearing the Smiths I am reminded always of a video I saw where a woman, under the influence of a chemical that suppresses sweetness, tastes a variety of things — coffee, vanilla icecream, chocolate — and experiences them anew and finds the unbound flavor notes surprising. The Smiths remained undiscovered by me during adolescence, Tori Amos and Björk and any number of gay divas more than following the gas law and filling their container, so I hear them today without the unifying top-note of nostalgia that seems to inflate their impact with my friends. I find myself bopping pleasantly along to a ridiculous song that surprises me by turning out to be "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" — a title I've seen tattooed on more than a few friends and former lovers alike and cannot believe this is the song that has changed them so.
Been thinking about the inevitability of death the last couple days again (who needs the Smiths?) I began regularly taking my meds this week so we may just be able to conveniently chalk this up to the newly surging levels of Buspirone and Escriptolam in my blood, along with today's unpleasant eyeball pressure. In any event, there it is just under my last email of the day: you'll die; there it is after dinner: one day this will all just stop. Fortunately, there's always another email, and dessert, coming up.
Books read in March
Two weeks ago my 40th birthday. John takes me to Orsa and Winston for a 5 course meal, the wine pairing perfection. It’s a Michelin single banger, in a small no frills space in downtown. The food is truly excellent but you can also tell that’s where all the money is going, the same shoe string, no-forgiveness budget of all restaurants. I get a candle on my dessert, we also see 4 of the five other dinner parties get candles on their desserts: it’s a popular spot for celebrations, and I wonder, if like a Chuck-E-Cheese the staff is totally inured to any sort of fête in their personal lives at this point. Anyway that’s what my birthday would have been like without John: me attempting to stoic it away as a “it happens everyday” sort of nonchalance, a not-convincing veneer on the solid mass of midlife crisis beneath. I’m feeling this birthday coming and I know I’m aging and life is brief and blah blah blah. Forty!
Laura flies into town just because, crashes with us for a few days. She and I make a clarified milk punch cocktail she designed for me called the Seven Wonders, after the number of spices she infuses the brandy with, but in reference to a shared moment of bliss circa 2018 where we see the music video for Fleetwood Mac’s song of the same name at Moby Dick in the Castro for the first time and are all agog. The alchemy of a schlock song with a schlock video in a schlock bar some how adding up to a moment of perfection that somehow makes me emotional. The VJ that night was a 20 something barista from the Verve near my house in Duboce named Alejandro, a young Poz queer who always cracks me up, we went to cheer him on at his first VJ gig. Somehow knowing he picked it with fresh eyes, pure uncut nostalgia from a time that has informed every aspect of his life adds to this true transformation of lead to solid gold.
We head to John’s folks for a weekday birthday lunch, where my sister’s fam will meet us. I’m nervous because John’s folks house is like a medieval museum full of breakable wonders that I know my nieces and nephews will love but also potentially demolish. I can’t wait for it though, because I know John’s mom has always wanted grandchildren and will simply not be getting them, not ever, and I know she will love my nieces and nephews and they will love her. The biggest tragedy of my life is that my mom will never meet John’s because I know they would have gotten on like a house on fire. I love John’s mom like I love my own, but I know John’s relationship is more fraught, and that our time is limited, and anyway that’s what I’m thinking about as we walk up to the front door, me John & Laura with our big jug of Seven Wonders in a Chemex when the door opens and it’s John’s fam and mine and wait also my sister from Utah and Jon and Danny and Chris and Ian and Pat and Dave and Taylor and Justin and Adam and David and Sam and Miles and Will and it’s a surprise party for me and I never saw it coming not for a single second.
I don’t know how John did it, but I’m glad he did. I would have regretted not doing anything, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put something together.
Books read in February
And that’s the crest of the hill, baby.
The birds, the birds, the birds. I don’t really know when it started but suddenly a few years ago I began being a person who likes birds. Not in the absolutely unhinged way of a beshitted person who owns a cockatiel or an insipid little blue thing with a rubber cement applicator beak that makes kissing noises on certified viral tiktoks, but just in the way of Marge Simpson holding a potato.
You always have something to watch when you like to watch birds. I haphazardly take binoculars to the river, as often as I take my Real Camera, a novice’s entree Sony alpha 2012 something or other. I think sometimes that I should get a Real Lens, something long and sáfarique, but I am shocked to find out that for my now extremely long-in-the-tooth real camera, a real lens will still cost a real $1500. So I content myself with spotting and snagging with my iphone the occasional wild thing on the river: the random night heron, the darting hummingbirds, my beloved annual fledgling osprey.
Months ago I walk the river with John’s parents on a coffee errand. We come across a gentleman with a telephoto pointed at a run of the mill, regular-degular, boring-ass, one-of-10-dozen resident snowy egrets, and he turns to me and says authoritatively “That’s a snowy egret.” and I want to slap the shit out of him. Of course it’s a snowy egret, you absolute imbecile, you dolt. A horse! he may as well say, pointing. My impotent passions and milquetoast fascinations are precious and wondrous, but hold a mirror up to me and I! will! attack!
A few months ago I snag a last minute spot at a local falconer’s demonstration. I follow this falconer not only for bird reasons, but for horny reasons as well, so it’s a real-two-for-one and I do love a bargain. I stand with nine other people and we take turn holding two of three birds: a barn owl, a harris’s hawk. I am keenly aware that this hot falconer is bored as hell, keenly aware of his auto-pilot delivery of terms and cautions and factoids, and keenly aware that I do not care even one little bit because holy shit I am holding an actual owl oh my absolute god I see the owl and it looks at me. It’s face is a perfect porcelain dish made of feathers so fine and delicate that it literally does not seem possible, the smooth velvet white dissolving at the edges into hundreds of flawless fish-scaled feathers no bigger than a sunflower kernel a piece.
