last night i said something about how when the world ends and she said it already has

don juan quixote

whatever it was i wanted to prove to myself, i have proven.

and here i am now, a relative to who i was when i first began.

i mean to say, still a lonely man.

but best friends with that which used to plague me

post election results

I thought of us chasing the moon.

i went back there this morning to watch the sunrise and claim my own sense of the world independent of all the well deserved clutter and hysteria

and i heard the wind so agitated and melodic and i watched the sunrise and it was slow and powerful and with effort and i got to the top and no one else was on the whole damn mountain not like that night when we couldn't buy silence as the sunset with all those mother and fathers and their kids on the rocks behind us

this was only me all alone and

i took pictures and looked at my dead dad's instagram and felt i felt i felt so full so full of life and spirit and no matter what happens on this earth baby

i have lived so full and grateful and i am connected into and all of it and i have loved it i am with all my flaws i am love and oh how i loved yelling at that moon with you and hearing you laugh

and oh how despite all the ugly in the world oh how i will continue to love

the great seduction

I love those things that keep us apart.

A human energy machine.

I'd like to touch me.

You are on me then you are gone. All of you.

I am stalked by shadows. Cars. A black audi. A bmw 3 series i can't remember. A white big body hyundai. One mid size suv with sideview mirrors ripped off on skid row. A golden toyota camry with green license plates. A couple of priuses. A bicycle she fell off of and broke her arm on. My old camry, a '98 bashed in rear bumper. I miss that car, the huge fuel tank could get me to San Francisco and a quarter of the way back.

A sexual ability great enough that it has cuckolded the need for deeper feelings. How bout that, a sexual ability that has cuckolded its own source. A sexual ability that found its own meaning and terrorized the rest of the senses from which it arose.

I touch the way I would want to be touched. She, all of them, say they love my hands. I touch the way I want to be touched if ever I could be touched. I already wrote about this but: I massaged the fluid out of my dying dads thighs and he moaned in pleasure, oh Josh you have such nice hands. I touched him the way I'd want to be touched if I was dying. I was dying.

I touch the way I want to be touched if I were living and breathing with a human being who could just be intent on me for a moment.

A human being who could just look at me knowing me and understanding that I just want to be touched the way they tremble when I touch them.

I am living and breathing I remind myself.

I got fucked up and sad and kept thinking about how deep black her hair was back in those days when we were young enough to truly hurt and be brave hurting cuz we thought everything would ebb and flow endlessly and return multiplied in our favor if we just stuck to our guns on the subject of love.

My mom's first husband died and she would smoke pot and eat ice cream and listen to Cat Stevens. And yet he still reminds me of my dad, Cat Stevens. I was a young boy in his white Lexus in the early 90's and the song Father and Son came on and he asked me if I felt heard by him. I told him yes. His ice water melting before I kissed him to go to bed every night, he would always give me a sip. Ah man Ah man Ah man.

My upbringing gave me a brain of trauma. One with ptsd. There were good times everywhere yes, I wouldn't trade them, but there were bad ones, absences, delusions spun far too intricately to ever be whole.

So when my lover saw all those dead bodies on the streets of Port Au Prince and I met her on the other side of Hispaniola, I knew how to touch her. I knew how to let her trauma melt in my hands. I could handle all of it. She cried the first time she came in that bedroom where traveling nuns used to sleep. She said she kept having flashes of bodies and so I held her in my own. I had my hands on her to match her greed for them to take what she knew. I know the needy greed of a survivor of trauma remember my brain was formed by one, by it. She would thank me for how I loved her for years after I had left her to chase the undiagnosed trauma off of my own brain. She got drunk with friends one night in New York and cried about the love we made when she needed it most. I was only giving her what I always wanted but never knew how to find from anyone else.

I was only giving her what I always wanted but never knew. I only touch them the way I want to be touched. Sex, hey all the sex isn't working but hey it isn't working the best out of all the things that aren't working. I only touch them the way I want to be touched and have never been touched.

