Bacon + Beer + Tiara = Babe

Making stuffed mushrooms in 2009

Part of me (the part that subscribes to Real Simple) enjoys playing the perfect housewife, vintage apron wrapped around my waist, braised tangerine chicken in a platter carried to the table where my butch waits. Our food blog, Lez Cuisine, attests to this. I relish the fact that I can indulge this housewife fantasy without feeling as if I had sold out feminism.  I’m a woman cooking and cleaning for another woman.  We are making it work the best way that we can.  There is only so much time, and I admittedly take a certain pleasure in camping up the housewife trope.

Other times, however, the pleasures of the EZ-bake oven (or the 4-burner gas Edgewood) pale with the fact that in this cluttered apartment with a cat, a rabbit, and no dishwasher, I can spend all of my time running from one task to another, doing load after load of dishes, laundry that never seems finished, tidying up after the pets that leave shedding nests in every corner.  The work is never done, and subsequently my real work is never done.  My work as a writer is easily shunted to the side for the more tactile and visually demanding work of pushing back the monsters of filth.

So it goes.  And every day I make choices to procrastinate on one to the benefit of another.  As I sit here typing this there is a load of dishes at the sink, the kitchen floor is filthy, the living room which we cleaned yesterday is again larded with crumbs from a gathering last night.

I could bitch about it.  But then I look around and realize that for so long I wanted a place that was mine, that was not a roommate situation or a dorm or my parent’s house or some godawful crackden.  Watching the sun set over downtown, lacings of branches segmenting the pink and orange, I am content that this is a home I share with my partner, as an adult, and that that alone has been a long time coming.

Outside the kitchen window, all is calm

The empty stage before the bar opened

Reading from Jet Set Desolate

The knife fight breakup scene!

Photos by Claudia Casey

Many thanks to Liz Garo for organizing the event.

Valentines day ended with all of us in Two Boots, where I gorged myself on pizza to sop up the free beer.  I awoke the next morning feeling like I needed to start strength training again.  I’ve been neglecting my exercise routine for the last two weeks, and my body feels it.  The base of my spine, a pain, whether from five inch heels the night before tramping up and down to the Echoplex and back looking for the stage door, or from my body falling out of tune.

Angel on the wall at Two Boots

Dark clouds and an early morning, and sitting with Stephen and Alex having a work party.  Essentially we sit in a circle with laptops so as to make the work less lonely. My work right now is this and that, the other, quite a bit piling up.

Via the Homo-Centric blog I found Glitter Tongue,  this amazing Valentine’s Day collection of queer love poems. Diving through them this morning my heart brightened, inspired.  I wanted to write poetry again.  Writing for me comes in waves of compulsive excess and then withdrawal into administration/promotion/performance. There are the things that go into being a writer that do not involve writing.  I can spend too much time on them.  I want to swim again with lyric prose.

I recently finished Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest , after her powerful performance at Featherless #13.  On the subject of queer love poems, poems of desire, poems of piercing clarity and ferocity.

They make me feel alive.

Two episodes, with Untucked, back to back.  One would think I was starved.

Back to back the readings come, then.  The Rhapsodomancy event went well. I really enjoyed the other author’s work.  Here are some pictures:

Instagram of Podium at Good Luck Bar

Reading from Jet Set Desolate

Photo by Omar Routher

The red chinoiserie of the Good Luck Bar felt glamorous.  It was like reading poems in a James Bond movie.  Now onward to The Echo’s Valentine’s Day Sad Hour today:

Tonight! Free!!

I slept at Stephens last night so that he would not be alone.  Sleeping on the couch, the Christmas lights shimmering soft, I left them on and tied a padded sleep mask around my eyes.  Since his rotating potluck/shiva, when the house filled up with food, there was a roach sighting.  One or two.  Here or there.

I was reminded of my old apartment in North Hollywood with the very real roach problem where I slept with the lights on every night with hopes the pale glow would keep the insects back.  I had a sleep mask and held onto the lease with both hands.

Now, in Echo Park, we have gnats, moths, and daddy longlegs on a rotating seasonal schedule, but I have not in two years seen a roach. I sleep here safely in the dark.

