Three of Hearts

Update

2012-01-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

I'll be blogging in a few other places for the time being:

diariumcollective.com (a new collaboration with Kate) and

exquisitemistake.net (for the CalArts school of Theater's development of The Portrait of a Lady)

And, as always, new photos and such on my website and flickr.

xA

winter blues

2012-01-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

2012-01-06T15:16:00.001-08:00

2012-01-05T01:54:00.001-08:00

being & not being

2011-12-11T20:01:00.001-08:00

Imagine you've read On Being Blue- a "philosophical inquiry," perfectly meandering and tangentially obtuse. Blue as a state of mind, as the color of our interior lives, as the color of eroticism, blue as a foray into the language of love, the love of language. Imagine you haven't been able to see words or sentences or metaphor the same since. You keep thinking of all the ways you've been writing the flesh of things, rarely bone or muscle. Just hair and pores and blushes. The surface of things. The shapes of things.

And then a house. Imagine a perfect house, full of people, cold outside and then suddenly you walk in and it's warm, too warm, but it smells of cloves, something hot and boozy gurgling on a stove top. You're wearing a coat you haven't worn since New York, the navy blue one that makes you feel like you're in a Salinger book because you spent the morning talking about Franny & Zooey. And there are people kissing. And people wishing they were kissing. People drunk. Angry. Lonely. Unstitched. Everyone is dressed up, wearing silk and suits, looking silly and beautiful all at once and it's as if everyone is yelling out their insides, saying I'm drunk I'm lost I'm in love I'm exhausted, interior lives practically dripping off the walls and everyone's neediness being passed around like a joint. There are candy canes on the table and someone asks you what your holiday wish is and you say snow and mean it because snow is filling your daydreams in a way that feels obliterating and significant. Someone says I like your coat and this is a perfect example because you don't hear like or coat, you hear only the underpinnings, the language within the language, and it makes you nervous and flushed. You get a beer that you don't drink, just hold, and you sit in the big leather arm chair, tucking all the excess of your dress up under your legs, and you rest your head against someone's arm while he scratches your back and you wonder how long you should bother waiting before you leave. Not long. Maybe ten minutes. You feel sick to your stomach as you go, not sure why, and then you walk down the street, looking up at a full moon and palm trees and your hands deep in the pockets of your long coat and none of these things feel like they go together. Not the fullness, not the fear, not the cold, the trees.

You get home and sleep on the sofa because tonight your bed is too big and still rumpled and smells like shampoo and sweatshirts in a way that makes you warm, too warm, and you suddenly imagine yourself married and your husband dead for the first night and wonder if sleeping in the bed you shared would be soothing or unbearable. But no. You sleep on the sofa with your dog on your stomach and you wake up at 3:33am with such exacting lucidity that you wonder if someone you know is dying, right then. But no. No, you go back to sleep and when you wake up again your neck is sore and you feel scared in a way that you can't shake, in a way that just gets progressively worse throughout the day until finally, around sunset, you get lost trying to find your way through a labyrinth mess of a neighborhood for dinner and a meeting, so you sit down on the curb with a half-eaten crate of clementines and a bottle of champagne and you cry in a way that feels like leaking. Your toes get cold and you watch a woman chopping onions through the window across the street and think, still, about blue and then, of course, about the ocean and then you imagine yourself a woman waiting in the cold, a hundred years ago or more, waiting for a speck of boat to appear on the furthest extreme of your horizon. You wish hard for snow. And you wait. And you wait.

2011-11-28T11:25:00.002-08:00

2011-11-20T23:24:00.001-08:00

Stocking up on film and paints, empty notebooks, new music, stacks of library books and everything else I need to see me through the winter hibernation, while also simultaneously trying to ease myself out of a numbing bout of creative burnout. Burnout hits me in my whole body. It dilutes my sleep, changes the way I eat, the way I breathe. I feel it in everything.

