Some deluded plant around here thinks it’s May and begins wantonly dispersing pollen as the sun sets in crimson fire and giving me hay fever–in December. Only in Silver Lake would some ridiculous exotic from Bali or Martinique or New Jersey go into a horny plant reproduction frenzy at Christmas time, leaving me involuntarily humming Feliz Navidad between sneezes and eye watering, Kleenex all over the floor like new fallen snow.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Eunuchs
Just read, with knees clenched, the Wikipedia entry on eunuchs. Quite a history, especially in Asia. Lots of famous eunuchs. By the end of the article I was thoroughly unsettled and walked around the house singing Old Man River in as deep a voice as possible, reassuring myself.
Thanksgiving Eve
Came home with 150 bucks worth of groceries to a blackout and now we’re drinking lukewarm PBR and listening to crackling vinyl on the portable phonograph.
A hot dry wind
Been loving this bone dry air and skin cracking heat. The desert blows in and it’s Raymond Chandler time, honest, brooding, beautiful. Languid moves and the cool delights of shade. Desert grooves spin on the victrola and someone says Fats Domino has slipped this mortal coil.
Writing on paper
This is an old school So Cal October heat wave, dry as tinder, hot as hell. The room swirls in desert wind and I lie on the sofa and evaporate. I love these days and even more the nights and the memories of slow stoned afternoons writing on paper.
Power Outage
Power’s been off and on, mostly off, all day here in our stretch of Silver Lake. Gotta love the DWP, delivering juice with all the intermittent excitement of a fourth world capital besieged or maybe Caracas on a bad day for socialism. I made dinner in the dark. Spilled milk. Didn’t cry. Ate in a candle lit room accompanied by our battery operated phonograph. I had listened to Chicago jazz all afternoon–found an extraordinary LP side of Pee Wee Russell, Vic Dickinson, Wild Bill Davison and Bud Freeman from the 1950’s I don’t think I’d ever listened to, with a riotous Muskrat Ramble at be bop tempo, just nuts. At one point I realized I’d listened to three LP’s worth of tracks none of which had been cut less than ninety years ago. An afternoon like that. Then the power came back on halfway through some late forties Ellington. Cat Anderson hit a high note and switched on all the lights. So I put the turntable away and reset all the clocks and started laundry and got online when Elmer Fudd at the DWP tripped over the extension cord again and the whole neighborhood was draped in dusk. As it lingered, ever darker, I lit candles and pulled out the record player again and switched to the two Bowie LPs I have left (I used to have a dozen, but they’re gone) and cringed at Kooks, as always. Then power came back on finally and I put the record player away and blew out the candles and was about to turn on the computer when Jerry Lewis at the DWP beat me to it by falling onto the main off switch with his foot stuck in a waste basket. Darkness again. The whole neighborhood enveloped in darkness. I sat in the living room in the dark and listened to distant light. A siren cut the stillness and coyotes howled and it was like the end of civilization, like Paris in the depth of the 14th century, beset by plague and war and brigands and famine, when wolves haunted the night time streets and snatched the unwary. Like that. Well, not quite like that. It was dark, though. So I lit more candles, pulled out the record player, and listened to the first Buzzcocks LP which I bought forty years ago next year, and it sounded gloriously low fi like it did on cheap punk rock record players in 1978, and I sat in the dark and remembered what a great album it had been to fuck to, but never mind. The second album sounded even better, incredibly creative, and just as Late For the Train reached its swirling, soaring, pounding finish the power came back on, lights on everywhere. Damn, someone at the DWP has groovy timing.
And here comes the epilepsy, a buzzing numbing fog. I forgot.
Corner of Effie and Lucile, a hill or two over, in another blackout, but you get the idea. That’s Sunset Blvd down there, looking awash in klieg lights. Photo by Armand Emamdjomeh, Los Angeles Times, from 2015.
