countessian

I didn’t write this; I found it between layers of my clothes on someone else’s bedroom floor in a foreign country.

I thought a lot about what to do and then decided that seeing as it was tucked in among my belongings it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable for me to take it and keep it secret for years and years and not show anyone until now, when I’m much older and and it’s been so long that I sort of can’t remember being hopelessly infatuated any more.

I found it the other day and had completely forgotten it but somehow kept it with me through, I think, eight house moves and one change of continent. I was looking for something else entirely, and it was so strange to find this.

Stepping off the curb, one man was whining to the other: “It’s always the same with you. You never do anything different. Everytime you go out it has to be some ghetto-ass Mexican thing.”

And the other one replied, “Nah, I just don’t go out looking for dick every night”

The first one said, “Well, that’s all well and good, but does it always have to be so ghetto-ass Mexican?”

And the second said, “Well, that’s just me. I am a ghetto-ass Mexican.”

The first man sighed dramatically and said, “Yes, but I wish you’d experiment more.”

///

We reached the other curb. They carried on walking down San Vicente, and I got on the 704.

Also on the bus were: a very large man with his bus pass seemingly glued to his lower lip; a girl wearing a shirt that said “I ONLY DATE DJ’S”, errant apostrophe and all; a man laden with late-night groceries who inadvertently hit me in the face with a jar of peanut butter; the porn actor from “Sweetzer to Vermont”; and a boy with “H O P E” tattooed across his knuckles.

I went to a farm with my boyfriend to visit his friends who lived there, but then he had to go back to London for work, and I stayed behind on the farm with his friends, who were very wise and taught me lots of things.

Then a pig gave birth to little piglets and the friends said I could have one for my very own and that they would take care of it for me because it wasn’t fair to raise a piglet in the city, but that it would definitely be all mine and then when it grew up I could kill it and eat it at a celebration of my choosing.

I was obviously very excited because I loved my piglet very much.

When my boyfriend came back up to the farm we spent a lovely afternoon together, with me running around in the yard chasing after my little piglet and him sitting on an upturned bucket singing The Kinks’ Animal Farm to me.

Then I woke up all snotty because I caught bloody swine ‘flu from my bloody dream.

[A TRUE STORY]

A gorgeous boy got on the four at Sweetzer. Really stunning. He was immediately the only thing I could focus on. Jeans, t-shirt and trainers—nothing remarkable, but if you look like that you don’t have to bother dressing nicely. No one but me seemed to notice.

Then an elderly man got out of his seat and staggered over to the boy, who was listening to some hardcore band so loud it was bleeding from his ear buds (and I’m such a sucker I considered that alluring.)

Old bloke said: “You’ve got an amazing set of eyes, son. What do you do for a living?”

“Porn,” said the boy, without turning the volume down.

“Porno, huh?” said the man. “Do you do, you know, private parties?”

“No,” said the boy.

No one but me seemed to be listening.

“Well, if you were looking to get some more work,” said the man, “you know, to make some more money, I know some people, quite important people.”

The doors opened at La Brea.

“Well, this is me,” said the old man. “Take care of those eyes.”

At the front of the bus, another elderly gent got on, this one on crutches and complaining that the driver could’ve pulled up a bit closer to the curb. The driver didn’t reply.

I stared very hard out the window trying to stop looking at the boy with the eyes, but just hearing the sound of the drums seeping out of his headphones was enough that I kept accidentally holding my breath. He got out at Vermont and went underground. I was still blushing at Alvarado.

“How do you like being photographed?”

“I don’t like it. I like to photograph others.”

I was alarmed when the young man beside me asked his companion across the aisle that question, because I’d been thinking how much I’d love to take his picture ever since they got on the bus. He was the image of a very young Sylvester Stallone, eyebrows and nose and black bouffant and all, clammy complexioned in a brown sheepskin jacket, probably mid seventies, that was slung over both shoulders like a cape. He’d earlier asked the girl in their party if he looked high; she replied: “Not really wasted, but… yeah, like you had a long day”.

[A long pause.]

“There’s an oil of me, an oil painting,” he continued, “sitting in a chair, wearing a tuxedo. It’s my grandmother’s chair. I keep it in my room, all year, but on holy days, on high holy days, I have it moved to the family room. There’s a menorah, too. See, my parents, I’m adopted, see, so they’re French, French American, so that’s why my name’s D—, which is very common in France. My birth name’s Cohen.”

“How would you feel if someone took a photo of you, without you knowing?”

“I wouldn’t care. Anyway, so, there’s Christmas trees everywhere else in the house, little itty bitty ones in the bathroom. Anyway, the oil was painted by an artist in Palm Springs…”

…And with that they disappeared into the dark of a Beverly Hills night.

First, the fortune teller ran away with an accountant in Dubuque. While ironically unforeseen, her departure didn’t cause much of a stir; people run away from the circus just as often as off with it, though it isn’t as much commented on among normal folk, of course.

The next to go was the midget clown, who drowned after passing out drunk face down on the floor of a flooded saloon outhouse near Cedar Rapids. The seven-foot-one other half of the double act shot himself beneath the big top the next night in Waterloo, splattering blood and brain matter on the first three rows. Neither had been well liked in life, and was not much missed in death by the remainder of the troop, which soldiered on to Sioux City.

The following night passed without much human incident, but the agitated tiger, Raj, was dosed with a tranq dart intended for the elephants by the inexperienced son o the tattooed lady, while the tamer was otherwise engaged with the mute Wolf Child. On discovering his favourite beast unnaturally slumped with the oversized dart in his flank, the tamer burst forth with drunken cries of vengeance against the skinny boy who’d served as his apprentice since the age of six years and two months.

