Commute

Posted on March 1, 2012 by thisblue

My commute takes fifty minutes when there’s no traffic. Here are the times I’m guaranteed not to have any traffic: Saturday at 7 am. I commute to a college campus, generally speaking, in order to teach composition and writing classes. Composition and writing classes rarely take place at 7am on a Saturday.

I have been driving back and forth between Los Angeles and Irvine for years. Years. But I can’t describe the journey between those two points. I can’t list the exits. I can barely summon more than an image or two—downtown at sunset from the bend in the 101, a stretch of car dealerships as you merge onto the 405. Even though by some reasonable calculations I have spent as much time on these roads as I have spent with my child—no really, I did the math—I have blocked those hours out. My brain’s defense mechanism, its defense from itself, is pop music and a profound ability to daydream and disconnect. This isn’t work-lite, it’s not time when anything gets done. It’s lost time. Internal fog. I realized today that I have put serious mental energy into pretending that my commute does not exist.

The traffic in Orange County is called “the Orange crush.” It comes at the intersections of the 5, the 405, the 73, and the 55. The traffic in Los Angeles is called… traffic. It comes mostly downtown. It’s almost impossible to miss both rush hours. If you miss one, you almost always hit the other.

When possible, I take the train. The train runs along the cement flood channel of the Los Angeles river. I pay attention to the river. I can picture it in early morning and early evening light. I can picture the Santa Fe-lite architecture at the Fullerton station, the adobe tiles at Santa Ana, the way the sign outside the Angel’s baseball stadium stands alone in an empty sea of parking spaces at eighty forty am. I know the eerie mass of the zeppelin hangars at Tustin.

But commuting by car brings on a fugue state. The only thing I can tell you with complete certainty about the 5 between Silver Lake and Irvine is that there is a cube. A black cube. Somewhere around the point when the carpool lane begins. It rises on the side of the road, above a movie theater. I have no idea, to this day, what the fuck it’s for. A black cube. Smaller than a house. Larger than a semi.

I tried hard, today, to pay attention: A night at the Motel 6 costs $45. This made me feel old. The turret-shaped diner restaurant that closed a couple of years ago is still closed. The Halloween superstore seems to be doing OK. Plastics covering. Granite. Sofas. These things are all for sale.

I have been writing and thinking about Joan Didion for years. Literally. I have spent serious time analyzing her relationship to Lakewood, the Levittown of the West. I have also read and taught DJ Waldie’s memoir about Lakewood. And all this time, I have driven past the Lakewood exit. But I have never once felt enough ease, or freedom, or entitlement, to turn my car off the freeway at Lakewood. I know what it looks like only from books. Next time I drive, I’m getting off at Lakewood.

The normal, the evolved, grown-up thing to do is to barrel home. I have listened to countless hours of  This American Life, and Louis Menand books, and The Lovely Bones, in the car. I try to pretend: I would be doing this anyway. If I were at home sitting on the couch, I would be reading these books. I’m not here, wasting my life sucking asphalt and fumes.

Once, my cousin gave me a book on tape. I generally share this particular cousin’s taste, but for some reason, this novel was like nails on a chalkboard. I kept listening, for her sake. The voice on the car radio is intimate. It’s just you and the voice, and maybe that forest-green SUV doing the “texting while driving” fish-tail.  The occasional glimpse of a black cube. Just after meeting the author of Jarhead, I re-read it by listening to it in the car, and it was like I had spent a month with the man. But this book from my cousin was making me crazy. Eventually, I looked at the dust jacket for the audiobook. I recognized the actor reading it, the one whose voice had been making me tense up every time I turned the key in the ignition. It was my ex-boyfriend from college.

Tonight, I drove and tried to pay attention to my surroundings. I drove past the Citadel, a fortress masquerading as a mall, complete with stone towers guarded by Sumerian winged beasts and two-story digital-display billboards that flash ads at high speed. These LED sirens call to passing drivers: Crash here and consume! The ads today included:
A pale blue all-text promise of a $9.99 seafood dinner.
The question “DO YOU NEED WINDOWS?” hovering above a grimacing, androgynous floating head.
A background of either fire or fireworks advertising the mall itself: “Exit here!”
The Citadel is the shock-and-awe of outlet malls.

