My New Year Resolution for 2026 is going to less typos. But it’s still 2025, so anything can happen. The amount of typos I launch into text message has been alarming me lately. Partly it’s because I’m typing wicked fast, not looking at what comes out, and hitting send. Two evenings ago I was typing to one of my group chats and I did look down before I sent it. What I saw was startling. My fumbly fingers and/or autocorrect conspired with the Goddess to create the message: Vance. Hekate.
I was in Downtown LA because I had tickets to see the new documentary about Sean DeLear. I’m currently reading his diary, I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear, which Semiotext(e) published a couple years ago, so lots of you have already read it, but also lots of you maybe never have heard of Sean DeLear, so I’ll keep going. Black, queer, punk, post-punk, a queen, a musician, a fashion person. Yoko Ono was a fan - I’ll leave it at that. I was excited to match the horny, creative, pretty hilarious and deeply bold teenager I’m getting to know in I Could Not Believe It with the adult who was a living example of the truth that sometimes your life is your biggest art, your participation in a scene one of your purposes. I could not find anyone to go with me to this amazing movie - my husband had a big work interview the next morning, and the screening was more than a movie, it was also a reunion of the band Imperial Teen and Kid Congo was going to DJ and there was a suspicion that the whole thing could evolve into a dance party, so who knew how late it would go. Tara had to work and Harris was exhausted after apartment-hunting all day. Bree already had something fun to go to and Clement was over-socialized (June is a hard month for queer introverts). Saskia’s stepchild was graduating and Nicole was working on a book deadline. Me, too, but that didn’t stop me from taking a one-hour bus ride downtown.
I love riding the bus. Sometimes it feels overwhelming how much time it can take to get somewhere by bus in Los Angeles. I look at my phone app and am like - 61 minutes! But then I remember it’s 61 minutes spent reading Didion & Babitz, which I just nabbed from the Glendale Public Library. I felt such affection for the library, with all their signs about freedom to read and classes to help folks attain citizenship. And there was this book right there, so I’m reading it. My thoughts:
- I feel like the author is super condescending to Eve, even as she professes to love her. It’s a low-key negging energy. I detect in the voice of the author a deep belief in ‘success’ and ‘failure,’ which mucks the read up for me some.
- Eve really couldn’t write without spiraling into tangents and digressions, and she knew this about herself. I already suspected she was a chosen ancestor and now I’ll be putting her picture on my chosen ancestor wall.
- Eve got sober at the Rodeo Drive AA meeting in Beverly Hills, which I know about from my brief friendship with Kate Braverman, who spoke about it like a sort of country club.
- Eve was friends with Joshua John Miller, my favorite 1980s child actor in two of my favorite films, River’s Edge (‘Get your nunchuks and your dad’s car. I know where we can get a gun.’) and Near Dark, where he plays a ten-year-old vampire who’s really like 100 years old (‘You have any idea what it’s like to be a big man on the inside and have a small body on the outside?’) Of course this toxic little genius is queer in real life, and now a horror writer and director, and former Friend of Eve. So happy I had a reason to rabbit-hole him. I feel like I solved a mystery or something.
Anyway, yes, reading on the bus is great. Also, sitting in front of a queen who was having a sad breakup on the telephone was, well, sad, but also fascinating. At least I thought he was on the phone. When I got off the bus I turned to peek at who it was I’d been eavesdropping on, and it was, of course, an adorable fag, but sitting with him was his soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend! I did not hear the STBEB speak once the whole ride. Was he miming? Mouthing? Just rolling his eyes? The only actual story that makes sense is that he is deaf and was signing, and the other guy was also signing, but talking as well. There, that’s two mysteries I’ve solved today.
On the bus downtown I saw all the graffiti that had been on the news and posted over and over on the internet. The streets were pretty empty. There was a guy taking pictures of the graffiti, which I sort of wanted to do too, and when I got off the bus I did make a video of the epic BLAME TRUMP painted on the side of a wall, and took snapshots of every little protest-related tag I spotted on the buildings I passed. I passed a guy maybe in his late teens, early 20s, with fuscia hair, having a slap fight with a phantom. I passed a little clutch of masked kids in black on scooters and bikes, flying the Mexican flag.
