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Today's writing

Fact is, she liked him because she wasn’t sure of him. She liked him because he was slippery, not in a slimy way but just unpredictable. He was a new voice in her ear, a fresh taste in her mouth. She didn’t quite know what to make of him and that was as appealing as it was frightening. So often she’d lived for the familiar, the known, the safe and sane. This was a departure and it both intoxicated and repulsed her.

Years and years ago

Like, I think, 12. Drunk Adam and Oliver. 

Recent writing

He’s going to ask me if I loved Jason. I hope he doesn’t, but he will. I know Danny. He’s persistent like that. Wants to get down to the brass tacks. The real shit. I love that about him, but it’s wearying sometimes when you just want to watch Netflix and cool out.

 

Here’s the thing, though: this place seems to invite conversation. That’s not surprising, but it is encouraging. It makes me want to talk, want to spill. The trees keep secrets. The ocean washes everything away anyway.

 

“So, okay. You guys hooked up.”

 

“I wouldn’t call it hooking up.”

 

“You had sex. Right?”

 

“Uh. Yeah.”

 

“That’s what’s known in parlance as hooking up.”

 

“Does that mean that we hook up?”

 

“Technically, yes. But not really.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because we’re in a relationship. Were you guys in a relationship?”

 

“Kind of. I mean, we were friends.”

 

“Friends means hookup.”

 

I’ve lost count of the number of cigarettes we’ve smoked at this point. Three, six, twelve, does it really matter? The pack is yet to be emptied, so we’re still all good. And if we need more, there’s the Chevron station down in Gualala. Life is wonderful.

 

“Okay, so we hooked up. Do you want to hear the story or just sit there getting a hard-on about it?”

 

He laughs a little too hard.

 

“I mean, I didn’t expect it to happen. Honestly. I thought we were just having dinner. I thought we were just friends. I had no idea it was going any further.”

 

“But you wanted it to.”

 

“May-be.”

 

“Did you ever think about him when you were masturbating?”

 

I blink hard in his direction. I mean, he knows I do it. We all do it. My typical – unasked – question is this: are you part of the 99 percent who do it or part of the 1 percent who do it and lie about it? But we haven’t really talked about it. It feels like the thing we keep to ourselves, of ourselves. The idea of talking about it is both invasive and a huge turn-on.

Changes

I'm finally about to launch my new website. My old one needs some love beforehand, though. I always loved it, particularly the McGee's Farm popup and the popup with me and Adam. Goodbye, old friend. 

Sonoma, 2011

 

Score!

 

Some really good bad '90s rap

 

Posted this six years ago

 

Allison Landa

MatSSoSpaoygcns dor2Sndde7h, 201sd5l  · New York, NY  · 

Shared with Friends; Except: Steven Landa

As a kid, I was not allowed to be sick. I was not allowed to cry. I was not allowed to be vulnerable, and heaven help me if I spilled a glass of water at the dinner table. I really thought I had processed all this. I truly believed that I had taken care of the many triggers that my father implanted in me from the time I took my first breath. This trip has been about much more than taking pictures of skylines. It's about learning who I am and who I wish to be.

The autism diagnosis

Baz is on the spectrum. We first suspected it a year and a half ago when his preschool teachers sat us down and said he's not making logical and social connections. Thus began a journey that continues to this day. I'm listening to this right now. It's about getting the diagnosis and how to deal with it in yourself. "This isn't just a phase of life," the podcast says. "It isn't going away." Nope. 

Rosa's book launch, 2019

 

The Beatles, "Don't Let Me Down"

It's the love that lasts forever
It's the love that has no past

2009, Lake Tahoe, chubby cheeks

 

Today's writing

She turns and I realize – certainly not for the first time – how gorgeous she is. It’s such a unique thing, her looks. The eyes that can flash over the most minute things – good, bad, in between. The lips that don’t need gloss to be distinct. The teeth that without intervention – no braces, nothing – stand straight and white despite coffee drunk and the occasional cigarette smoked. Speaking of which.

 

“You want to go outside?” I flash the pack of American Spirits that I got before we left. She raises an eyebrow.

