the Hottest Damn of all

The feeling of bricks under my fingertips seems to be the most visceral experience open to me today. In a lifetime of unrestrained tactility, I can't tell you how many times I've traced the sides of my house, tousling ivy or tumbling into mortar seams.

I've been sitting on the front porch for days, reading mystery novels and photo books. Being present means being tactile: I test my weight against the pillow at my back, and stretch my toes along the twisted vines and flowers on my lovechair's arm -- I am here I am here Iamhere.

But soon: Away.

Oh, child: my cuticles can't handle another move. I swear to you that I will relearn to bite my fingernails, and wake up each morning with my fingers in my teeth, enamel to keratin, gnaw gnaw gnaw.

(Just kidding. That's gross.)

And let the guffaws bubble forth like methane from the tar pits. Peanut gallery: withhold all condemnation until the brilliance of the punnery dazzles your senses like magnesium flash powder in a basement bar. Yar har, yar har har, and so on and so forth.

I have been audacious LAcious for a month and a half now, and I have the worst tan and I've made two friends. Two! Admittedly, one of those friends might have put her hand on my thigh and commented on the length of my legs less than a week ago, but I still consider it a feat.

But yes, pout city (population: me). I'm getting tired of this relentless sunnery, truth be told.

Today, while cleaning, I found some scribbled notes from my first few weeks in LA.

From the plane trip:

...rested her feet along the side of the plane and on the back of my arm rest, the cuticles pulling from her toenails like paint peeling from an old weathered wall. What fresh hell is that? But still we sally forth. So excited about seeing the Sonora Desert...

On driving on the 405 with my father:

...cars ducking and weaving like Cassius Clay in his glory days. A white LA county van says: "don't abandon your babies."

A festival in Palm Springs:

A man is singing songs from a dog's perspective (including fart references. Yes.) Gothic militant highlanders: electric cellos and grunting. Tanned and privileged children fellating frozen bananas (gross). But with the mountains in the back! Beautiful.

I had forgotten, since arriving, that the woman sitting behind me on the airplane to Calgary was resting her bare feet on the back of my arm rest. How unnervingly gross! But I am happy to remember the Sonora Desert, and the grapefruit that I consumed there (so fresh and heavy that it dripped juice through my fingers and onto the sand.)

1. [Referring to a fibrous plant growing near my parent's Camry]: "You just whack off a bit and put it in soup and it tastes like celery."
2. [Related: referring to a dandelion]: "Just whack this off, right here."
   
3. [Referring to a half-finished home improvement project to remove the clothes-line pole at the end of the yard]: "I want to get ride of the pole. I don't like the pole and the hole."
4. [Discussing the evening's activities on the phone]: "Emily's just pulling up her pants so she won't have plumber's crack. I'll get her so you can talk to her."

Admittedly, the final point was neither innuendo nor unintentional, but it was still illustrative of just what it means to garden with my mother.

All these things you told me to expect are so unexpected. And yet and yet and yet.

As of today I'm extending my temporal belt. Tell me that I can think of tomorrow, and not forget twenty years from now. Part of being impulsive is recognizing the things you regret doing tomorrow are the things you regret not doing years and years and years from now.

Is this logical?

I'm nauseous. No, nauseated. But nauseated does not describe just how nauseous I feel right now. But hey, some tincture and I'm cured; inured.

I need a safe place, the geographical equivalent of a nap. Or maybe, an anthropomorphic snooze. Did I tell you that I had a nightmare two nights ago? That I feel asleep and dreamed I was caught in the crossfire in my childhood bedroom, hostage to those who tended to entropy like RC. The walls were punched tin like a Mexican lantern, and the light came in and there were so many bullets and I've never seen bullets so they were bullets like only the blind can describe: terrifying.

 

Resin coated (RC) photographic papers have an inherent vice: titanium dioxide. This artificial brightener will make your whites pop, yes, but when exposed to UV light it oxidizes into a singlet oxygen, which, went not dispersed, will lead to crazing of the photographic emulsion, yellowing of highlight areas, redox, and silver mirroring.

When you're in the permanence business, maintaining non-archival quality photographic prints is a challenge. But then, not even the Twinkie is built to last forever. All things tend towards entropy; each object has its own downfall built into the very materiality that makes it it.

Dig?

To keep your RC print forever, please put it inside an archival (inert) paper envelope (mylar will do in a pinch) place it in a neutracor box, and put that box on some coated metal shelving. Relative humidity, at its highest, should not exceed 50%; 30-40% is best. Keep it in cool storage if you want it to last an eon, and cold for forever less a few years (give or take).

Friends: do you get that this is a parable? A story? Allegory?

I'm not meant for this permanence business. I read about cold storage, and sometimes I feel like I'm caught in a four-flap envelope with an accession number pencilled in on a toe-tag at my feet, locked in a drawer.

My advice for preservationists everywhere: let your collections breathe! Please let the art out of the box and into the street, the protective tissue strewn like ticker tape and all of your assumptions about what future generations can or want to know about us and how they'll learn it out an open window, aloft on a breeze with your thrice-filtered air.

Today

Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still make a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

-- Frank O'Hara

Dear aspiring photo preservationists and archivists: the things that have meaning are as strong as rocks, are with us every day and not in banker's boxes.

Being in cold storage is bad for your soul.

I know that it's arrogant to believe that the world will end in your lifetime, but there are times when I believe that the world will end, and with me only in my twenties.

Hubris aside, certain things should and do often end in the early twenties. Like blogs.

So consider me retired. Or: as good as.

When you never hear from me again, chalk it up as a symptom of my growing distrust of a networked world, or a direct result of me being murdered by the world of pain that is the downstairs neighbours.

Blogosphere, I am out of anecdotes and adjectives. Lil Wayne says shorty wanna thug, but this shorty wanna hug. But this hug oughta be analog, and off-line.

Important date: May 28th. It's the anniversary of my foray into the adult world!

In my last year of university, a prof kindly admonished a mixed group of graduate and undergraduate students to just be nice. His point was timely: as undergraduates we had spent four years learning to be hyper-critical, and we only had months to learn to behave before us tomcats were herded into the real world where we would be expected to behave like tame tabbies. 

This post isn't an allegory; it's a trip-trope! Ladies, recognize the distance all us girls will go to escape the boys we cannot date. To illustrate: on Valentine's Day, 2004, I bussed to Halifax and left a lovelorn boy hella-fucked. 

That year I was moody and introspective, such an undergrad. Typically, I wondered: is this liminal? A space between two places, and all us bus-bound linked without critical distance. Minimally liminal, but yes nonetheless. 

True, this isn't a classic missed connection. I made mine: Montreal, Moncton, Amherst, all. I fell asleep at midnight in Riviere du Loup and awoke hours later to a French boy with chapped lips asking me for a coffee date as we idled at a truck stop. It was daytime then, and New Brunswick. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom instead, and wrinkled my nose at a fellow passenger. "Milk run," she mouthed, and dashed. 

This I miss: that sense of adventure. Trip-tropes don’t exist for working stiffs, and when they do the trip’s eclipsed. All final destination, eliding and eluding truck stops, no more napping in naugahyde terminals, or long lineups of smokers beneath broad bus windows. While I'm inclined to romanticize, these days I always decide to fly.