Chicken counting one two three

It's been like summer vacation, where I often have no idea what day of the week it is. There are simply four or five days of the week where friends aren't free to play during daylight hours, and then there are two odd ones where we romp around in the sandy valleys.

There's been bounty hunters that show up on our doorstep at 3 am.

And I'm sending out job applications into the Ether, each time counting chickens before the rooster even gets a twinkle in the eye. "I could see myself living in a war-ravaged and mega-homophobic country, why not?" That kind of musing and I'm catching up on my Book a Week vows. Seven novels in the past week and I just picked up my eighth. I've been reading about Burroughs and Ginsberg writing to each other about going face-deep in ayahuasca in South America.

It's kinda shocking that it's the 41st week of the year.

I've also been doing some writing on the side, definitely rolling around some ideas for Spoonwiz.

Here's a rough chunk I need to edit and add to about food and community:
There's something that touches the soft squishy side of me almost every time we have co-op house meals. It sounds incredibly crunchy granola made by Berkeley grandmother anarchists, but I think every culture has figured out on its own that putting certain things in your mouth is blissful, and that you want to be happy and warm in the comfort of other people. So we gather and swarm at various points of the calendar year. Thanksgiving, a convocation of urban tribes bearing turkey, oh-so-clever usages of pumpkin, and a joke about what corn is called back home. Tết, Hannukah, it's all about warmth, about family and close friends, about bringing your neighbor a pot of hot soup on a winter day.

Why did our cave ancestors stumble upon this ridiculous formula of Food + People = Joy, and then decide that civilized people would only indulge in the practice of being really happy a few occasions of the year? More simply, why aren't we all exchanging moon cakes every Friday instead of once a year during Lunar New Year?

Bags of gourmet Cheeseboard pizza often magickally appear in our house fridge, courtesy of a co-oper's boyfriend who picks up what the artisinal bakeries nearby can't sell. On most nights, a co-oper will bring a friend or two to dinner, and it's an endless flow of the global nomad community that centers on hubs like Oakland. I like the idea of people resting up, eating some homecooked food in our urban oasis before they make the long gorgeous curve down the Pacific Coast Highway. It's sometimes like an orphanage. Not to the extent that the trope is a sad one, but that we are always a port in the storm for our friends. Recently fired friends, traveling the world friends, broke ones, there would always be a small room with clean sheets off the living room waiting for you.

So yeah, life is pretty good even if I don't know what's next. Hazy and unclear, but it's been a lot of fun to have the time to think, to plan out what kind of career I want.

Standing outside my co-op after a caution cookie shard and I'm holding warm heartstopper pizza while Tyler wraps up his cigarette, the Vietnamese woman next door, Coi, smiles shyly at me as she walks into the orange light and then around her own small garden. We had finally met the other day when she thanked me for the paper bag of cukes we had left her. Her son will stand between our buildings and just scream and scream until Coi barricades herself into a room or the police come.

I'm wandering the Urban Ore aisles with my best friend and it all seems like one of the used doors will just get tugged on, a knob will turn, and we will just be in the past, an alternate dimensiom, or just fucked. An older man hovers over me as I flick through the crusty paintings, and as my flipflops pad through the musty innards of Ore, I'm thinking of the Yelpers warning about getting all your tetanus shots, but people are also hysterical in general practice.

Thought I'd lost this again, but the thread is regained. Obviously still rocketing along, it's like Kerouac is making fun of us, trolling us, it feels like the right time as I move through this pool of fog, Abhorsen bells tolling, moving backwards, simultaneous swirls and orbits of metal. I want to be traveling, getting to know a city by myself, learning customs, fitting in like I pride myself on doing, being the cat who has fun in a paper bag.

I don't think that it's a bad thing. Except for Jakarta and holding in liquid explosive shit while wearing my only suit in the smothering dripping heat of Indonesian summer, and there alternates clouds of bugs that nibble at you and smoky meats that emerge from the grill for you to nibble. It's all a series of nibbles, where this stand sells the best duluk from a particular province known for juicy, and I'm ready to get back to my hotel to sit on the throne, and the daily hour where my driver makes ten minutes of smalltalk before I give up, nod off, and my interpreter is still chatttering away, so I wake up to continue talking about his side business as an artist, he owns a printing press, and I'm talking to the precocious Gutenberg of Jakarta.

I don't want these to be my last adventures, and I don't think they will. I remember having a giant shit eating grin on my face every time I travel, and especially one warm morning when I woke in Bangkok in a purple bed, slithered into some shorts and flip flops, walked into a cloud of humidity, looking to spend some baht on fresh fishcake and fruit, and doing the wai to the valet and doorman, and I watch the street food vendor's child carry a bucket more than half her size down to the brown torrent of a river under a pedestrian bridge. All of the rice noodles, pork and herbs float in the oily scum as the girl and bucket both submerge.

I'm waiting again and it's like last year and the ones before since I'm just waiting and hanging, not that I mind, there's something about staying hungry, being young and dumb, and wanting to see the world on someone else's dime. Last year, I had visions of Japan, Morocco, France, and I ended up feasting on ribs in white barbecue, talking to a very naked and very large man who insisted I listen for hours as he talked about struggling against the company and losing, about his roof leaking all winter, his kids going hungry, going around to six different soup kitchens. Another man told us to stop filming once he started crying and that it would be hard in a small Southern town, the neighbors talk, you know.

It's the twenties that are important because you're finally a baby adult, and you're making what feels to you and your friends like major life choices, and people a little older are looking at you and smiling at how you really have no idea what you're getting yourself into soon, and you're falling into a cliche. Where there are rivers of unmentionable herbs, milk, honey, ink black plumes of late night conversations.

Travis concert, cookie crumbs midway, smoking on an airy patio with a front row seat to crackhead shenanigans, succulents, dying tomatoes, and the golden virgin mary, we take a break out of the clouds to get Tu Lan vermicelli, "I hope it's still good even after the city made them clean their kitchens of rats."