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[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Hollywood

The line for in n out burger stretches around the restaurant. It’s teeming with humans, squashed into every crevice. I think about whether I want to wait for a second before I decide that it must be worth it. I’m hung over from a Bumble date I had last night on the Hollywood strip. I just received a message from him saying, rather callously, “you fucked me so good last night 😍”, which is possibly the best message to receive after a date. Especially since it was the first time I ever fucked a guy from Bumble, let alone kiss him. And of course, in the tradition that it appears I am not attracted to Americans (a bitter twist) he was English.

I met him out the front of the bar he suggested, and the first thing that happened was a high speed police chase. A truck came screaming past with three police cars after it. It mounted the curb down the street, span off into a u turn at a busy intersection, and pulled again down our street on the opposite side. The driver got out of the truck and bolted, leaving the truck and the confused police cars to hesitate and lose him in the crowd on the walk of fame.

We drank a lot of shots and cocktails and went to a few bars and the night ended in me getting pissy because the bottle shop on the way home was closed, and heading to his house with a cheese and ham croissant from the late night grill.

I was in full drunk porno mode by the time we got to his room, but I’d kissed him at the bar we were at and he was a great kisser, I was in my element now.

My memory fails but I remember it being good.

There are fifty customers before me in line. Fifty.

I wait for around half an hour before walking my food back to my hostel. The guy from last night wants to meet up again, but I have explosive diarrhoea within the next hour and I lay in bed clutching my stomach, wondering if I’m repeating the pattern of unavailable again. What do I do to create an environment where a relationship is possible? Do I really want one, or do I need to work on my relationship with myself?

I mediate on whether my loneliness is being helped by using another body as a scratching post for my unfulfilled desires. I wonder if I could improve it by respecting and looking after myself more.

I google how to overcome commitment issues, as I’m sure that this has something to do with my repetitive narrative. One of the suggestions is to get your self esteem boosts in ways that don’t involve other people’s feelings. I read this just a few short minutes after Dave, my ex, sends me a stream of messages about falling in love with me, what it felt like, and how good in bed I am. I tell him it’s the second time I’ve heard that today. And then I wonder if this counts. We discuss my commitment phobia, and he says that our entire relationship dynamic changed when he told me he loved me, and a few days later I bought him a guitar and said the same. He says it was all downhill from there.

I try to recall if I just had cold feet or whether this was a larger pattern.

The article talks about how commitment issues are often just a fear of rejection. I know that my fear of commitment must be self worth related, because I tend to choose things that I instinctively know are not good for me, that encourages chaos in my own life, and drama. Even if that drama is simply me getting my feelings hurt and reaffirming that men are shitty and I am not good enough.

What do you do to break out of that cycle though? How do you remain happy and at peace without excitement? The kind that comes from the chase, the unknown, the possibility. Maybe I get off on the fear.

The article mentions that the more likely you are to care what people think of you, the less likely you are to let go, and the more afraid of commitment you are as a result.

Even Tanessa reminded me of this irreversible truth about myself. That I have always been preoccupied with what other people think of me. My need to be liked seems to be an intrusive part of me, something that I use alcohol and food and unavailable men and short term gratification to avoid. I’m sure there are plenty of examples in my past that illustrate this as the driving force behind a myriad of my negative behaviours. When Holly Whitaker talks about giving up things that she is terrified to give up, like alcohol and weed and throwing up, I feel that. I think it is such a comfort in clinging to a pain narrative because it is less scary than stepping into the unknown of who you are without it.

I wonder if this main driving force for me, this loneliness, is a common denominator. Like, as in maybe it’s the reason they say that the opposite to addiction is connection. I guess not just to other people but to yourself. Looking at the uncomfortable bits and accepting them and not giving a shit what anyone else thinks about that. I wonder if all I’ve ever done is try to perform for an audience that doesn’t really give a shit, and can’t really even see who I am. Maybe this audience I dance for doesn’t even exist.

I read something this morning, it said “the hard bits are not bad, the hard bits are hard.” And there is something so simple, yet so profound about this statement. The person who wrote it also wrote that they are learning to sit with the hard bits instead of avoid them. What strange creatures we are, that something read or said at the right time to someone else, can have a resounding impact on someone else’s life. This is the type of social media pro that creates a space of acceptance and universal feeling. Because experiencing the entire range of emotions is something we tend to avoid discussing, because we fear weakness.

When I’m reading Billie Eilish interview, her brother says that even though she is young, she still has the capacity to feel what every human goes through. I think this speaks volumes about the age you start to feel the spectrum of life, and how we continue to experience it and ourselves. As we get older, we believe we are experiencing it more deeply. But what if we are experiencing it just the same? But we get better at it, and our experiences, comparatively get worse? Is our range of emotion always present, but we just discount it in hindsight because our problems don’t seem as bad as they are now?

I guess that leads me to my next division. Do we get better at avoiding our feelings, or do better at dealing with them? And is that the difference between our evolution and our stagnancy? To walk into our fear, or to fulfill the narrative that humans will do anything to avoid their own pain?

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Portland, LA

“You look like you’ve shit your pants” says Michelle, a middle aged woman from Glen Roy, who I’ve met over breakfast bagels. She’s on a whirlwind tour with her friend, and scoffs at my hiking stories. My back is seizing worse than ever today and I find that stretching out my hip flexors seem to give me less relief than previous days. I’m starting to think I may have strained a ligament in my back now. I haven’t had a proper bed in three weeks, a spring loaded mattress or a lower plastic bunk bed has been the best case scenario, amongst hammocks and dirt and sleeping bags and couches.

I make my way on the metro to the airport after giving the reception the wine I don’t want anymore. I haven’t wanted to drink since waking up in the Fart Princesses bed. I can’t sit still on the metro as my hips keep tightening and my legs are vibrating pain, so I stand and make all sorts of weird stretches until I get to the terminal, where a man sees me stretching my hips out on the floor in the boarding lounge. He asks me if I have a running injury, and I tell him I’ve hiked 100k in two weeks. He says he’s run 200k: he’s an ultra marathon runner. I’ve read a few books on ultra marathons and I think it’s incredibly hardcore and super impressive. He is well over 60 and looking after his grandkids, and the guy is fitter than anything. He’s done two 100k runs in two weeks, and the last one took him ten hours, which is so impressive I nearly fall off my chair, except that I’m already on the floor stretching into pigeon pose.

By the time I get on the plane my back is radiating pain down my legs and I’m starting to worry.

I meet a 75 year old woman in the seat next to me who comments on my one Portland souvenir: a sweater that says “body by pastrami” that I am planning on wearing til its rags. Especially since ironically, I’ve probably lost some weight out here, though I haven’t properly checked. I also haven’t eaten any pastrami, but that’s beside the point.

I’ve been thinking deeply about sobriety again after yesterday’s discussion with chris. I started to talk about the book “this naked mind” by Annie grace, and how society is governed so much by alcoholcentricity that it is saturated to the point of external validation being completely biased.

We spoke about his friend who has a drinking problem and how the neural pathways can suffer a degeneration so severe that you can’t come back from it. And it occurred to me whilst I was preaching this that I had been black out twice in two days and it was the first time I had a bender like that in while. I didn’t feel guilty about it, but it made me worry about the injuries I’d sustained and whether that would have been different if I hadn’t drank. I would surmise that yes, considering that alcohol in vast amounts or even small ones can affect muscle recovery. I wonder what my capacity to hike would be if I was not sinking well above my average units of alcohol. The man who does ultra marathons had inspired me to start running again, but I know I can’t do it if I’m drinking, not in the capacity that I’m allowing myself to. Maybe not at all, whilst I train and build my body to overcome large distances.

Renee said that Muay Thai had helped her discover something she didn’t want to drink for, and I could see that, and feel that, when I was hiking. I would purposely not drink or only drink a bit before a hike the next day. But as soon as I had recovery time I would go Wild with it.

I think about Nathalie often on this trip because I’m still so pissed off at her reaction to me, but I realise lately that I have to let it go because otherwise it will prove to be cancerous for me and my propensity to be defiant and then just drink because someone tells me I can’t, which makes me understand why they try to break down your ego and humble you in AA. Because some people really don’t like being told what to do, to the point where they will do things they don’t even want to, to prove a point. And I’m one of them, which makes me want to shatter my ego to slivers and throw it out to the universe.

