WeHo Psych Mom

This week I published a profile of Ty Segall in Alta Journal. Thanks to the friends who told me I could do this thing I really wanted to do.

I’m honored that Not Knowing How was mentioned in three newsletters by writers I admire very much: Lost Art by Sarah McColl, Mommy’s El Camino by Wendy C. Ortiz, and Message from the Underworld by Jim Ruland. Thanks to them and to everyone who reached out to me with kind words about the last edition of this newsletter.

I have a new identity: WeHo Psych Mom.

Psychedelic is a wildly overused word, almost meaningless at this point, but it still has some magic friction.

Mind shine. Let my mind shine.

Moms are to be ignored, out of their sexual prime, perpetually exhausted. When the person teaching the Baby 101 class we paid too much for in the hopes of making friends exclusively addressed me as Mom—because, she said, she worked with too many parents to learn names—I had a fantasy of lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke over the mat on which the babies lay, into her face.

I called my Mom Mommy long after my peers dropped the word, into adulthood, when no one really cared, but I was still a little bit ashamed, a shame bound up in my bottomless craving and passionate love for my mother. Mom is safer than Mommy.

Sometimes I see a representation of a mother and child that touches my well of longing and the depth of my child’s innocence and need for me, the weight of it, and suddenly I’m crying in the gynecologist’s office or the oversized playpen with rejected fruit leathers stuck to my thighs.

And I live in West Hollywood, a place I never call WeHo with a straight face.

What could be psychedelic about being a mom? (Everything.)

It is more than a little funny to be a psychedelic (how? why?) mom in WeHo (how? why?).

Drugs are fine, but if WeHo Psych Mom was about drugs, that would be corny.

WeHo Psych Mom always has wet bangs and dry hair at daycare dropoff.

WeHo Psych Mom is ironic and earnest at the same time, and also embarrassing. A joke, a cudgel, a friend. A way to take myself more seriously by taking myself less seriously. I can’t say it without cracking up. It makes other people laugh, too, or at least it made my partner and the one friend I told about it laugh.

Making people laugh makes me feel safe. Like I will be allowed to stay.

WeHo Psych Mom does not care about the accomplishments, accolades, and professional milestones that long preoccupied Lisa Locascio and her successor Lisa Locascio Nighthawk. It’s nice when WeHo Psych Mom achieves what she set out to achieve, but that’s it: nice. WeHo Psych Mom does not wear her ambition as a cilice scraping her nipples raw under the sweatshirt with the cowboy and his horse that makes her baby squeal in delight.

WeHo Psych Mom’s primary aim is to lose herself in feeling a feeling, in trying to understand it. She is my personal iteration of the Kermit tea meme. That shitty self-abnegating mixture of jealousy and desire? That’s none of WeHo Psych Mom’s business.

Maybe WeHo Psych Mom arrived in 2000, when to my surprise the nice older girl I sat next to in freshman French told the whole class that I had taught her not to make assumptions, because when she met me she had been sure I was a huge druggie who came to class on mushrooms every day, largely because of my pink hair, but it turned out that wasn’t true and she had learned a lot from the experience.

What if I had been on mushrooms every day in freshman French, though?

“There’s an alternative version of me I think about a lot,” Emery Pearson writes in her excellent newsletter Writing Witchery.

I just finished Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman, about a Portland mom who survives a childhood of horrific violence by severing the toxic, twin-like bond she shared with her mother and creating a new identity. In a dark fairy tale of reunion, her mother resurfaces the day Clove weans her youngest child. She and her mother excel at being who the men they serve need them to be. Left to their own devices, things go more than a little sideways.

Reading Madwoman brought me back to three books that have stayed with me: Ross Simonini’s The Book of Formation, Acting Class by Nick Drnaso, and The Friend of the Desert by Pablo d’Ors, translated from Spanish by my friend Shook.

The Book of Formation purports to be a collection of interviews with the figurehead of a cultural movement that has made the practice of shifting personality mainstream. It is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, but it has become less strange in the decade since I first read it, either because I am getting older or because my Instagram algorithm serves continuous and heady doses of content designed to make me feel as if I could change any thing about myself through the right cocktail of will and submission.

The deeply unsettling graphic novel Acting Class begins when a group of people with sad, ordinary lives meet at a community center. Under the tutelage of an utterly unqualified teacher, group begins to travel into other lives through a sort of collective lucid dreaming that overtakes their banal reality. That the dreamworld contains all the terror of the waking makes it no less appealing for the students to slip off the idea of a prioritized “real.” It reminded me of two science fiction novels that terrified me when I was a child (and thus are remembered as influential favorites), Invitation to the Game and Galax-Arena—the latter scarier, and more believable, because it did not have a happy ending.

The Friend of the Desert by Pablo d’Ors (the author is supposedly a Spanish Catholic priest, but I’m not convinced this isn’t a fiction) is the story of an abiding fascination with landscape that becomes a self-consuming obsession, like Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (translated by my friend Mike Fu, who writes a great newsletter) if it were a private journal instead of a collection of breezily written columns.

