Books read (and re-read) in April
I open my front door and the air is thick with the scent of citrus blossoms. The hills outside the house are shrouded in mist and it's cold again. Rainy today, suddenly cold again - I miss my morning meetings because, reluctant to get out of bed (it being around 55 in the house when I wake up), I fall back asleep after I cancel my alarm. At the river, trees lie capsized in the now-shallow flow after weeks of flooding and birds have returned to the riverbanks. Every tree in bud, soft lime-green leaves showing out while drenched roses bloom.
New baristas at the neighborhood shop, a twinkish boy with a chain of organic pearls, and another with impossibly smooth skin. Today the latter sings along under his breath with the Smiths while making my coffee. Hearing the Smiths I am reminded always of a video I saw where a woman, under the influence of a chemical that suppresses sweetness, tastes a variety of things — coffee, vanilla icecream, chocolate — and experiences them anew and finds the unbound flavor notes surprising. The Smiths remained undiscovered by me during adolescence, Tori Amos and Björk and any number of gay divas more than following the gas law and filling their container, so I hear them today without the unifying top-note of nostalgia that seems to inflate their impact with my friends. I find myself bopping pleasantly along to a ridiculous song that surprises me by turning out to be "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" — a title I've seen tattooed on more than a few friends and former lovers alike and cannot believe this is the song that has changed them so.
Been thinking about the inevitability of death the last couple days again (who needs the Smiths?) I began regularly taking my meds this week so we may just be able to conveniently chalk this up to the newly surging levels of Buspirone and Escriptolam in my blood, along with today's unpleasant eyeball pressure. In any event, there it is just under my last email of the day: you'll die; there it is after dinner: one day this will all just stop. Fortunately, there's always another email, and dessert, coming up.
Books read in March
Two weeks ago my 40th birthday. John takes me to Orsa and Winston for a 5 course meal, the wine pairing perfection. It’s a Michelin single banger, in a small no frills space in downtown. The food is truly excellent but you can also tell that’s where all the money is going, the same shoe string, no-forgiveness budget of all restaurants. I get a candle on my dessert, we also see 4 of the five other dinner parties get candles on their desserts: it’s a popular spot for celebrations, and I wonder, if like a Chuck-E-Cheese the staff is totally inured to any sort of fête in their personal lives at this point. Anyway that’s what my birthday would have been like without John: me attempting to stoic it away as a “it happens everyday” sort of nonchalance, a not-convincing veneer on the solid mass of midlife crisis beneath. I’m feeling this birthday coming and I know I’m aging and life is brief and blah blah blah. Forty!
Laura flies into town just because, crashes with us for a few days. She and I make a clarified milk punch cocktail she designed for me called the Seven Wonders, after the number of spices she infuses the brandy with, but in reference to a shared moment of bliss circa 2018 where we see the music video for Fleetwood Mac’s song of the same name at Moby Dick in the Castro for the first time and are all agog. The alchemy of a schlock song with a schlock video in a schlock bar some how adding up to a moment of perfection that somehow makes me emotional. The VJ that night was a 20 something barista from the Verve near my house in Duboce named Alejandro, a young Poz queer who always cracks me up, we went to cheer him on at his first VJ gig. Somehow knowing he picked it with fresh eyes, pure uncut nostalgia from a time that has informed every aspect of his life adds to this true transformation of lead to solid gold.
We head to John’s folks for a weekday birthday lunch, where my sister’s fam will meet us. I’m nervous because John’s folks house is like a medieval museum full of breakable wonders that I know my nieces and nephews will love but also potentially demolish. I can’t wait for it though, because I know John’s mom has always wanted grandchildren and will simply not be getting them, not ever, and I know she will love my nieces and nephews and they will love her. The biggest tragedy of my life is that my mom will never meet John’s because I know they would have gotten on like a house on fire. I love John’s mom like I love my own, but I know John’s relationship is more fraught, and that our time is limited, and anyway that’s what I’m thinking about as we walk up to the front door, me John & Laura with our big jug of Seven Wonders in a Chemex when the door opens and it’s John’s fam and mine and wait also my sister from Utah and Jon and Danny and Chris and Ian and Pat and Dave and Taylor and Justin and Adam and David and Sam and Miles and Will and it’s a surprise party for me and I never saw it coming not for a single second.
I don’t know how John did it, but I’m glad he did. I would have regretted not doing anything, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put something together.
Books read in February
And that’s the crest of the hill, baby.
The birds, the birds, the birds. I don’t really know when it started but suddenly a few years ago I began being a person who likes birds. Not in the absolutely unhinged way of a beshitted person who owns a cockatiel or an insipid little blue thing with a rubber cement applicator beak that makes kissing noises on certified viral tiktoks, but just in the way of Marge Simpson holding a potato.
