Thing of the Week: Nicotine Withdrawal Day 2K16, Fetishizing Laziness

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Nicotine Withdrawal Day 2K16 

ABOVE: Some1 being a sad saddo on Nicotine Withdrawal Day :(

I quit smoking last Friday night at 1 or 2 in the morning or something. I smoked my last cigarette sitting on the square foot of sidewalk out back of my dad’s apartment where I used to smoke my seven billion cigarettes per average day. I felt shameful about the way that little patch of land was always littered with my Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights 100s butts and would brush them up into my hand and dispose of them upstairs so that the ex-convict whose community service gig was sweeping them up wouldn’t judge me.

I barely even cared that I was smoking my last cigarette as I was smoking it. I was too distracted by listening to the shitty demo Matt & I made of the song Good Morning Wolf Girl I wrote about my friend Eli and taking selfies of myself. The next morning I woke up and felt a bit weird and antsy and drove up to Prince Edward County to hang out at vineyards with my father all day, which was nice. 

When I woke up the next morning the quitting smoking being hard part of quitting smoking started. It felt so bad. I wanted to crunch up cardboard boxes with my hands and rip beautiful flower-heads off their stalks and slaughter some stupid animals and burn Beatles records and bite people’s wrists until they bled. I wanted to kick walls until I broke my own feet.

I was being stabbed in the brain by all the different kinds of headaches. I was spacey as fuck, could not formulate proper sentences, felt like my whole face and head was barriered off into little sections separated by panels of frosted glass so my brain and my mouth or ears, nose, etc, had no ability to relate or communicate. I spoke quietly and slowly and couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say or even a non-interesting thing to say. I hated all my friends and my phone became disgusting to me. Like it had this really evil energy about it that still hasn’t completely worn off. Any time I received a text message I wanted to impale myself on whatever impale-able thing was nearest by and whip my phone at whoever the annoying phone wanted me to know was trying to tell me something via some stupid social media platform and in doing so fuck their face up. You have no idea how terribly I wanted to fuck everybody's face up. All my best friends' faces. I wanted to hurt them so badly.

I guess maybe you’re wondering why Nicotine Withdrawal Day is my Thing of the Week when it was very clearly and obviously one of the worst days of my life. That’s a good question. I guess I just like it a lot, in my memory, because it was so different from all the other days. It was very unique unto itself, and made a very big deal out of being itself in a way that I respect. It was no wallflower, nicotine withdrawal, that's for sure. 

ABOVE: druggy face-vibes on Nicotine Withdrawal Day, starring Laura Jane Faulds as the owner of her own druggy face

On Nicotine Withdrawal Day my poison headache & I watched the Zac Efron/Seth Rogen vehicle Bad Neighbours at 6:30 in the morning while eating raw raspberries smushed into peanut butter on an English muffin because I’m trying to avoid the sugar in jam. I was jealous of Zac’s inguinal ligaments and wanted to beat the fucking crap out of Seth Rogen for having such a stupid ugs voice that sounds like if a yellow lab with thick spit and bluish gums could talk. It also co-starred James Franco’s brother as a different frat boy who looked like a ceramic figurine of a squirrel. He was my favourite character in the movie.

After it was over I screamed at my dad for a bit maybe and then went for a run. A lot of the time when I tell people I went for a run I am lying and actually just went for a jog, or like a slow walk, but this time I fucking RAN. I ran like I was fighting with the air, like I was trying to teach the air a lesson, or do something to it: make it not be air anymore. Or turn myself into being air too. I felt like my lungs were faring better than their usual smokery selves, and that was a very good feeling. I want to say I transcended but realistically I was too spacey from the nicotine withdrawal to transcend; I opposite of transcended, landed back inside myself. I probably cried. I like and liked life, I love and loved life, it felt good to know I’m probably not going to die of lung cancer, I’m going to run really fast and far forever. I ran along the side of the lake past the hotels and into the financial district which was grey and dead on a Sunday. I listened to Psychotic Reaction over and over and came home and signed myself up to run a half-marathon next May either 7th or 17th and then felt like shit and wished I was abusing my loved ones again.

I don’t remember what clothes I wore. I showered and walked to Zara and tried on a zippery rose-gold leather bomber jacket that looked cartoonish on me. I walked to the convenience store on the corner of Queen & John so I could buy a bland square of carrot poppyseed cake wrapped in saran wrap. I used to eat those squares for breakfast when I was ill and depressed the winter I was twenty-two. I bought one and and a Fresca and sat and ate them on a bench in a parking lot listening to Syd Barrett and either crying or trying not to cry. I walked over to Kritty’s house and some new neighbour I’d never seen before was standing outside her house repairing a fan or something. He asked me if I lived at Kritty’s house and I replied so quietly he couldn’t hear me so as not to further fuck my brain up— my voice, out of all the voices, was the most abrasive voice of all. The yelpy sound of it made me want to beat myself up. 

Kritty has a little lock-box with a key in it on her front porch so I can let myself into her house while she’s not there but there was a bike blocking my normal route to the lock-box and my brain was too muggy and slow to know how to deal with it. The dude was like, "Can I help you with something?"- I think he thought I was high on drugs. I said some mean things to him. If my voice were in an Archie comic it would have been surrounded by a speech bubble that looked like it was dripping with icicles. My head felt like I’d just smashed it into something. I ignored the guy and walked away. I forgot to mention that I hadn’t brought my phone with me because its evil energy was just too horrible for me to deal with. So I couldn’t text Kritty to say I was out front, so I didn’t. It was so weird of me to do that. I walked all the way there, and then just left.

I was too distressed and disoriented to listen to music so I didn’t. I walked to a movie theatre and learned at the movie theatre that Joseph Gordon Levitt is an actor in a movie they've made about Edward Snowden even though Edward Snowden’s story isn’t even over yet. It’s so stupid, how desperate they are to make a movie about fucking anything. That was really upsetting to me, and I couldn't make heads nor tails out of what any of the other movies were about, so I walked all the way back home and lay in bed and cried and my dad was very nice and hugged me and told me I could do it but I really had my doubts at that point. I was angry with cigarette companies for being evil and angry at every smoker and at every non-smoker. I was angry at my little kid self for having absorbed pro-smoker rhetoric at such a young age, I kept remembering this memory of being at daycare and watching a group of punk smokers who were teenagers smoking beneath a tree. I knew then, when I was five or three or whatever, that I'd grow up to be a cool smoker myself one day. 

"This is what has become of that day," I thought. The start and end of the same story. I couldn’t move or barely breathe or think. I dealt with it as actively as I could, because that's what I do, and made a little movie on my phone for myself to watch any time I ever want to smoke again in the future. Here is a very earnest excerpt from it:

That night I blew off all my plans and put my phone on airplane mode and walked down to Sherbourne Common, the little park by the lake where the fountains look like brontosauruses. Brontosauri. I swang on a swing and listened to my favourite song Miss O’Dell by George Harrison.