When I am ready for the dark, and when it is ready for me.  I keep going into the bedroom, curling up beside my wife, the warmth of blankets and soft sheets. I lay there and suddenly it’s as if the night spits me back out again, I go stumbling out of bed towards the living room, towards stimuli, the lonely glow of facebook, the empty ask of email, the rabbit-hole of tumblr or twitter.  The internet gets boring after 2 am, it ceases to vomit forth content with such rapidity.  I also am finding certain platforms less charming (tumblr) than the endless vortexes of amazement that they once seemed to be.

With overuse, all things fade.  Especially sparkly kitty gifs.  OMG Cats in Space,  however, still does it for me.

This leads to a maddening claustrophobia tonight, while Katie works and I practice and pace and do administrative whatnot for featherless.  I whiten my teeth and do the dishes, I take out the trash and send emails.  Eventually what can be done is done, and I am at loose ends.  Whitney Houston’s death comes to the general consciousness and explodes across twitter and facebook in a wave of youtube farewells.

Katie calls, “Guess who’s dead.”

“Whitney Houston.”

“Let’s get drinks.”

I laughed.

Waiting for her to get off work, my mood improves.

These dead celebrities, everyone has something to say about them.  I’m not sure I want to be part of that conversation. Not to be flippant and blow Whitney off with a lemon twist off my G & T.  Not that Ms. Houston and I are really on a first name basis.  To be larger than life you become familiar to strangers. People want a piece of your tragedy.

I was deeply upset when Amy Winehouse died. I think because I identified a great deal with her music and spent a long lonely breakup playing “Back to Black” over and over again.  Whitney Houston, pop diva of past junior high jams, while a larger figure her death touched me less.  What infuriated me in both cases were those who pass judgment on the deceased based on their addictions.  With fame comes frailty, excess.

I really need to stop reading comment threads. That in and of itself is a sickness.

It’s growing on me too. I used to think twitter and foursquare were incomprehensible beasts, “Why would you want to do that?”  Now I dive in lustily.  Such fun.

workspace

Social Media is one of those inescapable facts of life now, as much as I may want to bake fresh bread and run barefoot through fields of poppies, I don’t or can’t and so I sit inside with my laptop and iphone and participate ersatz with a world I am twice removed from.

I just received news that I will be reading at the Echo for the Valentines Day Sad Hour Revue, and I was giddy like a schoolgirl.  My wife and I will be celebrating Valentines Day on the 13^th as she has to work late on the 14^th, so it works out perfectly.  Especially as our favorite restaurant does not take reservations, and getting in on V-day would be an exercise in heartbreak.

I have spent Valentines Day crying into a bottle of vodka after emergency therapy appointments, I have spent it crying onto the shoulder of a friend with benefits whose benefits were abruptly revoked after this episode.  “Things got too heavy, man.”  I am so happy to spend the fiercely coded evening with the woman I love, exchanging trinkets and eating scorching hot Thai food.

disarray

There is a coziness here, but a feeling of calm before chaos, respite from the emotional turmoil of the last few days.

Stephen’s father died a few nights ago, and as I listen to the hissing of our heater I remember the heat in his apartment burbling like a percolator beneath the sound of muffled tears.  Both his parents were dead now. He was 27.  I sat on the couch and listened to him talk on the phone to distant half-brothers, entreating them to be his family. My heart hurt.  I wanted to bring him lasagnas or vegetable bakes, some savory comfort food as I knew he wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, was stretched out on the floor between us in a sleeping bag afraid to be left alone with his thoughts.

“How will I go on with my life, what will my life be about now?  It was all about my fathers ideas before.  I’m an artist because my father wanted to be an artist.  I called him every day.  We talked every day for hours.  Who will I call no.  Who can I call that will put up with me to that level?”

dried flowers

Noone said anything.  We made comforting murmurs.

“Why didn’t I record him. Is it stupid that I didn’t record him, that I care so much about the recording?  Is it stupid that I’m obsessed with recording him and now he’s gone?”

“No, dear, no.”

“I just feel like if I had recorded him I would have him with me still.  I grew up in the computer age, I don’t trust my memory to hold everything.  It’s not enough.  The computer holds it better and but I lost my files, I lost them before and there were some really good recordings of him in my old files.  I should have made new ones, why didn’t I? Will I always be full of regret?”

“No, you may have regrets for awhile but eventually they will heal.”