So much of this trip has me confronting the ridiculousness of my pride and ego. Somewhere recently I managed to pick up some large amount of insecurity, that has completely blown out my ego. I have become more sensitive lately, to my distaste, and I don’t quite know how to fix it.

I wonder if it had something to do with my time at refresh, and whether James not believing I had filled my capacity at any point had me wearing myself so thin that I blew out on feeling unworthy. Also, my penchance for unavailable men, which has me clinging to the narrative that I am too much, and not able to be loved, and unsure of how to love in an adequate way.

So much of this year has made me realise how much of a child I still am, and I wonder if we ever really get it together, or if we cover it with husbands and children and study and distractions large enough to identify ourselves by so we don’t have to face our lack of growth.

It is a slow process, realising you don’t know anything and then attempting to wrangle the beast that is a life that is constantly in transit.

And hiking mountains makes you completely aware of how insignificant and tiny you are in the grand scheme of things. I wonder what I can do in my life to influence the people around me enough to ensure that my name is said in reference to joy or insight after I am dead.

I wonder how far reaching kindness is, and I wonder if I have been kind enough lately, and I wonder if that is why I have felt my ego rising up to meet me with such aggressive fervour.

I keep hitting the left side of my body, cuts on my knees, restubbing my toe a million times a day because I have no toenail and I’m sleeping on a top bunk so low that I keep sitting up and smacking my head on the ceiling and then smacking my toe following that. My body is covered in bruises from hiking, clumsiness and drunkenness. The hike has left me with small scratches all over my feet that are stinging constantly. I still want to hike the Hollywood sign though. It will be the last hike of the trip and I think, a great place to end.

I listen to Halsey and G-Eazy on the plane and think about publicly being obsessed with someone to the point of making music talking about dying with them and then breaking up in the public eye.

I wonder if they then just refuse to play that song in their tours again, probably.

It makes me think about infatuation and love and how flawed we all are. Love seems uncomfortable, sacrificial. Infatuation is great, I wonder if it continues to come around in long term relationships if you try hard enough, and what those steps are. I guess that life is a series of storms you weather together, like they say. I wonder how often in love that you actually like each other, and how often you wish for something else, and whether it’s really worth it or just something we dreamed up because were animals that need to procreate and loneliness is debilitating. And whether fear of dying alone and unsupported plays a starring role in the perception of a relationship over the years. And then I think, tomorrow I could fall off a cliff and then I would never have to worry about shit like this, and maybe that’s the most comforting thing I have thought all morning.

The lady sitting next to me tells me about how her kids took her to Alaska for her 75th birthday, and whether it makes all the diarrhoea, sickness and relentless verbal slinging matches that occur when you spawn worth it. Whether it’s worth being told you are hated and being terrified of losing them to illness and accidents and hospital visits and mental health. Whether it’s worth the bills and the school and the bail outs and the disagreements. A trip through the wilderness that you could have afforded anyway, but maybe you would spend the time feeling so desperately lonely that your heart is the size of the moon, and the only thing that makes a life worth it is the notion, if not the reality, of love that is unconditional.

As I leave the plane, the lady next to me tells me her name is Pat.

She looks at me from the seat as I’m standing in the isle, fiddling with the strap of my bag.

“I’m envious”, she says.

I laugh, but the words curl themselves into my rib cage, and I wonder if they’re true.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Washington, Portland

I’m pissed offby the time we get to the campsite because I’ve managed to stub both my toes in the short walk to the liquor store and I haven’t even been inside. My left mangled toe is bleeding all over my flip flop and I’m limping as I enter the cafe we’ve stopped at for lunch.

As I bend over to collect fire wood I feel my sinuses press into my face. The seven cigarettes I smoked in the last two hours are making themselves apparent, but I don’t care anymore.

I set up my tent, my stubbed toe pressing and pulling against my shoe as I smack the back of the hatchet into the spears. I look over at the pristine river and have no inclination to go there. Tanessa leaves with Hank to inspect the river entrance, and I surreptitiously masturbate in the tent about the threesome I had with Tessa and Hayden. At the time, it was amazing, but when Will told me he was going to sleep with another girl in England, I took it as a trifecta of rejection, even though it was the furthest thing from that. It’s amazing how you can convince yourself that you aren’t the first pick when you never expect it for yourself. And equally amazing that you can qualify contrary evidence as true with enough self loathing and denial. Anything becomes the truth if you try hard enough. If your motivation is to belittle yourself, the mounting of experiential evidence becomes painstakingly clear.

Like the fact that “I stubbed my toe because I was clumsy”. I stubbed my toe because I chugged half a bottle of wine on the ferry and nearly threw up making my way back down the stairs. The call went out for everyone to return to their cars and I poured it down my gullet, thinking about being sick, and then of course wanting to be sick because I thought of it. The power of your brain is incomprehensible. And yet, we use it to convince ourselves of the strangest things.

I am starved of other people, and it’s making me resentful. This is something I don’t want to admit aloud because our trip has been so wonderful and Tanessa has driven us the whole way. I wonder at what point in the last six months I became so focused on the negative. It’s as if I get everything I want and I still can’t stand it. I live with privilege and freedom and act like a caged animal. Hank whimpers if his food doesn’t come exactly half an hour after he wakes. I behave in the same way.

I think about that Billie Eilish song “I don’t want to be you anymore”, and the way she explained that she doesn’t like herself very much. It would be easy to deduce that to her being 16, but I wonder if anyone really ever likes themselves, or whether it’s just wilful delusion. Like if you repeat something enough, you think it’s true. And it may be true, but it’s not fact. Whatever the human grasp on truth is, we will never understand the reality of a situation. If, of course, reality is comprised of verifiable facts.

I lie in the hammock and fall asleep. When I wake up I have a cracking headache.

I look at the bottle of wine in pure hatred. I don’t drink for the rest of the trip.

The next day, after I’ve passed out and mistaken myself for someone who can actually sleep in the woods, as opposed to someone who screams when a deer nudges her tent, we go back to Portland. But before that, in the wee hours of the morning, I scream so loud when a deer puts it’s head in the back of my tent (and into my head) that campsites all around us unzip their tents and survey the area for serial killers. The deer of course, moves on to the next campsite and I hear much more reasonable calling out for mum and dad from a 12 year old in a mutable tone than I have reacted myself.

As I expected, the ride home doesn’t take 5 hours. It takes 10. Which is why it’s ideal that we left at 7.45am, but it’s also not good because when we get back to Portland it’s 5.45pm and Tanessa has fallen asleep seven times at the wheel and I’m glad we have our lives in tact. Exhausted,I buy her a massage, to say “thank you” and also, “I’m glad you didn’t kill me”. Hank is ecstatic to be home on solid ground again, and he helicopter tails all over Tanessa’s apartment.

I feel like going out and meeting new people, so I load up Bumble on my phone again, and start swiping. I’ve already drank a bottle and a half of wine and had an argument with tanessa about something she said in the car when I slammed the buckle of mikes bag in the boot and jammed the door for twenty minutes after my hike by the time I have a location. This means that when I get there, it only takes me a few shots and the disappointment of not being attracted to the guy I’ve been texting to send me into another stratosphere. I wake up on his couch, and he very sweetly pulls all the sticks out of my hair. Apparently I tried to go to sleep in his garden. I don’t think this was the sort of date he was looking for.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Washington

I’m pissed offby the time we get to the campsite because I’ve managed to stub both my toes in the short walk to the liquor store and I haven’t even been inside. My left mangled toe is bleeding all over my flip flop and I’m limping as I enter the cafe we’ve stopped at for lunch.

I have just hiked 30 kilometre accidentally. When I get to the car I slam the door down on the boot, and manage to catch a backpack clip, which proves, hours later, to infuriate Tanessa to a degree I have never seen.

As I bend over to collect fire wood I feel my sinuses press into my face. The seven cigarettes I smoked in the last two hours are making themselves apparent, but I don’t care anymore.

