Wednesday, July 08, 2009

The breeze is so busy it don't miss a tree

I guess you know it's been a long time since you posted when your Safari doesn't recognize, then fill in for you, your own blog address. And by you I mean me. And is there a word for that filling in URL thingy that happens when I type, say, "fl" and the computer adds "-eshbot.com" and then I know I've been spending too much time looking at porn this summer?

How are you? How is your new marriage/baby/divorce/book tour/as-yet unidentified medical problem/organic farm coming along?

Despite the ominous tone of my last email, I am doing quite well, and am even, for me, slightly tan. Problem with that last post is it was written during a confluence of difficult events. It was finals week and CT and I had broken up and, heartbreakingly, my grandmother died. I'm still mourning my grandmother, but the rest is water under the bridge, more or less.

I will not take this space to say much about the breakup, except that it involved me realizing that for a while I'd been trying to fit square pegs into round holes for the sake of romance, and not in a sexy way. It's good to be a writer, but it's bad when constructing a fictional narrative becomes something one attempts to do to one's life, as opposed to on a computer, in Word, usually to make a deadline. Because there are no drafts in real life and the baby jesus knows that I, for one, have never nailed it on the first try.

The good news is that, rather naturally and without much story structuring, I have met someone I am very very extremely like super taken with and he with me and we together have been adventuring about this summer, making everyone sick with our hand-holding and neck-nuzzling. (He is a writer, therefore, he shall here be called M, because if I call him W you will picture our former president and that is really not at all what he's about, except for the part where he sometimes gives me awkward backrubs when I speak to him in German.)

For instance, we took a road trip to L.A., where we ate so much good food, we probably did some brain damage in the form of mercury-and-garlic poisoning. There is very little excellent, affordable sushi here in SLC and no Cuban at all, so we ate the shit out of everything we saw and spent a bit of time lying around, moaning, clutching our torsos in pleasure and pain.

We also saw an underground stand-up comedy show featuring the stylings of one Paul Jay who was the best of the bunch and also a member of the West High Class of 1995. You might remember him as fedora-wearing, coin-flipping Paul Rhead. Which I can make jokes about on my blog because he makes them, himself, in public, to hundreds of strangers. He performs regularly in L.A. and around the west coast. I recommend, no, demand, that you see him next time you find yourself in his general vicinity.

Also in L.A. is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which M recommended and which lived up to his praise for it. I don't want to say too much about it, because part of its charm is its mystery. But you should go there for sure. It's my favorite museum now, although to compare it to other museums is difficult but also part of the point of it. It's a paradigm-shifting place and may change forever how you think about museums.

The last significant happening on our L.A. adventure was the made-for-sitcoms accidental drug dosage, involving someone's medical marijuana prescription and a well-disguised cookie. Let's just say it made for some excellent afternoon record-and-t-shirt shopping on Melrose. That was the afternoon we discovered fried olives at a place called Burger Bar. There is maybe no more delicious stoned eating on the whole entire planet.

Even though we could not have been less hungry after many days of this sort of behavior, we stopped by In-N-Out on the way out of town because it was mandatory.

Here is some beautiful food





And the beautiful desert





And my beautiful grandma, who loved to hum "Oh What a Beautiful Morning." It always was when she was near.