THE FEELING: Saints With Cowboy Mouths

Dads, David Lynch, dreamers living in a dream

Pals,

A quick one, because I am on “vacation” (have had calls every day since the 6th) and because, like Serena van der Woodsen, I have to go. (I’ve been rewatching Gossip Girl — original, obviously — and relistening to voicenotes during my new year/post-birthday sabbatical. Season two of Gossip Girl, oh my god.) I return to life on Monday.

David Lynch’s death made me feel the way a person always feels when someone who built part of their consciousness dies, with an added sense of grazing a live wire with the palm of my hand, due to the fact that David Lynch reminds me so much of my dad, best-friend-forever, co-main dude. (When Simon does something selfless and in silence, I say “What a [dad’s name]!”) I only noticed the similarity after I realized that my dad was old. Same major, attitudinal hair; same speaking bark; same fearsome morality. Philosopher-iconoclasts, in very different milieux. Most girls who are close to their fathers are, it seems like, Daddy’s Girls. Not me; not my sisters. We are real buds, engaged in pursuits dedicated only to our interests. (Though, when needed, he’s been an invaluable and shit-scary advocate.) So yeah this one “hit” or whatever.

My dad is fine, but old. My mom just died. Days are passing.

I was the perfect age to be fucked! up! when I saw Blue Velvet on Canadian cable TV, and ensorcelled by Mulholland Drive in the movie theater as I was getting my sea legs as a person making their first cultural choices that weren’t simply handed down by the band of alt-y, art-school-y brothers-in-arms I hung out with from the first days of ninth grade. What IS this? That’s your firmament. I was in a hotel room by myself when Adam Yauch’s death was announced and I sort of stood around, and then walked the room in circles, not really knowing what to do, and not yet knowing how to process that feeling. (Related: more recently, David Lynch has meant a lot to me as a meditator ((she says, cornily)), a dreamer in a dream-er, as well as a Dadelgänger.)

Is it weird to be so hung up on this kind of thing? I mean, I am very interested in faces — and voices, and gesture and affect, the whole moment-to-moment circus of it all — in general. I like and despise and resent and enjoy my own face. (My time has finally come for Botox and maybe a micro-mini and maaaybe some filler: I got a softening reprieve during the postpartum era, but like, she’s three.) Strawberry is a chimera: she is identical twins with seventeen people who look nothing alike, including me, Simon (well, Simon and I look too much alike, but he lacks my elephant eyelashes and I lack his perfect nose), her aunt, her cousins, my mother, Simon’s mother, and Kira from Dark Crystal. (I’m wary of parents who are their children’s fans before their agents and champions, and smugging out around your own offspring’s beauty is a little graceless, but I am mostly intrigued by the shapeshifting, and how much happens in a face, especially her face, over a mood, an hour, a month.)

It’s a little weird, sure. But it’s also just the easiest and most acute manifestation of something, of trying to explain some piece of my interiority and experience in a single move. When I say “David Lynch reminds me so much of my dad!” I’m grabbing at something that is both convenient and essential, literal and symbolic, flattering and bare.

One of my best friends only just met my dad, and met my mom a month before she died. Another one, qui vit en Paris (is that right?), has met neither. And it’s not like a warm three minutes in passing is useful in any real way, anyway, is it? Is that all we get, if we find our forever-friends in adulthood, and don’t live near our families? This question will be my next case study in my efforts toward understanding and accepting reality.

Like many traumatized, safety-seeking adults, I overexplain myself. I die to be understood. All I want is to show you something you’ll recognize, because otherwise, I’m just so mercilessly alone with it. And here’s a way in, to something that feels so beautiful and meaningful that it blooms and bursts all day, every day, and one day will simply disappear: celebrity/artist-as-legend, as a comp, for this silent, selfless person. A self-made suburban businessman who I once observed snap someone’s head clean off about trans rights in the motherfucking nineteen-nineties (and I have a million more like that). The cool-ass weirdo whose heart was always, always right. The firmament.

I have to go.

xoxo

Gossip Girl

“People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth.”