Hermit Phase

The sun is transiting through the final degrees of my 12th house, the sector of isolation, the dreamspace, the shared collective subconscious. Once a year I get to reacquaint myself with this strange void, and surrender my excess emotional material. I have psychic fatigue. I feel displaced, like I have a phantom limb in some otherworld. Like I need to locate a lost part of myself. Light has been moving differently, orbiting people and plants in a cloak of otherworldly ether. Neon purple and electric blue. It’s beautiful, but a solitary beauty- almost impossible to articulate, yet so immaculate that it begs to be shared. My world has been like that lately. Pocketed miracles with no witnesses. 

I want to blast myself apart, and prang open a year's worth of wounds, unfurl the rancid twisty thoughts that have clouded my perception.

Thats what wounds are.
They are perceptive distortions.

Perceptive distortions that create. And create. Sometimes entire circumstances, people, timelines.

 I want to give up on being perceived by anyone, and simultaneously I want to be told that I am beautiful. 

I pin angel wings to my wall, steal flowers from neighbors and keep them in a box around my bed. Rummage through boxes of notes, dream diaries and photographs from ex’s. In my dreams I am trying to make a puzzle out of bark in a redwood forest. Running barefoot. Following hawks. 

I vow to dispel grief, swear off heartache.

Become sterner, smarter, colder.

I can’t.

Coyote

I should probably tell you at this point that I don’t write  in chronological order. And none of it will be about you. I have never written about a man, ever. 

We got off to a promising start. You took hikes the same distance as mine, about five miles, on different sides of town. I thought that was funny. Like we were casting circles, leaving our thoughts to dance behind us, a trail of ephemeral entities that get taken with the fairies. Like we needed somewhere to stomp out the confusion. 

You hated covid because we couldn’t go to coffee shops, the museums and the restaurants, your local haunts where you could draw musical inspiration from. You said you wanted things to go back to normal. 

To normal. That irritated me. I thought covid was delightful; absurd and entertaining. I enjoyed the craftiness of it, the sneaking around, meeting up on fields, caves and beaches. Driving Mulholland drinking rose in camelbacks, the primitive intensity of apocalypse dating. Looking for men who could build fires and shoplift. 

But you were funny, sharp, quick-witted. Stylish and attractive, but in a hyper conscientious way. Awkward and honest in a valuable way. 

You showed me your hike and I showed you mine. Yours wound a loop through the hills of highland park, culminating in an impossible pond, dusted with lichen and moss. You told me you were followed by coyotes regularly, and you didn’t know what that meant. When I didn’t have sneakers you spent an hour looking for someone with the same shoe size as mine. Later you would send me a song about that moment, and I appreciated that. I didn’t tell you then, but I appreciated it. It was one of your finer moments.

We had sex with a plastic jesus hanging over us, in a Christmas themed hotel room. I joked that if you couldn’t build me a fort out of blankets, I would never date you again. You couldn’t build the fort, and you also didn’t realize I was joking. If we had stayed together longer, perhaps we would have fallen in love, or perhaps I would have started to hate you. It was better this way. 

Maybe I needed a gestation of normalcy, and you needed an existential shake up. It was a vacation of poles.

*

I am sitting perched poolside in a cul-de-sac in Laurel Canyon, as palm trees fan out casting strange shadows. Our backdrop, a sickly  flamingo pink sky. This house could be a dollhouse, part of a “Hollywood in Miniature” set.  Something feels mighty unnatural about this December afternoon. The cocktails have too much sugar and our only auditory accompaniment is the irritatingly timeless omissions of a white guy on acoustic. 

I am being eyed by a dude that talks to me like he's pitching jokes in a writers room, and yapped at by a bleach blonde who sounds like he's confessing sins in a rehab. I am bored of men sharing “thoughts” and “opinions”. Enough of that useless shite. Look, you sullen man-girl, you silly bitch boy, look at the cosmodemonic doomsday phallus being shot our way. Unless you're mocking the institutions, don’t comment on them. Shut the fuck up and start building us compounds. 

Or sit in a circle and butt chug fluoride, sing a song on acoustic, perform a ritualistic circle jerk to Em-rata. Pick a team. and stick to it. 