Sitting for a portrait late on Friday night, a cheap bottle of champagne and frequent breaks to stretch my legs and fidget with my camera. And then this weekend, mornings in bed reading a book about muses that I picked up for its section on Lou Andreas-Salome, but have held on to for its full breadth of characters. I've been revisiting Lee Miller and Suzanne Farrell, favorites of mine back when I was always anxious to find an example of a female artist with a male muse. But muse seems as synonymous with femaleness as it is with inspiration. So I'm tracking examples of inspiration and love and art and companionship and collaboration as if it's scientific- isolating variables, testing, retesting, forming a new hypothesis.

Someone once told me that my grandfather is my muse, pointing out the inevitable old man in all of my plays. I used to mirror finishing a play with a period of intense love, like tracing paper- the person not only permeating my writing and photographs, but the whole creative impetus beautifully fresh and renewed. Almost all my favorite photos I've taken are of my best friend, an entirely different sort of muse-ness, quieter, more resistant, enduring despite changes of city and scenery and cameras. I used to feel the cities I lived in were muses, Boston and then New York, but not anymore. The West coast doesn't fashion itself a muse- it's something more diffused, more expansive. Out here the cities lose the definitive characteristics of a person and become a flavor, a feeling, a texture.

After a period of intense work inevitably comes burn out, acidic and also numbing, like a full-body sickness. And then the hunt, where I am now. I'm on the trail of something I can't quite articulate, but I absorb the entire world as if it's full of clues. I wait to be lead to the next bit of text, the next place, the next image, the next sound, the next smell, the next person. Everything has gravity. I form my whole being into a state of held breath- show me where to go next.

But this hunt is different. The burnout is deeper, more painful, and the stakes feel greater. I'm hunting for something bigger than inspiration, something more akin to soul. I'm trying to figure out how to recognize it, how to measure it, how to detect it, how to imbue it, how to let it rest and then reignite it, like attraction. The movement of the body. The transparency of skin over spirit. The ignorance of time progressing, of things changing, moments of perfect, unflinching stasis. I'm trying to find the stench of it. Looking for it like a lost pet. Hunting back through my own life for periods of intense soulfulness, like remembering the softness of an old and well-loved t-shirt but not where I lost it along the way.

2011-11-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

2011-11-17T20:35:00.001-08:00

2011-11-16T13:49:00.000-08:00

2011-11-12T21:33:00.001-08:00

Three weeks, a dozen revisions, one extreme hair cut, and a disgusting number of Red Bulls later, the first developmental workshop of Prairie Fire- my second year work-in-progress collaboration with Whit MacLaughlin- is complete. In the back of my brain, I can already feel the benefits of three weeks of intense script work (and Whit's incredible theater brain) percolating into my consciousness, but these kinds of experiences are impossible to evaluate mid-step. As Katrina so aptly put it, I feel hungover from words.

(Thank you, Whit. We miss you.)

2011-11-02T00:05:00.001-07:00

my tongue changing color like fall spilling off the trees

2011-10-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

Fall fattening up. Driving home a different way, a way with more trees and fewer thoughts. Days spent writing, evenings spent rehearsing and then brainstorming curbside while the midnight sprinklers flair up around us. Two days already encompassing what feels equivalent to a month of creative movement. I can't put my finger on what it feels like to be me right now. It's an unfamiliar taste and a sound that echoes back. I'm unaccustomed to the full spectrum of my day adding up to a singular focus- one show, one script, one set of characters and collaborators. I'm eating the script. Sleeping beside it. Not only bathing with it but using it for soap and shampoo and toothpaste and perfume. My play is about a big fire in a small town and so everywhere I turn, people are asking me what's burning. What's burning, what's burning? And I can't answer because I can't think of anything that's not burning. Everything is somehow, simultaneously, the flame and the dry field and the smoke and the ash and most of all the hand that dropped the match.

fall on fire

2011-09-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

Already in the thick of things, somehow. Days blurring, blending, a heartbeat through line of writing, reading, rehearsal schedules. The onset of evening in a newly-mowed field, talking and talking and talking because for months we couldn't so now everything feels white-hot and relevant. I go home and my legs itch from hundreds of tiny grass-bug bites. A half-corked bottle of wine and stacks of Brecht, pencils, an empty coffee cup, the smell of smoke, feeling dizzy from the rush of things cementing themselves in my memory- the precise amount of smoke, just how cool the air was coming in through the window, the feeling of a Tuesday, of life simultaneously leaking out and rushing in, of being a half-person in some things, a whole-person in others, and sometimes ten selves at once, dimensional as a fun house mirror.

