Lincoln Blvd

and i can feel it changing. the heater on all night, dragging myself out of bed, skateboarding in the dark to another job down lincoln. music in my earphones, the click clacking of the skateboard to uneven curb ridges, i remembered people and things and i could feel a present again. i was so elated to feel the present, i wanted to write. but this, this is day time, i'm going home now to do just that. several dark mornings ago a woman named lisa came into the cafe soaked in rum. lisa had been bulldozed off the 300 block of rose to make way for progress. she was a dj, a shamaness, an energy healer and i believed her. she showed me the ayahuasca wrapped in paper towels. and her high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes gave away the southern california girl stayed too long, not that she was afraid to tell me just that. i replied not to be sad, that change is good. let's go. let's leave to mexico or detroit, some place where the rich people are too afraid to follow. or i can find my way back to paris, god dammit i want to be in paris again. and this morning when i got to work, the coffee tasted like a woman. i thought about about women all morning, like i do most mornings. the music played. etta james, louis armstrong, edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros. and they all got me thinking, that with some people, some of us just live beautiful, while together.

My Nebraska

Video by Britt Warner. Song and Lyrics by FWB.

Muddled

My footsteps echoed instead down neighborhood streets, my breath materializing beneath the thin lit night. It wasn't love but an opportunity for a warm winter. And I was rather gone in the unknown.

The other morning there was this beautiful preface, one of those tiny intro paragraphs starting the story one way, only to unexpectedly change humorously. It was about a young man and the world of love and how the immeasurable swell opens up previously overlooked doorways and larger, larger, expands everything that is known so much so that a brilliant evolution occurs. Then, however, it was with much dismay that this same young man's time in that spectacular world was about to conclude. And he was to begin.

I was reading the Brothers Karamazov when my own trio was thrown into disarray with a crime. I'd never encountered a re-questioning of trust prior, but its happened and now I know why it leaves people in such disarray. Reality, you learn, is prone to illusion. But I'm not talking about illusion in that grand metaphysical sense that lights two people up when they can relate similar terms about the spiritual and invisible together. I'm talking about the day to day, year to year, slow-drawn illusion where trusted notions are not black and white by any means but where, with time and our own wishes, we can still be utterly, vacantly, polarized and then fooled. The act is not the magician's alone, but belonging equally to those with present attention and hope.

What I mean to say, is that I've been walking. The soles of my Converse are tearing from the rest of their shoe, almost like an acknowledgement that they belong to the street. I have been alone more than anyone I don't know. I walk and observe these little bundles of marvel apporating in the scenery and in myself. Then I either let them go or figure out how to share them in some tangible metaphor but a lot gets lost in the initial process and then even further disappears in the attempt to actually bring it to another. Occasionally, I can sprinkle the gold dust of the experience to where it lights up again. And I live for these occasions.

But Venice is getting ruined like San Francisco and every time they call it Silicon Beach I want to blow up the world and I am a hypocrite because I use Gmail and this very stupid blog is of that service and eventually if given the opportunity I would live in something contemporary in these neighborhoods but not because of any boutique or industry but because I put my ear to this place and listen and climb the coral tree late at night and detect the subtle changes in atmosphere and pick up trash from the beach every morning and it's really, what it really is, is that it's different because I have had and lost and had and lost and when you lose enough of your life living in a place you tend to take an ownership of the location because it's the place that cradles you, it's the place that communicates with you when no one else will or when no one else knows to and it can happen quick or through time but it can happen and then you know yourself in a distinct way and you are someone who can not be mapped or bought or written about and you can call yourself home.

*Apporation is a mystic skill used to summon an object vocally, as it disappears and reappears in hand. Harry Potter Wiki

Motor Ave

I let my name go. Then my history. Everything fell there onto the sand. I imagined this blank canvas of a form, one spirited mannequin, opened my eyes and it could've been gone. The blue lines crystal cut, small ripples travelling, the sight before my eyes a heaven prior to the association.

Nights ago, my friends and I held hands to pray, sort of as an indulged joke, but afterwards I couldn't wipe the smile from my face.

You can't go searching for one person in a town composed of everyone. It makes no sense. I get so flawed at times but I can still feel myself leaving anger behind. And it's beautiful. There is everyone, they are all around, kinda magnificent even if you encounter an unsettling character or two. They've been unsettling lately and the lessons are louder that way but troubling all the same.

Baggage don't just come in bags.

This girl, my friend's roommate, she scared us both. She had exited belief awhile ago and was one strawberry margarita into a diatribe on, not humanity, but each individual human and their lack of redemption. I ate guacamole intent on getting her to feel improved. Patient. Because it's felt like no one around me is feeling good these days. Feel good. Feel good! She hated everything, everyone, us, contempt. Independent of me or an HBO series found disagreeable or an accidental overdose on anti-depressants or confronting this and its end, feel good! I had my own basket of tortilla chips, asked the waiter if he had change for a twenty and he offered me it in cents, two dimes, we laughed. I'll take a canned joke over an original critique. Fuck, I drank a shot of Patron like it was the origin of a tomorrow.

You wake up greet a new day like an unfolding page or a tsunami wave but a moment all the same. The way it mostly holds steady is amazing.

I'm one of these dumb suckers who believes this attempt is worth something of cosmic value. I know it's dumb but I feel it. I feel it. These last few months, I couldn't tell you how I made it through intact. I want to tell someone but the words are beyond a friendly interaction and I'm not sure if I'd be seeking sympathy or clarity. It's like, if you can manage to handle all the psychic pain, then it becomes very personal. Then the pain becomes a privacy in a wide open day and age. And I don't remember if that kid ran into my car before all this or during it. But he was fine, wearing a helmet, shaken up. We all find grace. I think we all search for an element of grace to ballet dance upon our inevitable agony. But there is no need to worry, no need to search, we all have the grace already, all of us are inborn with grace. Trust me. I had this thought awhile back, how everything exists in a state of peace and that's why violence, tragedy, natural disaster, is an event. The bad stuff is an event, because existence is dominantly good.

Even to dissect a single moment, you'd discover a dominant peacefulness amongst the minuscule pains.

It's all a wonder, for those of us dumb enough to try. It's all a wonder.

5:03 with a play count of 34 times in itunes

leaving my bed, i move quickly, imagining only twelve seconds to find a heat source before petrification occurs. my apartment is so cold in the mornings.

who would find me frozen in place?

old ghosts thrive on this time of year. i see them in my neighborhoods. i hear their silken whispers curling from my radio pores. but i'm not going on dates with them anymore. i am on my own, this body, form, blazing new trails and scorching the present with alacrity, even amidst the bleak.

yesterday i made a joke about my preoccupation with death and a love of life, even if i don't quite know what to do with it all the time, life. i love life.

i wish i could tell you what i'm working on. 

it's a seasonal thing, understand? the leaves are off the trees. even, here.

