I.
When I was twenty-four I moved to Los Angeles with my then-boyfriend, having never visited at all. We slept in a converted tractor-green short bus parked most consistently outside the Culver City lot where (we heard) Californication was filmed. We showered at cheap gyms and yoga studios and rode the city bus to the Santa Monica public library most days to apply for jobs. I was trying to answer the question of how I might avoid the scrape of daily wages for rent, and found that I didn’t like living in cramped quarters with anyone, particularly my then-boyfriend. Eventually I answered a Craigslist post advertising FREE RENT and after a series of strange interviews in the valley, to which we wore our cleanest J.Crew, we became the building managers for a 60-unit stucco apartment building in Los Feliz.
Nobody really dropped by to welcome us or anything, but if they had they would have found we lived in an empty room. I met the other tenants by osmosis: in the elevator or just exiting the building, most of them staring at my face quizzically. “You’re the new manager?” It was all very embarrassing for me, too. It was one thing to have gotten one over on a property management company, who referred to tenant protections in our meetings as un-Fair Housing Laws. It was another to try and fool e.g. the lovely redhead who paid her bills with royalty checks from her appearances on Reno 911, or the elderly man with comic book memorabilia all over his walls, who’d never gotten as famous as Stan Lee, but who had worked with him (he claimed)—at least until the computers took over his job.
Once a week I did yoga with a neighbor in her late twenties, crowded into her living room with three other women for two hours of vinyasa while her boyfriend drank beer on the patio. There was a pool that was under construction the whole time we lived there. The previous manager, Randy, was let go from his duties for unclear reasons, but retained his corner apartment on the ground floor. It was all very adversarial. One afternoon Randy’s girlfriend pulled the fire alarm because she’d forgotten the key she needed to get into the elevator from the parking garage. We’d had no idea what to do, how to turn the noise off, and it had been Randy who talked to the firemen when they showed up, grinning from ear to ear. It was only later, reviewing the tapes, that we pieced it together. Randy wouldn’t let me talk to her when I showed up at their door, but promised on her behalf that she’d never do it again.
I got a job driving a coffee and sweets truck from catered gig to catered gig. I took the bus downtown to pick it up in the mornings, at the lot that was always being power-washed, always smelled like soap. iPhones were new then and I didn’t have one; the owners printed out directions from MapQuest and left them on the dash for me each week. I parked at small festivals, in a circle with a handful of other trucks, or at film sets, or at car lots. Once a bottled-water company paid an exorbitant fee to wrap the truck with their new ad campaign and have me drive their marketing team around Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, just getting some exposure. The marketing team members were also young, and from New York, and mostly spent the week window shopping and looking for celebrities. They bought me lunch at a steak house in West Hollywood that looked like a theme park, because they heard Jessica Simpson went there sometimes.
One day someone asked me, if I had no intention of getting into the Industry, why I was living in LA at all? I had no good answer, and decided it was time to leave. I sold the bus to a young family who wanted to drive it back to Eugene, Oregon, and park it on some family land. I gave notice to the property management company, suggesting they might hire Randy back after all. They were upset. I agreed, at last, to have my palm read by an old mystic named Virginia who lived on the top floor. When I arrived she had a bowl of green grapes sitting out on her card table for me, and I popped them into my mouth one by one with my free hand while she read the lines of the other. She told me I had to leave my relationship immediately, which I already knew. She also told me that, for the remainder of my days on earth, I would need to stay vigilant if I wanted to be happy. I’d have to guard against, as she put it, my sense of disappointment with the world—what it actually was, and how it actually worked.
II.
What do you do with your desire for things to be different? This is what I want to know. Bracing against wind chill in crystalline January I hope to walk out the feeling, unfurl some translucent hallucinatory wisdom within me—wispy as a butterfly, but wanting catching, too. Make it a ribbon, or a key. An object on this earth.
We go out into the glittery cold, just over to the park and back, before the bomb cyclone descends. This is how people were describing it at the grocery store—people who would know—so that’s how I describe it now, too. The phone forecasts -22 on Saturday, -18 on Sunday: an overt invitation to live somewhere else. On the walk it’s difficult to locate my body, but easier to trace the contour of whoever’s inside it.
The desire for things to be different is the feeling with which I have the most dynamic relationship. At least in this moment of my life, nearing my thirty-eighth birthday, paying rent in a medium-small town that’s a satellite of nowhere, really. How direct and explicable it would be to be possessed by work, or family, or place. And yet at every level of concentric circle outward from my body, beginning in my lungs (and maybe deeper than that) the desire for things to be different is what drives me. This desire is the current protagonist of my life, or would be if I was brave enough to trust it completely.
