Unnecessary & Loving It

Life is feeling sweet like amber sap dripping out of rough bark or like icy hot lotion accidentally finding its way into your vagina.  I am living partly like a retiree. A beautiful summer vibe is exhaling over Los Angeles and everyone is feeling a touch stoned upon waking. Things I had accepted about “my place in the world” feel remote and perplexing. Are we all shifting into our hearts? Or are people just freely having sex again and we’re all catching whiffs of the glorious smell of balls slapping ass. One can’t be certain what is happening, but it feels nice.

I am in a twilight, a stupor of a continuous meltdown that is making me feel lighter and lighter. My relationship with time has hit a wall or maybe has just ended. Overall, I  am begging the government to chip my ass so I can manage time better and have built in gps. I am feeling like goo again. Back in a void of simply experiencing. My opinions on anything seem empty and meaningless and the momentum of any resentments or hidden desires from myself pre-pandemic feel obsolete. I am doing just fine feeling unnecessary.

It seems were being given slack on whatever rope binds us to certain things and it’s up to us whether we want to cut the rope all together.  I have been trying to decide what the hell I am letting go of, but I have no idea. I am too high off the faces I get to see and the way my 7 month old niece grins at me while I’m not looking like an admiring grandparent.

My therapist talks a lot about expansion and contraction and how we don’t honor those seasons in our lives even though they are the natural rhythm. You go out and create and then you cocoon,  nurture (masturbate), and hibernate with new information to process and digest. It all sounds good, but our society isn’t run on that level of creative and emotional process. We need titties and car crashes and we need them- YESTERDAY! A damned shame if you ask me because I seem to be unable to work in any other way. If I don’t have anything to say why write? “Maybe I should just shut up” is something I said when I was around 12 at a dinner with my Aunt and Uncle, they laughed very hard and its been a family catch phrase ever since. I’m not sure what proceeded it, but I stand by it. Maybe I should just shut up. 

I like to write on here to try and give a little microphone to the being inside me that straddles the line of artist and crazy. The one that is tirelessly on the hamster wheel of my repetitive fears and fantasies, while also being aware of it. It’s nice to meet people at that level of intimacy. I think I am attempting  to articulate the windstorm of subconscious forces I dance through every day. At least, I believe that is my connection to this outlet without trying to make my inner narratives more right or wrong. Its more about the space I am giving myself to dip into the blurriness. But recently  the vibrancy of long awaited communal experiences has replaced my tendency to...well, write.

I spent May slobbering over all the faces I love and got to see without a trace of guilt or shame.  There is no getting too close to a face right now. I believe we should all be doing those acting class mirror exercises with strangers in the grocery store. The tired woman grabbing bagged salad and you should start mimicking each other: deep eye contact as you trace your fingertips exactly the same way down your profile, eventually you wind up kneeling in front of each other, bowing to the divine in both of you. Their kid sits and watches in the grocery cart thinking “Alrighty...then!!!.” (I’m sorry, but their toddler has not a single original thought in its head.)

I spent May realizing more and more my own sensitivity to the reintroduction of people, places, and things. It seems that every time I socialize now, I have to rest for a day and if alcohol is involved it has to be four days. I projectile vomited at my friends house and then got into his new jacuzzi. “Do you still feel sick?” “Yes.” “Get out of the jacuzzi.” It was a fair exchange. My body is sending me clear signals “No, you do not want to see this person. You will feel like your arms are being gnawed on if you talk to them for too long.” “Yes, you do want to meet new people, your heart is generous right now. Take advantage.” “Look into your baby niece’s eyes for awhile longer and the sadness will leave.” The babies you meet right now seem to hold a very holy mission. A mission that we’ll all die before seeing through.  I have high hopes for the future we’ll never see. 

I spent May getting scuba certified that culminated in a trip to Catalina where we had our final open water dive test and then free dive. The things I do keep up with young Hollywood!! I had a private lesson the other week in a pool with an old man for 5 hours til 10:30 pm. He taught me emergency protocols and mainly every technique used in worst case scenarios. My mind did it’s thing where it splits and suddenly half my interest was in who this scuba instructor was and how could I get this grumpy old fellow to laugh. He had a military dad vibe and didn’t like when I got answers wrong, but eventually he softened when I laughed at myself for not understanding how to use a compass. I wondered what it would be like if I kissed him, our bodies were often in a hideous ballet underwater as I was trying to gain control of my buoyancy. A scuba porn to my knowledge has not been done post pandemic, but I am willing to make the first. To be able to tell my grandkids one day that I made the first scuba porno post pandemic? I mean that’s as good as gold.

In Catalina, skills we had to perform were flooding and de flooding our masks at the ocean floor, relying on our compasses to navigate underwater, (which I finally understood), and  CESA meaning Controlled Emergency Ascent. This was my favorite and most daunting experience besides getting my wet suit on. Your lungs compress so much when you are deep that when you ascend you have to maintain breathing because your lungs are expanding and if you hold your breathe they can pop or rupture. But what if you have no air? So during a CESA, you’re completely out of air and so you have to exhale the whole time you ascend until you’re at the surface. I felt my lungs expanding, which freaked me out, the visual of a ballooning exploding came to mind, but I am here and ok. We went down 58ft in the kelp forest. At parts the current was very strong and it felt like my fellow divers and I were in a hurricane on another planet. This was what I seemed to enjoy the most, the alien-ness of it all. A lot of people reported on different fish they saw and I just felt steeped in the sensory. It felt like a meditation to me not as much an expedition.  I spent two days in Catalina. Tourists joyfully drank and ate guacamole by the ocean. I saw the Catalina buffalos, heard various mythologies about the island from tour guides and locals. Not much Native American history amplified on the island though there’s evidence they were there in 7000 BCE. A very strange place that I wanna peel all the layers off of. 

I spent May horseback riding. There are stables very close to my house and I’ve been repressing an inner urge to jump on a horse for a long time now, so I thought why not. It makes sense after a year of distance to want to be outside atop a majestic creature, does it not? I take lessons from a sweet lady from Belgium who likes to hear about my love life. She has made noise that she no longer sleeps with her husband and shrugs when I ask what their connection is now. I haven’t asked if she has slept with any of the horses. My flat ass and horrified crotch get beat to shit every time I ride,  but there’s a horse named Remy who has patience for my ineptitude and is willing not to give up during our lesson like other horses have done.  I have no photo evidence of this because I am bad at it.

It’s embarrassing to feel like a happy, big hatted woman slamming sugary cocktails at a Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville restaurant who keeps eye contact for too long with the waiters and laughs 30 seconds after a punch line of a joke, but thats how I feel. Not a thought in my brain, just lovingly looking at the painted plastic palm tree decor, savoring a cheeseburger in paradise and the ahi poke nachos like its my last meal on this funny planet.