I've written out of duty, for responsibility, for a deadline. Written to try and prove I didn't like it, then to try and prove I did. I've written to forget things, written to remember things. Written to be sloppy, stupid, smart, romantic, clever. Written to invite love in and also to push it out. I've written to protect myself. To free myself. To distract myself. Always a new reason to write and now it's because life makes me dizzy, feels unreal in its richness, its preciousness, its potency, its strangeness. I'm having trouble believing I'm not asleep, reality and performance inverting strangely, untrustworthy days. Writing now because nothing else seems real, because sleep makes me anxious, because long rhythms of night seem to be useful only when stretched out on my stomach, filling pages until my wrist aches and remembering, strangely, that no one else is coming home.

use caution and be reckless

2011-09-14T21:57:00.000-07:00

It's easy to write when the heat of summer leaves you lazy and in awe of everything. Easy lists. Easy observation. Fall has come storming in and left everything cracked open in its wake. Five minutes in the sun to read and my legs covered in ants. Living off of bananas and coffee. Writing, casting, recasting, entire days spent orbiting around plays which, on grumpy, sleep-deprived mornings, just feels absurd. And also wonderful. And then again, absurd. Life in writing versus life in living. Craving space and time and air and long mornings and as much quiet as I can possibly stand. Wanting to sew these days up tight because I feel them changing drastically and entirely against my will. Everything is sticky and dripping off my fingers.

2011-09-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

I make a list of aims on the plane ride home, Arizonaoutside the window to my right. Itfeels unnecessary but I do it anyway, because that’s what you do with a newseason. You make pledges. You expand. You write a list of rules to break or surpass, a map throughthe terrain. Plays to write. The first few lines of a song, a newway of writing, a way of saying yes. The right color of lipstick. A standard for camera-carrying (everywhere, at alltimes). Ways to love and notlove. Reasons to stand upstraighter. Reasons not to sleep.

2011-09-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

Slept last night on the sleeper sofa in my mom’s livingroom, the windows open wide to a sudden coolness and the crickets coughing up arhythm, keeping me awake. Writinglate into the morning.

Kansas Cityis as it’s always been, a place of flat, brick schools and Costcos andfountains and movie theaters with twenty-five screens. In small pockets, it sparks. The restmakes me sleepy, but it’s mine, it’s my little seashell of a home so I loveit. There are certain aspects, ifyou catch them just right, the right time of day or weather or the rightlighting, that shine so bright, recalling entire chunks of life I usuallyoverlook. Quiet life. Life before real life.

Fall always makes me feel like a snake newly freed from alayer of skin. Boneless,chameleon-like, a sense of waking up loudly, of feeling everything loudly, oflife magically quadrupling in size. Cutting a friend’s hair before anyone else came back to school, littlepieces fluttering all over my dorm room floor. Finishing my second play and celebrating with room-serviceturkey sandwiches, cross-legged on a hotel bed, still strangers but the most inlove we’d ever be. A picnic on ahigh hill. A white button down andcurls on a visit to Pittsburgh. An old roommate's down comforter and navy coat. Thewarm-cold of October, sun and clear blue and the density of the air. Buses to New York. A houndstooth blazer. Boston, like it would swallow mewhole. New York threatening tospit me back up. And California,like something to sip on, easy.

Iremember fall with a clarity so fierce it’s like my life depends on it. I slip into love easily, witheverything, because life fills me up whole. I need nothing and welcome everything. Fall delivers me constantly,repeatedly, into myself. Deeper, and again. And again.

i have a dream where i am floating. (Kate guest post, pt. 2)

2011-09-04T18:40:00.000-07:00

1. Being two years apart in school, there wasn’t much opportunity for Caroline and I to speak. So how come I am so in love with her? I don’t know. I know why I love my parents but I don’t know why I love Caroline. There are small reasons, yes, but it is mostly the entire sum of her body and of the two inches of circulating air that surrounds her skin that makes me love her. It is the color of her hair and the birthmark on the bottom lip of her mouth, yes, but it is also the blood that I can not see that runs through her veins and makes her heart pump. It is the slightness of her hips and the way her nose is shaped, yes, but it is also her two lungs and the tree of her bronchial system and her spinal column and the delicacy of her spleen. All things that I will never see but that make me love her. When I think about why I love Caroline, I think about why my feet stick to the earth. She is like gravity. She has a gravitational pull. Without her, I would float into outer space and my head would either explode or implode from the pressure. I am not sure which.

