This Isn't About Anything

Phony owner-move-in-evictions; death trips; trees; Ducks, Newburyport

My period is five days late. I’m perimenopausal and wonder if it will come at all. Sometimes it doesn’t. The shitty part is, you still get PMS, or so it seems. Last night, sprawled in my bed watching Shadow and Bone, I had gabbed my phone to check for a text, and accidentally opened up the news, and caught a headline and started crying. I don’t even remember what the headline was, just that it struck me with the reality of utter loneliness that so many people experience, that seems to be a core facet of the human experience, and I felt sad for everyone and burst into tears. It all happened in the course of a second. I wonder if feeling sad for all the lonely people is a particularly Aquarian way to not feel sad about my own human loneliness. This is shaping up to be quite a chipper Substack, no?

It’s quite strange that I’m watching this, but I’m into it.

This morning, reading my stacks of books on the couch with my coffee my favorite part of every day, the cat sprawled out next to me, he having given up on getting pets what with my hands so occupied with books and coffee, having already rubbed his face all over today’s main book - Ducks, Nerburyport by Lucy Ellman - it’s his, now. I’ve been reading Ducks, Newburyport for years now, since before Covid, when I lived at my other house, before the lying owner-move-in-evictors evicted us and resold the place. It was such a great place. In Eagle Rock, tons of roses and lantana and wisteria, the wisteria so old that in some places the vine was as thick as the trunk of a tree, and a fucking pool in the back, with a little pool house, and it was rent-controlled, too. Then these jerks bought it, a man and his wife and their little girl and their chubby old dog. They kicked the downstairs tenants out straightaway whivh was a tragedy, I loved them, a sensitive straight couple, both folk musicians and beautiful. The boy would do flips into the pool to thrill my kid. They gave me the Motherpeace deck for Christmas once, we would sit each other’s cats. Their Christmas tree was decorated solely in pink deer and Virgin of Guadalupe ornaments. I forgot to return their extra set of keys and still use their keychain, a rough quartz crystal, as my own. I felt like me were living some sort of benevolent, California dream and then these jerks came in and ruined it.

First the wife, who was sickly or had sleep problems, was kept awake by my cats chasing each other through the house, and kept wanting me to do something about it. Do what? They are cats. They were extra outraged that I was not supposed to have cats at all, but what could they do? Evict me? Har. Meanwhile, their aged dog left enormous turds all around the pool and I would ask them to please pick them up and could their mom not chain-smoke by the pool with the kids? At this point I’m just being a bitch, I suppose. They had deeemd the pool house, where I had once housed overnight guests, off-limits, it was theirs, now. They told me they didn’t want ‘strangers’ - my friends - on the property. Straight people, am I right? The wife’s father was a monster, and I spent one morning lying in bed listening to him berate either his wife or daughter. I wondered if I should intervene, he sounded terrible, and it hurt my psyche to be in such close proximity to the sound of him. I suppose I should just feel bad for the wife, but she would harass my friend Deez when she cat-sat for me, phoning her moments after she arrived home from work to please take her shoes off. But Deez is an Aries Armenian Witch and after that would of course stomp around the house for a bit before kicking her heels off in front of the television. Do we all make out own hells or what?

I should mention they made quick work of digging up the old, generous avocado tree, and the orange and lemon trees, and the loquat tree, and even the spindly cumquat trees, to plant these anemic, identical olive trees in their place alongside the pool.

The mutual hostility came to a head when I was away in Mexico in the summertime, and Deez was cat-sitting, and she invited friends over to swim in the pool, and the new landlords could not believe that THEIR PROPERTY was filled with a bunch of femmes and trans guys and gender-non-conforming hooligans. Though Deez was literally right in front of him, floating on a giant pizza slice floatie, he decided to send her a fleet of texts telling her they all had to go. When she didn’t respond - because she was floating before him - he began texting me in Mexico to solve this problem. He was extra upset because he had heard a queer swimmer ask if a friend-of-a-friend could join, and Deez had said yes, and this outraged him - She doesn’t even know this person! I tried to explain to him that queer people in fact all know each other, even when they don’t, and what he was seeing was queer family in action, and I just kept saying queer queer queer as much as possible so that he would get the sense that maybe his horror at this pool party had something to do with him being a homophobic jerk in addition to a house-flipping, gentrifying jerk (I mean, to take a rent-controlled property off the market? How does one live with oneself?). And he did relent and said they could stay in the pool. We were to be gone in a couple weeks, anyway. We’d been paid out for the eviction, as was the law. When he was going over the amount with us he’d mentioned how it was higher if the tenants were low-income, but we weren’t low-income, because we always paid our rent on time. Can you even? I’d never been so happy to be low-income.

