“The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses their own specimen, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else.”

half a mind

its a weber & stampfel kind of day

for those of you who have wondered over the years why you received the slim, brightly colored babyfucker as a birthday or christmas gift from me, i  have a few things to tell you. and so do  amy catanzano, lily hoang, mike kitchell, jon rutzmoser, j.a. tyler, and jessalyn wakefield--five writes i asked to respond, in whatever way they wanted, to babyfucker. you can read the first two paragraphs of my intro below, or read the whole thing HERE.

Babyfucker Blog Project: an Introduction
When I interviewed Urs Allemann about his book Babyfucker in the spring of 2010, my family was outraged, and understandably so. Less than a month had passed since my mother divorced her husband, my stepfather of twenty years, after discovering that he had lived a secret life for almost the entire extent of the marriage, including sexually abusing my older sister throughout her childhood. It was not that my family opposed the idea of a book like Babyfucker so much as they could not understand why I would ever willingly associate myself with the words “baby” and “fucker,” especially only eleven months after learning about my sister’s abuse. Their approach was to get over “it” as quickly as possible. However, I was not so sure that this was something I wanted to move beyond; I didn’t want “it” to lose its shock value.

Excessive books like Babyfucker elicit excessive reactions. Excess, here, can be defined as that which is more than necessary, or desirable. Not only is the act of “babyfucking” an extremely rare occurrence in the realm of sexual abuse, the setting of the book is also excessive. In fact, it is all but impossible to imagine, except, perhaps, as a bad acid trip. The book opens: “I fuck babies. Around my bed there are creels. They’re swarming with babies. They’re all here. Always have been. Always will be.” As Allemann noted in our interview, “These sentences have no place in a realistic story [and] definitively exceed every notion of reality that claims to be adequate to reality.” More specifically, the last two “create a context that corresponds perfectly to the timeless present of the sentence ‘I fuck babies.’” As I was all too aware, nothing can be as it has “always been, always will be.”

your new favorite book

CVLT CVNT :: featuring work by Jessalyn Wakefield, Marie Fury, Farren Stanley, and yrs truly.

Hand brayered monoprint covers with a sexy blind print bonus. Hand bound.

Send $10 + $3 shipping (this equals $13 ) to jessalyn.wakefield@gmail.com, email for check/cash orders.

Many thanks to editor and publisher Jessalyn Wakefield for her invaluable insight and support over the years. You can view more of her letter press work here.

The Huntington

m's been working at the huntington all summer, but i haven't had a chance to visit until now. aside from the amazing gardens, with badass prop root plants, there's hours worth of exhibitions to cruise through. my mother and i literally spent two full days here. its better than disneyland!

"Its not so bad," the professor said. "It only isn't wonderful. Nobody has an obligation to be wonderful."

m.'s friends from san antonio and atlanta flew in for a visit

san diego zoo

i've never been to a zoo before, assuming it would be depressing, but this place was anything but. the whole zoo, which feels more like an amusement park, is geared towards preservation and educating patrons about the need for preservation. the extremely personable meerkats were my favorite. and the many mating flamingos.

notes on communal living

For over six years, my mother and father lived communally, as part of a nation wide colony, during the early to mid-1980s. Although my mother never mentioned the name of this group, both my older sister and I were members, birthed by ‘family midwives.’ Since I knew my mother as only a child knows their parent, it was impossible for me to imagine her living in a commune, or at least, how I imagined a commune.

When I was two my father died of a coke overdose, and the hostility my mother expressed towards all things associated with “drug use” or the “counterculture” was evident in my own zealous Christianity. After the 1960’s, the words “Utopian community,” “colony” or “commune” were forever tainted by their association with the media stereotypes of the counterculture, a bunch of half-baked long-hairs stringing beads, cruising out on LSD, and waxing their asses with insincere Hare Krishna’s. One rarely hears about the communities that thrived though they are numerous, such as Llano Del Rio, a Southern California socialist colony from the 1920’s that experimented with feminist architecture like kitchenless houses, communal daycares, and built-in furniture to make cleaning and general upkeep easier.

