5 min free write

"Sun beans on sandy hills the heat like potatoes boiling in rusty pots. California rises up like Lazarus reborn into desert, birthed through cloudless skies.

I wake up in my bed in Hollywood, fan circulated breeze slipping around me like olive oil separating from water.

The dream I had made my palms damp & clammy, but the memory dissolved with the last of my sleep.

A tuesday like any other, I'm waiting to bank on the pavement. Waiting for deliverance from the stale heat."

on skies + colours

Journal:

"Reading Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt & thinking about all the skies I have seen, all the different types of air. 

Thinking about how the air looked in different places & how you might lay that out. 

The warm wet yellows of New Orleans.
The steeliness of Paris, grey almost like iron.
The cold blue/grey of London
The brownishness of Brooklyn. 

& Los Angeles is bright--like primary colours, with a kind of occasional yellowish twinge. 

Why I think I never went much into visual art is because I could never get the translation right between my head & the execution of it by my hand. I can think of the yellows, but I cannot make them."

letter on running

journal

"fall starts in two days.
another fall, more time passes. & me in exactly the same place.
I'm tired of standing still.

but it's as if my arms & legs have atrophied. they can't move. maybe they never could.

I'm starting to think that the only movement I've ever done has been running away.

I ran away from Oregon. I ran away from New York. I ran away from every place & responsibility in between. I've only run.
now I'm getting that feeling again. that tingling under my skin. I want to run. to abandon everything.
staying still feels like staying stuck & that feels like dying.

but maybe you can never really get anywhere if you keep running. maybe that feeling I've had--that my life doesn't add up to anything--is because nothing can build if you're always starting over." 

journal, 2016

"curled under blankets ratty with age. I lean against the hollywood hills. perched like a gargoyle at its edge, I'm not making the climb yet but also not at the base.

it's a kind of limbo between the hills & the world below--not completely in either, not separate either.

do I feel a sense of belonging? have my skin & bones taken root here in the sand?


it clings to my ankles. exfoliates. I shed my skin around los angeles like a snake."

"I've been thinking about it & I think cockroaches are my spirit animal. They follow me & are hard looking but easy to squish."

-journal entry, 14 August 2015.

beverages

trying to remember to stay hydrated.

this is it.
this is american adulthood--
the weight of the world pressing down on your shoulders.

(or, in my case, the weight of a red ford focus).

coyotes

Journal
16 July 2014 
hollywood hills, night

Just now, out my window, I'm certain I heard a pack of coyotes. They do live around here, in the hills.
I swear I heard them eating something, killing it. There was barking & howling & it filled the neighbourhood. It rose from the earth, spiraling into the sky like a dust-storm. Then, there was this screaming. This inhuman, animal scream coming up from something's gut. Coming up from something's terror.

indirect viewing device for a solar eclipse

I thought of a poem by Emily Dickinson as a kind of "indirect viewing device" like those used to safely view a solar eclipse. I made a diagram in my notebook of such a device. 

watercolour, ink pen on graph paper. 

journal pages

I like to light pages on fire & use watercolours in my journals. 

"I am in the subway


it smells of gasoline.






this really happened."


-journal entry, last night.