i live inside my own heart, matt damon

Prince, J.Lo and my own rot era

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

hung out with a friend who was laid off this week and smoked three Capri cigarettes & drank 3.5 tequilas & ate two spicy tacos at 8:30pm resulting in such bad heartburn i went to the E.R. the next day because i thought i was having a lady heart attack — LIVING

Last week, temperatures in Los Angeles rose to 108º most days, cooling down to a brisk 85-90º at night. Even with our feeble AC croaking and cranking, it was too hot to cook, sleep or even really think. I woke up in the middle of the night in our non-air-conditioned bedroom wet with sweat, a burning sensation in my throat, the air outside smoldering, dry and somehow sharp in my lungs.

September is fire season in Southern California. It’s the worst month by far to live here. February is the best. In 12 years as a resident of the west coast coming from the east coast, I still haven’t fully accepted this. Instead, each time it happens, I experience a kind of reverse seasonal effective depression, an existential trapped feeling that’s far more suffocating than I remember from even extreme winters in Boston, Philly and NYC.

Still, even in a weather crisis like this, I struggled with what I perceive as my own “laziness,” by the fact that I didn’t want to do anything except take my kid to the movies (Beetlejuice 2 is great?) and lie on the floor next to a fan. As a lifelong restless/impatient neurotic whose identity has long been caught up in non-stop output and ever-expanding goals, I’ve been somewhat stunned by my own current lack of productivity.

The fact that I’m currently working only one job AND have yet to conjure a dozen complex personal and creative projects to breathlessly fill my calendar gaps (painting rooms, organizing closets, taking up pickling) has surfaced waves of fear, particularly around “stagnation.”

This is the prevailing wisdom, right? Stillness leads to stagnation. Stagnation leads to depression. Protestant work ethic, the foundation of capitalism, teaches us to live like sharks: if you’re not continuously, intentionally moving somewhere, anywhere, you’ll become, at the very least, dissatisfied and, ultimately, full of regret; if not dead.

can’t stop/won’t stop apparently.

Years ago, at the height of my workaholism, when my stomach was in shambles and I could barely digest a pea, an acupuncturist suggested I visit an energy healer to “energetically” “unblock” whatever was causing my gastrointestinal distress (California knows how to party, etc). Victor was a 60-year-old man with a white mullet and a bright smile who grew up in an indigenous community in Mexico and now lived with his husband in a cozy bungalow just off a main thoroughfare in Burbank. I remember little from our session — cranial sacral therapy, to be precise — and I don’t know if it did anything for my stomach, but afterwards I felt extremely relaxed in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe ever. When I mentioned this to Victor, he nodded through a plume of sage smoke and said, “Modern bodies are rarely at rest.”