Lately I just feel broken.
Like we were driving after 10 AT NIGHT on the 405 and there was just a car on fire right there, and people were barely even slowing down to look at it. I think cause we're all in our cars going that's me man
I already got that
Living in LA sometimes feels like you can't navigate the city anymore. Like you cannnnn do it, you are capable but the joy of living you have to fight very hard for like one salmon left in the stream and you and thirty bears, and they are built for it. That car was just blazing. And that's not even the first time I've passed something out of control on fire on that freeway. And even though the fire dept guys were scurrying to handle it there didn't feel like any relief there like there's no hose big enough. Frankly.
It might be that I was in the barn earlier cleaning up and resting on my shitrake (little known japanese food) and I felt for once like I'm too tired to keep outrunning my need to be loved. And then that felt funny, like this might be the year I just decide it's okay to allow people to actually love me, and to fuck it up even, and I will get up the next day and still want to eat frozen yogurt at the beach, like I won't be destroyed. I don't know actually how to do this simple thing. Is anyone else like this? Have I made a new little known channel into humanity that no one else felt ever not even like the guy who invented capezios or some dude picking coffee beans in Ecuador cursing his own heart, or some physicist studying the sun at a giant telescope in Hawaii, with a white collared scientist coat, isn't she sometimes squinting at herself and saying this is good but why do I feel so sad
I thought maybe I was just more broken than others, but I look around and there are way more broken than me. People in the paralympics are running without legs
But emotionally broken no is maybe not broken, it is maybe just as B says, so much feeling
I could be a scientist of feeling, I have fallen into that deep end since very small and splashing around in there makes pretty good writing but it is always threatening to drown you because it is VAST and churning. The ocean makes sense. The ocean doesn't care about you but you can't stop thinking about it or wanting it to be part of you. Maybe this is the drawback of being a writer. Immersion in uncontrollable feeling.
When we saw the car fire we were on the way to a bad horror movie, a screening at a theater in the farthest reaches of earth, across the 405. B and I both had terrible anxiety leaving an empty house what if my mom dies the house catches on fire the dogs die of lonely confusion it's dark out we hate people
But his niece needled us to go, the whole family went mostly, his side of the family the one that likes to gather even though they also hate people mostly. We got to this theater in the city one amongst many cities in LA where there were cars not on fire but so many cars and you could smell the beach even though we were about 15 minutes from there, I guess the air doesn't count in mileage, the air just brings the beach right to your nose. The air was comforting even if the cars were not and the marquee had the movie name of the shitty horror movie b had made and Aela had been 5 years old in, and uncle donny had starred in, and little furry balls of hell called critters rolled around eating people's legs off and killing the guy who would later star in Titanic.
Sitting in a theater with your family and two handfuls of weird sci fi horror fans scattered around like popcorn for flair is a good way to remember who you are. It ain't complex like it feels in your head and heart. You show up and see smiling faces and you smell the ocean for a second and the world feels smaller and understandable and you feel relieved that you're not alone.
And the movie was good
The best part was everytime b's brother was onscreen, b would just laugh quietly, like a little kid. Seeing his little brother makes him love the world.
Let's just chalk up the lesson here that writing is your diploma into a lifetime of terror, immersion into feelings that you then can't differentiate between yourself and your work (maybe there is no difference), and living in a big city when you are a tall girl with a large heart is like living at high voltage, battling your surroundings for emptiness in your eyeline you can fill in with yourself, all flooded out and relieved.
This is why we have oceans.