My mom’s depiction of her commune experience sometimes resembled Valerie Solanos hilarious portrait in SCUM Manifesto: “The most important activity of the commune, the one upon which it is based, is gang-banging. The `hippy' is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussy [...] but, blinded by greed, he fails to anticipate all the other men he has to share with, or the possessiveness of the pussies themselves.”

Whenever I talked about wanting to live on a commune when I grew up, or even more innocuous dreams of attending a Rainbow gathering, my mother would pull her hair into a ponytail: they are just as fucked up as normal society. Whenever there is one group stronger than the other, or someone sees a way to dominate, they will. At times her view of human nature seemed almost Sadean: the person with the whip in hand always holds the real power and the victim is always the person who has little or none. My mother did not believe that the rich felt sympathy for the poor, but like Sade, that the rich were rich so that others are poor. Although she wouldn’t use a word as harsh as ‘evil,’ her definition of it was wealth, specifically materialism, which she saw as bound up, inherently, with selfishness and pride. In this respect, and this respect alone, she praised communal living: it rejected crude materialism. In order to join their commune, members were required to donate all possessions and future funds to the collective.

Growing up my mother did not allow my sister or me to watch much TV. As far as she was concerned, TV was nothing but advertising, designed to lure us into the Cult of Materialism.

When the New Kids on the Block blew up the scene in the late 80’s, their faces were plastered on everything from lunch boxes to bed linens. My sister and I were the only kids at our Methodist Church who did not own a single piece of NKOTB paraphernalia. Whenever we visited Kmart or Sears, mom would walk down the aisle, shaking her finger at every NKOTB display: my kids are not a billboard! She also encouraged my sister and I to spend weekends doing community service at the children’s hospital or nursing home. She favored the latter: everyone loves a baby; they’ve got plenty of people to love them. That’s how my mother judged the neediness of others: their lack of love.

As I found out at age twenty-one, my parents were not part of a “commune” but rather a religious group called The Family (formally Children of God), which, in popular media, is referred to as a “cult,” and sometimes even, a “sex cult.”

My mother joined the group when she was twenty-six, a few months after she began dating my father who had been a member, on and off, for six years. At the time, she had recently divorced her first husband, an unemployable alcoholic, and relocated to Georgia to live with her parents (also alcoholics), and teach biology to sixteen year olds at a small catholic prep school. My mother often raved about working with “the nuns”—how smart they were, how fun, what fabulous dancers at the Friday night potluck and polka. She appreciated that they did not need to drink or fuck or spend money to have a good time. Throughout my childhood, I longed to convert to Catholicism for the sole purpose of becoming a nun. I dreamed of what I perceived to be their secret bliss: infinite solitude. I admired nuns for two main reasons: their devotion to God and the fact they existed entirely outside society—that is, women, living collectively, independent of men. That nuns did not actually live this way was of little concern. In my child’s mind, they represented a matriarchy not found elsewhere.

For others its different, but for me, prayer was pure pleasure, an interrogation, the first flush of intellectual life:  a place where I told God my wants and was called upon, by the one who loved me most, to investigate, with keen eye, whether they were, really, my wants. Christianity appealed to me in the same way I imagine it appealed to my mother:  it offered unconditional love and acceptance fused with a doctrine of noble suffering. Even as a child, I recognized the psychological usefulness, comfort, of repeating God never gives us more than we can handle. 

According to my mother, she felt “called” at a young age to serve the Lord. When she was eight, two nuns caught her stealing a bible from the sanctuary of the New Hope Catholic Church in New Jersey. It’s not like my parents were gonna buy me one. The nuns were charmed. They took her under their wing. I, too, was captivated by this tale: my mother so desperate for the word of God, she took to sinning. It was precisely the sort of ethical dilemma that confused me, that I delighted in parsing through while sprawled out in the weeds, alone, on the playground during recess.

I, myself, felt called to Jesus at age eight. Sunday morning: sitting on the cracked wooden pew, I yawned through a boring sermon on The Importance of Tithing, counting down the minutes until the back doors of the sanctuary flung open and released us into the harsh glare of the noon sun. Then, the praying started. I closed my eyes, kneeled on the red carpet. My body began to tingle.  I assumed my legs had simply fallen asleep. No. My face slicked with sweat. Within minutes, I felt utterly compelled to speak with this strange man named Jesus, to be as close to him as possible.