Someday, after I have stopped at Lakewood, identified the cube, and somehow earned my freedom, I will go to the Citadel. I will buy myself some Panda Express fried rice and a pair of cheap high heels. And I will pay attention.

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Mondegreens

Posted on February 23, 2012 by thisblue

A “Mondegreen” is when they play Owner of a Lonely Heart, and you hear “Omar was a lonely horse.”

I learned Home, Home on the Range when I was very young.
I didn’t know what “seldom” meant when I learned the song:
Where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day.

I imagined cowboys, approaching each other on horseback, and saying: “Seldom.”
Then they nodded, disheartened.

After I learned what “seldom” meant, I interpreted the song the same way. I imagined cowboys, saying “seldom,” and feeling greatly discouraged. It made sense to me. For cowboys, the very idea of things happening seldom is a bummer. Cowboys, you see, understand that everything should happen in abundance.

I rode horses as a girl. I grew up believing I would live on a ranch.

Other things I used to believe:
–Everyone wants all the chocolate, all the time, and is just being polite.
–My friends are strong, and brave, and grown up, and therefore, like me, they rarely admit to the fact that they are dying to sing Katy Perry and Shakira.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube This is what I want. This.

I really, truly believed for a long time that everyone secretly knew every word of Ciega, Sordomuda, but was too mature to admit it.

Eventually, after giving myself permission to venture out to koreatown with a few kindred spirits, I realized: Not everyone loves karaoke. Some people find it startlingly akin to standing in a small space with a lot of drunken people shouting at you. But the people of my tribe, those of us who follow Dionysus–we knew better!! We could rent a private room and dissolve into laughter and belt out Guns N Roses!!

Of course, life is a series of mondegreens, and I love many shy people. One of my closest friends happens to do an amazing dancehall rendition of Pour Some Sugar On Me. She’s also a self-described misanthrope. We were once on a train to San Sebastian together, in Spain. A group of guys were playing cards and drinking rum-and-Coke in the café car. I wanted, more than anything, to get in on that game. She convinced me we should go to bed. For the longest time, I believed that she, too, wanted to join the game, but that she had greater wisdom and self-control than I did. It took me most of my adult life to understand: She actually just wanted to go to bed. Some people actually just want to go to bed. I am still allowed to go back to the café car.

P. likes to point out that I always think it’s too late. I have felt that way, for me, for everything, since the moment he met me—since I was fifteen, since forever. It’s too late for karaoke, it’s too late for cards, the party is over and I missed it. Seldom. Damn.

Also, Joan Didion doesn’t sing karaoke. Of this, I am sure.

I called our party last weekend The Last Birthday. I feel, in some very real way, that it was. The Last Party. It’s too late to have any more, there’s not enough light left, not enough time. The problem is, I know all the words to Last Friday Night. And they didn’t have it in the book.

So maybe we all have to go back. Just one more time.

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pop physique

Posted on February 15, 2012 by thisblue

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Darcs Blevins Mosk

Posted on February 11, 2012 by thisblue

I have become convinced that higher powers are communicating with me via the graffiti that covers the walls along my train route.

FREAK
PHOBE
Riot

About half of the landscape I cross is heavy industrial. Last Thursday, I saw a group of men running across a lot. Their paths converged on the point of a lone figure who seemed to be cowering or bending, near a chain link fence. They ran like they wanted to catch him. Was he a thief? Was he a hero? Were they just… playing tag?

The train was going full speed. Just that suggestion of violence, and then they all disappeared before I could see what happened—the whole scene replaced in my field of vision by another beige, windowless, industrial building.

I thought about calling 911. “Operator, I saw men running. Somewhere along the tracks just before Norwalk/ Santa Fe Springs…”

In Union Station, a man leaned into what I had always thought was a plaque but which is evidently an intercom, at the top of the escalator that leads up from the subway. He said, in a loud voice: “Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe.”  I stopped to stare. He smiled at me.

A sheriff followed my gaze. His K9 unit black lab swiveled its head, too. I froze. I didn’t mean to bring suspicion down on the namer-of-dead-celebrities.