In the song George is living in Los Angeles and feels isolated, struggles with relating to his peers, and wishes a girl was calling him on the telephone, which all sound like negative things to be dealing with but the song is very chilled and easy and he laughs a lot in it. It’s the most perfect song I ever heard and it always helps me understand why I’m alive. I didn’t choose to listen to it, my iPod shuf just played it for me. Swinging felt good because the air was a little bit astringent the way it whipped at my face and my legs were pumping back and forth, I was eating up some energy. I was doing something.

By the time I got off the swing the worst of it was over. My legs felt a bit shakey and I walked down to the lake. I tranced out into watching the white & navy tie-dyed waves, looked at all the yachts and schooners and wished I was on one. I never used to look at the lake before I moved to England but then I came home from England and now I look at the lake all the time. It’s a beautiful lake, just like every lake. I'm going to die old, I think. I'm going to look out at so many lakes, and I'm going to take all the money I save from not buying cigarettes, I'm gonna buy myself a boat. 

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Fetishizing Laziness

The other morning I started thinking about how it'd be nice to be lazy like Neil Young, or like one of those super-lazy Neil Young songs, like "Round & Round" or "Out on the Weekend." I'm rarely lazy; I work a whole lot and when I'm not working I try to spend time doing things that keep my head on straight, like hanging out with pals and going running or for big long walks and reading good stuff, and trying to write good stuff too. It doesn't leave much room for true laziness, which I want to clarify as different from that thing of working too much and then collapsing into a heap and Netflix-ing for like seven hours straight.* That's just exhaustion, or at least the performance of exhaustion. Boring.

To me lazy means living according to your own easy-breezy pace instead of conforming to the pace of the world. (Or to the pace of people in the world, I guess is what I mean- I think the actual world wants us to be lazy more often; that's why there are meadows and beaches and other great expanses of natural beauty to wander around in.) It's a state of existence that's conducive to a deep and heavy zoning-out, the kind where you're not even monitoring your daydreaming for possible material to use later on. You're just on another plane, and magic things happen there, and they change your head in a really cool way.

In one ideal version of my life I'd live right by the sea, and on a weekday I'd wake up whenever I felt like waking up, and spend a lot of my morning drinking coffee and reading the paper on the porch. And then I'd take the dog for a walk, and the dog's an English sheepdog, because recently I decided that when I'm older I'm going to go Full Paul and get myself a Martha.** Work itself would be writing things I wanted to write, possibly at some crazy old writing desk, and while writing I'd drink about 800 cups of Christmas tea (which is black tea with cinnamon and cloves and tiny pieces of orange peel) and probably eat a banana or a Pink Lady apple. In the afternoon I'd take a break and make myself a great sandwich, like a walnutty chicken salad on crazy-thick brown bread from the bakery down the road, which also would bake some killer pineapple scones or maybe raspberry muffins. And then my Martha dog and I would walk the beach some more, and then I'd get a little more writing done, if I felt like it. And in the evening there'd be hanging out at the kitchen table with sweet people, and drinking halfway-decent wine and eating an amazing dinner that someone else cooked for me, and listening to the kind of music that people listen to in reasonably perfect lives- like Astral Weeks, or The Hissing of Summer Lawns. That'd be my Monday, or my Tuesday: by far the most high-stress day of my week.

I like my job and I keep getting better at it. The other day for work I met a band for lunch on Ventura Boulevard; the singer boy was a total angel and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and told me about listening to the Cranberries with his dad when he was little, and about how he wants to make songs to help shy goofs believe in love. I was like, "I can't believe this is my job, to talk to this adorable kid and then write some paragraphs so that people will pay attention to his record." Not a bad gig at all.

But it's also the kind of gig where you've gotta work a lot to make any real money- and I need real money, which means a lazier life feels very far away from me. It's not likely to get all that much closer any time soon, so for now I'm trying to slip into little moments of laziness whenever I can. And when I can't do that, I rely on fetishizing the laziness of others, like Neil Young in 1969 or 1972, or Keith Richards sunbathing at Nellcôte, or Paul McCartney hanging around with good ol Martha. Paul is the best because you know he's a total go-getter and an industrious weirdo, but he's also so good at cultivating a happy-lazy vibe, like the vibe of Ram. I used to believe in "I'm gonna make a lot of money, then I'm gonna quit this crazy scene," but now it's more like "I'm gonna make a medium amount of money, and then go hang out on my Scottish dream farm a while and eventually write 'Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.'" Dream Farm Paul is my number-one laziness role model. He totally happens on a pineapple-scone level.

*I'm not anti-Netflix or anything, and mostly I'm telling you that so I can work in a line or two about how in love I am with BoJack and how, the morning after watching the most recent season finale, "Stars" by Nina Simone came on my iTunes at the gym and then I had this cool moment of getting all teary-eyed on the treadmill, especially at the "And the latest story that I know is the one that I'm supposed to go out with" lyric; OH MY GOD

**I want to acknowledge that my English sheepdog obsession was also very much inspired by a dog named Rocco Roni, who I first discovered via this wonderful video wherein Rocco tries to climb up a chair but keeps slipping off. Rocco is an excellent Instagram follow; so many of his posts are focused on his butt, which is fantastic - both the choice to be butt-centric, and the butt itself.

Thing of the Week: Walking To &/Or From Work, A Song + A Dress + Anthony's Shirt

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Walking To &/Or From Work

It’s a few minutes past twelve on Wednesday night, and I don’t mean Thursday morning, even though Thursday morning is what I actually mean. But I just don’t buy that, that a new day starts when the clock turns to midnight. The new day starts when you wake up tomorrow morning. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still June 15th.
        I’m drunk on Verdejo, which, I’ve decided, is the best kind of drunk for me to be. Not on Verdejo, necessarily, but on a Spanish white for sure, made from some obscure varietal like Treixadura or Macabeo or Xarel-lo that nobody has ever heard of except for me, like twenty-five Spanish wine producers, and a handful of other weird nerds.
        I drank Verdejo in Islington tonight, at the Draper’s Arms, which is my favourite pub in London, I guess, or more likely isn’t, but sometimes is. Pubs in London are like Beatles songs— they all fulfil their specific function when you need them to. At the Draper’s Arms, I ate a piece of gold fish for no reason, I wasn’t hungry, but I saw someone else eat the gold fish and then I wanted it, it seemed stupid not to eat it, so I did. I shook Monica’s hand and told her I was going to move to Barcelona in January, because Monica told me to, and the last time I took Monica’s advice it turned out to be the best piece of advice anyone’s ever given me, which was to move the fuck out of the apartment I was living in with my ex-boyfriend, like, tomorrow. I did that, and that’s why my life ended up being what it became: a life I can’t deal with leaving. The life which I just shook hands on agreeing to leave.
        I was drunk and walked to Canonbury, the Overground station I used to walk to every morning, which wasn’t the morning then, it was the afternoon, because those were the hours I kept. The train came fast, and I took it to New Cross, which is not so close to where I live, but it’s close to where I work. I was happy to inconvenience myself, since I couldn’t bear the thought of making it through an entire day without getting to walk that walk.
        That walk is the number one thing that’s making me want to keep on living in London, and if Monica had never told me to move the fuck out of my old apartment I never would’ve gotten to know it. I wondered about what the Barcelona equivalent of that walk would be, and then I thought back to Toronto, about the walk from Palmerston Boulevard to Bloor Street station, and then I stopped thinking about any of it, because I was walking to New Cross to Brockley, and I was just so fucking stoked to be walking from New Cross to Brockley, drunk on Verdejo and listening to all my favourite rock & roll songs; I didn’t have to think about anything. I just was. 