When I got to Main Street, where the Sean DeLear doc was playing, there was a huge crowd of people outside and figured they hadn’t opened the doors yet. A sort of rocker girl with tattoos and a shag saw me looking and said, “It’s canceled. There’s a curfew.”
What?
“The mayor called a curfew. Eight o’clock.” She shrugged sadly.
Noooooo.
I crossed the street and approached the crowd outside the theater, thinking I might see Hedi from Semiotext(e), forgetting he’s out of town. I saw Steven, who told me about how he’d saved a bunch of Anais Nin’s papers from being burned in the fires, insiting to her family that the storage unit, located in a field in Malibu (that sounds sort of romantic) was in danger if a wildfire were to erupt. The were moved, and then, yes, a wildfire erupted, and the field in Malibu was burned, and we would have lost Anais Nin’s actual, original diaries if Steven hadn’t advocated for them in this way, so thank you Steven! Steven was talking to two very cute and stylish gays, Tyrone and another whose name I have forgotten, which is tragic, because he had very close-cropped, very bright red hair and wore an intricate, heavy silver chain necklace and a little black mesh shirt and absolutely would not discuss astrology, and I liked him a lot. Tyrone wore this blue button-up that had a patch of, like, animals from a children’s book or a circus or something. He told me he works at the National Center for Lesbian Rights and I told him how during the first round of you-know-who I had called their office, the day after election day, right after the high school near my home staged a giant walk-out, in the din of their chanting I called to see if they thought I might have to adopt my sun, who grew in my uterus but possessed none of my DNA. They didn’t think so, thank god, because that is exactly the kind of high-stakes, life-or-death chore I would have procrastinated on forever.
Right about then an inmate transport bus, long and sleek, new-looking, cruised by, and everyone immediately stop talking and spontaneously began to boo and flip it the bird. I worried that the folks inside would think we were booing and flipping off them, but hopefully we were all on the same page. Then we turned back to one another, and each saw ourself in the eyes of whoever we were talking to or looking at, and there was a sense of being together and existing in a weird and terrible time. I saw Darin, and Chelsea, who has been in the US from Australia for five weeks and is feeling really homesick. “There’s no guns there,” she said. I said I couldn’t imagine. I saw Romy, who would be on her way to Australia shortly, and Chelsea begged to be stuffed in her suitcase. I saw Will, who pulled to the curb in his car with Jone Stebbins in the passenger seat and we spoke regretfully about how there would be no Imperial Teen show. A woman asked for a dollar, and then a couple of teenagers asked for a quarter. What is even a quarter? I guess they were short. I saw Steak and learned the crowd was relocating to a bar elsewhere, and while I liked that an impromptu thing had sprung up, I had left my child at home with his step-father and grandmother, and though he was adequately attended to I don’t like to be away from him when he’s at my house, I’d made an exception for Sean DeLear.
I walked down the street to the bus stop. Looking up 5th I saw a glimpse of a small but loud protest, saw an American flag, lots of black clothes. The bus stop was in front of an abandoned storefront, and I leaned against a railing and watched a car drive by, two adults hanging out the window, sitting in the window like a little seat, holding a giant, fluttering Mexican flag. Another car stopped at the red light and a little kid, like five years old, popped out of the sunroof holding a magic marker sign reading FUCK ICE. I waved at him. Nearby a couple of girls in their 20s, with long extensions and short skirts, sat on busted, abandoned office chairs and drank from paper cups. They were with a couple of guy who teased them lightly, and they all laughed together, eventually leaving, rolling their busted office chairs down the street. A woman holding six plastic grocery bags in her hands, plus a balloon, dropped something, and bent and gathered it back up without dropping anything else. You got that? I asked. She smiled and told me she liked my hair.
An army-green tank towing a small flatbed stuffed with luggage rolled by and I caught my breath. It was followed by a sand-colored truck. Then another big, tanky green flatbed, and then some sort of jeep with a massive hood and a little bed. Then another tank, green, and then another tank, sand. And another green tank. And another. And another. It’s an uncanny thing to be in the midst of the news cycle you’ve been watching. The cruelty of the vehicles was palpable, they had a menacing energy, and I was shook enough at the sight of them to cry a little. I had only that day watched a video of a man crying, really crying, his face red, his gestures one of anxious helplessness, as ICE loaded his wife into some sort of claustrophobic looking van - it looked like a van-sized vehicle partitioned down the center, and the masked, anonymous ICE officers were trying to shove her into what looked like a tight squeeze, a dark, little hallyway, and she wasn’t resisting as much as having a panic attack and yelling to her husband, “Honey, I’m having a panic attack.” They have seven kids and had shown up at court for something, and the charges had been thrown out but ICE was there to arrest her. The way the husband spoke of it it sounded like there had been a few court cases, all tossed out, all the defendants kidnapped by ICE.
