swallowed in the sea

Can you ever know someone fully? Are people like a body of water that you can swim to, dive down, and eventually scrape the bottom with your fingertips before gasping for air at the surface? Or are humans more like an ocean, where you are capable of amassing various bits of knowledge—even extensive amounts—but never able to fully know the craters and crevasses that litter the ocean floor? In the end, are there depths to people where secrets hide like deep sea fish, drifting along and existing in their own private ecosystem?

Can a person be discovered, mapped, charted, and documented? Or are there some things you’ll just never know? I ask this because I realized today, for the first time, that there might exist an unreachable depth to people that you (or I) will never be able to see. This depth could be surprisingly shallow, as in the case of my encounter this morning.

A friend was bustling around the kitchen, filling a water bottle, grabbing her keys, heading for the door. We were chitchatting like friends do, and I asked, simply, “Are you going somewhere?” (because she was freshly scrubbed and chomping at the bit, and one would only assume it wasn’t merely to travel to the living room).

A pause.

Hesitance where there shouldn’t have been any.

“I’m going to the park.” A stilted answer. Eyes shifty. Back turned slightly.

“By yourself?” (I, of course, hadn’t caught on to the shift in social dynamics yet.)

“…Yeah…”

Subject change. Are those your new glasses? Yes. Oh, they’re nice…you saw a movie last night? That’s fun—wait, don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to hear the end!

Scurrying for the door.

Me: “I wasn’t going to tell you the end of—”

Her: “I have to go! Don’t tell me anything! Ah!”

Her voice was loud; too loud. She was dashing for the door in the midst of casual pleasantries. Behavior: sketchy.

Me: “Wait, are you really going to the park by yourself?”

Her (after a long pause): “No…I have to run errands…Ihavetogobye!” Slam.

I returned to my book, but was interrupted by a phone call ten minutes later. She was apologizing profusely. She felt cornered when I asked her where she was going. She claimed pride as the culprit and explained hastily that she hates it when people ask her where she’s going. (Why should I have to tell them where I’m going? It’s my business—why do people even ask? Why do they care? Just let me go!) Perplexed, an apology already forming on my tongue, I was beat to the punch:

“I’m sorry, I’m mean. Forgive me? Promise you’ll forgive me.” She pleaded, her voice crackling over the phone.

I paused, and maybe a sound escaped—not even a word or syllable. Just a sound. She didn’t waste any time.

“I can’t hang up without hearing you say it. Do you forgive me? Please forgive me. I’m so prideful, such a jerk, I’m such a—please forgive me?”

“Yeah…uh, yeah. I forgive you…” The words felt shallow and tasteless leaving my mouth, as though cruise missiles with no ammo and no target. The words just sort of hung there between two points, lynched on phone lines, useless and without purpose. She snapped them up right away.

“Good. Great! Well, I’ll be back later in the afternoon!” Her voice was chippy, staccato against my eardrum. She hung up.

She still never told me where she was going.


I realized then, in the disquieting lull following the conversation that oftentimes my friend goes somewhere deep inside of herself, and I have never known where that was. I don’t use the term “best friend” lightly, but she is close—perhaps the closest person in my life right now—and there is an expectation that as you grow in a friendship (or relationship, or what have you) that you will reach new depths with that person eventually. Discover new things. And likewise, find yourself more fully known.

Today I realized that it might not actually be possible. I felt like I’d been ambushed by a secret everybody knows. The apology, the initial infraction, the entire ordeal; it seemed as though these secret cues had been there all along, like white noise or sonic waves that buzz below our subconscious. Today they became glaringly apparent as I realized that I had, perhaps, exhausted my oxygen supply and would have to surface, defeated, never having seen the ocean floor.

It seems that I had the naïve idea that people want to be known. Apparently that isn’t always the case.

It seems that certain people knew it all along.

Today on "I'm in Hell" talk radio...

This week I found myself in the nightmare version of my life: creeping through interminable traffic on my neverending commute to work (advanced training: Rancho to Torrance=4 hours of daily forehead-bashing against the steering wheel).

