Just a Poor Girl in a Rich Man's House
No cure for ennui like a dead guy in an Italian swimming pool.
Happy solstice babies!
It is my time! AKA the first day of ✨Capricorn Season✨, and two days from my birthday. Did you know that Capricorn is the astrological sign most closely associated with the devil? Specifically, the pre-Christian origins of the devil, aka Pan. This fascinates me endlessly, for reasons I won’t get into much now, but boy do I love a mythological archetype as a metaphor for the human psyche.
I wrote most of this today at WeWork even though I’m technically on vacation until January 3rd, because I had a few things that I wanted to get done and being alone in my flat wasn’t gonna cut it because it is fucking dark. DARK. I feel like every single year around this time I go through the same bullshit of “surely it wasn’t THIS dark last year, was it? I didn’t lie in bed in the morning kind of wanting to die THIS intensely last year, did I?”
Right now the only thing that gets me out of bed is spoofing my brain chemistry by staring at pictures of the Canary Islands with my light therapy panel blasting nearby. The good part is that as of tomorrow the days begin to get longer again; the bad part is that the weather here has a way of staying grey and shitty until April. Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time researching digital nomad coliving communities in Tenerife and discovered that a) all the decent-seeming ones are already booked through the winter and b) I’m not really in a position to sublet my apartment right now and can’t afford to abscond for 2-3 months otherwise.
2023 was an especially shit year in freelancerville, thanks to the Hollywood strikes and layoffs all across tech/digital, and for the first time in a while, I’m legit pretty broke. So I need to make career triage the big priority for Q1. I’m currently consoling myself that if I pick up some good clients/projects, I can reward myself in March with a trip to a volcanic island off the coast of Africa.
This may seem both weirdly specific and fairly arbitrary as far as geographic descriptors go, but it’s not. I have a bit of a thing about volcanic islands situated between Europe and Africa.
Basically, on random night in May of 2016, I sat alone in a movie theater at BAM and watched Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash - a very good, very morally ambivalent erotic thriller set in Pantelleria, which is (you guessed it) a volcanic island situated between Europe and Africa. This film is a peak example of an aesthetic genre I like to call “lickable cinema.” You know, the kind of thing that makes you want to vacate your reality and crawl into the screen and… lick everything, basically. Even the light.
(This movie also features a very snaky St. Vincent cover of “Emotional Rescue” that I’m still quite fond of.)
I don't remember exactly what was going on in my life at this time, but it was around when I discovered the mystic potential of going to the movies alone. I’d also, due mostly to professional factors, only left the country once in the previous decade. I walked out into the night feeling like I’d had some sort of ecstatic experience, and decided I needed to spend the fall in Italy. I did, and finished it out in a hard-to-reach area of one of the Maltese Islands with no cell service, an experience which I think is still the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing ego-death while sober.
I can draw a very clear - if not exactly straight - line between sitting in that movie theater and the series of decisions which led me to the life have now, which is not the one I saw when I was in my 20s and chained to a desk for bad money. It’s a solid life, but maybe because I’m turning thirty-nine (39!!) in two days and it’s fucking dark out, I’m inclined to question everything. And I feel like despite some banner achievements (like moving abroad, say), a lot of the last 6 years got away from me due to events that were mostly beyond my control, but also exquisitely badly timed from a personal standpoint.
So now that I am one year away from 40 I’m suddenly beset by that feeling that I need to catch up and get it all sorted, though to what exact end I’m not sure.
Do I want to just be content in Berlin for now, but travel a lot more once I right my finances? This is probably the most feasible short-term goal.
Do I want to move to Barcelona, as my therapist randomly suggested today when I questioned the wisdom of remaining long-term in a place with such shit weather?
Do I want to move to London, if I could somehow get a visa to live in the UK? (In this fantasy the UK has semi-decent weather and I’d somehow never set foot in Heathrow Airport.)
Do I want to look for a job in America so I can be closer to my family, and the other people and things I often miss? (In this fantasy Donald Trump is dead.)
Or do I want to just say fuck it and find a rich man to marry, so I can tinker away at creative projects while island-hopping on someone else’s money, and not have to make any difficult decisions? To be fair I feel like I have probably aged out of being a trophy wife, though someone did recently assure me that I’m still foxy enough to pull it off.
One useful thing I’ve learned in the last weird years is that life has its own timing and is never a straight line. But in addition to buying a couple of “how to rethink your life at any age!” type self-help books (cringe!) to read over my vacation, I have been thinking a lot about the woman I was when I was 31, who watched a very Bacchic Italian movie and decided she was living her life all wrong.
I don’t think that will happen again quite the same way, in no small part because the health of my savings account matters to me more than it did eight years ago (ah, the dueling aspects of the Capricorn soul). But maybe something else will happen instead.
Anyway, I leave you with one of the truly great cinematic dance breaks:
Two little near-to-solstice bits. But first, longitudes; they are are good index of afternoon darkness now. NYC, 40; Toronto 43-4; Berlin about 52; Helsinki, 60. In '88 I was in Helsinki in mid-or late November. Totally dark and scary at 3 in the afternoon. I recall talking with a local and saying how bad it felt to me. I said, "I guess you folks are used to it". He looked at me with a long hard and wondrous stare and replied "ARE YOU CRAZY?"
The other bit is the opposite. I repeated the anecdote above to my former colleague, Joy Cohnstaedt, who had earned her spurs in Northern Saskatchewan, living way up there with indigenous communities. She attested that it was nothing like that for them; they enjoyed the dark winter with a lifestyle that was pretty close to hibernation. David