1. Home to Work 

Walking to work doesn’t start when I start walking to work, it starts when I wake up in the morning, when I lie in my bed and take a moment to remember whether or not I got drunk the night before. If I didn’t, I’m sad for a second, because it means my phone’s probably not popping off. I look at my phone and am usually proved right. My phone is boring and I’m bored of it. But if I did get drunk the night before, I get to have my cool moment of remembering all the cool things that happened, and then check out my phone to explore all the cool ramifications of all the cool text messages I sent, and all the cool Tweets I wrote. It’s amazingly exciting for me.
        I make my coffee and my peanut butter, and I plan out my outfit, and then I put it on. Sometimes my hair looks great, but usually it looks bad. I walk out my front door, and listen to a song. The song I love the most that morning dictates what my vibe will be for the rest of the day. I start Tweeting inanely, and then I put my phone on airplane mode, so I can be rewarded for having walked to work when I arrive at work and take my phone off airplane mode and watch all the favs roll in. There are two bursts of favs every morning, one from all the London people at 9:30, and then again at 1:00, when all the Toronto and New York people wake up.
       The best song to listen to on my walk to work is My Generation by the Who It’s easy, it’s simple; it makes its point fast, and hard, and loud. It gets me hype really fast; I like to peak early, when I’m walking past the graveyard, past the KFC ad in the bus stop that I always want to Tweet is the best skinny mirror in all of London, but I never do, because it’s too niche. I don’t relate to any of the words in My Generation, I only like the parts when he stammers at the front of the sentences. Some information I know is that that sound is meant to mimic the delivery of a person high on amphetamines, who is so high on amphetamines that his or her teeth are chattering. That is very cool information to me.
        The Seeker by the Who is also a good morning song, and A Quick One by the Who can also be effective, though only when I do this thing where I bookend the first leg of my home-to-work walk and the last leg of my work-to-home walk with it, so I can think about who I was that morning when I listened to it, and then reflect on all the ways I’ve grown as a person over the course of the day.
        Mostly, the mornings are for Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan songs always sound very fresh to me, just like the morning air. Subterranean Homesick Blues is always a safe bet, as are any of the Bob Dylan songs I designate as being “party" Bob Dylan. Blonde on Blonde’s a really “party” Bob Dylan album: Obviously Five Believers, Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way, Absolutely Sweet Marie. The one where he sings that he'd like to give Brother Bill his great thrill. The morning's when I make all my favourite “Bob Dylan inside jokes” to myself; the one I’m most amused by is when Bob Dylan sings “When you’re lost in the rain, in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too,” and I say, “Really, Bob? And it’s Eastertime? On top of everything?”— it’s not a very funny joke.
        The past couple days, though, the Rolling Stones have been speaking to the morning. Yesterday, I got caught in a thunderstorm while wearing skin-tight trousers and a leopard-print button-up. I was wearing Beatle boots after a month of wearing flats, and I felt uneasy in them, tentative, like a baby giraffe wobbling on its twigs of legs. But then Stray Cat Blues came on, and I settled into my strut. This morning I was morose, listened to Ruby Tuesday twice and felt it but was too stupid to figure out that my today vibe was “Don’t question why she needs to be so free”/”When you change with every new day”/”Dying all the time” all along, a missed opportunity for which I have no one to blame but myself. And then I listened to She Smiled Sweetly, and walked past the gas station and thought about the time I came to Brockley to hang out with Livia last summer, on that one really hot day last summer, and it was the first day I’d ever worn my glasses and they felt foreign on my face. I walked past that Esso station and had no idea where I was, had no idea that a year later that Esso station would become as big a part of me as my glasses would too.
        She Smiled Sweetly had never sounded so beautiful; it was the colour blue, a greyish-blue that you could see through. Mick Jagger sang “And feeling good, most all of the time”— he sings the word time in a lower register than is naturally comfortable for him, and pronounces the vowel very strangely.
        I pretended that that word was the ocean, and drowned myself inside of it. In a positive way.