Storm clouds. A band my friend introduced me to all those years ago when I finally ran away to chase my own undiagnosed trauma on floors and beds and cars and alone and the music is in my ears. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. You've done wonders with your mind. I've done wonders with my mind, I tell myself now. I tell myself in a way I was never told. I tell myself in the way I only know how to touch.

chain of title

nothing magic nothing magic something magic everything magic everything magic everything magic everything magic everything magic

the sad old sappy adventures of old dog - part uno

get up old dog.

these wooden tables sit beneath clouds of czech tobacco smoke.

old dog gets up from that table true to name.

god damn old dog when did ya get so old.

all right. all right. i'll take it easy on ya pal.

so there he goes. old dog gets up from the table and huffs the secondhand into his lungs almost gratefully cuz why. cuz it's a familiar smoke is why.

and old dog if he has done one thing, it's this before.

heads through a door down a staircase and a couple pretty hyenas with their faces distorted by the crude intoxicants swimming within the sludge of his tarry blood, they eye him.

and like he does old dog he gives em that slow sharp old dog smile and rambles on down them stairs to something like a basement and then another basement and hell it's just like that in this steampunk post cold war paradise.

i wanna live like this forever. i wanna live like this forever. i wanna the music cries or is it old dog who cries. he was getting nervous up in that cafe but down here in the bowels is that old familiar human density and loud sound and drinks flowing cheaper than dust all collecting to that satisfying feeling of gosh darn old dog opportunity

so old dog goes to smelling around and usually when it's like this old dog this dog that old dog he don't usually when it's like this he don't usually leave this kind of place alone

the night i became another animal

i was laying in that bedroom in amsterdam looking out the window at the night sky above the apartment buildings poised and enlivened

the men you meet on bridges

It is 4:18am. I haven't slept. Europe is keeping me up with myself. Almost as if to say, you two better work things out with each other or else.

I did. I got high on magic truffles in an Amsterdam Starbucks.

I did. I said I could stay or I could go. I kept saying it to my thoughts. Like, ok, you don't want me I will go to bed then.

But that was just an empty threat.

line in a movie

And it was always almost great.

the way we werent

on the grass. we werent on the grass together. i was there alone. i've been with the trees. i've been melting on earth.

i gripped my backpack in my arms and cradled all my ideas buried in my laptop like a pregnancy.

i can't tell if i slept.

you werent there when i decided to get up on stage and grab the microphone and stare at my shoes and mutter jokes to save my life.

i couldve died a million times. what about that huh. what about that.

you wouldve let me.

when you sway up and away

i was drunk and nothing could hurt me but my own thoughts but my own thoughts but my own thoughts.

so no darling it didn't hurt.

nothing but my own thoughts

all those things we share

it is weird to be found. i went out wanting to be a person and i was found. i said something to her as she ordered a drink next to me. she didn't say much back to me.

i returned into my notebook. she asked if i was writing down what she just said. i told her unfortunately it wasnt muse-worthy enough to make the notebook. that i was really just working on a to-do list.

and then we started talking

ser davos

the full moon settles above a family across the mexican diner parking lot who are having a birthday bbq for one of their young ones. the young ones shriek at each other.

mommy i need a mommy. daddy i need a daddy. i wonder if that's what they're saying: the kids.

cold beer sparkles next to me at the shitty card table i bought from the guy on the side of the road. he said on summer nights in the 70's they would get drunk and fall asleep on the island in echo park lake. these days/nights i pace around it like a madman.

how do i tell the world i've gone mad. i can't. that's the thing about being a madman. we go mad cuz there isn't the right combination of people to tell things to.

i envision being inside a cage at the freak show in venice beach. i never went inside. but just imagine me in the cage. everybody come see the madman. line right up to see the madman. marijuana smoke. mirrors. the way the ocean smacked me in the face most mornings like a lover no longer in love with me.

i would run down venice blvd beneath the sycamores. or i would weave through the walkstreets and neighborhoods watching the little bungalows get wrecked for the rich people. rich people are uncaring i learned the most in venice.

maybe that's why i can't be rich at what i do. cuz i care. i told trav i wanted to become a doctor and he said you can't cuz you care.

but i care about nothing. i am a madman.

