In Twilight Regalia

Waiting in morning for him to wake up. I have hated it, particularly on a Saturday morning. But he needs his sleep.
Funny thing happens when he drinks. The first time it happened I didn’t know what to expect, but today I know what to do.

I’ve been a nondrinker since age 19. It’s been a while since anyone around me got really drunk. There were wars in my mother’s house over alcohol, until it was pronounced forbidden. It had been the enemy that made the truth come out too sharply.

I had no quarrel with it for myself, but had left it for my personal convictions after a briefly rebellious period of experimentation, and then just for practical reasons.

I never missed it. I never missed the taste of it; I never missed the whirling lack of control, and I never missed the hangovers of course. It became my badge of independence. I’ve held myself away from alcohol even in the most oppressive situations, even in the face of Irish musicians, and THAT’s quite a fight to win, let me just say. I’ve seen myself through many a New Years bash without it, I’ve been insulted by wine connoisseurs, pushed and chided and made fun of, and generally disliked for it. But alcohol just doesn’t belong in my life, I’ve no use for it.

My job in my several circles of friends over the years has always been to ferry them home, to guard, to pick up the coats or wallets or keys they were leaving in the club coat=check by mistake, to hold hair back, mop up, to close the blinds in the morning, to answer over and over again that no, he or she loves or loved them, to discuss the wounds that might have taken them that far knowing it will all be forgotten sands in the morning, to pull off the boots and tuck them in with a wastebasket left close. I never minded that I was the odd one out. I felt like their angel, black or grey checkered though I might have been at the time myself.

And you have to live in Asia to really understand Alex’s reasons, and you have to forgive a bit. I came to see the point of it, even being a staunch non-drinker, while living in Japan. It’s a bit backward, but Asian colleagues always drag each other out to get drunk at least a few times a year (and usually much more often) — it’s an obligatory bonding ritual, with or without karaoke, and neither males nor females are exempt. You have to commit to the group there.

I being an outsider, was thankfully exempt, but the social pecking order and overall repressive structure of just living in an Asian culture is so completely restrictive in businesses over there that alcohol has provided them their only social escape. They use alcohol to step outside the ever-present threat of blame, shame, loss of face, and to be allowed, for a brief night, to be somewhat themselves. Various rice wines and Tsing Tao in China, Sake and Sapporo in Japan, Soju or Hite other Korean liquors here in Koreatown, are the chosen weapons of the mass destruction of the crushing daily inhibitions and restrictions they live under. And they are incredibly STRONG, both the weapons and the pressures.

You’re fully expected to get smashed with your boss, so the bunch of you can feel equally human, and your boss can feel duly superior by paying for the whole ordeal. You can’t bow out, it would be considered completely unfriendly. Some people manage to drink less and fake their drunkenness, but it’s tough to do since there are drinking games or rounds of toasts, always poured by others into one’s glass.

Alex usually passes on going at all if he can. It’s the only time he drinks and always gets a taxi home, such a good boy. But there was that first Friday — an important event, since he’d just begun working at a new company — when he came home looking impaired, but not smashed. He washed up, wobbled off to bed. All was well for a few hours. I thought the worst might be ahead. It was, but I hadn’t at all expected the result.

Rather than just parking his cookies in the middle of the night like a white boy, I was woken by moans.
I asked what the matter was, but he was out of it. When I put my hand on his forehead, he was obviously way past a normal fever temperature. I don’t measure, I’m not a medically inclined person, I had no thermometer. But he was scalding.

I was actually scared.

I made him wake up and take some water, which made him sick, and some more alcohol left in reverse gear. All the better.

I couldn’t get him normal temperature. I couldn’t get him to be conscious enough to realize this was serious. He wouldn’t sit up.

I put cold wet towels on him that made him protest the sting and shiver, and he kept begging for blankets.

I changed his blanket to a sheet.

More cold towels, back and forth to the bathroom over and over. He protested over and over.
He took aspirin, he threw it up. More towels.

Finally he began to cool down and look the right color. Eventually I could tell he was passing out normally.
He slept till 4pm the next day, and woke miraculously with no hangover at all.

