run away from rain only to get caught in hail

Last entry of the year I guess, I am sitting on a wooden bench my grandfather built, I am in the countryside at my mother’s. My boyfriend is making coffee in the Bialetti and I wish I could breathe mountain air every day but we leave tomorrow. There’s a custom here that has children ringing our doorbell and me hit for prosperity by them with handmade rakes made from birch tree branches. My mother gives them coins and chocolate bars in return.

I’m freshly showered and have washed my hair for the first time in days. I put on a sheet mask my mother’s Korean friend sent her in a care package from Korea that she is iffy about me delving into though I want to try it all at once and give the skin on my face “stewardess syndrome” or whatever it’s called when you apply too many different products at once. I’m wearing purple plaid cotton panties from when I was in high school, navy wool ribbed Ralph Lauren knee high socks, a thin heather grey cashmere quarter zip turtleneck and black fleece lined ski leggings to go for a walk in the snow.

My boyfriend gave me an Epiphone Coronet guitar for Christmas and it surprised me by being so light. It being light means I can actually play while standing up without being annoyed at the weight of the guitar, and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up an instrument that felt as enjoyable, maybe when I played the same Hoefner bass that Air used for Moon Safari on the outskirts of Paris.

Somewhere online I read that there’s nothing worse about musicians talking a lot and being self deprecating on stage. I wonder if I fell victim to this on tour during my concerts this summer. I am just not afflicted with a desire to remain mysterious in a fabricated sort of way. I think about this when I see other artists and when I have negative or condescending thoughts about them which is frustrating, and I’m not supposed to have them, ultimately of course I’m an anarchist enough to think everybody should just get to do what they want; yet I am just so critical, hypercritical and too self aware but perhaps not in a constructive way.

Sometimes I see photographs of myself, too concerned with how I am being perceived, and think about the fact that I never fill in my brows and maybe I have plucked them too thin. On shoots makeup artists are always trying to draw on my eyebrows and it annoys me in a kind of groucho marx way; my eyebrows were never super thick and I feel like when they are filled in (something I am guilty of doing all throughout my teenage years) it throws off the balance in my already asymmetrical face. Sometimes I see photographs of myself and I think yes it’s all happening, whatever it may be. Now I am lying down on mother is taking a photograph of me lying down on the couch with my boyfriend’s family’s dog and it’s my last night here and I immediately feel guilty for not wanting my photograph taken but luckily I haven’t said anything I’ve just been smiling so I get to just feel guilty for my thoughts.

December was interspersed with lots of strange interactions. My most recent ex keeps texting me; wishing me happy holidays. It’s now been 8 months since I have broken up with him. The other week I arrived to flowers sent by him, a regular occurrence, that he then apologizes for via text, texts I never reply to and have not replied to for months. It was mildly amusing at first, a bit sad to bear witness to, but by now I find it cloying and creepy. I also have had no contact with him; it being a one sided scenario has made it impossible to even be civil because I am invariably so weirded out by this. In that same week, my ex boyfriend from when I was 19, the one I was engaged to, sent me one of those U.S. made pelican ash trays I’d had in my old Echo Park bungalow. The ones where their metal beaks are parted enough to place your cigarette into. I used to spend so much time in that tiny little ant infested bungalow apartment, on the only non steep part of Baxter Street, nestled just underneath Elysian Park. It was tame most nights even if I had to park the rusting Oldsmobile Delta 88 too many blocks away, and in the morning I’d walk to the corner to get an americano and a cucumber cream cheese bagel and listen to him on the phone, in London, at the end of his day. When he came to see me in LA we’d drive out to Palm Springs in his convertible Jeep, which he’d bought because he’d read about it in Glamorama, a book he later confessed to solely having read because I was reading it and he’d wanted to impress me. In Palm Springs, stoned one day at an antique mall, I’d bought the ashtray. In one of my transatlantic moves I’d lost it, or maybe he’d lied to me and secretly pilfered it after me breaking up with him, I don’t know. I don’t know why he sent a replacement after all these years. He said he found it on eBay accidentally, but I wonder how do you find this very specific item unless you’re deliberately searching. He’s recently engaged again, according to an Instagram story.

Late at night now. Big discogs.com order. Blithely ordering books. Boyfriend orders us two copies of Thomas Bernhards Holzfällen - Eine Erregung (1984) so we can read it together.

