why men prefer to go to the liquor store or; why some men almost seem determined to go crazy

Drip. Faucet. Goes drip. Wake up on the next torturous splash to a stranger in your bed. She rolls in toward your hairy body and the blankets and the temperature increase and she kisses you with warm sour angel morning lips on your surprisingly fluent mouth. And you two had been facing the same general direction - sleeping toward your bookcase and the succulent plant on top of it with crumpled receipts and fragmented ideas and lines scratched into them with pen and the red and the black backpack on the floor with scattered remnants of hours ago worn clothes now cold uninhabited - but now warm she has shown you her sleepy eyes and hidden her communicative spine in exchange for that warm kiss which turns into kissing on one another and piercing into one another for several not insignificant widening angles of the sun across the eastern window and through the headboard window onto perpendicular walls in this bedroom. And you wonder who she is but not aloud.

the makings of a composite character

You look bad on an escalator. You look good in a movie theater. You appear dangerously attractive on a street corner. You look softly melodic hair spread fanned out on a bed. You look scary in my heart. You roll through an aquarium looking through glass walls at the scary territory of my heart. Have I mentioned my heart? you two should meet, he's that one out there on the plains.

(he volumelessly backhands the binoculars into her chest without taking his eyes off the horizon)

(and she wraps her slender fingers around them and raises the lenses up in line to meet her own)

Duarte

the best Bob Dylan is sad Bob Dylan. I used to work at his cafe in Santa Monica and he ran it like any other cheap small business owner would. But damn, he's good and sad on a rainy night in Los Angeles.

i was walking thinking about death. I was drinking while slinking in between staggered alleyways. I shared a cigarette. I smoked a joint that was handed to me. I ate tacos too spicy. I drank milk. My limbs  grew tired. I formulated so many beautiful things in my head to say over the course of the last several days but I drank them away. Washed them down the drain in a carbonated brine.

i had a short story. It went something like this:

at the end of the day, his hands smelled of fish and cigarette smoke. Because that is what he worked with to survive. And he would marvel at the shiny scaled fatty creatures that would arrive with such consistency to his cutting board. How lucky. To never have pulled one of them from the sea.. But to still revel in their bounty each day like an artist with fresh paint that stunk to perfection. Lemon. Dill. Chives. Fresh grated horseradish. Labneh. Mixed. He sold the salad by weight. It was his daintiest creation in the glass case and he liked everything else best. And he wasn't a smoker, just someone who choked on the fumes of a missing distant impulse.

and if you are going to do anything, he thought as he shaved off a translucent thin sliver of pink oily flesh with sharpened knife, you might as well do it beautifully.

my lover the moon

Her face was the moon and our love was the sun and we cast our shadows down like the uh the moon and I was um hot and on fire like the sun and we burned holes in the ground like the eternal sun through a magnifying glass shaped like the moon and her and I we sizzled like the surface of the um the sun again and she was definitely a lot like the magic of the moon.

wonders of scale

My neighbor asked me if I was writing at all. The answer was no. I take Decembers to let the limbs remain barren. Be nude and feel every speck that floats onto me or that I run into. This is an alone time of year.

But I once fell in love during a December. And under barren trees in Los Angeles is still the sun peering through with powerfully mustered strength from a Hail Mary distance. It's romantic this desert winter. So it once happened like this; where we were awoken by a muse in cold bedroom mornings but warmed as a rising recognition and impassioned cause rolling over into laying days on beds of earth.

I'm going to go to my friend's house today to talk about love. Or its absence. The romantic kind, that is.  Truth be told, it informs the other kinds doesn't it. It drives the universal kind of love, the hungering one. Even its echoing habit and sentimental ritual has more force than an asexual guru in lotus. And I am on a thin drip of its echo.

I forgot how much it terrifies me. My behavior does a good job of leading that obtuse charge away from anything it resembles. Protect. Protect. The animal says. Intelligent animal.

Walking down my alley this morning an old dog sidewinding crooked gave me a knowing look in the eyes. You can't keep me inside forever. I'll always find a way out, it spoke friendly, even if it's only for a brief wild time before the leash arrives. The tethering is only temporary to what nature cleverly devised - a biological pleasure system to incentivize the repetition of bodily advancement toward building a God-like spirit lover for the sensual and individual Universe of all things. The Universe is waiting for its body to birth an eventual match to make conscious forever love to. Just like me, a dude in another December, grateful to have another day in construction.

my friend i can hear the drums from miles

This body is just a body. Miraculous. Inside this human game I'm a trying failure. Outside of it, I'm a spirit. I'm the spirit. The impoverished don't use it as an opiate. I was wrong. The truly humbled just know. They are reduced and closer to it, so they know. That they are it. That they are everything. That they have nothing to worry about because they are something. And that its all meaningless prefix and that the thing is not an object, it is light, bright, piercing, expanding, ever. In human terms the sun is a dot in the light flora.

I was getting all caught up in the game of identity and it was small. It, the actions we take are irrevlevant. The inner garden we cultivate and the beauty it abounds, is decorative only for a time. Time is only a notion in a very small wristwatch on the hand of a man eaten by a giant lost in the multiverse.

I'll kill you. Understand? Do not take it literally. Do not take it in flesh. When those messiahs spoke in anger it was only a passion that was pouring outward toward light. It is a violence only in meek terms of language and human and temporal flesh, and only because that is a metaphorical velocity in movement. No one is harmed, not here, not anywhere, because they are not anyone. There is no one. That is not a lonely statement. It is a recognition. We are not One. Or one. Or 1. We are not we. We are not are. We are

And I know it is scary to admit. Open your hands outward and if you don't have hands or they are full let your spirit bloom uninhibited and no matter how you do it, it is never going to stop

til the doctor

I have so many memories. Which one do you want to hear? A chef at work was teaching me to cut fish and he said it was important to stay present in whatever you are doing. Including cutting fish. My joke on stage -- I will save for the stage. It requires an affect, a long a. Maybe a memory is not what you need right now. Maybe you need me to be present.

So here I am. Here. Obliterating myself into individual atoms that peel away upon themselves like onions. And so on and so forth. Tears. 

Maybe I just need to sweat. It's been a week since I last broke a good sweat. Maybe my dad needs to eat more so he doesn't look like a method actor. Maybe my mom needs to take 1mg instead of the five she was mistakenly prescribed by her free healthcare to keep from being dizzy. Maybe I need to stop using my parents as a cop-out.

I told myself I could drink beer all December. I told the audience. No. This isn't about making them laugh. This is about the present.

People get bored on stories without love. Tell a love story. No.

This is about the present. I'm listening to music. I'm patting myself on the back. I'm feeling awful. God, I'm getting better at making them laugh.

Trav was right about the palm trees at night. Damn, if only I could paint them. Still-black against a muted shade of telephonic gray. The moon-bulb in one tidy little section throwing about an evenly distributed party. All guests of light invited.

Also I'd be a millionaire by now if I'd given up that stand-alone courage I so admire in myself in exchange, for a wife. But then, I wouldn't have been present like I am now.

my lover the photographer

She said she liked Instagram. That it didn't affect her profession. That all the social media beauty was a relief from what she had spent so many years remotely chasing. The messy and the muck, the clashing of ugly spheres and cells to make a bloody born baby of a moment. Like that Egyptian trash pile where people lived and flies fed. Like a jagged and misunderstood light. A Gypsy's eyes. A Haitian morgue. She wanted what she saw with her own eyes and heart to challenge the limits of her lens, she wanted what she photographed to break her camera.

santa anna's diary

I have been in this land a long time doing battle. For many years I was driven by the deceptive intuition that I'd come out a victor. Maybe it wasn't intuition, maybe it was my mother. This land. That I belonged so certainly in it, a general, something like a king.

But as the years continued on I participated in my fair share of victories and loss. It was loss I found most interesting, honest.

Every time I'd get high, it was loss that chopped me down. As though God, telling me that any apex of achievement was folly in comparison to a life humbled. But I fought against humility. Maybe it was just my nature, maybe it was the distance of my father. The sky. Me. I wanted to be the warm wind that caresses the ear of your soul, the one that moves you in an otherwise collapsing fragmented time of year.

   

who wants to be a millionaire

The narrative I crafted out of you. Oh God. You should hear it.

But I wanted you to remain alone forever. That would have proven to me that it was real. You. Alone. Forever.

Regis Philbin intones:

You have one lifeline remaining, would you like to phone a friend?

Nah, Regis. I'm good. What I'm gonna do Regis. Is. I'm gonna take a big mighty, informed by experience, guess. And then, after forever happens, the television feed cuts out, you and I both die, Regis, I'm gonna die again. Without the answer. But into something larger and whole and it will know that I spoke my form of the truth. That whole will recognize a liar's ceaseless attempt at truth. And for that, it will accept me.

