Running Through Little Tuscany

Pavlova, Is It Important to Have Friends, Palm Springs and more

Pavlova

Trying to remember my dear friend's favorite dessert. Was it Pavlova? I can’t remember. She dropped it off for me one time in Minneapolis on a day too humid to eat. I wanted to try it again, I thought, as I tuned into the pitter-patter of rain against the tin awning outside my kitchen window. I used to hate these awnings for they are ugly and worn. But after my first summer in this apartment, I understood them more. It stays so cool indoors, no one believes me when I tell them I am okay without air conditioning. I’ve even come to love them in the winter—when they amplify the sounds of the valley healing. From beyond my front door I hear the echo of water splattering inside the portico; the wind blows it in and pulls it down against the tile steps. It’s very quiet inside my home. I am cocooned by all sorts of out-dated materials, viscous stucco over a thick, adobe stone. My balcony doors, sticky and gaping at the bottom, the only real entry-point to the world, as I can get a glimpse of it from up high and observe incognito. See, if I were to go out the front door I wouldn’t have a clue what was going on.  

Almost Five Years a Woman

There is a liberal arts college that I did not attend, but have passively and accidentally formed a strong alliance with since graduating from my own. Most of my inquiries into the social dynamics at this institution lead me back to a lesson I’ve learned about “loud side” and “quiet side.” These two non-competing sects of the student body are characterized by the side of the dining hall one circulates. But I quickly discovered that these terms have little to do with dining hall politics; “loud side” or “quiet side” is an easy and universal means to convey someone’s general flavor. I have friends from both “sides,” and a few who cross over between the two. To one of these cross-over types I ask: “So it’s my assumption that while people from ‘loud side’ may not know people on ‘quiet side,’ everyone on ‘quiet side’ knows everybody ‘loud side.’ Is this right?” 

I had recently attended a party in mid-city where I had met a serious number of “quiet side” kids and given my very bizarre and blithe attitude towards my social life lately, I had a feeling that they may infiltrate my future world as somewhat key figures. 

“Maybe,” my friend said. “But it would be more common for a quiet side person to know a loud side person because they are, well, loud.” He paused for a minute to make sure this statement checked out against all the people he knew. “Unless of course you are deep quiet side. Then you might not know anybody at all.” It had started to rain in Los Angeles and on his end I could hear the wind tunnel effects of New York City. 

I thought for a bit, given this new information, where I would have fallen on the scale. “I guess then,” I said, “I would have been a quiet person on the loud side.” He agreed and we moved on to other, more devastating gossip. 

For me, wintertime in Los Angeles is a very special time of year. It is interesting that in such a “world-class” city, this season demands that its citizens return to a more ancient way of life. For many of us in 1950s Spanish-style dwellings, the heat emitted from a small unit at the front of the house is unlikely to make it all the way to the back of the house, the bedroom, and it therefore provides no value at all. It is therefore important to stock up on wool socks, flannels and hot water bottles during the these months. I can suggest, from my experience, placing two piping hot water bottles at the foot of one's bed, and sleeping with the third atop one’s stomach or under one’s arm. I can also suggest purchasing a plush robe to keep on the bathroom door for easy access after turning off the shower. It is otherwise helpful to have the kettle on low most of the day and fling the shades open immediately after waking to allow the sunlight to cast warm patches across the floor. In my morning shower I slide the small window above the soap dish open. The compact pane is colored in with blue sky and wisps of Cypress green. Steam spirals into the foreground; I watch it travel out into the day. 

A lot of people like to groan about the cold in Southern California. But if it weren’t for these sixty days of chill, we would not experience the same degree of feeling when walking outdoors and letting the sun cast its rays across one’s face. We are so accustomed to the sunshine here that we forget that it could go away—we could be left trembling on earth-cold tile, waxen and deficient. If it weren’t for the winter, for the necessity of the sun to warm our homes and our faces, there would be no way to differentiate those of us bought by Hollywood from those of us who remain free. Like the others, we would forget about a reality that does not include some stupid rendition of ‘365 days a year of sunshine and bliss!’ The winter keeps us just enough on edge from reclining back into an avocado tree and saying, here I am in February! No worries, no problems! It’s my preference, for this reason, to keep the heat off. To freeze a little bit. It is a natural part of the human experience to endure the seasons in this way. Otherwise, the warmth of the sun on my back would never please me.   