Of course there are exercises for dealing with this. Once in a breath workshop the instructor suggested we learn to find stillness in our space despite e.g., noticing that the picture on the wall needed to be straightened. Did it really? she dared us to ask. A rhetorical question for the type of person who thought it did. I was prepared to believe my thoughts and impulses were the result of living in an anxious culture, or an anxious body, at least at first. But it didn’t stick. Why not just cross the room, make one satisfying adjustment, and cease thinking about the picture at all?
In another exercise, one with a wider circumference, the desire is acted on before rational analysis takes over. Moments are seized. Plane tickets are purchased, debts boldly accepted, jobs abandoned, children conceived. If your arrow is straight, and your desire sound, you can propel yourself through rumination and out the other side. On the other side, theoretically, is a room full of objects you’ve chosen with the entirety of your being. But maybe it’s merely an escape velocity to be maintained…
The desire for THE WORLD to be different is a desire that leads to nowhere in the tangible sense. Can lead, when poorly wielded, to a feeling of total powerlessness in the grand scheme of things. I am conscious, mostly, that the fantasy of refining a global system (Melt The Guns) from my current station in life is ridiculous. And yet over drinks, with good bread on the table, the conversation swells toward ways in which our governing structures could be utterly remade. Everyone contributes boisterously, ingeniously, before ebbing again into bashful silence. Welp, we sure solved all the world’s problems. Driving, in the echo of that, back to our rented rooms.
The trick, I guess, is to find the boundary line. The furthest edge of upheaval that could be attained without falling off the cliff’s edge of, idk—generating a whole new set of problems. The variables are practically quantum: the rising rents, the price of other people’s money, the dedication to our love, the length of life, a sense of bravery regarding psychedelics, the location of aquifers, my current inability to make a living without access to costly industrial equipment—all equals what?
Chris Kraus says desire “isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy—a claustrophobia inside your skin.” I pace around the studio on long phone calls with friends in Durham, Boulder, Austin, Berkeley. We talk about the places we live, and whether we like them, and if we think we’re going to stay.
III.
I’d like to be more specific. At the coffee shop this morning, sitting at the window table across from L and watching the snow flurries come down on the railroad tracks (now defunct) I felt mysterious to myself. I drank a foamy latte in a blue cup. We were talking about winter, talking around the feeling of this winter: our near-dead president gearing up for a second war, the grey babies, a probable downturn. Her therapist had told her she’d never be rid of her grief and pain from childhood, so why even try?
It’s hard to say. Is it the world or is it just me. Is it just me or is it winter. Is it winter or is it this era, this genocide, these interest rates, the pandemic. Is it that rent has driven the artists away from the places with art museums, driven them into their phones. Is it the phone or is it my lack of will power. Is it Palestine. Is it that the weather will only get worse. Is it capitalism, really, or is there a better word. Is it grief and pain I’ll never be rid of or a challenge to address the grief. Is it a challenge to remain in the discomfort of human life, and make peace with it, or is it simply time to go. Is there a place to go to.
L says this year she would like to be liberated in her art. When we say goodbye I kiss her on the cheek. I spend the rest of the afternoon thinking of remote work jobs to apply for and looking up ranch houses for rent near Joshua Tree before fizzing out, drawing a bath, and resolving—tomorrow—to make a list of what I want.
IV.
Maybe writing this—writing anything—is a way to push desire out: to make my secrets visible to me, so that something will need to be done. Publishing circular litanies about the cost of living, the precarity of work, a foregone amount of energy—what action can be taken from that? That we make our lives within the weapons factory, at great expense, is not a secret—just a context from which we must live.
Yesterday we stayed home and rearranged the furniture. Cranked the heater up, made a pot of soup, piled blankets on the couch and sat beneath them drinking coffee. Four or five times throughout the day one or both of us retreated to our rooms on either end of the house to write, or record. Out the windows, frigid snowdrifts blanketed the dead lawn. I got a little too stoned too early. A painting took shape, wetly, on the kitchen table.
What made me think of California? Its sun, maybe—or wanting to be back in that place again, passing by it all so quickly you barely have time to write it down.
When I was younger I thought everything solidified with age: ideas hardened into beliefs, fixations into jobs, raw impulse ran itself out and became contentment. Now I see it’s just the opposite—that everything gets weirder and more vaporous. That things are only held together with great effort, one or two at a time.
Cleaning papers out of the bedroom dresser I discovered three ancient notebooks and a book of poems hand-stitched by a friend from ten years ago, maybe. The poems’d been hand-typed and bound in handsome green paper; the notebooks filled with (what appeared to be) diagrams of my own mind. I had been looking for my envelope of tax receipts. What was it I was trying to tell me?
When we moved here we wanted, I think, a little distance. A wider perspective; some clearing out of the blood. I can’t say we didn’t get it.
Out the split window, from my seat at the desk, I can see the bitter haze of wind-blown snow obscuring a distant peak. The pastel blue, ethereal sky. Then a vision of a future me recalling this place fondly—the cheap rent and sub-zero winters. The six years we tried our best to stay put.