And I could tell you what colorful outfits she wore like a crazed genius peacock on a myriad of occasions and I could tell you what each article of them looked like on the floor of a bedroom, a car, a park somewhere remote in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Regis.

anonymous

Hello. I am a man. Oh dear. Forgive me strangers. I never do these kinds of things. Plastic chair. Shoot. Hard floor that seems harder than any floor. God I would hate to crack my head. But anyway, I have never been a man all that up for the thrill of public speaking err -- I mean pubic speaking -- no. I meant public speaking. I had it right the first time. Anyway, hello.

First off, I am a man with a very low tolerance for pain. Wow. That felt so good to share. I get it. Got it. In that moment I shared it. It's gone already, I can feel it gone already. But I got it then when I did it. I understand why these meetings happen. Yes. Well. Anyway. I am a man incapable of handling anything beyond a brief passing flutter of human pain. What some would call a minor headache, could very well send me shivering to the emergency room if lasting longer than forty-five minutes. For heavenssakes I sound like a Viagra commercial.

Internal monologue: Dammit. Is any internal monologue THAT, an internal monologue, if there is already an editorial oversight stating it to be a monologue. I mean. By virtue of my acknowledging an internal monologue, have I really just made it a dialogue or is the listener, me, supposed to gift the pretense of oversight? Like. And bear with me here. I once read that inside a box unseen is a wave-particle and that until consciousness enters the box, it remains a wave-particle. But!

As soon as consciousness enters the box, the wave-particle either becomes. A wave. Or a particle.

Besides, hi. What I'm really here to discuss is not so simple to approach in terms of words. It needs warming into. Like. Oh man. I didn't see the free coffee over there. The free coffee is probably watery thin. Tastes of faint charcoal if anything at all. Mmm. Yep. Goes down watery thin and leaves the nervous system jolted and then worse off for the wear long-term. Also for instance

I believe myself incapable of romantically loving another human being.

brunch drinking with my ghosties

I stood in the backyard of a house on the Eastside. Sunday night. I was staring at a tall tangerine tree. A citrus time of year. A young black man singing like an angel amid his delicate electronic instrumentals. People artfully scattered amongst the features decorating the rustic earth with a presence.

Friday I was at a bar in Venice. After hours of conversation, I kissed a lovely black woman by her car. I bring up her race only as it pertained to her age, she was 35, older than me but lovely. And black 35 is like a white 28, I joked. I asked the crowd at Silverlake Lounge if that was anywhere near racist. They said yes, toward white people not aging well. Relieved. White people are fine. White men especially. I am one and if it's any consolation, I said, I'm not having that much fun with the whole thing either.

I gotta save all my best lines for a script or two. I'm sorry.

As long as life provides me no free time to think about what composes life, I'm frickin doin all right.

That people fall and pine over each other even when there is merely a prison window of a chance.

I wrote in a little notebook that I was so drunk that the subtle nuances of my penmanship had changed enough to become court verified indistinguishable.

I realized recently, only, I don't know why, that I can't stand watching people licking their fingers after they eat.

Oh! The park. There was this little park off Sunset. I'd gone there to read at 1:30 yesterday in the afternoon. Just a little sliver of grass with a few mature trees, some large smooth sitting rocks, and mariachi music blaring festively from one of the little bungalows surrounding. And this androgynous figure in black sweatsuit bottoms and turquoise sweater, in down-dog, one legged at times, two at others. I barely noticed. But then two hours later I walked by and the person was still there doing it. Then four hours later I went back to my car to charge my phone and the person was still there doing it. then at 7:30 I went back to my car and the person was still there doing it.

One night, I put condoms into a hidden pocket of my jacket, and this just so happened to situate the protection over my heart.

in my car on my break

This lie, the one I keep telling about not being heartbroken when it'll come time to leave Venice, is never more evident than on the boardwalk in the morning. The truth is that I will miss the beautiful way this place has allowed me to be in sadness and in joy. How it archs its spine, rolls its tongue, sits there dead still, then smiles all the way off its face. That it provides a fitting poetry for the entire spectrum.

$590 Fare

There is a custom or a studied tendency involving strangers in seated rooms. If I were to see someone sitting at a row full of tables and I did not know them, and all the empty tables were available to me. I would choose distance from that person. At least two to three tables away combined with any additional considerations I might have pertaining to view, comfort, table size etc.

My joke is that I'm such a liberal, I skateboarded to the polls. Politicians describe their version of the world based upon their own inner state. Everyone does. It just seems uglier when politicians do it. There is only another Cold War where there are cold people. I mean that from all sides because there are none. Not without agreeing to the terms of illusion. A garden almost anywhere can grow.

There is a yellow orange light that my bedroom inhabits each morning that doesn't photograph the way it can be shared in person.

joshua, she called me joshua

I wanna keep writing. I wanna keep chasing it. If I get up and leave I'll be in the daydream when all I really wanna do is hunt. I'm tracking some game. I don't know what it looks like. I wasn't raised in Africa like Hemmingway. Was Hemmingway raised in Africa?

No, but he wrote that passage in garden of Eden. He was working on that story with his pencils knubby about hunting an elephant with his dad. My friend mentioned Hemmingway underwent shock therapy prior to his suicide. I didn't know that. It was at a comedy club too. I kept hearing about shock therapy at this comedy club. The good and the bad of it. And Hemmingway.

I am hunting.

playing the long game

I met some mystery girl who wasn't all that interesting outside a nightclub in Hollywood years ago. Then we'd run into each other everywhere. At a house in the hills. On a sidewalk outside of a Chipotle on Sunset Blvd. You know, everywhere.

And I told her the night we first met that I'd like to see her without make-up on her face. And it went like that. I would say a bunch of insignificant shit to her every time we'd speak and sometimes it was for hours on the phone, that's right I forgot about the phone, and I could make her laugh. It was like a seductive cartoon cat, her purr. She'd call me. I'd call her. She'd purr. And then we just kept bumping into each other insignificantly.

Then there is this pregnant woman who comes into my work. She is beautiful. I run into her and her husband everywhere. She pretended like we'd already met before the first time we actually met. I told her we hadn't. Cuz we hadn't.

So. But. Listen. I don't want to be with anyone longer than two nights in a row. There can be a sweet morning where we get a bleary-eyed breakfast together with hair messy and hands touching. Then there can be a sweet mourning as we continue the process of never meeting again.

lorrie moore

Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce--winds, seas--a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world--no flower or stone--as a single hello from a human being.

pomegranate

Baby crying. Hey. Baby crying. I know. I know. But it's safe for you now in Venice. I hear you crying babies everywhere. Strollers everywhere. Baby. Crying. Venice is now an upper-middle class family town Baby. I don't know exactly what that may mean for your upbringing. But Baby I'm guessing they might forget to tell you that grown ups have nightmares too.  

I see you there, suckling at your mother's breast. Crying. I'm just trying to write here at this socially conscious cafe/shoe store Baby. Me. I woke up scared last night. I didn't cry. But I was scared. I shook on the inside like you might cry on the outside. You should know that sometimes grown ups wake up scared too. It is a fact. Might as well embrace it Baby.

And I kept my phone in the living room too. I didn't want my phone to be what kept my fear at bay this time. Cuz what if someday I don't have my phone there for me Baby. I just had to get back under the covers and accept my fear.

I guess I get guilty. Or I get scared cuz there are all these places in the world where it doesn't matter how much is done in the interior world. That a bunch of crazy killers are on the loose with ridiculous agendas, religious and otherwise, it scares me.

Like Baby I heard about these killer clowns up in Bakersfield or something. I didn't look too far into it though cuz not looking too far into things is sometimes the only way to stay sane.

It's just like, I hear people talking about things on the periphery and there's only so much terror a grown up is capable of entertaining at times Baby.

I mean, really. They won't even tell you certain things unless you are in a war zone or being raised by wolves. Gosh there's probably a lot to learn from having wolves as parents. I don't want to frighten you further but it happens Baby, babies get lost once in awhile and get raised by wolves. And it's not so bad.

Oh my dad by the way, my dad always makes a point of saying, that there was a feral quality to his children as they were growing up. What cuz, we lived up in the hills with our mother and all, without electricity for awhile or something. But Baby. Baby you've got a golden glow. I've been told it's safe here in Venice these days.  

getting over the flu

When I'm looking out of a window at the rain, I feel like a powerful man. Powerfully silent. Powerfully knowing. And I can see the beauty in all things. It's a regal pose. Especially as water drips through faulty sills and loose body hair curls along my unswept bedroom floors. Cough. Blow nose. Cough. Sneeze. Patter of the rain. Powerful. Sick. Crumbled tissues. A powerful man. This morning I was thinking this morning of all things.

