New Fever.

I've begun to get cabin fever. This is not, I suppose, unexpected but its typology is more insidious than I would've guessed. My sickness has dissipated enough that I feel well enough to go do things but, in reality, I'm not.

I had a lovely day yesterday stoned at the art museum. Went to the folk art museum, was not impressed when comparing it to the folk art museum in New York (one of the most enjoyable museum experiences I've had). The LA folk museum had an exhibit of crocheted handbags made to look like counterfeit designer bags and some wood sculptures. Did nothing for me, felt dismissive. Took a picture of the following artist's statement because it seemed like stuffy-headed (strangely punctuated) nonsense:

My work is meant to spark an elusive emotion, awaken a memory and explore the spiritual and metaphysical dimension of our lives. I use the vessel-humanities oldest and richest metaphor- as a vehicle. Through subtractive sculpturing, I'm building a visual language to express this emotional sub-context and elicit a contemplative response.

Saw a twisted traffic sign uprooted next to the entrance seemingly spooning with a downed tree branch. Was surrounded by traffic cones and I was unsure if it was an installation or not.

Went across the street to the LACMA to see the permanent display stuff I missed when I saw the Kubrick exhibit. Holy moly. All the Dutch painters from the 17th century blew my brain wide open. It hurt. I was inches away from the paint strokes, just marveling at it all. In particular the work of Jan Davidsz. de Heem I couldn't get over how well rendered Still Life with Oysters and Grapes was. The grapes look like they're going to burst with liquid! The details were just so fucking beautiful I almost had to take a seat. It made me think about the frustrations I've been having with my pen and ink experiments and that what I really need to do in my goal of truly understanding and communicating light and texture through linear shading and crosshatching is to work BIG. If I work at, like, four times the size I'm working now, I think I can really do the details I want to do.

After a while, though, all the religious imagery began to schiz me out and I had to leave, out into the chilly sunset. Still feeling free and floaty I drove to Audrey's house listening to Yes. I guess I'm a big fan of the band Yes now. Not something I would have guessed of myself but it's true. In particular Fragile and the song "We Have Heaven" which led me to singer Jon Anderson's ridiculously proggy Olias of Sunhillow album. It's beautiful, complicated stuff.


Had a nice potluck at Audrey's but lost my voice talking. My throat is the last stronghold of this flu and it still feels rough today. I have a series of people I'm meeting this week, which I scheduled thinking I wouldn't be sick anymore. Not the case! I want to go grab the world by the tail but I think I need to sit tight.

Patience is really the watchword for this month, I guess, and I hate it. I read my tarot and the active card was the reversed Chariot - a warning to hold back my usual Aries methodology of going and doing and trying to ram my head through obstacles towards what I think I want. Instead I need to sit back and let things flow and do what they will even if, in the meantime, it leaves me feeling sick and helpless. It's frustrating waiting to get well, to find a job, to make new friends, to find my artistic way. Irritating.

Recovery.

Woke up today feeling 75% cured of my flu. Like the waters of Lake Minnetonka, a quick dip into Santa Monica purified my body last night. Despite a day of regressive, overpowering sickness I forced myself to get out of bed and go to my cousins' joint birthday party.

My plan was going to get pleasantly stoned and post up in some corner with one or two new friends. This was the a plan for a bar scenario. When I found myself in a line with an hour-plus wait-time surrounded by bros in button-downs and girls in clingy dresses doing that wavy, sailor walk in their high heels I realized that this was a club. A club for yuppies. These kids were young, urban professionals out on the town after a week of going to an office. They went to school to learn how to do practical things. Their life goals and reference frames seemed alien to me.

My sick delirium coupled with the weed made everything fascinating and funny. I talked with a girl about why she has no interest in veganism (she likes meat. The End.); I listened to a guy semi-derisively namedrop Bruno Mars to a bunch of ladies; a guy with a perfectly manicured beard came up to his friends in line and pulled out beer bottles from his pockets and said, "Now this is how you wait in line, boys" as people gazed in awe of his ingenuity; I heard a guy get out of a cab saying, "My quote in the New York Tines was, 'One thing people don't understand is playing a college sport is a full-time job.'" I thought about how my life choices had decisively set me on a completely different path in a completely different sphere from these people and I was happy to spend some time soaking in their culture.