I think the problem is, he doesn’t GET hangovers, he just completely malfunctions.

Why don’t people remember alcohol is poison? Especially when it registers on the body this dangerously? And his is the mild part — it doesn’t touch on the fraternity deaths caused by everclear, the BILLIONS of deaths on the highway, the babies that were an Oops, the paralysis or broken bones from drunken falls, the abuse caused by dark personalities turned on a dime, the triggers pulled that wouldn’t have been, the monetary waste of bar-room brawls ending in a jail cell, the soccer stadium tramplings, or just the quiet daily submergence of an ailing spirit.

He says it only puts him to sleep. He’s just never realized what his body’s doing in sleep.

So here it’s another of those mornings, I hate waiting to drag my man’s sorry carcass out of bed to go and do something on a Saturday.

But today I can’t. It’s not fair to. That company is going belly-up fast and he resigned before things got ugly. They gave him a sendoff party and now it’s up to him to find another gig.

And that’s another challenge.

And another wasted Saturday morning after, no doubt.

The Avalon, Los Angeles

To start, I had a feeling that musicianship might get outweighed by power with Secret Machines. They are not the musical technicians that, say, Mute Math are. They are experimenters. I knew it wouldn’t be about technical graces. But I didn’t know what to expect, actually.

One thing I really didn’t expect was the age of the crowd — they were 30s and some beyond, rather than the usual bouncing 20s types I see at concerts.

On appearance, they were very subdued in dark nondescript clothes (except how can you not watch Benjamin in that jumpsuit thing and not drool, he’s just … darling…. ). Brandon looked hidden rather than stylish in his growing out hair, but Brandon is most of the show’s focus, and every bit the creator. Josh is always fun to watch with his big dark eyes and wild mane flapping like a muppet.

I came away with mixed feelings on what Secret Machines are about, though, which is … well, rather more painterly than I had thought. And of course VOLUMEMONGOUS.

They pack more sheer amp wattage into a space than any band I’ve seen since 19?,::cough::, and that’s saying something. We’re talking WALLS of Marshalls shored up against the in-the-round scaffolding. My husband likened the experience to audible massage. It was sheer awesomeness in terms of its overabundence of raw sound. The pleasure of having a familiar tune fill your very bones is like nothing else.

But there were difficulties, one major problem being the first set, which seems to lump all their similarly paced songs in an overly drawn out pileup of steady pulsation, some of my favorites even slowed down a bit to fit that collage. I came away feeling it was more appropriate for listening in a quiet, pensive mood, rather than in concert. Or maybe you were just meant to be stoned, as I could smell some of our audience definitely was….. I ended up feeling that the volume and pace gave short shrift to the great writing and showcase of vocals that the recorded versions provide.

It was like an oilspill of sound — Benjamin’s shimmering guitars bleeding into too much keyboard bassline and too many smeary loop effects that were lost on an acoustic theater of that size (fairly small). Which may be what they wanted, but I was hard-pressed to audibly discern some of the parts I like best. (The portion they played of their huge hit Pharoah’s Daughter was absolutely tired, and brief. Were they bored with it? They might be.) Some of the audience looked like they were rather yawn-y about then. Some people would attribute this to the Ten Silver Drops material just …. being boring. I don’t know. I think it could have been done differently. Tempo choices I wouldn’t have made.

Second: as the set progressed, I could see that the actual problem was most likely Brandon himself, who was blowing his nose once or twice between tunes, and whose voice and demeanor was not energetic in the least. Oh man, he’s SICK, I thought. That SUCKS. Poor guy. Can’t do anything about that. I’m not saying I hated one little bit of it, but it may well have been better on another night. Oh well.

