Going to Whole Foods these days in DTLA is a bit like being in a real life dating app. As you line up outside, people done up in the way only LA people can be, stroll by to get into the back of the line waiting to enter the store, which is limiting occupancy due to the virus. Everyone is putting on a show, and the collective group’s head swivel from left to right as if we’re at a Wimbledon for hotness. In each persons eye you can see if they swiped left or right based on how fast they lob their gaze back to where the next person is most probably going to enter the scene from.
I guess there’s not a lot of places to get noticed when you are locked up all day in your apartment, so grocery shopping is sort of like heading to the club now. Walking up and down the aisles I’m bound to see more flesh than heading over to the deli. It also makes me think about how this time of coronavirus is a bit like having a lot of casual sex. Anyone who has never had a slutty period of their life can at least now feel some of the emotions associated with it.
Much of social distancing relies on your trust in another person and about them being upfront about who they have been around and how careful they are. My decisions on who I hang out with is not only about keeping myself safe — maybe I’m someone that doesn’t care if I end up with an alphabet soup of STDs — but also making sure that others are aware of my views on the virus so they can take precautions and have ownership over their own health. I can’t wander into someone’s space these days, maskless and ready to talk 6” from their face, since that’s basically like a new form of non-consensual contact: I’d be taking up a persons space and putting them in danger based on my own willingness to take on risk.
I guess if you want to run around as some biological weapon with no mask on, do it, but don’t feel you can detonate wherever you want: coughing over all the fruit in the grocery store and trying to shake my hand. That’s like failing to tell me you have herpes before sleeping with me.
I think in preparedness for this situation, I accidentally created the perfect fragrance, which I named Cat Fancy. This occurred on my friend Rebecca’s birthday, when I took her to The Institute for Art and Olfaction in order for us to make our own fragrances. I know a lot of people say “I think I got coronavirus back in February”, and I don’t want to be another person jumping on the “I already had it” bandwagon, but back in February when we went to this event, I had a fever and no sense of smell. I was very perplexed by these symptoms as not a lot was being said in February about Covid-19 and I didn’t hear of any cases in California, so I went ahead and tried to make a scent while sweating profusely (sorta normal for me) and not being able to smell (not so normal).
For some reason with these systems I was certain I could still make a great scent. It reminded me of when I was in 8th grade band practice, forgot my trumpet on composition day, and thought I could compose a piece of sheet music from my incredibly tuned inner sense of music. I had no such inner ear. (As a side note I think my friend Dan Davey’s had such an ear, and I remember his trumpet being shinier than everyone else’s trumpet and having a lung complicity of two small weather balloons. He played waterpolo and seemed to skip and hover across the water like a dandelion seed refusing to come back to earth, which I think was due to his enormous lung capacity.) But on this new occasion, at The Institute for Art and Olfaction, I believed I had an inner nose of some sort, I guess.
Rebecca walked away with a delicious tobacco/wood creation, while I apparently picked 5 materials (that’s what they call, in the industry, the different notes of a scent… the MATERIAL that is used to build the home of scent. Although, maybe this is a good use of vocabulary since memory seems to find its place within the walls of scent, so eluding to materials which can be fabricated into structures make sense as the basement vocabulary of fragrance) that when mixed together perfectly replicated the smell of cat piss. What I love about this experience is that I was very enthusiastic, as was Rebecca, and she was incredibly supportive as I dug deeper and deeper into my unbenounced alchemy of cat piss.
In this time when some people don’t give proper distance, what is a better deterrent than cat pee? For marketing, I’m obviously going the route of calling it Cat Fancy. Perhaps the logo will be of a cat spraying a person’s face in a sea of other’s wearing masks.
When I was in middle school, I remember going to see my grandfather in Florida. He lived at the end of a culdasac where you entered into the house through a curtain of air-conditioning, stepping onto tiled floors of a room with vaguely sweet air. Things felt openly static, like vegetables in a crisper drawer. He lived on the water and light came in on wavelengths made of arrows and there was a dock where schools of these solid brown fish would swim under in packs like wild dogs. They wouldn’t be tempted by bait on hooks, only nets thrown from experienced hands, and I would gallop along in the yard watching them like a ball-hungry dog on one side of a fence protecting tennis courts.
The grass in the yard was all equal thickness; debris from a paper shredder, cut to length, and left out for a night under a green paint sprinkler. Uniform. Dry. Sharply spongey. Uncomfortably inviting.
Lizards scampered around and there were these clay pots that were constructed to look like birds with open mouths, and the geckos would dart down their throats only to pop their heads up later like lost words on earthy bird songs.
On this particular trip, my grandfather took me to his study to help me with a project I needed to get done for school: creating a map of Africa. He had an atlas and said he’d trace the outline of the continent onto a piece of printer paper for me. The outline was tough for me to see standing there next to him, and I remember thinking that he must have a better angle, but in retrospect his eyesight was falling and he couldn’t see anything. His pencil sputtered and lurched around a continent-type shape, just not that of Africa; it was more of a freeform continent. My grandfather, however, presented the paper to me with the confidence of a man with complete belief in his skills. And I remember being a bit uncomfortable by the experience, much like the first time, later on in life, when I realized I could beat my dad at 21 in basketball. The situations were different, but similar in their distinction of showing, very acutely, a specific part of time passing.
I think a nice piece of adulthood is that I’m given the opportunity to look back and not recognize myself in previous stages of life. I know who the person is in the stories, and relate to parts of them, but I’m definitely not that person anymore. If we’re lucky I think our past is a lineup of suspects (or perhaps actors) for roles in similar plays. The transition to adulthood is maybe just the first time you look back and think “huh… that person is vaguely familiar” and then turn fiercely towards the future.