How my mom's ex-lesbian lover took her minivan from her in Topanga Canyon.
How my mom's fedora wearing ex-lesbian lover is a narcissist.
How my mom's first ex-lesbian lover was a former teacher of hers who came to live with us for a period of time while my parents were still married.

The rain stick she brought into our house. Magical, I thought the rain stick was. The noise it made, the way the noise shimmered with some unknown element. I couldn't believe something like a rain stick could exist. Cuz I was at an age where people were starting to tell me magic didn't. I wondered what other magic was out there. And just now I was thinking about how my parents met in a mental hospital. And one day I will write about all of it but I'm still in it.

Ray Liotta will smile by the end of the commercial if given the correct brand of Tequila from the diminutive bartender.

I got a job at a deli. I am almost thirty years of age. They are perfectly good people running a fine operation but there is no good result to that job interview. Don't get the job, I'm broke and waiting for film projects to happen. Do get the job, and I do get the job. I am almost thirty years of age and a hundred bucks still feels like a substantial amount of money.

Kevin Spacey wants you to grow your portfolio using E*TRADE.

An erotic experience was with a young woman I once worked with at a cafe. She said the doctors diagnosed her as bipolar but that she didn't believe them. I didn't know. She was crazy smart and fast and electric. And I ended up in her bed. And she was a feminist but coming to terms with liking sex on the rougher side. She felt now that the two were not mutually exclusive. I was just happy being around a young woman, sex, I had no preference in style.

So when she wanted our bodies taken beyond the edge of our heavy-run intimacy and into the impersonal shouts and moans that pornography is made of, I did the filthiest thing I could think of,

I grabbed her face close to mine and kissed her at a lazy pace. Ground into her deep and indulged and caring of a distant impulse. And then we looked into each other's eyes with a kindness that acknowledged that we were two scared near strangers making love together against the harsh hating parts of our outer and inner worlds.

And days later she said she couldn't help still thinking about it, she texted, wanted it again. And like Los Angeles, I cited my initial disclaimer. Oh yeah, I had given her an initial disclaimer earlier in the night, about how like Los Angeles, I wasn't in any place to be held accountable to anything serious. Which made me a bigger jerk for kissing her slowly.

I've heard Brad Pitt gets on his knees every night and prays we all smell of Chanel No. 5.

the sudafed vignettes

Do you love him?

No

Then, why not leave?

I guess cuz he feeds me as much blow as I want off his car key when we're out together

And is that all you want?

Right now, yes.

I fell in love at first sight with this blonde blue-eyed with a round odd face and probing eyes and it was at first sight. Very important that it was at first sight. Her face! I never remember a face but the memory of her face is waking me up in the middle of the night! 

That's a myth - love at first sight

No! I used to think that but as I'm getting older, I'm starting to believe love at first sight is the truest form. I'm starting to believe that the very first moment is the most powerful and that everything else dims after that, subtly/slowly in the best of cases or rapidly/violently in the harder world of things but it's that first moment that pushes into your perception of the world and changes its shape and course forever

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. I don't know why. I don't know why

Yeah, well

I don't believe in love at first sight. That's just the sunrise, beautiful indeed. But I believe love follows an arc like the sun. With plenty of beautiful moments, including high noon ---

Yeah but you're always talking about the damn sun!

That's cuz like love, it has always been here for me, even if it seems to go away for a very dark night or two

Can I help you?

Yes, I'd like half a pound of--- um--

Ma'am?

I'm sorry, excuse me. I'm just-- I'm sorry.

Where on Earth have you been?

I've been around.

Around? I went to Around. I went all Around. I didn't see you there!

Remember? That's cuz remember? You don't remember do you? How we once agreed - that if we hadn't met that one particular way we did - that we never would have

Yeah but I thought we were just saying that cuz I was tangled in your arms and we were naked and close as close as two people could be - so we could say risky things like that to each other

No, it was true. We were never gonna find each other again, our souls had never met before they had that one night remember the feeling of it we both shared in my bed that one morning long ago?

I remember but...Well then how do you explain this huh? Here we are! Here we are! We found each other again!

That's cuz you called me

i wrote this in my phone either before the hospital in it or after

It all wants to make you serious, don't. It's been indescribably hard but life building and strengthening. Muscles are supposed to tear before they repair. And the last year I've just been tearing.

He built her a castle. She gave him her youth. They left each other bankrupt. And they both were right and wrong and they made us.

Then she moved us to a rundown mouse-infested beach house that was powerfully rocked back and forth by the crashing waves. And one night it rained and the skylight above our bunk bed blew off and I figured because I was on the lower bunk that I'd just stay there and survive and I did. Wet and everything.

Then I grew up and started remembering things in pieces, that threaded into me as I changed. And an important thing to remember about a thread is that for the story to continue it must disappear and rise back up with a faith that it first went to another side.

the blat of Jack's horn

OH no I'm starting to feel my heart well-over

Let it

But so much

Let it spill onto your toes and into the Earth

Sometimes I don't know if I can stand it. The way I struggle and toss and turn with this faulty proposition

Struggle then

I've been walking home a lot
I've been freaking out a lot
I've been waking up with tears in my eyes that aren't even irrational but instead true
My tears have been true

You've been moving in the correct direction try to feel every fucking inch of it til it makes you a sun

superrito

I know why I felt bad leaving the stage. I had provided all these between the joke windows but refused to explain what they were saying. And they didn't necessarily care. An indirect viewing of how hurt I was, without just saying it.

Laughter wasn't the point for me but I functioned under that guise and toed the edge.

They were there to get away from theirs. You were allowed to do the same. Just be there for the joy.

I dunno sometimes I just feel like the ugliest girl at prom. Remember that tag next time, it makes the joke, ties it up into a bow.

before google eats us alive

We could be that slow drunk couple drinking at the Cock N' Bull on a Sunday night. I'll be buying your beers and it's the sweetest thing. The way I tend to your drink when it gets low. And you have your legs and torso swung in my direction with hands on my knees in the sweetest body language. And when that old folksy song comes on, we sing along, better than expected.

Or we can be one of those new age Bohemian couples with our finances in order. I'll spend my weekends tinkering with the soil of the vegetables in our urban garden, talking with the solar panel technician about doing the water heating system, and motoring to and from Little League games in an electric Tesla. Our two children have long hair and Sanskrit names that could be shortened to sound harmlessly Anglicized if they want. But they'll probably embrace em especially as they get older. It's really up to them. And you'll have that room where you paint and meditate up in that separate guest house perch with the huge open window that catches the afternoon ocean breeze and you'll say it's your favorite time and place, the afternoon time. And even when I emerge from my own zen den grumpy and manic you're somehow always ready to embrace me because you know creativity has so many forms and sources and that it is endless.

Or if those two don't work for you we could be that couple I've seen on Lincoln Blvd. late at night or on the Venice boardwalk early in the morning. Living on the streets and sidewalks. You yelling out your demons at me, I, threatening to leave but never going further than the shore, us, always coming together tenderly. The two beings between our bags in the evening, breathing in the Earth together, intermingling with the saltwater air and fooling the naked eye upon us because we are involved.

This could be the part where I say we've never met. But we have. In tiny fragments as you drove by, caught my attention on a promenade, or middle of the darkness while I slept and dream-formed your presence and how it felt as we cradled one another as a boat on a sea.

book review

I'm not sure about prior generations but our own life-long love stories will be with ourselves. I will look back and treasure what I saw with myself. And who I loved with myself. It is a modern alteration for sure.

We evolved genetic change in sweeping numbers beneficial to the climes and they manifested into collective behaviors and constructions that took on lives of their own.

I felt God wrap tentacles around my heart, first like an out of control weed, then as a hug of vines.

I bought the pen I wrote this first draft with at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco to ensure the $10 credit card minimum was met.

Saltwater in my hair and a smile in my heart I fell asleep last night re-experiencing diving under the waves and whitewater and looking at the light under green ocean on my legs and the time I've spent in the world below the surface and how extraordinary it is that we've figured out how.

A girl asked me to walk with her to the sunset. I told her the ocean is not our home but we are brave for figuring out how to belong in it for awhile. Humanity clinging to shorelines because it expresses a breaking wave and its return to the whole, dispersed but into a significant One. And it feeds us in fish. It feeds us in spirit.

Back for another coffee already?
Yep
Today's the day.
Today's the day I fly away.