The next set was however was much brighter, utilizing very interesting transitions in and out of a mixed bag of both earlier and current songs, irrespective of popularity (They even played Marconi’s Radio –THAT in concert? and it worked!). This allowed some space in the paintbox for single runs and hushed pauses, and a few crashing entries in tunes like Nearly Nowhere and I Hate Pretending that were just pure lightening (@@!!). The unity in timing these more delicate points was really spotless among the three of them, and a delight to watch. Josh was pure energy, completely solid. “Solid” is good in, say, pop, but this is HEAVY. I mean weight: It’s as if sheer will carries through his beats. His conviction is what you hear. I LOVE that. They ran through a bunch of great tunes, starting at The Road Leads Where it’s Led and finishing up with First Wave Intact, which was surprisingly good; the crowd seemed to just be getting really really into it, which is where they should have BEGUN, and then it was over. Dang.

Well, health is a bitch when you’re traveling to another city every two days, and an especially heavy burden when the show is just three players, with focus on one, and you’re it.

I wish them all good things, and more happy and freer times ahead, so they can get back to their initial battery-charged level. I will still buy them and love them, because they have so much evident devotion to their particular sound, and are not afraid to experiment in an age of pre-packaged garbage pop.

And because somewhere in my heart, there still lurks an adolescent boy waiting for that wall of Marshalls. Yeah, baby!

I am gritting my teeth and saying nothing right now. I am so mad that I could spit.

And worse, I can place my anger nowhere. No one deserves it.

I am listening to an air filtering device made by some Korean company that my husband won in a raffle. It was free, not to mention it has a pointlessly flashy LED display panel on the front indicating what kind of level of air cleaning it’s doing at the time, so he decided it was very cool and placed it, with its 1970s faux-wood-panel and square aluminum box shape, looking like a 1970s alarm clock magnified about 20 times, in the middle of my otherwise antique Shanghai furnished living room. When you take out one of the filters to clean it (the magnetic ones — there are six of different types), it plays an electronic musicbox version of There’s No Place Like Home. This is perhaps the most annoying, ugly, sty one could place in my eye, directly in front of what would have been at least some semblance of a fireplace (it’s faux as well, but at least that wasn’t our doing).

My husband has no sense of these things. He has no sense of history or art when it comes to surroundings. He wants everything to be clean and modern, whereas I grew up with simple modern lines to the point of inanity, and crave an elaborate castle out of the middle ages, or a multipatterned Mongolian yurt, or Turkish casbah, or something more comfortably eclectic as that. He has no sense of beauty except a sort of Asian idea of modernity and freshness. It’s in every Japanese, Hong Kong, or Korean magazine I’ve ever picked up. I know it well, with its air fresheners and plastic corner bins and its chrome racks. It’s …. someone else’s idea of a life. It’s a cramped version of the American dream stuffed into the small chambers of the East. And he doesn’t see how I can feel this way. Why would I want that old stuff?