At All Defiant Risk - yesterday

We have this tendency to empty our lives of all the people and activities except for the bare essentials, my brothers and sisters and I. There is a baby crying inside this Echo Park library. An immigration pamphlet warns that the wrong help can hurt. This golf pro giving a lesson on television once cautioned that left to our own devices we sometimes master our own mistakes. I bring up the way my siblings and I clean out our lives because an upbringing without dirt makes a child prone to weakened immunity. Though we are strong, grown in soil, I'll give us that. A powerful constitution still bends amidst a hurricane. Last night, nothing was wrong, but I laid in bed absolutely terrified at the thought of life. I'd been trying everything I knew, all the tricks, profundities, philosophies I'd intuitively known and learned to get through this storm, while protecting and evading connection with anyone and their horrors, all those horrors that another person can bring, but it didn't work. We have to hug. I'm not just talking about romance. We have to look someone else in the eyes, hear their breathing, share something sensory.

garden of eden

"The young man put his arms around the girl and held her very tight to him and felt her lovely breasts against his chest and kissed her on her dear mouth. He held her close and hard and inside himself he said goodbye and then goodbye and goodbye. 'Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all' he said and his heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye."

a bunch of lunges

and i'm sitting here eating sauteed kale and a trio of beans and i'm looking at each of these beans, scraping them up from the thin salsa pool on my plate and i'm thinking about how lucky i am to have these beans and it's stupid and new age and this kale is all so available to me and i did nothing to deserve these beans and this salsa and the temporary comforts of civilization but i'm doing my best to contribute to this world in the way i know how with the spirit of improving the experience and existence for myself and others by continuing to spread the availability of beauty and garden fare and whatever sails this seafaring ship of exploration like a trio of beans into the colors of the momentary void that we keep painting and repainting and this is not a prayer or a guilty form of gratitude, though it would be fair to suspect, it's only a fleeting thought, already blowing from my fingers and heart, out through living room window mixing with onshore winds while i'm swelling with new ideas both selfish and intuitive for activating an urgent expression of life and creation and the ability to catalyze.

this is not a metaphor (part 2)

I don't want to write this. Bad sentence. Turning back was scary. I was getting cooked on top of that mountain. No one knew where I was. The Federal government was shut down. I kept thinking that the Federal government was shut down and so, on this Federal Land, a rescue helicopter couldn't arrive or it would cost way too much money if it did. Money, I missed money up there. The pursuit of money and all the stupid things people do huddled in their mankind. Nature is horrific, is why. That's why we have all this asphalt and insulation and electricity. It's because nature is horrific. I don't want to write this. It took me an hour getting back to that big Crystal Geyser bottle. I wanted to save some for the next lost passerby but I also wanted to soak myself in a flood. Dump the water on my head and body. So I did my best at both. And I drank a little bit. I know I shouldn't have. But I was thirsty and desperate and I wanted water because mine was long gone. Yes, I was pretty close to desperate.

I did this all to myself.

Survival became about discerning the proper trail out of the many snaking paths and gigantic obstructing rock formations. I had to surmise the vaguely-recognizable landmarks and attempt to recall how I had arrived above and around each one to get to where I was, stuck, and doing all that deciding took awhile and then in one particularly large collection of rocks, I was dwarfed by the largest rocks and climbing down into a pit within the rocks. There was no way to get through and I swear to God if there were no Mountain Lions living in the dark nooks and crevices of that jumble, I don't think they live at all. I know I keep bringing up the Mountain Lions and capitalizing their letters. Do I do this to heighten the danger? Did I want to do battle with a Mountain Lion? Do road bicyclists on the narrow shoulders of the Pacific Coast Highway secretly want to get hit by cars? Are we a culture primed by a Thanatos urging? Are there simply individual impulses that crave challenging their own unique mortality, especially when everyone around us seems to be wounded or out of control in their own different ways themselves, but wait that goes back to culture so let me try again. Do some of us simply want to die?

I didn't, want to die. Not wearing cargo shorts. Not up there. I wanted to live. That much I knew. Which made navigating that maze all the more alarming.

But I did navigate. A few wrong turns, backtracking, climbing, "could it have been this long's"? and then segment after segment of confusion just to get back to the main trail five miles from what I knew to be my car. I wanted to go sit in my car and cry or take an Instagram detailing my travails or both. Man must have purpose to survive, Instagram and crying momentarily became mine. Then finally, that passed and the terrain was beginning to appear familiar. Yes, I was recognizing species of bush and their frequency of occurrence and yes, a rock to the left, above yet another cliff, and the rock was flat like a bench and I remember seeing it on the way up and it was so smooth and flat but I couldn't sit down. If I sat down, I feared my muscles would cramp and lose power. They were getting tight, my muscles, especially in the sockets of my hip joints. My legs were stiffening. I still, yes, had five miles to go. I should mention, I had a walking stick now and it was helpful (and could be used as a spear) and I grew quite fond of this stick but also my trapeziums were getting tight, so I had to drop my stick but I was there anyway. I was on the proper trail and I was relieved. I knew the path. Thank God I found the path. By the way, did I make a few deals with God to get to this point? I don't quite recall. I believe there was something about living in honesty with my purpose if I could just get the hell out of there.

I had two miles down steep uneven trail. My feet hurt with every step. It wouldn't have been so bad in tennis shoes but these five-toed Vibrams were killing me. But complaining, that's a good sign, it meant I was getting closer to the Western World. Then I saw my first person in five hours. He was practicing karate down faraway on the trail, I could see a sliver of the ocean out by Ventura to my left and down, several phases below on the wide-open familiar trail, was that guy doing karate, wearing a black beanie and backpack. I wanted to ask him for water but he kept hurrying on before my approach. And then, then, at the bottom, a young couple were kind enough to have an extra water bottle in their backpack.

"You look like you're dying."

The young man said to me. I tried to explain my circumstances through parched throat but I think they wanted to continue away from me, like giving to a homeless person. I felt no shame in their charity. I gulped the twelve-oz in two swallows and continued. Brain off. It's what got me up the long, winding, steep trail that I knew awaited the end of my struggles. And I made it up. Saw two more people staring across the valley at my Cathedral mountain peaks and I wanted to tell them that I'd just been up there and seen the other side but I didn't want to get into it and they looked at me funny and when they passed, I crouched down and almost cried but I still had another half-mile or so to get to my car. Which I did manage. The sun almost gone when I arrived, opened the door, and gratefully sat down into the driver seat. And there were no missed calls on my phone.

this is not a metaphor

I didn't want to die wearing cargo shorts. There was ridge after ridge, sharp rocky outcroppings that jutted above the disorienting trails which stretched miles beneath canopies of dry brush forest. I had no cell phone. Nudity from modernity, in the name of spiritual clarity without technology. It was my decision. I go hiking a lot without my cell phone. So what did I have? A rapidly diminishing twelve-oz bottle of Vons generic-brand water, cargo shorts with blue Dodgers t-shirt hanging out from the waistband like a tail, sweaty torso (especially my back, caked in a very discernible layer), a stupid wide-brimmed safari hat I bought as a joke in the clubhouse on the golf course years ago impulsively worn on my head, and then my damn five-toed frog shoes, holes in their bottoms and my feet getting bruised by the uncertain terrain with each step and it kept getting worse.

There were many steps.