After a half an hour of waiting one of my cousins came out and led a group to a different bar where I got to give him my cousinly love and, I fear, my sickness. He bought me a Shirley Temple before I could think straight to buy him a drink and I peaced out home in a cottony fog through which I played the first side of Quicksilver Messenger Service's Happy Trails, one of my favorite pieces of recorded music of all time.



This morning I woke up feeling a million times better. Lucid and decongested. Max made huevos rancheros and the house listened to Enya. I'm having some thoughts about art and music that need calming. I think it's contingent on meeting the right people here who are on the same wavelength I am. But I'm resolved to take a day out and about before the week starts, just as I'm resolved to keep my career insecurities out of this blog. So I'm off the folk art museum (it's free today!) and then to Audrey's for a Southern potluck, feeling happy to be recovered and taking this new LA life one day at a time.

Dreamday.

It's hard to want to write a blog entry when you have a belly full of delicious minestrone soup. My stomach has shrunk over the last few days and all it took was a bowl of the stuff from a pub in Los Feliz (pronounced by everyone as Los Fee-lays for some reason I dunno) and I was asleep on my feet. Although really I've been asleep on my feet all day as, in my sickness, the vocabulary of the world has begun to slur into a dreamlike babble. And really the soup wasn't served in a bowl but in a tiny, black cauldron because Los Feliz is trendy/silly like that.

My dreamday began when I pulled myself out of bed to go see Zero Dark Thirty with my delightful new friend Andrea. Andrea is my first real, brand new friend here in LA and I'm excited and happy to have her. After the movie we talked about my favorite talkin' subject, religion, as I ate from my cauldron.

I thought out loud about the idea I've been thinking about since seeing the Kubrick exhibit at LACMA and (bringing it up for the second day in a row) the monolith, the symbol in 2001: A Space Odyssey for the Divine Unknowable. I talked about how I don't think there can be such a thing as a pragmatic religion. The practical aspects of every religion (or cult, for that matter) are usually universally accepted but a religion isn't a religion without some aspect that is is completely bonkers. In other words religion must require faith. And that I think from the outside we try and pigeonhole these crazy aspects - virgin births, past lives, etc. - in either literalism or metaphor but neither does justice to what I'm again going to call the Divine Unknowable.

When watching 2001 no one ever explains what the monolith is/represents/means, but we as a viewer understand it in a space beyond the left or right sides of our brains. There's some great, cosmic truth that religious imagery and miraculous stories (and, I would argue, folk and fairytales) give us peepholes to and it's a truth that makes sense in a base, biological way beyond our intellect.

Or perhaps these things have a character that invites projection and rather than tapping into something divine we instead invest them with their meaning from this same subconscious place. And then, trying to make sense of our emotions that such an act stirs within us, we end up worshiping what is tantamount to a blank projector screen. And if that's the case is it any less mysterious and beautiful and... divine?

So that's what I batted around over a late lunch while we also talked about visiting ghost towns and a potential documentary on an aging Marilyn Monroe-impersonating drag queen Andrea might decide to helm.

It was a good way to end a day of running out of the movie theater every hour to feed the meter and stop myself from getting another ticket (there was one on the windshield today because while I was sick in bed I forgot to move it out of the street cleaning zone on Wednesday). All this running back and forth trifurcated Zero Dark Thirty but it didn't matter because 1. that movie was fucking amazing anyway and 2. I actually did end up fending off the meter maid who strutted away after disdainfully calling me "sir" in that way I hate and 3. my dreamday has been so borderline surreal that Zero Dark Thirty was almost just a collection of pictures and sounds anyways. Thankfully it's an intense enough film that I could follow it but now that I'm back home and the blood is rushing to my tummy I know I only have so much consciousness left in the day.

