Lia Rain

The older I get, the more I think the “trick” to this thing called being alive — if there even is one — lies somewhere in one’s ability to do the same things over and over again, encounter the same situations endlessly, have the same conversation every day of your life, without going completely insane from sheer, bludgeoning boredom. Put another way, this might be about developing your tolerance for stupid shit, because on enough repeats, everything is stupid shit. “Really? We’re doing this again? We changed nothing after last time, or the time before that, or the time before that?”

It makes me think about the sitting-and-waiting-to-die-brigade quite a lot. If this is me now, knocking on 50, how profusely over it am I going to be at 70? 80? There’s a retirement home (“active living residence”) immediately south of me, and I think I’ve mentioned before, they have fire alarms pretty much all the time. It’s been happening for about five years (so: too long for it to be a faulty sensor, or bad wiring, or an open window, or a bat). It used to be they’d have an alarm like 3 or 4 times a week. Which was a lot! Nowadays though, I shit you not, someone in there is yanking that alarm 2 or 3 times a day sometimes. The obvious conclusion is that a demented elder is, in their mental anguish, exercising the only action available to them that is sufficiently directive, re: their profound sense that “something is wrong.” (This reminds me of my grandfather, who in his final years of senile dementia, would call my parents house in a confused panic, not sure why he was so upset, but sure that he was.)

But I recognize that it’s also possible that some 2-or-3-decades-from-now incarnation of me is sitting in there, listening to the same stupid bullshit about roses or golf from Ethel in the lunch room, and then just quietly getting up, walking to the red lever, and yanking it. Because, enough already.

Thought experiment: what if it’s actually me in there, right now, but the me of the future? That would be pretty good. I moved into my place ten years ago (happy birthday baby!) and they built the retirement home a few years years after that and I was immediately like, excellent, here’s a plan, if nothing else materially changes about my circumstances in the next twenty years I’ll just put all my shit in a shopping cart when I turn “old,” wheel it half a block down the street, and move in.

Now: here’s time-traveller me, who woke up on their 75th birthday unstuck in time and was like, “shit, it’s the 2020s again” and decided to just proceed with the plan, nipping and tucking the timeline so that I am simultaneously here in my condo thinking about someday putting all my stuff in a shopping cart, and already there, having done it. Is it self-fulfilling prophecy when everything’s already happening, all at the same time? It’s a little like when I was in high school and people asked what I wanted to be when I was older and I told them “a hermit,” mostly because of Ben Kenobi, but also because some part of me strongly, desperately wanted to walk into the desert and confront whatever it was that was wrong, and come out clean. Now I look around at my post-pandemic cirumstances, and while I’ll fully allow that I neither live in a lean-to nor make my home deeply removed from the throng of civilization, there isn’t something… not hermitlike… about how I spend my days. In as much as I fully believe that I’ve lived a sequenced chain of lives and regenerations leading me to this moment, I also wonder if I’ve always been exactly the same thing, all the same parts jumbled up inside me, even if I couldn’t recognize them for what they were, at the time.

This makes me think of Lia Rain, which is my private name for girl-self when she comes fully out, which this spring has been rarely. After last year, honestly, I think she’s just tired. Or she knows exactly her place in all this and leaves the boring, repetitive ministrations of being alive to cis-fronting Matthew who is loud on Zoom calls, which honestly, fair play. I’m still having… an active negotiation with how I feel about what people see when they see me, vs. what I feel when I feel me. I have so much love in my heart for all the people who have spent time — real, honest, actual time — in the past year to make sure they are affirming my gender identity somehow anyway, in a way that feels right to me, even if (from my perspective) it seems like it might be an impossible guessing game on any given day or in any given interaction, with respect to what I need to hear. (What I’m saying is, it’s a guessing game for me too, dearies.) This particular Pride month with alll these particular things happening (fuck the American supreme court, etc.), I’m thinking about that a lot: that effort. I guess I get why there are people who proactively refute the need to even consider making that effort. Effort is hard and mistakes are awkward and who-fucking-cares-anyway, etc. It would be better if we lived in Kacen Callendar’s world, the Infinitey Alchemist world, where some essence of a person is detectable (through magic) and their gendered self is just clear, day by day or even minute by minute, to everyone around them. The relevant passage:

“Most people were taught how to sense energy, at the very least — fancy schooling and licenses unrequired — and a person could choose to share their gender with others around them. It was something that Ash had learned to do at a young age. He projected the fact that he was a boy so that strangers could sense and feel who he was, a simple knowing that would appear inside a person’s mind, as easily as realizing the sky above was blue, or sensing that another person was happy or sad.”

