EPISODE 501: LIVING MY MOST TERRIFYING LIFE
Crazy Persons, This Guy and Los Angeles
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hello and welcome to a new season of Pop Culture Spirit Wow! For those who are hopping on for the first time, welcome. It’s great to have you. And for everybody else, great to be with you again! Hope you all had great holidays.
I’m getting back to work a little later in January than usual. That’s because for the first time in many years I took two solid weeks off. No work (with one tiny exception) between New Year’s and the 13th, no email either. Automatic vacation messages, you are my everything. I read, I slept, I started this PS4 game Contact where my brother has been kidnapped by a secret government agency and now they’ve been taken over by creatures from another dimension. It was great.
On a couple occasions I also just drove around Los Angeles. No plan, just got in the car and went. On the surface this is almost certainly the worst way of coping with existence in Los Angeles. Only a crazy person thinks What will really help me live in Los Angeles is driving more?
Correction: A crazy person, and this guy! A couple years ago I was in a pretty bad way and from time to time as I tried to sort myself out I started just getting in my car and driving for a couple hours in the afternoon or evening. And I found it often unexpectedly wonderful.
Like one night I was driving on city streets at rush hour–absolutely the worst version of this worst possible L.A. idea. But because I didn’t have to be some place and I wasn’t fixated on Waze telling me where to turn and showing me all those weird symbols for other drivers, I started to noticed some of the actual people I was trapped in traffic with, the men and women in the cars to my left and right. And it was like getting glimpses into all these different lives. The L.A. version of the neighbors in the tenth story window of the building next door in New York, minus the occasional moments of nudity. I loved it.
This time around I found myself in a national preserve I didn’t even know existed, ended up winding through lushly dark streets of a L.A. neighborhood that had these streetlamps that looked like exactly the kind of thing kids in fantasy novels stumble across on their way to adventure, and watched the setting sun drench the bluffs of Santa Monica in oranges and pinks, reds and purples.
It doesn’t always work, this wandering without intent, but for me there’s something about just putting yourself in a position where I’ve dialed back some of my internal efficiency and organization mechanisms and just allow myself the possibility to be surprised that can end up being really rewarding.
(It may be worth noting at this point that my alignment is Chaotic Good.)
Something that seems to happen to me every time I take a break of any kind is that I start collecting ideas and comments about writing and life, which for me are always somehow on some deeper level connected.
A few favorites from this year:
Every character is always feeling multiple emotions.
Be terrible. Throw it away. Be less terrible next time. Something brave lies in that, something vulnerable and true.
There is no direction you can turn that does not face toward certain death.
(Being reminded I am definitely going to die is like poking death in the eye. Soehow it always reassures me.)
And lastly, from the new film Little Women, which I had never seen or read before and absolutely broke me:
Please be loud. Don’t just quietly go away.
I hoped I’d leave my vacation with some clear resolutions. I don’t know that that totally happened. But there is one thing that I think I’m really fighting for in my life this year, and that is courage.
I have these two screenwriting projects, which I’m calling EVERYBODY SAYS DON’T and ANOTHER HUNDRED PEOPLE (yes they are named after songs by Stephen Sondheim, he helps me understand my life and he is turning 90 in March and I am here for him always and forever; also I maybe kind of believe that using his song titles for my projects is a magical act of summoning that may help me know more of the discipline and boldness he has always shown).
DON’T in particular has been floating in and out of my worklife for the last 18 months, but every time I start to get any momentum I’ve ended up pulled away into something else (aka I have used other projects to run away from this, the real work, the scary work that I am supposed to be doing).
So -- and even though it’s already a done deal I’m kind of freaking out about saying it out loud to you right now -- I’m taking six months away from my day job at America Magazine, where I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years writing all kinds of different things, and pretty much just doing the writing work that I’ve been avoiding.
You know, I think that’s a better way to describe my resolution for the year:
This year, I want to do the things that most scare me.
And now a weird photo to distract myself from how much that last sentence freaks me out.
THREE TWEETS
Speaking of Driving in L.A….
Also, the Kind of Thing that Only Happens in L.A….
And Lastly, This, Which Has Nothing to Do With L.A Except for the Fact that All the French Vampires Eventually Move Here…
(Don’t miss the comments on this one. Prime Twitter.)
THE ARTICLE I WANT EVERYONE TO READ: The Lingering of Loss, by Jill Lepore
It came out over the summer, so not new, just new to me, but this article about Jill Lepore’s best friend and having a baby and grief and old computers made me want to read every single word Jill Lepore has ever written about anything.
RUNNER UP: “When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’?” An Extremely Important Guide”
The Audubon Society can do funny really well you guys.
THE SONG I’M LISTENING TO: Voices Carry, ‘Til Tuesday
It’s a throwback I know, but I can’t get it out of my head (and the end of that video is incredible).
THE COMEDY ROUTINE THAT MADE ME LAUGH SO HARD I THINK I WAS SHOUTING: John Mulaney’s Salt and Pepper Diner
This story of something Mulaney and a friend did in a Chicago diner when they were 11 years old is just the greatest, so much so in fact that I am unable to stop from clicking on it right now and listening to it again.
Never think $7 cannot provide you with the best meal of your life, everybody.
(Between you and me, and that’s the only reason I’m writing in this tiny font and not at all because I am terrified, one of the things I am most afraid of doing in my life and also wanted to do for a long time is to try stand up. For about ten years now I’ve been saying I’m going to give it a shot. 2020, maybe you’re the year? Ish?)
THE BOOK I’M THINKING ABOUT: Logical Family by Armistead Maupin
I stumbled across an interview between Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin and actor Jonathan Groff a couple weeks ago, and something in the way he talked about his 2017 memoir Logical Family really grabbed me.
I immediately got it and then could not put it down. I couldn’t even tell you why, exactly. I just know there’s this one moment where Maupin goes to a party filled with theater people and he’s surprised to see how open and accepting they all were of each other. It was like a moment of revelation for him, both a glimpse of what he wanted from life and a confirmation that it was possible. A community of his own. A tribe.
It has really stayed with me.
Finally, A RECIPE: Morning Drink (aka Appalling Green Sludge, by Warren Ellis
My recipes often end similarly, but with just an added soupçon of regret.
I very consciously try not to write about politics in this newsletter (and that trend will most definitely continue in 2020). But I don’t know, entering this particular year, an election year, I feel like I’ve stumbled into a 1960s Batman TV show trap where there’s a scythe hanging by a thread above our heads and alligators leaping up from below and we’re all on a tightrope together in between and Cesar Romero stands at one end laughing maniacally.
And you know, in one sense that all true, we are on this ridiculous tight rope. But also it seems like that’s what the world is trying to get us to feel, especially the government and social media and a lot of news sources, and honestly should you ever trust the Joker really, even if he is as cool as Cesar Romero, I think probably not.
So personally, I’m going to work really hard to do the good things I can and otherwise not get sucked into all the nonsense. I hope you carve out space in your life where you can do the same.
On my Twitter feed I have pinned a Katie Cook cartoon of Princess Leia; Leia is my patron saint for the year, who/how I hope to be — hopeful, funny, and utterly refusing to submit to outrage or despair.
2020, take your best shot. We’re not going anywhere.
See you next week.