2. Work To Home

Either I am walking home from work or I am walking home drunk from whatever I ended up doing after work. But I'm not going to write about the drunk times, because it’s June 16th now, and on June 16th terrible things happened to the world, and it no longer feels relevant to write about the time I drunk-listened to the Who sing Cello cello cello cello cello cello cello cello etc etc etc You are forgiven you are forgiven you are forgiven you are forgiven etc and jumped up into the air and punched it when the guitars got bigger. That act was performed as a tribute to the world being a beautiful place. I feel stupid, now, for feeling like that ever.
        So I’m not drunk, I’m never drunk. I’m tired. I am acutely aware of the way the muscles inside my legs are moving. They remind me of the inside of a clock.
       All the streets look different when I’m walking from instead of to. There are certain street corners from morning and night that it took me weeks of walking to realize were the same one. In the night my feet feel damp in my shoes because water splashes on my shoes all day. I feel dirty, I need to wash myself. There is always a little container of food in my bag that I have taped up with masking tape. I’m worried that the food is going to spill inside my bag and mix up with the pre-existing mess of tobacco flakes, gum wrappers, and 75,000 quarter-full bottles of Highland Springs sparkling water. When I get home I’m going to eat the food and then exercise for twenty minutes and then it will be the actual night.
        The sound of songs sounding so good. The Rolling Stones have been speaking to the evening, too. Psychedelic Rolling Stones, mostly; that’s the vibe. Child of the Moon & Dandelion, 2000 Man, Citadel, She’s A Rainbow. I recently re-read a thing I wrote about She’s A Rainbow three years ago in which I trash-talked a thing I’d written about She’s A Rainbow four years before that. Seven years ago, I walked down College Street in the summertime and bought myself a waffle cone of one scoop raspberry and one scoop white chocolate gelato, walked down the street eating it and listening to She’s A Rainbow at the same time, and I felt like if 1967 Mick Jagger had seen me doing it, he would’ve written She’s A Rainbow about me, which bothered me. I felt demeaned by Mick Jagger, unimpressed by his having nothing better to say about the woman he loves than that that she wears clothes which are different colours and combs her hair. Three years later, I decided that I actually loved the line about the girl combing her hair. I thought it represented a very pure and true style of love: when you love somebody so hard and so much that even the dullest, simplest, most mundane things they do seem spectacular. When you’re so taken with someone that you can sit around watching them check their Weather app or scratch their elbow, and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
        I’ve never felt like that about a person in my life. Boring shit is boring, whether you love a person or not. Today I think the lyrics to She’s A Rainbow are fine, not really worth reading into, a series of mostly vacant sentences that do a great job of communicating a thing, which is exuberance, or joy, the zeitgeist of a time. It’s not a song about a girl, it’s a song about what songs sounded like in 1967. It sounds like being trapped inside a music box. It traps me inside myself, away from the world, and inside my head it’s always 1967. I wish it really was. I want to put a flower in a gun. 
       On the day we found out about Orlando, there was a leak at my work and we had to close down one side of the restaurant. It smelled really bad in the restaurant. Everyone was crying, I was crying. I went outside and told everybody “Fifty people died” and my boss said “I thought it was twenty” and I said “It’s fifty now.” I locked myself in the bathroom and cried hard. I wanted what happened not to have happened and felt selfish and babyish about the way in which I wanted it. I stopped crying, because you can’t cry forever. I sat on a bench with my boss’s three-year-old daughter and we watched a cartoon music video for the song B-I-N-G-O & his Bingo was his name-o together and I sang along to Bingo. The little girl put her hand in mine and it reminded me of a tooth, it was so tiny and light. I picked her up and ran around holding her and spun her around in circles. I was exploiting her, nourishing myself with her exuberant vibes.
        At the end of the day I had dirt all over my hands from cleaning out the extractor fans or whatever they’re called, and she sprayed the cleaning spray on my hands to wash them off. The cook asked me why I was letting her spray that spray on my hands, it’s bad for your skin, she said, and I said I didn’t care, because I didn’t. I hugged everyone and helped with the leak as much as I could and felt less like shit about things. It feels good to do nice things for people you care about. I thought, “Maybe this is enough, maybe I am doing enough, maybe I can’t do any more than this, maybe this— perceiving every moment of my life as an opportunity to give a gift to the world— is actually something.”
        It isn't. I don’t know how to say any eloquent or moving things about how fucked up the world is. All I can ever think to say is There’s nothing easier to do than LOVE but it comes off so naïve, which checks out, because I am naïve. I’m an idiot, like Ringo, who still always tweets about peace and love. I’m stuck inside the year 1967 in my head. I was born in 1967, and I’ll die in 1967.
        That night I walked home listening to She’s A Rainbow and it worked: just like hanging out with a three-year-old, or drinking a glass of Verdejo. Like kissing, like eating, like the summer, like the sun. Some people know how to write words that mean something real and other people know how to write words that mean something else. The entire world is crashing down in front of me, but if there is beauty to be found, I will find it.

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: A Song, My Dress, Anthony's Shirt

Here are my three things of the week:

i. THE POSIES + BURT BACHARACH VERSION OF "WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE"

I accidentally downloaded this song very late on Saturday night - I’d gone to see Lloyd Cole at Largo, and he opened with a very sweet cover of “Sometimes It Snows In April,” and after the show I wanted to hear every jangly and heartbreaking song that was ever written. So I got myself a bunch of Posies songs, and their version of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” sneaked in there, which was a nice surprise. Then on Sunday I woke up to the news and decided to ignore whatever I’d planned on doing that day and just go to the beach. In the car I listened to “What the World Needs Now Is Love” lots of times and then I listened to it on the beach and then I listened to it on the pier. I talked to Emily Richmond on the phone and read the New York Times at Patrick’s Roadhouse, where I had a veggie omelet and a Diet Coke and toast with strawberry jam. Mostly I just felt like walking around forever, which is generally how I always feel, so when I got back to Echo Park that night I walked around more and listened to the Posies + Burt Bacharach and ate a Cherry Garcia pop. And then at home I watched the last 54 seconds of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Best Score acceptance speech like 50 times and listened to “What the World Needs Now Is Love” once or twice more, on my earbuds in my room.



My favorite is the last minute and a half, where the song turns into a snappy little party full of flowers and fireworks and then gets all dreamy again, and then Burt Bacharach brings the house down with that last line. It's such a cool thing to be totally sappy but also unequivocally true in whatever you're saying. Let's have everything be sappy and cornball and beautifully mushy forever.

ii. MY NEW DRESS

This is my new dress. I got it at Hutch, which is next to the Scoops in East Hollywood and maybe ties with Gotta Have It for my favorite vintage store in L.A. Everything’s under $30 and feels like it belonged to some groovy librarian from 1978. I had the upstairs all to myself and when I tried on my dress “Nothin in This World Can Stop Me Worryin ‘bout That Girl” came on the radio, and I knew I had to buy it: all new dresses should be about “Nothin in This World Can Stop Me Worryin ‘bout That Girl” in one way or another. I also got a beach bag that says “Victoria, B.C.” in beautiful grandmotherly cursive, because Wolf Parade are from British Columbia. And as I was paying the song on the radio changed to “Vincent” by Car Seat Headrest, and then later on I bought that too. Now I listen to it all the time, when I’m not listening to the Posies + Burt Bacharach or to Divine Fits’ hot cover of “You Got Lucky” by Tom Petty. My favorite "Vincent" lyric is “They got a portrait by Van Gogh on the Wikipedia page for clinical depression," which I'd bet is most people's favorite "Vincent" lyric. Whenever anyone sings intensely and dramatically about stupid things like Wikipedia, it cracks the world wide-open for me.

iii. ANTHONY'S SHIRT




I love the shirt that Anthony wore for Carpool Karaoke. It’s got a flamingo and a tiger and a palm tree and says “TIME TO SUBMERGE”; it looks like it was made by a weirdo fifth-grader who’s blithely ignoring today’s art-class project in favor of working on her cool flamingo art. The new Chili Peppers album The Getaway came out last night and I’m so happy, I love my guys so much, my buddies and my brothers. One fun thing about there being a new Chili Peppers album is all the bores on the internet get to make a huge deal about how horribly the Red Hot Chili Peppers offend their incomparably refined sensibilities, and I get to scroll past their draggy bullshit and feel wildly superior in my chill joie de vivre. Another fun thing is that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are my favorite band in the world, and each new album always fortifies that joie de vivre and makes me feel like a 12-year-old goof again but also super-reflective and wistful and very chorus-to-“My Back Pages”-y. So in celebration of all that, I’m taking today as a half-holiday and going to eat an egg sandwich at a country store in the woods where they give you free cookies on your first visit. I'm going to wear my new dress and listen to The Getaway and probably "What the World Needs Now Is Love" and "Vincent" and lots of other songs that make everything feel as beautifully mushy and stupid and magic as the world truly is.