2. When I was fourteen, I did not know that I liked girls. This was after my father may or may not have tried to kill me and after I started sleeping with, admittedly, a lot of boys, but before I realized that I wasn’t sleeping with all these boys because I liked them. I was sleeping with them because I was trying to like them. I don’t want to like girls. I want to like boys, and not just to fulfill my little duty of maintaining societal normalcy. I like the puzzle piece factor of a boy and a girl fucking, I like how certain parts of our anatomy click together and there are certain pleasures but also certain consequences, like sometimes it hurts and sometimes you get pregnant. I like putting condoms on and taking them off again when you are done and wrapping them up in tissue paper and hiding them in the bottom of the trashcan. I like the rhythm, the in-and-out, the repetition. I especially like if there is music playing in the background and the beat of the music becomes the beat you screw to, and it’s not something you have to think about, it just happens. I like how the boys have to go inside you and you are like a treasure chest. I like how sometimes they beg you to let them fuck you and even if you aren’t really in the mood, sometimes you do it because you are bored and because you’ve already done it so many times, it’s not like this one will really change anything. Dr. DeWitt says you have to treat each sexual partner like a completely new experience and you have to answer certain questions before every single time you have sex and every single time you let each new sexual partner share this precious part of your body, but I don’t really agree with that. I think that every boy I’ve ever slept with is just one part of a bigger being, I think they are all the same, I think regardless of what color their skin is or how hard they do it or what their name is, they are all the same person. It is all the same moment, it is all the same experience. In the back of a car or in your bed when your mother isn’t home or in their house if they are old enough to have a house. It’s not special and it’s not important. It’s just something you do to pass the time until the next time, until the next time, and until you eventually die from something completely unrelated, possibly alone and with an enormous black scar in your abdomen from where your father once stabbed you with a fountain pen and the fountain pen exploded ink all into your belly and the doctors say it will probably just never go away.

3. That moment, the first time in my life that Caroline speaks my name, that is it. The entire bathroom spins around on a Caroline-as-sun axis, and I love her. That’s it, I fall in love. And I know it is real because she does not look pretty and she has throw up on her face and the bathroom is smelly and her eyes are red and watery. But all of sudden, she is the prettiest thing in the entire world to me, so I know it’s true. I mean, I know it’s real. I think the best way to tell if you love someone is to see them in some awful, unattractive way. Then, you will know if you actually love them or if you just want to fuck them, or perhaps you only think you love them because they are unattainable or sleeping with your best friend or teaching you astronomy using a light up globe on their bedroom floor or perhaps reading you Shakespearean sonnets, this time on your bedroom floor, while you sit on your bed and watch your world tilt slowly upside down. Sometimes the world tilts slowly upside down when you are in love, but sometimes it is only because you have smoked too much weed and had too much alcohol and it is not love at all, it is a chemical reaction to the drugs in your system. Sometimes it is hard to tell and that is why you should test it.

4. Caroline and I sit on the bathroom floor for two hours. She pukes once or twice more and I rinse the finger towel out more times than I can remember. We don’t talk much but at one point she sort of leans forward and puts her head on her knees and then she leans to the side so her head is resting on her knees but also touching my knees and my stomach flips in a way that it only flips on roller coasters. This is another way that I know it is real. I have never felt this way about a girl before in my life, but here she is and she has changed everything. All I want to do for the rest of my time on earth is stay in this bathroom with her and touch her hair and her face and bring her pizza when she is hungry and set up a TV so we can watch movies and buy pillows and blankets so we can sleep in the bathtub. It will be like a little bomb shelter. We can order new clothes from the internet but we won’t need shoes because we will always stay inside.