                                                                   

Three weeks later, I was baptized under the bible verse 13:13 Corinthians as Amazing Grace played on a pipe organ. I felt incredible lucky, smart even, to have discovered the soothing joy of faith so early in life. As a teenager, at school, it was not uncommon for some smug boy (always a boy) on the debate team or Mathletes to roll his eyes at me: you know belief in god is just a defense mechanism. As if I were somehow unaware of the religion’s single biggest selling point, the thing that kept me coming back again and again: what happens on Earth, in the here and now, does not matter. It just does not matter.

I figured if those boys on the debate team were really so smart they might have pondered, a little longer, the question that had already begun to terrify me: what does it mean, for an individual, to organize their entire existence around the promise of a better life, a future pleasure that is so awesome it cannot be understood by the mortal mind, must remain a mystery, forever “beyond me.” That is, what does it mean to waltz through life emboldened by the delusion it does not matter what happens to me. It just does not matter.

After her contract with the catholic prep school ended, my mother moved into a house with one other couple located in a suburb on the east side of Atlanta. She described a yard raked clean of everything but dirt, two withered pecan trees. There were many defining aspects of Children of God that classify it as a cult, the major one being the role of the group’s founder, David Berg, as prophet.

When David Berg founded Children of God in 1968, he was fifty years old. An established minister, Berg had recently returned to California with his family after resigning from a church in Texas under the cloud of an unspecified sexual scandal. His new ministry set up shop in Huntington Beach and focused recruitment on teen addicts and disaffected hippies seeking shelter, recovery, and the Answer. A “prophet of the end times,” Berg preached the collapse of Global Capitalism, and that ‘the system’—including organized religion, the government, and the the nuclear family—was so crooked that no moral citizen could live as a part of it without being implicated in its evil deeds.

As an adult, while embroiled in a political discussion with my mother, it was not uncommon for me to say, in exasperation, something like the system is so fucked, unaware of the phrase’s connections to The Family. My mother’s response was a predictable eye roll. Beyond the fact that we both tended to vote democrat, we did not agree on most political issues, not in the details.  She seemed to think everything was so corrupt, it could not be changed so why not just wait it out, go with the flow. She was a ‘take your pleasure where you can,’ no nonsense kind of woman. She did not attend church, or read the bible every day, but she never stopped believing.

I did not abandon my Christian beliefs so much as take a break from them, ‘my little siesta’ ... that never ended. In my sophomore year of college, living alone in a cramped attic apartment, it seemed there was simply no way to exist as a devout believer as a member of secular society, certainly not college culture, unless one lived in total, terrifying isolation.  I had reached a crossroads, so to speak, and decided to go the way of the Amish: Rumspringa, the German word for “running around.” Let the youth go out, into the world, feel ALL the pleasures.

Like many, I thought I would remain faithful, but when I stopped praying, strange things started happening in my brain. I stopped thinking of time as a thing to endure, to get through. Instead, time became an everyday phenomenon. I had to sit very still, look very close to discover that I possessed nothing but time: a supreme blessing. I skipped class, sprawled out in bed, read up and through history. Whole centuries devoured in an afternoon. That rare, ripe pleasure of total engrossment.  Whoever said reading isn’t a physical experience? In a few months, I had discovered literature, marijuana, and the present-tense pleasure of the clitoris. I no longer wanted to wait for promiseland. I saw no distinction between the present and the future, between time as a form of constraint and time as a possibility for freedom. What mattered most to me was the here and now.

Initially, Berg’s ministry attracted little attention from outsiders. Southern California was no stranger to mystics, sex-obsessed communes, and gurus of all sorts. One writer in 1921 described the region as a “breeding place and a rendezvous of freak religions.” The first cult was founded in the 1840’s by a quack doctor and economic theorist Dr. William Money.  He was also the first person to write and publish a book in the region: The Reform of the New Testament Church, which was also the name of his cult. In the 1930’s the region was home to over 1,000 practicing nudists, and three large nudist camps, including The Land of Moo, whose entrance was marked by a large, wooden sign that read “In All the World, No Strip like This.” “The existence of a large number of transients and visitors,” wrote historian Cary McWilliams, “has always stimulated the cult-making tendency.”