Thing of the Week: The Day Karl & LJ Didn't Drink Black Velvets or Eat CoYo, A Theoretical Peach Schnapps Wine Cooler

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: The Day Karl & I Didn't Drink Black Velvets or Eat CoYo

I met my soulmate Karl T. Lyons about a month ago, but we also know each other from the great many past lives we have previously lived through as a duo. This was extremely obvious from the very first moment we met.
        Karl and I are co-workers, and the first week I worked at my new job my boss kept telling me that Karl and I were going to love each other, but I had my doubts, since I’m not the hugest fan of most people. I was sort of dreading working with him for the first time since my boss had obviously been telling him that he was going to love me too, and it would have been really uncomfortable if we’d ended up hating each other. Worse even than hating each other would have been complete indifference. At least if we hated each other we could have been like, “Well, love and hate are two sides of the same coin!” and then participated in a workplace feud that I’m sure would have been very entertaining for all parties involved.
        But, as I’ve already made explicitly clear, Karl & I are soulmates, and upon our initial meeting, experienced the phenomenon commonly known as love at first sight. We’re both Cancerians, obviously, and within, like, ten minutes of knowing each other, began planning our joint birthday party. At our birthday party we will be co-performing a conceptual art piece simulating all the different stages of sub/dom sexual intercourse in increasing intensity wherein all our party guests will be free to leave at whichever stage makes them feel uncomfortable— this also relates to the pro-positivity movement we founded that day, since we wouldn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable and therefore negative about the experience of watching us have fake sex at our joint birthday party.

Over the course of the next few weeks, a bunch of other beautiful and important Karl & I things happened, the most significant being that we both watched the live-action 2016 adaptation of The Jungle Book. At this point, I find it nearly impossible to relate to people who haven’t seen it, and probably never will. If you can’t comprehend the fundamental truth of the pack being the strength of the wolf and the wolf bring the strength of the pack, I don’t really want to know you. Other cool things we did:

1) figured out what Harry Potter houses all our co-workers would be sorted into, and obviously we’re both Slytherins
2) decided that I’m an arctic fox and he’s a snow leopard
3) staged a fake fight at work where I was like “Your cologne is irritating the fuck out of my eyes” but then we kind of lost interest in it because it’s way easier to just love each other
4) started a Keeping Up With The Kardashians book club
5) decided to learn Krav Maga
6) decided to leave work in the middle of work one Sunday afternoon so we could go get CoYo (coconut yoghurt) parfaits at Whole Foods and then spend the rest of our lives at Whole Foods (we didn’t do that)
7) And then we decided to get married, and also become wedding planners, and have four weddings, one for each season.

Last Sunday— the Sunday after the Sunday we didn’t abandon work in the middle of it to go eat CoYo parfaits at Whole Foods—we decided to turn our dream of eating CoYo parfaits at Whole Foods into a reality. That day was pretty much the greatest fucking day of my life.
         We met up for pre-CoYo parfait iced BAMs (black Americanos) at Browns of Brockley, where we also shared a brownie, since a big part of Karl and I’s relationship is loving RS (refined sugar) togeths. At Browns of Brockley, we made friends with a stranger named Bob something-that-wasn’t-Callahan-but-sounded-like-Callahan, who asked us if we’d be his guardian angels and watch his bag, which obvio we were down to do, since we’re both major angels anyway, and it was nice to finally be appreciated for it. We hung out with Bob non-Callahan for a bit, and then we went to a little shop by Brockley station that I forget the name of, where we bought lollipops and took a selfie with the owner of the shop. Karl’s lollipop had a pineapple on it, and mine had a rose.
        We took the train to Green Park, and then stopped into a Japanese bakery that was at once spartan and twee. It sold shit like red bean paste wrapped in an oak leaf. We eventually ranked the employees of that shop (“Japanese ladies who thought we were WILD”) as #7 on the list we made called People Who Loved Us Most Today. Karl bought me a maraschino cherry embedded in a block of clear gelatin shaped like a gemstone which was wrapped in a little parcel of lovely Japanese paper that we became very weirded out by. It felt warm and damp in my hand. We made several disgusting jokes about it that I am too shy to write down and then a man on the street told me that I should make Karl shave off his beard and I was really appalled that anyone would ever speak ill of my beautiful snow leopard and shouted about it for a while but then moved on with my life.

Next we went to Whole Foods, but they didn’t have any CoYo parfaits, which was fucking ridiculous, so I punished them by shoplifting two raw vegan banoffee pies. I just walked out, carrying them in my bare hands, and nobody even noticed, because we are just too huge of angels for it to ever occur to any human that we might also be immoral. So that was a nice little thrill for me! I felt cool and badass and like every single person in the world was in love with me.
         Post-Whole Foods, we devoted about an hour of our lives to popping into a million different bakeries and bougie health food places called things like Detox Kitchen and asking them if they had any CoYo— nobody had any CoYo! It was fucking embarrassing for them, and disgusting to us. I got really into playing the role of “delicate little flower who has every dietary restriction, and all my fragile digestive system is capable of handling is CoYo”— I was a dairy-free soy-free gluten-free vegan. We stormed out of so many places in a huff. Another thing that happened during this phase of our day was we followed an shady-looking cardboard sign with the world “MODELS” plus an arrow written on it in Sharpie up a decrepit staircase to see what would happen, but then we decided that the answer was probably death and turned around. And then we met our cool new enemy the garbagey dog-owner who replied to Karl’s asking her what breed her dog was with “Don’t ask me things,” which was an admittedly inspiring take on being a human, but at the same time, maybe save your garbage attitude for people who aren’t angels.