I wouldn’t call it life changing and yet was my life not changed?
Cut to now as I buy millet and black oil sunflower seeds in bulk for the camera feeder in our backyard, and anniversary gift from John. And I always have peanuts in my pocket. Crushed kernels for my girls at the coffee shop, whole unshelled for the crows on the river. I find myself having an ear tuned at all times now, aware of the chatter and the delightful comb calls. The other day I sip my coffee and hear something altogether different and see a local mating pair harrying this entirely nonplussed red tail hawk above me on the power line. I am Oren Ishii spectating at the foot, cheering them on.
“Wow they really just come right up to you!” says a familiar barista as I wait for my coffee outside. Later a woman stops in her tracks when she sees one take a bite right from my hand. Last weekend, Marcus and I take our drinks on the banks of the river, and he gasps when he turns around and sees a dozen or so of the house finches waiting patiently directly at my back. I am intolerably fucking smug about all of this.
At home, on the camera, we are at well over 150+ notifications a day as the house finches come and go, triggering the motion sensor and pinging my phone directly. Sometimes they are security cam frozen: bickering kids at the lunch table; sometimes they are too fast for the scanning sensor: biblically accurate seraphim, all wheels of wing.
“I just think they’re neat!”
The news reports with eager glee on a now eight year-old study reporting that “just being within sight of water can calm the body and reduce anxiety.” It is forwarded to me numerous times and each time the only thought in my head is “no fucking shit” as it is, in fact, the only glue holding me together.
My little morning routines, evidence of the rapid descent into geriatrics, to which I must simply surrender: wake up and be horrified at the sounds my knees make, the actual leather stretching sound of near 40 year old sinews over increasingly knobby bones; walk by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, walk by the birds, see the birds, marvel at the birds; get my coffee without having to tell the baristas what I want, tip generously for never having to discuss neither the order nor the predictability of it; drink outside; do my duolingo (680 day streak), feed the birds, imagine myself as a known entity to them, a benevolent demigod bristling with peanuts; gnash my teeth at the reality of shitty little free range LA kids and their shitty little free range LA parents; walk back by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, toss peanuts to the crows.
I fret that, little by little, the predictable little cultural signs of aging are being repackaged and sold back to my silly aging cohort as somehow anything but that. Each night for the past week we bask in the genius of Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face, but I can SEE with Jessica Fletcher clarity that this is just Murder She Wrote for millennials. Each day my friends and I log each other’s Wordle scores in our group chat, our little virtual rest-home reporting of The Jumble. I know that it is only a matter of time when some chic cafe or restaurant in Silverlake will start offering a very cleanly branded “Late Brunch” that we will flock to, realizing too late that this is simply the Early Bird special by another name and that it smells just as sweet. See also: orienting my whole daily routine around feeding the fucking birds. Tuppence a bag, bitch!
Anyway, the light has been lovely lately.
Books read in January.
John, Hex and I spend the weekend in Big Bear with Sam, Justin and Taylor. Sam makes breakfast each morning: bacon and soft-scramble eggs with Boursin; drop biscuits and sausage gravy. John makes dinner and a brunchy nosh: Andy Baraghani’s steak and leek stir-fry, smashed cucumbers; a brie, pear and prosciutto galette; rosemary and thyme focaccia. Taylor makes dinner: a massive dutch oven of slow simmered bolognese. I make snacks and treats throughout the weekend: an asian spin on romesco with a sprawling charcuterie board one day; pears, ski queen cheese and crackers another; warm, blood orange-marinated spicy olives; David Lebovitz’s fresh ginger cake.
The weekend is only slightly marred by a non-stop snow storm, resulting in an impassable road to get out of our rental. On the morning of we spin out of our snow chains twice, then Justin does the same on his car. We shovel almost 500 feet over the course of two and a half hours to finally leave: it rains, snows, and hails the entire time.
I accomplish my second and third renovation projects while John leaves for the second day to work on the float. “Get ready for a surprise when you come home! I’ll have knocked down a wall and installed a water feature.”
He leaves and I jet out the door behind him to the store to make a final decision about a media hutch / console thing. We’ve been using the same, ramshackle ikea sideboards since I moved to San Francisco in 2016, and it’s time for them to go. I’ve got ~$600 in my pocket in the form of a digital Visa giftcard from a work rewards cash-out so I’m trying to do all this for essentially free. Console looks good, so I order it online while in the store for in-store pick up because this digital gift card can only be spent online. Order placed, I also order paint for pick-up from Sherwin Williams, and painting supplies from Home Depot. After running to all those places in reverse order as my phone dings that the times are ready, I make it home, clean out the living room, and dismantle the furniture.
I summon all the deep memories of painting and edge cutting from home renovations since I was 11 and bang out the wall in 45 minutes flat. While that coat sets, I assemble the hutch, make some executive decisions about what will stay in the room, and have a mild freak out over how light the paint looks. I stress for another 20 minutes before noticing that where I started is substantially darker than where I finished, and just decide to trust it. 3 hours later, the paint looks great, and I immediately undo it by painting the second coat, which while wet looks worse than before.
I reassemble the room, get things moved into their semi-final positions (read: 3 inches from where the wall is currently still drying) and hope it dries dark enough for John to be impressed. It’s the least ambitious episode of your favorite home makeover show, but when John comes home, he’s over the moon.
