ITS DIFFICULT / AND THEN ITS DONE

Weird having lived in one city long enough to see almost all my favorite joints close.

My first heartbreak here was the Nova Express Cafe on Fairfax, and the one that hurt me the most personally, probably, was the C++ 24 hour punk rock coffee shop in Glendale (rules on the wall: "don't come in and be a drunk fool. tip or make coffee at home"). I'm guessing I've mentioned both before but I don't know if I'll bother to check. Another tough loss was the Cat Club on the strip, because André and I had once driven Dee Dee home from there - I had just met him once prior, and I had my one and only heart to heart chat with him on the way to his place. (me: "Dee Dee, why don't you drive?" him: "I don't trust myself not to do something stupid") This is also where the public memorial was for him after his death, and when Arthur Kane walked in, André leaned in and said to me: "that man is a living legend."

Living in a city of constant change as they all are, and especially in the throes of capitalism destroying all our good things, knowing anything could go bankrupt and split at almost any time, it's counterintuitive that I do this thing with a few special places, and that's make a point of visiting them infrequently, so they don't lose their magic (Toi Thai is the pique example of this dumb behavior - I've gone twice in the past six months, but really only because the first of those two was with a friend who passed away not long later, and I couldn't bear that to be my last current memory of the place)

So here's something I still only do at most only once every couple years: sit for an afternoon and read all the notes in the magic chess table at the Alcove cafe. I sincerely hope that place *does* close, and greedily I can purchase that table and take it out of commission and love it forever privately before it fills with self promotion and fuck yous. but for now: it still remains a spot where (mostly) people leave love letters and affirmations and off the cuff well intentioned poetic nonsense.

I sometimes stick a note or two in there myself, and this time I did something I haven't done before: maybe I'm going to hell - a principled documentarian should only observe - but I took a note home. It just really spoke to me.

Some favorites (for the sentiment, the humor, the handwriting, whatever) from this last visit, below. They do obviously get purged every couple years (individual drawers at different times, as they fill beyond usability, probably) and slowly regenerate. Some have dates written on them and these go back to late 2021. A barista told me the owner keeps them all and hangs his favorites in his office. I love that after all these years they don't say anything about it. There's no paper & pen at that table or anything - people discover it on their own, write on and with whatever they can find: napkins, coffee sleeves, notebook pages, lipstick. Either your curiosity leads you there, or it doesn't. And it's not an artsy weirdo hangout. The desserts are pretty good but the Magic Table is the magic (a name many people have given it, possibly independently of each other, over the years).

(good call ditching that apostrophe, Jenna)

depends on what you're using it for?

weird but i dont know if i drew this

before i got to this one

(after)

(ok to live on timid island if you like)

+ cats. duh

(Magic Table product placement)

well, there it is.

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.

*Not Toronto

sorry I just drop this blog and pick it up at random like (what do people pick up and drop at random?) 

sorry again, only good at metaphors of my own making... er ... yo-yos? post-show flyers some dork's handing to you when you're sweaty and tired and want to go home. hotcakes or whatever. loose change falling out your pants from a hole in your pocket (inspired by Austin's work pants pocket hole and his phone falling down through his pant leg and out onto the floor, over and over). dumb hobbies. ugh, terrible. yeah, also , yeah ,,,, I know it's not a metaphor anyway but a simile. I would rather say metaphor. I prefer the word. AESTHETICALLY. everybody knows what I mean. you know what I mean. if people know what you mean, then the word works. right? and the point of words is for people to know what you mean. so sometimes, it's ok if they're the wrong words. pin that thought ..

so bad though. I'm fired. for the bad SIMILE attempts and also for keeping my (three) readers guessing how long it will be between posts; look though, explore the archive dates and you'll see that's how I've always been. can't say you weren't warned..

ever have a moment in your life where you're SO SURE about something? like, POSITIVELY SURE. let's say you've made a decision and it is THE PERFECT DECISION 

well fuck that moment - it was a psycho moment - because there are no perfect decisions in life

I knew this. I know this. I know this.

if you think something is above scrutiny in fact you are just not scrutinizing it, which is fine. some things are better left unscrutinized, or .. infrequently scrutinized. I only function to scrutinize, it seems (I did tell a friend recently my brain only has two settings: 1.vegetable, 2.overthinking), so my having been so certain of something is actually quite far out of character, but actually in retrospect I really wasn't so sure because i did warn you, er, warn me, warn myself, out loud, by which I mean here, where anyone could read it, that if I looked too hard I would melt that decision with my laser eyes and in fact, I did

OK, CONSIDER THAT AN APOLOGY to whoever was happy about that wrong decision

 

family, mainly. sorry, family. that's what airplanes are for

 

*sigh*

 

ever read House of Leaves?

I've written on it before. due for a re-read. Join me and we'll have a psychic book club, which I'll never mention (out loud) again.

there's this bit, after you're thoroughly exhausted & confused by the formatting of the book (not a complaint; it's brilliant – this is by design, as you'll see when you read it) where a footnote says something like "if you read too fast or too slow, you understand nothing." I think of it often.

the same could be said for decision making. in any case, I finally just occam's razored the whole situation and made the (imperfect) best decision, the one all roads led to. It has good and bad qualities, (note to self:) because that's how life is. Now stay tuned to see if I manage to pull it off.

this is feeling like a housecleaning post. ew.

if you are cleaning your house, HERE IS A PLAYLIST I MADE FOR THAT

actually it's made for vacuuming, and it comes with this caveat: if it takes you longer than this to vacuum your place, you should give up and hire somebody

 

I'll wait if you need to go vacuum. Go on

 

 

I don't know when I last talked cats in here and it's just that with the aforementioned agonizingly intermittent posting, all the cat updates would be RIP CAT posts. (speaking of agonizing) I have lost four cats in four years (if you know me, you know a chunk of my heart falls out each time so, understatement to just drop that info and move on) and can no longer even really be called a cat lady. RIP CAT LADY IDENTITY. so much furry family loss. I'm down to a conventionally acceptable Three Cats (I did notice about twenty years ago when I had my three first generation cats that three was still a crazy number of cats to most people, but that's no longer the case; multi-catting has now become hip) and I fully and without guilt plan to get one more cat when I Get Where I'm Going™*

what else? OH

the WGA is on strike. why should you care? because I'm unemployed for the foreseeable future, that's why. does that mean I'll post more? NO CLUE.

I wrote this last time the writers went on strike. it's definitely not a novel

I did post A LOT after that though. A LOT. for about two years. that was before social media doomscrolling existed. I can't make any promises. I've forgotten how to write (or talk). what do words mean? I give up

SEND RAMEN.