Brooklyn, September 7, 2022
Bad dreams about all my dead dogs, LA apocalypse, underutilized alfresco options, Lynch is a foreigner
My best friend, a true LA native (also half Mexican and could fool anyone she’s a chola if she pulls out the kohl liner and hairspray until she opens her mouth and spooks you with a vaguely old-fashioned mid-Atlantic drawl she picked up while studying theatre) texted me late into the night about how she’s sequestered every living thing in her apartment into her bedroom where there is some kind of air conditioner. “87 percent humidity and over 100 degrees” she said, alongside the most defeated-sounding unpunctuated string of words about how awful it is. In my mind’s eye, the city that I can most realistically picture burning away, Terminator 2 style, or imagine slowly drying up and crumbling in the most desolate and cruel way, Cormac McCarthy style, is Los Angeles. My beloved Los Angeles, where I did so much of my growing up. Something about hearing about this on the other coast, here in Brooklyn - where the breeze has cooled and the appeal of fairy light lit alfresco has taken shape - makes me feel guilty. We had rain for a couple days, and it was the kind of rain that I love the most: torrential, big fat singular drops committed to ruining Labor Day bbqs. This kind of rain takes up space, aggressively decides the day for me, and I thank you rain, for making it about you. I am very sensitive to the pressure before a good downpour and so my body hurt a little bit, I got headaches and kept dreaming about dogs, including dogs I used to own as a kid. Just ghosts of all my dead dogs crying in cold and dense forests that I kept stumbling through, cutting up my ankles, screaming for them. I woke up crying and my throat parched.
The sun was nice and washed itself over everything today, in the gentle painterly sort of way that early autumn or early spring brings. It brought a kind of ambient peace that I love most when it has power to convince me that all is good, all is held. But I got bad feelings lately. It has been called The Black Cloud, I call it some kind of darkness or sickness I can’t shake out of me. It invades me like another face. I feel it gathering like a violent storm in the pit of my stomach. Someone suggested I try some kind of somatic experiencing therapy but I just feel this overwhelming anger bubbling up when I imagine paying $200 a session for some soft-spoken white American guy calmly telling me how he can understand my struggles with processing things through my body and all the cultural elements involved with this. It enrages me. It’s unfair and unnecessary, I know, but I can’t stop these feelings.
Close to my body, close to the truth. How filtered I’ve become.
I just keep seeing the opening scene in Blue Velvet over and over again….black hard-backed fragile things with nothing but self preservation and will crawling all over each other in vacant panic, the strange, perverse and deafening sound of sprinklers and wet grass, the roses reaching towards the sky, as gravity and rot pulls everything under, under, under.
There is something beautifully simplistic and almost naive about Lynch despite his indulgent abstractions and I think he often captures the American experience as if he’s a foreigner. It is soothing, it is unsettling.
Have a great day. From David and me.