There is a wildly crackbrained market in Los Angeles, which some people have the nerve to call a “grocery store.” In the last several years it’s become popular to wear this market’s branded apparel out in public as if this were not only “fashionable,” but also a normal thing to do. Like all things once cool, it intrigues me that once something has transcended the public realm to a degree so obvious that one might bump into a man wearing that brand’s sweatshirt in a beaten-down pharmacy off La Cienega, that there remains people who continue to believe it's effective to drop this brand’s name as a sort of shorthand for style, opulence and success … when in my mind, this place stopped carrying any weight in 2018 when people began to ask me if I’d “been there.” It’s rather fascinating to watch those who teased you for spending too much money on rice from a supplement store they can’t pronounce turn around four years later and post a ten-photo carousel, sneaking the logo on the brown bag into every single one. “Groceries, bitch!” The caption might say. 

Salad Bowl 

In the morning we went to H Mart. Everyone needed various things. We are surprised to find, out on the streets of New York, that actually, everything is open. I feel old remembering a time when there was no place to go on New Year's Day. It must have been before the advent of this certain breed of “productivity” which we seem to have chained ourselves to for no sensible reason. Well in any case, we went shopping. 

We had, the night before, spent our time playing “salad bowl,” a game I am convinced brings everyone closer to their personal truth. It also helps to clear up certain college misnomers, as well as rumors which had perhaps never been unraveled. For instance, a story I had spun about Alexi and her relationship with a Warriors basketball player. In that particular case, however, I can’t remember the parts I had made up versus the parts that a combination of Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and a man named Marrell could verify as fact. A lot of Australian slang was thrown around in this particular game; I learned what a “Bogan” meant and I learned about the precautions one must take to avoid getting “swooped” by a Macaw. I wrote down “Jacob’s Mining Town” and put it into the mix. 

When it struck midnight, Ella wanted to go out into the street and scream, as is customary in Park Slope. No, Diva said. That is not done in this neighborhood. So, we discussed our varying stages of progress in therapy and then went to bed. In the morning my friend used her intercom to call upstairs for breakfast. “Do you want coffee or tea?” She asked. There were also bagels and a variety of cream cheeses made by both animals and plants. The rain came down and we made almond butter cookies. We were careful not to drop any of the chocolate crumbles on the ground for the dogs to find. Natalie and I poured coffee from the percolator. Ella chose tea. 

At the table I corrected my friend. “Not resolutions, manifestations.” I said. If there is a God: save me from myself. Later, we put our boots on and went out to find pens. 

Hot Guy in Lassens

Eve Babitz dies and then Joan Didion dies the following week. Oh no, we are left alone in the Irish countryside with Sally Rooney. 

My friend asks me for directions to get to a certain location that I am trying, desperately and inappropriately, to keep under wraps. He’s asked me for a landmark to map to, but because this is just how my brain works I tell him: take the Hollywood Freeway north to Barham. It is a very quick exit, beware. Take a right onto Barham and then right again. Keep veering left until you get to the top of hill, where you will see an ugly, pink house which will somehow sell for three million dollars. People are very distrubed by speedy drivers here, so slow down. Once, a man threw a bag of dog shit at my windshield. You will see cars parking to hike Wisdom Tree when you get around the bend. Go past them and pull over to the right. I hope you brought seeds for the deer. There is another way to go, and although it is much more beautiful and mountainous, it does not seem fit for an Uber driver.