I did find considerable inspiration in the various forms of tagging along the 110 (getting your name on an overpass, I'm told, is like the holy grail of punk kids everywhere. Ah hah.) ... however, my audio french lessons could only get me so far (I can now say, "I'm very tired." But I don't know how to write it because, as I mentioned, it's audio french lessons).

Let me get to the point: www.sigalert.com could save your life, my life, or anyone's life who has ever braved the concrete at 8am on a monday.

Summer Reading List

This is ambitious. I realize that. However, I am an unstoppable bookbuying force to be reckoned with.

Hopefully by December I'll read these.






(One star means I'm reading it, two stars means I've finished it)

"The Sound and the Fury" William Faulkner**
"Errands" Judith Guest
"The Catcher in the Rye" JD Salinger**
"In the Lake of the Woods" Tim O'Brien**
"July, July" Tim O'Brien**
"Shampoo Planet" Douglas Coupland**
"Generation X" Douglas Coupland
"The Sun Also Rises" Ernest Hemingway
"In Our Time" Ernest Hemingway
"Breakfast of Champions" Kurt Vonnegut
"Mrs. Dalloway" Virginia Wolfe
The entire Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
"The Photograph as Contemporary Art" Charlotte Cotton*
"On the Road" Jack Kerouac*

blinking

Sometimes I feel as though I have just woken up and stepped, yawning and half-lidded, into the forehead-tightening brightness of the sun. In times of transition, the “before” appears as though in a dream, hazy and forgetful, with no trace of history preceding it. It’s like when the phenomenon of being awake—receptive, senses firing, nerve endings buzzing—comes as a shock after an especially deep sleep.

College felt like a dream—no, all of life felt like a dream. Cloudy, covered in a thin film that prevented me from recognizing reality. But now that comfort-cloak is gone, and I find myself sensing everything: I wake up from a dead sleep to the faintest thud of a door closing somewhere, and I am convinced—convinced—that finally the world is ending. I suppose I’d been waiting for the end of the world forever.

I equate post-collegiate reality to the curt, shallow sting of eyedrops invading the warm, squishy balanced ecosystem of an eye. It isn’t a question of whether or not this equation is normal so much as whether or not someone, somewhere has realized this very same thought. It’s a matter of the vulnerable, bashful way we quickly avert our eyes when our soul collides with another soul begging the same questions. Suddenly vulnerability doesn’t seem brave anymore. Now instead it retracts with anemone-quickness, disbelieving that anyone, anywhere could be feeling or thinking the same thing at the same time. Alienation is an ironic companion.

And now I sit, watching the leaf of a table plant quiver to the pulsing rhythm of a DVD humming in the distant, distant living room. For the briefest of nanoseconds, I toss around the possibility that the quivering is really a pithy precursor to the earthquake that will swallow California whole—instead of a houseplant shivering to the music like a hipster hopped up on vodka-and-Redbull. Why the sudden panic?

In post-collegiate life, I am suddenly aware of my own responsibility—and subsequently, my frailty. Fragility. Humanness. The porcelain-ed way I’ve constructed my life, and the quickness with which any little bump could shatter the dream. These days, instead of cruising around donning the armor of invincibility, I busy myself trying to build thicker skin. Perhaps one day I will become calloused like so many other not-quite-young young adults who set out to protect themselves when they woke up one day to that bright, hot sunlight. Perhaps not. Is callousness a negative thing? Or is it simply the wizened, indestructible fortress within which a soul is cowering, still asking those same questions, still looking for answers.

The above was posed as a question, but like so many questions, ended before its completion. A self-refuting inquiry.

Now I am wide awake, blinking into the white-hot brightness of the sun. And I stumble into post-collegiate life, buzzing with the prickly sense of my raw-nerved existence. Is the end of the world truly immanent? Perhaps. But until then, the quivering houseplant isn’t the precursor to impending doom. It is simply colliding with the sonic waves of the DVD player, and so I collide with life, blinking hard, hoping. Hoping.

glimpses

Hover

This morning we hurtled past crumbling concrete freeways—stately, but always one earthquake away from utter destruction, much like many midlife crisis-ed adults I’d witnessed in the past few months. They—freeways and adults—clung to the shreds of their former grandeur like a crow clutching the remains of a hamburger wrapper, flapping far above the transient concrete grid of Los Angeles proper. And Los Angeles, like its freeways and adults, has reached her midlife and now stands one earthquake away from a meltdown.