I put cream in my coffee so that I can drink it right away. Last night I rode the bus. I walked for miles in the dark. Spoke to my mom on the phone. She wrote a children's book about the Universe. The scientist in the NY Times book review this morning said we are nothing like ants. I want to go see the Matisse works at MoMA. I want to go to New York City. I want to bring this entire experience with me through life and eternity.

thus it was written

Having little to do with the institution of marriage, how we are at a wedding is how we feel about romantic love. Sober and withdrawn I walked through the ceremony more or less unimpeded. I have this praying thing. Where I pray. And it's not to any personified entity in particular except maybe myself. And it's amazing how much love I have for everyone including the most random people. And if they flash into my head I announce them in prayer and it makes my heart feel corrected. After my car accident I was telling Britt that it was broken. And maybe it was, is. But it keeps correcting itself in a state of prayer and plenitude.

on my knees

The only people who know how to be nice are the mean ones. I know because I am an absolute defensive asshole piece of shit and the things that go through my mind would make the average middle of the roader vomit endless bile onto their shitty made in China by young children shoes fuck them fuck the labor laws fuck what people do I swear to God sometimes I want to kick everyone in my path down onto their backs spray them with gasoline and light them on fire laughing as they struggle and----hang on let me get that door for you ma'am. Well yes you have a good one too ma'am. I most certainly will make a nice little place for you in my prayers tonight ma'am, right there alongside the shadow of my own soul.

Dude

I was eating too much cinnamon. It was making me light-headed. It is a blood thinner, cinnamon. It was giving me vertigo, the cinnamon. I'd been putting it on my oatmeal every morning. Too liberally. I'd be walking and getting like I was going to fall down and I thought it was the stress or caffeine or skimping on food but it was the cinnamon. I stopped and the problem went away.

The story is too long. So I won't tell it yet.

When a bus goes by and I'm on the skateboard it is a smooth wave of wind. You'd be surprised because there is nothing worse than being on the sidewalk when the bus fires up again into your face. There are worse things but you know what I mean, it is an expression. But when moving at a speed closer to that of the passing bus, it is a smooth feeling.

I am almost 30.

we are a naked baby getting diaper changed on sidewalk

Sir, we are going to have to ask you to leave

Wait. What. Why.

Sir, we have had complaints.

Complaints. Complaints. About what. Wait. Is this because I told the barista I wanted my coffee black and then winked at the barista and stuck my tongue out like a lizard. like a lizard at him. Is that it. because if it is. I am sorry. It was a bad joke. I could have sworn it was only in my head. I get these bad jokes in my head sometimes. I don't mean to ever let them out but I get that me doing it may have been offensive. So I am sorry.

That would have been cause for removal absolutely sure. But we do not currently have a black barista.

Who said anything about him being black.

We have not had one in months. Not because we are trying not to have one. It has simply just worked out that way.

For the record it was not a racial thing. It was a-- It must've been somewhere else that I did that then.

Sir, your admission about race and coffee would have indeed been enough. For sure. But we must ask you to pack up your-- is that a typewriter.

No. Yes. I am done with the lies.

Your typewriter and please leave immediately or we will be forced to call the cops. And you know that the police are not friendly in this town.

I still do not understand. Am I being persecuted because I keep staring directly between the legs of each woman and man who walks into this establishment without ever looking anywhere on their bodies but directly between their legs. Is that it. Because if it is then let me tell you I am just curious about their private arenas er---areas not arenas - though when you think about it our private areas do become arenas of sorts. Mine would be like the Lousiana Superdome post-Katrina. A total mess. An arena in disrepair then hit with a hurricane and thousands of lost souls.

Sir. I am going to have to cut you off. You must leave because one of the customers overheard you talking to yourself.

Oh! Is that all! We all talk to ourselves! Survey the populace. Do it anonymously if you must! Survey them! You! You must talk to yourself!

I do.

See!

But I do not do what you do. I do not say what you say.

What. what. did I say. that was so horrifying.

It's really not appropriate for me to repeat in this coffee establishment Sir. We have too many members of the tech industry here with too much start-up capital and clout. I do not want to offend the members of this evolving community's virtual lifeblood--

That I'm a poet. Is that it. That I said I was a poet.

Sir.

It's that I'm a poet. That I said that I was a poet. You are kicking me out because I am a poet.

Sir. Please. I am going to have to call the police.

Fine. Fine. I will leave. I will pick my typewriter up and leave. I get how shudder worthy it may sound to folks these days. That there is no path. No interest. Not even fleeting click-bait. That this is not a world for the poet.

Sir.

I placed my heart into a case
with her own

Sir. Please. This is embarrassing

in a case
in case
what we did
became too messy
and there they were
like clowns packed into a tiny car
our hearts
unrecognizable
indistinguished
from one or another
so that
they were one
our hearts
a blubbery unified
heart
and the case
was above us
and we were moving
in motion
on a bed
for hours
and
hours
and
hours
and
sweat
I did that part
to give her so much pleasure
so that the other ones would have to become unrecognizable
that
she would be so overwhelmed
her senses had to start over
that
they would have no trace
and it was selfish
the best lovers
are selfish
we are selfish
the best lovers
the best lovers
the best lovers
want to haunt their lovers as the only ghost
the best lovers are selfish
they want to haunt their lovers in a way that has nothing to do with love
and it was selfish
that
after I had left
that
her body was empty of any trace
of any other touch
and haunted
that
I left her haunted
and that it took
a long while
for her blood to return
and
it took a long while
for her to take her heart back out
from that
already left-opened
solely inhabited
case

Sir

I'm going. I'm going.

The Bechdel Test

He got off the RV somewhere near Topeka

I hate to leave you babe but I can't stand it anymore, this is where I gotta get off

Is it what I think it is, Johnny?

I don't wanna lie. Yeh.

What? You promised! You promised!

I know babe but addiction is stronger than love sometimes so it's probly stronger than a promise

Fucking asshole. You fucking. asshole! Get out then! Get out!

And she did let him get out and off the RV and she drove on. And she thought about herself more than anyone else. It was unexpected. Her thinking grew very clear, it bloomed in a way it rarely did these days what with technology and all it bloomed. And it was a bliss because for the first time in god-knows-how-long all she did was think about herself.

all the animals

It's gone. What I wanted to tell you. With mindfulness comes a full spectrum of colors and patterns. A ladybug on my window screen. The yellow monarch fluttering in the far depth of view. This lady walking in a bright neon peach t-shirt. On my friend's street near the train tracks, late at night, there are white bunnies. White bunnies lingering in the middle of the street, and on the sidewalks like cats, the bunnies. She says they belong to one of her neighbors. I once tried to drown my sorrows only to realize that they'd been keeping me afloat, my sorrows.

I Swear It

You'll write her like a mystery. The necklace she insisted on wearing. That relic to the brand she'd been creating. She hacked computers. Obsessed over data. Wanted to build an ideation factory beneath the ground in a house made of soil down on the property she owned in Central America.

I'm an underdog darling. I'm an underdog baby. You may not believe it. But I'm an underdog.

I didn't give you a tenth of a preview to a teaser of a sneak peak of a trailer to 1/10 of my love.

How long can he go on feeling the pin-prick of everything. It's an--ouch. I can withstand the--ouch. One night I might even get brave enough to start digging into that buried well filled with the best of my dark material and--ouch.

I am the mineral rich Earth you forgot to bring in your bags. I will visit you in the jet black days of your winter. You told me I'd like it there.

why you had to quit drinking

I want you to picture yourself. No selfies tho. Picture yourself in an entirety seen from the sky. Laying there like a clothed fetus on a womb of flat grass. The POV, that of a whirling drone hovering from half a mile above. It zooms in on you just before it leaves to go spy on Americans and/or deliver packages for Amazon.

You are laying on the grass of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Trees. Tar Pits. Museum. You, like clothed fetus. A speck floating atop a sea of green.

Here, I peer. I am peering down at you like an invisible Benjamin Franklin, spectacles low on my nose, hands behind my back. Picture me looking at you like that. Me like Benjamin Franklin and you with Johnny Appleseed bags sagging beneath your closed eyes. Beads of fermented sweat rolling down that prominent Neander brow of yours. Getting closer to you. I am borrowing a cinematic angle a little like what we remember the opening image from that film "Boyhood" by Richard Linklater to be. Only it's not a boy we are talking about. It is, you.

Butt feel the gentle blades of green grass, tiny, cut low. Invisible Benjamin Franklin is gone. It is the middle of the afternoon during a bad heat wave in Los Angeles. The temperature is aggressive like a man at a bar who is wearing hair gel and a golden wristwatch. The heat is like that aggressive. You, not me, just drank a bunch of beer at the Old Farmer's Market. And that pale bartender woman with the bandanna was serving you. You know her name right? She has been there for many years. You know her name and things like that because you are no longer a boy like that boy from "Boyhood" was at the beginning. You are much older. And you have been to this bar many times before. And that boy had nicer eyes than you. The boy from "Boyhood" did. What? He did.