There is a hot guy in Lassens who dresses like you. My friend texts me this early on in the new year. I had yet to return to Los Angeles, as it had been annoying me. The pandemic had it overrun with people who saw the east village empty out and Santa Monica fill up. People who had just been seen down Houston in boots and coats donned swimsuits like idiots in the winter, and they equated these people with trailblazers. Los Angeles is a big city, I remind myself. And yet, the energy in the dead air has changed. It is, in fact, alive now and I hate it. It has become polluted with closeted Capricorn freaks. Bouncing from one appealing place to the next one, purchasing a showroom set-up lifestyle, tuning into the particular lexicon and mood. At best, choking down extracts and tonics that the rest of us actually like. At worst, considering themselves pioneers of the West, real individuals. Eventually, this migration will kill us all. The east and the west are not positioned to assimilate. The zeitgeist is very different. The kind of “fun” we have in Los Angeles is not like the kind of “fun” had in New York. It is infused with loneliness, as that is our way of life. Distance is a framework within which we assess wants versus needs, where we weigh the degree of immediacy. Both cities require grit, I believe that’s why this certain echelon of people keeps switching from one to another, sweating it out for a “bi-coastal” life. I wish they would give into Miami. They are wrong in thinking they can escape hard work. 

Regarding the hot guy in Lassens, I reply to my friend: what is he wearing? 

“Dickies,” she says. “And an oversized crewneck sweater.” I reworked her statement to make it clear that the hot guy in Lassens does not dress like me, but that I dress like hot guys who shop at Lassens. 

Little Tuscany

Riding an electric bike through Highland Park

So I’m riding this electric bike through Highland Park and I’m making one of those “In” and “Out” lists that have become popular. The activity in and of itself, belongs in the “Out” column. In: electric bikes. Out: people. 

Montana

I made a pit stop in Montana on my way back to declining Los Angeles. The wind felt really nice out there. The snow lay thickly and evenly over the world. Everything was infinite and at night the stars fell over the Earth in a way which made me feel like I lived inside of an upside down bowl. The pine trees surrounding the house varied in species. Some of the needles drooped and some did not. In the middle of the day, with the sun out, we would periodically hear a shelf of snow collapse onto the branch below it. There were so few sounds around us that when this happened we could hear it all the way from inside the home theater with the tomb doors shut and a movie playing. When I was little, and we had just moved to Minnesota from the East, I assumed that because only North Dakota divided Minnesota and Montana, Montana was our neighbor. But there was so much that I didn’t yet understand about the West, the Midwest and the rapid degree to which the U.S. landscape morphs into something entirely different. With it, of course, one’s sense of personhood and long-standing opinions on certain types of livelihoods. 

In the times I’ve been to Montana since, I see the unmistakable contrast between both places. I notice it mostly in the way it feels to walk on the ground. There is a spongy quality to land in the Midwest—even in the most Northern corners, even in the deadest season up by Canada. In Montana the Earth is hard. I can feel the core in Montana more than any other place I’ve been to so far. Heat radiates up through a rubber-bottomed boot. There is no forgetting that one walks on the Earth in Montana. 

More Texas Tax Stuff

Like every other rich Californian, the CEO of the company I work for is moving to Texas. He keeps sending me information, via email, explaining the various tax benefits that have pushed him over the edge. These emails typically arrive with the subject line: more texas tax stuff. He been spoiled by the fact that I fulfilled the role as interim CFO at my last job. Like most people, he assumed it meant something. In response to his email, I tell him it seems like he’s making the “right move.” 

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel terrible about it,” he said. “Just, you know, California really needs to keep their hard-hitting taxpayers.” Tax evasion seemed perfectly alright to me, unless of course I ever ran into the type of person who actually didn’t pay their taxes. Though I felt okay about consoling him; had already made a lot of money and now tried to give other people a nice place to work. In that way, I suppose he was allowed to fuck off to Texas and leave the rest of us behind in this dump.

I’ve known a handful of people being tracked closely by the IRS. Their life seems really funny to me. I am always asking them very technical questions: how does the IRS log into your Chase account? Do you give them your password? I never got clear answers; whether it was because these questions were too stupid to warrant a reply or because the reality was just far more complex … I didn’t know. It also always seemed like perhaps there simply were details that these people just didn’t like to reveal. I doubted the legality of all the things around them. I would sit in the kitchen while they pulled an espresso from their Pasquini and wonder if I would caffeinate myself fraudulently. It was yet another exercise in my life as a person within this delicate and collapsible tier; one where I knew enough about the positions above and below me to relate appropriately to most everyone, but lacked a certain level of truly exquisite and outrageous experience to understand, exactly, certain motivations. 

