beached

Every morning I wake up, brush my teeth, slip into something gauzy, and walk downstairs.

Even though all the doors are closed and the air conditioning is blasting something fierce, you can still hear the cacophony of insects and birds clamoring to be heard from their tree podiums. I've always been unnerved by complete silence so this tropical symphony rocks me into a gentle state of constant calm.

I pour Costa Rican coffee which is slightly sour but enters my bloodstream at breakneck speed and sip it until my body is humming. I crack and cook eggs which are carrot orange and slip them on top of pillowy pieces of buttered toast. Once fed, I pull open the sliding door and feel the thick, rich, perfumed air seep in.

Our view overlooks a cove where even from our perch on top of a hill,  we can still hear the waves roar as they smash into the sand. Once in a while, Squirrel Monkeys or Capuchin Monkeys will jump onto our balcony from the surrounding palm trees and we reward them with a banana or two for their inquisitive nature and cartoonish pratfalls. Lizards are everywhere but you don't realize it until you walk in their direction and they scurry away like little children caught eavesdropping. One of our guides once told us, "You have no idea how many eyes are watching you from the jungle". You get the sense that this is true and wonder how many silent witnesses are watching you from amongst the palm fronds.
 

I just thought I would be in a different place.

Everything else is great. And not in the way where I overly post on my various social media accounts to assure the world that I'm sure cares that everything in wonderful, really, honestly, in that desperate, pained way that just reeks of the opposite. I actually do mean it.

But it's human nature, isn't it, to focus on what isn't. Someone in college once told me about how life is like a stovetop with four burners- one representing family, one friends, one love, and one career. Three can only be burning at the same time. See if you can guess which one I'm fixated on.

It's hard because this burner dominates my thoughts, my energies, my survival as an adult person. For a majority of my time, I feel invisible, inconsequential, unrecognized. The skills that I think I have, the skills that people I love assure me that I have, maybe they are just apart of this elaborate delusion.

Yet I perserve. This delusion, this idea of what I want to do, as ridiculous as it is, is all I have to hang onto. There isn't really a plan B. There's shades of a plan C, D, or E but those plans are shades of pleasures that I indulge myself in, not actual pursuits. There's nothing but this. I can't let my upbringing, my fear, my insecurity swallow me whole.

domestic bliss

how appropriate it is that the emblem of adulthood is owning a house.

adulthood is about finding the one. adulthood is about creating a family and home with that one. adulthood is about introducing new ones into the world. adulthood is about the process of segregating oneself. letting go of the party friends, letting go of the hierarchal social structure that dominated our energies and minds from middle school onward. the people on the peripheral who always could hand you a glass of wine but not the type to pick up the phone past 3:00 AM on a Tuesday night. it's about the drifting away and the moving forward, the desire for satiety and fulfillment on all fronts and the letting go of the frothy, the trivial, the fleeting.
as i get older, i realize that we might die alone but our fantasy is dying with the other holding our hand.

how appropriate it is that the emblem of young adulthood is renting an apartment.

there's always someone within the vicinity. the lack of the plan didn't always result in the death of a night. the nighttime was a blossoming opportunity, a malleable thing that could either result in your greatest triumph or monumental tragedy. you're in love with wanting to change the worst in people; correction- be the one that changes the worst in people. you get off on that period of transience. everything is now, everything is magnificent, everything is terrible, whyisthishappening, ohmygodthisfeelsfantastic, don'tstopdon'tstop.
when i was young, i realized the value of living in the present.

dissolving into a million pieces in a billion places

her own self is betraying her but she lets it.

what must it be like not to trust your own mind? what happens to a person when their memories so precise in chronological order are shaken up like a bingo wheel and you are left to sort through the broken pieces?

truthfully we've never been close. blood bonds us but little else. i'm too outspoken, too inappropriate, eating with my elbow on the table and knife raised almost like i'm ready for any unseen combat, an obtuse reminder of the schism between ladylike gentility of her time and the abhorrent modern rejection of those values.

yet we've always harbored an affection. i was the first grandchild, a boon to her good genes with her ski-jump nose leaping generations to my face and her translucent skin on my back. however, that deep-seated understanding between generations has eluded us for reasons i can only speculate.

seeing her now, during the only time of year that i have had in the past seven years, breaks my heart in ever increasing unique ways. only the disease crafted by the cruelest hand could possibly create one that lets the infected's mind crumble while those who love them watch the person they knew disintegrate.

