the overhaul is going down for a while.

I cannot write about this.

I am sorry.

brain din

I walked again this morning around the streets near my house. It's really quite pretty and I think I'm gonna try to keep it up daily. Flowers that are buds one day blossom on my next trip past.

The houses are all old, Craftsman style and range from bungalows ensconced securely in old growths of trees and climbing vines and intricate gates to large things with huge picture windows I can see in through, and look at people's overlarge livingrooms, where not a thing seems out of place. One clapboard house always exudes a smell of mothballs when I walk by, which I love because it reminds me of my grandparents' old house.

Walking around today I found myself narrating the entire little journey in my head, language in my own brain thinking for me, as though I was telling a story I might read, or write, later. [I wonder--am I doing that now?]

It was a sensation that, once I was aware of it, abruptly became uncomfortable. To hear the cogs and wheels smoothly clicking away between your ears and there seems to be...nothing...you can do...to turn it off.

As I walked it just smoothly went on: "What a gorgeous rose. All yellow with pinked edges. I imagine the rest will bloom by tomorrow. I could never afford a house like this...oh! look at the date stamped in the sidewalk...this one says 1952...I think that's the earliest one I've seen so far...the rest are all repairs from 1992...he's driving much too fast for a little residential street like this, I don't care if he is going downhill...I'm surrounded by so much privelege, and...hey! what a fascinating pattern that gate is made into. I like how they would stylize the old gates as much as the houses...it seems to be an Arts-And-Crafts architectural phenomenon...and..." and on and on and on. I couldn't stop it.

I tried. It slowed to a crawl, and each time it attempted to take off again I'd just gently try to put it away, and let silence fill my head. But the world kept invading with sights and sounds and smells, and even my own awareness of the process made the voice start up again, narrating my own attempts at silencing myself: "No no no, don't start with that...okay, this is what you are supposed to do when you meditate....[and then I'd silence it again, but it would slowly rise up...]...so focus on something else. Breathe. Focus on you breath...[and I'd put it away again]..."

It was very hard, but I arrived back at my door having achieved, for a few seconds on and off, a bit of silence in my brain which, since I began to learn words, has been thinking with such florid and multilayered languages that I barely feel my feet on the ground sometimes.

The quiet was nice, for this girl who thinks too much.

this is peace and nature in Hollywood. It is not so bad.

In the mornings I walk around the block. It is an old part of Hollywood and the jasmine and car exhaust battle for supremacy. These two smells dominate my morning walks.

Right now, at this time of year, the jasmine is winning, even down on Hollywood Boulevard where it tumbles in huge pillowy piles down over the crumbling retaining walls that hold small spans of garden back, moatlike, from pushing past the barriers out onto the road and spilling their carefully tended contents of roses and sweet alyssum, like the gardens are just lunging for escape from their adjacent apartments, doddering and old clapboards and crown mouldings under the dormers and eaves, dating back to the twenties and the blossoming of the city. Just feet away, the street is roaring with the sound of rushing Range Rovers, the crunch and plash of tires splattering the opaque black asphalt.

I see the same people with their same dogs each morning. The dogs are sweet; the people, alarming to a greater or lesser extent.

would like very much to dissolve these last few days.
am therefore waiting for acid rain.


the saints and the desert use their heads
-the new pornographers.

how come I feel so washed up now
at such a tender age
I’m on a straight line and a man comes around
And tells me I got nowhere to go
Come back and tell me something I don’t know
-spoon.

things I learned this weekend, or if I did not learn them anew, they were reinforced as true

The desert is sublimely beautiful.
Do not forget your goggles at home.
Shooting roman candles back and forth at other people in the dark is fun.
How to shoot a gun.
Turn right at the old wrecked car. No, not that one.
Don't drink TOO much. Just drink a lot.
Eating is unnecessary when you have the nutritious calories of beer.
I simply must do this more often.