In February I returned to California. It was the longest time I had spent away since I turned seventeen. This includes the time I spent fading into the Himalayas with dysentery, as well as a period of suffering up North. But what old news. There is a pandemic to contextualize. And an entire summer which I have neglected both in processing and general scrapbooking. The important stuff I tend to throw away in a blackout state with great velocity.

I passed June, July and August with my head down in large patch of corn in the middle. It was hot, hotter than I ever remember. The sun exhibited a whole new class of vulgarity. It baked in an unavoidable aura, which one no one dared speak of. It swung through the air like a heavy bag of dog shit. I spent a while out on a little island filled with East-educated Californians or otherwise people who had missed the boat for Nantucket. I read my book. I delighted in the way sun damage wore across face and forgave myself in advance. My birthday on a horse farm in Wisconsin. We sent up a Chinese lantern along to the beat of Holocene. We creeped across limestone into Lake Michigan the way children do before they slip, fall, and crack their heads open. I stopped and started drinking coffee. I disappointed some friends and surprised others. I made a short list. I made a thirty by thirty list. I pledged to listen to the radio more often. Minneapolis came to feel quite a bit like some memory I had stored away of Europe as a young girl. Daylight stretched to ten at night like Denmark, raked yards and properly kept trash like Switzerland, the speckled cement of the sidewalk like Luxembourg. I looked after my childhood dogs — especially the ailing one dependent on a modern cocktail of pharmaceuticals, fresh air, and cannabis.

What I predicted began to transpire. Everyone starts to look towards Southern California. Dead space becomes increasingly appealing to those sequestered in hell. “Die hard” New Yorkers not from New York start to change their attitudes about freedom and peace and a certain boxy car. I’m ridiculed for bringing along my own Tequila, but by the end everyone is … drinking my Tequila. In the heat of August I escape to a lake filled with Copper. “Just wait!” My father says. By the time I’m forty it will have been drained by desert folk, salivating in their body charms for something crisp and pure. I fell asleep in Minnesota, woke up in Wisconsin. I glanced out the backseat as my friends picked up Erbert and Gerbert’s in Eau Claire. Someone on the precipice of falling famous is described to me as a “Seth Rogen Package, but not even fat.” I come close to adopting a Shih Tzu returned twice for biting its owner. The fires go. We wonder about blue skies and if we could make do with orange. I resort to ringing up a breeder, getting a dog mixed with everything obnoxious and small and name him after a sandwich. The job market waxes and wanes … I decide I’ll have to get paid for the time being and head to Palm Springs to indulge one last time.

A burning red sun flies above us at La Jolla Shores in the early days of September. A kite plummets from the sky. In a moment of panic, Ella and I cruise over to the nearest AMC and see a bad film with masks on. The air conditioning revives the essential reservoirs at the corners of my eyes, my nasal passage, and the fluids keeping my ankles loose and acrobatic. The fan whirs to death throughout the night, termites zoom with ill-intent, bumping across my body on their flight to nowhere. At dawn, I make a break for the water, tripping desperately towards the Pacific. My mouth is swollen. My constitution is weak, though it does not appear that way. I appear more or less indestructible. I jump the guardrail in Del Mar, hopping the PCH without shoes on. If I get a nail, I get a nail.

I passed by a kitchen store one late summer afternoon on the way back from paying off parking tickets - only half of which I deserved. There was a closing sale so I put everything in my basket, including a mandoline, but left it all in a pile by the pepper grinders after noticing how the line curled out the door. Nobody seemed to care, one way or another.

In the fall, Tesla waged a holy war down my block. No one emerges from suicide doors with purpose. I observed them head to a matcha cafe on the corner, order a beverage, let it melt, and dispose of it on their way back to the car. I recalled an afternoon in Autumn back when I had no fears about being “pinged” while out enjoying my one, short life. Macchiatos while waiting for Bebe Zito to open down the street. Eve paid. “No,” she said when I extended six dollars in her direction. The worst things done in the Midwest are better than the best things done any place else.

“We make traditional ones here,” the barista alerted me, her hair the innermost color of the rainbow. “Are you familiar with traditional macchiatos? They are very small.” I remember thinking that I needed to stop wearing whatever I was wearing.

Shopping for everyday groceries in Malibu. An illogical thing I do more often than not. Fishy Point Dume where an extraordinarily American part of me believes I may end up. A surfer bikes by with no hands. “Respect the Food Chain” is printed across a Great White sketched bearing his teeth. “Goodnight!” He calls to me with all that pink light hanging in the air.

