tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

downlikehoney: scout niblett & will oldham covering tlc, no...

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:02:52 -0700

downlikehoney:

scout niblett & will oldham covering tlc, no scrubs

morrisdog: I am missing near 17th and Bryant in San Francisco. If you see me, please call...

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:13:23 -0700

morrisdog:

I am missing near 17th and Bryant in San Francisco. If you see me, please call 425-786-8114 immediately.

Some Secret Rivers I Have Known and Loved. A companion piece to...

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:46:00 -0700

Some Secret Rivers I Have Known and Loved.

A companion piece to Some Secret Stairways I Have Known and Loved.

I mean, what are birthdays for other than the excuse to wear...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:14:17 -0700

I mean, what are birthdays for other than the excuse to wear obnoxious sunglasses, ride roller coasters, win stuffed Rastafarian bananas through dubious methods, eat a bucket of fried chicken, and cry when presented with a tiny paper sack full of warm beignets?

There is no one I would rather huddle under a child-sized...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:28:00 -0700

There is no one I would rather huddle under a child-sized sleeping bag to make collective sex eyes at Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear with or ford freezing rivers with or admit my weird and shameful crush on Harvey Keitel (1976-1993 only) to than these pals.

DANZIG/ROLLINS 2016, Y’ALL remember when I had a...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:34:00 -0700

DANZIG/ROLLINS 2016, Y’ALL

_{remember when I had a Danzig-themed birthday party?}

What the Finale of Girls Would Look Like if Hannah Were Almost 32

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:46:00 -0700

Hannah has recently joined the world of online dating since all of her friends are in fucking couples and go on fucking double dates and she is tired of spending Friday nights in talking to Jessa’s cat.
Jessa’s cat lives with Hannah because after 33 years of being staunchly single, Jessa has a serious boyfriend and has forgotten about her cat.
Hannah goes on an online date with a seemingly normal, nice, down-to-earth dude. He takes her to drink whiskey and sing karaoke and steals her a cupcake. He texts her when she gets home: “I had an amazing time tonight…”
Hannah tells her friends how nice it is to hang out with a “grown-ass” dude. Who sends follow-up texts! “He’s like…remember Adam? He’s like an Adam who has figured his shit out. Like, he’s in a band but he also works at a nonprofit and is like, DONE with the partying and wants to buy a house in the woods and shit.”
Hannah then hears nothing from grown-up Adam. She sends him a friendly, “hey, wanna hang out?” GUA texts back, “sounds like so much fun, but I have a band rehearsal! Can’t wait to hang out soon!”
Two weeks pass.
Hannah debates deconstructing the texts with the other Girls, but stops herself. “No,” she says out loud, to no one. The era of deconstructing cryptic texts is over, an art best left to 20somethings. If you have to deconstruct, the answer is no, or, to steal an aphorism from another HBO series, “He’s Just Not That Into You.”
Hannah lines up another online date. The morning of, she wakes up with a throbbing pain in her mouth. Panicked, she goes to the dentist. He shoots her up full of novocaine and performs something called a “root planing” and yells about flossing. I mean, like, really puts the fear of god into her about flossing. “Dbo yuer shink she nvockain werl wer off bey 8?” she asks. She reschedules date.
Hannah spends every consecutive night neurotically flossing and swishing medicated mouth wash while the cat stares at her from on top of the toilet.
Original Adam announces on facebook that he and his 24 year old girlfriend are having a baby. Adam is now 34. When he met this girlfriend he quit smoking and started drinking kale smoothies.
Hannah googles “at what age should you freeze your eggs?”
Hannah googles “shooting mouth pains.”
Hannah clicks on “uncurable trigeminal neuralgia.”
Hannah ponders a life of chronic pain and misdiagnoses.
Hannah takes too much codeine and cuts her bangs.
Because she spent her 20s fucking up her bangs she knows what she is doing now, even in an opiate haze. Crisis averted. But once when she was 22 she had to wear a headband for a whole month straight.
Rescheduled Date dutifully texts things about health wishes and hopes for enjoying the sunshine together…

*CLIFFHANGER*

Fact: If you live in or visit San Francisco and are not seeking...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:03:00 -0700

Fact: If you live in or visit San Francisco and are not seeking out its secret stairways, you are doing everything all wrong.