Not initially, initially it was my hike as usual with a twist up to Danielson Monument. This guy, this Danielson (a Junior it said on the memorial plaque) he donated all this wilderness and he had a commemorative monument framing the nature, a monument that spoke of peace, love, Christianity, and it had a hunting Rifle adorning the left vertical pillar, a Rifle, cowboy spurs, roses, everything to portray a man of the West and it was all painted white and it was a remembrance. And I tried to pray or meditate. Standing there, it felt like I should try to do something observant, standing there, thinking of peace and love and light for all the people in and out of my life. And that was a good ten seconds before I wandered away. Three miles, according to the signs, into this monument and I still had an abundance of energy and the Pt. Mugu State park encompasses over 70 miles of preserved nature. Like a challenge, omen, mind-blowing recognition, ten minutes before arriving at the monument, two tall distant peaks hovered somewhere far above me like Cathedral ceilings. I figured that up there, perhaps they wouldn't be too unreasonable from a path that could lead down to the ocean on the other side. I had often dreamt of reaching the Pacific Ocean from this Hidden Valley side of the trail and I figured above and beyond them was the way to the shore, figured, though I'd never cared to look up the correct route.

The difference between a thirst for adventure and an act of self-idiocy, lives only in the fashioning of the results.

I turned from the monument, a chimney remained intact, alone under sycamore trees. To its left was a not so obvious trailhead. I followed it curiously at first, baby steps turning to determined ones uphill and uphill and soon my stride became something like obsession and I kept pushing and pushing and thinking I'd arrive at the roof of this mountainside to asses my array of options. But the trail kept going. Fragmenting soil would rise up overhead on both sides leaving a flood chute for phantom rains to sparsely arrive and create a river. But it was dry as a ghost. Then the brush grew over me, a tunnel, nothing to do but keep going through a tunnel. There is always light at the end of a tunnel, supposedly. Then more brush, altered in its shape, this brush but taller than me. Newbury Park and Hidden Valley was getting smaller through peeks between this dense brush. Yes, I could have turned back. One hundred more paces and I'd turn back. I kept saying that to myself but then would lose interest around the count of thirty or forty. The numbers were useless but I kept telling myself that I'd turn back and I'd mean it, but then the compulsion, curiosity, and indestructible belief in my physical ability, pushed and pushed and pushed me upward and upward up into the unrecognizable.

There is a lot going on in my life.

Everything was foreign, in myself and the terrain. Here in ancient native soil. It was foreign, planetary even, but I didn't think about it being planetary at the time. But yes, planetary. My breathing had changed, as did the altitude on this planet. It was no Kilimanjaro at only 2500 feet above sea level. And I never fancied myself Sir Edmund Hillary, just a hiker. Furthermore, I was not venturing into virgin territory anyway, there Was a trail (albeit a vanishing, dead-ending, straight through sharp vegetation at times trail), footprints, coyote shit, unnervingly fresh. And there were no people. Not for miles. I was the most isolated man in the greater Los Angeles area.

You couldn't have found me if you wanted to, if I wanted to, and that was the danger and probably the purpose.

Somewhere along the way I figured I'd just keep going to the ocean. That I'd find Sandstone Peak and everything would be familiar. My ex-girlfriend and I had spent two New Years Eves watching the sunset from Sandstone Peak together, huddled beneath loud hiking groups. We drank wine from the bottle and ate cheese from Trader Joes. Years ago, but I knew it well enough. I'd get there, admire my tenacity and then I'd take those trails down to the parking lot and I'd borrow a cell phone and call Trav and we'd write off my eccentricity in our mumbled fragmented conversations through Decker Canyon or something. Only, I couldn't find Sandstone Peak to save my life. The tallest point in the Santa Monica Mountains was nowhere to be found. In fact, there was no guarantee I was anywhere near it. I thought I was, but apparently I wasn't. I've checked the maps online since yesterday and still have no idea its relation. But I kept going. The terrain angles down and then back up, bare earth, one particular lonely stretch feeling especially like a good place for a predator to sabotage its lonely prey. With sparse enough bush for the predator to hide but also enough free space to maintain its stalking pace. Was I being stalked by a predator?

There is a lot going on in my life.

I put my water bottle in my pocket (almost empty) and grabbed two sharp rocks, gripped them in both hands, and dropped them when I had to climb anything steep, then picked up new ones. And I had to pick up new ones a lot. I had to climb away from the brush. I didn't have to but I was climbing. The full-bodied experience of climbing. I began climbing with an alarming frequency. These big huge collections of sharp boulders resting high above trail, leading to what I'd surely hope was the final plateau before my rescuing descent into paradise, but the arrangements were confusing and their passages narrow and cave strewn and if mountain lions didn't live in these parts of California then the poor bastards are extinct because this was remote and the energy severe. Markedly severe and indifferent. This was a strange part of land, rolling waves with unfriendly growth and blind distances. Somewhere up there, between collections of tall-steep rocks and dramatic angles of land, I happened upon a small circular collection of stones, resting alone high above a one hundred-foot drop above barren hillside. The organization of the stones, alone, signalled the presence of a forgotten campfire, alarming because half the state park was still scorched black from last year's wildfire. This must have been after the fires and safely contained because above these stones, there was a 3/4 full big gallon bottle of Crystal Geyser. It was that tall, ridged, vertically rectangular bottle of Crystal Geyser. You know? Sometimes they sell 10 for 10.00 with your Ralph's Club Card? Sometimes they have those cheap handles? I wanted to gulp gratefully from the bottle after these several hours of demanding ascent and had little water left in my own 12 oz container, but I had seen too many survival shows to know something about bacteria. I didn't actually know much about bacteria but I was paranoid enough. So instead of drinking, I dumped a bunch of the water over my head. It was both cool and then warm from sitting out in the wind and heating in the sun on top of that cliff-side. Which reminds me, I haven't mentioned the sun, the ever-present sun, yesterday it was hot, intense, all day, but I didn't mind. The sun felt good and consistent. Actually, it was the shade up there that was terrifying. The moments I'd spend on the dark side of some gigantic thirty foot rock or another that would sink my spirits. The shade would reduce me, everything growing dark. Night could be like this if I was out here long enough.

The sun was my companion, the shade my fate. I feared.

No one knew were I was. I had either screwed myself or gotten my wish or maybe each was one in the same. The shade reminded me that things were bound to change. I'd begun my hike at noon and now the sun was, not inching, toward the ocean, footing, like, markedly inching, toward the ocean - which I could see fully now. I had scaled the tallest heights, arrived in the middle of jagged lands, and couldn't tell how much more I had to go to get to the ocean, the perspective sucked with all those ridges and down-phases in the land mass, but there was the ocean distant. I still had all this land. I was buried in all this land. Mired in all this land. There was so much land and it was all indifferent. That is what struck me, was how indifferent nature was to anything but itself. I began to project my own selfishness upon nature. And the ocean was a shade lighter than my already shade lighter Dodger Blue Dodger t-shirt and it, the ocean, was being pounded with a weighty glare from the sun and the reference of my viewpoint altered the appearance and it was the first time I can remember looking at the Pacific Ocean and feeling like it didn't contain anything resembling some kind of wholeness and/or peace. It was was the first time, outside of the ocean, I felt afraid of the ocean. Like it was only a pond, a grand pond. That the ocean was a grand pond with its own concerns. That it, and the forces it abides to were separate from me, and that hurt. And maybe now, thinking about it, I was being warned by that mother of mine. And it was further than I perceived. I knew it. I kept looking for a route, with reason and eyesight and my steps, my pained steps. But I couldn't find Sandstone. I'd glance far away South through my location and something like it, appeared. My feet throbbed. I wasn't sure I knew how to return. There is a lot going on in my life. I never stopped to sit down. I knew that stopping would weaken me. Gazing straight ahead, due West, there was another distant ridge that looked as though it preceded an unfathomably steep face and the trails were zigzagging across the mountains and hills and appearing and evaporating and so I finally convinced myself that I had to turn around. I had to turn around. There would be no phone call from the other side.

