Walking and Miscellany
Resuming the format
Karissa and I talk about pre-colonial recipes, adobo before soy sauce, food before chili peppers, or before chili peppers were ever put on a boat. We plan a dinner and I want to make lumpia the size of small cigars, just like I used to have at friends’ birthday parties in elementary school. K said it’s not appropriation if I do it because they were originally a Chinese recipe anyway.
I read that the pink mold in your bathroom originates from some bioweapons test the government conducted in the Bay Area during the Cold War. I look it up; it’s both true and false.
A young woman at work asks me who my favourite musician is. I always imagined I’d get asked this question here, but it still takes me by surprise. “Ummm,” I say, “I don’t have just one. Do you?” Without hesitating, she replies, “I used to. It was The Smiths. I don’t listen to them anymore.”
A ladybug flies into my cheek and away. It feels like the tiniest crash.
A thing that makes me feel inordinately stupid: I only just realize that the vintage calligraphy painting I’ve had on my wall for years doesn’t depict a basket of persimmons; that they are probably loquats, a fruit I don’t care about as I’ve only eaten one or two from sidewalk trees in Los Angeles.
I listen to deep house while doing monotonous spreadsheet work, dancing in my chair, moving mostly the upper half of my body as I type in random numbers and hit Delete over and over again. This is probably bad for my spine, I think. And, sure enough, my back hurts the next day.
RJ and I walk past a front yard filled with lilies halfway in bloom. We touch their stems and buds and they feel like plastic, hard and waxy. We consider for a second that they’re artificial, but they aren’t. It’s like seeing a celebrity. A field of them, even. We commit to come back when they’re all open.
Someone I just meet says their grandfather bought a house with a hot tub in the basement. He had no use for it so he built a work bench over top of it for carpentry projects.
In the morning I read from Les Fleurs du mal. This guy coined the term modernity/modernité. It shouldn’t, but that feels insane to me.
Things that give me hummingbird heart: Vietnamese iced coffee, almost getting hit by a Tesla, dreaming of my sister, some Clarice Lispector (derogatory), not knowing which direction is north without the mountains to tell me.
I see a woman a few paces ahead reach up with both hands and pull down a huge white flower from a branch. She sticks her face in it, takes a deep inhale. I apologize for passing her, interrupting her, and say, “I had no idea those had a scent.” “Oh, it’s incredible,” she exclaims, “you have to smell this” and she pulls one down for me because I’m too short to reach. Its fragrance is shocking and just as she says. Subtle but not at all. Almost tropical, like perfumed water in a hot country. She says it’s an evergreen magnolia. Later, walking home at dusk, I see the same species of tree but this time much smaller, with a single, large flower at exactly nose-height. Lucky!
Lately I cannot bring myself to watch television. I eat an edible at night and try to read in bed and the words tessellate on the page. I start to wonder if entertainment is overrated. Or if I should start reading comics and manga instead.
Teenagers on bikes. They are yelling after their friend but then they all fall quiet as they surround a tree. I hear a faint but persistent hooting. The teens are saying it’s an owl, but one of them interjects: “No, it’s a mourning dove. It’s a mourning dove.”