Sandra newman

so you may know

There is a guy. There is this guy I am fading

He is standing outside the front door of my building.

the one you crept inside of.

Outside, you'd text. I did. I did come down the hallway in my socks to find you.

This girl. She, beautiful. We eat at a mexican restaurant in silver lake. She, asks me. How do you think this is going.

Ok, i say.

This guy. the guy outside my building's front door is in dark aviator shades. Middle age. Playing music from his boom box that is in a bag on the steps.

She. You. Walked up em. You walked up em. I liked the way we would laugh. I liked our jokes and the way you let me be low and weird and how my strangeness was a value even a gift to you. Thank you for that gift of you

Even if we were drowning in desert dust

when i see your drivers license in my center console

pulse and
an unexpected turn how

i once yelled at my friends dad in brazil as he drunkenly hugged mountain corners in a minivan.

where am i. i am a man running out of his own dead dad's money. we sold his humble little townhome. the one that looked like the one next to it and the one next to it and the one next to it.

in a community of old people in a suburb of old people.

but dad you are alive. i don't mean to call you dead dad. you are alive. i hear your midwestern melancholy warmed by 50 years of the southern california sun.

how brave you were. i wonder if anyone ever told you. not about the cancer and how you fought it but how you lived your life and made a home somewhere else and stayed.

i remember how you used to light manischewitz candles on the days your own parents had died. so i will do that too, this time for you.

in twenty days it will have been a year.

and

the guy thought i forgot my jacket

she wouldn't tell me her last name and i don't remember her first. we met at a mezcal bar in chelsea. i could barely breathe she was so beautiful.

i couldn't remember my ex girlfriend's mother's name.

i couldn't for the life of me. i had to track down her name on the internet. i'd been wrong about my guess at her name. i felt a satisfaction in the throes of this loss.

setting it up. this life. clean bill of health. for what. hey, don't think like that it's for something. remember--

enough with the memories.

how about now. how do you feel now.

before she left me to work with teenagers full time, my therapist said she learned from me: resilience.

open toed sandals becoming more and more frequent. crossing then uncrossing of the legs. dimming of the fluorescent lights. then darkness. in the darkness where the shadows appear, in comparison, to be lights.

i sunk like a stone.

i sunk like a stone.

i dreamt of my sick father. we ate a big greasy meal together but he was already all wasted away - like he was at the end.

and in my dream i was concerned he ate all of it cuz he was so skinny and weak like he was toward the end.

and in my dream he surprised me cuz he followed me into another room and stood there with me while i tended to my task.

and in my dream i turned to him and i said--

dad we don't know when you're gonna go but when you do, i'm gonna miss you. and then i woke up with him gone missing him.

after i woke up--

i told the story to trav over breakfast early that morning and just as i did he pointed out a green hummingbird flittering above red flowers.

and i forgot to mention about waking from that dream:

that that morning after i awoke from that dream but before we met for breakfast, i had stared at my bedroom blinds with tears in my eyes and i had asked my dad for another sign.

and then the hummingbird again. like the one that flew into his house minutes after he'd died.

watching my dad lose himself was an intimate experience. slow. so slow. the way the disease deconstructed his body, pound by pound, appetite by appetite. the way the painkillers commandeered his mind.

i haven't gotten over it. i haven't gotten over it. who knows if life will give me time. i just read about an indonesian man who is 145 years old. maybe by then, i won't need to get over it, cuz i'll just want to die. 

but not right now. now i am alive. even if it's just a night with my memories. what a treasure. there it is-- that old famous: resilience.

don't think. don't think. 

just remember the way she looked across the train platform. and the things you texted to each other before she got onto hers and you then realized you were standing on the wrong one.

but it wasn't the wrong one you were on at all

that time her alcoholic father beat me at ping pong

i was in the midwest for fourth of july with a girl and her family. i thought she was the best.

we slept in the basement of their lake home. her mom had to buy a dehumidifier cuz we were breathing in a lot of condensation the first couple nights.