(part one)

Oscar Wao

"He wrote that Ybon had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex ---it was the little intimacies that he'd never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl..."

-Junot Diaz

Tonight

My mother and I stood on top of Topanga watching the little bats scurry about the remnants of twilight. She was getting her home ready for her lover to arrive and I was driving back to Venice. We bought books today Lu and I. She read me a story from the Brentwood Country Mart to the Hippy Canyon and it was a simple story about a man who makes bets for people's fingers and she read it wonderfully. Vin Scully is a voice I will one day miss, radio, Dodgers scored three runs in the top of the first before I switched stations, tired. My head is throbbing. A glass of whole iced milk. At my cafe, I ordered pasta with chicken. I am waiting for it, no sugar in the sauce, my friend behind the counter checked. Turns out she had been in a smelly yoga class yesterday, as had I. Before arriving here, my dad and I spoke on the phone while I drove down PCH, and he sounded fatigued, but he'd also put together a dresser today. I told him that the last time Trav and I tried to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture, we looked like the monkeys in 2001 Space Odyssey. And he laughed. And my food is ready.

Beginners

Have you ever driven down the 105 Fwy East from LAX under the tunnel and along the way? It's an ugly journey, to the right are a bunch of military industrial complex buildings and depots and corporate drudgery fronts, but still I've somehow become fascinated by the distant view of the sky and the particular angle of the roadway and sometimes I'll take it to the 110 and then the 10 and arrive downtown. I have been scouring this city for years upon years. Turned over rocks. This city is infinite. This city is endless, one of hidden abundance, but there are certainly permutations. The film Beginners, the gay parent, failed romances, cancer, life emulating art or vice versa, it's powerful to feel a little bit or a lot understood. Even if it's unnerving and sad and beautiful. And stylized. Life is not styled in such a way. Life is not linear. Life is absolutely stunning in the beauty it contains and stark in how much savagery it amounts. I knock on wood. The wicker of my nightstand. I knock on wood obsessively. I wanna talk about the real people. All the real people who have somehow managed to populate my worldview with remarkable elements and passion and care and surprising talent and understanding. Characters are for movies and we pronounce them and they help illuminate the indistinguishable mass of continuous life and they are important in their own way. But the people. They aren't with me in the flesh at the moment, but the people are what we're here for and I know that we are an equation that's involved deeply in answering ourselves.

the hills behind left field of dodger stadium

        
Chapter One

My day begins between Maria's legs. I imagined this room. It's dark, while the air remains a hint of cool, we are a furnace. The bed would be on the floor. She is the source. Her moans are rhythmic reminders of life, that we are alive, rhythm, we have this gentle clawing rhythm. Her hair is black, spreads itself out like a moonlit cave atop a rocky outcropping of ragged pillows. Trying not to disturb the other occupants of the house, I cover her mouth with my hand, then use my lips. What's being made, it leaps and dashes across space color. The door is closed. I rise up to view her through blurry eyes. This must have happened. Her breath is spiraling along my ear, down my throat, impressing my active lungs, expanding what's known by inspiring shapes of unknown. This is a place only two people can visit together. How could I be making this up? This is all a dream. But I tangle our legs, and wrap her slender torso into my uncompromising arms written forever, and really forever, even with the world in disagreement about forever. It's saying no to forever. I'm still writing on top of the red marker. I can hear laughter, and the savage rush of morning, loud, street noise calling intolerably, surrounding this dark room. The whistling of a passing train yells through town and brings the volume to a final cry. I am still here with her. We are breathing relieved and deeply in unison. I am kissing her like it's the first. Stop checking your cell phone. I am communicating with her heart in a language we are inventing. It is green stone, this table, with wood-lining. I am far away in another place wondering about the existence of these moments. I almost smell her, or maybe want to so bad that it happens. 

be back tonight?

yes. with moon.

mmm. good. you two have fun.

...we will.

I am flung away. When it's this warm, everything threatens to melt, begins, even. And there is also the silence, don't believe the hubbub of noise, we live within the gaps of silence.

I stumble out of my woman's blue dark loving room and into the circumstances of living. Human sweat and change, thick inside this crowded bungalow of a house. I am not really here. I was never invented.  While somewhere distant, a helicopter churns blue butter in the sky. Inside, scattered about, are remnants of the people who belong to this home; aunt and uncle, cousins, grandmother, ghosts, skeletons, ashes, good old-fashioned people gone already to work or still asleep. There is scattered lint, clothing, shoes, articles of evidence left recently behind. They belong to people, thank God for people, because for no understandable reason they've taken care of me like I'm one of their own. Even if I am not, even if I I am no one, someone, everyone. I am sitting in my father's house. At his table. The green one I mentioned. We are going to the doctor today. I don't know which version of reality to entertain.

her blood-heavy lips impart one final smack of immortality on my lactic corpse and then I break away, rise and sway to the humbling mechanisms of bipedal locomotion in the twenty-first century. I am disappearing from her fast. I am being sucked out of the door, holding on by its frame, gaining one track to and away from her eyes. 

 be back tonight?

yes. with moon.

mmm. good. you two have fun.

...we will.

ginger & whiskey

most geniuses give up, the rest of us and a few brave brilliant go ahead and keep exploring the human maze. the venice canals are blue at night. the back of my ears are still covered in sand. the tide charged to shore then pulled away from my feet with suction almost disappearing into wherever. it returned over my ankles, white silt spread across the water and we threw in our bread. i chucked mine left-handed quick to rid myself of reluctance. you had your own mysteries.

then we splayed along disintegrating continent.

i wonder if the ocean finds people to be a tease, just out of reach. life, on the other hand, with hands on bodies, sensual, seductive, clasping, intent to suffocate, and then it won't let go. so to find our own element, we let go, held hands, let go, spoke, listened, atop a bed of shredded stones left soft and infinite. i kept thinking about how beautiful this all damn was and my father. my mother the blue pacific, my father the earth. and i drank the entire flask of bulleit whiskey this time, i did it myself, without my walkstreet compadre and she drank homemade lemonade with ginger and i remember that moment walking weeks before with jeff, how we knew my guy at the liquor store was right wasn't he? that tasty brew being worth the extra dollar. we were in the alley and jeff and i had that moment realizing that it was good whiskey. and a few days ago this lyft kid got into my car, shaken and wavy, claiming that he had the same condition as my father but i had told him first so wasn't sure if i believed him because he had been in my car once before and that time he had offered me up a map of a fantasy world complete with eight-foot tall invisible soldiers and fragmented landscapes. and this time we bought burger king from the drive-thru on la brea/sunset and he told me i could keep all of his ideas since he wouldn't be needing them anymore. and i wasn't sure if he was lying about his own imminent demise but i laughed a bit too hard and started hiding my tears and for instance, him and a yemeni girl had been together since middle school and shared an email account and both wrote in it, saving their love letters under drafts, because her dad was in the cia and she belonged to a different man in marriage and so then they both met up years later in a motel room and i dropped him off near apple pan and when we both shook hands we held them together in a way that felt like truth and he must have been telling me the truth and even if he was lying then it was its own form of god given truth because the moment absolutely required every ounce of attention in the air and atmosphere. and i hope that the kid goes on living and that everyone can keep their hearts and lungs and vital organs oxygenated and breathing and we must have stronger hands and arms and legs and minds and invisible superpowers than a few stupid user generated web forums would ever have us believe because its already a plain damn miracle that we're already here, that much is clear, and so i'm going to be like a fucking cartoon character or a spoonfed disney automaton and believe in miracles because they are everywhere. and then that night i walked you home.