We began to believe in a certain myth that promised we would wake up in a pool of golden light with flower crowns on our heads. It was not so. A French woman stopped me in Franklin Canyon in the new year. Her Doberman came galloping out from around the bend and and my small, white dog charged him. “Fearless!” She said to me. For a brief moment I thought about how rewarding it might be to have children and raise them correctly. “But you shouldn’t come here anymore.” She finished. Never mind, I felt no need for any additional drains on my psyche.

“Oh!” I said, her melodic accent detracting from the irritating aspects of a stranger’s unsolicited advice. “Why?”

“Coyotes,” she said, herding the Doberman back to her feet. “They will eat him.” I knew they lurked around these parts — these seedy, unscrupulous corners of a place synonymous with bounty and polished treasures — but I had never fully considered the consequences. I sort of lurched into things with a genre of untethered “faith” one might call “stupidity.” But so far I seem to be one of those curious breeds of “lucky” people who hasn’t garnered enough luck to take one far in any significant way, but is slightly more genetically prone to tolerate a considerable amount of mindlessness without having to face devastating ramifications. If I get hit by a car, for instance, it will happen in the most advantageous spot allowing me to roll off the hood and land on my feet. It strikes me from time to time however, that I may turn out to be one of those people I read about who drops dead one day and nobody knows what to think of it. If I turn out to have been cursed in this way, I hope my friends will at least laugh. “Emily,” they should say, “would find this hilarious.” And I really would.

“This dog,” the French woman said pointing to my Shih Tzu creating dust clouds up and down the trail, “is a rabbit.” She told me about her friend on Mulholland whose Pom was kidnapped from the backyard. “Mountain Lions. Done.” She brushed her hands together and pursed her lips in that predictable French way. Not to be rude, but isn’t a Pomeranian living on Mulholland Drive asking for some kind of unnatural death?

“And the Coyotes … they stalk you, you know.” I liked her on the whole, but I began to wonder if she was one of those neurotics worried about unnecessary things like missing flights and accidentally eating raw meat. “They learn your scent and your patterns … what time you arrive during the day, when you come at night. They know you. They know you and your little dog. Next time … pouf!” The usual hammering, yellow sun climbed above the canyon. Early-morning compassion burned off with the fog.

It was really too bad because I enjoyed this trail so much. I never encountered ignorant people with their iPhones out blocking my way. I suppose they stuck to Griffith Park with all the views. There are no views in Franklin Canyon. Only a pond filled with unaccounted for bodies from 1968, Sycamore trees, walnut trees, frogs, mice, and rats. There is shade, believe it or not. Grips on various Indie teen thrillers running through the woodland with a mildly chilling tenor. There are coyotes who eat dogs. “But don’t be afraid.” The French woman told me as she walked off, the satiny Doberman at her hip. “If you see them just dance and cackle extremely loudly.” I took note.

My dad came home from a dinner late one night in June looking spiritually exhausted. He stood in the kitchen peeling an orange and told me he can’t talk to Carly because her face is too tight. “We were standing in the kitchen waiting for Joel to come up from the cellar and I had to say something so I asked her where the wall clock was from. She is obsessed with decor and I’m looking for an art clock anyways.” He poured himself a tall glass of oat milk and I thought about how far he’d come since retrieving two-percent jugs off the front stoop in 1973, suiting up in whites, and heading to the clay court with strong bones and a steady mind.

“That was nice,” I said. “Where is the clock from?” Energetically, he seemed to be climbing down into an underground passage.

“This is what stupid people talk about in their forties,” he said. “When you’re buying shit and trying to impress everyone.” He left and went upstairs to bed then, a few Cara Cara segments on a paper towel and the rest of his “milk.” I’m not sure about growing older … it seems … disorienting.

July 18, 2020. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies. I have this written down in my notes application. Below it I wrote: Biking around in a sundress makes me think perhaps the world was made for women after all. All of this makes sense, until you factor in the emboldened alt-right and their interference in anything remotely “progress” related. Or, the fact that somebody called “Q” may not even exist but has somehow riled up and banded together a whole division of freaks. Being a women is “fun” while coasting between Elm trees on my silly Dutch Omafiets, but the moment I step off … there are men pouting and slaughtering and squinting through their busted brains when anyone with any sort of twinkle in their eye says anything vaguely out of the ordinary.

I participate in talk therapy like a reasonable person raised by Boomers. My therapist tells me about his mentor, Sheldon Cop, and his mentor’s mentor, Viktor Frankl. At least four clocks dot the room, none of which tick. Two Persian rugs lay over a larger Turkish one. A wet summer breeze rustles a stack of eight thousand papers stacked one of six tables. The mood is Pre-War in every sense. I sidestep some major themes and let him fill in with what I assume to be figurative parables, though feeling lazy I choose to take them at face value alone. What a great tale about a woman who lost her shoe and never turned back to look for it! I left that day, hopping on my bike, pedaling with great effort through the Midwestern swamp, feeling equally as lawless as I did going in. And while I had no idea about my own life, or what to even eat for lunch, I had at least learned about Sheldon Cop’s brain tumors. “He fell over a lot,” my therapist had told me. “Especially in the afternoons.” Wobbling up the punishing hill up to my house, I realized the advisory parallel he had drawn.