i would wake up at five am still drunk and go upstairs and write a screenplay that i still want to produce to this day. i would write it in a room next to a covered indoor jacuzzi. but there was also a window that looked out to verdant green forest.

i knocked out an entire draft while we were there too. it was a productive time even though it was the beginning of our end.

she read it on the dock by the lake with her legs curled up on a wooden chair.

the lake was little and still and mind altering and i loved it.
 i found some pictures her and i took in the forest together on one of those days, i was strong and muscular and my head was shaved. she was slender and her eyes were battling her enemies while simultaneously serenading her mysteries.

i was so strong and muscular that one night her dad did something insulting to her and i insisted he apologize. and then she took his side and apologized for him.

i was so strong that the next morning i walked 8 miles into town along a forest path. ate a pizza, then walked 8 miles back. i remember being chased by an angry horse fly that just wouldn't leave me alone.

you undecorated and you unbecoming

in a towel. no, a cavern. i woke you up. i shook your feathers. lice crawled out onto the floor.

on a rock. a distant shore. you ate me up. i was something smaller and you ate me up.

with terrible pause. i sat in your circle. you said don't leave this circle or you'd kill yourself. and it wasn't fair.

in a barrel. niagara falls. i was part of your stunt. i didn't want to be part of your stunt.

i was raised in a cabinet with fire ants. i was raised in a shoe above the pacific ocean. we slept on trampolines. we started up faulty machines. we tilled soil. battered down fences. built crooked things.

on schrader blvd in hollywood a few buildings from the ywca i was 22. she was older. a secretary or something. she had all this pop art decorating her apartment that she made but didn't believe in like she needed to. she told me she had been hooking up with a guy who was a real ladies man. she had tan lines where her bikini once was, shading beige to outline pale white. her hair was curly. earlier that night i approached her and said i believed she was the female version of me. then hours later i couldn't get my dick hard for awhile. i was nervous or drunk or something. finally i did in the morning but after a terrible night of nervous limp sleep. and when i did finally get it hard she said something like finally. something like that's what i'm fucking talking about. and then she sang opera beneath me for the neighbors. and then i finally left and walking into summer and along hollywood blvd it must've been like 136 degrees fahrenheit outside.

do you remember it that way. how the past was blazing and showing no evidence of hope. but how we hoped anyway. or how i hoped anyway. i'm talking to myself

sophie strindberg

They had/have two different stories. They were/are conflicting. It shouldn't be surprising.

My mother left my father as a young woman of 26. She changed her name and moved to New York City. She left him in the San Fernando Valley.

And she changed her name and moved to New York City. She says she auditioned for a play.

He says she called him crying begging to come home. He says he wired her money via Western Union.

She says he begged her to come back. That she didn't want to but that she was young and weak for support.

One day 30+ years later, Britt visited them both. One of them in the morning. One of them in the evening. And she remarked how unbeknownst to either, on that day, both of them were baking chocolate brownies in their own ovens. So many years removed from the other one.

wally wallin

if u havent noticed ahahahah i cant write aymore ahahaha

whats so funny about that

its funny when we confront loss like it wasnt inevitable like we dont deserve it like we werent put on this planet to briefly lose

oh so thats funny then
its kinda sad if ya ask me

sad of course it is sad

i know

yeah what trav said

in slow motion

no one's said that thing to me in awhile. that thing that turns the world on its head. i had it in the car but i left it when i walked into a Starbucks.

The fucking espresso/toaster exhaust in a Starbucks. No one talks about how it's poisoning us. The lack of ventilation.

zuma beach

my friend. he was this beautiful tan blonde blue eyed surfer kid. he knew how to be a teenager better than anyone i'd ever met. he would tell me how to do things to get by as a person in ways before i even knew those things were things. and he looked too long in people's eyes. he stared intently and didn't let up.

as though he was trying to solve a riddle.

i saw him not too long ago all grown up, and he had the look of someone who still hadn't figured it out, the riddle. perhaps it was now even a question that he could no longer even hold or ponder.

she, this girl. i liked her. shit, everyone did. she liked him. she liked him cuz he was the strongest boy in town. and she wanted to create her finest work of terror through his strength.