This breaks my heart.
He truly never understands.
After an entire weekend inside the apartment, where I neither felt like creating, cleaning, nor working, the dimness and the L.A.-ness was getting to me. The Spanish yelling outside the windows, the cigarette smoke in the wind, the litter on the parkway, the flat 1970s buildings that once long ago had that sort of Asian idea of modernity and freshness but now are covered with graffiti and closed with metal accordion gating.
I wanted to get out. The ambient television was playing a show on public television while we were both typing at our keyboards, about the San Francisco earthquake. They were showing the beautiful vistas on all the streets I called home for so long. I always obligatorily point and moan like E.T. whenever they come on a TV screen.
“HOOOOOOME.!!” I say. (It’s the same voice I use when I see something dear to me. “Moose!!” or “Pitties!” or “DOG!!” I say.)
My precious, my home. The only years I was truly happy were there.
The claustrophobia hit a high and Let’s go for a drive, I said. Can’t we just go for a drive?
He didn’t really care to, but knew how I felt. He didn’t want to go but was gracious enough to take me out. He knows I’d rather the two of us went together, because for me, that’s the point — I want to share a perfect beautiful time with him. Then came the disasterous question.
So WHERE do you want to go?? he says.
Up to the hills, I said, can we go up to see a view?
But WHERE, he said.
Can’t we just drive that way? Just GO?
Griffith Park Observatory is still closed, he said. We’ve already been up there anyway. He looks puzzled.
(He’s looking at me like I’m crazy. Why would one want to go up there again if you’ve seen it already?)
What about the rest of the hills?, I said. What do they mean when they say Hollywood Hills?, I said hopefully.
That’s the Valley, he said. (This means: No way, we’re not going there, it’s a traffic nightmare.)
What about the hills above where I work? Or above Beverly Hills?
There’s nothing to see up there, he said. It’s all blocked with houses.
But they’re nicer houses! I said, nodding. Yes, that would be fine.
Honey, you can’t see anything up there but bushes, he said.
Well, please can’t we turn around and go UP instead of down toward the freeway and the beach?
He gets disgusted, seeing no point, and turns the car around and heads it over toward the east, not north, as I keep pointing.
He goes to Western avenue, one of the ugliest streets in Koreatown, and then turns north. We have 15 minutes of ugliness ahead.
He’s doing this because it’s quicker, I’m sure. He wants to avoid traffic. His idea is to get me where I want to go quickly, show me the damn grand canyon or whatever, and go home.
We get up toward the hills. I tell him, can’t you go up this way?, still trying to pull him from the main traffic artery off into something with visual interest.
He turns up the street AFTER the one I point to. It’s a yellow triangled sign to the right side, and I say, “It’s a dead end.”
He either doesn’t hear or ignores me. Up we go.
It’s a beautiful neighborhood, white stucco mansions, bird of paradise plants, moroccan windows, statuary. I am enjoying myself till we wind up to the driveway of some rich person. He turns around. We come down. He hadn’t understood it was a dead end.
I enjoy for five minutes and he comes down onto another eastern route, Sunset. Sunset is burger joints and Target and shoechains. Boring boring boring boring.
Can’t we go on some other street? I ask. He tries another one with old glam highrises and it’s under construction. We sit for ten minutes until he turns around out of the stalled line of cars.
Now I feel guilty. I should have just taken the car without him. He’s having un-funness galore. He doesn’t understand anything I’m asking for and everything is now conspiring against us.
Eventually he descends down to another quick artery, Wilshire, that I travel every damn day of my life. That’s all I do is go up and down Wilshire, doesn’t he know that?
He doesn’t seem to care at this point, he just wants to get home. To his websurfing and his ambient television.
There’s no point in asking for him to go anywhere else. He’d just be frustrated with me.
I watch all the familiar shapes go by and wonder why I married. No one else ever wants what I want.
I don’t know why I keep expecting them to share my world.
I don’t live where they live.
I’m in here. Alone.

Tinkle tinkle little airfilter box. Your days are numbered.

I just found someone like myself in print.

And in person perhaps that would be completely untrue –
it may be just a distillation of a person I find on the page that I bend toward so longingly.
Perhaps in reality it would be so awkward and average.
Perhaps it’s in my eyes entirely (I never believe myself, I can’t at first, I can’t.).

But how could it be?

I’m certain if I keep reading, reading this person’s thoughts,
I’ll hit that inevitable bump
(he’ll be like the others)
that tells me I need NOT to know this person,
and that I was foolish all along,
and there is no such thing as a reason to connect,
at least not in a real-time sense.
All you really are entrusting your feelings to here are the snail-trails of a moving body sliming its human miasma across the universe. Let’s get Darwinian about it. You’ve no business expecting anyone to really have that much in common with you. The configurations of the meanings spoken are multiplied by the actual feelings that could never have been accurately sewn in words on a field of white. What you are looking at is not even the bloom of complete release.
I tell myself these things. These part-sorrows and part-truths.
I stuff my heart under the pillow like that. It gets dangerous and I have to.

But I keep reading, and I warm
and I recognize and smile and tears come
and I know I shouldn’t rejoice
when someone says the things he says.
The earnest, knife-clean depth of his honesty.
The dawning need for his self-celebration,
The ever present harshness of his self-humiliation,
and then up again to the muses and angels that give him his dignity back.
I know I shouldn’t rejoice. But I do.