Next we went to Liberty, where I performed my “I have every dietary restriction in the world” shtick for an employee of the Liberty chocolate shop. Karl told her we were engaged and she congratulated us with such alarming sincerity that it ultimately earned her a #4 ranking on our list of People Who Loved Us (“lady who thought we were actually engaged (liberty, choc shop)”)
         I guess now’s as good of a time as any to mention that Karl is a gay man who is in a long-term committed relationship with another gay man. But, you know, it’s been a big year for me thinking about marrying like twenty-five straight dudes who aren’t in long-term committed relationships with anyone except sometimes me, and they’ve basically all been shit-shows, so fuck it, you know? I may as well just call a spade a spade and marry Karl.
        At Liberty I tried on a cute dress that looked good on me and then we explored the housewares department and made some plans for the future house we’re going to live in together. Karl has insisted that said house contain a “cat room,” which will be a shrine to cats featuring cat trinkets, cat paraphernalia, cat art, and also some actual cats. I am not the world’s hugest cat person but like cats well enough so I’m fine with that. We found a cat-shaped butter dish that would have been perfect for the cat room but it seemed like it might be too small for butter. We talked to a Liberty employee about it. Karl told her he worried that it might be too small for a stick of butter and the employee said “Well, just cut a smaller piece of butter”— I see her point, but at the same time, why don’t you just make us a bigger cat dish. We went downstairs to the men’s department and decided that Comme des Garcons PLAY shit with the logo of heart with eyes on it is gauche and I held a long-sleeved striped t-shirt of it up to myself to gross Karl out and then I decided that I want to own a ton of it, but like, for around the house, on hungover off days, to wear while eating cold Thai food leftovers and watching Kardashians.
        Then we left Liberty, and were entirely over CoYo at that point, and decided that what we actually wanted was to drink a Black Velvet. A Black Velvet is Guinness & champagne mixed together in equal proportions, ideally served out of a tin cup. I’ve never had one, but sometimes pretend like I have, since it’s so on-brand for me to be drinking tons of them constantly. Everybody knows I’m really into champagne, and that’s great, I’m classy as fuck and I’m not going to blame myself for that. But, let’s be honest, champagne is a bit basic. The addition of Guinness scraps it up.
        We spent the next, like, five fucking hours of the day doing the Black Velvet version of the same thing we’d already done during our CoYo search, only by this point we were better at it. We were more straightforward, all business, extremely confident in our ability to communicate faux-outrage using body language and minimal dialogue. I think we probably destroyed a lot of people’s lives that day.
        Even though Hix didn’t serve Black Velvets and therefore was worthless to us, it was there, and we were at it, and we needed to take a breather from traipsing around Central London, so we hung out there for a minute. I had a glass of champagne and then a Zombie and Karl had something I can’t remember and then a Zombie. We ate a plate of raw radishes and mayonnaise. It was the Scottish bartender’s last day at his job and a drunk woman who told me an anecdote about one of the actors from Game of Thrones that I found difficult to follow bought a bunch of Mars bars for the kitchen to deep-fry in his honor. He gave us a bite of one, in doing so earning himself a very respectable sixth-place position on our People Who Loved Us list.
        At that point we were deeply over Central London and needed to venture back Southeast, where we belong, but not before stopping into a hundred thousand more pubs and restaurants to inquire as to whether or not they served Black Velvets— they didn’t. “What is this city coming to?” we asked the Universe, raising our palms to the sky in theatrical defeat.
        On the Jubilee train to Canada Water we met a very drunk lad whose can of disgusting lager I took a sip of, followed by the #5 Person Who Loved Us Most, “Jack & Coke Girl.” Jack & Coke Girl had cute fucked up teeth, said something sassy to the drunk lad, and was drinking a can of Jack & Coke on public transit, the exact act of which is an integral component of my summer fashion concept, so obviously I had no choice but to love her.   

Once we made it back Southeast, we went to the Rose in New Cross, which is our thing. We got to chatting with one of the bartenders, who was Irish and vaguely cute but also the inspiration my recent genius Tweet “worst thing that cld possibly happen to a person happened to me last nite: was talking 2 a cute boy, then he said he's into PARKOUR.” Karl & I fucked up a bottle of Cava in about twenty-five minutes, and then fled the scene, since were both really over listening to Parkour-man tell us about Parkour/the boring backstory to his affected bisexuality/congratulate himself for having a “non-skinny” 6’2” Danish girlfriend who obviously doesn’t exist. We gave him a stolen raw vegan banoffee pie as his medal for having a non-skinny girlfriend and then went to a different pub and tried to convince the bartender to eat an Oreo that Karl had picked up off the street in SoHo but he wouldn’t, because he was gluten-free. We ordered a glass of Prosecco and a pint of Guinness and mixed them together in an empty glass. It was not delicious. We went to a chicken shop and ordered a thing of fries and a thing of potato wedges and ate them with ketchup and mayonnaisey sauce and then went back to the Rose for one more. The Irish bartender was still there, being a nuisance and having shitty energy, ordering shots and wearing a stupid skinny scarf and leaning drunkenly against a pole. Fuck that guy.
        We sat with our legs up on the table and Karl heckled him. “You’re a mess!” he yelled.  
       “Please stop!” I begged, “Please don’t bring him back into our lives!”
       That was when we wrote our list of People Who Loved Us Most Today. Even though the Irish bartender probably loved us, he didn’t make the cut. He was sectioned off into his own little category, People Who Don’t Count. It consisted only of him. The number 1 through 3 spots on our list all belonged to people from the last half-hour of our day, because that was where we were at that moment, and we were drunk, and our long-term memories were weak at that point. Number three was a cockapoo named Dexter we met, number two was the hot bartender with the great ass, and number one was “bouncer lady at The Rose.” I don’t remember much about “bouncer lady at The Rose,” but it’s nice to know that for a moment of my life I believed that she loved me.

A couple months ago I went to a bougie/hipstery art party chock-a-block with dilettantes who wanted to see and be seen with a cute boy, and after I’d taken a moment to process the vibe of my surroundings, I said, “This seems like the kind of fun other people are always having,” and as soon as I said it I could see from the way the boy looked at me that I’d impressed him, that he now saw me as sharp and tuned-in woman with a keen eye for “noticing what things are like,” and I liked the way it made me feel. Sometimes it’s alright, spending my time with beautiful useless straight men who probably identify as “sapiosexual” (EW) on their Okcupid profiles, but at the same time, attending some la-di-da art world shindig with a moron is never the kind of fun I would actually want to be having. It’s a kind of fun that I will acknowledge is fun but it is a kind of fun that I would prefer to hate on than participate in.
        The fun I had on Sunday is the only kind of fun I care about. I like zoning really hard into the presence of one person, I get kinda squirrely when it’s two or three. I like running around and wreaking havoc and having adventures, making messes. I like lying about dietary restrictions and irritating strangers and making lists of things that don’t matter. All I want is to eat stupid food and get very drunk and marry gay men. I want to be an arctic fox and grow my own garden in the tundra.

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Peruvian Sangria, A Theoretical Peach Schnapps Wine Cooler, George Harrison of the Beatles




Here are three of my favorite things this week:

i. Last weekend my friends Renaldo and Sarah got married in a park near Santa Cruz and a bunch of us rented a house* in the redwoods, which had a baby grand piano and the weirdest hot tub and this amazing pantry and a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends by the bed. The wedding was adorbs; there were bacon-wrapped hot dogs and a taco station and a super-cinnamony Peruvian sangria where all the fruit was strawberries and pineapples. On the drive back on Sunday we stopped for wine in Carmel and beer in Solvang and listened to lots of Moth episodes in the car, including the one with “Franny’s Last Ride” by Mike DeStefano. I don't think the Moth description really does it much justice ("Mike struggles with how to give support to his wife, who is dying in hospice"); it's about love and a motorcycle and being free, really it's just as much about not dying as it is about dying. It's 11 minutes long and you should listen to it at least once. Listen to it in a place where you feel good about crying.