The cat dashed around our feet, a flash of black and white.  The tiles shimmered, golden-beige.  Christmas lights hung around the room over clutter and an old Dutch Masters painting that looked so much like Stephen’s dad that he had hung it over the couch.  The couch, lumpy brown leather, was Wild West themed to him.

Katie, Alex and I were seated in the narrow living room with Stephen, nursing him through the night.  The call had come abruptly, Alex and I were playing the ungame, gearing up to do some voice recording, when Stephen called.  We ran out, leaving a note for Katie when she came home from work.

I am sitting here now a few nights later, having left Alex in bed with Stephen that night, leaving them in comforting slumber party mode.  The four of us were all in bed with Stephen at one point, joking that we were the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate factory.  He needed warmth, and he needed closeness.  He’s an orphan now.

Stephen refers to Katie and I as his family.  We are like his sisters, and sometimes I feel maternally towards him.   I love having him over for dinner as he acts like a son at his mother’s table eating everything in sight and talking about how delicious it is.  I know we are not his real family, but surrogate queer families can be very strong.  I feel this now.

Now I am in bed, and it is nearly four am.  Perhaps I should not have had two cups of what seems to have been espresso strength. “Night and day are not discrete entities anymore, anyway,” as my partner remarks.

Insomnia seems to have become a constant, much like rising drenched in sweat.

I like this time of night. It is so quiet, so private.  I feel like the apartment is swathed in eiderdown and cool night winds.  This morning I thought I heard gunshots, I thought I heard one car squeal and slam into another. I chose to put my head down, and sleep.

This animalistic groping from one day to the next…

But, then again, there’s always Lana Del Rey I suppose.  I’ve listened to her, seem her performance on SNL, and my take is this: Women love to hate other women, especially pretty young ingénues who have everything they’ve ever wanted and haven’t worked very hard.  Her voice is smoky slow burn, a whiskey voice.  Her lyrics are uninspired, the musical arrangements lush and lovely.  It strikes me that in her interviews she doesn’t seem ready for the blitzkrieg of publicity that’s plastered her across every spare wall and magazine.   She stands blithering with too many eyes upon her.

But in the end, who knows if she will last?

Drops in the bucket as traffic streams outside, the night wind, the freeway past the window as I turn to sleep.

There’s a pattern here, a pattern of restless sleep, a pattern of late rising and frenetic onset of tasks.  I sort through the fog on awakening discard some things take on others. What is it today?

Last night I had some wine and spent a little too much time discussing Tupac’s “To Live and Die in LA” on facebook chat, after Stephen posted it.  The centrality of facebook chat, gchat, to communication these days.  I used to talk to people on the phone.  A rare occurrence now.

I don’t really mind, I remember being so frustrated with the single house phone in college, I’m still mystified by my iphone and all it can do.  I wake up expecting it to have done the laundry and folded it neatly, or at least provided an app whereby I can catalog housework on a leaderboard and compete with other housewives to check in at the kitchen sink.

I am content to live and die in LA.  I was born here.  Then my parents fled the traffic and smog of the seventies for San Diego, which to them seemed like paradise, and to me seemed like childhood.  The blandness of now.  In childhood there is nothing to compare anything against, there was no frame of reference, only the constant of now. I ate Popsicles, rode my bike to the library and avoided social contact.

Now, in Echo Park, against the savaged lake and the towers of downtown, I shuffle through the days.  I am preparing for a reading, turning pages, toning inflections, resisting self-consciousness.  I am watching the cat lick herself obscenely.

When we play Apples to Apples I am told I am the literalist, and that appears to be the case here.  I am drinking coffee at the kitchen table and typing about the literal minutiae of my unexciting life.

What is outside the literal? What is exciting? What am I excited about right now?  This:

1. Austra’s Lose it, from Feel It Break
2. Gin gimlets
3. An old friend coming out of a coma
4. Upcoming Rhapsodomancy reading on February 12^th
5. My nails look like a unicorn shit on them

My scrappy manicure, post-dishwashing

It’s like this messy afterbirth of emotion.  Hopefully I can dress it up and take it out of the house sometime in the next year or two.

I later had to read many instructions.  Being reckless and heedless is something I’ve had to temper.  But enthusiasm, early morning adrenalin at finally figuring things out, that’s a lovely feeling.