Life imitates art 🪞

And I'm the first person to ever say that

~Two weeks ago, in the middle of moving (Goodbye, Mold House!), I went to a pilot taping of a new improvised (!!!) multi-cam called DINKS. It was very funny—and very long. We left after 6 hours, a sandwich, and sunset but, based on what I know about sitcom structure, before we hit the end of Act II (of 4 or 5, I assume) and the next morning’s sunrise.

At some point, comedy sorceress June Diane Raphael improvised the line:

“You shit so hard, you broke our toilet.”

It’s the kind of string of words that makes you laugh so hard and then even harder when you think “What? The physics of that are preposterous!”

And then, reader, one week later… I shit so hard, I broke our toilet¹.

And then also the shower because those are connected for some reason I’ll never understand.

And then also our second toilet — and that shower.

Basically, our pipes colluded to make me look like a one-person sewage plant and nearly derailed a whole trip to Portland, where I am currently a) writing this and b) enjoying plumbing that—despite my best efforts with an exclusive diet of cheese and caffeine—is working.

The timing of it all is a little bizarre and a karmic mirror of last summer’s aforementioned mold adventure. The tl;dr: we had mold so bad it buckled our floors and displaced us for nearly the whole month of July. It was chaotic and stressful and, if you ask only our cats, traumatic.

Part of what spurred our recent move was the mold’s cameo reappearance in our kitchen that no one asked for. Happy to concede that territory to something I’m very, very allergic to.

We were so relieved to find a new—hold for gasps—house to rent. It wasn’t easy or, often, good or fun. There was one glorious weekend when we thought we found our dream house in Highland Park and instead got temporarily ghosted by Phoebe Bridgers’ mom (the realtor). There’s a boygenius title in there somewhere.

So, finding and securing and moving into our new home in Silver Lake felt like the end of the long Zillow chapter.

Weirdly, it felt kind of natural to experience a lil housing hiccup within the first week. Last summer was such incredible chaos training that my partner and I looked at each other, worried for about 25 minutes, considered canceling our trip, and then shrugged to our favorite refrain coined by comedian Shantira Jackson: “Ah ah ah, I don’t own this.” We texted our landlord and set the alarms for our morning flight because I don’t know if you know this but I’m not a plumber if even if you can use most of those letters to spell my last name.

I don’t really have anywhere to go with this (other than Portland) but, circling back to the DINKS line that started it all, i.e. the flood in my house:

I think a lot about art imitating life and how, in practice, that’s almost never true. I’ve noticed that it’s almost always the art that predates the life it’s said to imitate. See: The Simpsons.

As a writer, I try to remember how powerful language is; how careful you have to be with fragile ideas; how easy it is to paint a visual you didn’t intend to. In the past few years, I’ve really tried and often failed at creating things I haven’t seen yet or heard yet or lived yet — but want to. (Oh god, sorry for basically plagiarizing “Be the change you wish to see...”)

Basically, all I’m barely trying to say is that creating the art before the life feels like the wild west and it’s messy and imperfect, but sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can create something so specific or queer or funny or all three—thinking of Bottoms, Challengers, Love Lies Bleeding, I Saw The TV Glow, just to name a bunch—that it maybe changes the entire trajectory of a stranger’s life… and ruins their hardwood floors. And that’s something to be proud of. Oh, happy pride month, I guess?

This was a status report from our catsitter. All floors, no cats.

Funny now: Speaking of something so specific and queer and funny, I had the pleasure of catching the first two episodes of Julio Torres’ new show Fantasmas at the ATX TV Festival (pre-move) and it’s so good that it’s mandatory summer homework. I expect 600 words on “Why I was right” by Sept 1.

1. For the record, I did not actually break the toilet. I shit a normal amount and used the medically recommended serving size of toilet paper. We think the former tenants left behind a clog, which is a new interpretation of the phrase “security deposit.”