$.99 Novel

Available here:
http://www.amazon.com/Calm-Quiet-Place-Destruct-ebook/dp/B00F05E17S/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378494540&sr=1-1

sov sött

my novel will be available in the upcoming days. alone in the car my father and i bought, discovering that people have noises living inside, awful noises that leave our lungs and guts when the desperation to scratch eternity becomes necessary. my cheekbones rosy and raw when i awoke and stared in the mirror. my beard is my father. my smile is my father. i will honor living.

one of my favorite apartment sounds is hearing trav and hannah making fun of each other outside my door. today, talia and i talked about laughter, we've always laughed, we did even on the phone, and it's my dad who gave me this ability. and she, dust covered, voice in thick soothing waves from a few naked days in the wild desert, she, the only one i could call. the day is alive, honor the day.

i brought up my novel because it's comforting, self-absorption, right now. and it's more than that, i know, i've never known it more certainly than i do now, the creation, the impulse and the act, essential, vital, blood important.

first there is love then there is light, you told me. those birds were on the shore beautiful chaos, pelicans. that video you made of los angeles. the hill where you broke your arm. magic in a bedroom, on a pier, playground up ocean park in the dark. scorched hills, a large rock, creaky windmill, small green plant dots covering the surface of a shallow waterfall pool, your hand drawing a line through.

i was saying the other day, how each day feels like a lifetime. each day is its own life. have a safe flight. each day its own life. first there is love then there is light.

then we can all rest, go to sleep, sweet.

the improbability of meeting

i'm having a real run with the used books of late. a hot streak. this little kid in my cafe just said that this is the best day of his life. middlesex was three dollars at counterpoint records, huge cookie dunked into a glass of milk and ice cubes at the bourgeois pig while waiting out traffic. the password that night was rollinginthemud, one word. two veggie burgers! my friend sings from this counter here. yesterday between business meetings i was in the beverly hills library scoring the sun also rises for the old three dollars again. the lady sitting distant behind the low desk was old, she was gonna give me eighteen dollars change from my twenty, but like neurotic knight in shining armor, inner dialogue reverberating through lifetimes in the seconds between, i refused to let the error slide and made sure to pay her full price. i grew out of the night without a line like those twisted branches decorating the garden room of that tree house for rich people. three of us guys in a photo booth trying to find document of ourselves. the ask was two dollars here, perfect condition paperback, plus tax. i'd read this little number and the papa novel several times each, but twodollarsc'mon! these stories familiar and new, well written, are happening amongst something very much the same.

the end of the brain/heart vacation

there is a window greased and free-flowing within its frame. when you open this window the entire world floods into your home and heart. chaos runs amok in these moments before you're supposed to have the planet over as houseguest. this old man sneezing into his newspaper dozens of times. nina simone singing "you kiss me and with your kiss my life begins". a forty-three minute recording of my father monloguing about the layers and layers of his fascinating times and life, bits and pieces, that make one heck of a meeting room pitch from Beverly Hills Adjacent to Mid-Wilshire and up to Century City. i watched the sun setting from a pre-tragic boardwalk, glowing orange yellow, the final brilliance lowering down behind mountains like a gentle pit of faraway light lava.

Trail Rides Along Sycamore County

In a pond where the Allyne children had played, there lived a fish shaped like Jesus. Two summer days after the media storm descended and subsequently vanished, the eldest of the small children returned to the soft muddy edge of the mucky pool with barefeet sinking ever so slightly in a gentle way. Cheetos bags, batteries, helicopter echoes and the memory of bad syncopation, camera flash, littered the atmosphere. It was all ruined. He wept fresh crystal tears. They fell one by one, dropping from cheek to chin down into the impure waters for a few surviving tadpoles to consume. His legs were long, hair blonde, and the fish gone. Something he couldn't identify stood still, achingly so, while a sneaky feeling crept through the reeds and slithered away like a sliding snake. The sun was shining in pockets without shade. The bare earth was heating like a cake, trees and setting rustic. Birds made noises tiny and large but beautiful. When the other children caught scent of their brother's return to the water, they ran down their dirty hill, past the swingset and wildly into the creek. Splashing, thrashing, and joining him loudly, unselfconscious, occupied by all those simple and stubborn conflicts that young ones are so capable of creating and forgetting about in instants and in lifetimes. Water was happening in varying directions above that once still plane, and the young hollering voices were propelling his smile with an activity and unabashed chaos and gentle inquiry. Those strange few days which passed were already starting to fade into a remote and distant sliver of the black and white. Those jagged memories competing and losing to everything in the here and now. Then that old bullfrog resembling Ray Charles came out of hiding, croaking music and plopping around as they chased him along the banks, while the boy, recognizing the infinite magic of things, tried clinging to some strand of that awful feeling he had endured, which had no bearing on today, and all likely went away.

ladies and gentleman

every business lunch ends with me wanting to go eat lunch. words are vital but now i'm seeing the white space. even on this page, white imprinted by hard fought dark. then if published on here, the opposite, with lettering illuminated. i feel like i've been drowning in space. last week i was rendered nearly immobile by the alarming quantity of sky, distance between people, my own cells. i will not break this into paragraphs, chunks, instead let the sentences hug themselves close. i remember an old friend of mine would get consumed by these things, like a vonnegut character or something, she moved downtown to bombard herself with energy, but found it to be only a confused version of active space. sometimes i imagine she makes my shape on her floor, with all the things of mine she never gave back. the sweatshirt i've mythologized and lamented in so many conversations as torso and centerpiece, the beanie which fit my large head on hood, short story book with a human heart on the cover resting in slender fingers of left hand, perhaps inserted on top of the sweatshirt logo above chest cavity. also my harmonica below the beanie, where my mouth would be to play the music. finally that seventh grade photo i.d. of mine somewhere between all those things with innocence of soul, spirit, in simple image, possibly hanging down from loft ceilings strung by fishing line hovering. the pants, maybe my shape would wear no pants because maybe my nature was always to be naked and hers, wanting space, from a bad past or maybe just a different truth. perhaps she'd use the watercolors i gave her to paint the legs and beautiful whatever else. i was on an airplane alone when i realized that she did what she had to do to save her own life. I wrote all the words you just read, yesterday morning. then the day happened. a friend of mine spoke of our travels and my own pseudo hollywood nonsense. weeks before, she had cried on the sun temple as the sun rose, continuous tears, streaming, pouring down in release to mountains and a heart-opening beauty, all prior to tourists and after a bunch of plateaus on a journey to profound arrival. i left and randomly found my brother, sister, mom, parked outside of an el torito of all places, joined them in this far flung serendipitous world, eating nachos. later, moving from the sun i drove strangers west to east in the early night, spoke, identified, learned something about people and context. then came fairfax and the sea witch, we are warm blooded, vital, ridiculous, alive, alive, alive, somehow you will be my friend, lady, woman, girl, steamed windows and everything. like a natural stick in the changing tide of that little bar where you once said kind words to me years before and again and again, here we are, i'm always listening. now, here at my table, i don't feel the space anymore. there is a physicality, fatigue, never-ending battle with ideas and creativity and purpose and functioning and mortality and i will breathe and make jokes about my own cremation and honor this experience of here and now and it's a wonderful wonderful time to be doing what we're doing and yesterday this lady from detroit was going on and on to me about today's youth and artificial skeletons and mourning the loss of cameras when suddenly she shifted toward how lucky she is to be where she is, seeing what she's seeing, getting to be here.