Weird times
Epilepsy snuck up on me a couple weeks ago and left the brain kinda beat up and wiped out. I probably wrote about that. I was writing about everything. Not a neurologically safe thing to do, writing. Gets everything all worked up, spitting sparks, burning up dendrites in a flash like singed hairs. You can tell the next couple days that things were damaged. You’re slower, and suddenly can’t remember things that you remembered fine the day before. So I’m avoiding writing for a few days, letting damage control reconnect what neurons are still in working order. There’s less each time. Not drooling yet, though, or saying inappropriate things. I was totally weirded out by groceries, however. Weird times. Well, they’re always weird times for spazzes. But weird times out there in the real world too. Fire and fury, the pretty news ladies were all saying, fire and fury, fire and fury. I sat on the couch watching the chatter for hours. At some point I reached my limit. Enough of the fire and fury already, I said. So I changed channels but there was Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire and bashing it to smithereens in a psychedelic fury.
Saint Valentine, oh Saint Valentine.
Loretta Lynn
I knew I was tired last night when I saw a beautiful photo on Facebook of a young Loretta Lynn, her guitar across her lap, reading the paper. Darling picture. But some guy was commenting on and on about how he felt so betrayed and heartbroken that she was a Trump supporter. It was jarring, Loretta fresh as a mountain daisy and here’s some whiny little nothing of a fuck complaining about her backwoods politics. Shut the fuck up, I said poetically, and leave the politics be for a minute and just dig Loretta Lynn. I was tired, the little editor in my head had clocked out hours before and so I posted that comment. Boom. Then I added how much I couldn’t stand you little keyboard warrior fucks whose notion of the Resistance was whining on Facebook and giggling at Alec Baldwin’s Trump impressions on SNL. Boom. Well, not boom. I hesitated before tapping the enter button. I mean I really like the lady who posted the photo and maybe the whiny guy was her boss or something and besides, I was being a tad on the extremely rude side. I get that way sometimes. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Words, you know, they can hurt but sometimes they are so much fun you forget that you are directing them at ordinary mortals and not other people who write words like they breathe air. So I deleted that comment without posting, backspacing the letters out of existence into nothing, like those thoughts that pop into your head just for a second and disappear never to be remembered again unless you write about them the next day. I think the moral of this story is that when we start insulting whiny little fucks just for being whiny little fucks then the terrorists have already won. No, that moral was two presidents ago. I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Though at the time I was too tired to care anyway. Instead, I pushed the keyboard away, fell asleep on the couch and woke, hours later, to the sound of Sonny Rollins, but I already wrote about that.
“The girls in New York City they all march for women’s lib/And Better Homes and Gardens shows the modern way to live/And the pill may change the world tomorrow but meanwhile today/Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin’, the dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin'”
It’s a dry heat
No TV till middle of week. Will have been three months. Been really nice. In the meantime I watched a zillion movies off these Mill Creek fifty flick box sets. All Fyl’s science fiction flicks now. Lots of incredible obscurities I’ve never heard of. The heat wave gives me the excuse to lie about digging the mad monster get ups and occasional mind fuck plot devices and not think that I should be doing something else, even though I should. A breeze blows through the room with the hint of distant fires. I sip coffee and think about roasting a sweet potato for dinner. I love this weather. The laziness, the torpor. It’s a dry heat, like Noel Coward.
Boraxo
I spent the best years of my punk rock life working for US Borax. We had Boraxo up the wazoo in those days. Since then, I’d completely forgotten about it. The feel of it, grainy, like fine gravel, and stuck in the crevices between your fingers. We had whole cases of the stuff in the office, hundreds of cases tucked away in the basement where I worked, and little sample packets of Boraxo scattered throughout the above ground floors from the lobby to the executive suites in the vast US Borax world headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. There were fine secretaries, too, and I was a twenty something Mensch and easily distracted. Now strange sensations swirl about. I’m not sure if this is nostalgia, a flashback or maybe allergies.
(To be perfectly honest I have no memory of writing this, and am just as confused as you are. I found it in the drafts folder.)
Brick Wahl 