Times like these I want to slink off to some remote corner of the earth with talking trees and ferns that let me tune into their ever-singing transmissions.  Swear it all off. Everyone is craving the quickest, most efficient of transactions. We are corporations of individual identity, trying to sell ourselves. Trying to sell ourselves to each other in subtle ways. Carefully refining our likeability, relatability, compatibility. 

My product is very disorganized. I am a messy symphony of the vulgar and refined, the spiritual and superficial, the present yet delightfully inebriated. Pick me! I am an articulate supergirl with a messiah complex. 

If you were here, we would make fun of this together. We would sit, elbow to elbow, wondering if we were becoming too soft. We love it, we hate it. The parties that take five freeways to get to, the pretense, the silly urgency to make fun happen.  

But you're not here, and you did get soft. I hear you're expecting a kid.

Telepathics Anonymous

I wake up from vivid dreams, and even though I haven’t been touched in a while- I radiate superheated ripples all over my bed and my heart pounds. Like I’ve been touched.  

In my dreams I am pirouetting through white lights and purple flowering jacaranda by a river. It all churns into a whirlwind of color, and I don’t remember anything else, other than that I am being watched. I’ve had this dream three nights in a row. 

How well tuned are your instincts? How dedicated are you to feeling? The human experience is a physical one. We are supernatural machines, impossible to mimic. Resist being cloned. Resist the artifice. Don’t pretend you dwell and exist in boxes within boxes. Overflow and spill out. Exercise everyday until you sweat. This alone can save you. FUCK becoming a matrix battery. When you are in your body, you are in your own resonance. When you are in your body, you can’t be deceived. 

You are the magic. Most people don’t even care about feeling anymore, about stopping and checking the sky. Scanning the clouds for clues, pondering who plants us in the ground just to pluck us back out.  Most people don’t have wilder, wetter dreams- beyond the gross regurgitation of cultural memes. Most people don't live knowing our morality is always on the verge of collapsing. MOST people don't think about the chains of molecules that bring things together, the vibratory photons that shock you awake, the lightning bolts that go off when you meet someone or something.  Most people don’t see this as an absurd, absolutely ornate disaster. 

Play with your perception, and pick the kindest one. Stay alive in every cell of your body. 

Have you resigned or are you excited?

Winter in LA

It’s Winter in LA, but you couldn’t tell by looking at it. Things don’t die here, even the buildings get facelifts. We are immune to Winter. We are better than that.

It’s Winter in LA, and all the imports have returned to their respective small towns, where no doubt the local celebritism that made them move here in the first place is sadly affirmed. 

The prettiest girl in every midwestern high school, the music prodigy, the theatre buff with the chiseled jaw.  

And for the rest of us, who were formed in the trenches of learned celebrity nepotism, in the changing thraws of cool and uncool, will basque in the “gratitude” of less traffic, shorter lines at erewhon, and resentful, competitive comradery with our fellows- who also grew here, when you flew here. 

Those of us whose parents were sick enough to think this was an appropriate place for a child, who grew up drunk on bourgie enlightenment, who grew up feeding us adderall as we bounced between psychics and psychiatrists. 

 I am getting tired of this scene and the 2000’s cosplay, the same rotating faces lining up to infantilize themselves, for another dreadful evening of “Whose Who.”

We’ve all slept with the same people. I couldn't tell you if this is because of karmic soul contracts or a lack of creativity , but IT IS equal parts interesting and disgusting. We float-glide even, in these incestous circles, prancing around nightclub to nightclub, swapping sexually transmitted demons. Oh the LA natives, so tragically unusual, so immune to cool. 

Make sure you pretend not to notice the most notorious person in the room, which will no doubt rotate to each of us eventually.  Hold your breath, be careful about what you say- because for whatever reason, we are all pretending we are on the precipice of becoming, incredibly, monumentally, successful.

You better be careful how nice you are to me. Haven’t you heard, I am going to be directing something very important, almost soon. Please adore me. And notice my strange shoes.

You feel like a miracle sliding down my throat, and you keep me from overthinking. Keep me present.

 I imagine in some distant future, you lock me up in a mansion with high walls in a canyon, keep me, own me. I am swilling red wine, trying to predict what comes next and lighting candles to keep you rich. I’ll listen to you muse about distant planes, feed your imagination, make slapstick jokes about God. We’ll have a dog, because fuck cats. Eventually a kid with massive bulging eyes who knows too much- because that's what we were- two weird, lonely kids, with adult faces. 