Berg, himself, was born in 1918 to a long line of esteemed California evangelicals, and learned at an early age to speak to large congregations as his family traveled from one town to another.  In the early years of Children of God, Berg strayed little from traditional Christian scripture.  As membership grew, however, he called for the dissolution of the nuclear family in order “to form one family,” The Family of Love.

When I read about the Kerista Commune in a sexology class, I longed, in a far off way, to be a member of such a group. I was an unfucked, unloved twenty year old. What attracted me to Kerista was not their interest in Gestalt Therapy, and certainly not their self-description as a “hippie free-love trip,” but rather, their practice of Sex on a Schedule. Polyfidelity was their guiding principle. Certainty, the ultimate comfort.  Members were faithful to a family group of more than two and up to eighteen people. A new lover every night. A fucking unencumbered by personality, seduction, or frustration. None of this headache of having to do right by feelings. 

In 1976 Berg introduced a “more intimate” method of witnessing called Flirty Fishing, which is defined by members as “evangelical sex” with strangers for the purpose of conversion and financial support. Flirty Fishing was the use sex appeal for proselytizing. If masturbation, oral, or penetrative sex occurred, it was called "loving sexually" and also counted as “deep witnessing.” 

My mom always asserted I never. But if she had prostituted herself, I would not have cared.  A part of me felt that promiscuity was a kind of manifest destiny: a god given right to fuck. I admired notorious whores like Mae West grinning “it ain’t no sin” or Anais Nin with her two husbands, one on each coast, completely unaware of the other. Although I knew little about her sculpture, I taped a picture of Louise Nevelson’s heavily creased face, eyes outlined in thick kohl, to my bedroom wall. When she was left out of an important exhibit of female sculptors at the MOMA in 1959, she showed up with a top art critic and a fabulous floor length dress. Although her very presence shocked, she also stole the bar’s ice bucket, ducked behind some velvet curtains, pissed on the ice, then rolled out. That is—I steeped myself in a kind of feminism that made little room for tenderness, or even honesty—anything outside the triumphant unfeeling I just can’t give a fuck.

I had almost wanted my mother to be one of these mythic, hard-ass whores that put all the judgmental, sexist, rich assholes in their place. But this was not, and never could be, my mother. She does not believe in pissing in the ice bucket. Revenge is almost as despicable to her as the idea of stinginess. Her compassion was her thing. She donated a kidney to my grandfather, despite years of animosity between them, when I was nineteen. However, her kindness also manifested itself as a kind of weakness, or rather what I once perceived as weakness.

Whenever my mother talked about my father, which was not often, she claimed that he was one of the only truly unselfish men she had ever met. A literal kindness, she’d say. He’d give a stranger the shirt off his back even if he didn’t have another. As a child, this image delighted me: Jesus, too, had been known to give the shirt off his own back.  I clung to this tidbit, shred of info, in part because the only other images I had of him were those of ‘Addict’ and ‘Lonely Misfit.’ At night, in bed, I would comfort myself with the question: who was this wonderful person that the world had shit upon over and over who would still give their shirt to a total stranger? As I got older, however, I found her story harder and harder to believe.

Perched on my own adolescent moral high horse, I considered my father a loser. He ran away from home at age thirteen, had dyslexia, could not even spell the word ‘deceased’, and struggled on and off with drug abuse of all kinds since adolescence. When I was six, I visited my patern grandmother in Florida, and she took me to Disney. While we waited in line for Its a Small World, she said I was relieved when your father ran away. He was so annoying to be around. You have no idea. His younger brother echoed the sentiment. When I was thirteen, over two massive plates of chimmichangas at strip mall restaurant, my mother told me that often my father had asked her to give him some sort of signal—a pinch, a little kick in the calf—to let him know to  ‘tone it down’ whenever he acted too crazy while socializing.  No matter how hard I kicked him, he wouldn’t stop, she said. As a child I was terrified that I would inherit my father’s personality—his extreme eccentricity, the curse of not knowing how to shut up, “be chill.”Apparently, he was so annoying that even the cult could not stand him and gave my mom the ultimatum: him or us.