i remember how she tortured him. and he came off like an asshole to everyone else. and he probably was.

and i loved him. and for a long while as an adult i would dream about him. about how he taught me all these strange little things to get by as a person that he'd barely care to know that i still think about to this day.

rebekka first

she would tell me about a property she owned in nicaragua and how u could build a home in a hole in the earth. how you could scoop out a hole in the earth. that they do that all over the world these days.

it always felt cool, the thought of living in a hole in the earth.

she said she wanted to create a property that was an incubator of ideas, inventions, solutions. i invited myself.

she would go into something like a seizure when she would orgasm. it was frightening the first time. gratifying all the times after the first. i made her bite down on an apple once. she shook harder.

she called me one day months after she had ended it but before she had left for the second time. She told me that sex wasn't the problem, that it was quite the opposite.

how she ended it that one day in her room, crying.

how easily i'd let her go.

i had picked her up while a this american life piece was playing about an endearing teenage boy in love with an undercover cop. and the way i was with her, it resembled nothing of that boy's love.

and we both knew it.

two sensitive people in the world. cruel but sensitive. to feel on such a level that a body can shake and jerk and eyes roll back in pleasure, imagine what pain could do.

it's not supposed to feel like this. i know, i said. you never reached out to me after my dad got sick. i know, she said. i didn't want to be that person for you. i know, i said. two days before we found out about my dad, i had told her i didn't want to be that person for her while she was gone the first time. then she was the first i told and she didn't want my tears. we were both honest and wrong and right.

she called me after that first time on her way home, she was in new york for a week first. she said she was broke. she said a guy she was staying with had hit on her. i didn't tell her i missed her. or i don't remember if i did.

she was hit by a car on her bicycle the day we re-met months later. she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm a couple months before we'd first met months before. when i found her, she was distraught. it was on lincoln blvd near a car wash. she was crying. when i went to hug her, she pushed me away. later that night we kissed outside of a bad thai restaurant on lincoln blvd. it was warm like it was. she slept in my bed that night and i remember asking if she was in love with someone else. she said she wasn't.

i drove her to work. we weren't sweet like the last time. when we'd eat bagels. we weren't sweet like those first weeks when we'd eat bagels. we bought groceries for dinner one night. she was upset i didn't offer to cook it with her. i was upset she thought a guest should. two sensitive people shivering atop her mattress on the floor. it was freezing. i wanted to leave. she insisted i sleep over. sex was better than it should have been, even the way we'd taught ourselves to feel nothing for the other one.

the way she hardly wanted to kiss me the second time. like how our lips were loaded with too many of the things we'd never say, like fruit unpicked, withering on their vines.

then she ended things. after the radio. i remember her crying. i remember walking to my car and seeing a park full of people and purple sky.

months went by. she called me a day before she left and we met. she said i looked happier. we finally got her the right slice of pie, not vegan. i had one bite, my face flushed. i had not eaten sugar in the months since my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. she told me about a man she loved, truly loved. i told her about a woman. we were telling each other about ourselves. we were building metaphors to say what we never would say to each other. she told me about berlin and how much she loved it. she was obsessed with the internet, the threads and seams behind it. the interactivity. the design. we talked all about love. we walked down to the beach, the same one we'd been so many months before hand in hand. we had taken a picture on the pier together that she had never sent me. now it was another golden hour. and we were on the same beach again. the one just below where she had playfully flashed me her panties while leaning against a chain link fence up on main street. the same beach again.

the same beach where talia once told me that it's all beautiful, sitting together in my loyal junky car, she told me it's all beautiful even when people create something that says it isn't, that they know it's all beautiful.

she used an andy gump cuz she was on her period. she told me she was on her period. i felt stupid and felt like asking if she had to take her tampon out to pee. she told me i had to visit her in stockholm. she insisted. i emailed her once months later. she didn't reply.

now that everything had been said in metaphor, i think she was surprised i didn't try to kiss her that afternoon.

