In Twilight Regalia

Effortless beauty.

The scene was from my car, as most things are around here, and so it was a sidewalk moment.
She was a Latino woman, dark, small, unremarkable, in a puffy coat, until the sequence of clockwork events, that all occurred simultaneously:

She was crossing a sidestreet to the opposite corner,
and I noticed she had her headphones in, and they matched her white puffy coat, while

A man in green with a hose was standing across near a building, spraying out in my direction,
making the brown sandslab glint in the morning sun,

and a pink and yellow print woman with a package in a sack swaying, coming opposite her direction,
was walking a steady
click
click across,

and a car from a third direction hesitating to round the curb until after she passed,
was just pausing,
on its rubber feet rolling a bit,

and she took a bouncing few steps, to avoid

first the car, to which she smiled and nodded and headed past, her black hair wafting out behind her,

then the sack woman’s package, which made her pause a step to let pass, moving aside with a small turn, and then a step,

and then to the curb and water spray, which had just flashed toward her,
and upon noticing her, pulled back,

and step stop,

and

she and the hoseman’s eyes met,

hers in mock “Yikes” and his in “Oh Sorry!”, and

she smiled the most beautiful smile, a gorgeous woman in that instant,

wide eyed, flashing white teeth and dark soft hair, and so light and charming,

in her crisp white coat of youth

in her

one,

two,

cha cha cha of the morning.

Little Jewels We Are…

(If we could all see our most beautiful moments like this.)

I sound like an idiot in print.
I use exclamations too much.
Perhaps it’s because I’m so hot.
It’s SO hot here.
But I do use too many.
Anyone who knows me would probably think this sounded like me on drugs.
Some would find that a relief I suppose.
But, if you had read the beginning of this blog, you’d know that it was all started on the pretext of not wallowing in abysmal sorrows and whining.
What’s left are the times when I sound like I’m on drugs.
And they are therefore, rather few and far in between.
Since I have done a lot of that kind of reporting, and it sounds in print something like Abba used to sound musically, and I come out rather like cottoncandybarf, I intend to start reporting all of it.
The dark and twisty person as well as the shiny happy idiot.
We think it’s time.

The small discontent:
There’s no privacy at all at work, and yet as I’ve no work at the moment, my tolerance grows more strained with each half hour. I have no way to be anything close to myself here, so it’s a bit exhausting. I tap dance on warm water every day.
Thoreau, how right you were, I am full of regret over these clothes.

Another small one:
Thanksgiving is coming, two days away, and we have absolutely no plans, and my husband who will most likely not eat turkey, and no one close enough to extend an invitation to us, which means Thanksgiving will be another boring homebound day when everything is closed and the Los Angeles sun shines and shines and shines like a friend who’s trying to convince you of your good fortune when both of you know you’re shitouttaluck.
I detest holidays without my friends.

The large one:
WHY did I MOVE, WHY?.
::sigh::
It’s hot here.
Materialistic heatwave.
(The sun created some mist today coming off the waters in Santa Monica, so there were at least vapourous clouds in the air. A quote about human miasma comes to mind…)
I miss San Francisco daily.
I should never have left. It was unquestionably home.
I miss its cold fog, I miss its blustering cold wind crossing the bay on the ferry, I miss Chinatown with all its strong smells (yes even the fishmarket bleach smell)and wonderful food (yes even stinky tofu).
I miss not sweating.
I miss the silver Bay Bridge and the tiled Treasure Island tunnel on the way back that twinkles gold and orange when the sun sets.
I miss wearing a stylish velvet coat.
I miss knowing where everything is, and finding interesting views at every turn.
I miss the goths and the gutterpunks in the Haight.
I miss raven blue hair.
I miss being on real hills.
I don’t miss parking or the homeless, or the smelly cars at the end of
the BART, they are a vivid memory too.
But it’s my home.
If I could move back there as a single person, I would take a place in Chinatown or near it, perhaps Richmond district.
An odd choice, but … I’m odd.
I don’t mind the rain, I can deal with the roughness of the homie kids,
and I miss the glam-in-your-face honesty of the Castro.
I miss seeing people in black and navy and sharp artistic lines.
I miss the art schools and their healthy crazy students.
I miss rice rockets.
I miss the huge green cemetery where my pets are buried. (Don’t tell.)

Everything here is beige, candy-colored, Barbie-fied, palmtree glitterbling dyejob crap.
This town is about money, stocks, bags, shoes, nothing else.
It is not about soul, or origins, or stories, or music, or GOD HELP US innovation. Hell no.
You put a pink and aqua cadillac into the setting of, say, Seattle, and it’s kitsch. It’s immensely cheerful and nutty. It’s a grand gesture.
You put it here in L.A. and you’re either a lowrider or a complete asshole with a fleet of them, among which this is a lesser sample.

I actually felt smarter there.
Here I feel like sand in the hourglass.

Settings are important. Immensely.

I spent a while Friday night ogling the details in the set of the fourth Harry Potter film.

——-(At the announcement of the Tri-Wizard Tournament they have little white mice made of sugar traversing all the tables, and chocolate rabbits coming out of Chocolate Hats! Ah to be a set decorator.)=======

Sunday was spent sewing a hanging panel for a canopy bed in 90 degree heat .
=======(in November?. Yes. We almost broke records.)=======

I wake at 4 in the morning Monday dreaming that I am sewing an important magical adventure suit which is sort of like a very stylish combat outfit.

It is supposed to have an escape hatch in one of the pockets.

I’ve sewn it wrong and somehow ended up with a New York Subway stop coming out the front of my pants. People keep arriving and wandering out the front of me in snow gear, saying this is definitely not 72nd. They blink in the California sun, and my 90 degree room gets fuller and fuller of wet, bundled baffled New Yorkers…..

I was thinking in my forward and backward future thought game and was wondering why some friends of mine are constituted the way they are. They dance the dance of the abuse in their past, and I keep wondering where the hell they got it.

Take my friend A., for example, who is black, a true large-figured, loudmouthed, in-your-face, know-it-all, talk-to-the-hand kind of woman when she gets angry. She’s a delight most of the time, all humour in big deep laughs, baking and sewing and grandmothering, but has a huge chip on her shoulder about the white world (and maybe she should?.) and turns on a dime when pressed. I love her most of the time, but when she gets that way, parts of her just turn into Level 5 whitewater. She’s just un-runnable.

I visually traced back to her parents’ time, in the 1930s or 40s. Tough times for everyone. Then I visualize the grandparents in high collars when Louis Armstrong was just a kid. Days when no black person spoke to a white person without a shuffle of reverence and compliance, ever. And then before that? Slavery. Who taught them to hand down their abusive anger? Us. We did it. Yup.

And here it is still snapping out of her. It’s still damaging all of us, scaring me, making us grumble and hurt, coloring our decisions about each other, ruining lives.

How many slave-holding estate owners actually existed in this country at, say, the time of the Civil War? Couldn’t have been more than a few thousand, could it? i wonder what the actual number was. Only a drop in the bucket of population of the planet. And look how much crap they brought on the world. How much pain, how much death, how much irreversible psycho damage.

I look at what we’re doing in Iraq, no matter how well-intentioned some parties thought of the initial plan, and it makes me sick. If slavery swelled into this kind of damage, I can’t envision the sad future the Middle East mess will vent on us. I almost am relieved I’ve no children to see it.

To the progenitors of this war: Look at yourselves. Think of yourselves branched out into hundreds of decedents, all living in anger and hate and pain and dearth of food and water and health and normalcy all because you just couldn’t resist the idea that you knew better than everyone else on the planet. Are you proud of yourselves now? Are you?