I set up my tent, my stubbed toe pressing and pulling against my shoe as I smack the back of the hatchet into the spears. I look over at the pristine river and have no inclination to go there. Tanessa leaves with Hank to inspect the river entrance, and I surreptitiously masturbate in the tent about the threesome I had with Tessa and Hayden. At the time, it was amazing, but when Will told me he was going to sleep with another girl in England, I took it as a trifecta of rejection, even though it was the furthest thing from that. It’s amazing how you can convince yourself that you aren’t the first pick when you never expect it for yourself. And equally amazing that you can qualify contrary evidence as true with enough self loathing and denial. Anything becomes the truth if you try hard enough. If your motivation is to belittle yourself, the mounting of experiential evidence becomes painstakingly clear.

Like the fact that “I stubbed my toe because I was clumsy”. I stubbed my toe because I chugged half a bottle of wine on the ferry and nearly threw up making my way back down the stairs. The call went out for everyone to return to their cars and I poured it down my gullet, thinking about being sick, and then of course wanting to be sick because I thought of it. The power of your brain is incomprehensible. And yet, we use it to convince ourselves of the strangest things.

I am starved of other people, and it’s making me resentful. This is something I don’t want to admit aloud because our trip has been so wonderful and Tanessa has driven us the whole way. I wonder at what point in the last six months I became so focused on the negative. It’s as if I get everything I want and I still can’t stand it. I live with privilege and freedom and act like a caged animal. Hank whimpers if his food doesn’t come exactly half an hour after he wakes. I behave in the same way.

I think about that Billie Eilish song “I don’t want to be you anymore”, and the way she explained that she doesn’t like herself very much. It would be easy to deduce that to her being 16, but I wonder if anyone really ever likes themselves, or whether it’s just wilful delusion. Like if you repeat something enough, you think it’s true. And it may be true, but it’s not fact. Whatever the human grasp on truth is, we will never understand the reality of a situation. If, of course, reality is comprised of verifiable facts.

I lie in the hammock and fall asleep. When I wake up I have a cracking headache.

I look at the bottle of wine in pure hatred. I don’t drink for the rest of the trip.

The next day, after I’ve passed out and mistaken myself for someone who can actually sleep in the woods, as opposed to someone who screams when a deer nudges her tent, we go back to Portland. But before that, in the wee hours of the morning, I scream so loud when a deer puts it’s head in the back of my tent (and into my head) that campsites all around us unzip their tents and survey the area for serial killers. The deer of course, moves on to the next campsite and I hear much more reasonable calling out for mum and dad from a 12 year old in a mutable tone than I have reacted myself.

As I expected, the ride home doesn’t take 5 hours. It takes 10. Which is why it’s ideal that we left at 7.45am, but it’s also not good because when we get back to Portland it’s 5.45pm and Tanessa has fallen asleep seven times at the wheel and I’m glad we have our lives in tact. Exhausted,I buy her a massage, to say “thank you” and also, “I’m glad you didn’t kill me”.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Seattle, Elaine

All of West Coast America is on fire. Driving over the Seattle bridge for the third time in two days, it’s so smoke ridden that we can’t see the city.

When hiking Rattlesnake Ridge in the morning, we discover that the smoke cover is from the BC fires, this time. Oregon and California are also on fire, with firefighters from all over the country coming to try to stop the trails from burning to the ground. Large “No Bonfire” and “No Fireworks” signs are displayed all over the park, a warning to hikers making their way to the top of the vista that overlooks the lake.

A man stands on the sidewalk, spraying water for his gutters. He appears to have one of those extreme clean water jets that he’s pummeling the sidewalk with to clean it.

The irony strikes me as we yawn and make plans for the Pike Market, a half an hour drive away. It is the market to end all markets. The birthplace of the original Starbucks. A gym wall down in the bottom alley is the second most unhygienic tourist attraction in the western world. We get coffee and watch the boys throw fishes at the market. Then we split to have a break from each other. Tanessa is an introvert, so I can’t imagine how much she needs to recharge after spending the last days in each other’s pockets. Even I need to walk the streets, and think the words I want to write.

Seattle reminds me of Kate. It’s pretty, has character, is full of art and music, but it’s a little rough. There’s a darkness here, it’s what makes it beautiful, rather than just a nice thing to look at.

I think maybe, she’d say the same thing about me.

I get to the art gallery my mum has recommended but it’s 30 dollars so I wander around the city for two hours, looking at the homeless people and wondering about their lives. I suppose there isn’t a great divide between them and me. If I know anything, it’s that.

Our air bnb hostess is Elaine. She just got back from a week long seminar on the holocaust and what it means to people who teach it in language arts and history. She got in because she persisted until they let her, but she was the only “pure” art teacher there. Everyone else is History and for lack of a better word, English Literature. When they separate them into groups, she has no idea where to go. I find it ironic that she is in a seminar discussing segregation, and yet the other teachers turn their noses up at her, because she is not like them.

“What determines who goes to the gas chambers or not?” says a Christian Literature teacher, during a class. Elaine puts up her hand.

“How many of us are over forty?” She asks. Thirty percent of the class stands up at her request. The rest are squirming in their seats, but they know they are over forty as well.

“If you have stood up”, says, Elaine, standing.

“You’re dead.”

Most of the people who were pushing back the agenda were thirty or under. That’s how they sent the people to the gas chambers. If you were too young or too old, you were dead. She is one of only two Jewish people in this entire seminar.

She tells me, as I’m curled up on the couch after a day of Tanessa and I smashing our bodies hiking and traversing the city, about her summer job teaching kids in jail.

The juveniles that she teaches are only there until their sentencing. After that they go to other facilities. It’s interesting to hear her take on them. She says that the two most brilliant of her students, are a couple of 16 year olds that lured a 14 year old into the woods and stabbed him to death. She likes the girls more than boys, and talks often of her mistrust for young men.

She used to foster children in her home, until air bnb, and now she only offers her house as a respite home, meaning for kids who are transitioning or waiting for another more permanent foster home to come along.

It is a place full of her strange art, each piece on a canvas, with a quarter of a frame in the top left corner. She then collages, and paints in wax over the top of them, creating eclectic pieces based on her personal experiences.

The one in our room is reminiscent of her time in Cambodia with one of her foster children. She had him stay with her for nine years, and being Cambodian, she took him back to explore the country and the village he was born in. She says she thinks he resents her for it; her taking him to such a sad country with a sad past, in the way that young people who are unaware of their blessings yet often do. She speaks passionately about her animals, past and present, and the children that she allows into her life.

She brings Tupac’s lyrics into the prison and has the kids pull apart and study them. There are a lot of black and Hispanic kids from broken homes with lofty sentences awaiting them. Young humans who have made terrible mistakes, who are paying and are going to continue paying the price. Prison making them harder, and clever, and manipulative. Their young age doesn’t deter them from rioting in their classrooms and attacking each other in the middle of the day.

“Never have I ever seen more avid readers than I do in prison. These kids don’t have cell phones or internet on demand, and the only thing left to do is start gang fights and read books”. She is talking about bringing her knowledge of the holocaust to them, so that they understand the tattoos they are etching into their hands of the “star of David”. It’s a gang sign to them, they think they are disciples, a part of a Californian gang. They don’t realise the etymology of the things that they ingratiate themselves to. They think Elaine is OG because she wears the star on a chain around her neck.

She laughs loudly and often. Her voice is loud and ungainly and makes Hank bark in protest from the safety of our bedroom. On our first night there I tell her my back is locking up from hiking incorrectly. She pulls her Epsom salts and essential oils out, and offers me a bath. She takes our washing and puts it in the dryer for us when we are out in town, and offers Hank treats even though he won’t come out to the living room until we get home.

We talk about the fact that in every westernised country, we accept the fact that we are the daughters and sons of colonialists, that we all have blood on our hands, or in our bloodline, but that we cannot apologise for what we weren’t here for, or maybe we can, but we can never take it back. Her snake, Osmosis, spends a lot of time trying to reach the top of his cage in vain, wanting to taste the outside world. She gives us chicken soup to eat, and boils the kettle for coffee.

She is on my mind a lot in the days that we are there and the days that follow. I wonder at the things she has seen, and how she manages to be both hard and soft at the same time. Giving and generous and honest, but you wouldn’t want to cross her, ever.