5. In the dream, I am floating over the houses on my street but I am moving away from them. I am moving to the next street over. I am heading towards the house where the party was where the bathroom was where I sat on the tiled floor touching sneakers with her. Where I watched her puke into a toilet and where I wrung out the finger towel for her and where she pressed her cheek against mine and then squeezed my hand and these gestures were some sort of secret code that I have yet to crack. They mean she loves me, they have to mean she loves me, because if she doesn’t love me I will die.

(Kate guest post, pt. 1)

2011-09-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

The madwomen, the Maenads, had no temples. They went to the wilderness to worship, to the wildest mountains, the deepest forests, as if they kept to the customs of an ancient time before men had thought of building houses for their gods. They went out of the dusty, crowded city, back to the lean purity of the untrodden hills and woodlands. There Dionysus gave them food and drink: herbs and berries and the milk of the wild goat. Their beds were on the soft meadow grass; under the thick-leaved trees; where the pine needles fall year after year. They woke to a sense of peace and heavenly freshness; they bathed in a clear brook. There was much that was lovely, good, and freeing in this worship under the open sky and the ecstasy of joy it brought in the wild beauty of the world.

I would not say we are crashing through the woods together but there is a sense of singularity in us that the people - I am not saying the ones sitting praying in their churches, chanting in their mausoleums, anointing each other with oil in their synagogues, pressing their foreheads against dirty wooden floors in their temples - do not share with us. I am just saying there is us and there are other people and sometimes it feels that we are - no, not crashing through the woods, but skipping quickly - while they are doing all the complicated rituals that make them feel closer to their god.

I wrote you a letter I never sent. I compose letters in my head and I never write them. I wake up in the middle of the night and scratch my dreams into my bedside table but by the time the dawn hits the window the wood is smooth and even I cannot remember whether I dreamed the dream or dreamed the waking.

The city is a jungle. I do not mean a Sinclair-jungle of slit necks and animal fat, I mean an actual, living breathing growing green jungle. Underneath the buildings there are ageless trees that have kept growing and will keep growing. I read a book once about what would happen if we all vanished and it is amazing how quickly the nature we cut down rebuilds itself, grows haphazardly across fifth avenue, cuts a long diagonal through Times Square, a river in Brooklyn.

The other day a man caught a rat, the rat was three feet long and he held it up in front of the camera and he had pitchforked it through its little rat heart and the rat was white with pink eyes and I remembered when we watched Ratatouille together and afterwards drank until morning.

I am not saying we are cutting our way through forest tangles with machetes but we are certainly not kneeling in between long lines of pews, either. I am not saying we are sacrificing barrels of wine to Dionysus but we are not avoiding his libations, either.

Then today on the subway there was a man sitting next to me and he had rolled up bits of fabric and pressed them inside his ears and he was talking to himself so animatedly that people seemed to shrink away from him and also to try and catch a neighbor’s eye because we are always looking towards other people to validate our normalcy. LOOK HE IS TALKING TO HIMSELF BUT I AM NOT TALKING TO MYSELF. Not aloud, anyway, not aloud.

I am not saying we are waist deep in river water running naked through a grove of poplar trees but we are not dipping our newborn children into basins filled with holy water to cleanse them of the sins they are still too young to speak.

If I built a house for my god it would be in a hollow tree. I know this only because I carved our initials into a trunk once and when my parents sold our house I couldn’t tell them why I was so sad to leave you.

I am not saying we are godless, only that we have forsaken our gods in exchange for open spaces, wide rivers, wine, yes, and running naked.

Italicized text from Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

Non italicized text by Kate.

2011-08-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

A moment yesterday, and I don't know why, where it hit me that summer is on its last legs. This doesn't mean much in California but I can still feel it, the impending shift of seasons, the onset of fall and how sublime it makes everything feel. Friends coming back in town, schedules fattening up, stacks of scripts on the kitchen counter, crawling slowly out of summer hibernation. No more quiet mornings, white sheets and sun, early writing out on the deck in a slip, coffee in hand, 8am already reeking of heat.