Being who I am, with half a life behind me,
having come so far from that place of identity where he is now,
and still longing to go home to it, he’s there signing it.
He might think this is where life begins,
and later life will char and maim him into a different man.
But I tell you, I have come so far, such a large arc around,
and he is THERE, where I long to go home to, again.
Does it matter now that he knows nothing else?
This kind of youth is not for sending away to the attic,
This kind of youth is what keeps you from dying.
It’s more than the music, to keep you alive,
and that’s saying something.

I wrote long ago looking for someone in that youth.
That request for a man so different from others,
that when I found it it changed me immeasurably.
and now I come back around the curve to the end,
and I read this new one,
and he says he wants
“a girl who isn’t afraid to stare at the sun with me.”
And he means cut close to the depth of truth
and he means hold that stare to the real choices
and he means the greatest largest want
in the smallest of the interior worlds, his heart,
and it is
just what I meant then.

I got my new license plates last night.

We put them on and I felt suddenly very naked.

Hm. Now anyone in my building might be able to search me out if they knew.

Anyone in my office (god forbid) might be able to, if they knew. I’m telling them all that it’s just an old nickname.

But for the average person on the street, driving by me, I really like it. They’ll probably not understand its meaning at all, anyway, and point to it to their drivers and say “what’s a Ecks-Eye - bee?”

For anyone who would read me first and then see my car go by, now THATwould be cool. There goes XIBEE! Who would know? Only a handful of people who are probably all pretty much in different cities. Two friends or so who could go “oooooh” when I drive them about. That’s about it. Would they actually say that? Only in jest.

Driving is an oddly isolating experience — both invigorating and false, enticing and flimsy. It creates empowerment, but not without separation.

The late Karl Hess, Barry Goldwater’s former speechwriter and counterculture guru, once talked about that with a friend and I when we visited him in his home, built into a hillside in West Virginia. He later put the same information into a small documentary film made about him.

He was talking about limousines, and how the world about you changes when you ride in a limo. The smooth officiality of riding poised on your leather seat across from someone (whether famous or not) whose interest you have garnered, the driver you inform to your whim of where to go, the masses outside to whom you are invisible behind your cooled tinted glass. He said there’s a kind of hypnotic trance that comes over you at that point. It convinces you, erroneously, that you have somehow “arrived”.

Just how much of it is that limousine?

…when you step onto the sidewalk with your entourage surrounding in your fine suits, you walk the shining polished wooden and marble hallways, and you buy into the life that says you are somehow more by means of its price, its venues, its food, its cars, its sycophants.

Have my license plates, my car done that? Strangely, in some small way, they have. If I were still the person I demonstrated in public in my youth, that thought would have been completely laughable. I walked everywhere, even great distances, and expected to live proudly in counterculture forever. My current job has connections to cars. When I got it, one of my best girlfriends from back in the day said simply: “YOU?… There?!??”

And it still hits my ear sideways. But it’s somehow true. I’m sure that everyone who attains glittering machines in life that they have seen, coveted, or bought feels this to some degree — that they won it; they deserve it, they fought for it, they are at a level, a rank, a platform of height.

It’s then about what you do with that that signifies you.

Some will gather their spoils about them and keep climbing, leaving older values in the dust. I can’t do that. I’m more like Karl, who left Capitol Hill to grow out his beard, barter his writing services or teaching lectures for the sheets of metal for his rooftop, or the dough-mixing vat which would become his bathtub, and trade his quiet wit for the solar panels that heated his water. He just couldn’t stay. There was just too much to get involved with. And he wanted to stay connected.

I have no problem with certain gifts of materialism if they create a little joy, and minimize woe for someone, and I crave that connection. It’s not fair to horde it all.

I feel like everyone in the world should come ride in my car and have their hair blown back by my kickass stereo.

I want to collect them from the bus stops …..I want to grab the little old Korean grandmas, I want to snatch up those punked out little museum girls, I want to give that tired Senora a ride home that I see waiting for the bus every day. Hey there’s the crazy senile guy from my building, he should come too. And there’s that same UCLA student in shorts who looks like he’s freezing and ready to blow away every day. If the world were more of a movie, and safer, and if there were parking spots along Wilshire Boulevard, I actually might have done so already.

