[Salt]burning the old year
A few things. After, a few more. Frequently and fervently, I have believed myself 1. unserious 2. cowardly 3. immune to the self-improvement strategies espoused in pink-jacketed pop psychology hardbacks but also yoga studios, writing workshops, serious philosophical texts, wellness influencer accounts, shock therapy. A poor student. Least coachable. Nervy, pathetic, underperforming and desperate to seem otherwise. These are my darkest worries now. It used to be that everything came after the fear that I’d get fat but then I did a little and it’s fine. It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t say I am perfectly recovered from all the retching and small deaths and the counting and dark thoughts, okay, but I’m moving on. I’m putting that one down to explore my interior. There is so much wanting inside of me that it is difficult to name what, precisely, I want, the clamoring, then, an end unto itself, treading water. I know I want to begin and to stop winking about it. I want to try even if [when] it feels stupid and embarrassing. I want to be more like the annoyingly overconfident child I once was and less like the annoyingly unsure adult I turned into and I want to be able to admit that the two are the same and always have been and it’s fine, really, it’s fine. As Scheana Shay’s forearm reminds us,, , It’s All Happening. I want to be and I am.
A few things. Now, a few more. Frequently and fervently, I have pretended not to know that 1. Life is serious and it’s here already. Acting as if it were not, moving through my days like a dress rehearsal, archly, maintaining ironic distance, reserving the right to say jk jk about any pursuit–all of this is more shameful than simply trying hard and seeing what happens. I have thought this before. I mean it today. 2. Bravery can be very small and it is still bravery and you can decide to have it and then you do. 3. Something is opening for me now. Legally, this must be credited, in part, to the introduction–at very long last–of some additional dopamine into my system by mouth each morning, BUT if I’m honest I think it’s because I happened to see a random gray haired beautiful Santa Fe hippie sort of woman on Instagram say that she is so happy for capricorns this year. She said we have been down bad since 2008 and I was sixteen then so I know that’s true. Something about pluto. Apparently a very tiresome or maybe wicked influence. Well, anyway, she’s finally leaving us alone, and with this exit comes the end of a long and painful period of becoming. I don’t know that I believe in astrology so much as I believe in not not believing in things, a pathologically open mind, which I realize sounds very stupid, and maybe it is, but that’s where the matter stands. It could be true! How should I know? If I can’t prove it wrong then as far as I can tell the only thing to do is let it fly. It follows, then, that I should accept these random glad tidings delivered by Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm as neither fact nor fiction but just another possibility in the grand parade of possibilities and to go on about my path in some small measure stronger for it. So I will.
I turned thirty-two on Sunday but I feel younger than I can remember. Maybe younger than I’ve been, though not in a neurodivergent adult minor way. Just that I’m open. That I mean it. I am forcing myself to type this all out properly with capital letters and everything else. It’s fine to do things all the way, to be intentional, rather than only blazing. I want to remember that. Friendship ended with being a cool girl now applying retinoid cream to the grown woman skin that covers the blood and guts and big bright eyeballs of a hopeful little baby hungry for adventure is my best friend.* Or whatever. I have been reborn as a dangerously sincere adult woman or alternately have decided that I was. I don't know. It really seems like anything could happen.
You know, what I wanted to say is that this year my actions will be ruled by something other than fear. Naturally, then, I want to make a statement on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, a television program powered by pure terror. The Utah iteration of Andy Cohen’s storied empire has from its inception presented with a whisper of spookiness not present in the other cities. Perhaps it is the thin air which makes these women circle one another like poorly socialized pandemic puppies, pissing and crying then snarfing a bag of Kit Kats no one realized was in the room. Could be! My own brief visit did give me the spins. But, realistically, the ghost in the machine is pedophilic narcissist Joseph Smith and his cult of fear and shame colloquially known as the Mormon church. Much in the way that Kyle Richards’ family trauma remains the centrifugal force which spins The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills even during those periods when neither of her sisters is on payroll, that most American religion–oppressive in all the usual Christian ways but with such bizarre sci-fi dolloped on top–looms large over all Salt Lake proceedings, even though, as my raised-Mormon (and hot and kind and talented, if we’re just naming traits) girlfriend tells me, none of these women could even get a temple recommend. Whatever that means.