And all this before we hit the park at sunset- wet hair air drying from late afternoon swimming, already planning on frozen yogurt for dinner, summer oozing out like a slowly deflating balloon. Everything almost painfully potent and if I could, I'd live my whole life in August's slide into September.

Fire Fire- Warby

2011-08-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

The first time she hears it, she’s lying in bed, already in that soft, pliable, half-aware state, so at first she thinks she’s fallen asleep without realizing it and is already dreaming. She listens, her ears big against this voice coming out clear and direct, like a conversation happening right next to her. She sits up in bed and she can hear it, buzzing words, full sentences, her entire bedroom suddenly full of chatter amidst the slant of evening light coming in through the window. When she thinks back on it later, she wonders why she wasn’t scared. Why she held her breath for the sake of listening closely, the voice sounding a bit like her grandfather, a bit like that car salesman from the commercial with the inflatable ape and a bit like something else she can’t quite put her finger on. Something warm and smooth, something that leaves her sitting up straight and rigid in bed, listening tight, waiting.

The next thing she remembers is falling out of bed, hitting the floor with a thump, the snap of her arm, the pain that shot through it and burned like her entire right side was being electrocuted. She laid there, her breath coming out in silent, hollow gasps, trying to remember that voice, what it said. Something about the old house down near Bonita, that voice that sounded like her grandfather’s, that voice that she could hear through her bones.

Later that day, her arm is in a cast, a muted white that looks like vanilla pudding. She can barely do anything now- can’t put her hair up in ponytail, can barely get dressed on her own, can only scribble out shaky words with her other hand. She’s helpless in her arm cast and cut-off denim shorts and her lop-sided one-handed ponytail, but she finds her way to the house, the two-story one with the barn in the back. It’s been empty for years, since the family moved up to Nebraska for better schools and better jobs, and the windows stare back at her with sad, dirty expressions. She steps inside and her arm starts aching and the voices get louder, once voice now, clear, and a feeling like something wild caged up and then set loose takes reign, a buzzing pounding out in her bones and then it’s suddenly quiet and her arm has no pain and there he is across the room, sitting calmly in his arm chair and opening his mouth to say hello.

2011-08-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

The beach was a strange maze- a long coastal drive followed by one of those pristine golf courses set up like a rolling kingdom on the hill, and finally a steep, dusty trail down to the beach. The sand was full of stones and the water was rough. We dove in and the fierceness of the riptide was a shock, a moment of panic as I swam furiously back towards the beach, a few paces behind Drew, feeling myself moving further and further away from the shore line. The life guard was old and retired, watching over us and shielding his face from the sun. I need to go home for dinner, he said, but want to be sure you're not going back in that water. It's no good for swimming.

A stack of plays and a brown grocery bag of snacks, friends newly in LA, friends newly in love, a sunburn stretching out along the back of my legs, driving home late while the sun set over the freeway. Coming home to wash the sand off of tired legs and dirty feet, squinting at our tan faces in the bathroom mirror, windows wide open to the night air, big plates of roasted chicken for dinner and leftover pie for dessert.

2011-08-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

Placerita Canyon yesterday, Rancho Palos Verdes beach today... using up the final days of summer while they're still in my reach.

Fire Fire- the opening and the end

2011-08-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

She drops the groceries near the door, shuts it behind her and walks into the room. Arthur imagines the fruit now bruised and tumbling around inside the paper bags. Peaches, bananas, a carton of blueberries spilling open, the dented corners of milk containers. There’s something different about her today, he can tell- an unfamiliar sharpness, a hum in the air now that she’s in the room. She calls him Arthur today, not grandpa or GP, her teenager slang, and the sound of it makes him cringe. Arthur, she says. Then again. And again. Where is it?

He’s not going to tell her. He’s already decided that. As inflated as she is with the perspective of being seventeen, he knows he’s still many steps ahead of her. He’s not going to tell her where the money is. He’s not going to tell her what his plan is. He’s going to wait until she leaves. He’s going to stay calm and not lose his temper. And even as he shackles himself to the necessity of being calm, of not raising his voice, of not letting her get to him, he’s looking at her now, standing in the half light of the afternoon, with her dark eye makeup and baggy jeans and her clenched jaw and he knows this is going to end badly.