An idiot called my cell phone at the end of March. “Just saying hi,” he said. Jacaranda petals blew in from the tree planted in my neighbor’s bocce ball court. I received an invitation for a dinner party alongside a Loud person I wrongfully presumed had gone away. The same personalities that popped in and out of orbit wreaking havoc in my atmosphere at inopportune times came back into alignment with the sun. The everyday magic which seemed to dust the mailboxes and the houses in the neighborhood blew off into the faraway plains. Simple pleasures would no longer do. Time to switch back to tea … fuck! Traffic returned. Smog strung the coast, the valley, and the desert together again. Authority figures took back their kindness … deadlines bludgeoned those of us who had soaked down into the soil. That’s when I knew … things would go back exactly as we left them. An earthquake struck in Lennox the other night, toppling the tinctures on my dresser. I waited for the dog to bark. I waited to wake up inside the molten core of the Earth. I expect the Hawaiian Breeze ceiling fan over my bed to crush me when the Big One hits.

It’s wedding season and, apparently, it’s vibe season. Everyone is crawling out looking either very good or very bad. The people are after tight skin and wine. Several friends have asked me how I’m celebrating my birthday. “It’s in August,” I tell them in March. “Right,” they say. “But this summer is going to be crazy.” And I’m not ready. Some things remain which I’d like to get in order. My purpose is still fundamentally in question.

“What are your favorite flowers?” Somebody asked me walking home with evening espressos in regular sized to-go cups. I didn’t have one. “I would guess Tuberose,” they said.

“Okay. Tuberose, then.” When it came down to it, however, I just liked sprigs of things out in the wild. I was one of those people.

“Is it important to you to become published?” A man who I admired had posed the question.

“Not at all.” I told him. “But it is important to me to live well.”

“Then I will give you the names of some content people.” I called them but it was impossible to hear as one was on a seafaring yacht and the other, riding a bike with the wind in his face.

Ray attack, February. What a generous welcome back into the Southern California Bight. A promising omen most certainly. Three paramedics hit the beach, sirens going and all. It was clearly the off-season. A lifeguard who met everyone’s needs approached me and I reached for a shirt seeing as - surprise! my bathing suit did not fit. He instructed I soak my foot in water the greatest degree of scalding I could tolerate. “The hotter the temperature, the faster the venom will dissolve.” A friend texted me about Steve Irwin. My mother took pictures in portrait mode.

So it became a matter of trading in one type of pain for another. Boiling oneself alive is at least a choice - getting stabbed through the foot while out innocuously trying to cleanse my lousy aura is more of an assault on my character. “I got stung pretty badly.” I told my friend most in tune with the natural world.

“What would you do if an intruder came stomping through your house?” It was the response I anticipated. I could tell she was eating something on the other end. Pretzels, I think.

I came across a Quail nest beside our pool on a beating afternoon in Indio. They were the largest eggs I had ever seen, aside from the time my friend found a snake egg in her laundry basket. Odd things happen at women’s colleges. The night winds made me think about stuff. Everyone kept calling the breeze “tropical.” I understood only in the sense that the air out here has no body but still somehow seduces its visitors. There is not one single place to hide a secret in the desert and yet it’s brimming with them. Like the Bighorn sheep, I have no idea how they survive. A gust came through the backyard. The string lights flickered. The Queen Palms bent down, rippling the pool. Cups flew out across the golf course. I had an inkling someone would be coming into my life very soon.

There is a man who recently moved onto my block with a French Bulldog named Santa. He stops by my yard in the mornings and our dogs greet each other. He’ll ask me if I felt the earthquake or if I heard the helicopters last night or if I had a trusted auto body nearby. I answer yes to everything. Last week he walked by with a little girl in a stroller and a wife. “My daughter, Eloise!” He said. Sometimes I think I really have my finger on the pulse of existence then other times people who I think are in love with me are absolutely not.

My friend came to Los Angeles in April with a new ring and a new haircut and just a drop or two of plastic surgery. We took a wrong turn and our hike quickly turned into a climb. Dogs came barreling down the canyon, tied together. My friend skipped over a rattler by a margin so narrow he may start believing in God. Peculiar and fake Hindu paraphernalia marked path from brush. Faded prayer flags crested arbitrary openings. They appeared ragged as if pieces had been bit off by human teeth. I thought about Charles Manson as I always do while North of Hollywood Boulevard. We got coffees, we got fruits, we got our cameras stickered at a certain establishment without windows. I picked up on a general sense of panic. It is not so easy to turn twenty-six. Just as it’s not so easy to turn twenty-seven, twenty-eight, or twenty-nine. I have an idea though, that it’s not too bad turning thirty. At least then I expect to have the time to shut up and to have stopped ripping everybody to shreds and perhaps I might even have a bit of money to spend on fixing things.

