Bread and Bread

I spent a piece of Sunday afternoon at L.A. Zine Fest, primarily at the urging of Brodie and his friends, a cadre of friendly ladies with punk hair and vintage clothing. It occupied a big garage/warehouse-type space at the Helms Bakery Building, and it was a little overwhelming. I’m not well versed in the zine world, and I wanted to read everything with a funny title or a cute cartoon on the cover or an interesting binding or a friendly person selling it. Which is to say, pretty much everything. That would have made it easy to get a kind of quick, general shot of inspiration and leave having purchased nothing. But I reminded myself that staying part of the literary community means diving deep and being at least a little bit extroverted. So I made my rounds and ended up with a handful of awesome-seeming zines. Aurora Lady's zine from Fair Dig Press . I heard her read Wednesday night, and she was funny and vulnerable and great. Because I like to draw, I am so tempted to...

I recently saw a headline that said Why A New Year’s Theme Works Better Than a Resolution. My first thought was Fuck. I failed at my resolutions just by making them? My second thought was I needed a theme for 2014. The Kleins like a theme. My mom always let my sister and I pick out our friends’ birthday gifts, but she strongly discouraged two-parters composed of discordant parts. Pound Puppy + Barbie outfit? Nope. Pound Puppy +   paw print stationery? Thumbs up from Mom. Pound Puppy + Pound Purry: another acceptable combination. Speaking of my mom, I’ve decided that my theme for 2014 is going to be CURIOSITY. She was a librarian, relentlessly curious to the point that she may have over-helped me with research papers, creating a shoemaker’s-child situation. Instead of learning how to do my own research, I married a girl who thrives off meticulously planning trips, and who reads six articles about any movie she sees before she sees it (and another five after). So I conti...

Last weekend we went to a holiday party for the clinic where AK is interning, which means almost everything about the party was top secret for reasons relating to the intricate traditions of psychoanalysis. Can I say that I got a nice scarf in the white-elephant gift exchange? I don’t even know. Can I say that the host’s house was super posh, in a way that was one part early California mission, one part Buddhist monastery? The host herself was wearing a non-sheer version of the dress below, and we had a good time. Hands on. Last night we went to a party for Razorcake , the punk rock magazine editor Todd Taylor invited me to contribute to after I met him at my reading with Sean Carswell in June. It had never occurred to me that I could write for such a publication, because one time in seventh grade I wrapped embroidery thread in Rastafarian colors around tiny braids in my hair, was asked what reggae bands I liked and had no answer. I’ve been very careful about being a pose...