My father, at age twenty-eight, had never had a girlfriend or any long term lover other than a forty-two year old married woman. He had no friends outside of dealers and cult members. My mother chose him. Although I used to think she was an idiot for even dating my father, much less marrying him, I am now thankful that there are those who love—whatever that love may be— what no one else will take.

My mother’s opinion of her communal living shifted radically after turning fifty-five and divorcing her third husband, Gene, my stepfather of twenty years, after discovering that he had lived a secret life for almost the entire extent of the marriage, including sexually abusing my sister for years. After they sold our family farm when I was twenty-three, I moved to Los Angeles to live with my boyfriend and attend grad school. For a class I wrote an essay describing my mother’s new single life, or rather, what I had wanted her life to be like. I wrote that she moved into a co-op, a purple house that sat high on a hill overlooking nothing but dirt, a smattering of firs. I explained that she shared the house with ten other women, all over fifty years old, who grew various hydroponic vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Although I knew no such communities existed in Georgia, it provided a little light to an otherwise gloomy tale. In truth, my mom moved into a one bedroom prefab apartment complex in an edge city of Atlanta. She lives alone with her fat, brown beagle.

Six months after the divorce, Gene had already remarried a woman he met at the only bar in town, Kevin’s Korner. The woman was the typical southern barfly: salt n pepper hair, loose jean shorts, drank High Life, lived for two week sprees in Biloxi. I read on his facebook page—before he ‘defriended’ me—that she ‘seduced him’ by helping him replace the refrigerator in his RV.

When I ran into Gene at the Wal-Mart tire center in Christmas 2009, I almost did not recognize him. Then, I did. I ducked behind a vending machine selling sticky buns and gum. From my crouched position, I watched him slide his keys across the front desk, smile. Where he had never had an accent, he now talked in a thick southern drawl. He also dressed in camo, a far cry from the hippie garb he had donned with my mom. I stared slack-jawed. For months after their divorce, I had dreamed of such an encounter, the reckoning, which was to be my moment of glory. In the fantasy, I see him across the aisle, rush up to him, and shout you molested my sister! and the whole world would know! Yet as I watched him standing in his brown leather boots, real casual, beneath a dazzling noon sun, I couldn’t move. This was, of course, a supreme defeat, specific ache, for if you had asked me what living with Gene had been like, I would have flicked my wrist and said a schooling in putting motherfuckers in their place.

The first time I met Gene was in the Hartsfield-Atlanta airport in 1991. He wore a “SUPPORT CLINTON” t-shirt.  I was five years old, flying home from the aforementioned week-long vacation in Orlando, Fl with my Grandma Jenny. The trip was dramatic: Grandma Jenny was two hours late picking me up from the Orlando airport when I arrived. As I waited for her, sitting on the glassy top of the “information desk,” I pissed my pants while an annoyed airline employee tried to reach security we’ve got an abandoned child.  I was too embarrassed to tell Grandma Jenny what had happened so I wore my wet panties till bedtime, chapping the inside of my thighs bright red. Then, there was the trip to Disney, hearing the ‘inside story’ of my father’s childhood. I got pregnant on my honeymoon. I mean, I had just married. I had no youth, she said as we ate bratwursts in Epcott. And to have HIM as a first child.  Before my flight home, Grandma Jenny curled my hair, painted my nails, gave me a facial, and even polished my shoes. I felt impossibly glamorous: flying alone, my shiny patent leather heels clicking across the airport’s glass tiles. As I rode the escalator up up up, I spotted my mother and sister holding an armful of yellow balloons, smiling wildly. I rushed into their hugs, did not so much as notice the man standing next to my mother. She squatted to meet me face to face: This is Gene. He leaned down, shook my hand and smiled: you better be nice to me or I’m gonna bop you. My sister laughed as did my mother. I remained straight-faced: I don’t think that’s very funny.

