well, i won't do anything at all

the facts being what they are, the jury must rule that the accused has passed the bulk of another summer sort of vaguely, on lurching pins and needles feet, perpetually just accordioned out from under a sofa’s limb lump, with long stretches of greasy unmarked time spreading out between the moments—not gone—of crystalline joy. the expectation of sunny merriment leaves me more on edge than the worst winter storm ever does. a shame, how leisure haunts and disappoints me. unbecoming, ugly, and unfair. i do try to handle this better. i have improved! when i was small i would cry in the middle of parties imagining the ride home and how i hadn’t had fun right. i do know it is one of the great calamities of the self-important, wanting so badly for varied good times and idle hours to add up into some greater meaning, when the meaning should be the pleasure of each moment itself, and no one will be taking an accounting when it’s done. i do become fearful if i’ve had too much coffee on an empty stomach or on my lunch break walks where sweat creates an entire new world under my jeans and the jeans themselves turn stiff enough to stand upright even if i were to float away somewhere, gone. i do become concerned if i wake up in the night or sometimes in the shower or on the bus or when something catches the corner of my eye while i am reading a book or more likely a tweet. in these sleepwalking moments where my guard falls away i slip sideways into the dank cave of my stupid and unseemly desire to be doing something important with my life and, in step, confront my complete failure to adopt the obvious and enlightened view that a life, the organic fact of it, the insane trick, is important already, and the various itemized facts and details of how it was spent make little difference. i am in many ways so resplendently happy; i worry all the time.

my job answering phones and adding calendar updates from the sixth floor of a round building in hollywood is low-paying and menial. much in the way that taco bell is essential but serves pepsi products, or baseball is beautiful but full of qanon guys, or my girlfriend is an angel but likes ketchup on a hot dog, i detest careerism but am ashamed that my career is not better, more. that i am not a high achiever. that i didn’t turn out right. that i waste the bulk of each day toiling at nothing of any value and am often too tired to make good use of the scant hours leftover once that’s done. that because of this i’m dull to talk to. that yes certainly its capitalism grinding my bones to make its bread but that no political reframing of the personal toiling actually makes a difference to me here. that i should be running more and writing even a little and thinking anything at all about anything at all that has anything to do with anything but me, my mean and watery wants. that if a bus were to veer off course and run me down where i stood beside the benches that were pink last week and are green again now so little would be left to show for my life. some bad posts, several niche custom designed coffee mugs, and perhaps a lawsuit against the city which would at least make my loved ones richer. i fret. i hate my body. yawn. we went on a perfect road trip last week. but it’s so humid. i mope. i think my period is coming. i think if someone looks at me for too long on the bus i’ll cry. and it is particularly arduous to be antsy in the summer. when the time is one for pulling jacket sleeves down over hands then a dark mood seems almost stylish and passes less painfully. the nasty baby navel-gazing doom phases to which i am prone sting more keenly in the lemonade season. everybody’s got on shorts and i’m pouting and i’m melting and i’d like to be held in contempt or chained to a rock at sea or both.

it’s not all bad. obviously, that’s what’s mortifying. very often it’s very good. maybe that’s what Barbie is about—being a woman is good because you can listen to the indigo girls and have sleepovers but being a woman is bad because everyone hates you, most of all yourself. “lol”. just kidding. kind of. it’s true but i’m not being serious. i want to float. we haven’t watched much baseball this summer. i suppose that’s actually what i came here to say. all that about getting sad sometimes and wondering where i’m going or who i will become was really just a pretense to say that baseball is my warm weather pleasure and lifelong friend, the standing date for my summer evenings back before and after and inbetween any times i had somebody to be with instead, and that we aren’t so close right now. the festive uptick in homophobia as the sun’s reach lengthened in late spring made it easy to turn, without thinking, or discussing, toward the other great american pastime, cbs’ survivor. there are three hundred and twenty six seasons. it makes for a good forest to enter if you’re bent on wandering. many men are ignorant and oafish there but none of them are clayton kershaw so it doesn’t hurt my feelings. a few weeknights with eyes averted from sportsnet LA became a few weeks choosing the mission: impossible movies over games after work—absolutely head empty no thoughts eleven out of ten stars stellar…..beam me up, tommy—became not even really knowing who is in the rotation anymore. i adore baseball and the love of my life has been a dodgers fan since birth. we are not engaged in protest. i don’t know if you’ve heard, but young girls they do get weary. maybe that’s what Barbie is about. and we’re not so young.

not so young but still a believer. megan flipped my hat around backwards in the bottom of the ninth at dodger stadium tuesday night. not young but we stayed to the end of what was shaping up to be a bad loss. not young enough to commit to a proper rally cap but i left it brim to neck as she’d arranged me just to see. and we haven’t been watching but we watched them come back to win that game. there was an umpire review on the walk-off after “i love LA” had already thundered over the mostly empty park and it was stupid and i felt all lit up. slapping palms. blue drink from hours and innings before snaking inside me. smiling. thinking it is a privilege to be so sad sometimes. that i’m horribly lucky for the good fortune that means i can preen in it. i do know. not so young. not so promising. how funny to count all these summers like rings of a tree striping my stomach, arms, mind. my legs hold me up and i can kiss. it was a very good win. what is it that’s so great about becoming? i am.

the all star game was two weeks ago but i guess they should have held off. placed it instead on the barbenheimer weekend and had the teams wear black and pink. shoot off fireworks and wads of half melted tiny shoes in center field. surely there’s money there. cowards, all of them, those owners, their advertisers, mr. manfred, they would never air my powerpoint about how Oppy would stop at nothing, would rollerblade and go on the jet ski and row the boat and camp with laundry on the line to get to that bright pink world the bomb never touched and fuck that physicist Barbie. incorrigible! but a girl can dream. (not a woman, that’s something different.)

the men of major league baseball would surely find it easier to perform support for Girls (not women, that’s something different) than queer people, but even then, it might depend on which parts of reddit they call home. if i try to imagine what a pathetically fragile little brain, stripped by tunnelling worms of all structural integrity, it would take to be offended by imagined radical politics in a warner brothers live action doll film i get slap happy. the violent attitudes of the most emotionally volatile people put us all in danger. pathetic fear and baseline stupidity shape the reality we have little choice but to stagger through. a lot of things are fucking awful, but the grove was overrun with people dressed up to see a greta gerwig movie last saturday. this does not materially or even rhetorically improve the position of The Woman in the world. but it was cool and very funny. i am not made of more tasteful stuff so yes it was our second movie of that day. and do you think probably we didn’t need to see the einstein clip quite so many times? after a ten thirty am screening of oppenheimer i had a blt at islands. i eat meat now. well, some. it depends. i don’t have rules now. when i made that one up i was a child hoping to vanish. i hoped to punish my body down, down, working it like a stone in a river bed flatter and flatter. i tried for a very long time. even once i was more well it never occurred to me i might want chicken. i met my girlfriend and discovered i was hungry, not all at once but in a blooming flush that rises redder still when i least expect it and always. there was so much i’d thought i did not want. a woman, that’s something different. i may still turn out all right.

the truth is we got high at a matchbox 20 concert back when LA was under a months long blanket of gloom that sunk shoulders and knit up brows with the big wet weight of it. to explain how that came to be true would take more words than the too many i’ve already used. it was cheap and we walked and the woman in front of us wore bermuda shorts and running shoes and booked a motel on her phone and dragged her husband back down the aisle all before the third song ended and without taking her right hand away from the place where it rubbed and rolled at his neck. she didn’t even hear “push”. but i’m happy for us both. there’s no reason to worry. it’s summer.