I think a bad part of these stages of life is that we maybe start to bootstrap them with less intention. We begin to trace the outline of our experience a bit like my grandfather’s outline of Africa. But unlike the physical decline that led to my grandfather’s misshapen landmass, the lack of vividness that can come to sections of life is a lack of desire to look for detail, because it takes energy and time and after awhile I think we start to think we’ve seen what we need to out of most of the things we run into.
Right now, in isolation, it is hard to look for detail, especially when everyday seems to be a copy of the pervious day. I was talking to my parents the other day and had the thought about us all still getting older during all this, and not to be morbid, but also all getting closer to dying. It made me think about our future selves, who will be looking back at the selves of today and thinking “huh… that person is vaguely familiar”, which reminded me to draw my map today carefully with the tools I have. If we forget to pay attention to detail we will end up in the situation where the stages of life all look like some distorted landmass. Sort of different, but sort of the same.
And drawing maps that all look the same is sort of like the general process of forgetting. I was taking care of grandfather once over a long weekend, having flown down for one of my only 1-on-1 trips to see him, and on leaving his room to let him get ready for bed on his own, I heard a crash and ran into the room to find him on the floor having missed the seat of a chair he uses to sit on while getting undressed. He was naked on the floor with his body twisted around bit, and I remember thinking of hands in Egon Schiele paintings and just how crisp the folds of his skin looked. His body invited viewing. I picked him up and couldn’t believe how light he was, like it was maybe better to hold him down lest he float away.
His wife, Anne, came in and we made sure he was situated, before letting him get his sleepwear on. After he was in bed, under the covers, I came in to say goodnight, and he looked up at me with those same eyes that had so clearly seen Africa, and said “Were you here the other day when I fell out of the chair?” and history seemed to be coasters stacked on top of each other in a pile that didn’t change shape and I said, “Yeah, Opa, I was here. I’m glad you were okay.” And he had these real thin lips that smiled playfully, but maybe chased a bit of a narrative that only he could see.
And if forgetting is part of the process of dying, I think there’s a lot of joy to be had in even the smallest memories; harbors on the coast of a map.
jobs will make you go brain dead.
i can barely type this email since any creativity that i might have
scammpered together over the years has been dashed by costumer service.
there are error correction keys for your brain, just like on a cash
register, and people asking you to purchase things from an
establishment you work at is like someone repeatedly hitting said key.
i like red and orange. error correction. mountains are lovely. error
correction.
i do not know what colors i like, i do not know where my favorite place
to be is.
would you like cream with that?
i go home from work wondering where my dog spot is, my wife, my 2.5
kids, and what on earth i would ever do without primetime tv. there
are newsgroups online for me to discuss my favorite tv shows while i
await eagerly, as one poster put it, "for the best part of my week to
come on". i don't mean to sound abbrasive but what did so-and-so do
with her hair? omygosh, you noticed it too? interactions are subtle and
sweet, but with a little work from all sides, we can cruise through our
days as if on the crash side of a 10 day meth binge. my son is playing
with legos on the floor, clicking in place green red and yellow, but
i'm not sure if i quite got that part, as they stack higher and higher,
i'm thinking of my office building. but why? i hear someone builds the
things around us, but why won't my son just watch some tv with me?
oprah wants to know why an actors beauty was a hard part of their life.
i'm hooked.
ronnie orders coffee all day long. he's building a transport bubble
that has no moving parts, and every day asks if it should use a
joystick or a keyboard. i tell him that it depends on the client. i'm
into it. i make up ideas, but everyday ronnie asks the same question.
i've been tricked by a mental. in the kitchen i lay a tab of acid on
the tip of each index finger and rub my sweating temples with finger
tips.
our special today is beef and barley soup. a cup? sure. that'll be
3.50. i open the cash registrar drawer, and curl up in the quarter bin,
and hang a do not disturb sign around my neck.
i can barely type this email since any creativity that i might have
scammpered together over the years has been dashed by costumer service.
there are error correction keys for your brain, just like on a cash
register, and people asking you to purchase things from an
establishment you work at is like someone repeatedly hitting said key.
i like red and orange. error correction. mountains are lovely. error
correction.
i do not know what colors i like, i do not know where my favorite place
to be is.
would you like cream with that?
i go home from work wondering where my dog spot is, my wife, my 2.5
kids, and what on earth i would ever do without primetime tv. there
are newsgroups online for me to discuss my favorite tv shows while i
await eagerly, as one poster put it, "for the best part of my week to
come on". i don't mean to sound abbrasive but what did so-and-so do
with her hair? omygosh, you noticed it too? interactions are subtle and
sweet, but with a little work from all sides, we can cruise through our
days as if on the crash side of a 10 day meth binge. my son is playing
with legos on the floor, clicking in place green red and yellow, but
i'm not sure if i quite got that part, as they stack higher and higher,
i'm thinking of my office building. but why? i hear someone builds the
things around us, but why won't my son just watch some tv with me?
oprah wants to know why an actors beauty was a hard part of their life.
i'm hooked.
ronnie orders coffee all day long. he's building a transport bubble
that has no moving parts, and every day asks if it should use a
joystick or a keyboard. i tell him that it depends on the client. i'm
into it. i make up ideas, but everyday ronnie asks the same question.
i've been tricked by a mental. in the kitchen i lay a tab of acid on
the tip of each index finger and rub my sweating temples with finger
tips.
our special today is beef and barley soup. a cup? sure. that'll be
3.50. i open the cash registrar drawer, and curl up in the quarter bin,
and hang a do not disturb sign around my neck.