I release a huge spider from the bathtub to outside, my Australian showing through my smile. She calls me a “fearless Australian warrior”, and takes a photo of the eight legged creature at the bottom of the jar before I let it go. It’s pincers are huge, and I hope it doesn’t bite me even though I’m almost certain that it won’t.

Hank barks at her as we are leaving, protective and a little scared. She looks at him with love, as I imagine she does with everything.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Forest for the trees

“Did your dad ever want to live in a forest?” I ask? Incredulous at the quality of the tent overcover that were strapping to the roof of both her and mikes cars.

“Yeah, this was the place he wanted to blow his brains out, I told you that.”

Tanessa is talking about her father, and how, when they first started talking again he told her that he had planned to head out to the forest and take his own life.

Opie is manically running around the campsite, unable to focus on one thing at a time. His tail and head must be made of bricks because he hits them on everything and never has any idea that he’s doing it. Tanessa says that one time she slammed his tail in the door and he didn’t even whimper, he just stopped, wondering why he could no longer run. He is a black Labrador and pit bull mix, and appears to have lost intelligence to both sides of his breed, replaced with a beautiful coat and face, and the energy of a hyperactive three year old. Hank plays with him for a while, but prefers to patrol the campsite to make sure that no unwanted visitors trespass, barking at the nearby families as they pass like the terrier he is.

Mike teaches us how to make fire from sticks, and points out where we can find more fire wood. It occurs to us how much harder it would have been to camp in the wilderness without him. Even in this campsite, we are novices. He is the boyfriend I approve of most for Tanessa. Patient and kind and very smart. It gives me hope that I can find someone that is right for me when I see my friends with people who are right for them. A keystone in our relationship was our connection over how fucked up we both were. Our traumas and parents and the messes that we made of our lives. It pleases me to see the people around me growing up and making better choices. It makes me think that maybe someday, I can too.

We walk to find the lake and attempt to balance on logs across the flow of water. I follow Mike down a particularly big log with a large flowing river bed under, and try not to think of how much it would hurt if I were to slip and fall in. The dogs are too scared to follow.

We find tree stumps to climb, and creeks to sit in, while a huge forest surrounds us. It looks like the woods from the twilight films, everything so green and lush, and the air is easier here.

A small group of campers sit on chairs next to their fly fishing equipment, sucking down cigarettes and beer and shouting ‘hello’ at anyone who passes. There are children rolling around on their bicycles and families making fires for dinner. It is idyllic in the way that I imagine the traditional American holiday; a campsite in the woods with the dogs and two and a half kids. White picket fence to come home to, peanut butter jelly sandwiches. Two weeks off a year and dad jokes. I know this is not what I want from my life, but the confirmation that it exists does something for my belief in the world.

As the night falls we drink wine and reminisce over Tanessa and my past at Fitness First.

The nights we would sit on her couch watching “the bachelor” and stuffing our faces with pizza. Almost every Tuesday we would over order and over eat, I would regale tales about my most recent misadventures in romance, and we would dub ourselves singing to Justin Bieber on our phones. We talk about the journey Tanessa has taken over three continents, to end up here in the forest with a fire and a friend and a boy and two dogs, warm and happy, far from where we were.

The fire dies and we head into our tents, and though we all fall asleep quickly, I wake up in the night thinking of Allan, and Will and how lonely I am. I hear a snuffling sound in the distance and freeze from fear, half sleeping for another hour before I’m too terrified and my back is seizing so much that I have to wake Tanessa and Mike up and grab the keys to the truck. I push the seat back and wrap myself in a sleeping bag, dreaming of bears. These huge woodland creatures attacking my tent, my powerlessness, and a respite that doesn’t come until I open my eyes. I’m too sore to walk properly, and I limp around the campsite attempting to straighten out my crooked stance. The bears in my dreams are huge and brown and majestic in a way that is terrifying.

“Are there bears in this forest?” I ask, telling them about my experience in the night with the snuffling sound nearby.

“Yeah, there are. But there’s probably too many people here to worry about it, and even so-“, Mike pulls out his gun, and brandishes it. He is in the military, so always carries a gun and a suture kit, along with a bunch of other things I would have never thought to bring, most of which he leaves with us when he leaves.

“We let Opie out to pee in the night, though. So that’s probably what you heard.” Opie, hearing his name but not knowing where it came from, comes wiggling over to sniff at my hands. I am still terrified of bears, though I can hear that the sniffing sounds are identical to what had me frozen in fear in the night.

We are supposed to hike Mount

Ranier, but I’m so stiff that we drive the whole way around the park, stopping only for a short hike towards unicorn mountain, which Hank is not allowed to accompany us on.

Mike and Opie have headed home and now tanessa and I are on our own, thankful for the small knowledge he’s bestowed upon us, as we continue on. The mountain is heavily trafficked but still beautiful, the glacier looming over the oncoming greenery, the wildflowers covering the fields. Pops of colour amongst the dense foliage.

As we head further north, the weight of my life begins to release its hold on my shoulders. We are leaving the park and continuing on toward Seattle. The summer day outside is blowing warm air into our windows.

I think, nothing really matters. I think, as I watch the tallest trees arching over the road as we pass, that nature moves on, never complaining about its heartache. That we could keep moving and never apologise for ourselves and no one would really care. Our thoughts and our experiences and our rejections, just pales in the forest.

This is where you come to realise it is all just another facet of a superfluous reality. I see a sign that says that “man was not just made for himself”, by Plato, on a park bench. I guess this depends on your definition of God. If we were made for God, we still maintain our significance. But if we were made for nature, for the trees, and we would go back to them when we breathe our last breath and decay, we are but tiny blips in a radar that barely registers our footprints. They simply are washed away down the river, and what we do to each other’s hearts has no consequence if we do not act on it and simply breathe the air that is given to us by the leaves that surround us. The warm hug of a life that has lived itself long before us, and will continue long after we die.

I think about Tanessa’s father blowing his brains out in the woods, and how, even if it’s macarbe, it is an efficient way to take yourself back to the place that you came from. Abandoning your earthly worries and going back to the earth. But a piece is missing here, in the knowledge that you are not important. You are part of the the bigger picture, you are not made for yourself. Ending your life is just another act of self importance, in a world that never cared.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Heart

I want to write about catching and control. And about ego and power and the hardening of my heart. I feel it’s old softness dissolve as it stitches itself with a new coat of armour, of grit, iron, indomitable. In my minds eye, my sheets change colour, once pink and are now souring and darkening.

There is starvation and meaningless sex and protection because that is what is safer than a home of raw meat and beating flesh and pain dribbling from every orifice.

I want to write about the taste of rejection and the bite of delusion you take when you fall into self loathing and painful evolution. I want to talk again about control, and the loss of it, that makes you scrounge around in a pit of despair and denial. The suffering, the unnecessary suffering that one undergoes when you are struck by your own strangeness.

I was talking to a 21 year old freshman the other day, on the Caltrain to Santa Barbara. She asked me how old I was. I told her I was thirty, and a look of awe came over her face, as if I had something to offer her, a tome or a testament. I wanted to tell her I had no idea where I was going, and I never have. I wanted to tell her that when I was young I had more faith in the world and the system within which we live. I wanted to tell her that I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, or if i wanted to be with someone, or if I wanted to be someone, and whether those two things were mutually exclusive. I wanted to tell her that just recently I had only discovered what it means to recognise your own loneliness, forget about it, and then once again meet it, only dressed in a different dress. I wanted to tell her that I still didn’t know what was good for me, and I quite often made the wrong choice. That I found out what I wanted by not getting it, again, again, again.

Instead I made small talk about how Oprah lives in Santa Barbara and lied when she asked me if I had someone to meet me at the next stop.

I was climbing a mountain this morning, it was hot and vast. I kept thinking, maybe this is evolution. A slow walk into the flames of confusion forever until you find yourself on a monitor being disconnected from the matrix. I kept thinking, my ego could swallow the world.

I remember when I was fifteen and I stuck a collage of pictures of myself to the inside of my diary, and in all the spaces I wrote “not good enough”. It’s like I cling to that narrative so hard that I make decisions that will affirm it. Man manifests destiny, I manifest my own demise.