In Orange County I Stayed in the Slow Lane

It’s Saturday and the sun is setting into an uncharacteristically clear sky. A high wind advisory kept people off the beach, the sand whipped periodically without warning and traffic on the PCH was getting pushed around. There was, in addition, a rising fear of falling rocks coming down Tuna Canyon. Many boulders already lay in the middle of the road. They blended into the overarching stricken-down aura and I believe the community liked it that way. I waited on the beach for the sun to fall behind Point Dume, there were only twenty minutes to go and I was in no hurry to get home. The sand came, I tilted my large hat into the wind and fared fine. I rung out my wet hair. It was too cold to dry in the air, I would have to wait until I got back into the car and turned the heat on. My sandals blew down to the waves. I didn’t worry, they were rubber and they would float. 

I wondered suddenly, if I had actually become the woman I always wanted to be. I hadn’t thought about it before. But as I looked around myself, with the long, dirty hair and my thick flannel … my dog and my book and the ocean in front of me … I wondered if I had accidentally turned into something I had intended. It didn’t feel that way, but I suppose I had “checked off” certain things. I may have expected to be thinner, with tighter skin, but as I took inventory of what I had and where I was and the general perceptions I had sharpened about my hopes for the life ahead of me … I realized that I was possibly growing into the person I quietly imagined. It was an extremely odd reckoning, since I have never felt yet as if I’ve “achieved” any one thing. And yet, it seems that I’ve achieved some understated iteration of a subconscious childhood dream. External powers show their cards so rarely, though when they do I’m reminded of a private toiling which is set into motion with only the most sincere and courageous of desires. It is a slow and deep process and when certain segments are at last revealed to us, we must revel in the wondrous riddle of our life. It’s very comforting, I think, to know that serious work is happening in the background. Or at least it made me feel better that evening, after the sunset, helping my dog into my Jeep and driving away.   

In Orange County I stayed in the slow lane. I let cars fly by me because I didn’t care. I was busy thinking about how there was nothing to do anywhere, so why not move to the O.C.?  I decided to get off the exit at Dana Point. I parked in the lot above Strands and put my hat on. I changed out of my clothes next to a Volkswagen full of teenagers playing Frank Ocean with the windows halfway down. The smell of cannabis, in this context, comforted me. I had cut my hand earlier when putting the roof back on my Jeep. Which, it turns out, is the stupidest thing about me. As I took my jacket off, I noticed blood all over my arms. Orange County was just like Los Angeles, except a little bit different. For example, everyone was a Christian. Class played out in velour and Princess cut diamonds, rather than Herringbone chain and linen. The families were enormous in size and blonde to a stunning degree. Their bodies were toned and tanned, but not detoxed. I got out of my car and went over to the lookout to see how many people were out ruining the beach. The way I walk in the suburbs is different. It’s full of confidence and a type of brawniness I lack in the city. Nobody wants what I want here, and that makes me more sure that I’ll get it. Blood on my arms in Dana Point seemed correct, so I left it and let it dry on my skin. 

I write a lot about the landscape and the sun and the heat or the snow and the cold and fox and the kinds of palms and scrubs on a hillside. But that is all I know. The smell of mesquite versus the smell of blossoming Dogwood trees is the only method that comes close to describing how I am feeling now versus another time. Because so far, it is the marine layer and the smoke and the clear, crunchy tundra that have told me the most about who I am trying to turn out to be. And for whatever reason, I only understand people by way of their specific reactions to their environments rather than what they say or how they appear apart from the natural world. Perhaps it’s boring to keep discussing the density of the fog and the depression I suffer when it burns off, but it is this phenomenon which rules me. If the sun is beating down and grinning at me provocatively for the sixth consecutive day, I will be kind to no one. Therefore, I will suffer.

Burning Window Panes

“Hey, do you want our coals?” My friend said to the group of kids adjacent to us. We were leaving for the night and didn’t want to go trudging in the dark looking for a place to dump them. “Hey! That would be awesome!” They said. Wonderful, they wanted our coals. Life could not have seemed more fortuitous in that moment. Two boys came over, they picked up our pit, they tossed the embers into their fire and they returned the pit back to us. “Thanks, we really appreciate it!” One of them said as we folded up our chairs. “Have a great night.” The other one said. I wondered if kids had gotten nicer, or if we appeared so old to them that they felt they really needed to behave courteously or else we might call the cops. 

