umpteenth letter to mandarin
Saturday 23 June 2007 | I like a cookie
Dear one!
It’s Saturday afternoon and Pride Week in San Francisco and you are off marching around, waving your feather boa, possibly wearing silver eyeshadow. The Brujo is in the other room napping and I am trying to type quietly. I would probably leave you a voicemail were it not for the aforementioned napping—but I wanted to send something since it has been days and days and (opens bedroom door noiselessly to let in cat who will otherwise yowl because as you know she hates closed doors for some inexplicable post-traumatic reason) and because I worried you might read my blog-nightmare and get the Wrong Idea. (The Right Idea is that the B. and I had olives and ravioli with roasted garlic sauce and chocolate crème brulée all just before falling into bed, and I woke up parched and disoriented and thoroughly nightmared.)
It’s suddenly Arizona-hot here, which is grand, but the cat is SHEDDING, not just shedding but SHEDDING, great gouts and clumps of fine sooty undercoat which gets all up in your face and clings around your nose when you pet and kiss her, especially if you are the Brujo and have facial hair, which just acts like Velcro. No matter how much I brush and comb and hoover there are dark snowdrifts of cat hair everywhere, especially in the sheets, which I now wash every few days. Because worst of all I suddenly seem to be horribly allergic to her, and don’t really know what to do. She still sleeps under the lilacs (especially now that it’s so hot) and it’s possible she could still be coated with pollen? When we get to AZ I will spring to have her professionally washed and groomed, and see if I get better there. If not…want a cat? I love her to pieces, and she loves me too, but I do NOT love feeling like I want to scrub the inside of my nasal passages with a Brillo pad.
(Two brand names in one paragraph! Am I Don DeLillo or what?)
The B. and I briefly attended a hippie solstice party with bonfire and fireworks; we were only going to stay a few minutes but then there was an open music studio in which Matt was already playing bass and a shirtless Ross, electric guitar, and…he valiantly staved off the impulse for almost ten minutes and then fell headlong into the drum kit and didn’t emerge for an hour, during which I stood outside alone and grinned, leaning against the adobe studio and feeling the stored heat and thrum of percussion radiating against my kidneys, staring at the cloudy night sky and writing screenplay scenes in my head. The only thing that bothers me about the script so far is that it’s not funny so far, and I want it to be Shaun of the Dead, Firefly, HellHoles and Fight Club all rolled into one. But the B. says, just write it and then later we can punch it up. I average about five pages a day (which is approximately 1/22nd of a whole script), so it might even be done before we move—! I like screenplays. They’re short. You can literally write a crappy movie in three weeks.
Because the Brujo wanted to see the Salvador Dalí scene, we watched Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman, which I thought was (presumably unintentionally) about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen; but Hitchcock always makes me think fondly of you. Still—oh God, the skiing scene! When Agee interviewed Gregory Peck, the actor would only say of his performance, “I was awful.”
You wouldn’t recognize my flat. There are stacks of laundry in every possible stage between filth and cleanliness, and Trader Joe’s two-buck-Chuck cardboard wine boxes everywhere. I never know what to do with the accordion tic-tac-toe bits inside the wine boxes, so those are everywhere too. Add to this a shedding feline and colored 3×5 scene cards and you have a MESS. At least I did do the dishes yesterday, after reading an excerpt from Cheri Huber’s new book, in which she talks about the unnecessary energy we expend during the pointless back-and-forth between self-hatred and avoidance, and gives doing dishes as an example. I’ve actually peeked at the Living Compassion retreat schedule, wondering if her set-up would be a way to engage with my root tradition again without falling headlong into Zen masochism. Though it seems scarily like a big dharma business; and, she routinely lectures and hectors (however gently and sorrowfully) her students in their monthly “newsletter,” which, were I in residence, I would be sorely tempted to call “Cheri’s Nitpicky PMS Bulletin.” But possibly this is projection.
Speaking of PMS…I’ve discovered chocolate salvation (while at Trader Joe’s acquiring wine boxes)—TJ’s mini meringues, which have only sugar, egg whites and cocoa. Big cocoa hit, low fat and, to be sure, an unconscionable amount of sugar if you have the full “serving” which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 157 cookies. But it’s still better than wolfing an entire Dagoba roseberry bar, which I did, in installments, day before yesterday. Abilify seems to produce the same delightful carb cravings in me that Remeron and worst of all Zyprexa did, though it’s a low roar rather than a full-throated bellow. Or perhaps my metabolism has simply permanently caved in, after decades of rigorous righteous ironclad self-denial around food? I still hold out hope for being somewhat lighter on my feet once it’s 120 degrees, I have a bicycle and all the B. and I want for dinner is mineral water and lettuce stems.
The B. and I have pretty much been welded together at the hip since Tartarus, though we get along very well, which I guess is appropriate or at least reassuring, since we’re soon to cohabit. (I keep saying, with trepidation, things like, “Is it okay if I hang out here at your place another half-hour until the laundry’s done?” and he responds teasingly, “Are you still going to ask me stuff like this when we live together?”) We’re both so disoriented that in our panic we cling to one another, even if all we’re doing is lying in bed stunned and anxious, saying, Why don’t we take another nap? Just one more chapter. Do you want a chocolate cookie? —Etc. It’s some species of mild social phobia, probably brought about by the magnitude of the transition and maybe too many meringues.
Permissions is indeed a nightmare and I have successfully avoided it for an entire week. But on Monday there can be no more hiding out in the pages of Faulkner; and the drafting of request letters and rewriting of entire chapters to delete quotations, etc., begins in earnest. I feel ill just thinking about it.
Funniest thing I’ve read in ages: Apparently when Peter Benchley was trying to think of a title for Jaws, he had all kinds of pretentious candidates (Death in the Water, e.g.)—but his father (Robert Benchley’s son!) kept it real by suggesting alternatives, including my favorite, What Dat Noshin’ on My Laig?
This is a perfectly absurd hodgepodge of a letter, kind of like these boxes I’ve been packing (but why can’t I put tennis shoes, lava lamps and rice cookers all in one box?!) so I will not try to transition out of it gracefully, merely truncate it by saying I hope you’re having fun parading the streets of your fair foggy city, and let us make a real live phone date. The Brujo plays poker tonight (not last night, which is why I was at his house eating olives and ravioli) and so I am on my morbid ownsome and I would love it if we could talk, though I’m sure you’re invited to fifteen cool lesbian parties and then going to bed at 8:30. Anyway you’re invitated—if not tonight then soon?
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
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