I watched The Artist is Present alone in a dark theater a few...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 00:17:00 -0800

I watched The Artist is Present alone in a dark theater a few months ago. I was supposed to see it with two of my closest friends, who were busy falling in love with each other at the time. They didn’t show up. A week earlier, the man who haunted most of the last decade of my life attempted to pick a fight with me, to see if I was still inhabiting that lonely satellite in his orbit, armed for an ongoing mutually assured destruction that has lasted through a marriage (not ours), a divorce, various relationships. I never wrote him back. It was one of the harder decisions I’ve made.

The look between Marina and Ulay: I recognize it. I think most of us do. It’s the look of recognition, a recognition of trying and failing, of grasping and striving for something you’ll never be able to name or explain. It’s the acknowledgment of a tether between you and another, across the years, across time and space, across burned letters and silent phones. Across the Great Wall of China.

Plato once wrote,

And such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

I have a tattoo I share with the other half of that tether, a tattoo we got together in the urgent throes of a rainy Tuesday at midnight, after we had broken up for the umpteenth (but nowhere near final) time. “Let’s do this,” he said. “Let’s never forget what we had. Let’s do it right now.” The tattoo is of Plato’s visualization of a soul mate: two eternal halves, split, who only fit each other. Puzzle pieces. On my back and on his arm, you can see how the two halves fit, but they hover maddeningly out of reach of each other. Sort of like we always did. One has a blue eye. One has a green eye. They stare at each other. They recognize. Years later, I got words from a poem by Richard Siken tattooed around the image:

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

I think about these words often. I think about them when my heart gets crushed, when I feel myself going hard around the edges. To remember: it’s okay to be ruined. It’s okay to be gutted by another person. Because what else do we have as real currency? Think about it: what do you really want, beyond knowing what it is to be truly known? These are the stakes. For years, I thought (and sometimes still do), that my preoccupation with this particular relationship was tangled up in fear: fear of moving on, fear of never being gotten again. And maybe that is all true. But when I see the look Marina and Ulay exchange, a look that no words will ever do justice, I see that recognition right there: “Oh shit, it’s you. I would recognize you in this lifetime or the next.” And through marriages, divorces, quiet spells, through it all: here is a connection that is at its core transcendent of the trappings of pain and love. And it is okay to let go, because that tether will always remain, and it doesn’t need a name, it doesn’t need a title. It’s carved in our skin, it’s carved in our initials in the sidewalk on the corner of 14th and Guerrero, it’s a traceable thread across the Great Wall of China. We will live our lives, perhaps many times. When I am an old woman and I catch a glimpse of the faded ink on my back, I’ll remember and smile. Even if only fleetingly, I will know what it is to have been truly known, and I will know that the ruin was worth it.

February.

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:56:46 -0800

February.

"The reason the ping-pong table is outside is because of the fire. The fire? The fire was caused by..."

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:29:38 -0800

“The reason the ping-pong table is outside is because of the fire. The fire? The fire was caused by an electrical fire set off by the mystic who works next door. When she was around we could hear her tuning her crystals to specific frequencies through the walls, and it was very annoying. A lot of “sciency” [sic] stuff was lost in that fire, including a machine that produces static electricity, and a marshmallow gun.”

- from an essay one of my students wrote about our school. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. Someday I will write a novel about all of it, I promise.

So basically, former Doobie Bro Michael McDonald trolls...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:14:00 -0800

So basically, former Doobie Bro Michael McDonald trolls twitter for people who use words in his lyrics and tweetbombs them. I mean, imagine the real life version of this: you’re just eating dinner with a friend, and you’re like, “dang, I was such a fool to go on a second date with that loser.” And all of a sudden MMcD strolls by, singing in his soulful, just-been-punched-in-the-throat way: “What a fool believes...” Regardless, this would have been a great SNL sketch in like, 1985, no?