I will give everything at once, like a force of nature, a typhoon. And then when I break houses and people and livestock, I say, I told you this. I told you I was trouble, I told you that you shouldn’t have wished for me. And I am soft, but I have no idea how to be. I have no idea how to be gentle. The breaking has always come easier to me.

And patience, what are you? No matter how many times I tell myself or read the texts or the novels or the instructions I come barreling in like a Rottweiler on a ham steak, slipping in my own saliva, desperate for a piece. Give me love, but don’t make me feel like I deserve it, because I want you to give it to me but I cannot accept it.

If I was a card in a tarot deck, I would be death. And not because I want to die, but because the my world is always being turned upside down. Because I am always letting go. Because I am always changing and starving and dying and waking up a different person every day of my life. And then I go ahead and change again, before I am ready, before anyone is. I am death and she is a woman, a tide or an ocean or a stone rolling down a hill. By the time it reaches the bottom, it has gathered everything in its path. It has created new terrain that isn’t comfortable, and I have never been comfortable. I am always in transition.

In my mind, I dress in black lingerie and lie on my bed like a commanding priestess.

I feel my eyes darken as I stare out into my future. I don’t want to be soft anymore. Not even at the core. If I wake up and taste power on my tongue every morning, maybe pain cannot touch me. Once the inflicted, now the oppressor.

My shadow lengthens in the candlelight. I look across the sea of discarded emotions. Tears that have crusted into the rug. The burning of incense in the corner. I close my eyes, and the heart follows.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

PDX

I get to the airport in Portland and log on the internet to see a stream of messages from Will. He says he feels guilty because he was sleeping with a girl from Australia who moved to the UK and now he’s about to see her and he didn’t expect to. He finishes the message with “should I tell her I shagged my housemate?” Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. I have the sudden urge to smoke seven cigarettes at the same time and my stomach feels as if I’ve been gut punched by a welterweight champion. And I only have myself to blame. It occurs to me that I never say what I want because I never know what I want until it’s too late and rejection feels shitty even if the person isn’t right for you. It’s the third time in two months that I’ve been sleeping with a guy that has somehow or another, seemed to be somewhat regretful about choosing someone else over me, and they tell me because they think I’ll be cool with it. Or to get themselves out of the guilt lock, or just to make themselves feel like better humans because they’re at the mercy of their penises. And I don’t think it’s their fault either. I act like, and convince myself, that sex is just a rudimentary urge, and I fulfill it only to realise that it’s more than that to me. But by that point it’s already all laid out, I’m enjoying the attention and I don’t want it to stop but I don’t think I’m worthy of commitment so I don’t ask for it. And then it’s too late because if I asked for it in the first place I would have never slept with them, and I might have gotten what I wanted, or what I thought I wanted, if it even is what I wanted.

So I bite the bullet and nicely say that I don’t want to sleep with him anymore and that I want a higher price on my head. That I want a person that looks at me like maybe I’m magic. That sleeping with unavailable men and women make me feel like an option and not a choice. I don’t feel anything as I say this but that it’s the correct choice to minimise the damage. I watch a homeless man raid a bin out the front of northeast fifth street from Tanessa’s balcony, and smoke menthol cigarettes whilst hugging my knees. I say, I know it is my fault because I never know what I want and commitment is hard for me. I don’t say that I want to travel the world with the partner I want and that I never want mediocrity or boring days or to trap a person but that I want to love a person so much that I want them to feel free. I do say that I can’t expect someone to make plans with them if I’m not willing to show up for them, but I don’t say, that I am, that I really really am. And that I never ask because I’m scared they don’t want to show up for me.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

In the Air

It’s strange when you realise how deeply you are affected by your own loneliness, and how convinced that external forces can be the salve to that particular blistering ache. The minister that had me crying on the train the other day, Kevin, said that man wasn’t meant to be lonely, that’s why he made woman. But I said, but what if you don’t have a woman or a man or companionship the way that it was designed? And he said, but then you are full of god, and you are never alone, and he walks beside you always. I guess maybe in that moment I desperately wanted to believe him. That the spirit inside us is enough, but it isn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t seek each other out. This profoundly sick society would not have us all stuck inside the bubble of the internet trying to reach above it and over it and throwing ourselves off of buildings when we don’t find something real enough to satisfy our expectations of ourselves within the constraints of this society.

I listen to everything everything, I don’t remember when they overtook John Mayer as my favourite, but I think it was when I realised they largely sing about the sad and profound nihilism of life without having to obligatorily mention the hope that is contained inside the human spirit. Even though, that is important too, but let’s not sugar coat it, if you cannot project everything you want onto another soul vessel, then you become increasingly deferent to the idea that life isn’t just exceptionally painful. We seek connection but never achieve it, because we can only connect with ourselves. It is bizarre and infuriating, and yet we keep trying because that’s all you can do besides hang yourself in your hotel room.

The enduring hope of the spirit is something I’m intently fascinated by. I mean, it is sometimes the only thing that keeps me going. I know there is a home somewhere and that it is largely inside myself but I feel like I’m missing a critical step somewhere.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Airport Hopping

The shuttle bus driver seems preoccupied with the fact that there’s been a no show, as he’s talking in broken English over the radio. We’ve been stuffed into that bus for half an hour, driving around down town San Francisco, and I’ve been watching the multitude of homeless people that litter the streets, in various states of disarray and distress. I haven’t been privy to this many displaced people before, but the Uber driver who’s taking me from the more affluent Bay Area to downtown the day before has already pre-warned me. He says it’s because the weather is milder than other states, that it’s an easier place to be. It doesn’t look easy to be there to me, but one time when I was in Canada Dan told me about the number of homeless people that freeze to death in the winter and I realised it was something that had never occurred to me because we don’t have snow in Australia.

I down load and read a novel “places where I stopped on the way home” by Meg Fee, as I take a flight from SF to LA and then catch a connecting flight to go back in the opposite direction, and wish that I had checked my flights when I booked them. I’m wasting a day in transit, but I’m drinking a glass of Californian Riesling, and a fat lady next to me orders a dirty martini. She talks about how she doesn’t like L.A. and that it’s okay to wear yoga pants but not if you’re fat, and I tell her that you can wear yoga pants any time you want. She chuckles and they head off to wherever is home for them, and I realise once again how strange and huge and varied the United States is but that how it’s the most broadcast place in the world and every city conjures up an image inside of me that I’ve only recently discovered to be very accurate, and surprisingly so.

I listen to John mayer on the airplane on the way to Portland and let Johnny’s comment from the morning burn through me and I wonder if it’s true. I also really really hope it’s not and I chastise myself because I don’t want to look.

I talk earlier in the week to Renee about the fact that girls get attached to men when they share their bodies with them, and there’s something about the book that I’ve read today that talks to me about that tiny voice inside yourself that says “not him”, and I hope there’s that voice inside me and that it’s loud and not louder than the loneliness.

Will lasted a couple of days without going out drinking and then came back with a split forehead and blood everywhere and no recollection of the event. He managed to make a story up in his mind about being hit by a bottle but was told by a person he was on the phone to that he just smashed his head into the key box above the door. I feel a stream of jealousy as he doesn’t tell me who he was talking to at stupid o clock in the morning and then Johnny’s comment about me having feelings for him later on in the day smacks me in the face with the same force that I imagine drunken Will ran into the side of the door, completely unexpectedly.

I do not want that, he is not the right one for me, and I think maybe somehow I’ve become somewhat addicted to that horrible slide of horror show that is the unavailable and only that. As soon as Josh stopped messaging me, when I knew he would because I gave him what he wanted with all the ease of a slippery slide, I thought of him every day. I didn’t call him, but I wanted to. Even a week later when I messaged him when I was drunk and he wrote back a feeble response just for the sake of reminding himself that he was a good guy but also revealing to me that he definitely wasn’t interested by the lack of response after that one interaction.