I'm still supposed to go to a party tomorrow - and want to go to a party tomorrow - but that's going to mean a drive out to Santa Monica and an evening spent awake when I should be lying down with a fruit juice IV or something. Worst comes to worst I'll just make a nest on the beach and pass out there. Because they have a beach in Santa Monica and such a thing is possible.

Speaking of things that make a sort of dream sense, the other highlight of my day was watching this video of Slim Gaillard. Talk about touching the divine... Everything about Slim's performances are dreamlike to me, including the seemingly nonsensical moments the audience chooses to laugh. I aspire to this.

Sick.

I got the flu on Tuesday and it's completely laid me out. The last two days have been literally spent in bed. It's actually a silver lining on the unemployment cloud that's been hanging over me because if I did have a new job this would sure complicate things. In the same way I've been trying to treat my unemployment like a vacation in my lucid moments I've been enjoying the fact that I actually couldn't do anything but lay in bed with my face stuck in a book or a computer screen. Besides finally making headway in La Moustache I watched the first season of Dallas and two films: Cloverfield (which was better than I expected) and Wake in Fright (which was pretty excellent). It's a pretty decadent way to spend two days but then I was thinking back to the people who would come into the video store and rent four movies a night. What sad, lonely lives those must be. As much as I wanna be a slug it can take something like a 102 degree fever for me to let myself enjoy the experience.

My fever broke yesterday after hours of wiggling around, too hot to stop sweating, too cold to remove any layers. Today I actually got up, put my clothes and sheets in the laundry, made a million mile trek to the post office and got some groceries to make some spicy Indian food, which I suspect will make me feel better. At least I'll maybe sweat out more of the sickness. My roommate Tara (who gave me this fucking flu in the first place) said my complexion looks good from how open my sweaty pores have been, so why stop a good thing?

Plus, on Tuesday, as I felt the sickness descending on me, I walked down the block to the Super A to get some food for the next few days that I wouldn't have to actually prepare. This was good thinking on a practical level but trouble in that the healthiest food I could find were Lean Pockets (a mistake), Campbell's Soup (surprisingly, a bigger, saltier mistake) and a rectangular, microwave pizza (which I burnt really bad then ate like an animal, pulling chunks of cooling, blackened crust off something that looked like the 2001 monolith). I don't remember if you feed a cold and starve a fever but my body hasn't wanted food at all.

This morning Jesse made Tara and I smoothies and I appreciated how nice the people living in this house are. It sat heavy in my stomach on my million mile post office trek but I know my body was glad to have it. As I was walking I made a mental list of things my neighborhood has a lot of:

• Tiny, yappy dogs in small enclosures
• Pay phones
• Discarded televisions
• Abuelitas with interesting faces
• Restored classic cars

 Now that I can sit up without feeling like I'm going to die I'm going to begin being productive again and finish inking the artwork for the Gamma Knife album. There's lots of things to look forward to this weekend so I hope I don't relapse. I'm going to see Zero Dark Thirty with my new friend Andrea tomorrow; it's Josh and Sarah's birthday on Saturday (though I probably shouldn't drink), plus Tara's working as a photo assistant on some art project and I'm gonna see if I can tag along and maybe meet some people; then Sunday Audrey's throwing a Southern potluck.

Beginning.

I'd like to say that people keep asking me to start a blog about my new life in LA but it's not true. There's something to exhibitionistic about blogs that I feel like I need some validation from people clamoring for my thoughts and experiences before I take the step of putting them out there. 'Cause honestly I'm not sure if people care that much. I'd really only be navel-gazing for my own amusement. But maybe it's OK to navel-gaze once in a while.

The other thing that scares me is that I have so much trouble finishing things I start and then I feel like a failure. I'm choosing to take consolation in the idea that there's really no good place to end a blog so if and when I get tired of writing here there'll be no reason to beat myself up.