Things I Loved

• I feel like I’m massively behind my movie-watching quota for this year because I’ve been watching so many TV shows. Along with seemingly the entire internet, I fell in love this month with the Pitt, an old-school, unpretentious medical drama about a fictional Pittsburgh ER, featuring relentless, gloriously gory tension (intubation, anyone???) and an ensemble cast that’s so easy to love it hurts. Dr. Robby you will always be famous. Dr. Abbott I am available for marriage. Bonus points to the show for casting two excellent nepo babies, Brian Cranston’s daughter Taylor Dearden and Brad Dourif’s daughter Fiona Dourif. I also watched the first episode of Seth Rogan’s inside-Hollywood comedy the Studio, which was very funny (Martin Scorsese’s cameo only slightly edged out for me by the appearance of David Krumholtz). Speaking of Mr. Krumholtz, important PSA: all time cinematic masterpiece Clueless will be back in theaters for a 30th anniversary re-release on June 29th. You’re welcome.

• Spring is in full blossoming glorious swing here in sunny California, and it’s reminded me of a favorite poem of mine by Kay Ryan, the Things of the World:

  

• Relatedly, I’ve gotten my film camera out again recently to capture some of nature’s glory, and I quite liked this chiaroscuro window pic of my baby Soda Pop admiring the scenery:

• Los Angeles is a city littered with free books, and a while ago I picked up Mao II by Don DeLillo on the sidewalk. I hadn’t read any of his stuff, and was only vaguely aware of him as one of the Great 20th Century American Authors, and the guy who wrote that Noah Baumbach movie that bombed. Turns out he whips. Great prose is like heroin to me, and I’m still high on his sentences. Here’s a few of my favorites:

  • “A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran to soft fire, the tree seemed revealed.” (170)

  • “The rush of things, of shuffled sights, the mixed swagger of the avenue, noisy storefronts, jewelry spread across the sidewalk, the deep stream of reflections, heads floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors, bodies shivery and elongate” (94) — perhaps my favorite ever description of New York. I will forever see towers liquefied on taxi doors when I visit

  • “It was strange to lie still in a small corner and feel the power of movement, the gull-rush of air over the hood. A sense of memory pulsing in the skin. The cat moved past her hand, a shrug of lunar muscle and fur.” (90)

  • “Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering with it.” (107)

  • “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself." (48)

• Last week I and 36,000 other Angelenos hung out with Bernie Sanders for the LA stop of his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. I don’t feel like rehashing my general sentiments about the whole affair so I’m just going to repost what I shared on instagram below. I mostly went to the rally for the music, which included brief sets by Maggie Rogers, Joan Baez, and Neil Young. I’m a huge Maggie fan and have seen her live before, but didn’t expect to fully bawl my eyes out when she sang a Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright duet with Joan. So precious. Side note, need somebody that looks at me the way Maggie looks at her. I was really excited to see Neil Young, because I have a few friends that are huge Neilheads and always talk about seeing him live like it’s a religious experience. I was not misled. Gonna try to see him when he comes through LA for a real show in September. He’s old as fuck so here’s hoping he makes it until then. Thanks for the music and for showing out, king.

  

• Lastly, my beautiful perfect bouncy Laker boys are the third seed in the playoffs. Lakers in 5 all the way. ~Can’t believe this is my life~ LeBron meme.

Little Wisdoms

I enjoyed this secondhand wisdom from my beloved Tom Cruise about how to deal with social anxiety:

If you walk into a room and you feel the anxiety’s coming, you start to overthink, do I look weird, do I seem awkward…try doing the opposite. Look out, look around the room, [and ask,] where is it, where is the thing I have attached onto my insecurity, is it that person over there that reminds me of my school bully, is it that person that didn’t give me a job once, that person over there that I think was mean to me once, where does it live outside of me? If I look at it long enough, the anxiety then can have a name, a label, or what will happen is I’ll go, “oh, I’m really jealous,” or “oh, I’m really lonely,” or “oh, I’m really intimidated by the talent or the confidence of that person,” and as soon as I can name what it actually is, the general sense of free floating anxiety goes, and then I actually have an opportunity to do something about it…If you’re scared of something, keep looking at it, try not to close your eyes or turn away, just keep looking at it, and it will often give you information about what to do to overcome it.”