“Bop you” was a southern phrase I was, at the time, unfamiliar with. I later learned that the phrase was also used on cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle. As a child, I loathed toons. Too silly. The only children’s show or movie that appealed to me was Charlotte’s Web, which I was obsessed with in the years following my father’s death. Charlotte’s Web, of course, is all about death. Charlotte spins the clever messages in her web about Wilbur to save him from the slaughterhouse—all while waiting out her own inevitable demise. In the final, and most important scene, Charlotte dies, and Wilbur, distraught, protects her eggs, all her children. When the eggs hatch, Wilbur implores them: Don’t you miss your mother? Don’t you want to stay here? With people who loved your mother? And the motherless children say, one after another, it does not matter, as they fly off into the sky.

hollywood

m's family drove out from tennessee to visit. yesterday we went to hollywood. i enjoyed the trip maybe a little more than i should have.

the jacarandas are in full bloom, a frenzy of purple pushing up against the living room window. sun-splattered petals line the sidewalk, some still fleshy, slick to the touch while others, just husks, lack any identifiable color. there is spring in southern california, if you squint: a shock of pink in an otherwise green bush; great big blossoms, with their faces turned towards the sky, as if waiting for a princess with stained red lips and braided hair to trot down the boulevard on her silver shetland. today i will not write about tornadoes, dpi technology, or the knot of exhaustion at the top of my neck, but the unmatched pleasure of canvas sandals smacking the bleached concrete as i walk, at noon, to the korner kart for a spicy fajita burrito and beer with lime and salt. i sprawl out on the patch of grass between two parking lots and the freeway on-ramp to chat with a vagabond iraq vet about habeneros, spider solitaire, and sex. we eat our burritos slow as possible, sauce running down our wrists, grease splotches on my skirt. we split a spliff in the shade. his whole face falls slack as he leans back against the chain-link fence, kicks his legs out shit man. the sun a small triangle of heat on my back. that nothing is anything but itself is sometimes enough.

on the walk home, i stop by the overgrown lot where charlotte perkins gilman lived after divorcing her husband in 1888. in her autobiography, she refers to this period of her life as "my first years of freedom." in a rented wood-n-paper cottage, during a week of sweltering heat, she finished the first draft of the yellow wallpaper. the restorative effects of the city seem to have been the same for her as for me. “I have lived much here. I love the place—Pasadena, and mean earnestly to return, build, and live,” she wrote on her last night in town. when she was diagnosed with breast cancer many years later, she returned from the east coast to pasadena where she took a lethal dose of chloroform in 1935. her suicide note read: “human life consists of mutual service." i snap pictures of the swath of air where her house once stood, then walk on, up the street.

Les Figues Press Garden Party

Les Figues Garden Party, May 14th, 2011

Performances by:

Renee Petropoulos / a reading
Jen Hofer / a reading + surprise
Kate Durbin / "Procession of Figues"— a mini fashion show of hats inspired by Les Figues books and modeled by the authors

w/ special emcees: Stephanie Taylor & Vanessa Place

last friday was the calarts graduation. i missed the ceremony due to a brutal, otherworldly migraine. as i laid in bed, face spangled with sweat, wondering when i would throw up next, i began to feel rather sentimental about my tenure in the calarts mfa program. as a general rule, i loathe school. my whole life teachers and professors have tended to dislike me, and, in high school/undergrad, i often feuded with other students. (the most infamous was at GSU when i blew up at this vegan girl with braids feminism is about more than body hair and words!) but calarts, so i was told, was an institute unlike the rest. this was the home of womanhouse, the naked marching band, and pee wee herman. by the end of my first semester, however, i had finished the necessary paperwork to drop out. considering how warm and fuzzy i now feel, i thought it necessary to remind myself of my mental state in fall 2009. below is an unedited entry i wrote in my paper journal after my first seven days in the mfa program:

the first week of class was harrowing. met a few students who seem to "like" me or whatever while others avoid me altogether. i blame the latter on the bizarre conservativism of a few students and a late-night conversation about pornography. apparently word got round that i don’t think its unnatural to watch someone fucking or to want to be watched. when millet was asked about her infamous orgies, she responded in other words, i am not afraid of being glimpsed unaware.