Anyway. Staying focused. This is about you. It is the middle of the afternoon. Scorching hot. And you are on the grass at LACMA. Asleep. Your sister, not my sister, is sitting there like a fawn, watching you like slow television. She will need a ride to work. She has been watching you sleep. Passed out on the lawn. She ate a salad while you drank another skunky beer at the LACMA cafeteria. Why has she been watching you so intently by the way? Your sister. While you sleep. You wonder. But don't be so paranoid. She is your sister. If she had wanted to cut you open in your sleep, she would have done so a long time ago. Like when You cut open her diary and showed the innocent, amorous, sexually-themed passages to your dad as he drank ice water at the desk of his office, growing up. You are the one who did that, not her. 

But as she was nudging one of your numb shoulders you awoke near one of the lesser La Brea Tar Pit puddles feeling like a collection of fossils and mankind's last hope. The air like black sludge, crystal clear and heavy like black sludge. She said she would drive. Your sister. You don't remember if you listened. Your stomach was bubbling. It was only a couple of blocks. Middle of the day. She got to work safe. You kept the air conditioner on and parked near a bunch of duplexes. Closed your eyes. An ex-fling of yours drove by, and texted you something sarcastic. Then moments later your ex-girlfriend called. What are the odds? And you answered. You spoke to her on the way home. While you drove. And you experienced losing her again. Like you did every time the two of you spoke. It happened still in faint echoes across the pane of her voice.

Zoom out. Further. Drones. Airplanes. Space Satellites. Then God. Then the one watching God like fissured television. Then the one above the one watching God. All of them. Feeling like their trillions of spider eyes were focused everywhere but on you. That they had lost sight and interest in your journey. That you were truly alone. Flailing in the unseen forgotten energy dots of the Universe. It's all there when you picture it, if you can just picture it, why you had to quit drinking.

Light You On Fire

"You are a hateful little Martian," he said. "I've never met anyone like you. I remember seeing you get up on stage, piss drunk, ranting the most unintelligible stars in the sky I had ever heard. You fucking loud mouth."

She dragged on not giving a genuine care, or at least posing in an artful disdain that was convincing enough to fool all us remaining members of the crowd.

Volcanoes

I was just talking with two baristas about the phenomenon where numerous people will come in one day and uncannily order the same damn thing that never gets ordered usually. We attributed it to three things 1. They briefly even momentarily observe another persons order 2. They are vessels of the collective unconscious 3. Similar people are attracted to similar places at similar times then per #2 we began talking Joseph Campbell and how nearly identical myths sprouted all over remote parts of the world and how the same thing happens with inventions. And that it makes sense on a physical level how we are all such similar mechanisms operating from the same type of physiognomy in somewhat similar environments. They had other customers so I walked away. Looked at my phone, twitter feed, and this story from The Washington Post was at the very top of my feed.

 Synchronicity is uncanny and observable all around us how integrally connected we and everything else is in operating together. Even if it looks and behaves on entirely opposite ends of the world.

finding my people

This is an ocean of white. Published, the ocean is lettering. The rest becomes black. I was sitting in a bar drinking soda water and eating fish and chips feeling like the festive millenials weren't me. That I didn't belong to them. But that barista in Oakland, her and I both apologized a lot. We kept apologizing for our apologies and then to the yogi behind us, we apologized. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. Love means never having to say you're sorry. I'm sorry then.

I will burn a hole in you until you are a whole.

to both destroy and marvel

They said goodbye at the bathroom door. She was going in as he bid his prolonged farewell. The passcode, 7426, then a blue light and a beep. One allegedly travels faster than the other, light/sound. Buzz Aldrin got back down from the moon and felt depressed. I should tell you about John Muir, the second time. here are my notes unedited:

A revolving gyre of water revolving there in a cove. The seal poking its head up to greet me. Girl with pink hair and blue bandanna dress storming dreamily in the wind, her wild dog barking happily with her. I'm so full of love right now it's scary and exceptional.

this one's from Point Reyes, at the bottom of the steps:

And borne of these earthly circumstances was a creature who recognized both it's impermanence and the wonder that sprang from it equally. Not always at the same time but he built lighthouses.

then these notes are from that abandoned flour mill in Vallejo:

It's weird that depression creates the concepts it does.

Which I am not anymore

We're all trapped in this thing pretending it matters.

Those notes, such polar arcs between experiences in nature and one in decayed industrialism. I had this joke, a tweet, that The Garden of Eden kind of alludes to another person named Eden. 

I am in San Francisco feeling fine. There is a room up the street, filled with addicts and alcoholics. I know, because I went inside for a meeting a few weeks ago, left before it started, then called for my same old fix. It's a girl. It's a drug. The heart is an impulsive organ with willing veins.

Acting 101

I told one of my directors, in his kitchen, that I was apprehensive about a few upcoming scenes. He told me not to worry, that I was locked in, my performance spot on. That I was a talent. I leaned my hands onto the cool tiled counter and prepared my new found actor diatribe. The thing about it was, the performance wasn't my concern, rather the experiencing of it. The line between me and my character is currently non-existent, separated by a name and a premise. A wardrobe. I have my faculties. I'm not in danger. I've just created someone and it's profound - that who we are is so often reinforced by the lines we're most often fed and how others play into and against us. That with myself in the off-hours, I have been relying upon the bedrock of my personhood and it is a wild west. And this is a fascinating way to experience the world, within the already over-solidified one that we're primarily bound to but peeling into something else. Exploring a sub-world. One of our own making that soon grows its own dimensions beyond our control. That everything takes on a life of its own if given enough attention. That movies provide an alternate excuse to live. That our participation teaches us an entirely new focus and angle on the bigger picture. That it's always moving, even in stillness. An excursion into make believe.

This photo bothers me. One day at a time and then new fresh air.

Cows and Saltwater Air

The Valley of the Moon Amateur Radio Club was attempting to get in touch with another station from their Point Reyes garage at 11:06am on a Sunday morning. Today. A woman with a boy's unassuming blonde carrot haircut. The park ranger with light chestnut ponytail descending the 30 stories of steps. The dark-haired mom with her little daughter at the Fairfax County burrito stand. Thousands of road cyclists. I strode beneath a wave of backbending cypress trees, like they were leaning away from the cliffs and the sea below. I've seen the Pacific Ocean from millions of angles, heights, weather systems, and it never ceases to expand my version of things. I was driving along, thinking that even if I applied no philosophy to what I did but just kept doing, that it would still change me profoundly and unrecognizable. But I am a man who thinks a lot. I thought that the creative instinct is what led me here. That the creative instinct is for better or worse a lighthouse and to trust it. That it may be closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays like the signs redundantly kept saying, but to trust it. It doesn't matter who built it.

Below is a boat you are aboard on a gigantic mass of water. From here, through the filter of my phone lens, is a rippled plane, a magnetic frosting, but the truth is that it is penetrable. Down there, the illusion of surface is containing a world even larger than this one up here. I can write simply. It's fine.

my mom said

on the phone, that when I was two years-old I climbed our backyard fence and started walking alone down a dirt trail. She said she panicked and finally found me well on my way to somewhere. I remember it. I remember wondering why all the worry? I knew where I was going. I told her on the phone that I had spent yesterday yelling inside of a car, on camera, and to forgive my outburst at her beginning of an outburst. That if she could just be quiet for a second, and stop blaming herself, that I was lucky to have her as my mom and I wouldn't want any other mom in the world. And she started crying, like I was crying, days before, arms tingling numb inside an Emeryville Mexican Restaurant, doing a scene and channeling all the people I love. I know that I walk into uncertainty with a certainty in it. I know enough to know that it's all confusing and chaos, pain and pleasure. And because of that, tears in my eyes, big smile on my face, I know where I'm going.

Rio Vista

We were filming inside this bar with animal heads on the wall when the owner of the establishment became impatient with our small crew and turned the television back on to reveal that Robin Williams was dead at 63 years of age. I used to run errands for his managers and he always seemed like a sweet man. The bartender was a slender brunette young woman with big olive eyes, scared and wild. We commiserated about it and she said something about a full life. We took consolation that he'd lived it. But I only wanted her. Just like that green eyed beauty outside the cafe on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Full lips but not pouty, and still functional, her feet crossed messily beneath her butt on her chair. I was dressed in brown slacks, black Payless shoes, and a pale yellow button down shirt, like an off the clock bureaucrat.

