Peeking through the curtain for a peek back.

                                                                                                                                                       
When I disappear from my blog, it’s because something wonderful is happening or something terrible. Recently, I abandoned wading through my alphabet soup because both the good and bad of life took hold. Who has time for a daily A to Z post when dealing with plague, pestilence, new love, art and the muddled mindfuck of the mix?

The blogging territory is new and strange to me now that I’ve been absent from it. So I’m peeking through the curtain to see what’s out there. Whether you’re new and like things quick and dirty, or you’re a regular reader who tuned out because you weren’t into a daily A to Z post, let me catch you up with a mashup of recent Gunmetal Geisha fare:

On moving to Los Angeles for acting

Listening to the Harvard-graduated sex troll wasn’t very different than witnessing a rank guerrilla in an armchair lecturing on guerrilla mating in Oxfordian English. Somehow I didn’t find it unreasonable that beneath my baseball hat, plain-Jane hair and unmade-up face, I must have harnessed some potent goddess appeal that his savvy dick-pendulum was able to detect. (Itemizing One Actor’s Road to Hollywood)

A few weeks after my move to Los Angeles, I was reading on the couch when my eyes caught the turquoise vase across the room. It had hopped microscopically. Right then, I perceived the rumble through the house and figured my neighbor’s washer was on spin. But when the couch jerked me side to side, I squealed in delight: I was in the middle of my first earthquake!

There wasn’t a real shaking to it, more a disruption in everything’s equilibrium as if it was all straining to keep together. The violence was in the unnaturalness of objects appearing to work to keep whole, rather than any splitting of the earth.

I had designed my life to be a permanent quake. For me, that which stood still was a reason to run. When I was in New York, I longed to be in Los Angeles, and when I was back, I planned my next trip out. But through the years, the forces that yanked me to and fro eased up gradually and bicoastal me gave into monocoastal peace. (Quake)

On having been a juvenile delinquent

The guy from the nightclub tossed a handful of blue pills down his throat along with a shot of whiskey. Within three minutes, he was on the floor, tear-smeared and passed out, and I was stuck without a ride back to the city. So like a good brat, I left the apartment and asked around for the nearest police station. Then I walked to it with the intention of getting the cops to drive me back to New York. But since I was a kidnap victim, a minor, or both, it turned out they could neither give me a ride nor release me. (The Jail Incident)

The silver fox police chief of the Lyndhurst station let fifteen-year-old me sit in his office while we told each other about our hopes and fears. We became such buds that when I pointed to the locked glass case on his wall containing a gun collection, he unlocked it and let me handle an unloaded .38 Special. (My Five Encounters With Guns)

On danger and adventure

As far as my body was concerned, finding itself midair attached to nothing—except the giant man strapped to my back who was also attached to nothing—felt like a most unnatural and desecrating act perpetrated against it. (Flight)

The man on the bicycle, whose helmet shone a spotlight on me, could’ve been a concerned passerby or nighttime killer. The sadistic gods held their breaths as I reached for the door handle. You might ask why I would reach for it, and as I opened my car door to the melodic creaking of no return, I asked it of myself. (Mulholland Jesus)

On social media

Long before the digital age did away with our former notion of privacy, I was a babbler. So as far as I’m concerned, life reduced to 1’s and 0’s is the best gift to come out of my generation. Now I get to hide behind the world’s Instagrammed poolside toes at the rate of thousands per second while adding my own. Mine is a human disease to which few are immune. Maybe we think if we convince others that we enjoy life, we become better convinced ourselves. But imagine if one-upmanship didn’t exist: The power-hungry would cease their greed and manipulation, and duck faces would be relegated to feathery creatures with bills.

On love

Non-liars are the gold-standard of humanity. But I’m thankful for both my good and bad exes. The good ones made me a better partner, and ditching the bad ones made me available for someone good.

His Valentine’s gift to me was a flock of wild green parrots appropriating the skies of east Los Angeles.

I had pointed to a massive flock of birds — the ordinary sort you’d expect in a city sky — mid-flight in formation. I was mesmerized as their undersides glowed white when the low sun hit their angling turns. It was then that my love brought up the wild parrots of the Eastside for the first time. My head filled with fantasies of forging to the artsy east in search of the emerald flock.

Once on a glorious path of bizarre gifts, fascination flutters around you like a flock of urban parrots. It probably always did, but now you’re an awake witness. (Oxygen)

When you fall in love, life is a theme-park ride with pretty props and clever animatronics staged for the benefit of the two of you. Being in love means, when you breathe next to his/her skin, you get high. This is a fact. It’s ascribed to the happy-making dopamine produced by your brain. I’m no stranger to euphoria, induced or natural, so I’m quick to identify it.

“You could wake up to the same view of the sea for the rest of your life and never tire of it,” I said. We left the sand for the narrow cement path. There we encountered a cluster of hula-hooping Burning Man types. A beautiful girl with blonde dreds, sparkling eyes and a bikini top handed me a hula-hoop. She was a hipster faerie.

I was hopeless at the hula-hoop, so I handed it to the dapper, exceptionally tall man. In his velvet jacket, he demonstrated a perfect execution while the hipster faerie operated psychedelic light patterns on it by remote control. The hoop went around and around his hips, firing off colors into the night. (The Play by Play)
 

Cathartic Monkeyism

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