black licorice tea

i can't breathe through my nose, waiting for the avocados on my table to ripen. lying down only makes me cough, so i sit here on this squeaky green-padded wooden chair in my dining room, where time is milked slowly staring at fruit. too much self-involvement quickly gives way to an unattractive form of life apathy. we seek ourselves, but in the wrong circumstances what we find can be tiresome.

succeeding many of the important phases in my adult life, i've become bedridden with flu or kidney stone or walking pneumonia or something undiagnosed to slow me down. sickness is supposed to be a gift at times, reflective and shedding of emotional molt. but my impatience to be in movement complicates the potential zen. stillness for me has always been best touched at blood-pumping levels or after voluntary methods of exhaustion. today, the energy of sickness is a surrender i've been ill equipped to derive full meaning from.

getting outside of this, then. you had that epiphany about opposites on the airplane, how everything is composed of them.

i will talk about paris, the meaningful precedent to this particular bug because, importantly, while there i was introduced to my own human form again.

nothing happens without cause, even spontaneity. somewhere awhile back, i was taught by one young woman the vital importance of romantic love and then by another its very same uselessness. following these imperfect attempts at spiritual union and bearing their varied consequences, my curiosity eventually became replaced by a spectrum of experience in matters, missteps, struggles, bliss, freedom. but first, things went dark for very long periods of time and i'd felt overwhelming waves of hurt and creatively directed my pain in every artistic direction i knew how and when it was still sinking me i learned other expressions. standup comedy was borne out of saving my life from a ruined garden of romantic love and this scary activity was one of the things that worked. from a dark hotel basement on vermont out into the strange and dysfunctional world of laughter and public honesty as medicine across this love-letter city, my healing began. it was rarely funny but it was brave and it didn't feel that way at the time but it was brave and it happened because i wanted to get here, standing and walking without conversational crutch or a need for reflective identity. here, something did change, and it diminished a tenderness but gave something resolute in the fluidity.

nothing is sudden, it only feels sudden because we are obligated to forget all the long forged attempts at progress in order to meet this new present with accumulated ability. i'm still a shitty comic and never know if i'll do it one more time or a hundred but it was a tangible part of the equation i can outwardly relate for this explanation. truth be told there were and are millions of devices to promote a functioning for me including this big one, this, but what i'm saying is that through the pain and my best attempts at managing to survive all the imbalance, i was capable of learning and knowing a unique beauty. i was able, for lack of a less obvious realization, to stand.

both feet under me, it felt like a good time to walk through paris.

rue

i visit the same cafe each morning. old habits, to ground. my feet have become raw from walking, pacing, tirelessly strolling through street after street of new.

yesterday, i sat down near shakespeare and company for an overpriced orange juice, something in my eye, a hangover dryly coursing through the circulating seine of my blood. three american girls freshly made-up and showered took a table in front of me, proceeding to speak some of the most asinine words i'd heard in awhile, i left them, and only later along boulevard st michel did i recall "are your croissant's here good?" "we totally have to go to argentina AND costa rica!" "machu pichu, that's my favorite song." and i thought about them with this mock, i've been here for five days assimilated superiority, and i looked at myself in the mirror of a storefront, with checkered gap flannel and black sweatshirt tied around my waist, grey american apparel t-shirt hugging my health-conscious torso, and starbucks, yes, starbucks iced green tea held in my right hand with too-long straw sticking out of its top and i laughed til i cried. the convulsions were from a sad wellspring and rising up became joyous and hysterical and self-conscious but all too pleasurable to deny as i went from one bench to another now in the jardin des luxembourg, frightening those across from and passing by my fluffy haired clown.

and then i laid down on one of the properly designated strips of lovely grass, with everything on my nerves dripping away.

5am

The first thing you notice about the Eiffel Tower is that it's ugly. From afar it's vertical and caged like one of those Zion machines from The Matrix movies. (Obviously it came first) then you get closer to the landmark and the height begins to do something wonderful, like Superman the Ride at Magic Mountain in California, even though obviously it came first, the tower. Then the base, the base is like a mechanical unmoving half spider which when glanced through maple trees becomes more and more ornate upon wide open viewing, the scale of its beauty obvious like something that came after.

SMC

This morning I was stopped in my car on the corner of Pico/20th, hours before the Santa Monica College shootings. For whatever reason, my attention was struck by a Powerball lottery sign outside of the liquor store, "believe in something bigger" it said. Grumpily or smug, I laughed to myself at the seemingly shameless merging of two perceived opiates, the debasing of spirituality for dumb hope, dumb belief in dumb luck. I was even about to take a picture with my cell phone when the light turned green and I drove onward. Now, I can't help but suspect that I noticed this sign for a different reason, not spiritual, nor a clue to go try my numbers. The something bigger, I believe is a human decency and logic, where in a modern society striving for peacefulness, there is a stark indecency in the availability of purposeless weaponry, specifically guns, designed, not for hunting or sport, but reckless violence and inevitable tragedy. The something bigger is knowing that we're capable of higher thoughts, feelings, actions than are capable with streets and homes stockpiled with brightly inane mechanisms of inhumanity without cause and hideous in effect. It's time as an advanced people to recognize that changes must be made in our laws, not to strip us of our liberties but to allow the return and acceleration of a flourishing of freedoms, to be able to sit in our cars and uninhibitedly wonder at the bigger things.

purple flowers

we're not making something out of nothing, we're chiseling off a chunk of everything. shaping, forming, providing distinct context to our knowing of existence. this is what we have to work with, these hands, arms, eyes, this body, heart, mind. a unique sensory experience to detect the environment, the invisible, a stripped away still different truth. time and life in enough agreeance for at least a sweet instant, a non-binding contract, month-to-month lease amended moment-to-moment and here we are and we're doing these things, some horrible, others feeling innately bountiful, all insightful. i don't know that art is a savior, i only feel the recognition intuitively. a farmer, greek playwright, naked philosopher, silent film actor, radio voice, a poem and a question.

