My Spring Playlist (Part 1)
A family of crickets recently moved into the ceiling light above my bed. I constantly find them loitering on my pillow, on my bear Peef, on the headboard. I used to scoop them off my bed, cricket by cricket, onto the floor but I’ve given up any hope of eradication. They’re too dedicated to their cause. Every night, around 10 pm, they’ll jump from the light onto my face. Father-cricket will leap first and then mother and brother and sister and uncle and aunt and second cousin and great-great-grandmother – cricket-chain migration. It’s a 5-foot jump, too – a cricket-sized Grand Canyon. I wonder if they competitively aim like they’re throwing darts. My nose is 5 points, each eye is 10, my forehead is 2 and my mouth is death. I think about unscrewing the light and looking for their nest but that seems over-the-top. We have a rapport; the room is mine during the day and theirs at night. If I decide to stay up late reading or watching, well, that’s on me.
Every season or so, I create a new playlist. And by season, I mean “season” – December Winter is very different than deep February Winter. There are Spring and Spring break and the end of Spring that’s basically Summer as you close Microsoft Word and pack up your pens and there’s the start of Summer when the ocean is still cold and Midsummer and school-starts (and work now, I guess) Summer and Fall and Christmas Winter, Sad winter, beginning of Spring. Each “season” has a sound – springy and pink, muggy and banging, declining and folksy, cozy and jazzy, slow but picking up, and running. That’s not to say the whole playlist sounds like that sound (bangers are allowed to come out in November, I guess) but the mood should match the weather and the winds and the floods. Every playlist needs its peaks and valleys and ballads and maybe one Dua Lipa song as a treat. You can dance in Winter but you’re dancing inside, roasted by the thermoset and this season’s Gap sweater haul. Your Spring dances are fresher than your Summer sways, which are hot and humid and only happen at night outside. In Fall, you dance with an IPA in hand.
Of course, I’m making this all up. In LA, at least, January is warmer than April and October feels like a burnt salmon skin. But still, seasons are mindsets and music matches mindsets, or mindsets match music. Winter playlists are always sad and drawn out by b-hits and moody folk. They last forever and become more and more off-kilter like a really bad edible. But it’s winter and unseasonably dry and all the hills around LA are browning. Your playlist does the same. It feels right to keep wearing it out.
So when Spring comes, and artists release their first singles of the year in prep for their big summer albums, you gulp it all down. Spring is here, rain is washing away LA’s pollution and the Dixie Chicks are back and out for revenge (again). Early Spring playlists are best enjoyed outside on grass or dirt like they’re picnicking on a really good day. And that picnic has strawberries and whipped cream and club sandwiches and jalapeno potato chips and peanut butter pretzels and no fucking vegetables except maybe two ripe tomatoes. Early Spring playlists are like if Jesus woke up on Easter and left his tomb, which is hidden beneath Dolores Park, and walked through the Park, getting second high and drinking a lukewarm Corona and watching swarms on swarms of people kick soccer balls and smoke and drink and fall asleep as the sun lowers in the sky, and realizing all was at least okay with his world and rapture could wait a year.
This year, though, Jesus stayed a while. Maybe that shirtless Uber employee hit him in the head with a Spikeball or something, but he stayed, and he was pissed, and he farted in revenge and a Coronavirus blew out. The picnicking moved indoors so the strawberries were eaten over Zoom and tasted sourer than yesterday’s batch, probably because they didn’t get those extra two minutes of photosynthesizing in the (also) picnicking sun. Dolores was clean for the first time since the 50s, but the Park missed the flavor of spilled Malibu and dog poop.
Our Spring dances were cut off and forced into living rooms, leaving the city quiet. Trucks were piled with dead bodies, hospitals ran out of ventilators, grandchildren said “See you later!” to grandparents, not knowing that later now meant “funeral,” small businesses tried to cram a $250 six-course meal into a small-ish bento box, Powell’s Books laid off, and then rehired, their entire staff, white women wrote think pieces about the existential crises of doing Pilates on Zoom and Donald Trump lied for 3 hours every night on national television while Joe Biden laid dying in a ditch somewhere in North Carolina.
In Italy, COVID-19 sounded like sirens, guitars, and people singing pop hits together on their balconies. In New York, you could hear the whoosh of the Uber Eats guy on his bike and the small chatter of stoop-adjacent neighbors sharing stories. In San Francisco, the fog was louder than ever, in Barcelona you could hear crying and murmurs of Rosalia and Tokyo sounded the same as before because they got their shit together. Miami sounded drunk. The loading doo-doo-doo’s of Skype made a special guest appearance in each city.
