I’m sitting here in a sort of delerium after ugly crying to Bridesmaids. With the recognition of how goddamn lonely I am. Usually it’s okay. The last few years have been so… intense that I had to focus on other things.
I feel like I’ve been in survival mode my entire life. Watching AHS: 1984 and thinking about how, yes that actor they got to play Richard Ramirez is gorgeous and sexy. I’d hit it.
But The reality for me as a child in San Diego in the 1980s was the feeling of constant danger. The Night Stalker was outside. Inside my childhood home were differnt dangers.
I’ve don’t remember if I ever saw a photo of the actual Ramirez. I know I could google one in seconds, but I don’t want to. I need separation between what I know as the craft and tricks and roles that CalArts trained me in with fictional performance and narrative text. Watching things for the sets and costumes may sound like reading Playboy for the articles, but it’s a real pleasure now that I’m homebound in toxic airspace.
Listening to Kesha’s Tiktok reminded me how much I did use to love dancing, partying, going out at night, all of it. Sobriety in Los Angeles pre COVID and Trump was an entirely different scene then my current house shaped masoleum. I could and did go out, drink my red bull, and have a lovely time.
This is a different phase of life.
I’m thankful for my cats, despite the gross twin on twin catcest that’s becoming a strange dynasty of identical floofs. Considering the dangers, these days, it’s probably just as well that I have a self perpetuating cat clowder.
I’m lying in my bed with Lana Del Rey on my headphones, as another day turns to dark earlier then they used to. In the, “good old days?” The thing is, my life was so examined, both by me writing about it and others reading, that I don’t have any period I could honestly say was “the good times.” Different cities, friends, jobs, music, art, performance, but there were always flies in the ointment. Or cockroaches streaming down the walls. Teetering edges of danger, finances, mental issues, addiction, grief.
That’s just how it is. I’m old enough to see how many books of my past are over. There is no going back. For the first time in a long time, however, I do feel hopeful and optimistic about 2023.
“2023, the year of me.”
“2023, l’annee de moi.”
It’s not like anyone else is around. Finally getting back on my feet physically and back to who and what I was before I made the horrible mistake of opening a dating app. Those are goals. Writing again, even though this maudlin pathetic spew is….awkward.
To show emotion is show vulnerability, weakness. Makes one open to attack. You don’t want to know how I learned that, and I don’t want to remember.
The present is safe in the dark with cats about. The past I lay down in type to lay those burdens down as well. Now I don’t have to remember. I wrote it down somewhere and may have shown in to some millions of strangers as that is what I do. Writing gives me a future of projects to look fowards to. A purpose. Nothing else has mattered more.
Andrea Lambert 