In heaven everything is fine

There are a few times in my life only where I've been absolutely gutted, not by my own diabilities and limitations (which happens all the time), of the weight of the dumb world (also frequent), but by the emotionality of someone else actually reaching through the cold universe into my coal heart and grabbing it deeply and with pure intention and without mercy.

One was when I was working the door one very late night / early morning at First Avenue in Minneapolis on a weekend dance night, very exhausted by the crowd and by my job overall which taxed my social skills well beyond their limits, exhausted by the time of night where drunks from other clubs were spilling out into mine, people not suited for the place, people who should be in cabs on the way home. This one guy seemed to have had too many, and I was trying to turn him away. He was with a friend. Something was a bit off. What his friend explained was that he wasn’t really that drunk, that most of his state of disassociation and insobriety was the horror of the life event he’d been drinking that night to try and leave out of his mind for a few hours; and the moment I tried to turn him away at the door was when that liquid armor failed him. His mother had been killed by her partner, recently. And he was too new in this shattered world of his to go out and do anything normal, yet, but he’d misunderstood, until I stood before him accusing him of too much comfort booze. I hadn’t known.

We talked for a bit and I’m no miracle worker and nobody could get in a time machine and make the thing not happen. But I am pretty raw by nature, both abrasive and easily harmed, and occasionally a thing in my orbit meets me at that level. This was the thing, someone unlike me, but in a rare state where he was so blitzed with grief he could split time. And I turned out to be what he needed. I was wearing a watch with my artwork on it I’d had custom made, he spotted it, asked me about it, and told me never to give up my art. Took off his watch. As a reminder, gave it to me, for whatever I’d given him – I didn’t even realize I had it in me. Hope, I guess, which he’d left at the last bar. He’d spun through aggression and dissociation and into healing in the blink of an eye.

He and his friend left then, and my manager saw my imminent dysfunction, covered my post, took me upstairs to the office and sat me down with a drink so I could recover from the shock of the whole thing. It was like I’d sucked some of the grief out of him and had to sob it out myself. I’d seen right through someone’s skin. This guy was inside out. Everyone is in there somewhere. But under so many layers usually. So many layers.

I've lost mine, like an asshole, but here's his.

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I’ve never had a worse year. I’m in shreds. My career has collapsed, my city is burning, I have no stability, nobody needs me, my dreams are gone. I’m out of gas.

So another gutting moment took me by surprise yesterday at noon when every David Lynch fan in the universe stopped what they were doing to meditate for ten minutes as he’d have done, on what would have been his 79th birthday a few short days after his final trip to the moon. I’d been fully immersed in a Lynch retrospective all weekend and was consumed by grief and awe. I was watching a stream of endless Lynch movies and clips. The stream paused for the meditation. And then when left alone with that in silence, it enveloped me. I sucked all the peace and love vibes from the thousands and thousands of meditating people radiating outward, and ate it up like a black hole.

flea on the iger dog

 Oh heyyyyy

Careful what you wish for, as they say.

Was it me who was a bit (year+) ago admitting I wanted the world to stop so I could get off for awhile?

Enter: multiple industry strikes. Yeah, they're over, and roughly a year from the first batch, there's the possibility of another (couple), so for whatever reasons (I could speculate, and have) there's still almost no work, and that's not really what I meant I wanted, for the record. 

Can't imagine I ought to feel any shame for admitting I've had around six weeks of work since last May, and I'm possibly one of the lucky ones.

It's actually pretty extraordinary to have volumes of free time if (unlike me) you're someone that can manage to use it while in a 24/7 state of panic about how you're going to keep a roof over your head. I could do so many things with it. If.

I did do one Really Cool Thing (I'll get to it, in another post) but otherwise my brain has some holes if you haven't noticed, and when things go awry I can't make much sense of anything (someday maybe I'll get into Small Awry vs Big Awry / recovery times / worldbuilding / contextualizing difficulties in this swiss cheese brain of mine, maybe not – for now just imagine I need sort of a life stability exoskeleton - but also am unskilled at achieving that – or things just swish around and get dizzy) and can end up pretty paralyzed, so there's nothing too fun about this.

[New wish: start the world again; I want to get ON. is that how this works? I don't know how to person, so also I don't know how to achieve goals]

Are there still people reading this? there appear to be. I don't know who you are or why – maybe we're both happier that way – I'm not going to storm in, hit the overhead light and demand you show yourselves. (rude!) It's totally fine, just chill.  Oh! hahah ... remembered recently (won't name him but) someone sent me a "Want to hang out soon? Netflix and chill?" text years ago before I heard that term and I was like "yeah, sure, soon" ..er, possibly disappointing him. welp. Say what you mean, friends! dropping hints here. 