And there we were, choosing to exit those neurotic byways in favor of the Pasadena neighborhood en route to the 110, a route deliciously contoured by the shadows of a million edible trees. The blue velvet shadows cloaked the decaying sidewalks, midnight blue eye shadow on a half-lidded hung-over, has-been. Houses swayed decadently in the early morning breeze, beckoning the drooping palms with their curb appeal. A siren call for the Starbucks-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away set.

Oftentimes I find myself losing the subject of a description in the description itself. Adjectives surround nouns and are swallowed by verbs, and around and round we go until an entire paragraph proclaims much but explains little.

To put it simply, we drove through Pasadena en route to the 110 South. But again, I was lost, mind over matter, beside myself, watching those houses and palm trees and edible shadows dissolve, their atoms reassigning themselves into new beings—literary beings, shapes described by adverb and adjective instead of shape and color. I wanted to eat it all, devour every last shadow, and hold it inside of myself like a quarter cast to the bottom of a pond. I wanted those palm trees to grow inside of me, stretching me thin and brittle. I wanted to feel the perfect morning air surging inside of myself, flowing within and without, replacing white blood cells and bone marrow. I wanted the silence outside and the whir of passing cars and the faint radio inside and the voice of my friend talking about gangs and respect and tagging—I wanted it to be inside my head—be in my head in place of my brain. In place of my brain, I wanted silence and whir, faint and gangs; frothy and bubbly inside my skull. I wanted it to grow within me, a thriving, ancient metropolis, en route to the 110 South.

Los Angeles is great that way; it really makes you want something. When you’re letting that warm, golden mess seep into your pores, you find yourself really wanting. Los Angeles really wants to figure herself out, but can’t. She is suffering the forever identity crisis. It makes you want to take the whole thing in, let it inhabit you for awhile, and figure out that identity crisis. You just can’t put your finger on it, but you find yourself desiring answers—not for yourself, but for that grand, sunbaked, wrinkled city constantly shrouded in the smoke of its own smog cigarette.

Sometimes you just want all the air in the world to be inside of you so you can blow that smoke from her face and say, “Get a grip, Los Angeles. The graffiti’s not so bad.”

To which she’d cough, and with a wan smile, reply, “True, but all that sun’ll kill you.”

Mozart

Sometimes I wonder if the life I lead is a small one. I realize that smallness isn’t such a terrible thing, but is it small because I haven’t been brave? Today I drove home from work, Jimi Hendrix’ Blues causing wheels to rotate and ignitions to fire. The mountains to my left seemed so immense, so foreboding, resting in their bigness. Smog hovered around their flexing muscled foothills and the only thing I could think was eyes on the road.

I recognize safety in my day to day meanderings, but it has left a sour taste in my mouth as of late. When I was younger, I would play the piano to feel courageous. For some reason, beating the hell out of those ivories, coaxing the song into a slow build, a dizzying, rushing finale, and an eventual pounding baseline, seemed so brave. It seemed unsafe because the song wasn’t going to play itself, man, and I owed it to Mozart or whoever to play it just this once, and get it right. But sometimes the melody would just move, against my formal expectations, notes slipping, cascading into shameful defeat. Other times my fingers would fly, muscles twitching faster than the neurons in my brain could fire, and my hands were truly something on their own. I would create this infinitely delicate hurricane of noise, notes rising and falling.

But even still, I only played what was placed in front of me—evidence of another person’s bravery. I’d be terrified of letting myself create something of my own. At my most daring, I am merely recreating. I’m a copycat, living someone else’s life and parading it as my own.

Heartbreaking, really. And perplexing; how, exactly, did I create this cozy, contented tomb for myself? Afraid of failure, perhaps—although that seems to be more to the tune of a psychoanalytical cop-out ballad.