When I go to my email inbox to check on my new purchases, I recieve a newsletter from Sugared + Bronzed Silverlake. Last year in March when I was living in Los Angeles at my old roommate’s while he was in Japan, I stole a brazilian wax on Sunset. It wasn’t even a fucking wax, it was sugaring, an ordeal that to me is far more aggravating than something just being ripped off you in one fell swoop. I didn’t even really mean to not pay, not like when I deliberately keep walking with something frivolous in my hand; but rather my US card kept declining on ApplePay and I was wallet-less; so I told the wide-eyed receptionist who invariably didn’t care if I lived or died that I’d try and pick up cash or go get my wallet from my car. It was only a small fable; I hadn’t arrived by car and my wallet was somewhere buried in a strewn pile of clothes in my Lincoln Heights sublet, and I suppose I had vague intentions of finding a liquor store ATM. It wasn’t until I found myself stranded in that godforsaken weird strip mall with the globalized Scandi aesthetic that houses the D.S. & Durga when I realized I wasn’t going to turn back, I wasn’t going to look back, and I was never going back to pay for my bill at Sugared + Bronzed.

Back in Vienna. I’m sitting at the Wien Mitte mall making a stupid little tincture of recent purchases from the Reformhaus — iodine water and bitter greens, while sitting on one of the few benches dispersed seemingly at random, yet somehow placed in the perfect trajectory to be caught in the crossfire of passerby sneezes. This mall architecture is so hostile, no room for loitering, and I think to myself that the only people patronizing the few seating options are absolute derelict freaks, and then I wonder if I, too, am a derelict freak. I used to come here all the time with my best friend when she was still my best friend back when we used to get recklessly high together. There is an older couple opposite me, in what appear to be their 80s, who look to be absolutely normal and docile, which momentarily relieves me, until I realize they are drinking Smirnoff Ice out of cans at 11am.

I am, unsurprisingly enough, continuing my two day binge read of every single Girl Insides entry. Earlier this month I had a nonspecific craving for something I couldn’t place, something I wanted to consume, one that was only absolved by me talking out loud to myself; consuming my own voice and thoughts while performing the menial Sisyphean tasks that govern my life. I am reading Girl Insides in every free minute that my day allows me to. I am jealous of her anonymity. I do not post here with nearly as much candor but I really wish I could. I wonder if would feel cathartic to just purge all my asinine thoughts and also my impure ones; imagining it would feel like absolution in the best way; just how I like it, publicly and with attention, two things I have made my entirely livelihood dependent on. Thinking in my head to myself like she writes This is my life this is my life this is my life. Reading her entries reminds me of some of the best things I’ve read; a mixture of Douglas Coupland and Eve Babitz, with a lot of what it was like on my favorite website LiveJournal back in 2006 and maybe some random short story I find in an old 90s Paris Review, or also the best part of that one Ottessa Mosfegh story about a young man named Tyler who lives in Los Angeles with his landlord he has a precautious relationship with and every time he uses her phone he can smell halitosis on her receiver.

I’m signing off for the year now, Yori and I are meeting at what I like to call the communist bookstore which is really just a subterranean room with a dirt floor and lots of dog-eared books. It’s pay as you wish which is great in essence, but also means I am constantly probably overpaying, pouring all my coins and crumpled bills into the ceramic pot meant for discreet donations. This summer I went to see a film there and we sat on a sticky bench and I chain smoked cigarettes and joined the post-film discussion with a voracity I’d normally only reserved for school, unencumbered and shameless. I remember having to pee crouched outside between two cars during the movie because there was no bathroom and the next public toilet was in a park that felt too far away. I remember it was an usually satisfying sensation to crouch between the cars on this hot summer evening, the air thick and fragrant, and smell the metal on the front bumpers of the cars I was in between. When I was describing the communist bookstore to my boyfriend I told him I didn’t understand how the communist bookstore is so unknown and isn’t universally in Vienna considered the epicenter of cool. It’s not even really a communist bookstore, maybe anarchist, but either way I am fiending to get out of the mall, and fiending for a perhaps mangled edition of Andrea Dworkin.

Also had wonderful cab ride on the way to the communist bookstore. We dodge the busy street by the opera to avoid tourists but end up on a far busier and more congested road. My cab driver turns to me and says “in Turkey we’d say, ‘sometimes we get caught in a hailstorm when trying to avoid the rain’, you know?”