So true, Tom, so true.

~~~

On burned and rebuilt bridges

Last week I went viral on Twitter for the first time since I accidentally made Chris Pratt cry. This time I was being nice, and I was surprised at the apparent relatability of a fairly basic shower thought:

The reaction to this tweet has had me thinking a lot about how relationships come in and out of your life.

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who has bipolar. I needed someone to confide in who would understand my particular anguish: I had reached out to another friend and asked him if I could interview him for my Substack (stay tuned, interview out soon). He’s a successful journalist with great taste and style and a nice guy I really admire—although not someone I know super well; a friend from Twitter that I vaguely recalled having briefly hung out with in DC, years ago. I realized to my horror shortly before interviewing him that I had in fact seen him last in 2021, not quite the nadir of my total rock bottom, but certainly a point when I was still Not Doing Well, and generally giving off a sort of unhinged, damn this bitch is going through it kind of vibe.

I asked my bipolar friend: how do you re-approach or rebuild relationships with people who knew you when you were spiraling out? It’s mortifying to live with a past version of yourself that you no longer recognize, when that version of you might be the only one somebody else has known.

My friend told me a story about trying to patch things up with someone they’d royally fucked up with during their chaos days, and how that person was nice about my friend being in a better place now, but expressed no interest in having a relationship going forward. That’s tough, I told my friend. We laughed about it. Shit hurts, but you get it. Hard to blame them. You try to move on.

I bit the bullet and called my journalist friend for the interview. He was nice about it all and we had a great chat. It was fine. Anxiety unwarranted (in this case), but real. I still cringe to think about how I must have come off that first time we met.

I’ve been lucky in that a lot of the friendships I lost during my Bad Years have come back into my life. Most of the ones I’ve saved were with people I didn’t have any falling out with, but were just people I stopped talking to for half a decade, and who were happy to hear from me when I resurfaced. I didn’t talk to my childhood best friend for most of my 20s; I reached back out to her a few years ago and we picked up right where we left off as kids, and now talk on the phone at least once a month. She’s a godsend. Several such cases. I’m lucky.

Last year a friend of mine from high school that I hadn’t spoken to but once in 15 years texted me out of the blue. We talked on the phone and realized we’d both had parallel life experiences: precocious youths, mid 20s substance abuse/mental illness era, followed by early 30s attempt-to-rebuild. It was so nice to connect with a comrade in the struggle. I was proud of him for reaching out to me. He was proud of me for my recovery.

But then there’s the others. The friendships I broke that are still broken, the losses that I still mourn. I think about one of my best friends in college, who drifted away from me junior year and who I haven’t had any real relationship with since. I realized many years later that she probably decided to stop being friends with me when she suffered a life altering tragedy and reached out to me for support, and I wasn’t there. I was stoned and stupid, young and selfish. Can’t blame her. I watch her stories now and think about how I miss her, and wish I could tell her I’m sorry. I could, I suppose, but I worry it’d be reopening old wounds, and that the damage is done. Maybe I’m just being cowardly. Her artwork hangs on my wall. It’s beautiful and it makes me happy, and sad.

As an aside: a peculiar weirdness of dealing with all this shit in the internet age is the ghosts of friendships that haunt you through socials. You can have a dead friendship with someone in real life, but still follow each other on instagram, and question everything when they like your selfie. You can watch them from afar in suffering silence, or wonder if they’re doing the same. Lost love leaving lingering fingerprints on the soul through a screen. Strange and alienating.

Anyway. There’s other friendships I grieve that I ended, by choice. I talk about this a lot with my friends now: how a hard part of growing up is outgrowing relationships you once held so dear; how brutal but important it is to let go of relationships that aren’t serving you.

I’m grieving the recent loss of a friendship with someone I still care about a lot. It wasn’t healthy for me to keep this person in my life anymore, so I walked away. As I’ve been walked out on before. I hope one day we’ll be friends again. I hope some of the other people I’ve lost might one day let me come back to them. I guess time will tell.

I don’t have a lot of grand wisdom to impart about how to deal with the Hard Cases. You can’t change who you’ve been and you can’t force people to forgive a past version of you, or accept a new one. You shouldn’t cling to friendships that don’t serve you, even with people you love. I suppose you can only try: try to be better, try to make amends, try to love yourself, try to live with love. That’s what I’m trying to do. I learn my little lessons, I let myself be sad. I make new friends, I cherish them better. I send my little birthday cards, and I hope for the best.

And as always, I practice gratitude: for the friendships I’ve lost and that I got to have, for the ones I have now; for the ones I don’t have yet, but will.

~~~

PS - Soda Pop says she hope’s you’ll take a minute to sit in the sunshine and think about nothing this week. It’s good for you <3