So many things I wish, pedal goes with a swish, and away I fly before I can actually prove I’m real.

————-Cars——-

—do–

——————————-that.

Yesterday driving home, I saw a girl walking by on her way out of the
LACMA museum area…. She was kind of a soft-curve kind of shape, with a
big comfy sweater on, and a big long flouncy skirt, looking so carefree
compared to the rest of the nervous anorexic LA hottie types I see around.

She looked like a friend.

She was rummaging through her oversized shoulder bag and balancing her
cellphone under one shoulder. I could hear her conversation as I drove by at the usual crawl.

“I was at the couch. Look by the couch.” (rummage, rummage)

I just had to smile.

Ah, a girl after my own heart.

I really need to make some friends again.

1) G.W., Sounds like torture to ME, dude.

2) FUCKING LAMEASS iTUNES 7 AND 7.01 betacrap tinkertoy house of cards collapsing I can’t download SHIT now and can’t even post a review.

3) Downloading the most disgusting porn on the planet accidentally when you wanted music. EWWWW!

2) What do you mean I have to buy another Sally Beauty card?

3) Restaurants in Westwood are bad and expensive both. “Terrible food, and such small portions.”

4) AETNA’s required questions before they let you talk to a body, all 15 of them

5) My dumbass backasswards luddite dentist who fucked up Aetna report by merrily omitting codes

6) I don’t feel like eating anything

7) I feel like eating everything but then I look at it and don’t want it
I eat it anyway

9) zits at my level of worldly travel experience?!

10) Korean Americans who are in a position to change history and are NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

11) What’s up with this Attack of the Ants shit? When are they leaving already?

12) Metal screws do not belong in my tire.

13) Mr. UVB Med Lightbox guy, I do NOT WANT a TAN.

14) Where the hell is my sister???

15) I can’t get sick and stay home. I really WANT TO. Someone send spinach.

So this morning I’m riding in wild spurts of speed and severe stoppage in the right hand lane of Wilshire, per usual, when I see this guy pull up on my left.

Silver Mazda Van (a fellow zoom zoomer), dark, kind of cute, maybe asian or philippine, and he’s …. Smiling at me. WTF?

I smile, and think, ok, whatever, that makes no sense, but I’ll take it and run.

Then the traffic moves a bit more and he actually pulls up alongside me again and WAVES and smiles.

Now I’m puzzled and embarrassed. Ok this makes no sense, I’m so much older and considerably a heavier person than this guy (I checked in the mirror, thinking to myself, what the HECK is he SEEING?). I look honestly at my profile at a stoplight. I’m not that interesting. Makes no sense. I look older than he is by
about 10 years. Makes no sense. I don’t acknowledge much, playing with
my hair. Maybe it’s just blonde hair?

He pulls up later a THIRD time and smiles and waves and starts unintelligible talking at me. I smile and point at my wedding ring. This seems to make no difference, he keeps talking and gestures — but again, I have no idea what his gestures mean. They’re definitely not the kind you can mistake for “Hey can you tell me where Doheny is?”

I’m just wierded out now. Too wierded out to turn down the blaring OK Go and find out what the heck he’s actually saying.
I think, ok he must be a scumbag. He’s in a van. Scumbags drive vans. Kidnappers drive vans.

Or maybe he’s only interested in my car??? Or my ghettoblasting stereo? Or maybe he doesn’t care because he has a wife already and kids (after all, he has a van) and he’s just a desperate househusband. I’m confused, but I’m no longer comfortable. I don’t know why I am, because after all, what harm could come to a woman at 45 mpg through glass? But still my initial reaction is to bolt, which I do.

In retrospect, I now truly wonder what the heck he was thinking. I know he was smiling at MEEEE. Not the car. I looked in the mirror at work. WWWWWHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAT? What on EARTH could he have seen?
Citizenship????

That’s what this period of life does to you. You start to see doubt everywhere. I no longer trust any response to me at all. I should have found out what he was saying….. Maybe it was something like, you look like someone, or…. Do you know you have no license plates? or Will you take my dog off my hands? He’s in love with you. Damn. I should have asked.