Isn’t that lovely. I wonder how it would knock against my terror of being seen, were such magical expression possible in our world. I’d hope that with time I’d get over it; that being seen would simply stop being terrifying, because my control of the perspective would be so perfectly, daily normalized. But in the real world there isn’t enough practice time at being perfectly myself and being perfectly recognized for it. All of a sudden I sense the reasoning behind evil billionaires, the ones who want to live forever. Some things in the time line move too quickly — we do them so often they become tiresomely repetitive — pull the fire alarm!! — and others dribble out painfully slow, over decades, tiny increments of change that one wishes (only retroactively) had all the runway in the world.

I’ve had a lot of names in my life. When I started making movies I credited myself as “Matthew C. Brown” — I guess I thought the version without the middle initial was too boring — but I never had the courage, in college, to go ahead and formally change it to “Matthew Centipede Brown,” which I both wish I had (turns out changing your name is no big thing, unless you’re an American, or you’re the recipient of an arts grant) and am very glad I didn’t (because oh my 2000s, that name is awful). I publish now under “Lia Matthew Brown,” first time officially in “print” a couple months ago, although I realize in writing this that the good folks at Screen Anarchy updated my handle to match my gender identity a year ago, so see above re: love. They also send screener copies to my house under my professional name, which confuses the hell out of my concierge; as does my email signature with my clients; as does my Zoom name with everybody else. There’s a (currently) unfordable gap between what people expect to see and what they actually see with respect to the presentation of gender, and I feel others’ confusion intensely, and only occasionally painfully. I’ve even started writing it into my own alchemist novel, The Last Alchemist, which is getting a Pride Month Edition revision right now, shaving off (ideally 10,000, more likely 5,000) words, and more importantly ensuring that Kya’s gender identity, while not central to the plot, is razor sharp with respect to what I’m trying to articulate for the character and the world I’ve imagined. Which falls into two camps: what I’m trying to say; and what I hope for, for her. A made-up person who lives in my head, who I realize, in revision, I’m helplessly devoted to.

My Buddhist name is Nyingje Chöchar, whose English analog is Compassion Dharma Rain. Did you know that? I honestly didn’t put two and two together when I started using Lia Rain as a private nickname for my girl-self; “Rain” has just been in my back pocket for ideal feminine names since I was about fifteen years old. (When I wrote an Aliens pastiche movie in the ’90s, I shit you not, the female lead was called Rain.) Then I talked to my meditation teacher for like fifteen minutes one time three years ago before I took the Refuge Vow and based on that (or, like, a random name generator, I don’t know!) she gave me my Buddhist name and I was like… every syllable of this is correct. The premises within the premises within the premises are correct. I don’t know how or why. It’s like when I came out, and my best friend heard that I’d be using the name “Lia” for me for the first time, and he was just like… yes. Yes, that is exactly right. He didn’t know why. Maybe some things really are just written in the energy of the magical self, clear the whole time; and all my worry about it is just “up here,” in the part of the soul that doesn’t matter.

Things to read and do

• I had so much fun writing about Billy Friedkin and being a dickhead and film school and capitalism and Sorcerer, I coulda gone another twelve pages. Felt like I found a new gear (no pun intended) with this one. (Screen Anarchy)
• Look, it’s never gonna happen, but I am mulling the pilot of my “Star Wars for adults” television project, and I can tell you that the title of that pilot would be “The Two Republics.” And I can tell you that the title is inspired by this piece, which you should read for reasons having nothing to do with Star Wars and everything to do with “right now.” (The Reframe)
• There’s also a movie on the Criterion Channel called Hide & Seek and it absolutely blew my hair back, and made me think a lot about the girl-childhood I never really had, and (to this day) covet. Especially because girl-me was such a lesbian. (The Criterion Channel)