Missive from the Cat Lady Frontlines
This is just to say that initially I felt okay upon waking given how much wine we drank with dinner. Then Grace launched a campaign ostensibly because I’d had the audacity to sleep until 645am when she absolutely definitely was going to die of starvation but really because she’s a Masshole feline with puritanical tendencies who doesn’t approve of the demon alcohol.
First she knocked over the flowers on my bedside table and when I still didn’t stir because sleeping on a bed of peonies and lilac pedals is actually a bit of a fairytale, she let out an enormous, bone-chilling wail, took a running leap and with claws extended landed on my foot, the one extremity poking out of my very soft and cozy comforter. And, uh, my permakitten drew blood because damn does that girl need a pedicure. At this writing I am disinfecting my foot while nursing a gargantuan hangover and Grace is sulking un-prettily and in general every resident of Gracie Rosmansion is in quite a state.
The Black and Blue Swans of Spring
Lately every time I want to write you I find myself writing my book instead. I need to finish it eventually, and why not now? is my basic thinking, and it’s solid, you can’t deny that. Especially since I feel like everyone and their sister is now involved in this process–that is, ever since I revealed my broke and broken underbelly and almost all of you were awfully nice about it.
Time is money, don’t you know. And more than that: money is time. Meaning when I have free time it doesn’t feel free at all. Now I really feel that I should be working.
When it was raining all the time and we New Yorkers felt like we were on some sort of dystopian Noah’s Ark–which, I’m sorry, the jury’s not out yet on whether we aren’t–it was easy to just keep working and working. But now that spring is actually behaving like spring again, I have to devise all sorts of tricks to keep myself on the straight and narrow.
Not that my book is especially narrow. Or straight. Continue Reading →
Interstellar Eve Babitz
Eve in her 50s.
Happy Eve Babitz Day! As a Gen Xer forced to spend hundreds of dollars I didn’t have in the 90s to track down Eve Babitz’s out-of-print books, there’s a part of me that’s irritated the millennial girls think they’ve discovered the brilliant writer, groupie-adventuress, and auto-muse. Just a tiny part, though, because everyone should have an Eve who gives Lilith a run for her money. Every female-identified person in particular should have a star-fucking, bridge-burning, convention-flouting, binary-busting, sexy and smart, lush and arch, totally mean and totally kind, self-identified-spinster role model like Evie. So I’m glad she is finally back in print and translated into billions of tongues. (She always was good with tongues.) Continue Reading →