Then, Will. On the day before I left we spent the whole day in bed and I could feel my need for his company rising up in me. He made me help him choose his dinner for him and showed an unusual need for gratification that I haven’t seen from him since. Not to mention, he knows about josh and about the threesome that I had with Hayden and Tess and he congratulated me on both of them with the ease of someone who really doesn’t care and I wondered when I started to, because this recent need for his approval only sprung up in the last week of me leaving. It was subtle. And then all of the sudden I was in America replaying the last time we had sex like it was something special when it was exactly what it always was, which is convenient, for both of us. And now, I was making it messy and I have chastised myself every day since and wondered why. I have two more weeks here and then he is away for another two after that. I hope a smooth month of separation will nix this bizarre infatuation and I wish more than once that I was a man and was just programmed to not get attached or just broken enough that it wouldn’t happen.

But somehow I’ve found that I’ve become preoccupied with another no show, just like the shuttle driver, speaking over a radio and largely into space, to no one that cares about it.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

SF Downtown

It occurs to me when I’m lying in bed at 10.32 at night, that my near constant affliction has been loneliness. I think about the people I’ve been sleeping with, I think about Will and how it could never end up being anything and then wonder why I’m bothering to do this to myself. It’s like, looking for love inside the arms of casual flirtation and meaningless fucking and expecting it to somehow turn into the feeling of companionship. I go traveling by myself and experience long time frames of being completely isolated. I wonder what it is teaching me. I guess I feel like it means I want more. That my priorities are all fucked up, and that I need to think about what direction I’m actually moving in.

It maybe feels like a strange regression, this lack of guilt. Not so much the lack of guilt even, just the lack of truly understanding what it is that I want. I want to be loved. But I’m not doing anything to further that agenda. I’m almost doing the exact opposite thing. It is strange that I should go traveling alone to reaffirm that I’m looking for the kind of companionship that I haven’t allowed myself to discover lately.

I see two Dutch boys that I met whilst watching a movie and eating pizza in the common area, downstairs. It’s 1am and I can’t sleep, so I go downstairs to watch the group of pimps arguing across the street. Only, I learn that they aren’t arguing, that’s just how they talk. They’re playing loud music that the concierge says they can’t ask them to turn off because they might pull out guns and knives, and they’re drinking on the street clutching bottles and paper cups. They are relatively unintelligible, just a lot of yelling and swearing. One of the Dutch boys, Tim, comes downstairs to sit next to me. He is visibly intoxicated and I can smell the alcohol on his breath. After we people watch the pimps across the street for a while, I tell him that I’m hungry and I’m considering the diner just past the commotion. His friend, Sjors, agrees to come with us, and we make our way up the street. The diner is everything I could have wanted a 24/7 diner to be, down to the sundae cups and the pancakes at 2am and the grumpy Mexican waitress and the little bottles of mustard and ketchup on the tables. Tim is making a lot of noise, yelling and joking, and I join him. No one says anything, no one even blinks an eye, which leads me to believe that this is the sort of place that attracts the loud, intoxicated kind. I drink a root beer whilst the boys plow into more beers. I order a salad and they both get burgers, and after an hour or so I’m sufficiently tired enough to go to bed. I give them my leftover weed in lieu of my flights tomorrow, eventual destination is Portland.

I slip uneasily into a fractured sleep, and wonder when I’ll get a proper night of rest, and if it will happen on this trip. Or whether sleep is tethered to security for me, and whether that is inexplicably linked to the loneliness that snaps at my heels wherever I go.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

SF

A girl called Emily picks me up from Alex’s at 9am. They wake me up at 8.54, so I’m totally fuck eyed and think that the water glass in front of me is full of water, which would make sense, but it isn’t, it’s full of gin.

I can’t remember getting home, and only hours later I realise that my shirt is covered in wine. The last thing I remember is playing drinking games with a bunch of 22 year olds who have a way better tolerance for alcohol than I do. They took me through the rites of passage in college life, or some of them. We went to a popular underage bar and stood on the bar top doing shots, which is apparently the first bar you go to when you turn 21. Before that, we were at a cheap Japanese restaurant where we were drinking “sake bombs” which is just a really nice way of saying “getting totally fucked up”. They gave us a kettle of sake which served us through four or five rounds of these bombs, with litre beers as the base. Safe to say, I was probably never getting out of there sober, especially since we went back to an old sorority house and played never have I ever, and given that I’m 8-10 years older than everyone else, the bag of wine I was drinking diminished quicker than I could have foreseen.

So, I make myself a ranch, salami and cheese sandwich, shove all of my belongings into my bags, and jump in the car with two strangers to drive to San Jose. Because, nothing says America like organised hitchhiking. Oren has arranged me this ride, a self confessed “terrible Jew”, who can’t tell me what will happen to me if I eat bacon, but can organise my travel plans like nobody’s business.

Emily is apparently hooking up with his brother, but she’s driving to San Jose to pick up her boyfriend from the airport.

In the back, there’s a girl who doesn’t speak the entire trip except for the end, when she’s telling us directions. I fall asleep for an hour and a half and wake up perky, remembering I have a cold brew coffee in my bag.

After a scuffle at the “gas station”, where I can’t take out more than forty dollars so it takes me seven years to withdraw denominations that cost me ten dollars per transaction, we arrive in San Jose.

I buy a train ticket to San Francisco, even though I’m assured by a well meaning onlooker that it’s not the most efficient method of transport, and that I should have taken BART, but as it is, I’ll have to go straight into San Fran and try to make my way to fisherman’s wharf, once in the city, which doesn’t seem that hard to me, although the onlookers passive aggressively talk about the ineffective train line were about to catch right next to me. At one point, the girl whispers under her breath “is she drunk?” because they saw me pouring the rest of my gin into the bottle I had drunk my coffee out of, to save space.

On the train, I get very quickly into a conversation with a man called Kevin. He says some amazingly profound things and about an hour in, he tells me he’s a convert of the lord and saviour Jesus Christ. Look, I have to say, it might have been the gin moonlighting as coffee, but he very nearly convinced me to get on my knees and pray right there and then, except that I had to believe that homosexuality was a choice and that anything besides procreation was a sin.

I mean, I was there the whole way with you dude, except, you know, you’re narrow. I really liked him though, so much so that the two hour trip took what seemed like 40 minutes, although that may have been the gin.

Zanaida, a Cuban seventy something year old who spoke to me when I first got on the train, accompanies me on both the train and the bus to the fisherman’s wharf. We wander around asking bus drivers where we’re supposed to be going and they are total assholes about it. Eventually we make our way to fisherman’s wharf, where I’m staying. I stop off at a bar and drink a little too much tequila and a few beers and tell an increasingly terrified Australian couple my life story. I’m so drunk by the time I leave that I drop my phone on the ground and they have to pick it up from me. My survival instincts are incredible, I manage to make it to my hostel, check in, throw my stuff down in my dorm and get to the bar where I drink more beers with a German duo, and i wake up in bed with all my belongings scattered around me, wishing for the first time in a little while, that I was still sober.

But it’s 8am which is just in time for breakfast, and no one knows me here. I keep expecting to run into someone who is going to tell me how drunk I was last night, but I’m beginning to realise I’m America, a lot of people just wont say it to your face.

At the beach yesterday, after hiking up a mountain and before the sake bombs, we went to wash off our sweat by jumping in the freezing cold ocean afterward. It was the first time not one person had mentioned my tattoos, though parents stared disapprovingly and turned their children away from their own gazed toward me. Not even my company mentioned it, one way or the other. I’ve never had a silent crowd when it comes to this, and it told me a lot of what I needed to know about the culture that I had discussed earlier in the week with the felon. He said, a lot of people will be nice to your face and never tell you what they really think of you, and I never entertained that thought about Americans before. But on that beach, it occurs to me that he might have been right.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

SLO

The two girls in my room are going home today, and as a result, need to get rid of their weed and drink all their booze before they get on a plane to Tennessee, where weed isn’t legal. They generously donate me their left over weed and pipe whilst I sit on the floor and regale them with tales of my slutty behaviour when I was their age. By the end of the conversation, they’re either suitably disgusted or in awe, but they leave me the last three quarters of a bottle of gin they have unsuccessfully attempted to finish. Just the smell of it makes me feel a little nauseous but I tuck it into my bag anyway and head off to the train station.

The “trains” are basically trams and they confuse me greatly, but a guy from DC who has just navigated the trip himself helps me to work out where I’m going and gives me his own printed out map with a highlight of my route to downtown LA.

