London museum grindr profiles of yore.
Stopped at Present & Correct after maybe literally 13 years of following them online.
T-minus seven days until we’re back in the UK. A week in London with John before I take off for Wales by myself for a week-long immersive Welsh language program on the Llŷn peninsula. I will now do the thing you’re apparently not supposed to do and talk about my plans before hand to the invested scamming public lying in wait to theft my identity.
We’re starting in London, and eating our way through the better parts of everyone’s recommendations. Then, off to the Salisbury Plain, by train, not automobiles, to see a man about a henge. (Today I was at Aesop buying face-stuff and semi-precious soap, and at checkout the clerk magnanimously offered me a spritz of their latest fragrance, to be sprayed on my bag. She told me, with a straight face, that “Ouranon* has notes of frankincense and is reminiscent of ancient monoliths” so I guess we’ll fucking see, bitch.) After Stonehenge we’re back on the train over to Oxford and then bussing back to London. On Friday I will be tattooed by a person named Mouse, on my forearm and up onto my hand against literally everyone’s better judgement, after which we will go see Abba Voyage for the second time.
*She couldn’t have known, but another Aesop fragrance, Hwyl, would have been too on the nose, as it’s Welsh for “goodbye!”
At the end of the week John heads back to LA, while I board a train to Holyhead/Caergybi on Angelsey/Ynys Môn where I’ll spend a day so I can have a head start the following morning to take a train Bangor, then a bus to Pwllheli, then a cab to Llithfaen, then a 1.5 mile walk down the side of a mountain to the edge of the sea to stay for the next 6 days at Nant Gwrtheyrn. I’ll spend every day from 8-6, learning to speak Welsh and making little excursions to taverns and coffee roasters to talk to locals, and I’ll spend every night sleeping in a row of converted miner’s cottages from the 1800s. I am terrified and excited and cannot wait.
After that I’ll retrace my steps back up the peninsula to Caernarfon where I’ll crash for the night before taking a 6 hour bus ride down the Ceredigion coast to Cardigan/Aberteifi where my great great great grandparents lived. I’m spending a two day breather there in a bougie converted-maritime-warehouse inn, before heading by bus, then train, then subway back to the airport to fly home to LA.
On the otherhand, today while scoping out spots to grab coffee in Aberteifi, I saw that this ultra cute bakery and cafe was hiring full time baker positions, no experience required, so maybe I’m never actually coming home at all.
Books read in August. I give up on River Enchanted & London Seance Society about 100 pages in, both algorithmically recommended via Goodreads, the first and last time I’ll be trying that. The Salt Grows Heavy comes recommended from a friend with gushing praise and is the single worst thing I have read… ever? Absolute dreck, I persevere out of sheer hatred and incredulity and rage. Verbal gooning and bating from an author who surely had a formative sexual experience in a Hot Topic, after hours deep in the American McGee’s Alice merch section.
Recently chatting with my sister as her husband and I plan our upcoming falconry sessions and casually joke about us getting older and spontaneously getting into birds and she looks at me and says “Spontaneous? You’ve been a bird freak for… a while.” And a few things suddenly slap me in the face: I have a ten-inch tattoo of a magpie on my arm that is now about 10 years old, and based on my personal identification with the bird that goes back to my childhood. I see a turkey buzzard circling over head recently and remember camping under the oaks on center street in Provo for hours 17 years ago to watch their enormous committee hanging over the street, two dozen birds strong, annoying all my roommates with reports from my obsessive observation. And then there’s my eagle scout project, hanging ironically like a 26 year old albatross around my neck: sourcing, securing and spreading 12 tons of nesting material to establish a riparian preserve for 50+ species of migratory birds in Arizona that is now a major ornithological destination.
This is like when my psychiatrist asks if I consider myself an anxious person, or if I struggle with anxiety, and I truthfully and enthusiastically answer “No, not really! Anxiety’s never really been a problem!” and she looks at my medical history that I gave her not 10 minutes earlier and says “But you take Xanax anytime you fly to manage panic attacks, and have been hospitalized in the ER twice for anxiety episodes that manifested as full-blown cardiac events?” I guess if you put it that way.
Anyway, all this to say that I’m very excited that the crows and ravens are finally back. In January I had a good thing going: daily trips to the river at 3 to feed the birds, where they’d all but eat out of my hands. I got them to come when I called and could pick out individuals, and when I showed up they’d come congregate. I was living high on the fucking hog, and then suddenly… mating season, nesting, and they all vanished.
Seven long months later and the pink-mouthed fledglings are out making a racket, and their folks are taking them down to the river to scrounge and learn the ropes. I’m heading back out semi-regularly now to start to make their acquaintance. My goal this year is to get them taking food from my hands (as they’ve been doing for 30,000 years, calm down.)
So much mental chatter. I wonder what I am doing, I wonder what I want to be doing, I wonder what I want to want to be doing. This is a mid-life crisis unmoored from the props and set-dressing of good old' fashioned heterosexuality. Where does the panic go when it doesn’t have a red porsche or a secretary to lose itself in? I’m just supposed to be afraid of death and look at course options at the Berkeley extension and wonder if it’s too late to get a bachelor’s in Celtic studies on my own? Look at metalworking residencies at the Penland school of craft and know I could afford it but am maybe still too scared of that kind of confirmation of insipidity this late in life? What fun.
There’s a moment before each time we go out now where I briefly… I dunno, full body panic. I look in the mirror and am like… what? Why would this go to that party? This is an old person. I don’t feel old, the I that sits behind my eyes, the I that cannot shut up inside not for one goddamn minute, the I that is excited by birds and learning languages and the Book of Taliesin. But the him in front of me looks tired. Looks like he has not, cannot, and will not never develop a commanding set of pecs. Destined to be… sort of soft, shapeless… forever? The him in front of me is graying at an alarming rate, the him in front of me has eyelids that are beginning to wander, the him in front of me has to shave his fucking earlobes three times a week. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another, I’m afraid. Doomed to be further and further afield from one another = I’m afraid. What! fun!
We are about to leave for a birthday double header, first to Adam’s then to Ted’s, I try to pick and earring and think… an earring? Do you think you are 12? I look in the mirror and it becomes this funhouse mirror, from the front, fine, and I start to turn and begin to see… my sister? an old man? Have I always been this… deep? My head looks like it goes too far back? When did these wrinkles on my neck appear? Am I shaped like a trapezoid? It goes on. I push past it. We go to the parties and its fine. Or is it. Who knows. I’m haunted by this thing I read where a woman says she always asks “how do other people perceive you?” in job interviews because it’s the make or break question: self-awareness is a key component in wanting to work with someone. “But it’s IMPOSSIBLE to actually know that” I think. And boy do I think. “I cannot actually stop thinking,” I think.
I’m drawing a lot of shit lately, little graphic explorations. Trying to have something for a show in September. I read blurb in a course description about the opportunity collage gives to expand past the limitations of printing capabilities and have a huge epiphany, suddenly invigorated. But then I realize it’s a revelation I actually had months ago, I just never did anything with it. Worried this is what it’ll be forever. Breakthroughs un-acted upon. John and I have this big, knock down drag out emotional come to jesus. Not directed at each other, just both of us losing it at all of it. I tell him that I've been fixated on this lyric from Fever Ray’s song “Kandy” — “what if I die with a song inside?” And I realize that’s what all of this is — the realization that life is probably more than half way over and that if I don’t start drawing now, really drawing, really making, really doing, then I simply will find myself at the end of the track. The I desperate, the me expiring, and time. is. up.
What fun!
Here are the books I read in July.
Books read in June.
Books read in May.