My phone buzzed. Someone I shouldn’t have been talking to asked me about my Coachella accommodations. I informed him I’d sold my ticket for an enormous profit. “I’ll buy you another one,” he said. Huh, I’d have to think about it. Ella yelled at me to carry some things to the car. I packed up the marshmallow skewers and some other shit. My long hair smelled of smoke. A man who was remodeling his house gave us some window panes to burn. I chose to ignore the carcinogenic effects, because it was a neighborly offer and also we were very low on wood. 

“Get the chairs, Emily!” She shouted from the parking lot. I have never been a helpful person. It does not come naturally to me to help. 

Leaving People Behind 

My friend texted me outraged. “YOU’RE LEAVING LOS ANGELES??” It wasn’t yet true, but it also wasn’t false. It was something that I’d started to tell people, slowly and uneasily. I had reached a certain level of confidence in this idea, enough for it to have transformed into a poorly formed fact. I explained to my friend the various problems I was running into in L.A. The polluted beaches, of course, sat at the top of my list. “Why don’t you move to Topanga? Topanga would resolve most of your issues without sinking you so terminally into suburbia.” I told him I’d consider it, but the water was no clearer twenty minutes north. The tumbledown aspect, I found, was okay when up high above the trees, but when situated so densely in a gully it drummed up only thoughts of trouble, mold, and quite honestly, death. 

“I’ll build hermitages for you in Ojai or wherever I end up setting up my cult.” He said. To that, I didn’t reply. “Come work for me. I want to build off grid eco houses for people in remote regions like the desert.” 

“Ok,” I said. “Will you pay me my tech salary?” There was a pause in the conversation. I could feel him filtering through a list of plausible responses. 

“Money doesn’t matter to you all that much in the wilderness. You’ll find that out sooner or later. Money can’t make rain, can’t make mushrooms grow faster, can’t make chickens lay eggs, can’t make roses bloom, can’t keep coyotes out. But yeah, if you’ve got skills and can make money for the organization—of course you’d get paid.” This would have been funny, if not for the fact that I knew he was not playing around.

“Clearly,” I said to him, “there is a lot to discuss.” 

“Sure, yes. Well, I’m excited for you to come visit when I’m back from New York.” In Topanga, he had recently found a home, with a property on which he harvested wild pepper for his spaghetti al fresco.   

“When you come back from New York, yeah that will be fun.” I said. 

“And I get to be your nature friend now, that’s so sick.” I heard the rasping sounds of Manhattan from the other end of the phone. “I love nature.” He said before hanging up. I liked nature too, but I didn’t need to live immersed in it. I think that was something I had been realizing. I didn’t want to hear traffic and I didn’t want to see throngs of people, but I also didn’t need to harvest all of my own produce. I could go to the market for that. I could walk, alongside trees and rabbits and domesticated dogs to the grocery store to pick up things for dinner, that felt appropriate to me. 

I had, however, wound up in a place where I had to get in my car and roll down a ramp onto a freeway to get average provisions like mustard and toilet paper. So I had gone too far one way, and now I had this crazy friend who had beautiful ideas, but an out-of-touch mind, who was pulling me too far in the other way. So it was settled then—me moving to some sort of off-shoot of a city, with cleaner water and neutral people and quicker trips to the store which could be accomplished on foot without becoming run down by an enormous SUV which cost well into six figures. It would not be “suburbia” because I would not have six children nor any sort of allegiance to the Republican party. But it might, yes, scare some friends I have who believe in “growth and development,” as one bonded item which may be reached over dinners at acclaimed restaurants and bootcamps that pound one’s body like a piece of meat. 

Is It Important To Have Friends?

“I’m perpetually pissed off with Salesforce. How dare they build that phallic tower!” I tell this to my friend over lunch in Silver Lake. 

“Okay, well you know who I’m pissed off with?” She’s eating a cobb salad without any modifications. She even kept the blue cheese, which says a lot about her perfect personality. “I’m pissed off with THIS NEIGHBORHOOD!” She nearly shouts it, glaring around any unlucky passerby with a fork full of pepperoncini and chicken cubes. She was having a bad week because some set builder guy had held her BMW hostage until she paid him overtime. There is more to the story, but I find it difficult to follow along with so many EPs and ADs and fucking Prop Masters and Best Boys and whatever other crazy shit is going on. “So with all these people running around, who is making money?” I asked her. 

