For now all you need to know is that Sacha is an icon in the tiny French towns around Plevenon. Her birthday is always fireworks and celebration for Bastille Day and in the town square children come up shy and nervous inquiring, "Qui est Sacha?"
I jump at their youth and my high, and my thoughts freeze so I don't say anything, I just point. That's the point.
We're all buzzing from moule and galette and French wine, except Jon who's sober and drinks about twelve espressos a day to counter the cravings. He's a fucking wild sport that guy, always ready to rage, always ready to dance and get weird in the rave lights, and always stone-cold sober. I could learn a lot from this man. I should really swing by his AA commitment in Venice when I'm back in California. It's a five minute bike ride from my house on Thursdays, and I could use some good wild conversation back home. Living seems so bland now, looking back, with the trends and hip society and the next big thing. LA is a city where tradition died with the first street cars, killed by the money that runs it.
No one goes to LA to see the old buildings, to take in the history and the culture. People go to LA to see famous people, or to be famous people, or to get a line on that money that's running things.
Scott knows. He knows a lot more than I do, that's for sure. He's seen it, the foreverness of losing someone. He's from LA, he's seen it. We talked stupidly over a font for the cover of a book I wrote. I somehow landed on Chanel Slanted, a messy-as-all-hell typeface. He thought I was cool because I pretended to be a writer. I thought he was cool because well, he killed it. He's a graffiti artist, but what he's really is a designer. He plays on Illustrator for fun and to pass the time sometimes. I think I read somewhere that the best way to learn is to put yourself in another person's shoes. That's how I learned I wasn't a designer, not really. All the people I thought of as designers, designed. They worked design, their passion was design. They constantly had projects on the mind, and with nothing else better to do, they designed. I always tried to write in those moments.
And so it's unfortunate--no it's silly to think that I put myself through an entire design program on a whim that lasted two years, just for the hell of it really. I wasn't bad, and it was all very interesting, and I made decent work, but perhaps the most important thing I learned was that I wasn't a designer. I only really did work when I had to. And then I'd write, just like I'm doing now. Wasn't that the point?
No, a castle sits out at the end of the point, off in the far distance; a blip on the horizon that nonetheless dominates a difficult focus of everything around at the beach. I'm at the beach now. The old man is out there again on the low tide, polishing his boules on the hard sand by the water, petonking, plombaying. He plays by himself. The children build moats by the breakers and slides in the reeds by the stream. We smoked a spliff over there earlier and I thought to myself, sinking in the sand, that I must be dreaming, I must be. Everything I hear is wind in the reeds and waves crashing, and I'm surrounded by only the most beautiful women, the most interesting and topless and of course delightfully English Tom with his stories of the weimaraners and mushrooms foraged at the old north castle by his home and shelfing the best drugs in London. Whenever he mentions Derbyshire it reminds of Claire. I still can't escape her here. Maybe I really don't need to. Maybe everyone runs away from the past because they're afraid of pain. I don't know, I've always been a masochist. There's something romantic and dizzying in my existence at the moment, it's a Dalian dreamscape.
Life's now a towel soaked in spilled champagne.
