3.19.25
we were smoking outside and you made a little pile of branches, pushed them together with the tip of your sneaker and
we were waiting to see if my cigarette on the ground would catch on fire. it didn't, so when you finished your cigarette
you stuck it in the pile and we watched the tobacco smoke up.
--
the California i remember was basically these large, trader joes fruit tower pyramids. so tall and perfect all the time, with fluorescent coloration; from the fruit bowl of the country, all of the fruits with any sort of wounds discarded and sorted to be shipped elsewhere.
I wrote: people stacked many many fruits into the largest fruit tower to go see god.
there are a lot of houses on the high high mountains that enclose santa Barbara. The only way to reach where those houses are is by car- it's too far from santa Barbara proper, there are no bus lines, and the altitudes become challenging quickly. I'm not even sure if it's legal to attempt to do that.
so the houses up here are all people who want to be left alone, like most people who go hiking, the exhaustion knocks the breath out of you, and mostly, the only sounds you can hear are bird calls, airplanes, and wind. no life except what has been deemed wilderness.
the houses you pass by when you're driving up to the mountain trails are vast pools of rectangles, connected to itself only, veiled in separation. the cars when visible are glossy and sticky in the hot sun through the thin air.
the story i was trying to write was basically trying to turn this other story on its head, because it was like, oh, heaven is on earth already, and i was like this is exactly the type of anti-"doomer" nonsense that someone who is way too depressed with themselves has to read to feel better about being alive. whatever. limp optimism. my story would be... communist... because... i didn't see enough communist themes in literature. like early Russian film communist, where the people are treated not as individuals but as a community, a collective, more than the stupid ones you see in the US where individuality and identity are in reign.
so then a cute tower of babel type story could be to destroy language and create a new form of communication, something that transcends the limitations of language, the cultural differences, something that acts as the opposite of violence, something that is so shared to destroy language.
like a sauna, where you sit in the heat and wait for your body to warm up nicely and sweat. all naked in the tiled baths, i was never really sure what the difference was between them and the kid pools we would play at in the suburbs (minus the swimsuits and the temperature of the water), but the nakedness destroys the bodysense, the act of being seen, because the seeing is necessarily reciprocal...
on the beach the tiny bikinis in the shops acted almost as the same purpose. heat dissipates so much better with as little on as possible. it has to make physical contact with the skin that creates the tender feeling required to tan, and it feels the same way in the cold pacific water rushing across swathes of skin. maybe the temperature bath thing makes you feel better (compared to what?), a high school classmate's girlfriend (?) said. Well maybe. At the beach a man walked up to me, balding, chubby, white hair creeping into a ring around his head. He introduced himself and told me I was so "cool" because i didn't care about anything he said- if I should be smoking, if i shouldn't dispose of it properly (i ashed it in the sand). before he said that though, he prayed, touching his head down to his prayer mat that pointed towards mecca, and said the rakats, although it was the first time i had seen it in person, so i didn't know what it was called then.
it's good to have some suspicion towards acts like that, although i did respect the rigid schedulekeeping, it was also easily possible for him to do it alone and finish it without me nearby, and the way the conversation continued didn't raise my hopes up for a pure intention. finally, he left me alone.