“No one. No one is making the money.” She had been taking her hair in and out of a ponytail for the last hour. She had also been speaking with her mouth full and slamming her utensils down into the bowl to emphasize various transgressions. “It’s unbelievable, can you imagine? I have to get over there, to Baldwin Park, and stand in front of this luddite, trying to satiate him so he doesn’t set my fucking car on fire! Like as if I haven’t thrown hundreds of amazing jobs at him. I really fought for him on Sam’s set, you know! Nobody wanted to use him, they said he didn’t have the portfolio. I stuck up for his stupid ass! And now here I am, this little woman, I’m addicted to my disgusting e-cigarette, and I’m chasing down some jerk WHO BUILT A CUPOLA ON TOP OF THE CHURCH WITHOUT ASKING ANYBODY and is alleging I owe him overtime. This shit is so stupid, I’m telling you Emily, you’ve made a lot of weird choices but thank God you were never foolish enough to decide to make movies.” She really hated this set guy, he had really poisoned her. 

I changed the subject, because it seemed like the right thing to do. We talked about the latest issue of Nick Cave’s, The Red Hand Files which answered the question, “Is it important to have friends?” He talked about three levels of friendship; the one you go out to eat with, the one you can ask a favor of, the one who brings out the best in you, challenges you, and makes you a better person. He notes that there is, on a rare occasion, a friend who might fulfill all three of these categories. My friend at lunch with me is such a friend. We do not have struggles for power. We just get on with our work at hand. And, we look out for one another. 

She brought up the subject of men. “I was looking at a painting for a long time. ‘Do you like this painting?’ He asked me. ‘If you like it, I’ll buy it for you.’ Then, at dinner he ordered a 165 dollar steak and I insisted on splitting the bill because I suddenly had this 1980s fear about me ‘owing’ him something if I were to let him pay.”

“I think the dinner makes sense, but you should definitely let him buy you that painting.” I said. She refilled our water glasses from the carafe and took hers down in one gulp. She started packing up her things to get going. “What about you, huh? Have you run into him yet? I have a feeling you’re going to run into him soon. What will you say when you do?” Like all things, there were so many subtle ways to drastically change the way it could go. So I thought about it for a moment. 

“I think I will tell him exactly how I feel,” I said. 

We pushed our chairs in and walked towards Effie Street. “Which is how?”

“You’ve really embarrassed me, I think is what I’ll say.” My friend tied her sweater over her shoulders and laughed as she did. 

“That’s really excellent, that’s great. Actually, I might use that.” For a film, she meant. 

Her phone rang then at the crosswalk and she turned away from the traffic, plugging her ear to answer it. It was clearly an actor who had called, judging by the frustrated and insulting look that stretched across her face. “Okay, yes I understand.” As we crossed and headed up the hill, away from grumbling engines, I could hear that it was a woman on the other end and that she was crying. “Well, migraines are for thin people, so I guess be happy.” A few more comments about scheduling and then she hung up. She pressed her fingers up around her brows and we kept walking until we arrived at the front of her house, in front of which I had parked. 

Her dog barked behind the door and she cooed at him from the sidewalk. “Oh and can you believe … the other day I took Jones around the reservoir and we stopped in the meadows so I could throw him the ball … somebody came up to me and scolded me for taking him off-leash! I wanted to ask him, excuse me you fucking moron where were you born?! Because I’m sure he would have said Nebraska or Oklahoma or some stupid goddamn place. No offense,” she added at the end. I hadn’t before considered that she lumped me in with those territories, but given her precarious state I only shrugged it off. “I mean Christ, I really have to move,” she said, rummaging for her keys. She blew me a kiss and went inside, I started my car and cruised back down to Silver Lake Boulevard. I had to go to South Pas for dog food from this Norwegian company that sustainably catches red herring and mixes it with quinoa. I then had to go to Rolling Greens to pick up a dwarf lemon tree. Somehow, I’d decided this was an okay way to spend the rest of my Tuesday afternoon. 

