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.