of course now, at the likely end of her days, is the time when i want to know her most, to understand her. how typical of the human condition to only want that which is increasingly out of their reach. i'm going to interview her. to sit her down with a cup of herbal tea and some recording device and ask her questions not through the lens of the family member but as someone who just wants to know about her. i'm afraid if i don't do this, she's going to slip away through my fingertips like sand. i want her to be known. i want her to have an impact. i want her life to have meaning.

rear window

so there's these neighbors across the way. i'm convinced that they are vampires because as far as i can tell, they don't sleep. they exist constantly in a wakefulness fueled by guinness and diet coke because those are the cans littered on their balcony rim like soldiers left for dead on the battlefield.

it's not that i stalk it's just that they are there. every time i look up from my perch on the couch where you can always find me at most hours when i'm not at work/sleeping/eating, i see their figures moving like lost souls, always moving and searching. logically i know that they are likely constantly on drugs and locked within the expanses of their neurological connections. yet i can't help but wonder what they see when we're all asleep. what they notice, what they hear. do they hear the homeless man who rattles our trash cans every morning looking for recyclables cry at night? do they look up and see those stalwart stars who dare blaze their light, la smog be damned?

i also wonder what they think of us- the neighbors across the way with the glass doors. undoubtedly they will see his curly head and my dirty blonde/auburn/idon'tevenknowanymore hair, usually tied up into a messy bun, out of the way. they will see us holding glasses of wine, usually white, sometimes red, sipping methodically as we consume the entertainment that we work so hard for during the daylight hours. i wonder if they think we are obnoxious- stopping every few minutes to gaze and kiss and touch and feel, still feeling awestruck by the majesty of love.

i wonder if they mistake the warm cocoon of monogamy for being boring. i wonder why i care.

jonathan dean sisto

I don't trust my own memory. I write to remember.

It's sadly enough an easy thing to forget in the wash of the day to day.

Los Angeles is like a vortex, a literal haze that sweeps away the prior years of existence so that the years within its valleys feel like centuries.

I'm an adult now. At least that's what I'm told.

But I can't help feeling that whatever adulthood is (the crushing of idealization and naivete?) began in August of 2005.

Real conversation. That's what brought us together or at least that's how I think of it now. I'm sure that we had those conversations that every teenager has but at the time our confessions and observations seemed revelatory. We were smarter than everyone else and could solve the world's problems in your Jeep Cherokee. 

Luckily we had gotten the hard part over with. One mismatched fumbling and pressing of lips at a school dance ruled out love so we were free to be friends. Of course that didn't stop you from the occasional seductive look. You seemed to give the entire world that look. Some weaker libidos fell prey for it as they do. They would steal your sweatshirts and never give it it back, probably clutching it at night on their pink sheets, the musky smell of man in their nostrils.

It's amazing how vivid your smell is to me yet I can't remember what I did last Thursday night. The memory is not linear- a chronological organization of what happened when. It's a jumble of sights/smells/feelings/chemicals that somehow make up a you-ness. The remnants of the past sometimes step forward out of the haze and announce themselves like they are tonight in this Ralph's parking lot.

These snatches of you are so clear now but will likely fade into the background once I awake tomorrow. 

What I'm trying to say is I'm sorry. What I'm trying to do is not forget. 

My goldfish brain is trying, Jon.  

the megan

A few minutes into her visit with plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a 40-something brunette pulls up a photo of Megan Fox on her iPhone.

But it’s not Fox’s nose or cheekbones that the patient wants.

“This is how I want my eyebrows,” she says.

The doctor smiles politely. It is the third time in a week he’s been shown a picture of the actres

“I assured her that it’s not really necessary [for me to study the portrait], because I have the shape of Fox’s brows and the direction of hair growth imprinted in my brain,” says Epstein, recalling the client’s consultation last month. “The look is incredibly popular."

Just as Jennifer Aniston’s “The Rachel” was the most requested hairdo of the mid-1990s, in this boom time for cosmetic enhancements, “The Megan” is the must-have eyebrow of 2012.

Powder and pencil can only go so far. With the bushier look back in vogue — fuller arches are the signature style of everyone from Kim Kardashian to Kate Middleton — specialists such as Epstein have seen a 30 percent rise in the demand for eyebrow transplants.

“Over the last two years, it’s got really big,” adds Epstein, who performs between 12 and 15 eyebrow surgeries in New York and Miami every month. “A lot of women want [to copy] the Kardashians, but Megan Fox is far and away the favorite.”

This is real life.