Palm Springs

Eve asks me to send her pictures of what I get up to in Palm Springs. In that case, it will be an occasional photo of brown, dry land or otherwise, a pool. I could, I suppose, also send her photos of telephone lines and peculiar billboards advertising varicose vein removal. “I want to know how you’re living, what you’re seeing,” she said. For better or for worse I always love spending time in Palm Springs. I like the opulent, bright, passé art deco against an environment within which we are most certainly not supposed to thrive. For that reason, I also host a mild degree of panic when in these desert cities. Where is the next place to get water? How many hours until my tear ducts clog with dust? These are questions that might flutter by when I make the brave and irregular choice to step out from my compound and walk someplace for a treat. It is a strictly biological response to attempting to “vacation” in a place which does not offer any of the essential life-giving amenities. 

It’s a well-known fact that there is absolutely nothing to do in Palm Springs. It must be why we love to come here. You can eat, you can sleep, you can splash around in a little pool. You can tool about on a bike for the first few hours of the day. You can go to the same restaurants that you can go to everywhere else. Depending on the time of year and the alignment of the sun, you can go out “exploring.” You can “admire the architecture,” celebrated for striving to fade into the land. There is some tennis, there is some golf. And amongst the very few, very ordinary things you can do, you cannot do them during most times of the day. So it’s this odd, odd place which has become synonymous with luxury and deep relaxation only because if one were to make any other kind of effort, heat-related illnesses begin to spring up as a serious concern. And even amongst the facade of this great mental and physical repose, our biology knows better. The minute we speed into Riverside, our bodies detect that we’ve plunked down in a place which cannot sustain life, they flip into an intense fight-or-flight mode, which persists through the week as we sip lemonade and float on rafts. 

You can tell the time of day in Palm Springs not based on the position of the sun, necessarily, but by the occasion in which one participates. For example, if I am out for a walk with a sweater on, it is morning. I will be looking for Bighorn sheep. If I am immersed in the pool or beside it, it is between the hours of 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock and there will be a tall glass of iced coffee nearby. A crow will have perched someplace in the yard, picking at the palm fronds. If I am out in the hills watching the sky turn colors, the sun will have already dropped behind the mountains and evening is near. If the moon has soared high, as if up against a sheet of glass, and if I am observing this from the cooling concrete of the backyard, it is dark. It is a similar kind of starry night in the desert as it is in the arctic. One has the same jolting sensation of being alone in the world and not very well suited to endure most of its elements. There will be a quiet sizzling of electricity and the translucent quality of desert modernism will reflect all sorts of iridescent things. If one were to go out the front door, of course, the night would look just like the day; big gusts of dried out wind, pavement, scrubs. The shadow of windmills would loom far off. But from out back, from between the two sliding glass doors, feet on a speckled cowhide rug, it is a cacti-freckled oasis. A forbidden landscape that we have, against all reasoning, cracked open as a deluxe destination and, ignoring all else, we have called it Palm Springs. 

Blowing Dust

There is a tune that gets stuck in my head whenever I’m out hiking alone. It happens all over the world. It happened in East Nepal, and West. It happens in Vermont and Montana. It happens in California. It's the same sort of tune, maybe it's melody changes from one region to another. But I think, it's this very kind and protective instinct my body has to keep me occupied and alert and not thinking about all the bad things that could happen to me by myself in the woods or the desert or on the beach after dark. I’m a bit of a renegade woman in this sense; I have never heeded advice from my gender about the perils of isolating myself in certain environments. It’s my entitlement but also some kind of fixed, rudimentary knowledge I have, which has been substantiated by my interactions with men my entire life. It is a certain sense of knowing that I involuntarily emit a frequency that keeps a lot of people out. It is a predominantly damaging trait, but it has also allowed me to keep from being one of those women deeply terrified of the second location. I don’t think about it. I think about the first location, where I am, and I think about what I will go home and make for dinner. I am a wild skunk; if someone comes up from behind, I’ll be okay to spray them and carry on my way. It’s hard, I presume, for a man to attach himself to a woman like that. 