I did need a reminder to write. Someone reminded me to write. Thank Eu. Writing is free. If there are consequences to it, like chat gpt is being trained on my babbling, that's unfortunate, but how helpful would it be to the big fake brain anyway? Sorry buddy, move on to a lawyer or somebody who tells good jokes or whatever, idk.

Possibly AI writing is most easily identified due to its repetitiveness or inability to understand what a joke actually is (that sounds familiar - I mean as is my writing, maybe, so while I imagine I contribute nothing, I could be selling myself short here and I could be a cog in the machine .. a *further* cog in a *new* machine, not just the same old cog in the previous machine, which was/is a tiny flea on the film industry dog that does little things here and there and just demands pay in blood, a parasite to the zaslavs and igers who I refuse to capitalize) << when I put it that way, I'm begging to be a flea again, aren't I?

To sum up here, my hope is this becomes a solid time of reckoning, not out of financial necessity but straight from my heart, that some things unravel that I'm tied down by, and new seeds are planted that create a new structure for my life that'll ultimately be more fulfilling. Do I want to go back to the grind? NO. I've got nothing to show for it. You can never run fast enough on the hamster wheel. It's fixed.

But I've got stories to tell, and instead of begging for scraps on the Hollywood Hamster Wheel, I'm going to tell them.

When I do go back to work, that is just a day job. They can have my labor but they cannot have my life.

Scarolina Rob & Sex Fish Story. (retitle)

Nah, I'm not gonna retitle that. That rocks.

So my head's unscrewed & I'm just gonna say the two sides of it aren't working together functionally today (or any day lately, or possibly any day hereafter), like Kim Peek of Rain Man inspiration fame, who had no corpus callosum which is what ties the two brain hemispheres together (did you know?) and but although it took some things from him, like social adroitness (familiar!) it also allowed him to do things like spot count hundreds of dropped toothpicks (oh alright, Dustin Hoffman did that. Probably a fiction) but anyway he definitely could read the two separate pages of an open book simultaneously, and take in the info on each. I cannot do this.

However. I am about to tell two stories that although they come from the same book (my weird life) have zip in common and are a terrible match to tell together, but my deep brain is shoving them both to the surface at once so I know there's a reason, and maybe I'll figure it out later, by the end of this post. It happens.

First things, unfortunately, first.

When I was living in St Paul with Bel, she had a younger friend from her home town come for a visit: Scarolina Rob. Rob from Scarolina. Bel was working a lot and I hung out a lot with the kid. He wasn't a kid though. He was a teenage mad/genius. He gave me a NOFX tape (White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean) and a red plaid spiked leather bracelet of his, which I once tore the apartment up looking for when it was lost, and worried everyone had stolen it, only to find it again and which I still have, one of my very most prized possessions. There is no better gift than a thing someone takes literally off their person and straight gives to you to put on yourself. Nothing.

[side bar: when I was working at First Avenue in, eh, maybe 1998, I was working the door and Grant Hart came in wearing a plaid clip on bow tie. I barely knew him. "Nice tie, Grant!" I said. He took it off and gave it to me. Needless to say this lives in a small "most special shit" box.]

So Rob gave me a few things, told me some stories, we traipsed around. Friends for a week, but fast friends. One of his stories was about dropping acid around town (somewhere in S.carolina) and to tell me the story he punctuated the "took acid" bit by tearing a tiny piece of paper and putting it on his tongue as he talked. (mind blown)

The next year, Rob took his life. 

We were living back in the dorms. A mutual friend (of mine/Bel's) found me in the elevator en route to dinner and said "I was looking for you. You have to come console Bel. Rob blew his brains out and–" everything went fucking black.

Hey, whoever you are, reading this: if it ever befalls you that you're tasked with breaking the news of someone's suicide to a person you think didn't know that person very well so what the heck, might as well blurt it out however? DO NOT.

wow.

Nobody slept that night. I had quit smoking and started smoking again, very much. A lot. Bel had a ferret in her dorm room and I remember it had gotten into some yeast infection cream. What the fuck. We all went mad. Crying, laughing. Silent, in shock.

A week later I sat in the dining hall with a few people I reaaallly liked, but didn't know well, and just started crying. Some hip hop characters, who I thought were kinda out of my league (years later I would go out with one of them, and when a friend was driving us home, at his place he lured me in by saying "Kate, I think you left your Holly Hobby lunchbox at my place earlier" which is – sorry, I know this story is busy being a tragedy, but that's when humor is the most important tbh – the BEST PICKUP LINE EVER UTTERED. I once got a guy to go out with me by answering his "no, I don't want a soda. I'm watching my figure" with the ridiculous "I'll watch it for ya" but this, this puts every person's best most ridiculous date story TO THE SHAMEST OF SHAMES)

Wow. Where was I?

