“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
–Joan Didion (as always, as ever)
Sitting in a café in Bankers’ Hill near the airport. Planes overhead screech so loudly it feels as though we’re being invaded, at the brink of the end of the world. The quiet in between the flights, the crisp cerulean rectangle of sky above me in this tastefully decorated courtyard. On a couch across the way, a teenager carefully applies false eyelashes as her mother types on a laptop. Hello friends. It’s been a while.
Earlier today, while slicing up a loaf of French bread for communion, I let myself cry, was glad for the time and space to do so. I didn’t know why I was crying really, though I had hypotheses: (1) Guga Paul dead because of an elective heart surgery and he was so healthy at 84, the way he scooped up the water at the beach, was so pleased to touch the Pacific for the first time, the way he held my hand in the window on the side of the road in Kakamega, looked and looked at me, gave us honey from his honeycombs for the journey out of town; (2) masked men marched into an Italian restaurant a five-minute walk from my house and handcuffed all of the workers during dinner, checked their IDs, arrested a few of them for not having papers; (3) I would like to be a rich mom but I am neither a mom nor married nor dating nor very rich; (4) last week I did battle alone with a cockroach the size of my palm that was in my sink disposal and no matter how much water I flushed into the disposal no matter how long I let the disposal run, it emerged unscathed and triumphant.
I decided to go to the protests yesterday. Ubered to my favorite downtown coffee shop, started to see white people holding posters as soon as we hit the city limits. Ended up hopping out of the Uber a few blocks away to save the driver the trouble of fighting traffic. Goldchild Coffee was full of people, the line stretching back to the bathroom. I caught Jeff’s eye as he manned the pour over station and issued quick commands to his employees. Ordered a drip coffee to save them the effort and the barista said thank you. I wandered cheerfully, slowly merging with the masses headed towards Waterfront Park. People had taken care with their signs. Artful (a hyperrealistic line drawing of Lady Liberty being tackled by ICE agents), funny (“It’s so bad even the introverts are out here!”), stalwartly straightforward (“America is a democracy! We do not want kings!”). I found friends, did the loop around with some 60,000 other San Diegans, feeling peaceful, safe, a little disappointed there wasn’t more drama. In DC, watching his own parade, I bet Don felt pretty much the same.
Of course. Work. I got eighteen cases in one week, hence the pronounced lack of Substack posts lately. For context, at one point I had eighteen cases total. “I’m going to need to change my practice,” is a sentence I’ve been uttering a lot. “I think it’s time to let the world end and call the whole thing off,” is something else I keep saying. Age mates of mine are taking vacations for months at a time, are on their third child. At the airport, I see my high school bully, still sleek and poreless. Her husband holding their Gerber baby as she zips away a compact and expensive-looking stroller.
I have had a conversation with a friend in which we discuss Carl Jung and families and alcoholism and she says it’s hard for me to find my why, I’m just waking up and going to work because that’s what people do. She wants a man because it would mean a story, a reason to be in the city that she’s in, maybe kids to love better than her parents did. She attempts to scroll the apps mindfully, she says. But deletes them when she realizes her primary feeling as she scrolls is contempt.
“The date is powerfully bad. He’s so weenily deferential, overgroomed in his little blazer with a graphic tee and matching Vans and raw selvedge denim. He has that sort of lenticular baldness where you can see the thinning patches only at an angle. Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test—what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately.” From “Pics” by Tony Tulathimutte
Another friend writes to say that he has gotten the job of his dreams. Three months later, that his contract has not been continued because he does not seem to be fully invested in the company culture. An accusation with which he agrees but also, how would they know? He feels the way he did in his twenties except now he has a professional job and a loving partner. A part of him wants to return his mother’s basement, work a dead end job, play video games and smoke weed until he dies.
Back in the city I’m on the bus and the lady ahead of me, a smiling white-haired sort, is reading an article entitled “Is Organized Religion Just Another Business?”
In the Metropolitan Correctional Center, I sit across from a man twice my age after we’ve reviewed and signed his plea agreement. He will be deported after twenty years here with no criminal history because he does not have papers. He worked in factories and farms in California and sent the money home to his siblings so they could attend college, to his parents so they could retire. He returned home to Mexico for the first time in more than a decade to hold his mother as she breathed her last. Got caught at the fence near Tecate trying to come back. He’d wanted to be an architect, a lawyer. He tells me he will pray for me every day, that God may give me wisdom as I do my best to help people, that as long as he lives, I will be in his prayers. I would like to repeat that I have done very little for him. I have timely brought him a plea agreement. When I tell my stolidly secular friend about this, he uses the word grace. What grace.
On the highway behind me I see a large black pickup truck. It is dusk, and the clouds are a Seussical pink. I am thankful for my life. Beneath the truck, an orange glow, which expands as I stare at my rearview window. Fire. Do the occupants know? The truck is too far behind me for my honking to reasonably signify anything to its driver, so I do nothing, continuing ahead. The flames begin to lick either side of the moving vehicle, which mercifully pulls over, growing smaller as I drive on. Two small shadowy figures leap out, running.
Babes wake up, a new Cross Section just dropped!!
Floored as always