Go Downtown With The Drugs In My Body

Without notice, i have slithered away into month-long disappearances. i now hide in an old downtown house with blown speakers and mixers, packs of cigarettes, warm coffee in the rain, raspberries and blackberries, dark chocolate, and my mess of papersreportsjournalsfigurestables next to my my little white laptop (i ask her to sing to me Feist’s The Reminder, Kitsunè Maison Compilation4, some BBC Radio’s Essential Mixes, and Billie Holiday). Those are the innocuous dohickeys in my toolkit by which i attack proposals, progress reports, final projects, posters, presentations, and committee meetings. Sometimes, when he isn't around, i dance barefoot on the squeaky hardwood floors to Dragonette's I Get Around or whatever Klaxons remix happens to popup that day. i smoke by the large window and watch the rain fall from the roof edges onto the green leaves of the bush and tall trees outside. Then, back to my patiently waiting white laptop.

i haven't been to my digs in months. i haven't been at home with my family either. i just travel from the university laboratories and libraries to this abode, then back again.

i miss you. and my friends. and my family. and the hipsters and the shows (the latter i only hear about after they have passed by). and the sun. and how we used to have coffee and pots of tea. and how i used to have the capacity to daydream.

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i got in yesterday from LA. i am tired. i am old and boring. i just want to wake up stretching slow on a Sunday with the sunshine pouring in the window, with orange juice, some dub soothing from the stereo, and rolling around in the sheets. Instead, i fly again to Québec City this Saturday. Québec City for the Canadian Society of Microbiologists Annual Conference, LA was for an extended family wedding and marathon reunion/first meetings.

And LA is surreal. Four days of familyfamilyfamily matted into the hazy humidity, backed-up crisscrossing freeways, mega- strip- and mini-malls, palm trees, diamond-encrusted Sidekicks, and shopping carts rattling alongside Beamers and Benzes. Between the family picnic in the hills, soy beverages in Chinatown, and dinners in Orange County, i made an expensive quick last minute escape to West Hollywood on a Sunday night, to finally dance and drink and smoke and hug a broad-shouldered man as we both ran across the then deserted Wilshire Boulevard.


family touristing

flowershop love

wine rounds the tables and corsages on lapels




first meetings and late night Long Beach breakfast



family reunion bar-b-q house in the hills



late night sneak away



nobody innocuous



happiness is...