Isleton

The guy walked up to us with a three-inch rubber dick on his face where his nose should have been. It was attached to black framed glasses with no lenses. He said that any man who didn't drink beer was gay. His shirt was an orange San Francisco Giants short-sleeve pushed out in the gut presumably by thousands of gallons of carbonated heterosexuality. The electronic fart machine attached to his belt loop made us laugh. The metal plate crotch-guard was curious, the way it flipped down to reveal his jeans. The good people I'm with on this film have evolved to calling anything subject to scorn, ridicule, or negativity; interesting. And it's a way better word for it, because it is true. Everything. Everyone. is interesting.

Up North

A lot of my time here has been about paths not taken. A woman who could have been a lifetime, another one who didn't even last a weekend. A trail up into the fog away from the beach. Sunshine traded for lush forest, raining.

I fell in love with your stories. They were what plagued me, that you were, that you are a beautiful person who lives greater in places than even my imagination. And they'd do battle, my dreamy mind and your fascinating heart. Then they'd trade places when we'd make love. All the while, we've been, your word, unravelling, the mystery together. Yes, we'll find each other again and do it if we're lucky enough to be old. Even if we don't get that wrinkly far, we once agreed that our souls had never met until this very life, but now that they have, I'm certain they'll be acquainted infinitely.

When someone speaks directly to your spirit it's a form of cruel warm torture.

I'll be shaving here all month.

Sandwiches Salads Soups Espresso Drinks

San Francisco smells like moldy peaches. 24th street, a man laying flat back on the concrete. His companion yelling. Third-wave cafes blending into Mexican taquerias. It's kind of perfect at this moment.

fiction in sugarlump cafe

who is he and what did he do better than me?

he'll ask.

And you'll become evasive and try not to cut deeper than you already have. But that will only make things worse. So you'll tell him truthfully and his voice will grow enraged.

and he won't really know why. it's just primal or something.

and then years later, if no one's done anything stupid,

he'll reach out and you'll speak civilized over the phone, have a couple laughs, and as the pictures he's seen of you smiling add to the unfamiliar tone of your voice, he'll offhandedly ask you the one question that still remains in his mind unanswered:

So he fixed you then?

No,
you'll reply.

he just kept loving me.

Gets Me Every Time

This nervous thing I do touching the skin above my upper lip to the bottom of my nose and rubbing them together, it hurts, cuts, a day or two after shaving. I have all these subtle massaging ticks. Like blowing air into my palms to feel my spirit. It doesn't matter where I go, it's all beautiful. There's this woman in line at a Marin County Starbucks and she's in cobalt blue leggings, with thin long-sleeved near transparent white top frayed at the edges hanging and form-fitting on her slender torso. Her nose is prominent but well placed between friendlier than you'd expect blue eyes and dirty blonde hair. Only she's clean, and her limbs bend in angular ease and my blood whistles like a jungle bird.

Something Recognized

The fluorescent light dimmed and clicked off when I left to go outside. In here, my heart is doing this curious and invigorating thing. No longer does it hang as a receptacle on hollowed hook dug needy into an artificial maple. Gone is the unnatural sap. Drained or disseminated, or bullied, whatever it was, it was a natural movement. I rid myself of a drunken impulse. My heart won't act in halves anymore. Like it used to. I know cuz I asked it. It's an active, now. It tells me in strong pumps.

Electronic Tolls

I got to the Mission. Half of Dolores Park was under contruction. Then so too was the coffee shop I liked, all of it. So I walked deeper into the neighborhoods than I had before. And I arrived at a new place.

Acting on Location Far Away From Everything

Now I know the allure. It's not to be someone else, it's to dance in front of everyone while silently seeing ghosts.

Trophy Wife

My troubles began when they beat those damn Montreal Canadiens. Wally was the fourth player on his team to lift it over his head. Then he kissed it, again and again. On North American television nonetheless. I flushed red. Sure I was happy to see him winning the Stanley Cup. But those lips were mine. Are mine. Those lips are mine. How could he forget so quick y'know? Which, that's why I'm so nervous about today and all. Each player on the team gets it for one day, to do whatever he wants with it. And today is Wally's turn. And I'm worried. I'm worried he will take things too far when no one else is around. I know how men are, especially professional athletes, the way they get caught up in the moment with shiny things. How do you think him and I happened in the first place? It was by no accident that a Hooters waitress from Detroit wearing a sequined dress - that still turns heads mind you - bumped into an Alternate Captain on the - at the time - fourth best team in the National Hockey League outside of a nightclub in Colombus Ohio during a promotional event for a Sporting Goods Chain. It's been seven years since Wally and I met that one particularly humid July evening seven years ago, and I get it now more than ever. I'm not naive. I always knew there would be competition. As soon as I got pregnant with our first, I knew then it would really start kicking in, with him on the road and all, and me not looking my slimmest (it never did seem to bother him though except for the very last month). But I never thought it would be the Cup. Groupies, I know how to do things to Wally that groupies don't have the imaginations to know. Actresses, models, they don't have what I have neither. They're too pretty, they can't chop wood, put on the pads, skate with the boys when he can't. Yeah, that's right, another thing is, I've mothered his three boys. No woman can compare to what I've given him, give him. No, it's not about another woman at all. It's about the way he looks at it, at me, now that he's won.

cosmonauts

He said to her:

I like getting you to a point of an abandon. Where it's no longer your history and my history and all that comes with two separate egos binding. I like when all that information turns. It happens where you leave somewhere, because it feels too good. And in my hands, I'm left with your body, it's sounds, thoughts. Activating the controls of your animate. The ways you rise and fall. How it's the two of us in feeling, giving and receiving the password to all the warming chemicals we couldn't get any other way. But that during all of it, with you heightened and honored, I can still be utterly alone.

Hey Mister Hollow Eyes

I've quit nearly all my vices. I'm down to green tea. I haven't been hiking in awhile. That time I was lost in Point Mugu, probably got to me more than I care to admit. Nature and its incredible indifference. It was likely a symbol I was chasing, cuz of all that's been going on. I was in a bookstore yesterday, not wanting to read, and thinking that there are too many. There are too many. When am I going to get to all those? There is a list hanging over my head and a bunch of cannonballs ricocheting within the walls of my heart. I've been thinking about putting it all onto paper in ink. I've outgrown my jokes for the set I have in a week. I have new material that I wanna get to but I'll be in West Oakland filming a movie. And that'll be its own material. I wanna see that new Richard Linklater film. I want to see them chart it, linear, like it's an actual path. I brought up hiking, I think, because it can't be all about consumption of media. And I'm not doing a good job of that. I think I'm looking at my phone a lot for the anaesthesia. I think that's why I'm looking at my phone a lot, because I'm without a few essential coping mechanisms. And my friend, she once told me that in the end, maybe that's all that constructs a personality, is how we cope. I thought that was interesting.

Through Telescopes

One day,
when my eyes can no longer see.
It's the words that I will miss the most.
Isn't that silly?
Out of all these brilliant things -words.
But it's true.
The way each letter has been wrangled from this gigantic universe,
and been given,
into tiny little shape combinations.

fleetwood mac

I had something I was gonna write regarding something she said. I can't remember. It was a compliment about something. She was talking about sitting next to someone she was so in love with they couldn't even look at each other. Shaking. That kind of love. I'm glad she called to have tea and say goodbye. It restored something that previously had only two polarized sets of interactions, the best and the worst. It proved that another kind of interaction exists outside of the duality. A spirited exchange.

A very young slender dark-eyed woman with matching dark hair was on her Spanish tile balcony in white underwear and bra, and the woman she was with asked if she spoke French. She did, and the sentence fluttered across the block or two off Melrose like an owl. She looked at me, fearless, unbothered, warmly. I don't think there are any beautiful girls left anywhere else, cuz they're all here.

I was watching a Nova special on the tsunami in Japan, this young man who lost everything said something that read in blocky transcript, The wave of black water flowed between the houses. This morning, this woman next to me spilled her coffee drink from the counter, it splashed like the end of the world. There was a purity in its disarray. The wave of black water flowed between the houses.

I'm feeling everything, and it is enormous, everything.

Day 49

The animal kingdom has no pity. I remember this kid I made friends with from Texas. He was my roommate's brother. We went to the beach one day and he was stunned by the breeze. He said it was the nicest breeze he'd ever felt. I walked out of this stuffy morning cafe today, unhinged, and he was right. It was cooling and almost undeserved. But the animal kingdom has no pity. So I closed my eyes and drank it in between my cells.

