[cigarretteluvr]

here i am again, hiding prayer in poetry

[cigarretteluvr]

and i know that love is mean, and love hurts, but i still remember that day we met in december

[sadistas]

[cigarretteluvr]

i always have at least half a bottle of red wine in my house because you just never know when a troubled friend could come over in need of a chat, a pretty boy could crash into my kitchen, or i could be really in the mood for pasta. i like the ones that have notes of cherry or tobacco or plum— anything i’d like in a perfume. it’s also just so romantic grabbing wine at the grocery store, popping it open with company, or splitting it with a grip around the neck. and white wine just doesnt have the same intimacy to it.

[xostargirlox]

[cigarretteluvr]

I am so in love with your brain. In your books, I look for your notes in the margins just to have a little bit more of you.

I want to comb through your thoughts and swim in your words.

But you're ruled by mercury, you were born to use your words like foreplay. It's in the stars that you are the way you are and that I eat it up completely.

[rosieandthemoon]

my icon

[vqtkufi]

‘I’d reach into your body, and fix you if I could’

[pink111shit]

[cigarretteluvr]

I never liked the mountains but I love them with you. In our charming bed and breakfast room, we have the next three nights together to stay up late and sleep in later. In the morning, the clouds and rain make everything fresh and damp so we can't go outside. We have to stay in, with arms and Keurig coffee to keep us warm.

We type away in each other's pajamas, breaking the silence to ask about line breaks or synonyms. When things get heated we act out dialogue and build on it as we go. We get into cheeky fights about sentence structure and character motivation. Our room service breakfast lays mostly eaten and abandoned on our bedside and we pick at the untouched fruit bowl over the hours. You eat the honeydew because you don't mind it and I make a scene. The smell of your maple drenched pancakes sticky up the room so I crack the window-- letting the air from the Real World infiltrate the sanctuary we've built. We can hear insects and the river outside. We are blissfully untroubled and in love.

When we're not in over our heads with words, we're head over heels for each other. Getting tangled in purely white, freshly laundered sheets. Giggling in between breaths. Drunk on dopamine rushes and the thrill of doing nothing. We don't draw the curtains because the only thing to see is the peaks dusted in fresh sierra snow. You sush me to quiet down, but nobody exists here but us. Us and Tahoe somewhere in the distance.

When we stumble back to the room after the bar, it's freezing. After hot showers and another round of room service, I watch you flipping through tv channels. The dishes littered on the desk, our clothes carelessly tossed around the room, it feels like the rest of my life. You feel like home.

[alexkolano]

[theangelthatfelltoearth]

[cigarretteluvr]

Nash-wood

When I touched down in Nashville, my flight attendant welcomed us to “Nash-Vegas,” (a name the city has adopted for itself alongside “Music City”). I thought it was a fun, quirky quip at the time, then incredibly misleading.

Nashville does everything right that Hollywood does wrong. It has the studios and celebrities and nightlife and history, yes. But where Sunset Sound lays looking abandoned on Sunset Blvd, Johnny Cash’s favorite place to piss on the street has been roped off in red velvet and a golden plate has been put there in his honor.

It would be ridiculous if I didn’t think it was so admirable. All the historic bars, fully upkept and functioning just like they did back in the day, pay homage to their rich history like they’re lawfully a museum instead of a honky tonk.

It feels wrong to hold a city that bulldosed Jimi’s bar in ‘65 to erase his legacy in such high regard. At least Hollywood left its history to decay with time. It’s all (mostly) still there. Decrepit and not much of a sight, sure. But if you walk over a couple homeless people and convince a resident, you can see the lobby of Hotel California in all of its renovated glory. That being said, there’s a reason Hollywood tours show celebrity homes instead of Rock-N-Roll Vaticans.

It all goes back to the laissez faire attitude entwined in Los Angeles’s smog. How it refuses to take itself seriously. It’s nonchalance hovers over its basin like a crown of coolness. Preserving Jim Morrison’s motel room in Alta Cienega would prove that it cares— even a little. Instead, L.A. decides to live and let die. Putting historic theaters in the hands of billionaires. Simple happiness, Eve called it.

It’s hard to go anywhere in Nashville that isn’t historic. Same with Hollywood, but in Hollywood, you could never know it. Nashville will always let you know if you're on something like Etta James’s favorite seat at the bar, or Elvis’s favorite liquor store where he bought the whiskey he drank before recording Hound Dog— or whatever. But you could unknowingly stumble into Barney’s Beanery thinking it’s a tacky tourist trap, eating mozzarella sticks in KISS’s reserved booth and walk out not knowing you’re butt buddies with Gene Simmons.

Unless you scower blog posts and Reddit threads and trust they’re right, of course. Which is what I do. A labor of love, yes. But labor nonetheless. If I hadn’t, I could have died having driven past the Chateau without a second glance. Sometimes, being a fan of Los Angeles feels like having a depressed lover who doesn’t realize how wonderful they are. I wish I could shake her by the shoulders and scream at her to realize her worth, but she’s content with being faded and forgotten. There’s nothing I can do but realize it myself. Obsession from people like me is the life support keeping the faint heart of Rock-N-Roll history beating. In L.A. anyway.

Calling Nashville “Nash-vegas” feels cheap and like a marketing tactic that I can’t imagine works. Even the bars on Broadway reminded me of We-Ho— swapping the MiuMiu and kitten heels for Shein tops and plastic cowgirl boots, of course. Vegas is brash and inauthentically hedonistic and in all the wrong ways. Good music doesn’t come out of Vegas either (except maybe Panic! at the Disco, but not without the knighting from Pete Wentz). Anyways, it’s a slap in the face to compare music to sin.

Spending a long weekend in Nashville made me a country music fan. I understand now why they act like it’s the only music in the world. It’s because nothing else sounds right there. It’s like when you enter CST, the frequency of all other music sounds horrendously pitchy and unlistenable. Folk, bluegrass, country, and soul are the only things that grace your ears. The southern humidity messes up everything else. When I came back to California and listened to Tennessee Whiskey, it sounded corny and ridiculous. But listening to it covered at Tootsies, it felt like the only song to exist. Just like how Lana sounds perfectly right in L.A., Bobbie soundtracks Nashville.

Going to Nashville felt like befriending a Montague and realizing that they might have something on us Capulets. The only thing Nashville has to be ashamed of (besides Jimi’s bar, of course) is turning Etta’s lounge into a Dunkin Donuts. Even then, nobody goes in there on principle, and the people that do just need a bathroom; or they haven’t taken the tour yet.

[cigarretteluvr]

look at you, tail wagging & eager eyed. sweet boy with dirty shoes. with your calloused hands grazing across thin fabric. so burningly anxious, so cute the way you wear your heart’s desire on your sleeve

[daitheflu-mx]

[celebpicss]

Addison Rae

[dk-thrive]

I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

— Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) (via Alive on All Channels)