Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part II

songs I've had stuck in my head all day part I

Lost Half

On Echo Park Boulevard, outside an art gallery, I lost an earring. This was years ago, and that's the thing about jewelry; sometimes it just disappears. There's something about earrings though, or an earring. A mitten, a sock. Losing one half of a pair feels like the worst thing. And even now, years later, when I walk by that gallery, I still look for the glint of my lost earring, in the cracks of the sidewalk around the shrubs, by the doorway, in the planters; this restless hope that all lost things can somehow, at some point, be re-found, reunited, complete.

Hammamet, Tunisia

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Pervy Optmetrist

My optometrist's name is Ira. He dresses like he works at Sterling Cooper. He's 70. He doesn't understand why anyone actually pays to eat lunch out when you can just bring a sandwich from home.

The first time I went to see him, while checking my eyes, he informed me that his 98-year old father has the same eyeglass prescription as me.

"But it took him a long time to get up there," he said, as though I had just won the blindness Olympics. Then he made me read another chart.

"No, sorry, your eyesight is actually worse than his," he nodded.

"In my day, a girl with eyesight like that - blind as a bat, you'd have trouble finding someone to marry you. But times have changed. We now value girls based on their intelligence. And we have contact lenses. But, pretty girl like you, I think you'll find someone to marry you." He looked skeptical for a minute. We both looked at each other in silence. I think he was waiting to see if I would react in some way. I think I was waiting to see if I would react in some way. Then I started laughing, kind of more in shock than anything. And then he started laughing too, except I think he was laughing out of discomfort because he didn't get what was funny.

"I'll have to special order your contacts," he informed me. "We don't usually keep prescriptions that high in the store," he shrugged.

Outside on the sidewalk, I stopped to think about that exchange. My optometrist called me blind as a bat! Amongst other things.

'Hungarian Gypsies all of whom were deported' in The New York Times, Sunday Feb. 12, 1905

Clive Grylls, Gypsy Girl, Pushkar, India

Ansel Adams, Freeway Interchange, Los Angeles, 1967

conversation with my lungs this morning (featuring a cameo from my ass. also featuring my brain)

Me: Should we do outdoor yoga or indoor yoga today? Outdoor yoga!

Lungs: Why don't we just smoke a pack of cigarettes and move to Mexico City?

Me: Oh come on, lungs! The smog isn't that bad!

Lungs: Not if you bring an oxygen tank.

Me: I can almost see the Franklin Hills!

Lungs: How about we skip yoga altogether and sleep in?

Me: Lungs! You are so unmotivated! It's a beautiful LA Day!

Ass: How about we spend all day on this incredibly comfy tempurpedic mattress with incredibly comfy washed linen sheets and incredibly comfy down comforter and read?

Me: Look ass, you're the entire reason I'm going to yoga in the first place. Besides, we can't stay in bed. I can't write in bed.

Brain: Isn't that what a laptop is for? Duh!

Me: Okay you guys. I'm in.

Symmetry

question:

Was that one Battlestar Galactica reference too many?

conundrum

Sometimes you have a brilliant idea in a dream, but upon waking it simply doesn't make sense. Like the dream I had of four interconnected books that could be read forwards and backwards and revealed different stories about the same person, but different dimensions of who they are. In the dream, this was a brilliant idea. In real life, I wondered how I could actually do that. I don't inhabit enough dimensions. Or I'm not able to consciously register other dimensions. It was like that really talky episode of Battlestar Galactica that everyone hated, but that I loved because it was all about the limits of human perception. And then I got all depressed and didn't know what to do with myself. Because I didn't know how to write a book that would speak, like directly speak, maybe even without the reading of it, despite it's four parts and backwards-and-forwards narrative, to the part of a person that's more expansive than just this, what we have. So I guess the blog'll do just fine for now.

-William Eggleston

Kabul, Afghanistan, Bill Podlich

Cadillac, William Eggleston

Vintage Misogyny

Over Denver. In a Cuba kind of mood...

Maybe I really do need to move to Denver, where the air is clean and the landscape looks like scaled Lego village and odd and magical and serendipitous things happen (don't laugh).

I can live in Denver if I want. This is the thing about falling in love with places and people and things and ideas that don't mesh with your own notions of what your life should be. This sloughing away metaphorical dead skin, so to speak reveals a handful of compelling possibilities.

Maybe this is what happens when you're just tired of the cacophony, the distress of decisions, the abundance of choices. You can't make them go away, and you're frightened of making choices from the wrong place and being enveloped by the ceaseless tide of things.

The only option seems to be finding your own true North and letting your life organize itself around it. This is what I've consciously been trying to do the past few weeks and it's been a compelling exercise.

Order within I guess. T was telling me about swimming in the ocean, which I don't really do because I'm small and the ocean is big and it's scary. And she said that the most important thing she learned was that you'll get where you need to, generally, and most people do (she was speaking about this within the context of her triathlon). She said that the hardest thing she learned as a swimmer was to not fight the ocean, which is what she started out doing. She'd still win races because she was good at it, and fast, but she emerged from the water exhausted, spent, anxious, frightened. But if she was still, she could find the tide and move with it. It would carry her where she needed to go if she worked with it. But she had to start by dropping her fear of the ocean. Being still, finding the tide. And when she told me this, my mouth literally dropped open because I realized that she was the most brilliant person on Earth.

Also, I totally get the Zen/surfing thing now. I kind of want to take up surfing.

ThinkGeek published the letter and offered this apology on its Web site to the board: “We’d like to publicly apologize to the N.P.B. for the confusion over unicorn and pork — and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn’t actually exist.”

via C. I had forgotten how disturbing and fascinating this opening was. I need to watch Magnolia again, particularly since I live in LA now.

Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, 1905

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

The River

In one day the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic the equivalent of New York City's water supply for nine years.

-New York Times

Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or other,
don't think I don't remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood

on one of the weedy threads that pour
toward a muddy lightning,
surging east, past
monkeys and parrots, past
trees with their branches in the clouds, until
I was spilled forth

and slept under the blue lung
of the Caribbean.

Nobody
told me this. But little by little
the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,
and in dreams I began to turn,
to sense the current.

Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.

Home, I said
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.

-Mary Oliver

this week's conversation snippets about the limits of cultural signifiers

Me: Why were these DVRs recalled? I like my Moxie.

Time Warner Cable Guy: Because one of them overheated and caught on fire and caused a TV to explode.

Me: Oh, okay. You can switch it out, no problem


* * *

E: So ___ was at the reunion and he was wearing a polo shirt with the collar popped up and sunglasses on the back of his neck.

Me: I think that's the official uniform of douches everywhere. especially pastel polo shirts.

E: Yeah, Ed Hardy's the other one.


* * *

D: Sometimes when I stretch in the morning I get Charlie Horses.

Me: I don't know what that is, I've never had one. Am I missing out?

D: How is it possible you've never had a Charlie Horse?

Me: I don't have a potassium deficiency like you.

D: So you never stretch and then feel like this --eeee-- Charlie Horse?

Me: Make that sound again.

D: --eeee--

Me: What was it again?

D: ...

Me: No, I'm serious.

D: --eee--

Me: No, I've never experienced that.

* * *

Very young random person: I don't like that old guy.

Me: Harrison Ford?

Very young random person: I don't know his name. But I don't like him.

Me: You don't know who Harrison Ford is?

Very young random person: No.

Me: How old are you?

Very young random person: 18.

Me: Oh. Okay.

Grllzonmlnchlltyhill - For more amazing video clips, click here

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

-Aristotle

i like this room. so i thought i'd share it with you.

This is how a human being can change.
There's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need to devour.

-Rumi

Things that happened/are happening

For over a year, you see her everywhere, the woman with the black Mercedes. You see her on Abbott Kinney, outside of LA Mill, at M Cafe. You see her at intersections and traffic lights. Once you saw her in the parking lot of the Arclight. For some reason, you are curious about her. Synchronicity is a mesmerizing bread crumb trail, but truthfully, you are curious about everyone. You snoop in on conversations people are having at restaurants and cafes. At the Silverlake Library, you pretend you are reading, but really you are watching the homeless man who is reading Ulysses and talking to the pug that he managed to sneak past the librarian in change. Because you have free time and an excess of imagination, you invent lives for strangers. The woman with the black Mercedes becomes a harbinger for good luck. If you see her, you know you will have a good day. She starts to appear in stories that you write. In writing, or in your imagined version of her, she is grim, and asks pointed questions. She always has a cigarette in hand. She laughs when you think of her as cynical. She points out that she is only part real, mostly, she is a figment of your imagination, as everyone is, to some extent.

Then one day, you are in a different city, far from home. Okay, you are in Denver. For a very particular reason. Strange thing happen to you in Denver. You are in a high-rise looking out over the city, waiting for the evening to begin, waiting for a client to show up, and when she does, you realize it is her, the woman in the black Mercedes. She tells you she is excited to meet you, she has already heard all about you. She gives you a hug, tells you she'd love to talk when you get back to LA. Then the woman in the black Mercedes (sans Mercedes on this day) tells you she is going back downstairs to smoke a cigarette. This event, occurring in a strange city, should surprise you, but it doesn't. The only thing that surprises you is how boisterous she is. And friendly.

It is like a moment from a dream, where the lines of reality are so blurred that your only option is to accept the absurdity of this moment. Should you tell her that all these months, you've been chronicling her imaginary life? That in your head, she is grim and calculated? No, this would deem you a crazy person or a stalker. Which you wholly admit you are, but still. You generally let this cat out of the bag later, after you've known someone a few months.

These things happen, are happening all the time. They will probably continue to happen. And you will unwrap them slowly, like small gifts left for you in different cities, on street corners and cafes, in intersections and parking lots. You will follow them wherever they wish to take you because this life is a long process of unwrapping things that come your way. It is best to take your time with these things, and see. For years you asked what these kinds of things meant. And then one day you realized: it is best to not ask exactly what they mean till you are ready, really ready for some kind of answer.

Foods that always look more appealing than they actually are

* Salt Water Taffy

* Jell-o

* homemade marshmallows

Foods people will eat in the future that sound equally appealing. But for different reasons.

* Astronaut ice cream (neapolitan)

* Algae chips

* mini freeze-wrapped pizza that expands to full-size in an oven-like contraption (Thanks, Back to the Future!)

Foods eaten in the Bible or other old-timey texts by humans and/or Gods that sound enticing

* Ambrosia

*Figs

*Manna

*Elixir of Life

no relation to the flotilla situation

But I've been listening to this album non-stop. It's appropriate seasonal malaise music.

I can't believe I just discovered this blog. So up my alley...

Saturday account

An hour of yoga. Drive to Venice. Consumption of vegan brunch. Meditation on a smoggy hilltop in Mount Washington. Making of strawberry jam. Writing of two pages. Editing of twelve. Cringing at pictures of gulf coast pelicans, sea turtles, dolphins. Nap to assuage anxiety over state of the world. Argument about the merits of digital distortion vs. analog distortion. Hike in the hills. Glass of Lillet Blanc with a curl of orange in the backyard. Late dinner. Glass of Albarino.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

-Edward Albee

My Jo is Director of the Media that Matters Film Fest in NY! If you're in NY, you should go to the premiere. Like immediately. or tomorrow night. Details here.