A man walks into the nail salon and is asked how his day is going. “Horrible,” he says. “I have aches and pains all over. I’m getting older every day and then I’m going to die.” As depressing as it sounds, it was really wonderful to hear. At least it was out in the open today. We didn’t all have to keep it boxed up in our heads. My sister biked back from town with mugs and towels she had bought from a store called The Shag. She came in the door looking windblown and thirsty. “I told the shop owner that I was from Canada,” she said. “I’m not sure why, it just came out.” The wind had come through over the weekend and blew all of the dust out of the air. You could see the halved moon and the stars. I’m always looking for Venus, just because I’ve been told to. The breeze had become warm, tropical even. I swam in the pool in the dark. From the open door I heard my sister call to my mom in the other room, “What’s a harlot?” She had been reading Brontë. “A harlot is a slut,” my mother shouted back. And then, “What’s a concubine?” In the sharp, desert air I shivered. I sat down, drying in a terry robe. I caught myself thinking about something Eve had been drilling into me all month; stop expecting things from people who will not deliver. 

I drove over to Palm Desert to see some of my parents' friends. They were going to watch the Superbowl and I was needed to corroborate their assertions about which performer was who at the halftime show. I let my dog loose in the backyard. There were about three pools and two hot tubs and lit-up decals screwed onto all the walls that said things like “Eat” and “Gather.” I got into a fight with someone about a book we disagreed on. There was subtle, but invasive, competition about who had more knowledge about the area. I thought it was funny, seeing as I had lived up and around here for almost ten years. But I’ve found, in these situations, it is much more powerful to sit back and listen to people challenge one another on the sequential order of the towns and what was a date shake and other geographical proclamations. In the kitchen, I was asked about my job. Obviously, I left the group stumped. 

There was one adult in the room who, given various complexities, was not supposed to like me. An inexplicable fellowship existed between us—I simply felt as if in another circumstance we were peers and in fact, friends. To him I said, “AI is very weird.” 

“Work is weird,” He said. “As is life.” The Bengals lost in the background. My father cried. 

I am starting to understand what people older than me have always said about the speeding up of time. It’s not that time moves any faster—it is not even that we perceive it to. It's that we become drawn further and further away from our daily, present lives and more and more absorbed into the schedules, timeline and routines of others. It is for this reason that the Christmas season fizzles down into two days in December, while as a child I recall it as half of the year. It is how Winter melts almost instantly into Summer, and then suddenly we’re dressing up for Halloween again. Before the methodological aspects of life emerged, I only had wooly memories of things I remembered enjoying and I then would look forward to these things when their time came around once more. It is as we wander with increasing distance from this kind of attitude that we no longer feel in control of our age and judgemental of how much progress we’ve made on our dreams. I thought about a trip to Mammoth I had next month, and a trip to Hawaii in the Spring—how I would in a few years conflate them as one. I thought about two different people in my perpetual orbit and how, if I zoomed out to the strip of photo negatives of my life, these two people were just one person attempting to knock in the same lesson that I have yet to absorb. So far, only a few things have become clear: I didn’t want to spend time with any man “on a mission,” I wanted nice things not cool things, and, what registered with me recently and all at once, I cannot always be alone. 

Running through Little Tuscany

A day after a virtuous rain in the desert. The particles had been sucked out of the air, Mt. San Jacinto glistened sharply ahead. I was running up an awfully steep and endless hill through Little Tuscany—a neighborhood with no telling when one might accidentally stumble into the jagged wilderness, or at least collide with a windmill. The road stopped abruptly at the top where the “Desert Palisades” gated community was being built. So far, only one house stood beyond the gate. It looked foolish there, sitting on a pile of rocks by itself. I started back down the hill, I zigzagged through the short streets so as to not destroy my knees. I stepped on a beetle by mistake, squishing it to death. I thought about all of the people I had unconsciously, deeply hurt. A large truck thundered by me carrying a load of boulders—had they been removed from the Earth or would they be installed for theatrical effect, I wasn’t sure. I zipped across the 111, having been recharged by the downhill. I ran in the center of the traffic lane; the sun had only begun to crawl up from the brittlebush and the desert palm and the prickly pear. The flat land flushed with the longer wavelengths of bronze. The blues and the violets had not yet come out.