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.