In LA, for the first couple of days, you could only hear the rain. We lived too far apart to serenade each other from our windows. No one owned a bike. Car horns went un-honked. Hills and mountains separated most of the city from itself. Beaches were empty and parks were full, and then closed. Some dogs barked. Every house and apartment had their own mix of sound, but the rhythms between places rarely linked. We were alone in our loudness.
LA is often lonely but at least there’s a cacophony of chaos to always remind you there’s someone else out there. An ambulance or a street racer or the Armenian mafia men who operate the restaurant with four Cadillacs outside that’s definitely a money-laundering front on Sherman Way/Balboa, a drunk girl arguing with her friend in the back of an Uber – all somebodies. Now our playlist was just white noise and the Cardi B “Coronavirus” remix.
Up Until 6 days ago when I was finishing up work and heard a couple of high-pitch screams outside. The raccoons don’t come out this early in the day, I thought. I went to my room and peeked through the blinds and saw three kids riding their bikes up and down our hilled driveway. Their parents were outside too, as were other parents and other kids all piled into our front yard. In Berkeley, this might look like any Saturday, but LA is not Berkeley and kids don’t play in other people’s yards in LA. Private property is God here. And yet a whole bunch of kids and adults and older folks were talking and drinking and falling over bushes in our front yard. My parents went out to join.
The next day they were out there again, and there were more people, and the day after that and the day after, standing six feet apart (mostly). I finally went out with the pups on the third day and met my neighbors for the first time in my life. There was Lacey, who was drunk and kept telling me that marketing was a waste of her life and she should have chosen finance instead. She was also writing a book. Her house was also haunted by the old owner Merv. She also had an orange tree out back with the biggest oranges you’d ever seen and I was invited to come over and pick a few whenever I wanted to. Lacey’s South African boyfriend owned The Sherman on Ventura and he was losing thousands of dollars because no one was ordering take-out. (It was okay, though, according to Lacey, because he never really cared about food anyways.) There was Lacey’s mom Shirley who had sun-freckled skin and wore huge glasses and sat on a lawn chair in the middle of the street. Then there was Jodie and Jeff and Jodie cuddled with her dog on the grass and Jeff was lifting a weight in one hand and holding a glass of rose in the other. Hillary and Brian lived across the street and used to live in Universal City, where the youngest still went to school, and Brian was on a serious business call the whole night but Hillary loved Thai food (but Night/Market was too spicy) and had a niece who worked at Metro and took my email and promised that she’d email me so we could get lunch. The other family who lived in the other house across the street, which had a pool and tacky stone lions guarding their front door, were outside too and they only talked among each other the whole time but stood close enough to the group so that their soft conversation intermingled with the rest of our noise. And then there were the kids in the truck, the kid sprawled face down on the grass, the kids riding the bikes and skateboards, the kids on their phones.
The neighborhood was loud. Bike tires skidding the street, dog licks, glasses dropped and shattered, laughter, shrieks, cries, loud introductions, networking, “A car’s coming!” shouts, and lots and lots of talk. Every day it was more people. We couldn’t touch or shake or even stand within normal talking distance. We were half-shouting responses to one another, louder than we’d ever before. Because we had to. Our voices bounced, slipped, echoed and blended. We were the first hot single of the year. We were Spring.
The crickets wake me up most nights partly because they’re always falling on my face but also because they’re so damn loud. I’ll wake up and pee and refill my water and lay back in bed and listen to a symphony I did not buy tickets for. I don’t know how long I’m lying there for; it can feel like seconds, or hours. I eventually fall asleep but it’s a different kind of sleep – it’s filled with the outside. I’m in my room but also out of it, in a tent somewhere maybe. My room is in and out, warm but also breathy. You can never tell where a cricket chirps. The chirp comes from every corner of the room. Mother-cricket is under my bed and dad is on my bookcase and daughter is nestled in my lamp and brother is on my thigh. (I’m not going to think about where aunt and uncle and great-grandmother cricket are.) I haven’t decided if the chirp is closer to a scream or a song. Either way, they’re screaming or singing to each other from afar. “Are you there?” “Yes, I’m here!” Where?” “Here” “Where’s here?” “I’m here! I’m 18 cricket-miles away but I’m here and I found a half-eaten granola bar on Nils’ dresser. Come, y’all!” “We’re coming! It’s dark but we’re coming!” I always fall asleep hoping they find each other before the night is up.