Anyway, I remember being very connected to the notion that renters never ‘have’ a home - we always have someone else’s home, and its at their mercy we exist there. To never, psychically, ‘have a home’ is a certain thing, it creates a background noise, one of the subtle strands of life-anxiety that comprise constant, low-level hum. I love the home I rent right now so much, it’s even better than the one with a pool, though I of course miss the pool and I miss the wisteria and all the flowers I used in magic spells, I’d really bonded with them. But in this house I have a giant palm in the middle of the front yard. and an octopus tree and mulberry tree from the neighbors grow over into our space, and the punk tree beside them all come together to make a little habitat for hummingbirds and squirrels and possums and raccoons and it has its own magic energy. The ginormous Camphor tree on the corner is part of this tree-neighborhood, it’s the same type of tree Totoro lives in and when I was nearly psychedelic from grief during my divorce I would sit on my porch at night smoking watching how the streetlights illuminated the edges of the dark leaves, and how it looked backlit and majestic.

Sometimes huge, dead branches of frond fall from the palm, and when my son was younger he liked to lift them up and mark around the yard with them. The first one he discovered he named Jeffrey, and then there was Jeffrey 2.0, and onward, until we’ve lost count and they are all just ‘Jeffreys’. After the recent storm that wasn’t a big deal at all, and I fell for it, went out and bought flashlights and gallons of water and batteries, and all that happened was a Jeffrey was knocked from the palm, and also, a squirrels’ dray. That was excited. It was woven loosely with strips of bark, like the squirrel had peeled and peeled these strips, or maybe they’d been leaves? It was hard to tell, it was clearly old, and woven into it all was a dog toy, a long stuffed zebra. It made me think of a couple Halloweens ago when I had wound all the pink flamingos we’d put on the lawn for my husband’s birthday with gauzey black material, shrouds, flamingos in mourning, and one morning I caught a squirrel removing it, really working at it, succeeding, balling it up and dashing up the tree.

The palm is also special because it has these indentations that look just like eyes, and beneath it a sort of lumpy growth that looks like a nose, and beneath that a dense scramble of old, dead roots that look like a beard. It’s clearly inhabited by spirit, and I think the house may be as well, a benevolent one. The house has two stories and I never in my life lived in a two-story house and find that it beats a house with a pool. If not for this house I would have never been able to rescue my mother from horrid Florida during the height of Covid.

Oh! My mother has finally gotten Covid! I’m very proud of her, not for falling ill but because she took a trip to Boston all by herself. She’s not terribly independent - she’s just not confident, the world befuddles her, she gets afraid she might not know how to do something and then the featr makes itself real. Plus she’s had health problems, mobility issues, and walks with a cane, often having to pause as pain washes over her. Would she be okay all by herself in Boston? Her good friend is in hospice and she wanted, essentially, to say goodbye. And my deceased grandfather’s girlfriend, also a friend, is quite old and there are only so many times she can fall to the ground in a heartatack and be revived, and so she wanted to say a goodbye to her as well. And a goodbye to the places of her youth, to the Atlantic Ocean and the particular places that sell amazing roast beef sandwiches at its shore. She was hesitant to go and had a sort of bad feeling about it, but she is a Scorpio, and anxious, and going essentially on a death-trip, so why wouldn’t it be accompanied by some dark vibes? Even the money she used to travel was laced with death; she’d confessed she’d been saving up a fund for when she died, so my sister and I won’t have to pay for her cremation. I was aghast! I mean, I was psyched that my mother, astrologically predisposed to be bad with money (moon opposite Venus), had managed to save some cash, but I wanted her to spend it on her life, not her death. In my family, the economic hit of death has occasionally hit hard, with a deceased member waiting a long time for a headstone and whatnot, but my mother was convinced to take her cash and go to Boston, and I am very, very proud that she did it. She now needs a bit of a lighter, mouth-wash-trip, perhaps to Las Vegas or a Disney Cruise. Anyway. She got Covid on her trip, and it is absolutely the very best time to get Covid, is it not? She got Paxlovid and had a negative test in five days. We lived through the early part of the pandemic terrified about her getting sick, with her COPD and her smoking, but now she smokes no more, and we have vaccines, and she didn’t even have to go to the hospital, just stayed in her little room going stir-crazy while I left her brownie bites and cups of tea on a little table outside her door.