i couldn't. i didn't want to kiss anyone at that point in time. i was scared and frightened and terrified of life of death of men of women of god of everything. I was shaken and raw and split apart and my body was strong.

i was an absolute wreck and i had the immense strength to hardly comprehend it.

mtmd1021

how you'd point out directions to us on streets we'd driven hundreds of times. how you'd paint only one wall in each room as an artistic choice. how you'd collect bed bath and beyond coupons. i even miss all the ways i never understood you.

someone flashy walks into ur life and ur just gonna fall for it

i once learned the spiritual definition of a dragon

i'm supposed to get news today. but i wont. maybe i will.

her shoelaces are untied on both of her white shoes. she wears yellow black pinstriped overalls. reads a book. if she isn't looking at me at least it's a book, the sad quiet narcissist in me thinks.

a need for attention.

what are you reading?

it's a book about a poem. a wondering about our days. a cry into the nights. oh those damn nights.

tomorrow morning i will wake up and go do my laundry and then try to forget about her again

the blues radio station on the internet

mama how do i fight the devil no -- wait --- scratch that

mama

how do i fight -- like --- the devil

mama cuz mama

do u remember how the devil worked hisself through u and u took his spear thing and u ran with it on fire in ur hands

mama cuz    mama

how did u fight so much of the devil

it must've made u crazy no -- wait -- i know that it did but -- it must've been the hardest thing in the world mama

to fight the devil like u did until u had to wield his tool until u found cold water

mama

ur brave mama


now i go

mama i go

searchin for the devil in all the ones i want to find

and not like the sinners mama

u know that's all hogwash

sinning

haha

no

like the ones possessed with an on fire spear in their hands and in their brains and in their hearts and between their legs and the fire is so much truthful when u get used to it for the moment u can

before it sets u on fire

how do i fight it mama

i mean

like it

blue earbuds

nature is god's tongue. i read that once in the autobiographical papers of martin luther king jr. so this morning i went hiking.

fuck nature. i said as i started walking. and smiled to myself. i do that. we do that. smile to ourselves. bounce a tennis ball and grip it. grip it for my grip strength. nothing crumbling on the trails quite like racist cops, broken systems, internet wormholes.

blood in a car seat. blood outside a liquor store. it's ok mommy. don't cry.

just soil and earth and early morning summer coastal fog.

but back to tongues. back to hearts beating in wombs. my old friend luke, i saw again for lunch on his way to go make documentaries in broken parts of his native brazil. i asked him what the sex of his baby was going to be. he said it has a scrotum and balls.

but i'm a boy.

no ur not

oh. i guess i'm not anymore. but but but

we had an attic. it had one of those fold down ladders. her and i lived beneath it together. i lugged a flatscreen tv and cable up there and books. hers and mine. it's the saddest part to see go, when the two of you go. the way both of your books split apart again.

i said love is a can of shit.

and i didn't believe it for two seconds

natural music
by robinson jeffers (again)

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

corresponding parts

she tells me to lick my pinky and dip it into her bag. i won't glamorize my meltdown. i won't concede to shadows.

she appears out of nowhere and asks me outside. i sit there and listen. to what. i sit there and listen. there is street noise. there is music. there is the chatter of a multitudinous voice.

what is she telling me. she works as a nanny. i hear radio static. i feel faint.

she appears out of nowhere and asks me to smoke her cigarette and to lick my pinky and dip it into her bag.

she tells me she has a boyfriend. i wander. her eyes pull me in. she says her and her friend are visiting los angeles and san francisco. great city, i tell them.

i have her hand to my chest. i brought it there. as if i'm asking this stranger to feel around for my heart.

pure waters

my mind settled on the pancake rocks. i was sitting at a bar begging my brain for memories and that's what arrived. the pancake rocks in new zealand.

my friend luke and i army crawled beneath a bunch of plants and tangled vines to hike up to them or something. we tried some kind of shortcut or something off a beach

we rode the buses from queenstown to christchurch with the old people.

one of the bus drivers wouldn't stop talking about grisly earthquake deaths and knew intimate details of the families involved, like their names.

and luke and i were young and listening to aa battery powered cd players.