My main goal of 2013 is to have MMcD surprise tweetbomb me. In the meantime, I have this this sensuous mouse pad to tide me over.

angeliska: When the Japanese magnolias are blooming in New...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:34:34 -0800

angeliska:

When the Japanese magnolias are blooming in New Orleans, the whole city becomes a valentine. It’s my favorite time of year.

claytoncubitt: There are a lot of places I like, but I like New...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:41:31 -0800

claytoncubitt:

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands… No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. -Bob Dylan

If you’re looking for something analogous to Mariah Carey...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:23:59 -0800

If you’re looking for something analogous to Mariah Carey remixed by Nine Inch Nails, well, look no further.

By Peter McCollough GPOYReading a book about Pt. Reyes on a...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:54:00 -0800

_{By Peter McCollough}

GPOYReading a book about Pt. Reyes on a cliff in Pt. Reyes and peeping some whales while your best friend climbs abandoned sinking boats and gets stuck in a bog

Marina Abramović & Ulay: Breathing In, Breathing Out (1977);...

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:12:00 -0800

_Marina_{Abramović & Ulay: Breathing In, Breathing Out (1977);}_{Reaction in Time (1977); The Artist is Present (2010)}

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. And he brought me to a boil.”

—Walt Whitman

“There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”

—Nietzche

“You don’t know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.”

—Don DeLillo, from The Body Artist

I’d say 2013 peaked here, in my living room, at 12:15am on...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:10:16 -0800

I’d say 2013 peaked here, in my living room, at 12:15am on New Year’s Day, but mere hours later we drove all over the city listening to Hunx and His Punx and ended up in a big friend pile drinking forties at the Batteries. Then we ate brunch at St. Frannie’s and watched Warriors.

This is all just to say: it’s gonna be ok.

Singapore Jim

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 02:23:26 -0800

OK.

There’s this place, it’s over a famous bridge in some famous woods. It is the only outpost of any kind for miles around. Let’s just say it’s an ancient-looking bar/inn, and local legend has it that it was shipped over in pieces from Britain centuries ago. Who knows if this is true. It’s besides the point.

This place has darts, a wall-to-wall fireplace, beef stew. It is usually smothered in fog. Melancholy strains of Will Oldham drift through the speakers. It is basically a bar that was built exclusively for me. It also has this lone bartender, this fellow I have had a smoldering crush on for…a long time. Long enough that it has ebbed and flowed due to prohibitive fluctuations in gas prices and bridge tolls.

But I have this rule (as a former bartender) that I don’t hit on bartenders. So what this amounts to is that I sporadically find a reason to drag my friends there and then we sit in the corner and whisper about him. My boss has offered me a raise if only I would ask him out. It’s become that obnoxious.

I mean, we have had encounters. Once I was doing some boring Tuesday night grocery shopping at my grocery store and lo, behind me, in line, there he was. On my side of the bridge! In my grocery store! On a Tuesday! Unacceptable. I had always assumed he never left the forest boundaries, doomed to ceaselessly haunt the moors when not tending bar. Upon spotting him, naturally, I pulled my hair over my face like a deranged Cousin It and turned back around (I was having a bad Everything day). Another time (clearly my grocery disguise had fooled him) he let me watch part of a 49ers game in the bar’s tiny kitchen with him. He tried to out-football-lingo me and I got haughty (haughtiness is my next alluring quality after hair-in-face disguises) and was like, “Son, please. I teach a class on sports literature, I will run circles around you on this.” He gave me a maybe-approving eyebrow raise.

Anyways, we have picked up bits and pieces about him over the years. Usually because I make my friend Ian chat him up (Ian is a chatter), but Ian is not a reliable narrator. For instance, even though this guy is clearly like, an Irish Riverdance cast-off (complete with vague lilting accent), Ian insists he told him he was raised in Singapore, and was picked on horribly as a child. “I think he’s pretty lonely,” Ian unconvincingly tried to convince me. Also, he supposedly lives on a boat and makes his own whiskey (which: swoon). So, lonely, whiskey-distilling sailor Singapore Jim has become a long-running inside joke, a mythic chimera of a man.

Then, sometime this evening between the minutes of 11:52pm-11:59pm, I googled the name of the bar/inn under the auspices of seeing if it was open for the holidays. His name popped up. His full name! Precious, google-able information. It was at this point I learned something that threw me more than Singapore, more than the boat distillery.

His middle name is Björk.

The plot thickens.

by Cassie J. Sneider

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 13:23:32 -0800

_{by Cassie J. Sneider}