thursday night was our first "visiting artist" series. wine and beer were served by a bartender wearing a faded calarts t-shirt. most of the students drank from flasks or 18-pks tucked in the trunks of their cars. by the end of the artist’s performance—he did a piece about the trans bar the silver platter—several mfa’s were visibly sloshed. i cruised through the room, consuming no more than two vodkas, stopping to chat whenever i could bear it. endurance in the truest sense: i have little to no tolerance for the wholesome. i didn’t drive 2,835 miles to stand beneath a half-lit moon discussing body politics as if women didn’t enjoying fucking or marijuana-use from the perspective “yeah but you have to wonder why someone wants that to begin with.”

friday morning B. sent an email to the entire program: hi! i’m house sitting tonight! want to come for some fun? its OK to bring a guest but DO NOT bring anyone you do not know PERSONALLY. when T. asked if i planned to attend “the party” i asked what party? rolled into koreatown two hours late, circled B’s house six times before locating a parking spot four blocks from the front door. walked inside helloooo? the living room and kitchen were completely empty, silent save a parrot which stared out from his perch hello, hello, hello. through the window, voices. we’re on the back porch. i poured myself a whisky neat then grabbed a bud light for m. who said i thought this was a--? on the porch: chinese lanterns strewn red and blue, a rickety picnic table where sixteen people sat blank-faced and silent. whenever someone did, by chance, speak up, the only response: uh huh or totally. not even a “dude” or “man” added for duration. after carrying the conversation for twenty minutes, i began to chain smoke. was the only smoker. B. said try not to blow it inside. hid my pack in m’s pocket, counted down the minutes till midnight, a “respectable” time to leave. on my way out the door, a girl named K. rushed over, tapped me on the shoulder oh hey wait i just wanted to ask are you on probation? i heard—. m. laughed, slapped his knee are you fucking kidding me?

the next morning, i met with my adviser for over an hour. she said i was an “autodidact.” wikipedia says: self-teaching and self-directed learning are not necessarily lonely processes. some autodidacts spend a great deal of time in libraries or on social networking websites. after the meeting, i hung out with m’s friends from claremont who, despite being history majors, were chill as fuck. we smoked, walked to a belgian bar, and bashed south carolina's lindsey graham for at least thirty minutes. on the walk home, the cutest boy i know called and left a message: you, me, probation. oh honey. fuck ‘em.

heaps of rotten seaweed sopping up the wet sand, black flies so thick as to form a second skin. multi-colored pebbles, bleached oyster shells, driftwood smashed into fragments i pick up and put into my pocket. each beach m. and i visit is unlike any beach i have seen because i have seen so few. we stop at every vista. i snap pictures of sea maggots wiggling in and out tiny rips in the body of a brown leaf; a dead fish; discarded men’s sandal with rusted buckles. up up up the one, speed peaking at forty. with each curve, we tower higher and higher above the pacific as it pushes up against colossal rocks, with or without trees, a carpet of lime green moss.

we left los angeles glazed with sun. a trickle of traffic, five lanes moving in unison until we drive down the grade: lane after lane of empty tarmac. santa barbara, the “tree city.” we park beside an oak—lay in the grass, suck on sunflower seeds, and eat tacos wrapped in purple wax paper. already the sky blackening, the “breeze” shifting to wind lifting my skirt above my knees. the sun holds out till san luis obispo. at the welcome center, a middle-aged man wearing a dodgers cap sells me a stale cup of coffee and proselytizes about obama’s unwillingness to show his birth certificate.

rain. water smeared across the windshield like vaseline. sixty miles outside big sur, a small digital sign: road closed ahead, businesses open. we drive on. as we soon learn, there are two roads leading in or out big sur: the pacific coast highway, which is closed, and a single lane mountain path, marked by an orange, handwritten sign do not drive after dark if unfamiliar. we rent the only room we can afford, a modified coat closet. no clock, radio, phone, or even nightstand. but a full size mattress, quilted comforter with aztec print. the placard above the light switch: NO LOUD TALKING. directly opposite the bed is a massive mirror. we unload our single black suitcase, all tattered with cat scratches, and fuck just once before heading to the lodge bar where we are the sole non-locals. on st. patricks day. the girl sitting next to us orders an irish car bomb, tells her friend in the imitation ugg boots: i fucked him last night, gestures towards the bartender sporting head to toe camo. don’t look! ten minutes earlier, i heard the same bartender say to a “regular” with premature balding: i slept with natalie. another round of irish car bombs for all. a four piece band with a blown out bass amp plays come back paddy reilly while a woman with a baby on her hip dances a jig, or what appears to be a jig, spinning round and round until she collapses into a deep-seated couch phew!