the botanical gardens in christchurch were beautiful. the church next to our hotel was beautiful. there was one of those life size chess sets outside our window in the park. there was a starbucks. we watched a mary kate and ashley olsen movie in our hotel room.

the first half of the trip we were drinking and snowboarding and drinking while snowboarding.

but the second half was dreary beaches. crystal clear rivers. temperate rainforests. dirty little cities. and i don't know if we did much in christchurch. we certainly didn't understand how to go out and be in the nightlife. i didn't fall under the spell of bars until years later i suppose

and i was still a virgin at that point in time

from what i remember

i invented ginger turmeric

i'll talk about my father because i liked the guy no

i loved him

when i was a young boy i loved him with a warmth that would be impossible to describe to myself now that i am older

my father, he was hairy, black hairy white olive body, bald on top of his head with hair wrapped around the sides and back of his head, and he had a beard usually that was sharp to kiss, and as a child i would dive into him like he was a burrow and remain in there as long as he'd let me

and he had a big jewish nose and a masculine chin and jaw, rolled forward shoulders like mine and i think he had big nipples like me too

and in our swimming pool sometimes we would ride underwater on his back like he was a hairy orca and we wouldn't rise until we reached the other side by the brown rocked waterfall that he had built

and it was a mystical feeling

maltman

q: this isnt a pretty time

8*: what does that mean

q: it just isnt time for it to be pretty

8*: what are u...u workin in the damn salt mines or somethin

q: of course not. but i am sweating. i am feverish in my ways. i am digging.

8*: quit it

q: quit huh

8*: with the metaphors u stilted fuck

q: ur missing the point. i am unhinged and tireless. i am an engine and inexhaustible. i keep...

8*: u keep what

q: i keep waking up

a thing i wrote on facebook this morning

I didn't want to talk about love. I wanted this to be a show promotion. For my 15 minute stand-up residency tonight at Rise N Grind cafe in Hollywood. I told myself I would limit my internet posts today to this show promotion only. And that I'd get my real writing done. Yeah but so what i fell in love. It happened quick. Then she had to leave. She returns for a bit. Then she has to leave. She's young. I'm youngish. We all become ageless when we die. 

I'm alone sweating in my kitchen. When you live alone you have to take full responsibility for the way your kitchen smells. The smell, it's on you. It is you. Also there's nothing like falling in love to remind you of how alone you really were. And there's nothing like falling in love to remind you of how alone you really are. And there's nothing like falling to in love to remind us of how alone we're going to become. Us doesn't exist, even as we band together heroically as wound fibers in the threads of time.

And the thing was you get used to being alone. It hurts at first. It hurts at times. But that hurt strengthens you and with the right attitude gives you more strength. And every time I get to a certain level of strength life comes by and it feasts. Sometimes it uses anguish. If we're lucky it uses its greatest tool, love. Love returns our strength to the nature from whence it came. Love drains us of our sweet sap. And we are grateful to be drained. The rush of making love. The rush of being intensely understood for moments at a time. The way we slide intellectually back and forth like drunken figure skaters haphazardly coordinating ourselves. The rush of watching her get into my car and noticing her freckles in the sunlight then driving up north to a cabin in the woods laughing like well fed bandits.

We stopped at McDonalds to pee. I knew I was in love cuz I found the McDonalds on the side of the 101 utterly beautiful. Only love can make McDonalds anything but ugly to me.

Yeah so she is gone and I am here and we continue exploring our own lives. Yeah so it is what it is. We say "it is what it is" when we've run out of words but aren't giving up. And it's insane but it's her. Yes, I'm still floored at the sight and sound of women. The young hip Echo Park butch lesbians who want nothing to do with me. The latina checkers at the grocery store who ask me about my tennis game. The kind ones nice enough to give me the time of day on drunken nights. And the ones I make up in my head. No, they don't navigate my imagination in the same way anymore. They dead end. And to them I am the same. She's now the combination and map to a maze I forgot exists. It's to me. To me, I know that means nothing to anyone else. I just mean to me. The unique arrangements of numbers and circumstances and coincidences like the first night we met where I asked her where she wanted to meet for pizza before seeing a movie and, not knowing where i lived, of all in the city she chose the place across the street from my apartment. Her visions. Her ideas. What she teaches me about the things she's interested in. The way she flipped off left field of Dodger Stadium then took a picture of it.