“I’ll smash your skull against the great King’s Arch!” he roared. “I’ll dash your brains out along the Stoneglass Bridge!”

His face glowed red as his beard, but Mr Valentine restrained him before he smashed anything more than bourbon bottles.

On arrival in Lincoln a few nights later, the three Silent Indians (who weren’t really silent, but just didn’t much care to talk to anyone) were offered double pay by a travelling rodeo, and took their horses with them. (They never saw much of the income they were promised, but that’s another story.) After the deal was discerned, the depleted troop sat watching as Mr Valentine paced—knuckle to lip—and contemplated his latest loss.

Wait, that’s not Russian at all. What is that?

…

Dear Serbia. Здраво. Драго ми је. Sorry for not instantly recognising your language. Опростите. I could, however, read quite a bit of your Wikipedia. I love owls. Хвала.

NO MORE DAMNER GODGRAMMIT.

It’s been a while. Here are some things:

Last night I was lying on the floor getting my blacks dusty while flipping spirit animal cards and rewriting mine for Euro-ness and childhood memories of milk saucers once the half-Burmese was gone (although she said otherwise that time on Micheltorena, when I closed my eyes for just a second but the 99c Store pink leaves grew — remember that? Me hosting dinner guests in a black cocktail dress and Sumi amused that I thought she’d ever died?) which for some reason felt entirely connected to the other night’s foraging in the dark cupboard flipping switches on orders from the desert, when my tenders proved too much for my Chinatown power supply when combined with an LA winter night.

Anyway, Charon — last seen dressed only in lace and a wooden rattlesnake — stuck feathers in hair and plucked outfit after outfit from the bed, and no one really minded that the bird’s tail broke. Ladylike falsities like side-saddle cello were abandoned, thank God, which not too much later felt like a sneaky little metaphorical reminder of something I haven’t quite remembered yet but will get around to one of these days, and the cranes of the house smiled if you looked close enough at their carved little beaks.

BREAKING NEWS: Our suspicions (seriously, kiddos, this one isn’t just me) about a certain bar game’s link to the government just received some compelling justification in the shape of a @navy.mil email address. Honestly, we thought we were joking, but it was so easy to joke. There was so much to say. And now this! Where will it end?

Anyway, back to the things:

At some point I washed my hair in the kitchen sink just because it scanned better with whatever dumb song I had stuck in my dumb head — UGH! — but that’s another story. It didn’t matter, my hair still smells like lemons. That might’ve been the same night as the phone call to the desert and the musty cupboard switch flipping, but all these nights in the new home get garbled.

It’s like every floorboard creak in the corridor twists the memory a bit, and the people watching though the gates are probably making adjustments, too. Sometimes I watch from my room, too, so I can cast myself as one of them instead of the hapless barefoot antiheroine for once. It’s luxuriously creepy in the middle of the night in there. I’m very happy with the creaking and the echos and listening, listening, listening. (For someone who doesn’t read horror stories, I’m bursting with them nowadays.) There’s nothing I like to view better than the corridor outside my flat, and there’s no photograph I’ve taken yet that sums it up like how it feels. Honestly, hearing “go out, down the corridor, there’s a cupboard, open the door” from the desert was more exciting than it should’ve been. It’s the odd stuff that switches my brain on.

At the weekend there was a girl with an accent like I used to have, with her hair in a short cut like I used to have, wearing lipstick I still have but never wear, and she was saying “Who knows how many people have died in this place?!” with such obvious glee that I almost wasn’t bitter that I’m too old now and she isn’t. As the place in question’s somewhere I frequent as much as I possibly can, I thought “Lots, I hope! Let’s write stories about ghosties again!”

No sleep for Rachels. We’re nocturnal, but we need to pay rent.

Abbie Cornish is Australian and therefore isn’t eligible to vote in the upcoming U.S. election, but feels very strongly that Barack Obama should be president. If you’re not too fussed about the whole election thing, perhaps you could vote for him on her behalf.

I’m foreign, too, so if one non citizen with great hair isn’t enough to convince you, maybe the two of us will.

I’ve lived in the U.S. for more than five years now and don’t have any plans to leave just yet, so even though I talk funny and don’t get most of your eighties pop culture references, I do feel a bit American and do care what happens to this country, and this country’s effect on the rest of the planet.

Please vote!

(From the red carpet at the grand re-opening of the Hollywood Palladium for NME.com.)

…is green and full of irregular shapes.

If it’s raining, though, you can go indoors and see lots of stolen treasures brought home by officially sanctioned pirates and stored at the British Museum.

Over the weekend — proudlybroughttoyoubyXanaxandSmirnoff — I found out that the reason the Ancient Egyptians drew their owl hieroglyph with a broken leg was to immobilise the cursed birdies if they sprung to life.

I also learnt the words for different sorts of owls in various African languages, thanks to Owl Pages, and that in Northern India hearing nine owl cries means good fortune, Tasmanian farmers who get caught running around naked in their fields can use the excuse that it’s the traditional method of scaring off owls, and that a pregnant Welsh woman who hears an owl will bear a blessed child, but a pregnant German just gets a standard baby girl.

(Hibou by the magnificent Marion M)

Also, Genghis Khan’s life was saved by an owl, once. Nice. In Cameroon, owls are too evil to have a name.

Anyone who’ll fix me up with an owl’s eye on a string around my neck, Morrocan style, will get an exciting prize.

PS — Shot Islands at the El Rey for Prefix last night and it was quite wonderful in every way.