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.