Where are U
Ars Forever
MUSE

I often have trouble with the last letter of the word, as the train speeds past:
MentR Dear? or MentL Dead?
Love BitEZ
This one is important: Is it Love BitEZ as in Love Bit EZ, as in, the Love Bit is Easy? or is it Love BitEZ, as in Love Bites?

Darcs Blevin Mosk

Every few months, some poor soul comes through and whitewashes everything. At the beginning of last year, the Army Corps of Engineers whitewashed the entire cement bed of the Los Angeles River. It was important not to offend the space pilots who could see the mile-long graffiti from orbit. The messages aren’t erased so much as obscured. Their ghostly outlines make them seem more pressing.

When the train stops at the Santa Fe-style station at Fullerton, I see a man in slacks bent in half, doing exercise. He twists rapidly from left to right but keeps his face and upper body parallel to the ground. His arms swing from left to right and back. He holds them straight, hands in karate-chop position, but lets them swing with great force, like a windmill. It’s like Jane Fonda tai chi on crack.

No one else at the station looks at the exerciser. A man in a suit talks on the phone. A woman wheeling a suitcase squints purposefully into the distance. I stare at him from my seat, to the extent that I once knocked my head into the train window trying to get a better look. Someday, I’ll get off and ask him if it helps. He’s always there, except for last Thursday, when no one was there except for the men giving the palm trees a haircut.

Steak
or Steal?

Kitten Wags
or Kitten Wages?

Deity
or DeitZ?

LOONY

Definitely loony. H. would have a field day. She would tell me a story that focused on Kitten Wags, Steak, and DeitZ, which she would rhyme with BEETS and then say “I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it.” She would add giants, babies, puppies, a mushroom, a glass slipper and a dignity of dragons.

I should tell her that it’s a dangerous game, looking for hidden messages—Love BitEZ, there is no MUSE, Darcs Blevins Mosk never shows. But I know I won’t. I often miss her on the train.

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paradise

Posted on February 8, 2012 by thisblue

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Building 29

Posted on February 4, 2012 by thisblue

When I first visited UC Irvine, I was already committed to going to grad school there. I thought I should take a look around. We drove down from Los Angeles for the afternoon and spent the entire time lost. Irvine, both the campus and town, were meticulously planned for maximum disorientation. Sinuous, circular streets. No grids. On campus, I asked a few students for directions to the English department. They frowned and scurried away. It was like I had asked where Mordor was— an apt metaphor because Irvine has a dorm called “Middle Earth,” and the students all know where that is. I later discovered that the parking lot we pulled into, the one where we did the asking, was directly behind the Humanities Instructional Building. We were basically looking at the English department. I park there all the time now.

On that day, we gave up. I gazed forlornly out the windshield at some derelict looking bungalows labeled “Graduate Student Housing.” And then we were driving in Orange County again. We passed housing developments with vaguely British names—Windsor Village, Bristol Manor, The Inns at CuteBridge. The landscape seemed to repeat itself, as if on a slow loop. We drove past rows of identical pastel townhouse apartments, fronted by the same formation of sidewalk-hedge-groundcover-wall, sidewalk-hedge-groundcover-pine tree… over and over. I started to panic. It felt like Stepford housing, built to give the impression of human habitation, but soon the robots would attack.

Then we drove past the blimp hangars in Tustin. Two massive closed tunnels rose out of what looked like an abandoned field. They were so big, they didn’t even look like airplane hangars. They looked like spaceship hangars. No English department, I thought. Just quonset huts for aliens. OK. Bring it.

The hangars are 1,088 feet long and 18 stories high, which doesn’t really capture their utterly inhuman scale. They were built of wood in 1942, engineered to protect blimps during WWII from the Santa Ana winds. The blimps gathered intelligence. About submarines. They have shot film there sometimes, like X-Files or Austin Powers. Building 29 was condemned in 2007 when the City Council rejected proposals for “a motorcross facility, a culinary complex, shops catering to the elderly and a futuristic airship building center” to be housed inside (shops catering to the elderly?). In 2009, Tustin Magazine reported that its parent company, WaterMark, had bought the building for one dollar in exchange for a promise to maintain and repair it. A photograph showed the word “TUSTIN MAGAZINE” painted along one thousand foot side. I can’t tell you whether these words are still there. I see the hangars all the time. In my mind, they’re blank and silent.