 

“They allow smoking here?”

 

“Why wouldn’t they?”

 

“Because no one does anymore.” She looks at me for a moment, concentrating. “That’s why you tasted like that.”

 

“Tasted like what?” But she nailed me. I’d snuck one in Jenner when she went off to the bathroom. Only got halfway through it before she came out, bitching that there was no toilet paper, but that was enough. The only reason she didn’t smell it on me before was that I made damn sure to keep the smoke away from my clothes, waving and waving it over toward the bay. But I hadn’t remembered the basic: brush your teeth. I guess I figured the coffee would cover the scent. Nope.

 

“Shut up,” she says, “and let’s go investigate the deck.”

 

It extends off the kitchen, accessed by a sliding-glass door. I get the sense the people who came here before us had a kid, a young one, who kept trying to let the dogs out this door. That kind of mischief that you laugh about after the moppet is in bed, but that in the moment causes you to grind your teeth like a damn combine harvester. I don’t know where this is coming from. I can just see them in my mind like I can envision any other memory. Maybe St. Orres is making me psychic. I’ll take it. It can be a new career path.

 

Twin chairs, a small table, and on it an ashtray. An unusual thing in any Northern California outpost, but particularly where fire is such an alive thing. Smoking and wifi. Maybe we’ll stay here more than a week.

Goodbye Stranger

 

Only I know why I'm posting this, and only I need to know. 

The house from the memoir

I don't even recognize this as home. 

This thread made me laugh.

No comment beyond that. 

Haircut!

 

Today

 

Overwhelmed

That about covers it.

Yesterday's writing

I said what? I said what now? Oh man. Six months in and I’m telling her I love her. I mean, I know it. I feel it. I experience it every day when I wake up to her morning breath, when I kiss her neck while she’s doing dishes, while we’re together in bed. But knowing it and saying it are two very different things. If I’ve learned anything from being with women, I’ve learned this. Once you lay down the love you, things change. Expectations arise. The whole program shifts. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Maybe I don’t even have to. But I’ll try: love you means that you’re going to be reliably home at night, that you’re going to be as subtle as possible when checking out other women, that you’ll hold them when they cry even – especially – when they’re being completely unreasonable. Love you is an enjoinment, a chain. A pretty chain to be sure, but make no mistake: It’s a chain nonetheless. And its links are damn strong.

Hi from Reno

 

Never was a cornflake girl

 

Yesterday's writing

Thing is, I’m not a relationship maven. I just never seemed suited to the endeavor. I could do the dating thing, though I never really liked it. It just seemed so damn fruitless and stupid. Still, I could do it. I could go out to dinner. I could invite guys back for coffee. I could wake up the next day feeling like I shouldn’t have done what I did.

 

But somehow I couldn’t get further than that.

 

Jeffrey was closest. Jeffrey was also gay. If that doesn’t compute to you, think how I felt. We met through Carolann, my roommate at UCSB. The hot Indian summer months at the beginning of sophomore year. We were still arranging our place when he came to visit. He advised me on the best way to position the ficus. I found him cute but a little – strange? That’s how I would characterize it at that time. I was innocent then, too much so.

 

Strange, but I liked him. He was a redhead with green eyes, Irish ancestry splayed across his face. He was also in good shape from riding dressage all summer. Dressage. That should have told me everything I needed to know. He wore a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and jean shorts. The hair on his legs was the same color as that on his head. That line of thinking made me blush hard.

 

Let’s be real, though: I knew the guy was gay. I knew it from the moment he asked me to go out with him to the Nordie’s café. I only wish that were a lie. Jeffrey prized his Nordie’s card, loved the piano player they’d installed at the top of the escalator. Over the years of our relationship – whatever that word meant in this context – I’d spend many hours in those air-conditioned confines, pretending to care about clothes that were probably made by some low-wage worker in Bhutan that were now marked up about a zillion percent.

 

Jeffrey and I never slept together. We never even kissed. Instead he leaned his leg against mine: at restaurants, cafes, movie theaters where I’d pretend I gave a damn about what was happening on the screen. I later decided that the way he did it was insidious. Masterful, really. He gave a girl hope. Never followed through, just held out the string and watched me chase, like the world’s worst cat owner.