She becomes, in that moment, a sort of parallel to herself as a small girl of two or three. He remembers looking up at her from the bottom of a flight of stairs, waving up at her. Warby, he said, come down from there, come say hello. And he remembers the strangeness of watching her leap from that upper stair railing, small limbs midflight, fearless in her confidence that he would catch her. And he did, still fairly young then and his reflexes sharp. And she smiled in an unknowing child way and he immediately felt himself beholden to her. And now here she is again, testing him again, here he is still calling for her to come down, watching as she hangs herself out and hovers just a few breaths away from falling.

2011-08-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

June and July, late night swims, loud angry parrots at the garden store while we packed up a low slung wagon with herbs and easy plants, the Standard and then somehow back again, Evi returning from Prague with missing keys and Drew scaling her fence in a button down and polished shoes, MOCA street art, everyday the same swim suit and denim shirt even as I sat to write, Archie finding his way into everyone's naps.

2011-07-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

In DC for about ten days, working on my play, The Glass Man, as part of NNPN and The Kennedy Center's MFA Playwrights Workshop.

DC is festeringly hot and smells like boiled river water, but it's been a completely blissful reminder of how much I love East Coast cities. My body is remembering the particular magic of walking everywhere (walking!), my hair inflating like a wavy balloon, long rehearsal days, rooms full of sharp, assertive brains, and everyone asking me, what do you need and, how can we help your play and then back to the hotel for rewrites with a bottle of white wine cooling itself in my hotel freezer, cherries for dinner and little bursts of gratitude pluming off my skin like heat waves.

2011-07-20T00:23:00.000-07:00

There was a summer in New York where it rained well into July, August finally rolling in soggy and smelling of mold. Lots of thunderstorms in the middle of the night, my window screen like a net scooping up the drops. A tiny fan pointed at a perfect angle from one of my north-facing bedroom windows. A black dress I wore every day because it was cool and soaked up the sweat. Getting stuck in one of those quick monsoon downpours under the overhang of a corner bodega, my hands full of oranges for homemade sangria and the rain filling up my shoes.

There was a summer I spent in Cambridge taking classes and sleeping in a wedge of a room with a low, violently slanting ceiling. Linoleum floors, a working fireplace, and a Russian roommate who wore tight white jeans and lots of patent leather. A favorite dress in speckled shades of bright orangey-pink. A large and well-loved book I carried with me through the heat. At night I'd sit with my feet propped up on the desk and write and when I got anxious I'd walk into Harvard Square and back again. Back and forth and back again. Again. Again. Walking and writing my way straight into September.

A summer new to New York with my hair too short and ill-suited clothes and air conditioning I couldn't afford to use. Summers growing up when lightning would shut down the neighborhood pool or we'd sit in the garage with the door open and watch the rain like a waterfall. Or we'd break the monotony of a hot evening with a drive or lemonade or a hammock, the kind of unimaginative, absorbable tasks you forget about once the temperature cools. And this summer, my first fully in California, with a shared pot of coffee in the mornings and meals out on the deck with all the dying, dried-up plants. Blisters on the bottoms of my heels, the unexpected heaviness of July, lots of cherries, three volumes of Caryl Churchill and the double-blind trick of time moving too slowly and never, ever fast enough.

I'm waiting for the meat of summer- the downwards slope into fall, all the anticipation that comes with August, the dog days. That's when things get hazy and it's harder to sleep at night, when your skin starts to feel like it's transforming into liquid silk. When every body is too hot to the touch and everything tastes better with ice and the air at night is so thick you can fall into it like a pillow.

2011-07-16T18:03:00.000-07:00

A quick visit to Drew's home town: an entire morning at Powell's (leaving with literally as many books as I could fit in my arms), breakfasts at Bakery Bar and Tasty n Sons, long walks around the city with his dad, drinks at Secret Society, a friend's house in St. Johns where we slept at night with big screenless windows and branches poking in and bugs darting up around the ceiling fan, old postcards and skeleton keys and vintage coffee cups from Noun, writing and painting in the morning, sketching and reading at night.

