Should I Explain?
on my last Substack, the 12 Steps, Overconsumption, and Train Dreams
Yesterday, when it was announced that Substack had started it’s own video channel, or had developed it’s own app that you could project on to your TV I thought it would be funny to make a video of making a Substack. I imagined how one would be watching somebody talking and then next there would just be a blinking cursor. But I am a filmmaker, and I know that something always has to happen, and nothing happens in the video. I complete a Substack in what is recorded to be 16 minutes, and in reality it took up my whole morning, and I kept trying to come up with ways to make something happen in the video, sometimes somebody texted me in the middle of the video, when I was looking for the film photograph of my Ganesha, a photograph of my daughter came up instead, and I have not shown her face on the internet, which at first I didn’t understand, and then I did. And so I deleted those screen recordings and started again. But also, in reality all my essays start by hand.
Too meta. My husband smirks when I tell him about it. And when I try on a jacket that I bought recently because I wanted to feel something, my husband informs me that this brand makes all their clothes overseas. And when I put the jacket on, I realize I don’t feel anything, and so I pack it up and send it back. Relieved in a way because I actually don’t need any more clothes, my office filled with things I need to photograph and list for sale. Things that I have outgrown, or things that never really fit, things that I bought that I thought would make me longer, or more beautiful, or or or.
In 12 step they say one of the causes of our ailment (or the biggest cause of our ailment) is a God-sized hole which I have stuffed in the past with drugs and alcohol and then continued to stuff with men who were mostly not interested in me or only interested in me for a while, or only interested in me when I was unavailable to them and clothes. I love clothes. I love the way they can change how I feel, I love that I can look like I did when I was a teenager just by throwing a sweatshirt on, I love that I can look like a director, I love that I can look like I am going to an audition, just by tucking my shirt in, or putting on a heel. I love that certain dresses are dangerous and so I keep them in my closet and I put them on whenever I think about writing. But I can only be so many people in one day, and I lament the idea that I have that someone in their late 30s can’t wear a short skirt, when all I want to wear these days is a short skirt, my legs still my best feature.
I tell my girlfriend at dinner that it seems like this is the first year I am truly confronting my demons, the ghosts that have kept me from moving forward, the limited belief system and how I can’t help but wish it had happened earlier, and how I also see that I’m only able to name and examine these things now because of what is happening in the world and in the familial. It’s three weeks into the year of the snake, right? It’s the year of the shed. She says, her hair cut short for a role, and at one point during dinner, we look at each other and both have tears in our eyes when we talk about the terrible movie we saw and how she guessed she liked the beginning and I guessed I liked the second half because well, it’s what I desire, to be able to see someone who has died again. My daughter clowning around us.
My friends that have died come back in dreams sometimes, and sparingly over the years, but I can never touch them. My ex sometimes appears too, hardened and unyielding, a friend I no longer see, a set, a stage, a camera, a whole lighting department, and often I am acting, or waiting to act, gripping my lines in the dark, trying to avoid the people carrying flats, and no matter what I do I am in the way, and there is snow falling.
I tell my friend that I didn’t like another movie that she is going to see but I also think I have to see it again, that they had cut my favorite scene from the book, the scene that for me made the whole book, the scene that for me imprinted itself into my sternum the way only Denis Johnson can. A lost girl, a lost man, who says I’m not a doctor I’m just the one that’s here. Tying her leg in a splint, and opening a window to let the air in. That the fire that rips through the scenes was almost too much for me to handle. And I try to think of movies that blend the past and the present together. That roll one around like they’ve been caught in a wave. And I know I’ve seen one recently, in the last three years, but it’s evading me. So I mention Biutiful thinking of the girl on the ceiling and the boy in the snow. I always think of A Prophet and how the dead appeared and it took my breathe away. Tahar Rahim a revelation. That someone had just done that, decided to present the dead as the living. And I have never rewatched those two movies. The intensity of the first time burning themselves into me. Just like Fish Tank and Corpo Celeste and Toni Erdmann. That I am scared to go back and view some of these films again, I don’t want to see how they are made, just how I remember them. Coming home after seeing La Chimera in Glendale, the entire screen flipping, and then 6 hours later, changing into my nightgown, I found myself sobbing, folded over on the bed, the movie moving through my body still and I said to my husband you must come with me, I must see this with you.