sweetheart redux

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a milli...

Santa Prayer Santa hovered close and said, “Why all the flies around your head? Why all the thumbtacks ‘round your bed? Your wishlist said you want a pony.” “I got candy stuck among my hair They pull it free and pluck me bare The tacks are so intruders spare This sparse and lonely thing. The pony – so glad you got my list! I prayed so hard I split my lip. Is Snowflake waiting outside for me? Or, maybe I’ll name her Cinnamon.” 

When I was a kindergartner, I went to a private Christian school in Koreatown, called “Pilgrim.”   Strangely, I currently work four block away from this building of nostalgia and terror.    A little background:   I never had enough to eat in my packed lunches, but I was too shy to tell my dad.   Instead, I became what other kids called a “Beggar.”   Nerds candies were sold at the student store, and as a big handful of Nerds is bound to spill over a little, I picked up the extras from the ground:  I actually roamed the blacktop looking for stray Nerds to eat.  I also regularly snuck into the classroom at recess and lunch, to steal, mostly food, but also some decorative erasers and such.   Also, for the most part, my few friends were boys, because I was always like “Look at my underwear!” all the time, and what boy in their right mind is going to be like “I want to avoid being friends with the girl who   shows me her underwear...

When I was a morose and pained teenager (as teenagers are), I was in a feminist punk band called Foxfire.  It was a pretty big part of my existence.   Tamra Lucid   from the band Lucid Nation  (our guardian angels who were always letting us share their equipment and promoting us through word of mouth) just finished emailing me a few mp3's she'd been able to create from one of our old cassettes (pardon any incorrect tech verbiage here).  My song "Earthquakes" was my favorite one to sing at shows.  Pretty much everything I had to get off my chest:  feeling ugly, not being taken seriously as a girl, being victim to a violent crime that left me jumpy to things like earthquakes -- it was all in that song.   Foxfire was a three girl band:   me,  Rhani Lee Remedes  and  Andrea Branca .   We all switched around on which instruments we played for each song; Earthquakes is A ndrea on ba...

The Four Tops, singing "Duke of Earl" The Los Angeles version of Autumn is here – a crispness in the air for a few hours on Saturday morning, before the temperature hit the eighties again.  Even when I was a little kid, that kind of autumn quality of air made me feel wistful for my youth.   The annual Halloween nights of trick-or-treating made me feel like a kid in a movie about trick-or-treating, because how could real life be so almost melodramatically, so theatrically childlike.   These annual Halloween nights usually turned out a little disastrous, with a mom in her cups who loved Halloween too much not to feel compelled to ruin it, to make it less fun and therefore more bearable.   I also got sick at least a few Halloweens of my life.   One Halloween, a close friend of mom’s, who used to be her room mate, sleeping on that old fashioned contrivance the Murphy Bed, made me a princess costume by hand, tracing a t-shirt and skirt of mine as a patter...

 "Halloween" (1978) I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use.  However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max  -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life.  Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story. Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation.  He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hos...

my favorite of our old Olympia houses.  I like to see it through the eyes of Google Maps.  It's that little gray thing hiding behind trees with a billboard on its lawn. When I was 18 through 22, I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I’d moved there ostensibly to attend The Evergreen State College, but my true reason was the town itself, which was the starting place and still-center for the punk community I’d read so much about since my early teens.  I only applied to one other college, which was prestigious and at which I was accepted.  With  Evergreen State College, I bombarded them with several fine points and essays in my application, and received an early notice of acceptance as well as a full-tuition freshman year scholarship, which I won based on my work on the zines I’d written throughout Junior High and High school, and my extracurricular activity of being in a punk band that played in a few L.A. venues.  There are so many stories that ...

Here is a short story by Guinevere Durado, Matt Harrison, Kelli Williams, Melanie Hilliard, Joanna Thomas White, Geof Nowak and Mike Tucker.  Each of them wrote 3 sentences without having seen anything but the last 5 words of the writing that came before theirs.   The man’s hair grew long and sparse and yellow-white like the sinews of a rump-roast.  His flannel shirt could not quite button over the expanse of his torso, which bulged in a grotesque game of peek-a-boo for the occasional customer.  The man sat behind the liquor counter while his little finger excavated his fuzzy exposed navel as he watched old NasCar races late into the night.  While the night also races across the earth, chasing the day or being chased depending upon your preferred point of view, it sits for a moment with a woman at Denny's, as she breathes fog onto the cool glass and doodles in it with a finger. The finger doodle is a code.  Across the street, ...

This is my Grandpas's brief sketch of the details of his life, written when the rest of the family requested him to, a few years ago.  Luba I never met any of my grandparents. I think my dad's parents died in Europe.   My mother's family was upper middle class. Her father owned a small department store in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. Fleeing both radicals and anti-Semites in l902 they came  t o the US, where they settled in Meridian, Mississippi.   I think my   Uncle Ben and Aunt Molly were both born in Mississippi. There were four sisters (Molly, Mary, Celia, and my mother, Luba).There were three brothers (Mike, Charley, and Ben). Mike and Charley were in the Navy in World War I; Ben was just a boy. Sometime before World War I they moved up   North. My mother worked as a waitress and cashier in a restaurant whose name I never knew, but she says that the composer Victor Herbert was a steady customer, so it must have been in Manhat...