We’ll ask questions about who planted us here and try and come up with crafty answers. We’ll drown out the tik-toks and livestreamed apocalypse, fight to stay in our bodies, plant stuff, argue, fuck, repeat. Keep our instincts sharp. Keep the rumor mill pumping by making random disappearances and reappearances. 

Or maybe not, maybe I was your existential experiment. Maybe you needed me to fill in the gaps about your understanding in the world, before you surrender to the chaos. Something you were trying on. 

We are the designer t-shirt. The good kind, understated, unpretentious (sort of), but good. Made with quality in mind. Seductively unattached, breathable. When you have THE designer t-shirt- it makes all your other t-shirts look low quality. We are of a heroic texture. The problem with borrowing the designer t-shirt, is it can change your whole perspective. Make all other t-shirts feel frumpy. And everything that is not it, will eventually look clumsy. Luxury-adjacent, not quite the thing you were looking for, a bad mimic, a synthetic knock off. But good fucking luck.

Eclipse

We are on the precipice of great and lasting change.

 We are designed to start following resonance, over logic and reasoning. To listen to energy and emotions before the cerebral. To stop thinking. All of these discussions of meta-verses, of virtual realities..they are designed to take you out of the body, away from the emotional. The human experience is unique, because we are the only beings that create with emotions. If you follow your own resonance, you will always be met by things “in resonance” to you. Energy does not lie. 

Everything is trying to steal that life force, that spark, and its a full time job to keep it alive. To feel and stop fucking thinking.

I forgive almost everyone for almost everything.

This paradigm is collapsing in on itself, and even the rules I have created for myself are disintegrating, I want someone to form me into a softer shape, less rigid, blow away my old beliefs like dead petals. Tangle into me and drift to a celestial tide, one without laws. Untethered and unashamed. I don’t want to be anyones existential experiment. 

There is a part of you that is very disguised. But it is ancient, unearthed and only seen by those lucky enough to be close to you. A part of you that is beyond wise, beyond human- an cosmic super intelligence derived from the place above time. You have a child’s eyes and the wisdom of something eons old. You are famous in the heavens. Your smile is contagious and your laughter moves energy. I see your resilience, your super-intelligence and your kindness. You are wickedly cool and accidentally mystical. I like you for the parts of you that are familiar, that feel like blood I was woven out of- but also for your laughable ability to be constantly surprising me and everyone in a three mile radius. You have childlike curiosity and a simultaneous-ageless knowledge- you are a perfect, gorgeous, lopsided symmetry of paradoxes.

When the Bad Wind Blows

I need an ayahuasca enema. I need someone to finance a weeks long vacation at the Chateau while I process the Santa Ana winds. I need to throw my iphone into the sea and hold firmer boundaries. I need a man to follow me around playing the flute.

 I have been irritatingly intuitive lately- but not in a fun way, in a tiresome, harrowing way. I have retractions from reality and then gasps of understandings, vignettes of the symbolic layers of this hologram. The mind-body-spirit complex. I’ve been trying to extract tendons of memories, cast people out of my field. Communicating with atemporal ghosts left in my body. Innadventartly hip deep in a shared subconscious, trying to seduce idiots out of ancient amnesia. Littered by old fingerprints, having ephemeral thoughts that brush against me like silver gnats.  I feel like a volcano coming up from the sea, stirring up something hot and explosive, leading me to important pain. Holy alchemy. Sacred mischief. 

It’s hard to stay soft when people are becoming computers. Hardening. The timelines are drifting further and further apart. People are thinking algorithmically, transactionally. Addicted to distraction. No one is witnessing their own emotional landscape anymore, and if they aren't witnessing their own emotional landscape, there's no way they gonna witness mine.  How fucking blasé.

I love ruthlessly and with conviction. I am not afraid to make room in my heart for anything. I won’t bend, I won’t water it down or make it logical or compact or digestible. I’ll walk the hills at night, become my own witness, my chorus the unsettling Santa Ana winds. I am committed to what I came here to do, there's not really another choice but to surrender to the unfolding, to be a bit ahead and wait. Let go of the reins and trust what I know.