I should add at this point, that LA is a massive fan of fountains. There’s one on every corner, and I wonder how much water it costs to run them. This would be absolutely befuddling for the citizens of north and South Africa.

I walk around downtown LA for a few hours, having acquired a three and a half hour wait and experiencing my first creepy guy who somehow decides there’s something about the way I look that makes him think I want to talk to him.

I end up at Grand Central Market, looking at neon signs adorning every stall and humans pooled along every bar top. I buy a burrito, but by now I know well enough that it’s going to be too big, so i get half to take away.

At the station a random man buys me a drink as he’s leaving because I say I love Californians to the bar tender. I get into a conversation with a felon named Nick who has only got one eye, because part of his head has been sliced up. He spent three years in prison for having a gun and a stolen car but he had a rap sheet already. Never finished school, and his dad was a heroin addict who he didn’t know that died last month. He buys me another wine and we talk about Australian native wildlife. I show him a picture of a platypus and he says, “damn, I thought that was just a Pokémon” in an L.A. drawl, emphasis on the “e”.

I nearly miss my train because I don’t check my ticket to the last minute but I make it and get into a conversation with some freshmans on summer holidays who are headed to Santa Barbara.

The hand soap on the train smells like maraschino cherries and a family of Mexican Americans with extremely loud and annoying children are running up and down the isles, hunting and gathering and shouting at each other.

Tired and smoking a cigarette on the train platform, Alex and his girlfriend come to pick me up from the train station. We drink two bottles of wine and watch “who is America”. I fall asleep feeling strange because I hear Alex and his girlfriend talking about me for hours into the night, and wonder which part of the ten different things I said that could have been offensive to her was the trigger.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

LA

Takes two hours to get through customs.

I meet a guy at the bus station who clearly doesn’t want to talk to me, so of course, I start a conversation with him. Good thing too, he ends up paying for my bus ticket because I don’t have change from a 20 and the ticket machine doesn’t give anything back. His name is Florian. I accuse him of being French, which of course gets us off to a rollicking start. He’s charmed by me. I’m frenetic, and as soon as he gets off at his stop I start realising that I’m literally in a country where Donald trump is president and anyone near me on this bus could have, and probably is carrying a gun. I still want tacos though. There’s a black man in a wheelchair talking about running into his grandma and giving her a pie and church on Sundays. It feels like I’m in some kind of movie, until I realise I’m literally in the place where movies are made, so it makes sense that people talk as if they’re in one.

After chugging an orange juice and a coffee I go wandering down Santa Monica Boulevard. Spot a tourist bus on the esplanade of the beach. The driver is in a rush and ushers me upstairs even though I have no idea where I’m going. She throws a pair of earphones at me, and I take a seat upstairs overlooking the road.

It occurs to me during the two hour round trip that a lot of los Angeles smells like ramen. And not the fancy kind. More like the kind you buy for less than a dollar at the supermarket when you run out of food money for the week.

I get off the bus after two hours of sitting in the sun looking at Hollywood mansions and trying to maintain a positive attitude. It dawns on me that I haven’t paid the 49 dollars for the tour, as I wander off down the street. The bus lady was too busy slinging water and trying to get people to subscribe to her YouTube channel.

Half an hour after asking every single street corner shop I see, I arrive at blue plate taco. I’m fucking ready for this, realising I haven’t eaten in about 8 hours. After a plate of chicken tacos and a margarita, I’m ready for a nap, but there’s still two hours til I can check in. I spend this torturous time trying to stay awake on a couch in the hostel, dreaming about eating more tacos, and napping, but not actually napping. I go out to buy more tacos while I wait.

I find a roadside food truck that sells me the biggest burrito I’ve ever seen in my life, which I’m not ready for, so I wrap half of it up and take it back to the hostel with me, which I put into my locker, and promptly forget about until one of my roommates asks why everything smells like Mexican food.

I fall asleep for three hours and fart myself awake at about 6pm. This prompts me to take a wander from Santa Monica to Venice beach, but it takes ages and I only find out later that apparently I’ve missed all the good bits of Venice beach.

I eat a reheated burrito, and try to stay awake past 9pm. This is unsuccessful and I wake up confused and delirious in a coughing fit at 2am, resolving to spend the next few days living healthy and sleeping well, all green juices and positive mantras.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Hack of all trades

“I’m surprisingly responsible for everyone in my house”. I say, mouthful of pineapple. Fiona says it’s not that surprising.

A slight panic arises, leading me to ruminate on whether I’ve lost my edge because I’m not so fucked up anymore. When being a train wreck has been part of your identity for so long, it’s hard to put down the torch.

I remember having a conversation about borderline personality disorder with Alice. It’s commonality is largely underrepresented but that’s another story. One of the most arbitrary side effects of trauma is borderline traits; it’s like an umbrella for chaos. Anyway so Alice says that the time when we are normal is the most dangerous time for borderline trait sufferers. Something about normalcy freaking out the average traumatised individual. You’d think worrying that something bad is going to happen would be the javelin here, but in reality, creating a problem is easier.

Self destruction looms on over and sinks into the crevices of imposed mediocrity.

Too much time to think.

Maybe that’s what’s happening now, as Fiona tells me it’s not surprising that I’m responsible. I’ve quit drinking and all the sudden I’m a limp blanket. Maybe I should go masturbate in the toilet or something.

An employee has gone missing and not turned up for shift. I’ve called him, my boss has called him, a few other people have also. There’s been multiple messages sent. No avail. It’s been three days. Fiona suggests I look to see if he’s been active on social media. What a great idea. His social media is pretty heavy duty locked but one thing I do notice is his tumblr account attached to his page. The first entry I click on starts off with an anecdote about wanking. I get in a few sentences in and there is some kind of mediation on dominant sex and the fragile male ego. I seem to have stumbled onto his journal. There’s lots of references of suicide, I notice a lot of it is really well written. The last entry is one from Saturday night; a music track he’s written and produced. It’s weird and has tones of Radiohead and I enjoy it. Says something about faking his own death. I wonder if that’s what he’s doing.

The rest of the day I keep thinking about him and if he’s okay. Some strange reverberation in my chest. I remember when he made a dig at me for talking about Nietzsche at work, and then we talked about writing, but I kind of walked off in the middle of our conversation as I had to tend to the function.

I read through a few of his journals, I wonder if he’d be angry at me for reading through his emotional Filofax but I reckon if you put shit on the internet then you want people to read it and you can’t choose who.

I’ve got his address on file and in a moment of madness I type it into my phone. What the fuck am I going to do with that? Walk to his place and bang on his door? “Hi, I snooped through your shit and read your diary and I’m wondering if you’re alive or not. Also, your writing is great, keep it up”

I consider deleting it, then I don’t.

The van has been broken into out the front of the warehouse. It seems to not have been much of a well curated attack. Most probably by “junkies” or “youths”. We take a poll in the office and the resounding majority votes “junkies” except will, who thinks it might have been young, stupid intoxicated kids. The jury sways toward junkies because we’re surrounded by blocks of decrepit share houses with junk utopias sprawling from their front doors out onto the sidewalks, and the van is packed deep in the car park, hidden from plain sight.

I wonder if the missing guy robbed the van. Got drunk after his recording session and bashed the window in, bleeding on the side door and stealing our beer and cassis liqueur. He says he’s a comedian on his blog. So he’s a standup comedian/writer/musician/depressive type thief. I wonder if he’s ever tried Prozac.

He has a podcast so I start to listen to that on the way home. I have lost the whole cutlery draw at this point. I wonder how much of this is genuine concern, how much of it is curiosity and how much of it is projection because I feel a strange kindredness to this person who was only ever a one dimensional, silent dishwasher. And now by the channels of social media, he has suddenly piqued my interest.

I wonder, while I’m calling him from my phone, whether I have gone temporarily batty. I’ve slipped down a rabbit warren of his thoughts, and all the sudden I’m caring about his well-being as if I ever saw him as more than an employee before. I mean that in a human sense, I do realise that all the people who work for me are in fact, human beings, but this has opened up the door of stark reality. It’s like walking past someone on the street and having that “wow, everyone has their own worlds inside” thought that everyone at some point has. It’s like tumblr bitcoin. And then someone pops up, like a click screen, saying “wanna see?”. Like, of course I clicked the screen. And now I’m standing in front of a show reel for a premiere I was never invited to.