far too buzzed from the drive and the gin to ever sleep again, i kiss m. goodnight and stay in the bar, dancing and cheating at chinese checkers with natalie and her friend in the imitation uggs. 3 am: hotbox a jeep wrangler. eyes all threaded with blood. the girls refer to the men they’ve slept with, not by name, but profession. trail guides, boaters, bartenders, line cooks, wood cutters, or the day-shift assistant manager at the monterey pet smart. in the morning, m & i wake to a sky still snuffed of light. rain. inpentratable fog. car claws on. arrive to L’s apartment in oakland a day and seven hours late. we hug, say hi and what’s up, pack two bowls, squatting to blow the smoke out L’s bedroom window. say bye. am off to sacramento, alone.

an unexpected toll road. i hand fistfuls of pennies and dimes to the man behind the glass partition who blinks really? when i knock on J’s door, she's wearing pajama pants, hugging her boyfriend in the foyer. we eat burritos and drink modelo in orange wooden booths. walk in the rain to a brightly lit bar with tile floors and a bearded doorman who nods us inside. gin tonics, gossip about internet friends. i watch J watching herself in the mirrors that line the entire room. we talk about catherine millett. and the clitoris. flaubert’s letter to maupassant “i touch myself when i think of you,” signed “sister clitoris.” regarding a recent liaison of mine, J says well he was probably that obsessed because he couldn’t have you. biting into a lime: no matter who-you have to play it cool, pretend you don’t dig.

we pay cash for a taxi, strip off our coats, and listen to the everly brothers while cuddling mugs of vodka mixed with frozen pineapple concentrate in the living room. two tabby cats slink past, snuggle down on the edge of the couch. no toilet paper in the house so i wipe with a whole foods receipt. J fills the room with her milky yawns, shuttles off to bed. i am hardly ever wild awake in unfamiliar apartments these days, but tonight, yes.

lay on the couch, write in my journal or listen to J's roommates through the bedroom door. their laughter interrupted only by bits of conversation about a girl whose name i miss, but who, last weekend, acted ridiculous, i mean really ridiculous. at some point, one of the boys staggers out, asks you smoking pot? can i rip that? i hand him the bubbler no worries, man. he does not ask my name or my reason for being there. sun’s first flush. i wake six hours later with my head going bomp bomp bomp. J brews a pot of coffee, toasts an english muffin. cigarettes? she buys toilet paper and cigarettes from the corner store. in the kitchen i read all the cute notes she’s tacked to the fridge if any of you need more time for electricity or rent, you can pay me in installments.

after a colorless sunset, in a part of san francisco i am told is “industrial,” m. and the others plug in keyboards, amps, a whole grocery bags’ worth of black cords while, in the basement of the venue, i talk to my sister on the phone about potty training and exposed brick. bookless and bored--walk four blocks past one hour room rentals to good times liquor store with requisite black bars on the windows, boiled eggs for thirty-five cents, a five-tier plate of sticky buns, and everything i need for diy white russians. no, i can’t concentrate on the band or L’s film tonight all these unfamiliar bodies swimming in and out shafts of light from the floor to ceiling windows. i study the girl in the too tight jeggings, her carrie bradshaw hair piled high atop her head. whenever she sits, she unbuttons her pants, turning her head side to side to see if anyone noticed. a group of out-of-place punks pick at their nail beds, finger a belt loop, occasionally kiss, or bob their heads to the beat. the twenty-something boy in turquoise corduroys, passionately texting, his face rimmed in blue. slip outside to smoke, wind slapping my face bright red, mascara clotted. it is impossible to light the cigarette so i just stand there five, seven minutes, staring into the sleet.

spring break