Everything I Loved This Week (09/13-09/19)
I finished a draft of my novel about a month ago, and have been flailing ever since. I need to be writing something, but I haven’t known what to write. One thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to write about wine. I am in a being bored of wine era.
So, I have decided to keep things as simple as possible. I will be using this Substack to write down a list of everything I loved over the course of a given week for as many weeks as it takes for me to lose interest and burn out in the classic Laura style.
I have been listening to a lot of T.Rex and am feeling particularly inspired by Marc Bolan’s horny and maximalist lyrical representations of women. Something I am always trying to do is write about men the way men write about women— not in an “empty vessel devoid of humanity” way but rather as decadent, fruit-bearing beacons of beauty and sensuality, like when Don Draper is having an affair with the elementary schoolteacher and says to her, “Long, curly hair— no one has that anymore.”
I feel like sometimes we, as women, get so stuck on writing about men being assholes that we forget to write about how hot they are, when really, these two polarities can and should exist in magnificent symbiosis.
Speaking of T.Rex, I really love and appreciate both Ringo and his wife Maureen’s outfits in this sassy airport pic.
The part in City Too Hot by Lee “Scratch” Perry where he sings “Whyyyy/ Whyyyyy/ Whyyyy/ Whyyyy”— I like to sing it to my cat, Arthur, as an addendum to asking him: “Why are so good?” or “Why are you my cat?” or “Why are you Arthur?”
I often wonder if Arthur thinks the word “Arthur” to himself in his head. Arthur.
I was really hungover at a 7-11 buying myself a Gulp of Coke Zero which for the record I was only buying because they didn’t have Diet Coke— I am NOT a Coke Zero person and would never want to be. The 7-11 employee pointed to a Big Gulp cup and said “Get this one, it’s a better deal.”
In a cadence and timbre I have never before heard come out of my own mouth, I replied: “Naw, I don’t want it all, I don’t want that one.” My delivery was so strange, impeccable and 1910s newsie-esque that I now want to put that sentence into a future book so the book can be made into a movie and I can coach the actor playing the character who says “Naw, I don’t want it all, I don’t want that one” in how to deliver a sentence in the coolest way ever.
I overheard one of my line cooks ask one of my other line cooks if he wanted anything to drink and the one line cook said “A Coke,” and the other one said “Regular or diet?” and the first one said “Whichever, I don’t care.” I’ve never related to anyone less/ respected anyone more.
We had an event at the restaurant on Friday. It was a group of women celebrating “being done having children,” which is something I never would have thought people celebrated, but you know: it takes all kinds. They hired a tarot card reader to do readings for them and they hired me to do a wine tasting for them. I felt a great and immediate kinship with the tarot card reader, and made a big effort to ingratiate myself to her, but also kind of forced her to do a three card draw for me. She said she saw me with my feet firmly planted on the ground.
When she left, I said, “I hope you made bank tonight; you worked really hard” and then I did that thing where I pointed at my eyes with two fingers and then pointed them back at her and said “I see you” like I was Jay-Z saying “I see you” to Lil Wayne which isn’t really a cool reference to make anymore. Anyway, I liked who I was in that moment.
This breezy Laurel Canyon fit I wore on Sunday
Arthur met a raccoon! Raccoons are my favourite animal, and I think there is something vaguely raccoon-esque about Arthur, who often reminds me of a woodland creature/alien more than a cat. Arthur and the raccoon seemed to acknowledge one another as like-minded souls.
Speaking of raccoons: on Tuesday I went to Bar Raton Laveur, a tiny bar in a shed that looks like you are inside a very pretty wine barrel, or at very least a ship. I drank two glasses of wine— a Champagne, a Meunier, which hit me right in the soul, and the latest vintage of Matassa Olla Rouge, which I was less crazy about (too tannic, too bodily, not fun enough)— and one beer, which is my new thing. All I want is to drink a single light beer.
At Bar Raton Laveur, I was talking about meditation. Since parting ways with my meditation teachers last year, I have been slack about my practice. But saying the words out loud, I felt a strong internal pull to start it back up again. I have had a strange month, leaving a troublesome job, and have rarely felt like myself, although if there’s one thing kicking my meditation practice back up again should remind me, it’s that there’s no such thing as “myself.” Well, okay— I haven’t felt good. So, I made a vow to meditate every day for the rest of the year, or as close to it as possible. I love that I am meditating again more than I am loving the act of meditating itself, since I am rusty, which is annoying, but part of it.
These pictures of Jeremy Irons and his dog, Smudge, are all I want out of life
I was driving home from work on Thursday night, and Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers came on my now one hundred and thirty-five hour long driving playlist, which is named, boringly, driving! It takes me about two months to get through a single iteration of driving!, though that amount of time will likely increase beginning in one and a half weeks, when I no longer have to drive to work every day. I won’t miss the time in my life that driving to work takes up, but I will certainly miss the driving. Driving turns me into a nineteen-fifties guy: just me and the open road, baby. Whenever I have a passenger, I’m like, “My baby at my side.”
About seven years ago, one of the times I was trying to quit smoking, I was also always drunk all the time. Being drunk all the time and trying to quit smoking are not a heavenly match, since nothing goes better with a cigarette than being drunk. Anytime I was drunk and wanted to smoke, I would walk to a park by my old apartment that had a swingset. It was usually the middle of the night, so there weren’t any people around. I would get on the swingset and put Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers on my headphones and pump my legs until the climactic peak of the song hit, right at the exact moment I was flying as high as I could. It was exultant, and undeniably more dazzling than a cig.
On Thursday, I was merging onto the Gardiner Expressway when Unchained Melody came on the car stereo. It was not a glamorous or exultant instance of merging onto a highway. It was slow and congested, but it did give me the idea that something I could try to do in my life is time hitting the climactic peak of Unchained Melody to the exact moment I am accelerating a car up to highway speed, which I think would feel even better than listening to Unchained Melody drunk on a swingset.