I Knew I Needed A Break

It was the uneven-eyed drunken leer at the blurry woman that gave me away. I could feel my left eye going crooked. The thermometer on the CitiBank had said 91 degrees. Sometime in May, unusual as I sat atop a green padded barstool at the Farmer's Market.

I don't write FADE IN anymore but when I first started writing screenplays it was a comfort, getting the first two words.

In the parking lot that afternoon outside the Johnny Rockets there was a beige '85 Super Diesel 300 Mercedes. The same car my mom bought after she divorced my dad. Goodbye Chevrolet Conversion Van. There were five of us kids so we didn't all fit. We'd squeeze four into the backseat but one time the police in Malibu pulled us over and my mom was reprimanded. One morning the alarm broke and the Mercedes started howling unpredictably for minutes on end and it was too expensive to fix. So my Mom would pick us up from school and we'd just hope it wouldn't go off.

The guy who wrote Gladiator said his main job was to write dialogue for actors. I liked that, because he did big movies with an opposite intention.

We'd know our mom was getting home by the squeaking of the German brakes. The music of the metal groaning its own warning song and resolution. It was a sequence of unique mechanical pain different from all the other cars outside on the highway. The way it cried. And we'd scatter like those mice living with us in that rundown beach house, turn off the tv and try to appear busy, cleaning or doing homework.

My sister's friend said to us the other night, that now that she's become a parent she gets why her own mother would yell, it's because on certain days there's nothing left.

We eventually moved to a plot up in the Santa Monica mountains. She eventually got a black F150 with front bench that allowed us all to fit. I remember looking out of my bedroom window one afternoon and seeing my mom behind the wheel of her parked truck, in our dirt driveway. I could hear a Gloria Estefan song blasting from her stereo, and through two panes of glass I watched my mother shaking her torso in wild abandon, getting it all out, there alone behind the wheel.

All screenwriters do it, none that I've yet read are too high and mighty to deny the pleasurable relief that comes with writing the words FADE OUT.

About

I envision a scenario where I quit this app. A farm. Blueberry patches. Calloused hands. You and I smelling of faint cow manure, no matter our tireless scrubbings with that soap from the general store. A life fraught with hard labor but little to lack. Evening and we're chuckling over lamp-lit dinner about how we met so very long ago. Eating one of our favorite chickens, because it's our anniversary. And your delicate post-menopausal golden mustache glistens across my red worn eyes. Tinder Love.

*my 500 character bio on Tinder.

Dogs and Jail

One of my brothers is in jail. The other one doesn't like dogs. When I tell this to other people, they're usually caught off guard, that one of my brothers doesn't like dogs. Because people tend to like dogs more than they do people. And we tend to project favorable human characteristics onto dogs because they can't argue, like people do. And perhaps this very good that we attribute to dogs is really just an overwhelming good that we also have and are too afraid to see in ourselves. And maybe if we did see it, maybe if we did call other people things like "loyal" and "unconditionally loving", maybe less of them would end up in jail.

orange umbrella

There is an analog beeping. A scratching. Intermittent with no rhythm. I'm letting music play loud in my earphones not to hear it. Everyone is so friendly to me. Yet I feel uneasy. I don't know how to save another person. It's so big, I can't surround it or I'll blow up. My principles are disoriented and no more. There is a flexibility which requires going beyond what's safe. It makes a person ready for the next pose long before he's understood. It defies feeling where, being present for another person used to be the answer to everything and now it could mean the opposite. I'm not familiar with how to make it better.  I'm not familiar with the guilt. I'm not familiar. All the while, always, an underlying current runs eternally undisturbed by the chaos of form. It is known. Unifying. Even if I don't want to hear it. Even if I do everything to find noise. Even if wave after wave crashes on top of my head as I'm about to rise. The only resolution is to keep going, hungry for life like an uncaged spirit.

walking home

At night the palm trees are ink blot silhouettes against wax paper sky beneath the streetlamp moon as I make jokes about yuppies in my head and Janis Joplin intones "you're out on the street lookin good but baby deep down in your heart..." And I can choose the past present future or I can just allow the beauty.

shining on my knees

The numbers are solving and collecting themselves in one long formula and we are them. Divided, multiplied, added, and subtracted. The equation is always finding miniature resolutions within the larger. I don't know enough about math to get into this subject with any depth of know-how, but the numeric likeness to the way we live our lives is becoming more and more evident. It's obvious that I am rolling through the violence of finding an answer and so are the people next to me. And maybe it's why we had to learn algebra in school.

Aunt of the Bride

I watched the people dancing. Shimmying. I imagined a matronly in-law waving me over to the dance floor to nurse a song or two. You've seen it before. Two lonely hearts at vastly different points of their reproductive years, defying predicament together. The two of us, generations apart, dancing together in lively unison at a wedding. One unlucky in love duo showing friends and family a glint of optimism despite it all. That all we have is the moment.

There she is. She is, big hair, big jewelry, big dress. And it is happening. She is asking me to dance with her, offering the aforementioned opportunity to throw caution to the wind. Let me start by saying, I am not that easy. I will not go quietly into mass movement. I have my limits where mutual motion is involved. Which is why I'm first refusing her with a smile and side to side head shake like "no, better not". Not tonight. Like I'm charming or something. But Surprise, Surprise. She, the matronly in-law, is not easily dissuaded. She responds without hesitation and waves again. Like, get over here mister! It's only just begun. There is an engine on this woman. She is throwing everything at me but the kitchen sink. Her focus is zeroed in. She is the Washington Wizards version of Michael Jordan and I am the long retired Toni Kukoc. She is casting a dazzling spell with mustered torso gyrations and still-got-it hip thrusts, albeit limited in their range of motion these days but still potent. Potent in the way they draw authority from the eye. Watching her amplify her sexuality from the near-bottom floor of post-menopause, is almost like being involved in miracle. A resuscitation not unlike CPR in an episode of Baywatch. I can't precisely explain the phenomena. It's almost like the stacked against cards of her diminishing biology seem to imply a gigantic reason to indulge a lady, or G-d. But I have my reasons. I'm stubborn too. I've told you that. I will not go quietly into mass movement. I've told you that. I'm cooly responding to her by miming that it's very much appreciated but still a no-go. And I'm almost sorry on the inside. I'm almost sorry.

It should be over soon.

Then it turns. She decides to play dirty. She's winning over the crowd's attention. Their faces are like floating masks. Indigenous floating masks of festive island people. Like the discombobulating movements of insects. A fluid cavalcade. A wasp's nest broken open and spilled outward. Their warped expressions communicating assuredly that I'll soon be joining them. It's only a matter of time. She is the de facto queen, by virtue of her energy, and I am a flower, by virtue of my roots. What a woman. She is brash and confident. She is pushing all of her chips into the pot. It's all in. Checkmate. I am cornered. I am as good as hooked. She is sauntering towards me like, c'mon, it's just one song!

The final move is grace, and desperate, and perfection. She is Hawaiian luau side-stepping between the tables and never missing a beat to the music. It's all in harmony with the wedding universe. Two forces must meet and now she is inevitably close enough to me that she's bridging our distance with an outstretched hand, nails done, about to arrive on my arm. And me, I can hear myself. It sounds like someone else but it's coming from deep inside. I know this to be true. Rattling my lungs. Altering my foot sweat. I'm yelling, way too loud for privacy but defiantly angry, NO! I said NO! What don't you understand about that?! Before I know what's happening I'm yelling NO!

And me, I'm standing there. It's silent. You could hear a cuff link drop. As men do in movies, I'm buttoning my blazer buttons, top and bottom, and then unbuttoning the lower one. I am not Don Draper. I am looking around like, the gall of some people. And she is, she is crouched and side-stepping away, wounded. And me, me I'm withdrawing a comb out of my back pocket and brushing my used car salesman head of hair. The follicles feathering up in soft waves.

And the party, the party is still quiet, band stopped, you could hear a life of broken promises and domestic agony drop if not for the messy gigantic body-convulsive-weeping of the tender-hearted, matronly, in-law who only wanted a young man to come out of his shell, cut a lil rug, and make a memory or two. And there I am, getting escorted from the premises by a usually good-natured uncle who smells like martinis. And there is applause. You make me wanna shout. Kick my heels up and shout. Throw my hands up and shout. They owe it to the night, to themselves, to forget.