I’ve grown slightly less disordered when it comes to my running habits these days. It began to feel more like chasing things I would never have or otherwise racing away from things that had already show up on my doorstep and I refused to carry inside. So I had to slow down and walk every now and then. Up hills, that is. I still have goals, of course. I may need to fall back on marriage.

Someone recently took me out to coffee and pitched a project with which I had no intention of engaging. “We’ve got it dialed.” He told me ordering another Americano. “I just want to make sure you vibe with the strategy.” It was extremely difficult to align the words coming out of his mouth with the shapes his lips were making, as I was sufficiently distracted by his tee shirt which read “I am a Beatle” and his watch, which was Cartier, combined with his shoes, which were burnt out Arizonas with the loose, suede straps I thought we had all abandoned with the advent of “self-worth.” I kept forgetting his name, though I could confidently call him Spencer or Parker or perhaps even Jude if he happened to come from a particular corner of the East Coast. “Assets” was thrown about liberally. Podcasts were used to equate work ethic with success. Fulfillment, in this under-water world, stemmed from never sleeping and entrepreneurship was described to me as the antidote to languor. The sun burned through the marine layer, reminding me that morning would end, day would come and the heat did not pity me. After all, I was the one who loved Los Angeles. I received a text from the dry cleaners. The ink stain in my skirt had not lifted. A colleague messaged me. Errors in my analytics. Gaping holes in my analysis. Obviously! Did anyone think I cared?

His buddy joined us halfway through breakfast, looking dubious in an unbranded ball cap and ripped jeans. Venice, California. It is indeed the place where dreamers come to rot. “All that matters is that you feel deeply connected to the mission. We can bring you up to speed on the skills. Anybody can pick up any skill. But I need you here for the cause.” It sounded bad, but of all the terrible things I’ve heard in “the work place” this statement was at least true. I thanked him for the opportunity. In a very strange way I genuinely felt quite thankful. I liked to be considered across the board. It made me happy that someone who used jargon so loudly and unapologetically, someone who administered this niche genre of jarring aesthetics had pinpointed me as the woman who could best execute his “vision.” It entertained me, but more so assured me that I never had to do the one thing I was doing at any given moment. That if the sun flew up into my room and I awoke stiff in my bed, unable to get to the kitchen for a glass of juice, then at least I could drag myself out to the curb, flag down any old G Wagon roaring down the street and assist the person inside taking their own personal stab at changing the world.

In January, I told Eve that the spring would challenge me spiritually. That I would find myself wailing on the hardwood floor after having stubbed my toe while knowing it had nothing to do with stubbing my toe. I knew that our saintly walking days would dissolve simply and overnight … that the last year would boil down to one, all-inclusive memory that I couldn’t ever write about. “Social lives” resurfaced. I became busy - a state-of-being which for me, unlike many, does not produce desirable results.

“You have to be a ten-out-of-ten or get off the scale,” I overheard while out to lunch. “ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.” The other person at the table agreed. A Dachshund lay underneath the chair. I felt sorry for him. It depresses me, sometimes, to exist in a world full of “go-getters.” There is no magnetism in “go-getting.” There are only the other sides of the coin: despair, loss, stolen time, chaos. Either that or I’ve let my attitude get so sour that I’ll end up with no other option than to become one of those off-the-grid people who moves to Tulum and can’t afford to get back.

I used to turn my back on intense personalities back when the collective youth pined after chill. The older I get, the more I question a life without intensity. I’d like to think I’ve left my last surfer behind … bring out the tall tales now told by the fire … I’m okay with men in cuffed pants revealing my most innate instincts as akin to madness. When it comes to love we just aren’t that powerful. We don’t get to decide what happens and what does not happen.

If “earning” is the adverb we plop before “a living” and if California continues to make it this difficult to purchase an incandescent light bulb and if I don’t begin collecting interest on all the emotional loans I’ve doled out to people who still haven’t figured out how to distinguish a big deal from a little thing … then I think I’d prefer to spend the rest of my life in a sunny little villa in the middle of no where doing nothing besides sorting the recycling and talking to myself in the yard and waiting for the rain to fall so that I can go stand in the mud. At least Spring has arrived and so long as I can forget about summer bombing into view with its pants off, I should be able to enjoy May Gray and snake season and the accommodating temperament of an overcast sky.