This year, the parks commission approved a plan to turn the whole area into a park, with ice rinks and a lake. The county plans to continue renting out the hangar. It should continue to play itself. 

On one end of the base, just southwest of the hangars, developers built a mall, years ago. It seems to feature a lot of surf and BMX gear shops. It’s unclear to me whether the new plans will follow through on any of the many ideas for sports and entertainment inside the largest wooden structure in the world. What can it be like to golf or dine in a blimp hangar? It’d  be like hitting the putting green on a moon colony.

I see the base every other day, now, from the train station in Tustin. I particularly like the way it looks backlit at sunset, when the sun is a low-hanging blood orange and the distant skyscrapers look like a handful of Legos between the hulking silhouettes of the hangars.

I never thought, when I first saw them, that I would still be here this many years later. I started graduate school thinking it would be three years, at the outside. Somehow I signed on for another degree, had a kid, was influenced by some things at the expense of others… We build colossal structures, thinking we have an eye on the future, but then it turns out we have planned for the need to accommodate zeppelins.

On my way downtown in Los Angeles, most days, I drive under Bunker Hill, and on days when everyone forgets to turn on their headlights, it’s dark in the tunnel. Then someone slows down and the red brake lights shoot up over the reflective tiles, like blood into water. I think about what it must have looked like inside the hangars when they were full of blimps, twelve of them at a time, sighing and outgassing helium. I wonder, without wanting an answer, how many hours I’ve spent daydreaming on the train to Tustin. I wonder what it would be like to go shopping on the moon.

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trophy girl

Posted on February 2, 2012 by thisblue

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Oatmeal

Posted on January 30, 2012 by thisblue

This morning, I put H.’s breakfast bowl of oatmeal in the microwave, because she said she wanted it heated up. She proceeded to scream at me because I hadn’t let her push the buttons on the microwave. When I told her I hadn’t known that she wanted to push the buttons, she could push them now, she screamed that she wanted to push them the first time. We finally agreed that she could reheat the bowl. She pushed the buttons. But when I put her bowl of breakfast oatmeal down on the table, she screamed that it was too close to her. I moved it. She screamed because now it wasn’t in front of her on the table. Then she got up to jump up and down, to emphasize her point. When she almost hit her head on an open drawer, I moved to close the drawer, which infuriated her further, and she laid down on the floor and let the floor have it. When I asked her what was wrong, we were back to not having pushed the buttons the first time. She told me not to look at her. At a total loss, I moved away. She wailed, “Mama, stay!”

It feels unfair, in a way, to record these kinds of days. She missed her dad this morning, who was away at a conference. Most days, she’s not quite like this. I actually made her let me take her temperature (normal). At one point, I lost it a little. I am trying, I told her. I am trying to give you what you want…

I once read a parenting blog entry that made me so angry, I pretty much stopped reading parenting blogs. It was an interview with a woman who had a high-level position in finance. Yes, she was a banker, so, perhaps I’m biased. But when she was asked for tips about how to get your kids out in the morning, she said something about making organic oatmeal in large batches on Sunday night so that you could spend your precious minutes in the morning “eating and talking.” “All you have to do is reheat  it, and maybe slice some fresh strawberries into their bowls.”

This, I would like to point out, is what I was doing this morning. Reheating organic oatmeal. I even sliced some strawberries, for snack. And here is my tip, for working parents: become a banker, get a fat bonus, rape the global economy, let the American taxpayer bail you out, get self-righteous about how you still deserve that bonus, pay other people to drive your kids to Chinese lessons after school, and then, when you feel a twinge of guilt about your class status, work through that guilt by feeding your children organic food and paper over your moral bankruptcy by putting out some kind of June Cleaver fantasy of yourself in a parenting blog.

OK, definitely biased.