I really hope he’s not dead.

I get midway through the podcast and finally my intensity has waned enough for me to abandon the one woman search party for a lick of social media presence since Saturday night. The night before his missed shift, when he robbed the van and faked his own death. The police have taken blood DNA from the van. I call him one more time to warn him that they’re coming for him. The police that is. He doesn’t answer.

I turn the podcast off, as he is talking about cigarette addiction in between gulps of smoke and swills of beer. I think about the way Fiona sees that I’m holding it all together, that I’m responsible and reliable. I mean, I am. But I also used to smoke meth on my rooftop only a year and a half ago and ram on about how I was going to move to Canada before my life imploded. I mean, I am responsible but I did slit my wrists the wrong way and overdose on painkillers like, two months ago because I was drunk and couldn’t see the point anymore.

I wonder if opening the curtain to another persons reality is really just an exercise in witnessing our dual natures in force. Enlightened by jungian psycho babble, looking at a Polaroid reality, eternally masturbating on my throne of privilege and intellectualism. What is boring is also fucked up. What is quiet it also loud. What is true is also untrue. She who is responsible is a verifiable trainwreck. Something like that.

[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Will I ever stop writing about the ocean

“But the thing is; I ended up writing a memoir about my insane mother which is the one thing I wanted not to do! I’d already written about my mother, I didn’t think there was any more to write”
On her third novel, and still writing about the thing that sears through her like a brand. And it makes me think of you.
Oh, how sick I am of writing about you. I’m not sick of writing about my mother.
Her and I were talking about you the other day, she said something to me, a repetition, fond as she is of echolalia. “Beware of the enigma. At the bottom of those stairs, at the end of all those locked doors is a scared little boy with nothing to give you” and there you are, with your hands clasped behind your back asking me to pick a hand, never relenting a fist. Both palms empty for eternity.
“But isn’t everything about the “enigma” just projection?” I ask her.
She asks what I mean.
I think about you and how I lay awake next to your face one night. I was so stoned I could barely catch my breath. You had fallen asleep earlier, and I lay naked, swilling expensive tequila from the glass I kept next to the bed. It was one of my earlier attempts at sobriety. “If I buy the expensive stuff I won’t drink as much. If I drink tequila I’ll be nicer” I really believed it at the time, in the way that denial wraps around you like a blanket passed down through heirs, the fortune of the damned, knitted with perverse optimism.
I stared at you, and before I knew it, I was lifting my phone above my head, to catch the moment. I wanted to hold the seconds in my hand, or freeze the instant that I knew I was head over heels, marshmallow softness, dribbling listlessly in love with you. I stared so hard at you, you could have disappeared. If my gaze was bullets, you’d be a desiccated mess on the drywall.
I was so high I felt a profundity not afforded to me by daylight, and all my effort was spent not floating away. But the truth was, I wanted to be in love so badly that I never really saw you. Or maybe I did see you. I saw you and I couldn’t appreciate you because I wanted to keep you so much. I wanted your love. And you didn’t love me, not really.
I wanted to mould myself in your image, but in my conversation with my mother, I realised that maybe I wanted to mould into the image that I projected onto you. Where I was fascinated was not in what you said or felt but what it evoked in me. I was fascinated by my reaction to you. The strength of my feelings for you was paradoxically with the possibility it birthed in me. There were questions that you asked me that tore me open in a way that made me whole. Through you, and the unrequited love I poured into you, drowning with a tide of it, I gave rise to an emptiness so vast I had to carve a new self out of the ruins.
In the desert that I made barren as you ran as far away as possible, I starved into a new version of myself. A fossil that I brought forward into the next life. And studied mercilessly, why I couldn’t let you go.
You’re just a memory now, a glorious epitaph written across the jagged landscape of my loss.
“An enigma is just projection” I told my mother. That night I thought that Rupert Sheldrake must have been right when he suggested that memories might not just be kept inside the body, because I could never imagine holding the memory of you inside of my meagre self. That night I felt so high on trust and love that I knew I was going to lose you. The night I wanted to keep because it was a slowly crafted, beautiful demise that I was sinking into with the passion of an astronaut finally launched into the new galaxy. That night I swore I felt the warm stinging arrow of love that I had promised never to feel again, and haven’t felt since. That night I was looking at you, I was really looking at me. My own self reflected back, a declaration at the bottom of a set of stairs. A length of locked doors. An open palm, and my palm in it.


[whatareyoulikeincapslock]

Be more Specific

Six am. Beats like a drum in the chest. I wake up startled, wondering if he’s texted. He hasn’t, of course. I have been the one to break it off. This comes as no surprise. And yet. For some reason I would have let him fight. Probably wouldn’t have gone back, but I would have let him fight. Is it a sickness in me that wants the power of his response. To not be the last one to say anything? Or to have to say “no” twice?

It is the right choice. There were red flags. Like when he told me “you can’t stop drinking” as if it were a travesty. When he told me I had to learn to moderate as if it were the first time someone had suggested that. Like when I did drink and he didn’t like who I became he called it a “relapse” as if just earlier in the week he was encouraging this drinking, having to see the lack of control when it happened for his own eyes, and then decide he didn’t like it. I told you what it was, and now you’re surprised that you didn’t like it?

Like when I told him I was going through a lot right now, and he kept suggesting a threesome and that I had to organise it as if that wasn’t already a stretch of my energy, and that I would also have to share that energy with someone else, a drawing of a card in a deck that was empty, and yet still he pushed.

Someone who didn’t understand boundaries. When I said no anal he pushed and pushed and made jokes about it and when I pointed them out as not really funny at all and threatening to boundaries that I’d set, he thought I was being melodramatic.

The greatest red flag was on the first night we slept together. We fucked and then I was tired and I wanted to go to sleep but he wanted to fuck again, and I said I wanted to go to sleep and he said “but can I just? You don’t even have to do anything” and I let him. And in the morning I felt weird and dirty about it and told a few friends but I put a positive spin on it like sometimes you do have to just do that or sometimes you do have to just push yourself and when I look back on this justification the bile raises in my throat and I realise I’m just folding myself eight times into the patriarchy just like I’m supposed to.

The way he demanded to try different things and then that I think of them because he couldn’t. He was bored with our sex life after a couple of weeks and wanted to try new things but said he didn’t have the brain capacity to think of anything besides a threesome and a sex party so that I should come up with ideas. My needs felt squashed. I didn’t need to experiment sexually I needed someone to realise how fucking stressed I was right now. I don’t need that kind of sex at all, it’s a giving and a taking of energy and I was doing nothing but giving in this situation. I was exhausting what little function I had for myself by giving it to an impetuous child who was bored with everything always and needed to be the centre of attention and used his mental illness to excuse that and then deliberately throw money at the problem when it inevitably arose. Could I have picked a less loving, more demanding person to give me exactly what I didn’t need? Maybe. But probably not. Be careful what you ask the universe for. Because when you ask to be fucked, that’s exactly what it gives you.

“All you ever do is moan at me” is the last thing you need to hear when you are trying to communicate. And even more so when the person in question has been sleeping with you for less than two weeks. “All you ever” sounds like a death sentence.

Never mind the fact that I’ve been suicidal, or that I’ve missed work because I want to stay in bed for three days straight, never mind that my life is falling apart and I could really use someone to not act like that’s a ruse for attention or a false alarm. Like waking up in the morning with the already unfolding punching bag in the pit of my stomach is something I want to have, a choice to have, a handful of pills for breakfast as I up my medication and chuck some extra benzos in because fuck feeling and no wonder no one talks about it.

I said I wanted to have sex, and that is what I got. Maybe I should have been more specific.

I want connection, and I want release. I want attention and understanding, I want intention and respect. I want alignment and I want imagination and I want to share a love of learning and reading and writing and creating. I want animals and plants and a life bigger than a pub and sports and alcohol and sundays that feel like a write off. I want theatre and travel and experience and exploration and sexual chemistry. I want sex, yes, but let me be specific here, I want the right kind.