I snapped out of it and watched them dancing. Shimmying. Having imagined this premise, I could hardly contain it. And so I walked outside, where people were smoking. And I imagined one of the grandfathers asking me to dance.

wedding

the grass was an undulating mattress of rolling hills and generous acreage, zigzagging blades of green, surrounded and lined by silver walkways and golden sporting fields. the earth was communicating along the length of my spine. beneath a tree. pinned by gravity, cradled by soil. looking for shapes in the tree branches. listening to ringtones of tiny chirping birds, beeping perfections, sharp chortles. the afternoon sun a delightful nuisance against the playful park noises. my head was resting on a tale of two cities. the book. already preparing myself for that night's dreams.

being in a paris-like version of paris with a train stop that, on weekdays, stepped out onto onto a floor of the building within which I was staying.

everyone thinks i'm being looked at but me. oblivious. i was on stage in santa monica and i caught one. this girl, she was beaming at me through hours of sierra nevada consumption and i can still see her smile. it threatened to break free from the edges of her face. she shined light on me. in front of the crowd i told her i'm not used to seeing young vibrant women at these things, so when i see you, i see you. i see you. where have you been hiding all this time? the best place when we were young was in the clothing hamper or that dark little closet in the back of the walk-in pantry. now it's trickier, like driving around los angeles, looking through the windshield for an opportune place to make love in the car.

day 24

stark-raving sober is what the guy called himself before recovery. nevermind is misspelled because of the nirvana album. everyone is in pain because pleasure is apirational and significant in forwarding evolution. i almost made it to thirty years of age without being invited to a proper wedding. i asked the salesman at men's wearhouse if that was impressive or sad. a little bit of both. he said. like everything in life. i said.

surrounded by genius.

remember to first bring you

and just like that, the blood wakes up. it's spontaneous when the senses meet a stimulus. you walk and talk about the complex interrelated mystery that is a family. and it's strange how a comedy I wrote five years ago could still dramatically hold true. she drew a circle around us in the sand. nights ago, a girl from my childhood grabbed a rosebud and threw the petals over my head, white with pink edges, they splendidly dispersed, swayed and floated like remembrances or opportunities. she gave me a tiny yellow flower. i grabbed a bundle of jasmine. the full moon dilated within a powder lavender sky that lowered to the same hue of blue. i have no shadow and then i do. my dad said, his lungs are clear, his heart beats slow and strong. my mom told me, she's glad i figured out the things she didn't, as early as i did. my sister held guardian over me as i drunkenly slept on a lacma lawn, her a fawn. my sister's loyal chihuahua guardian always runs to me excitedly, with it's little brain and everything, so long as my sister stays in the room. my sister and i hung out at mission beach and listened to her teenage punk music and she thought girls were looking at me, while i thought she was a lion full of love. i am an amalgamation of the people in my life. i am heart wide-open getting pummeled by their energy. i stand on my own two feet. in sand. dirt. piles of crumpled papers and notes written on old-fashioned pale green diner tabs. i see faces. talk like a depraved sailor. marvel at the nuances of vocabulary. fumble inane half answers when a customer asks me where the salmon's from. find the line to get a burrito at whole foods. note the climate change. record temperatures hitting the southland. i will adjust again and again to the climes. somehow building upon that which can not be stated in any rational terms of certitude.

Marble Countertops

People. You see the same people in the early morning cafes around town. Recurring faces, characters. I've served them coffee and food and I've been one of them. I can't speak for those sleeping-in folks but the a.m. crowd is a group haunted by loud dreams, nights, memories.

Austin, Texas was strange. I had ridden the Greyhound bus there from another town. One Saturday morning I awoke frightened by a ghost I couldn't shake and we paced the entire city and there was nobody alive but me.

Queenstown, New Zealand I did the same, I was younger and there were people and a cozy cafe. I had a perfect plate of French Toast.

Paris, France I was exhilarated. I'd saved one baguette, chomped on it while I dragged my bag behind me on roller wheels along bumpy sidewalks. Snuck on the train. The sun ached up burned and aged behind the suburbs. I hurried behind a man to get into the airport and held my breath. Then I took off back into all the space.

That's it, the space here, it might be too much. I think I might do better in a city where people cover me from head to toe.

i follow rivers

She's married now but I liked making her laugh. That'll begin the novel about women. For now it's just a line and a remembrance. She was living far off the wrong side of Centinela in a little house that got robbed by someone a psychic later told her was the culprit. The gardener with a brick, not the riled up ex-boyfriend of her sister. What a woman. I liked her and was equally happy to see her go. It's nice being graced by a presence that's never meant to be yours longer than a moment during a larger experience. She was in a large experience herself that was inside an even larger experience who she ended up having a beautiful child with and marrying. I was in the midst of a larger experience soon to enter a large experience posthumously within that half-life of the larger. Nonsensical, stick with me.

I'm walking to an open-mic in Los Feliz. It's today. Sunday. I pass by this damn wannabe Frenchy cafe with authentic marble tables and furniture that's still California wild enough to be more charming than a rip-off. And I can't believe it's here. Where it is, because I'd passed by it so many times since I'd been here first, oblivious to its actual location. Could there have been another location? No. It's the one. I drink a couple IPA's with my grilled cheese on sourdough (feta, cheddar, tomatoes) and I sit first at a table by the bar then snag the small table in back with the drawer that people leave notes inside of, the only outlets are right there too. But they deadened them, the outlets, the cheap money-grubbing bastards. But the food is good, sweet potato fries, the beer is deliciously bitter and crisp and the table behind me is where I first met an experiment of the large within the larger after we had initially encountered one another two days before at a night party.

I told her everything. My parents. My anger. My love. I spilled it out because she was listening. And she had texted me, while on my way there, asking what I wanted to drink. Anything but Stella, I told her. I don't recall the beer that awaited me, but a nice gesture. That was all, the whole thing was. A nice gesture, an entrance into an enormous cavern of beauty and pain, briefly, then an exit.

Two beers at 10% alcohol level shouldn't have an enormous effect on a big guy.

That girl, simply granted me access to a primordial sense of my green lava bubbling originations. She was a symbol. And, I, was a bagel counter number in a secretly crafted revenge, while her looks could still pull off such a numerous feat. She had many more to go after me and I realize some cases are best left unsolved and that poor damn thing could have been a princess in every sense of the spiritual word. But some people are going to be links in life and still incredibly valuable, to us, to themselves. Prized humans.

But it was within the larger but not the largest that I was living when I met her. I don't know the largest yet. I'm getting there. The larger, she was not a link, but the journey, fundamentally so, there was no other path without her, I'd never considered it since we met and won't now that it's suggested. She brought me the final steps to acknowledging God. What does that mean? It's invisibles, we're dealing with the invisibles here. So I can't explain. it's big, but not the biggest. I'm only thankful. That we met that we shared that we ventured onward, even though it hurt like a motherfucker.

When the large universities buy our our contemporary author's archives, will they get their cell phone notes?

Women, what do women do? They inspire, fascinate me. They are continuous and truthfully barely notice my presence within their spectral potentialities. I am lucky to be this other yin/yang individual able to have a moment or two in the sun and under the moon and stars with em.

And Britt, speaking of women, one of the best, another note on Blue Is The Warmest Color, Britt, that we never talked about, was the end. The end, I was thinking about the end a couple days ago, weeks after seeing it and the end. She meets the guy she had a spark with and maybe could have had a world with, she meets him again, but what I think that crafty French filmmaker was saying is that, unlike the time Adele first saw the Lea Seydoux girl then met her again and they both knew it was only a beginning, fate wasn't gonna smile upon love in the same magical way it did the first time. That guy, the spark guy, he wasn't gonna choose the correct direction of street to find her at the end of the movie, because fate or God or the patterns of things, it said, for the betterment of all, that she was gonna have to earn it this time.

And, but, I think she will.

Van Halen

The dream was about sex, dangerous swimming pools, a Night at the Roxbury actor and I bonding over sadness. Waking up teary eyed. Yesterday, my mom was telling me about her visit to the torture exhibit in a San Diego museum. Swimming with the leopard sharks in the summer. She called them tiger sharks. I told her the only difference between the two, was that one kills people and the other doesn't. She was wearing a Baby Bjorn and walking on the beach as we spoke on the phone. She said it was both fascinating and difficult seeing what people could come up with. That the very creativity of the devices was the sickening marvel. Who sits around thinking of these things? Sadists, probably. Was my answer. Some regulars at the cafe, after a brief delving into my history told me I should write about my family. I told em it was all still too close. That I'm only capable of biting off little bits at a time, kind of like a sadist. I'm kidding. We were a family, are one, that sits around and digs into whichever depths it takes, to get a laugh. That's why that girl the other night, telling me I was the most serious person she's ever met - she must have been upset that we were alone in her apartment drinking tequila and staying on separate sides of the oak table. Occasionally, my ego is good for something. I can't sleep with everyone, especially if we've done it already. It's been three days since my last drink.

That girl the other night read me a lovely poem. Something about hoofbeats running away. My mom told me the water was so clear she could see to the bottom, the rocks and everything.