You always have something to watch when you like to watch birds. I haphazardly take binoculars to the river, as often as I take my Real Camera, a novice’s entree Sony alpha 2012 something or other. I think sometimes that I should get a Real Lens, something long and sáfarique, but I am shocked to find out that for my now extremely long-in-the-tooth real camera, a real lens will still cost a real $1500. So I content myself with spotting and snagging with my iphone the occasional wild thing on the river: the random night heron, the darting hummingbirds, my beloved annual fledgling osprey.
Months ago I walk the river with John’s parents on a coffee errand. We come across a gentleman with a telephoto pointed at a run of the mill, regular-degular, boring-ass, one-of-10-dozen resident snowy egrets, and he turns to me and says authoritatively “That’s a snowy egret.” and I want to slap the shit out of him. Of course it’s a snowy egret, you absolute imbecile, you dolt. A horse! he may as well say, pointing. My impotent passions and milquetoast fascinations are precious and wondrous, but hold a mirror up to me and I! will! attack!
A few months ago I snag a last minute spot at a local falconer’s demonstration. I follow this falconer not only for bird reasons, but for horny reasons as well, so it’s a real-two-for-one and I do love a bargain. I stand with nine other people and we take turn holding two of three birds: a barn owl, a harris’s hawk. I am keenly aware that this hot falconer is bored as hell, keenly aware of his auto-pilot delivery of terms and cautions and factoids, and keenly aware that I do not care even one little bit because holy shit I am holding an actual owl oh my absolute god I see the owl and it looks at me. It’s face is a perfect porcelain dish made of feathers so fine and delicate that it literally does not seem possible, the smooth velvet white dissolving at the edges into hundreds of flawless fish-scaled feathers no bigger than a sunflower kernel a piece.
I wouldn’t call it life changing and yet was my life not changed?
Cut to now as I buy millet and black oil sunflower seeds in bulk for the camera feeder in our backyard, and anniversary gift from John. And I always have peanuts in my pocket. Crushed kernels for my girls at the coffee shop, whole unshelled for the crows on the river. I find myself having an ear tuned at all times now, aware of the chatter and the delightful comb calls. The other day I sip my coffee and hear something altogether different and see a local mating pair harrying this entirely nonplussed red tail hawk above me on the power line. I am Oren Ishii spectating at the foot, cheering them on.
“Wow they really just come right up to you!” says a familiar barista as I wait for my coffee outside. Later a woman stops in her tracks when she sees one take a bite right from my hand. Last weekend, Marcus and I take our drinks on the banks of the river, and he gasps when he turns around and sees a dozen or so of the house finches waiting patiently directly at my back. I am intolerably fucking smug about all of this.
At home, on the camera, we are at well over 150+ notifications a day as the house finches come and go, triggering the motion sensor and pinging my phone directly. Sometimes they are security cam frozen: bickering kids at the lunch table; sometimes they are too fast for the scanning sensor: biblically accurate seraphim, all wheels of wing.
“I just think they’re neat!”
The news reports with eager glee on a now eight year-old study reporting that “just being within sight of water can calm the body and reduce anxiety.” It is forwarded to me numerous times and each time the only thought in my head is “no fucking shit” as it is, in fact, the only glue holding me together.
My little morning routines, evidence of the rapid descent into geriatrics, to which I must simply surrender: wake up and be horrified at the sounds my knees make, the actual leather stretching sound of near 40 year old sinews over increasingly knobby bones; walk by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, walk by the birds, see the birds, marvel at the birds; get my coffee without having to tell the baristas what I want, tip generously for never having to discuss neither the order nor the predictability of it; drink outside; do my duolingo (680 day streak), feed the birds, imagine myself as a known entity to them, a benevolent demigod bristling with peanuts; gnash my teeth at the reality of shitty little free range LA kids and their shitty little free range LA parents; walk back by the river, see the river, marvel at the river, toss peanuts to the crows.
I fret that, little by little, the predictable little cultural signs of aging are being repackaged and sold back to my silly aging cohort as somehow anything but that. Each night for the past week we bask in the genius of Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face, but I can SEE with Jessica Fletcher clarity that this is just Murder She Wrote for millennials. Each day my friends and I log each other’s Wordle scores in our group chat, our little virtual rest-home reporting of The Jumble. I know that it is only a matter of time when some chic cafe or restaurant in Silverlake will start offering a very cleanly branded “Late Brunch” that we will flock to, realizing too late that this is simply the Early Bird special by another name and that it smells just as sweet. See also: orienting my whole daily routine around feeding the fucking birds. Tuppence a bag, bitch!
Anyway, the light has been lovely lately.