*That photo is not our house, it's a house down the street from our house. I loved that staircase and really wanted to experience walking up it.

ii. I’m reading Blood, Bones & Butter, which is a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton, who runs the restaurant Prune in New York City. The book is so fantastic, she's had this wild life and she's so tough and no-bullshit and seems so deliberate in everything she does, foodwise and otherwise. Twice this week I've watched the part in the Mind of a Chef episode where she peels the membrane off a huge lump of poached/shocked sweetbreads; I'll probably watch it several more times in the upcoming days. I regret not going to Prune while I was in New York and eating some soft ricotta with raspberries and figs and honey or a brown butter cake with salted yogurt and cold candied lemon, or at least just looking in the window. Here are some things from Blood, Bones & Butter that I want to eat:

-her first meal in Greece after traveling across Europe in the middle of the winter in her early 20s, when she’s run out of money and eaten only a raw onion and some pumpkin seeds in the last five days, that meal being: two dark-orange-yolked eggs fried in olive oil with coarse sea salt; a thick slice of crusty bread; and a blended drink of apple and honey and milk, which I imagine as so beautifully frothy and cold and golden

-retsina and lamb or anything from some restaurant on the Aegean Sea during that same Greece trip, where there’s no menu and you find out what they’re serving by walking back into the kitchen and lifting the lids off the pots and looking inside

-the prosciutto and arugula and olive oil sandwich her Italian husband makes for her on their first date, when he picks her up on his motorcycle and takes her to the beach in Queens in the freezing cold. She likes the sandwich but tells him he should add butter, for “the perfection of three fats together,” which is how I’d like my sandwich too

-ladyfinger biscuits flipped from the edge of the kitchen table so that they fly into the air and then splash into your champagne glass

-blackberry schnapps in white wine with a tablespoon of brandy, in a jelly jar with ice. (Her mom drinks this and Gabrielle Hamilton thinks it’s terrible and calls it “some sort of shitty wine cooler,” but I think it sounds exciting. Maybe add something sparkling too, like the passionfruit LaCroix? I’m curious about schnapps all of a sudden; I think peach schnapps could maybe be my thing of the summer.)



iii. Like everyone else, I love that New Yorker piece on the Frog & Toad books and Arnold Lobel (who made the illustration above, which is from a book from 1963 called The Secret Three by Mildred Myrick). There is something very soothing and wonderful about reading other people describe the plots to Frog & Toad stories. This was my fave:

"Take, for instance, the story 'Alone,' from 'Days with Frog and Toad,' in which Toad goes to Frog’s house to visit him but finds a note on the door that reads, 'Dear Toad, I am not at home. I went out. I want to be alone.' Toad begins to experience a little crisis: 'Frog has me for a friend. Why does he want to be alone?' Toad discovers that Frog is sitting and thinking on an island far from the shore, and he worries that Frog isn’t happy and doesn’t want to see him anymore. But, when they meet (after Toad falls headfirst into the water and soaks the sandwiches he’s made for lunch), Frog says, 'I am happy. I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how fine everything is.'"

And then I went back and reread the Frog & Toad shoutout from one of the first things I ever wrote for Strawberry Fields Whatever (which turns four-years-old tomorrow!), this little thing about buddies and pathological optimism and the first time I met Evan Dando. I still agree with almost all of it, and "He resembles George Harrison of the Beatles, but he wears his hair tied in a small bow at the back" is still a very sweet lyric to me. "Frank Mills" is all-time sweetest on many different levels.

Thing of the Week: Lemonade, Arcade Fried Rice

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Lemonade by Beyonce

First of all, I want to let you know right off the bat that today I am not going to bother with putting the proper “accent aigu” on the second e in Beyonce, not one single time, not at all. I don't mean to disrespect by Beyonce by doing so, so calm down Beyonce! This is not about you. It's a personal choice I'm making entirely out of laziness. 
         When I used to run a restaurant I would have to print out daily menus and whenever I needed to put an accent aigu on sautee or brulee or whatever I would Google the word “Beyonce” and copy & paste that second e into the word rather than try and figure out the proper “alt + whatever combination of numbers” code to get the computer to do it on its own. But that particular level of attention to detail is the exact kind of thing my current life concept is focused on escaping. I’m pretty sure that if I leave that accent off the second e in Beyonce everyone will still be able to deduce which Beyonce I am talking about.

I would also like to take this moment to address the the glaringly obvious fact that I am engaging with Lemonade about 95% apolitically within the context of this particular piece of personal writing. This is not because I don’t care; I do care. I think Beyonce’s relationship with race politics in the United States of America is fucking crucial. It’s just not the kind of thing I tend to shine at writing about. 