I hate that people are afraid to go to graduations in Los Angeles, for fear of ICE. That such a sweet celebration as a graduation, both aspirational and triumphant, would be impeded like that. The university my husband just got his PhD from, Alliant, has a ton of ]students from immigrant families, and their presence at the ceremony - this one, and when he got his masters, too - was so joyful and raucous and proud. So many things are being stolen from immigrant people right now. The thought of people having to hide in their houses. I just read about how the YMCA is making deliveries to people afraid to leave their houses because of their documentation status. Here’s a list of LA organizations helping immigrants right now.
The bus came but it was being rerouted. The driver motioned me to run across the street and then across the street and down the block. At least I thought that’s what he was motioning; my sunglasses are an old prescription and serve me less and less each day. Last week I mistook ‘pomo’ for ‘porno’ in a text from my meditation teacher. I have not heard from him since; I hope we’re good. The bus stopped for me. “Do you know what’s happening down here?” the driver asked in an accusational tone. The bus was empty. The curfew would start in about 20 minutes. Nearby was a protest, but I hadn’t know about it. That there was something larger, more organized. Soon Harris sent a picture to the group chat of a bunch of people holding signs before a wall of National Guard. The aesthetic of fascism, or war, the military - anonymous, muted color, bulky, stern. The men looked like the vehicles looked like the men.
I chatted with the bus driver. It felt sort of VIP to be the only person on the bus. He wasn’t down with ICE, of course, but why were protesters burning American flags? They’re angry, I said. I’ve been defending the free speech of flag burning since I was a teenager in the 80s, when Gregory Lee Johnson set one aflame at the Republican Convention in Texas, getting it into the courts and making it safe and legal to set a flag on fire if one wishes to communicate their anger in such a way. It makes a powerful statement - look, here I am, talking to a stranger about it. Latino people have been being portrayed as rapists and murders, the worst of the worst, for coming up on a decade now, I elaborted. People are being kidnapped. Also, that thing where like something gets destroyed - a flag, a window - and that becomes the primary upset, not the actual human lives that are getting destroyed. What is that. Also, California is Mexico. Like, why isn’t it? Because some guys had a fight. The driver laughed and nodded, sort of delighted. Just trying to be of service, one radicalized LA transit worker at a time. Eventually I sat in the center of the empty bus and took out my phone. The bus was one of those buses that are totally wrapped in an advertisement for something, so the windows are like a perforated mesh and the bus is very dark as a result. I kept thinking we were in a tunnel but we kept not leaving it. I texted my chat about what I saw. And I looked down at my phone before I hit send and I saw: Vance. Hekate
Hekate, the Queen of the Witches, is a deity I have pledged myself to many times, in many eras. She is all the femme energy wrapped up in one, the free slutty party energy and the nurturing big heart love momma energy and the knowledge of death and cycles crone energy, she’s it, she’s the whole enchilada. I’ve had candles carved for her. I’ve done ‘What Deity Is Trying To Communicate With You’ tarot spreads, and and Hekate comes up. And then my lover at the time did the same spread and also got Hekate. Recently I pledged myself to her again. But I hadn’t been texting about her, and I hadn’t been texting about Vance, and this was weird. However, the Divine often communicates with me through my my phone, and I knew this was a call from Hekate to enact a binding spell against the vice-president. I’ve only ever done two binding spells, one against an ex-lover’s ex-girlfriend, after which me and the lover broke up, so it was very effective, just not how I planned. Another time I did a binding spell against the proud boys and their hangers-on, to not show up and ruin a very modest and tender tiny gay pride march near my home. The proud boys had been around my home a lot around then, but that day they did not show up. Am I so powerful? Maybe, who knows? I’ll do the spell. When the Queen of the Witches texts I do not leave her on read.
What do you think this car runs on, god's own methane?
There has always been a powerful energy around you. ❤️