ruins and rebirth

my favorite place on earth, scorched by fire, left barren and exposed. hiking, running, lungs, working harder, mouth hyper-salivating, this spiritual sanctuary changed, stark. the naked ground dry, footing uncertain, and so many of the gentle subtleties i'd once known abandoned for the still, greater feeling of this home. beyond warning sings and unfamiliar, i climbed by magnet to a singular location in the mountains surrounded entirely by nature, enveloped, where half of everything was burnt charcoal and the rest its usual vibrant colors untouched. magic, still, always, magic, reminding me of what was, what is, and what will be, all in this one landscape, internal/external, and that from the ashes there will derive new growth.

homeostasis

in the shadows, we were in the shadows. now i realize we were in the shadows, even while i was wearing my punch-dumb heart on my sleeve.

it wasn't always this way.

i remember one new england summer where it rained every time we made love. there was a crisp evergreen in her yard, goats in back, an unseen mother upstairs who i never met. beyond the hours of red-lit sweat and that awful tongue-in-cheek bloodsugarsexmagic album playing on a loop in her room, it was somehow perfect. but beyond, i'd go outside alone under the branches and urinate into a large ground crevice of earth, inhabited by a creature surely no different than me, brothers in arms, while it rained.

then the sun scorched urban dissolution when i left her apartment by the ymca in hollywood, a woman in her late twenties that i'd met at a dive bar the night before. she called in sick for the day, we bought condoms at a nearby rite aid, and it took time for the whiskey and intense loneliness of the situation to break, but then music between us grew and her song was sung in loud face down shouts to a derelict part of town full of them. i always wonder what her name was and whether i ever drift across her memory.

there were all kinds of those experiences while i was young and stupid and blissfully unaware to the other side of the mysterious feeling and circumstance which i knew i craved to selectively share with someone.

a few nights ago on this other side, i couldn't sleep and started counting those women like sheep and it was not self-aggrandizing, only comfortable and sad. there were names and faces i hadn't thought about since we'd moved naked together, her with straight blonde german hair, hands upside down bracing against the wall, whispering a soft, gentle, accent. she was lovely.

still, none of those experiences belong to a tangible part of me, i'm on the other side, like a void chalk-white landscape on a suspended one-dimensional planet, though i myself am standing, witnessing a barely knee-high elementary occurrence of this mostly chalk-white dust swirling inconsequential, rousing itself maybe to start a new atmosphere, optimistically.

knee high, not unlike the black stalkings of her, dressed as a schoolgirl on a halloween night, asian, she wandered into my room without exchanging more than a handful of words, it was a stilted encounter incapable of connecting any energy, and i left into that night with a vague experience of finding a northridge house party where, a girl there was wearing a ninja turtle shell on her back, that's what arrives, the made in china green plastic and the lengths i'd still been going to protect myself.

there were neighborhoods just above rustic canyon, involving varying cars and colors and shades of her, a movement of meaning somehow becoming entwined. it happened and i was vulnerable and it's a beauty, go ahead and read some of the pages of this blog. now i'm on the other side, and if we were to go on talking long enough in person then eventually i'd volunteer what i've been doing of late and with whom and i'd throw in a detail or two, how it's been like those innocent years but with an extra dash of charm.

only, now i'm on the other side, which comes with it's perks and disillusioned reserve. at least i'm not being assaulted or removed, even if sometimes i dream of things that were never said and wake up with a mountain to climb. i have my legs again and i'm in the light.

we're now in the light.

$3.00

we get so used to seeing things as they aren't, that apparent change unsettles us. in coldwater canyon, laying down on familiar grass, it was significant because i'd been there before, so much lonelier then. time dies a slow death in beverly hills and now i could feel myself more alive. seven nights ago i sat watching a glass full of sparkling beer show itself off, beautiful in twisting candlelight, crisp color, senses surrounded by a bar full of voices climbing on top of one another in elevating volume. trendy stupid venice, i drank alone, oddly content with a swirl of feelings. both insecure and curious mind like silent king of the insects, when two butterflies floated my way, carolina blue bicycle, wobbly ride to rose, laughter, talk of life, genius, music, nestled on couch, adventurous bedroom, car ride smiling with heated seats, we kissed goodbye at separate times, coinciding in a moment which seemed fit for all of us, i'll never call them again.

on the grass, basking in the sun and a japanese author, finally able to read with novel done, better or worse, tired. the bark of the slender tree on the muscles of my bare feet, six mornings ago the kids and i almost caught the biggest bullfrog any of us had ever seen. they're wilder than i am, those brothers, but we're all hunters, survivors, hiking, catching blue-bellies, or western fence lizards as one of the women had told me the night before. the blue-bellies are called western fence lizards, i told the boys and they seemed to like that fact. awhile ago we had taken a scared friend of theirs on this same network of trails and we've since, on several occasions, made fun of the awkward way he was. but now, you should see him, the kid showed up again and this time he's climbing trees, shouting savage calls, leading the way, and all it took was getting him there once.

my novel is about exploring being in love and whether there's any spiritual progress in the attempt, infantile or skilled, that's what it's about.

waking tide

everything felt entirely vacant of meaning. anywhere that the city rose up from earth with human structure felt like a deformity. buildings, jobs, daily efforts, nothing that any of us had done, was doing, going to do, had even scratched the surface of meaning.

by the time i returned home, i was dying on the idea of life. hours passed by in front of the television with only a vague semblance of selfishness and vanity, everything evaporating. i tried to eat, fought the urge to smoke, waited. then my friend texted me, and in two different spectrum's of experience we related a bit, trav and i watched the lakers, ate a trader joe's pizza, trav kept me in the game, otherwise it would've been worse. savagely, i was being shepherded out of the abyss by unknowing relationships, creature comforts, and for what reason, i didn't know, care.

the night wore on, guided by the faint notion of finding rest and trying again, against my own weakness, pessimism, genuine struggle, i crawled into bed, covered my cold feet, and went to sleep.

i dreamt vividly, constructed an entire house in foreign hills unlike any i'd ever seen before, then leapt through a window screen downhill, into lemon trees.

today, i woke up early, and did what i've done so many times before, threw some clothes on, grabbed a couple tangerines, and walked to the beach. the anxious pulse from yesterday's caffeine sensitivity, nicotine withdrawal, existential angst, whatever it was, had calmed down enough that i could recognize a different path to the same place. basketball courts, sand, parallel bars, somewhere further ahead was the pacific ocean. what a patient mother, that body of water. i probably felt it everywhere on my senses as my joints, muscles, creaked into the first set of dips, IF MY BRAIN CAN DETERMINE MEANINGLESNESS THAN THAT ENSURES THE EXISTENCE OF MEANING. it happened there. This one thought, however worded, changed everything. Everything became enlivened. Everything was something, it had to be. If life is meaningless, then that very statement affirms that there is a recognition of meaning, because otherwise it couldn't be less. And if life is meaningless, that notion only guarantees a dual sense of meaning, in another form, presence, or beyond this minute experience into the vast complex infinitude regions of elsewhere. whatever it meant, it meant something to me and i could feel my soul shift, heart dial-turn into a moon bringing light.

i walked hurriedly back to the apartment, a world better than when i departed. shoes off, stepped inside, seemingly renewed. immediately upon my entrance, trav and i bickered and dueled like children with taunting smacks, punches, kicks, the immature kinds that only brothers know how to inflict on one another with perfect amounts of playfulness, humour, bite, buddhas we weren't. then i ate some toast, pumpkin butter, cottage cheese, packed up my stuff, and left to the cafe to do the thing that's always hinted to me of worthwhile investigation into this brilliant meaninglessness/meaning.

