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.