What can I say? I’m just being honest. Unfortunately, only with the people I love because the people I love can take it, okay? In my partnership, we say a thing when the other is getting charged/agitated/plain rude,
‘“COC! Remember COC!”
as in, Conversations Of Care.
It is an acronym that always makes me smile (I know - I’m a child), which is part of its charm. It’s annoying in the moment but effective. It allows us to consider the energy and sharpness of what is being said and how we say it so that the other might receive the intended message.
In less practical news, I am supposed to be sculpting a new novel. Instead, I am busy hanging out with my S.O. doing wholesome things like taking advice from everyone about the best places to go for ice cream, tacos and dumplings and making lists in the notes app, which is a type of writing. Is it not? I am also doing sunrise hikes and writing Beach Day on the joint calendar, then removing it because I can only handle the beach in minimal doses. Things I like more than the beach include;
I missed out Skin Contact, putting things in my cart but not pressing BUY NOW and walking down Santa Monica Blvd on Sunday evening when the clubs are popping, the blood sky behind us. This is the thing about writing a novel, this particular novel. I have to leave it alone for days, live large in the gaps between. I have to go out into the loud world and be open and porous, or that’s what I tell myself. I am taking a walk on Sunset. A person in a red shirt is smoking on the pavement. Later on the page, they become maroon, writhing around on the ground in the evening rain, inconsolable. Or my protagonists pair up - some ominous happening between strangers,
two broken stop signs, one across the other,
two red lines (a bleeding couplet) inside a poem. So you must leave the house, even when it’s an effort. You never know what you’ll find.
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