** 

Every morning I wake up weirdly early feeling hyper-motivated to tweet some jerk thing about how bored I am of talking about Lemonade but then end up tweeting some “I'm obviously really hype on Lemonade” thing about Lemonade fifteen seconds later. I guess I’m just bored of listening to other people talk about Lemonade like it’s the grandest feminist statement that's ever been made. Lemonade is a feminist statement; I will grant it that. But it is also a highly commercial venture that I’ve no doubt has been carefully engineered to make weird and scrappy women like myself and my weird pals feel like Beyonce is one of us. Sorry to be a wet blanket but she's not.
        I do not relate to Beyonce the beautiful famous baller on any level. We have extremely different coping mechanisms when it comes to life giving us lemons. Life gives me lemons all the time, and I do not get to lean on “being the star of my own visual album about how sexy and powerful I am and then having the entire world worship me like I am literally their queen” as a means of getting through it. Lemonade is brilliant and beautiful but I am not finding it useful to fully give myself over to the overly-simplistic narrative of “garbagey piece of shit husband wrongs legendarily badass wife and she avenges her own honour, and mine somehow too, by making a screamy & sort of raw record about it.” It’s shitty for Beyonce that Jay-Z cheated on her but I’m unwilling to demonise Jay-Z for his behaviour. I’ve done a lot of fucked up things to a lot of men, and a lot of men have done fucked up things to me too. I don’t blame myself and I don’t blame the men and I certainly don’t blame Sean Carter. Relationships are impossible and everyone goes insane when they’re in one. I refuse to use Lemonade as ammunition against every man who has ever hurt me.
        But I’m saying this right now. I’m drunk on a disgusting mix of crap Pinot Noir and crap Primitivo at 21:26 on a Wednesday. It’s raining out, and I’m sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, and my face feels really warm, and I’m dehydrated. I’ve got the sniffles. I’m a pretty pure version of myself. It’s the night.
        I love Lemonade in the daytime, when I’m not drunk, when I’m not writing, when I’m not thinking very hard about anything at all. I like the sounds of it, the noises behind the words. The word lemon is like the word sunlight and the look of it, the sun. It’s a daytime record. It makes me think about how much I love actual lemonade, the drink. North Americans don’t know this but in England “lemonade” is the generic name for a soda that tastes pretty much like Sprite. Conceptually this is not dissimilar to, say, calling the Dave Clark Five the Beatles. Calling Meghan Trainor Beyonce. You do the math. 
        In England they don’t care too much about how brilliant and beautiful our lemonade is. Fresh to death-ly squeezed lemon juice and melted sugar and bubbly water over ice. The best lemonade I ever had is a tie between 1) the lemonade I used to get from a little stand at a convention centre when my parents would drag me to an annual home renovation exhibition they were kind of into when I was a kid and 2) the whiskey-and-lemonades I drank for one week of one summer when I was twenty-five, Jack Daniels mixed with Tropicana from a one-litre carton on my Palmerston Boulevard balcony a week before some dude I no longer care about fucked up our relationship in a way that is either worse or less-worse than the way that Jay-Z either did or didn’t fuck up his.
        My favourite song on Lemonade is Hold Up because it’s the coolest and catchiest and has a DJ air-horn sound in the background. I always respond positively to that sound. Yeah I wish I was Beyonce in that frilly cornflower-colour dress smashing up car windows with my perfect tits out as much as the next guy but I’d probably feel exactly the same way about my own life if I didn’t. My favourite part of that song is when she says “I know that I kept it sexy; I know that I kept it fun.” That’s the only part of the entire record I for real relate to, that particular brand of explaining yourself to yourself. The process of figuring out that you actually fucked up nothing.
        Nobody ever fucks up anything. Things just happen, and if they’re meant to stay good forever then they will. You can’t ruin a relationship. Relationships can only ruin themselves.
        I like All Night; All Night I think is so beautiful. It sounds lazy and romantic to me. It's this half-assed brand of celebratory that I'm obsessed with. I like Sorry. I like Freedom. I like Formation. I like all the hits. I listen to these songs all day every day and they mean something to me because they mean so little to me. They are beyond me. I'm playing it too cool I think. Sometimes, in the daytime, they mean something. 
        Today at work I was playing Lemonade upstairs and in the kitchen the kitchen people were playing Lemonade downstairs so no matter where you were in the entire restaurant you had no choice but to be listening to Lemonade. I told my boss the entire tale of Jay-Z’s alleged affair beginning with the elevator incident and then I talked to one of my new co-workers, who is a stranger, about Beyonce in general. It was an excellent conversation, sort of funny, sort of deep sometimes; somewhere inside of it a moment passed and after it finished we weren't strangers anymore. Lemonade by Beyonce bound us together. It made me feel like I was a part of something.
       On my walk to work I listen to Lemonade in the lemony morning feeling hyper and serene. I listen to Beyonce make reductive lump statements about heartbreak and I do and don't envy how clear-cut it seems to seem. I walk past the house that looks like a Mark Rothko colour-wash in penny-plain old-pink and listen to Formation, attempting to tilt the balance of my emotional self more toward the hyperactive end of the spectrum. I sing my inside joke with myself “My daddy Lethbridge Alberta; my mama French-Morocco” inside my head and wonder how it’s possible that I of all people gets to be the one who’s happy. I imagine myself eating a Red Lobster Cheddar Bay biscuit and accidentally rip my headphones out of my ear while digging around for a lighter inside my bag. The bud of the ear-bud stays in my ear but the wire and inner mechanics of the headphone fall out. I wonder what it would feel like for Beyonce if she had to exist inside my life for one day. I wonder if she'd still feel like the baddest woman in the game.
        I don’t feel like I’m the baddest woman in the game but I definitely feel like I’m the baddest woman in some games. I’m for sure the baddest woman standing on the street I’m standing on. Easily the baddest woman sitting cross-legged and listening to Beyonce on my own bedroom floor.

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: Fried Rice at the Arcade

I'm going to do "Thing of the Month" instead, because I feel like it. April was a good month; some highlights include: going to the quasi-Big Star concert where Robyn Hitchcock sang "Downs" and Mike Mills sang "Jesus Christ" and I got to meet a guy whose very pretty songs I used to tape off the radio when I was 15; seeing Ex Hex for the third time and saying hi to Mary Timony a little bit; getting a massage for the first time in like three years and having a cool revelation involving sleeping pills and this beautiful performance of "Inside Out" by Spoon; the day I had a doctor's appointment in Santa Monica and afterward went to see Everybody Wants Some!! and then played skee-ball on the pier and listened to the first Clash record on the beach and got a veggie burger at this dumb beach bar I love; Lemonade.

One of my best nights was Saturday the ninth, which seems like a thousand years ago now, since it was before Prince died and Lemonade came out. Eleanor was in town and we got dinner at Button Mash, which is an arcade/bar/restaurant thing down the street from the disgusting house where I lived from summer 2011 to fall 2012. We sat at the bar and I got a double IPA and I think Eleanor got a rosé and we talked about writing books, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. Our bartender was a prince. I know from eavesdropping that his name is Dan. When it was time to order food, I asked Dan what I should get and he told me he liked the spam fried rice. Then I smacked my palm on the counter and said "Sold!" with much enthusiasm, except really I was like "Yeah cool thanks I'll have that." It was a perfect call on Dan's part. I thought spam was supposed to be mushy or otherwise horribly textured but really it was these nice fat chunks, all mixed up with the soy-saucy rice and veggies and cilantro and the sticky peanuts I dropped in there, leftover from earlier. I think maybe I had a pineapple beer with my dinner? I hope I did. I remember everything being perfect, so that's probably what happened.

After dinner I went to see the other great Dan of my life, Dan Boeckner from Wolf Parade and Divine Fits and Handsome Furs and his new band Operators, who were playing in the bar at the Bootleg. I think maybe he's my favorite person who makes music now. That's got lots to do with the music itself, which is heavy and gorgeous and has the crazy effect of hitting every raw nerve in a way that makes me so hyper - but it's also got to do with his face. His face puts worlds in my head or, more accurately, makes the worlds already in my head light up a little brighter so I can see everything more clearly. He's big-eyed and wiry and his bone structure reminds me of the main dude in my book, which I didn't entirely realize until I was watching him move around at the show that night. I like people who move around with an awareness of their own hotness but seem driven by some deep quiet force that keeps the hotness awareness from ever coming off all gross and embarrassing. Is that…mystique? I think that's what mystique is, at least to me.

One strange thing about writing a book of fiction is you spend so much time in a world populated by people you invented yourself and who are, for the time being, mostly known only by you. So it's wild when the material world gives you a person who reminds you of someone you made up. It changes the texture of your reality in a cool exciting way. It puts a new kind of electricity into everything.

After the Operators show I was so high on all of that, I impulse-bought a pair of tickets to see Wolf Parade in New York next month. I haven't been to New York in four years! While I'm there I aspire to drink a milkshake with a piece of cake in it:

P.S. The painting up top is by Aloïse Corbaz.