The power of these books lies in their odd ugliness. In Simonini’s borderline unreadable jargon of “p” (short for personality energy, or something), Drnaso’s indistinguishable and claustrophobic flat faces, and the madness and flat racism of d’Ors’s increasingly deranged Slovak narrator in his high colonial fervor, a slippery truth emerges through the haze: at any time, like Bolaño characters, we might walk (or be led) out of our lives and into another, never to see ourselves again.

I loved the first months of my baby’s life, his soft smallness, our peaceful home, taking long walks with him tied tight to my chest. I was happy and I was confused. Everyone told me that having a baby would thrust me into an intense identity crisis. But I just felt like myself.

The years preceding my pregnancy were far more ontologically difficult than having a newborn, I thought. My mother’s death devastated me, and in following year I was pregnant three times. The six-month gap between my two miscarriages and the pregnancy that I carried to term was a period of intense reckoning with my queerness so overwhelming that I asked the functional nutritionist with whom I was working on my fertility if my robust supplement regimen could be “making me gayer.”

I’ve always been obsessed with selfhood. I weaseled the idea into each of the morphing successive descriptions of my academic focus I gave for years and years of my life: early modern diarists and self-writing, the (gendered) feminine voice on the page, women’s mobility narratives, the embodied West, agency and self-making. My dissertation, “ ‘A Bag of Shocking Pink’: Occult Imagery in Contemporary American Fiction By Women” included a chapter about my ass.

All those years, even when I was writing about myself, I never thought I was writing about myself.

Beyond the sheer survival task of continuing to be employed in the academy and withstanding the dire negativity of the field, academia gave me a good cover, a way to be fixated with the people and ideas that excited me behind a veneer of respectability. If I wanted to write about something I loved, I had to justify that desire with a thesis, a publication, a paper accepted for delivery at a conference. It’s a seductive system for someone who loves affirmation. It keeps you small and hungry. I am one of the most successful alums of the graduate programs I attended, but by the standards of those institutions I have not attained the level of professional achievement required to render me legible as a real academic.

It’s been such a relief to have WeHo Psych Mom enter the chat. Isn’t it easier to just be into what you’re into? To keep thinking about the things you can’t stop thinking about? Want to hear a good song?

The last time I profiled a musician, a decade ago, I did it to impress a man. I was so focused on bringing the interview to him like a cat carrying a squirrel in its teeth, that I barely registered the conversation. What did that man say when I told him? “Oh you press junkee [sic].” (It was a text.) I might have made a few dollars for the piece, I can’t remember.

Around that same time my first husband offered me a new album he’d been sent to review. He thought I’d like it. This was my introduction to Ty Segall, a California multi-instrumentalist from whom an ocean of sound emanates. Segall’s music became something I wanted to talk about, but to whom? How could I explain how it made me feel, or why that mattered? That this was an experience I had had before made it no less lonely.

I kept those songs with me in borrowed rooms and at residencies, in the dire early evenings when my husband went to bed before sundown and I took a photo of the sky in my tiny window in my bathroom and labeled it freedom on my phone. I played them loud in my headphones in the backseat during the long drive back to the Copenhagen airport after the last Christmas I would spend in Denmark, thinking happily that I was thirty-one, but I could also be thirteen. I played them at the altar I kept in the room where I wrote. The music made me so happy; it filled me with a sense of fantastic possibility, just like the wide-open California landscape I loved to drive through.

After my divorce, I moved away from California, feeling like I’d lost my passport. I listened to other songs. Then in the summer of 2021, not pregnant but definitely queer, back in L.A., everything in my life different and also the same, there was a new record. Listening to it didn’t just pull me out of a mortifying period of intense King Princess fandom. This music made me curious about creativity again. How it works. Where it comes from.

Publishing a book and teaching creative writing had changed my relationship with reading. I was and am so aware of the market, critical of its banal tastes, hyperconscious of the way it dictates not just what we read but how we respond to it. But the more I returned to this music, the more I found, in the sound and in myself. That an oeuvre could offer immersion into a expansive universe, with seemingly endless side projects and collaborations branching out, was an abundance for which I lacked a thesis.

Last September I saw Ty Segall and his band in concert. On the nighttime stage in the trees, energy ran between the musicians and in a vibrant band between Segall and his wife Denée, who sat just offstage with their baby. It wasn’t until afterwards, on the drive home, that I understood that what I had perceived was love.

One of my favorite things to do is spend all day driving around California and listening to music, dictating voice notes about my thoughts. The landscape changes, becoming more familiar and more alien. Once you start to go inward, you can go very far indeed. You can find the things you need. You can even—perhaps with the help of a meditation or two—manifest them.

In February I, or whichever self, talked to Ty Segall about creativity.

At the end of our interview, I asked him to describe his perfect day.

WeHo Psych Mom agrees that this is a perfect day.

I have just the bright red thread of my feeling, and I am following it.

Let my mind shine.