But there it exists—that half-lidded, sleepy little girl within me, deep down anxious and terrified and thoroughly complex. But isn’t even complexity just a mask to hide the terrifying truth of being fully known? Or maybe it’s that being fully known also means being fully exposed. Suddenly, she’s not so complex anymore. Only fearful and safe. Singing to the tune of someone else’s song. (writing clichés that even Cal Contrite would scoff at).

The moon hung at half-mast tonight, a single star dangling from its drooping earlobe in the immense twilight. Somewhere in that vastness I felt very much lost and out of place. It seems that in immensity the only people who belong are the renegades, the brave souls, the desperados. Where, then, for the girl spooked by her own shadow, or the shadow of the unknowable present state, or the shadow of things within herself she doesn’t like?

And so I’ll wait and hope that someday I shall be brave. I hope that I can pound those keys with abandon and no ulterior motive. In the end, hope is the bravest thing I have. So I’ll wait for that sleepy moon and those dangling stars in that too-big sky, and when those constellations wink back at me, I’ll sing out at the top of my lungs.

4:57

4:57am. The clock blinked back at me, unflinchingly. A sort of stillness had settled on the house that only occurs in the no-man’s-land predawn hours. It only occurs when you’re sober, I reminded myself as I slid across the floor, hunkering down at the sink and downing two glasses of water, one after the other.

There were two stars before. Two of every star, twinkling in the hazy blue-black Alta Loma sky. I remember laying, feeling incredibly heavy, incredibly enraptured with gravity and all its magical forces, and observing the sky. “It’s not fully blue, and not fully black…but it’s both. Equal parts of both.”

“Yeah…” was all Winn would reply, the sort of obligatory response that could care and care less. He took a drag of a cigarette. “I vowed to stop smoking the other day. I came up here, broke all my cigarettes in half. You got any tape?”

“Tape?”

A light flickered and burned into the sky. “Never mind, it works alright.” He took a drag, long and slow.

“I didn’t inhale before, I just held it in my mouth.” I remember saying. I reclined against the pavement, feeling nothing but the two-star phenomenon in front of me.

He thrust his broken cigarette at me. “Inhale. I won’t laugh if you cough.”

So I invited the smoke into my lungs, probably the only unaffected part of me. I could feel the toxins in my system, burning, swirling, turning and releasing. I didn’t cough.

“I don’t feel anything.”

I felt everything. I felt the weight of gravity and the unbearable lightness of nothingness; I felt two stars and two skies and two curling smoke stacks within my lungs. The city skyline flickered indifferently. I remember making observations, but not as myself. I was a specter outside of myself, musing at this and that, not feeling gravity, not feeling the woozy, freewheeling, freefalling double-earth that I washed down with another sip of Port. From Portugal, I stated when I bought it. I didn’t even get carded.

Now I was its muse, or perhaps its victim, but either way, I was floating outside of myself, leaning into oblivion. Winn poured himself another glass as I waxed poetic and flung my arm back, knocking the wine glass I’d purchased earlier that day onto the pavement. I could hear the glass breaking, recovering against the tire of my car.

“Did it break?” Winn was chewing a candy bar. Hershey with almonds.

I said nothing, instead hurling the broken glass into the big city night, glinting into the atmosphere, shards of glass piercing the dusty earth. I took another drag of his broken cigarette. “Here’s to not smoking.” I squinted into the sky. “I can see Sagittarius, but barely…” my voice trailed off. For the first time, I didn’t care. The constellations yawned and continued in their path down the horizon. They didn’t care, either.

For the first time, I felt fully human. Fully alive. And fully inebriated. It didn’t matter that the details smeared into one another or that it was going to be a restless night. The only thing that mattered was broken glass, broken cigarettes, broken constellations.

And now the only thing that mattered was that glass of water. From the sink I gazed into the backyard. There was the impossible stillness again. I was the antithesis of it, unable to sleep. But there it was, all the same, coaxing me back to bed where I would soon blend into the unmoving scenery. I suppose I should acquiesce, but for some reason, devouring the stillness instead seems like a more viable option. Still outside of myself, but in a different way. Still making those observations, but only in my head. Still feeling that cigarette smoke in my lungs, but only in memory.