After we got through breakfast, H. wanted oatmeal for snack, so I was holding a glass bowl of it against me in the elevator at daycare, and I spilled milk down the front of my shirt. Other than that, I was feeling pretty good. We were at daycare. Our hair was not sticky. We were both wearing clothes. And then another dad got into the elevator with us. He held a pair of tiny pink shoes in his hand. Obviously he had forgotten them in the car and was heading back in. He wore jeans and a t-shirt. Just like me. But for some reason, to me, in the elevator this morning, that other child’s father was a vision of efficiency and grace. Just the way he held his keys, loose in one hand. He probably has two kids. He probably has triplets, and he published his third book last year. He is everything I’m not. Unstained, with perfect oatmeal.

My tip for working parents: Wait until after five, then you can open the bourbon.

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skeleton lady

Posted on January 25, 2012 by thisblue

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I do the best imitation of myself

Posted on January 23, 2012 by thisblue

A long time ago in New York, I saw Ben Folds Five at a small club in the East Village. I held onto the name of the club for a long time, but my brain has now given up on such categories of information. I remember a standard-issue black box, with sticky floors and a lot of posters. I was a generally shat-upon college intern at Time Out New York  that summer. Out of pity, I think, the marketing manager had given me her laminated pass to a music festival, plus the names of a few maybe-someday bands. The pass had her photo on it, and the only feature I shared with her was our gender. My California ID not only didn’t match the pass but also showed that I was twenty. And yet somehow, I saw some bands. The bouncer that evening on Avenue B squinted at me and said, “yeah, right.” But he let me in.

Ben Folds came on stage and sprayed pheremonal energy and sweat everywhere. He climbed all over his piano, which seemed to fill the room. I saw a couple of other bands whose sound I liked, bands who kicked at their gear and closed their eyes on the high notes. But that night, Ben Folds believed. He got down into his own music in that way that combines total release with pure control. I think it’s easier for men, that balance of wide appeal and intensely personal self-expression. For men, the rules about what is and is not sexy are slightly more lax. I now associate Ben Folds with a certain brand of late nineties irony, Rockin’ the Suburbs, the clueless chump you seem to think I am… But any rockstar has to play with charisma, and that night, he was very indie nerd testosterone.

Over the next few years, my socioeconomic demographic would come out big for Ben Folds. But I didn’t know that then, and I don’t tend to think of my own musical taste as particularly trend-setting. I was by myself in a club in New York. The vague recommendation of the marketing manager was all I knew about this odd, piano-centric band with funny lyrics. I stood there oscillating between euphoria and self-doubt. I let strangers jostle me. I steadfastly refused to give up my place near the stage. The crowd was full of music critics, industry insiders, real people who lived in New York and had real jobs… but suddenly I didn’t care what they thought. I wanted to run up to the stage and dance on that piano.

In an absolutely uncharacteristic move for me that summer, I found the guts to walk up to Ben Folds afterwards. I was burning with it. I had to tell him how much I liked his music. I had nothing in mind beyond pure admiration. I am technically no longer a teenager, I told myself. I have a pass around my neck that says Time Out. In the dark you can’t tell the lady in the picture is blond. I am paying rent on a sublet in New York. I have a right to be here. I can do this.

Ben Folds was incredibly nice. I managed to convey enthusiasm without drooling. We were chatting! Magic! And then he asked me if I lived in New York. I didn’t live anywhere! I was still in college! Keeping it cool, I said: I live in New Haven… He proceeded to tell me where he was playing next.  And where and when he would be in New Haven. And that maybe he would see me there? if I came backstage, to let him know?  The wheels in my barely post-adolescent brain strained with the effort. Not only had I managed to play the role of adult and Time Out writer convincingly, but this rockstar I had just met seemed to be asking me to come hang out with him.

As soon as I realized this, I blew it. I started thinking frantically about how I couldn’t get into the clubs he was telling me about, how I had no fake ID, how I was just an intern, how technically I was living with my boyfriend that summer, even if that wasn’t going particularly well. I felt like he could see all this on my face—that my face screamed confused college intern—which struck me as deeply shameful. So I froze. I got awkward and moved away. Before I even got out of the club, I started beating myself up, rehearsing all the ways that the more savvy, city, boarding-school kids I went to college with would have known how to respond. Since then, Ben Folds’ recorded music has never had quite the same panty-dropping effect on me, but I still like it. His voice gives me a warm feeling and reminds me gently that wanting something badly often makes me totally screw it up.

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