The swirl of horror and mystery reached a tedious crescendo in this week’s season four finale, an hour so loaded with wealthy people rolling over mansion lawns complaining wetly about the nefarious deeds of a reeking middle-class interloper that one could be forgiven for thinking of idiot film du jour Saltburn. Emerald Fennell’s gaudy failure hardly merits discussion except regarding its place within a growing school of films (in the wake of Parasite’s success, I think you can fairly say) that are “about” “class” in the most toothless and impotent ways. Bravo programs are nearly all about rich people and money does come up–usually when a housewife has been duped out of hers yet again, or someone is in trouble with the law–but directly exploring the friction which exists when normal people rub up against the very rich is not usually within the purview. Unconsciously, though, all of the vapid escapist media we consume wherein someone from up four tax brackets humiliates themselves for our pleasure must be about cash in the end. Fear and dollars and diamond rings lost in public toilets and private black SUVs through humble island neighborhoods and maxed out credit cards and, I mean, isn’t it true that money is what Americans fear most? The all-consuming pursuit of more comes in tandem with anxious hoarding, and then down, down under boot soles is the violence of living without it. The “reveal” that new SLC housewife Monica Garcia–young-ish (heavy on ish) and kind of sloppy, mid-divorce after her own infidelity, formerly employed as an assistant to the housewife who is no longer on this show due to being in jail for fraud–was once or currently or who cares involved in an anonymous troll account which the other girls (women, mothers, mostly Gen Xers) are for some reason super agitated over is about as thrilling as Saltburn’s reveal that Barry Keoghan’s character, who’d acted for the entire runtime like a psychotic little monster, was indeed a psychotic little monster. The juvenile details of this apparent indiscretion bore me, but the current of terror and wanting beneath the fighting burns white hot.
Lisa is afraid that her beloved boyfriend-son Jack will return from his mission unknowable and that it will be her fault for having raised him a Mormon in Utah without impressing upon him firmly enough that Mormonism is to her something of a semi-ironic pastime, like collecting 80s novelty t-shirts, or trying polyamory. Kinda funny, even useful in certain circles, but not to be taken to heart. She’s right to fear this. Lisa Barlow has got one of my favorite (most uniquely demented) brains on record but she fucked this one up bad.
Meredith is honestly not afraid at all except for sometimes when she has had too much Xanax and is afraid even to sit up. I love her.
On paper, Whitney Rose fears nothing. Whitney is a (wonderfully bad and ugly) tattoo clad, (cloyingly and with all the sensuality of a rectal exam) sex-pos, formally removed from the LDS church ledger (after multiple notary related misfires), ATV riding, backbending, post-fear girl boss and oh god it looks so tiring. An agony of trying to be enlightened (and, yes, to heal, or even hill) and cleansed and changed is the teeth-chattering certainty, which, of course, you ignore, and ignore, pick at, ignore, that eventually some other spinning plate has to crash the way they always have before. Whitney is certainly not thinking about fear but we can see it on her tight, bright face. Still, I believe in Whitney immensely and I want for her only the best and I expect she will be better off after the divorce gives her something new to process.
Angie K. is the toughest nut for me to crack because I think she’s just kind of a loser. That’s ok! I don’t think she fears anything except being left out and ignored, so she must feel better than ever this year, having fought her way into the fulltime cast. God, she wanted to be on this show so badly for so long, and for what? To wear the ugliest sunglasses known to man, be called two different types of dog by two different “friends”, and react in the least cool way humanly possible to rumors that her hairdressing husband fucks men. I guess she’s probably happy anyway. So that’s nice at least.
Mary is not of this realm. It would be stupid for me to pretend I know what’s going on with her.
