lots of daylight and no homework
The last time I had a reading planned, I canceled it to
stare nervously at the wall while waiting for biopsy results. We all know how
that turned out. But the first hint that I might be slowly turning the dial
away from the all-cancer-all-the-time-cancer-channel phase of my life
(knockonwood) came the other day the frozen yogurt shop.
“Excuse me, can I just say—” began a woman at the next
table.
Here it comes, I
thought, bracing myself for a comment on how brave I was to have not found a
way to magically keep my follicles from releasing my hairs while on chemo.
“I really like your purse,” she said.
Friday night I gave my first reading in seven months,
opening for Sean Carswell at Skylight Books. It was a friendly, mellow, well attended
reading, with a bucket of PBR fresh from the liquor store and no ice. I read a
little bit of my near-future story about genetic testing. Jim Ruland read about
karaoke in Alaska. Sean read from his new book, Madhouse Fog, which promises to be funny and unexpected. It was
nice to feel like a writer again.
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| Now featuring hair! (Photo stolen from Kathy Talley-Jones' Facebook page.) |
We had a small but mighty book club meeting, where we
discussed Jon Ronson’s Lost at Sea (I
liked the half I read—quirky essays that could be classified as stunt journalism
but run a little deeper than that genre usually does). It was nice to feel like
a reader again.
This morning we woke up at an ungodly hour to meet friends
of AK’s for a beach run in Santa Monica. It’s fun to do city things in the off
hours; it’s like the whole place was made just for you. Also, no traffic. I
hung with the pack for a while, then started walking and enjoyed watching the
boardwalk wake up so much that I didn’t even devote much time to feeling like a
self-conscious sicky.
Artists unpacked their canvases. Panhandlers unpacked their cardboard
signs. People outside halfway houses smoked their first cigarettes of the day,
or maybe their third.
We meandered (in a car) over to the farmer’s market, where
we bought peaches and beets and coffee. AK’s friend told me how to roast them.
I just took them out of the oven a few minutes ago, all deep purple and
delicious-looking. I feel so righteous for having PURCHASED BEETS AT A FARMER’S
MARKET AND ACTUALLY COOKED THEM that you’d think I just wrote to my congress
person.
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| Just looking at this picture will add two years to your life. |
We also saw Andrew read at the Concord, an art
space/somebody’s house in Cypress Park. At book club, people were talking about
how Highland Park is apparently the hottest real estate market in, like, the
world? I’m a happily oblivious renter, but I looked around at the stretch of
San Fernando Road that is now tire warehouses, thrift store distribution
centers, cement riverfront and sighed, “In five years this will all be
breweries.” There are already some up the road.
Andrew read some poems about Turkey and death and some
interesting new stuff and I felt excited to get back to one of my seventeen
works in progress. A writer named Ashley Farmer read some great constraint-based
flash fiction from her forthcoming book Pink
Water.
(I basically typed the above as a reminder to myself to buy
her book when it comes out in August, because it’s not listed on Goodreads
yet.)
Tonight AK and I are celebrating our third anniversary of
getting Canadian-married with dinner at Pizzeria Mozza—at which I will not be a vegan—and a late-night show
that’s part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
And I’m currently
synching my iPod and charging my Kindle for the first time in months. You can
do a lot when you wake up at 6:15, don’t devote any of your day to sitting in
traffic and plan to go to bed at 1 a.m.
In related news, I am super tired and my radiated right boob
looks like the beets I just roasted.
Comments
So there is that.
And huzzah to that tipping point where other things can dominate your consciousness for a time!
And, hey, no more Prop 8 or DOMA: FUCK YEAH!