"there are no bad words
for the coast today."
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Last week I flew to St. Louis and spent a day bumming around the city with M: eating and drinking and doing our nails, watching blooper videos with her husband W, trying and failing to trap a tiny mouse that's been nibbling its way through their apartment. Then we woke up early and drove south for twelve hours, W at the wheel the whole way.
We stumbled out of the car an hour after dark in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, onto a restaurant parking lot paved with bed of crushed oyster shells. Mikey's on the Bayou, it was called. We ordered bourbon, and shrimp po'boys, and I asked for a half dozen oysters but "they're $3 for half today, and $5 for the full dozen," the waitress informed me, so like, fuck it, I went for twelve. After we met up with the friends whose wedding we were in town for. They had a bonfire going on the beach. We drank local beer, the cans in custom koozies, and I walked out to the shoreline-- it was low tide, way out-- and put my feet in the Gulf. The water was dark and quiet but there were tiny white lights marking the shapes of piers and bridges in the distance: the city's glow to one side of me, and the fire, red and orange, flickering, behind.
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M has a sign over her desk that reads "I view my own interestingness as being directly related to the thoughts I think and the work I do rather than the aesthetics of my leisure time." I think about it pretty much every time I post something to Instagram-- how thoroughly I am trying to live by that metric and no other, and yet, how deeply, thoroughly satisfying it is anyway to document and publicize the aesthetics of my leisure, and my life. This is in part because I have been driven crazy by so many people's Instagrams that it feels impossible to withdraw from trying to drive someone else crazy in turn, like the score might ever actually get settled.
But it is also in part because I just love something about the fact of the pictures themselves.
I've always had the urge to take photographs, as far as I know. Not because I'm an artist or anything, but because I'm a relentless collector, a curator mostly of memory-- always trying to turn a moment into a thing I can keep, and share, like that means I might actually get to save it in a more meaningful or permanent way. I mean, you see it in my writing. ("Keepers of private notebooks," as goes the Didion.) It's the same instinct that made me tell you so much about the oysters and the bourbon, the water, the night.
The nice thing about a picture is that you don't have to like, narratively justify it, to build a whole edifice of story around the moment you're trying to preserve. All a photograph has to say is: I walked to breakfast in the morning, in strong, clear light, surrounded by lush green, low palms, my best friends. I waded out into the Gulf again, in daylight, this time, probably a hundred yards out and the water still laped no higher than my thighs. It made the same quiet sound water always makes. We went to a casino, with its damp, recycled air and no-time-at-all lighting. The bride's pastor grandfather read that First Corinthians verse, "from the holy bible." There was brisket, and dancing, and four kinds of cake, and we went to someone's house after, where we poured heavy and drank from red Solo cups. Walking home the night was misty. The Spanish moss hung from trees, like beards or ghosts, caught and held in their branches.
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So I don't have like, a tooooon of actual writing to share with you this week, but I did recently contribute to the Buffy Thinkpiece Industrial Complex for its 20th anniversary, an essay about heroines and chosen-ness and broken women and how radical it is to build a show around the actual grinding daily process of grief, and depression, and self-harm, and recovery.
I also have dates for book launches for GRACE AND THE FEVER! LA is at my beloved Skylight on 5/25, and New York isn't on their website yet but will be at McNally Jackson on 6/7. Doree Shafrir recently described GRACE as "about a gal named Grace who just graduated high school and has a run-in with a guy who's in the boy band of the moment, Fever Dream (cough One Direction cough), and the summer of craziness that ensues. As I told Zan after I read it, Grace felt real and messy and perfectly 18, and it's also about the celebrity industrial complex and falling in love and fandom and, well, it's just really great and you should pre-order it now." Couldn't have said it better myself.