so now, i'm writing again.

a primitive man describes meeting someone special to that very someone with the rain pouring down outside of a cave while the nearby glow of two eyes belonging to a saber toothed tiger haunts the periphery (painting drawn with smeared berries on crude tree bark)

excerpt

28

because the santa monica pier is the most photographed image in los angeles but no one gets it at sunrise.

because it's my birthday and i do dramatic things like this and quit smoking days ago, i ran here.

because this is my favorite time and place in the city and i've never taken a girl here this early in the morning so it's not covered in memories of what was, instead only, what is.

because 27 was as difficult and tumultuous as advertised and i'm grateful to be older.

because irony works this way, that the one time i forego spiritual clarity and bring my camera here, it's overcast, you can't see now, but usually the ferris wheel stops glowing just as the sun rises fiery red in the east, over the city, splitting sun rays through buildings hills and across the ocean while the pigeons clap their wings in applause, fly together in unison, almost like they're celebrating the entrance to another new day.

then i had this thought, looking at this, that life is but a game. powerful, humbling, scary, fun, rewarding, ugly, beautiful, but a game.

cold-pressed juice

i'm escaping addiction in all forms. i've saved some music, kept it hidden, distinct only from a time and place, of intense feeling. push play. it's clear to me now, that we're all given a bundle of unmanifest energy, libido distorted by context, sex drive pure, and then we have to figure out what to do with this concentrate, otherwise it overwhelms us. here it comes now, rushing like a tsunami onto virgin shore. healthy or unhealthy, nicotine, booze, eating disorders, self-abuse, drugs, medications, temporarily removing the cancer by also cutting the best parts around the cell, and sometimes to save themselves, people just go numb. i've seen it, been hurt by disappearance, played my role like a self-mythologizing tortured saint, but, there's also the healthy, feeling, sketching, painting, sculpting, writing, lovemaking, travelling, talking, listening, engaging silence, working, giving up, yeah sometimes, keep going, changed, skipping. and some can put morsels into millions of cubbies and are deemed well-adjusted, while others piss it away entranced by those chemicals or fixations, but then there's the brave, brilliantly pouring themselves into singular quests of motion, staring dragons in the face, illuminating great darkness, inner/outer, violently crushing apathy with a form of love independent of grasp, the wondrous, peacefully enamored by heightened discovery, whether bound within emotional systems, limited or infinite, moronic or genius, sick or splendid, time will tell.

you won't be sad

cigarettes, alcohol, the rising skyline of my humble city. this isn't about those things, they've been said already. i mine memory for it's blessedly flawed interpretations and the present for unabashed expression. but today is about fresh lungs, uncertainty, and opportune shadows. right now through the crooked window, there's an entire flock, circling, where there's usually only this one massive seagull, above a trash dumpster where i catch my breath. and these birds, they're riding the delicate changes of the wind, sort of like i did last night in my dreams. and it was almost casual, my realization across the waking line this morning, that my arms aren't capable of flight anymore. but they are, i am, thinking there is no vacation from the brain, tropical beaches, hollywood nightclubs, opium dens, it's a blessed constant while it functions and catalyzes for meaning. and this jovial guy named nestor told me never to trust a skinny chef and the same can be said for casual fingers on a wordsmith or serenity on the face of a beast.

santa monica/sawtelle

and sometimes you wanna collapse. sidewalks, grass, sand, people walking their dogs at night, fat kids on scooters zooming along your crooked line of sight. you're often saved by simply listening to someone else's story or lighting someone up with a little energy. an irish pub or a place in santa monica reminiscent of the roaring twenties in t-shirts and miniskirts, he said i was on fire a couple nights before and i seemed to recall something about a french accent, candle on head, sprint home. then i was talking to some girl about napkins and heritage and before long it's god and desperation, how we relate to ourselves, others, why it's not just a personified man with a white robe and beard and i made a joke about the pool table and told her i'd see her later on because the night was young and i was drunk and never assume you're going to meet someone again just because the two of you aren't strangers anymore.

santa rosa plums

lucien painted naked pictures of his daughter, rose. she posed for him on his couch, strong muscles, wide-open legs, hair in all the places a woman has hair, self-involved.

the line i punched into my cell phone last night: i was retrieving my tool kit, when she drove away on three wheels.

my words, written for me, dropped, message in a bottle for the sea and foreign eyes, are not for anyone to own. whether arranged in mocking betrayal or overflowing heart, i'm emblazoned by the imperfections of dancing. do not read this as an excuse, read it as a conversation with probabilities both imagined and real, filtered through conditioning, perception, but with angst to occur.

i've encountered things and people who defy sense and logic and this uncertainty has it's inspiration, proof, of a mysteriously unknowing sliver of universe.

unpredictability is what she taught me, through months of invisibility, ringing taunts, the arrogance she met her body with, time.

i let it sit. i think i was waiting. we happened, existed in something magic for a moment, spent all this time planning our escape, then i became flustered, she ran away, never together realizing. the pain isn't even a faint echo no more.

as for you, i know you, in between the moon and you, i hope you are living, breathing, feeling, trusting your gorgeous intuition. i was driving somewhere, i can't remember the street, when the impulse of love returned--not the sadness, egoic futility, taunting glimpses of what was and could have been, but-- right-there-i-can-feel-it-for-the-people-in-my-life-again, love. nostalgia dims love, it wears the mask of love but it's grief, regret. love is only momentous and accessible in acceptance for what is, what is, no matter how alone or together we are, love wakes us up to ourselves, here.

i'm not enlightened by what i know, feel, i'm strange. i'm not centered because i'm a mess, only, somewhere in this scattered crazy moving internal/external reconciliation are pieces of warm life evidence and ability. i do know, that in this town the best truths are improvised moments between characters stripped of their costumes and dreams, naked with each other in a thai food restaurant, standing face to face at a venice handball court counting numbers with a dreadlocked guru, finding evidence that someone's been with us the entire time, teaching girls to skateboard, climbing sandstone peak for a new year with that sunset, huge moon, yelling at strangers, drinking wine, an owl, drive home in peace, lovemaking, a cafe here, a cafe there, my independence zigzagging a flowing trail through paths both paved and wild, in this grid and chaos, flashes of brilliance woven into the fabric of a city founded for it's light, climate, proximity to the edge of the world.

i was born in van nuys hospital, i picked my brother up somewhere nearby twenty-something years later, all my siblings keep picking each other up all over the place. my mother's childhood lives in that valley, says she feels most like herself gathering stones at the beach and swimming in the ocean. my father's los angeles begins working at a prison hospital east of downtown, living above dodger stadium. i'm shading in all the space between, then coloring beyond their lines. i grew up eating blood red plums, summer juices dripping down my chin, warm on the outside, dripping with refreshing pulse within, minerals coursing through earth, tree, body.

i'm continuing with change, unfolding in glaring inevitability and stark reminder, contrast, opportunity for growth, recognition, spirit. and now, awakening to the next impossibility, another skin of life, new.

sitting in this achingly beautiful room, on a somehow forgotten block of bohemia, i am grateful again.