We did the drive home in one go with a box of doughnuts, the Savage Love podcast, multiple rounds of coffee and a bag of sunflower seeds. We finally got home around 4am, both bleary-eyed but laughing loudly and with abandon over some stupid joke, and I thought, well, that's got to be a good sign.

Fire Fire brainstorming- Julia

2011-07-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

Julia told everyone that she and Warby were together the night the fire started. Warby didn’t ask, but stated this fact with a firm aggression back when everything was still in chaos.

We were together that night, Julia.

Okay, she responded, voice fluttering like a bird midflight.

Say it back to me, we were together that night.

We were together that night.

Again.

Warby, wh-

Say it.

And she did, the way she always did what Warby asked of her. She repeated it to herself so much that after awhile she couldn’t even remember what the truth was. Maybe they had been together, right? As the days went on it became easier and easier to convince herself. And that was Warby’s magic- a clever manipulation of reality. Warby rewrote the world to accommodate herself and Julia never realized there was any option other than to participate.

But Warby’s inventions soon became far less interesting than what happened between them after the fire. The town’s disaster somehow made Warby plain while Julia became newly and irresistably dynamic. It was like the fire altered the natural balance of the town and somehow they’d switched places. And even stranger, Warby didn’t care. It all seemed like part of her plan, another sleight of hand. She knew something that Julia didn’t but for once, Julia didn’t feel left out. She felt sorry for Warby’s shorn hair, her bleach-stained sweatshirts, her jeans that hung large and ugly on her frame. It was as if the old Warby had been burned up in the fire and Julia had breathed in all those beautiful little particles.

When school reopened in the fall, everyone looked at them differently. Warby was a queen that had willingly dethroned herself, passing the crown to her most devoted and ill-prepared lady in waiting. But Julia rose to it and where Warby now lacked, she newly flaunted herself. Her long hair delicately curled, shorter skirts, tank tops advertising skinny upper arms, long limbs, every proof of femininity and girlish demands for attention.

They still walked together, sat and conversed together, but the school was too small to accept this kind of hierarchical shift coolly. What happened to Warby, they said, first from afar and then to Julia’s face. She looks like shit and she’s kind of freaky now and after awhile Julia couldn’t tell if it was Warby sinking or if she was rising and really it didn’t matter because she was still constructing her reality of self in direct proportion to her best friend. Suddenly, for once, she was on top. She was better and it felt delicious and powerful and like finally everything had snapped into its proper place and order. Julia wouldn’t admit it to anyone but the fire seemed like a blessing that had come straight from some fated, universal goodness and opened up a new world of possibility exclusively for her reign.

Fire Fire brainstorming- Arthur

2011-07-05T21:13:00.001-07:00

He liked the way the matches felt against his fingertips. Rough, but delicate, just a little bit of friction. Like sandpaper, or a cat’s tongue. And the smell, after they’d flamed up and then been puffed out. That smell that he couldn’t describe except by association. A smell like burning, like candles, like a bonfire, like birthday cake. He had a book of matches in his pocket, in all of the drawers in his home. When did this start? He couldn’t actually remember. An old man with his pockets full of matches. The exploding man.

Yes, of course he set the town on fire. What else could it have been? Anyone else walk around with matches? Anyone else wander out into those fields with his fingers all aflame? Other folks in town said it was lightening, heat lightening, or the wind blowing it in, or teenagers, or God. There were only a few people in town foolish enough to believe that God touched down his hand and lit up the prairie like an entrance into hell. But even so, it was easier to swallow than an old man, an old retired postal clerk, getting bored and senile and angry at everything and deciding to burn it all to pieces.

The whole town turning to cinder and soot and Arthur in his house just waiting to die. Gas in the toilet, gas on the carpet, yes, he’d made his ugly, death-smelling house irresistible to the fires. He guessed that he'd probably pass out from the smoke, choke, maybe even asphyxiate, but he wouldn’t mind the fire. A little singe. A little bit of burn. He’d roast up like a marshmallow. The hand of God lighting up the fires and him burning up like the devil in an old upholstered armchair.

Fresh internet real estate

2011-07-04T22:32:00.000-07:00