Start thinking of your city as your house like if you lived in a sprawling metropolis estate with hundreds of thousands of roommates. Like say you lived in a castle and if you were hungry it took you twenty minutes to walk across the grounds to like the dining hall. Just pretend the trip to the grocery store and back to your kitchen is how far it is to the castle or apocalypse camp dining hall it doesn’t matter. Then scale it up to a city. With all of your beautiful roommates that you don’t know. And then it’s easy to leave your bedroom
if the sun has already set you still have to go to the grocery store but you could choose to listen to the worst music imaginable for the task. Purchase vegetables. Take your time coming home and sit on a bench and read. Cook your food even thought you are cooking for only yourself and that makes it hard to eat. There is no way to romanticize this. Do the dishes. Lie to yourself. Lean in hard to the monotony. Waiting is an undertow you should notice and run neither towards nor away. Let it pull and pull away the sand around your feet. Bury and unbury you. When you are in the right place you will feel restless. the road ahead is just the reflection in the mirror. There is nothing catastrophic to do for the next month. Stop bashing yourself against the mirror. No clarity. No room. Accept it. Don’t jump from the tower into the moat. Wait for yourself to become the next staircase. Listen to Past Lives by LS Dunes. Take your meds. Sink your teeth into the flood of time and the lack of memory and the grey wash and stand against placid ness, against weakness, against abstinence. Indulge in neither suffering nor grace but your body. Finish all of your homework and go to sleep two hours later than ideal but not more. Get up, get dressed and do your errands in the morning. This city is yours. You have a place in it. You don’t have to be pure you only have to be beautiful and use up your whole heart as seasoning. You have to live. Desire to go out into the endless winding dreams of pavement again tomorrow. go to the bookstore. the park bench. the store of trinkets. the museum. the office building where you don’t even work. pretend to be yourself. Stop going inside. Go to the unlabeled patch of green on the map and wander through it. pretend to be yourself. walk down the street, walk past everything. All of these unwalled rooms with weather and people like the largest, most beautiful apartment in the world and it would do you good let more of it love you
One of my greatest inspirations as a writer is the late great LA Times food reviewer Jonathan Gold. I legitimately think he should be considered one of the best writers of the last 100 years. Look at this.
Poetry. Non-fiction par excellence. This is a man who not only understood the visceral, the sensory, the sublime, but he could put it into words.