Somewhere in the short time that transpired between these two main events (Rob sticking paper in his mouth to tell the acid story and his death) I had moved from Bel's apartment into an apartment in the identical building next door (although it was further down the hall, and OF COURRRRSE almost immediately I walked downstairs to get the mail and then let myself into the wrong apartment, OOPS,,, back out quietly...) where so many of us lived there in a two room apartment (among us, two couples: myself + Matt Sawicki, who famously once said to me on the phone "Dennis got knifed! oh wait, there's a call on the other line" and Eric + Heather) that we all had an arrangement to go out "shopping" when the others needed privacy. So one day Matt, Terry, and myself had gone to I dunno where, shopping. We came home and from the back room heard the most raucous, RIDICULOUS orgasm noises we could even conceive (ding!) – "oh, god, oh god, OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD" we just, we cracked up so hard & all thought the same thing at once: it's fake. They're doing it for our amusement, and TOUCHÉ, this is the best fucking joke any of us have ever heard. Dying.

Then it got quiet, and Heather came out of the room, surprised to see us, and died of embarrassment. Eric followed, sweaty. Matt said "wait, that was real?? We all thought it was fake, like, a sex fish story." then pointedly, to Eric:

"WE DIDN'T BELIEVE YOU UNTIL WE SAW THE FISH."

 

 

Now look. It's nearly inconceivable that all these things have happened, right? That I bore witness to all of this magic? This chaos?

I promise you. There is this much intensity in the world around you, around everyone. There's just a whole other art in the remembering and the retelling. The love of the story is (also) the story.

You. YOU. Are part of somebody else's story. You can tell it yourself however you want. But meanwhile someone else is bearing witness. And they might TELL IT FUNNIER THAN YOU.

Anyway, you've changed them; you are part of their story now.

This is how to live forever. This is how.

Ok, here we are, the monsters at the end of this book. What's the conclusion, Kate?

WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH??

I feel a little put on the spot now, like I'm trying to wrap up a Hannah Gadsby standup routine. I promised you some tragedy, I promised you some comedy, and I promised you they would tie together in a crazed little knot at the end.

Imagine if I had told the Rob story in a vacuum. Right? The other stories cushion it so it doesn't sink you.

Everything in its right place.

Grant's tie.

Zarvis bum oil redux

I don't like telling anyone what to do .. I mean thanks for being here willingly and reading this weird stuff I write so that it lands in a brain and doesn't just float into the cloud and dissipate like the majority of our ideas, energy, and time; but listen: I would really like you to read the original Zarvis bum oil post (< link) before you go any further. Go ahead – we'll reconvene here in a minute.

Ok, is your mind blown? Put it back together and prepare for it to be blown again.

Last February (2020 BC, "before covid") my last huzzah with the outside world was a trip to London and Paris. You can probably guess where I'm going with this: I paid the Zarvis London storefront a visit .. wait though, BY ACCIDENT. I STUMBLED ACROSS IT.

After laughing like a crazy person and snapping a couple of photos, I excitedly tried to chat up the gal running the store, ready to be embraced (maybe given the deed to my castle in Scotland, an inscribed tin of bum oil, or whatever – at least some fucking tea) and instead she completely went apeshit bananas on me for photographing the Zarvis sign. I explained the situation. I showed her my ID!!! But she wanted nothing to do with me and insisted I was violating her trademark by photographing a sign with my name on it! Come on lady. You can't trademark my name!! I kept trying to reason and she just kept yelling at me to delete my phone photos. No way, psycho. The last she saw of me I was holding my license up to the window desperately, like a fish drowning in oxygen, like Charlie in Lost

 

It was a total barf-o-rama.

Check this out. Even Mom was mad!!

^ this is Mom mad. She's very nice about it.

That's it, London woman. You're out of my will. You want that dirty hippo mug? Tough crap, jerk. Also, the store was empty. shrug shrug. 

 

O My Soul

I’ve been feeling pummeled lately by things happening that I really wish hadn’t, so I took a little weekend vacation and drove up to the bay area. It was just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. I drowned my sorrows in: a hot tub; wine, champagne, sushi, and ice cream; a couple new pairs of vintage boots; a reunion with a friend I hadn’t seen in – can this really be true? – sixteen or seventeen years; and Big Star at the Fillmore.

I’d rather not blog about things sucking, so I thought I’d can it until I felt a little better, but for now, that more or less sums it up. Life goes on, clouds and silver linings and all that jazz.

they run and hide their heads

this is how I feel today.

I wish I was in New England. The foliage is beautiful right about now. Three years ago I was ironing leaves in wax paper and then I took them home pressed in a book and made them into a painting. The next spring I gave the painting to my (ex)boyfriend, who still has it (because you have to own that sort of sentiment forever, I think - it's his, even if it sits in a closet). rats.

This is the painting.

This is Lauren (the ex-boyfriend).
It's so wrong that I have this photo. A previous girlfriend took it.

... sometimes maybe I get my priorities confused ...

I wish it would rain.