 

Over the years I’ve tried to look at it from his perspective: he was trying to figure out who and what he was. Then I came along. Obviously he liked me. Obviously he cared about me. Obviously he had some sort of thing for me, otherwise, why would he come up for the weekend, spending chaste nights on our ugly plaid sofa? One year I took him home for Thanksgiving. My mother pulled me aside and said: “Honey. He’s sweet. And kind. And considerate.”

 

We were standing in our huge walk-in pantry in suburban San Diego. My dad was long gone. It was just her and my brothers at that point.

 

“And,” I said, “You think he’s gay.”

 

“Oh, honey,” she said, and took a puff on her Benson & Hedges.

10 years ago

 

Today's writing

Such are relationships in the pandemic. We’re thrown together when we’re not ready or else we don’t see each other for weeks, months, on end. It’s a false advance or wall, however you want to look at it. Either way, we’re not free to define our own trajectories. Either throw in your lot with the one you love or get used to FaceTime sex. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to spend my time jerking off, either alone or with her on the other end. I wanted her in my bed, in my house, in my heart.

 

So we tossed it in together. She kept her place. I mean, she’s not stupid. She knew this thing could blow up at any minute. We bring ourselves into relationships, fully or not, and our partner chooses to do so or not. We’re still relatively new. Bringing ourselves wholly to this thing is going to take some time.

 

But what is a couple to do under these circumstances? We don’t do well apart. She’s not a phone person, I’m not a Zoomer or FaceTimer or whatever, and neither one of us does email sufficiently to keep a relationship alive. So we figured why not, let’s give this thing a try. Why not. Why not indeed.

 

“No,” I say, and brandish the vape pen. “Were you going to just hide this?”

 

She knows I’m not wild about her smoking pot. I try to control my feelings. I mean, after all, she’s a grown-up, right? She’s in her 30s; she’s old enough to figure out what she needs to do to be an adult.

 

I mean, she does. Right?

 

“I was going to tell you,” she says, her breasts drooping in her bra, “eventually.”

 

“Eventually as in when? Next September?”

 

“I’m sorry,” she says, and her tone is nothing like an apology. “Can I clean the puke up before you jump down my throat?”

 

Herein lies the nexus of a relationship: the point where you’re grown-up enough to do whatever you want but connected enough that you can’t do that at all. Hell, I recognize that. You think there are things I haven’t had to put away in the name of keeping this thing going? But I was honest with her about them. I leveled with her.

 

Didn’t I?

 

1000 Oceans

Oh my god this song has meaning. On many levels. 

Mother's Day in Santa Cruz

 

The last moments of your life

Six Feet Under posits that you'll see the most important people in your life right before you die. I will see Adam.

From my friend Marc

This is random but just wanted to verbalize that I love you, Allison, and wish that I’d been self-assured and confident enough to encourage you in our formative years. You’ve always been awesome and inspiring and so beautifully left of center! Keep on keepin’ on!

Transitional kindergarten

School scares me. School, where I send him and they release him four hours later. School, where they can see my weaknesses and judge me for it. School, where they know him in a way I don't, can't. Friend, you are also the enemy.

Marcus sent this to me

And a week later I saw it for myself at Mellow Yellow.

Still coming down from the trip

It was nonstop, seriously. Crazy. Hectic. Walking constantly around the Upper East Side, the Village, Lyft to Washington Heights to see my friend Rosalynd and her family. Totally nuts. Could it be another way?

A few pics:

Today's writing

Mom died on a vent. We clutched hands, cried at the iPhone camera. Ridiculous, really, except it was real fucking life. No one last chance to stroke her cheek, feel her breath on my face as she whispered those last words. We were maskless, Kelly and me, because it was only us. No way to enter the hospital except through technology. We had a bag of chips between us and I found myself eating them like there was no goddamned tomorrow, just macking away on the faux-Doritos from Trader Joe’s. The crumbs fell on our chests, our laps. They decorated our chins. We said goodbye to my mother with junk food on our breath.