Anyway. What is this post even about? I haven’t written here in so long, and it’s anxiety about that that made me sit down to write, more than having something particular to say. I had nothing particular to say but, evidently, many non-particular things to say. I started talking about Duck, Newburyport, which is a thousand-page single sentence tracing the train of thought of a mother who bakes for money in her home in Ohio during the Trump presidency. I got it at a book convention I’d been sent to by my publisher to promote a new book to the bookstore folks in attendance. I love going to these things because I like to get a lot of free books, even though authors are very stingy with them unless you’re going to make something happen for them. I think I have probably embarrassed myself with other authors, going up to them at their little tables and offering to trade books. That look, like, Why do you think I want your book? But I wanted their book! And I got them. Ducks, Newburyport was actually in a giant pile on a table in a room filled with tables heaped with books. It was the last day and no one wanted to lug them home. “THE BOOK AMERICA WOULDN’T PUBLISH” the front cover read, like, whoa. ‘Moby Dick in the kitchen',’ it also said. It’s like as if the running tape of thought that goes through all our heads over the course of a day with all it’s fleeting blips and one thought triggering another and so much of it utter garbage, babble, and then, a real memory, a true feeling. I think it’s a masterpiece. I hope to keep reading it for many years, ideally in this house, where I want to stay forever. My child loves this house. When I go to remember a childhood home, in that way, I don’t have one, because we moved so much, owner-move-ins and whatnot, divorce, moving in with grandparents, upgrading, falling out with a landlord who was once a friend, on it goes. The idea of a childhood home feels like something lifted from literature to me, like summer camp. A sort of classic, wholesome experience. But also. Isn’t moving the worst? And here I can walk to three grocery stores, three movie theaters, two malls, four nail salons, a Goodwill, three coffee shops (none good for writing in, though), one great breakfast spot, one great diner, a Nordstrom rack - it’s more than I ever could have hoped for, as a person who does not drive a car in Los Angeles. My plan, should it ever go on the market, is to beg and beg and beg someone with the ability to buy it to buy it and be my landlord. I’m in it right now, at my desk before a window that shows me the palm tree and the camphor tree, and elderly ladies with good fashion strolling home from shopping, and young women with their hair piled on their head with giant scrunchies walking their dogs. Okay, I think this is is. I have more to say, about how I probably tortured my ex with tidbits from Ducks, Newburyport, and how part of being in a long term relationship is being interested in your partner’s interests, but sometimes you’re not, maybe even often, and you either fake it or reach deeper and cultivate a newer level of appreciation for it and them, but this is work, and maybe the faking of interest in things such as your wife’s obsession with a thousand-page run-on sentence accumulates after a while and that’s divorce. I was also going to talk about this other part of the book that is a story of a mountain lion and her cubs, and how Lucy Ellman says that’s the real story of the book, and what does she mean by that, because I’m very attached to the human narrator, and how it made me think about Open Throat, this very good, very slender book from the perspective of a mountain lion in Griffith Park here in Los Angeles, that should absolutely be on of those One-City-One-Book things, and how this book I’m publishing on DOPAMINE, New Mistakes by Clement Goldberg, is filled with the perspectives - often snarky - of plants, and how it all has me thinking about the narratives of the non-human. In my recent writing workshop a writer shared the perspective of a rifle. If I was going to write a book from the POV of a non-human entity, what would it be? Okay I really ought to go, now. This morning Laurie Stone, whose substack I really enjoy, posted about a reader leaving because she thinks Laurie posts too much, and I thought how I’m afraid you’ll leave because I post too little, and it got me up here typing even though I should probably be working on my book that is due next month, or baking the vegan, gluten-free cookies I want to serve at the book party for the paperback of Knocking Myself Up tonight at North Figueroa Books. I’m going to be in conversation with Tara Jepsen and Harris Kornstein, who were my original knock-me-up-team when I decided I wanted to try to get pregnant. Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is moderating, because she is smart and a mom and a big personality who I believe can corral all us big personalities, stop by if you’re local. Maybe they have a copy of Ducks, Newburyport.