Heather Gay, whose book Bad Mormon, I’m told, was a bestseller per the records of the failing New York Times, is afraid of everything. I have to stand and pace the apartment sometimes til I feel the spray from her hatred and desperation slip off me again. Heather is afraid of her body, of sex, of freedom, of play, of her growing daughters, of judgment real and imagined, of ceasing for a single moment the manic micromanaging of everyone and everything and so getting left behind by a world she views with barely concealed contempt and bald jealousy. I do not think Heather is a bad person, but many are saying that hurt people hurt people and the hurt which Heather suffered from being raised in a cult which makes abject the joy and pleasure of being in a body and alive to the world’s gifts, especially for women, is obvious at every turn. Regrettably, she has been assigned by herself and the Comcast subsidiary known as “Bravo” the role of Post-Mormon sorority mom, the loud and proud single gal telling hashtag hard truths about her life after the church, a role which she does not yet have the healing, distance, or sense of self to fill. It’s painful to watch Heather have to pretend at all times that she wouldn’t still be sober and chaste and going to church every Sunday if only her ex-husband didn’t leave her. There’s a mine of trauma the size of the continental US which she apparently has no access to except for when some spills out like acid on a castmate. The simple truth is that anyone (Heather Gay) who would stay friends with someone (federal inmate Jen Shah) who liked a meme that said they (Heather Gay) look like Shrek (SHREK!!) is seriously unwell!!!!!!!!!!!! Girl get UP!!!!!!!!!!! Nothing in the world is worth being that scared.
Monica is afraid of her ghastly mother and of not being able to afford the life she wants and most of all Monica is afraid, like, wild-eyed, sick to her stomach scared, of being seen and weighed and measured and found less than, a fate she cannot escape in this setting and so the horrors ring on unending. These all are too raw and reasonable, and it could be that that’s why she grates on me. There is a kicked puppy quality to Monica that I recognize and rebuke. I need, to be most comfortable, for my housewives to be either deliriously arrogant (Lisa Barlow, Dorit, Vicki, Gizelle, Carole Radziwill for a long time and then suddenly NOT, the amazingly disturbed Kelly Dodd etc) or else, even better, so fundamentally insecure that they’ve papered over the truth of themselves with a layer of bullshit so thick it has changed the molecular structure of their being and even they can no longer see the difference (Bethenny, Kyle, Karen Huger, my darling Tamra and more). Anything in between cuts too close to the bone for me, feels too much like wading through my own hangups. Probably also it’s because Megan and I have welcomed weed gummies into our lives most heartily of late and sometimes if I’m too high the discomfort of bearing witness to Monica’s real and legible discomfort makes me go catatonic, twitchy, or both.
I am not excited to watch these women ploddingly litigate the mind-numbing details of whether Monica did or did not, for example, post the blind item about Whitney being a swinger. The original four will gang up on her and she will react poorly and in the end the nasty low bred grasper will be defeated and dusted off their shoulders, much in the way that Emerald Fennell, in her blue blood heart, probably wished Saltburn could end. Three cheers to our security; we will hold it tight in our teeth. What a dire way to begin again in a new year of your only life. But at least they’ve got those crazy soda shops.
Let this be the year I stop fearing what life might become if I tried my best. What that entails remains unclear. Once a week I will pause to tell you how it’s going or, instead, how the sky looked while walking home in love at night with lightning shooting from my fingertips and old sneakers on my feet or which domestic beers have rizz or what makes a household pet seem like they’re probably a homosexual. We’ll see. I've decided to try out trying and this is where I'm going to start.
consider: The supernaturally unsentimental medical advice (among endless other healing, though not life-saving things) dispensed by the late great Cookie Mueller in Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which I was late to read and now cannot imagine having been without for so long. I’m not going to quote any of it, though. Buy your own copy; it will do you good. ** That Poor Things is not “about” “feminism”, as it were. ** The Odette and Odile perfumes from Marissa Zappas & Courtney Rafuse, with their delirium-inducing swan bottle toppers, which I’ve yet to get my hands on, left only to reread the list of notes and lust but I must and I will. If you’d like to buy me the set of both please email your terms. ** This dinner that always always goes off. (original is from Joshua McFadden’s wonderful cookbook Six Seasons, which you should probably just get if you know how to cook or, like me, have a genius girlfriend who does. but this is basically it.) ** Summery sounding and not-new song “Big Wheel” by Samia which also kind of sounds like laptop commercial music but even so is steeling me this January. I got bad news / but I didn't fight. Here we go.
*I wrote this before I even saw Poor Things. Have a good weekend.
[i’ve imported my old tinylist subscribers to this new project mostly to avoid losing touch with old pals but obviously if you’d like to go then be free.]