Now, by combining all kinds of things in my life it feels like I'm thrashing in water to stay afloat instead of with her, where it's just floating. I just walked around an artificial lake. I suppose that's my analogy from it. I am a pedal boat. A jogger gave me a high five, I thought it was for thinking of her but then realized we both were wearing shirts with L.A. sports teams on them.

She says I dream about you. I say I can't sleep thinking about you. She says I love you. I say I love you too. Cuz be brave, why not. It's all gonna hurt anyway if we're lucky enough to feel it.

*the font on this post will be fucked if viewed cuz on a computer cuz it always is when i copy paste on here and i dont feel like re-transcribing it

character notes

bring me back a woman. not in this life, i won't be able to touch it in the way i want.

i want to bleed. i want that monthly red confusion. i want to let it dry on my sheets and inner thighs into  something like clarity. let me be a her. let me be her.

i want to house an earthling in my womb. i want to suffer and die and become reborn like a crazy phenix upon birthing. Birth, it begins and ends there.

A woman cuz i want to feel the contrast between me and a man. i want to fall in love with a man like i am now. bring me back a woman so i can find me again and we can make ourselves whole.

for a moment or two

a few stories

she was in a pink apartment with white cats taking pictures of a feminine boy she met on the metro who was too gentle in bed and in malaysia was in a glass house with her new boyfriend and wanted to prance naked through the glass house with him but he wouldn't out of modesty and he said you are still in love with him and she had been thinking of him and how he broke up with her when she asked him why he didn't want to go to malaysia especially cuz he would have been brave enough to prance about the glass house naked with her

he had thought of her funeral and how he would know all the boyfriends past and present there and the stories of all of them and how it pained him to know

like the half american who lived in his grandmas attic with windows that opened out to a view of notre dame who seduced her by rubbing her ear

and the handsome belgian who she made love to on a rooftop in morocco while the neighborhood kids spied on them

or the kid in college who looked like kurt cobain and kept hindering himself by giving his savings to needy relatives

the tantric guy at burning man who she fucked and cried onto for four dusty days and who emailed her too presumptively the next year about an std check up

the arrogant dark eyed jewish stud who fingered her to climax then said something racist that caused her to run

the aid worker in samoa who ate her out in the car on the side of a dark road who she faked an orgasm with

then on another island, he came to her once. her brain was in trouble. he felt her body drip like a candle and cry tears like a candle and begin again like a candle and she had been living on peanut butter and staring at piles of dead bodies in the streets, rivers of their blood, she bled her little living blood around the southern part of the island. and he drove her. he drove her wherever she wanted to go at all hours of the night and day and he drove into her over and over and over again until years later

her and her girlfriends were drunk in new york city and she had them all crying about the love they made

and her boyfriend now, he knew was in finance or something like that and had a chin like him, one of those pussy eating chins

blue denim work uniforms

my coworker. i don't have  one now but she   she   i used to have one who would ask me all enthusiastically what i had had   for lunch on my lunch break after i would return from lunch

and i  hated having to tell her cuz it was like don't we get enough of each other every frickin day basically

and i never told her, maybe i did, that my heart is a decrepit motel for nomadic souls cuz we never had one of those lunches together

but she went to thailand. i . remember that

for a  wedding

and she came back like she had had   the best time ever    and the way she melted when she told me about it was like a wave

she became  a wave right in front of me

the way she perceives the world is an explosion to me an explosion to me

transmissions for the first deifists and art collectors of the future

It was irresistible the way we. I just spell checked. We know what we are. It hasn't fully dawned on us yet. But I am being humble. At least on future terms. But I know we are accumulating data for the advanced regions of where we are going. I know. I know. And I'm guessing people are dawning on knowing

my gf the carnivore

she eats cheeseburgers. she aint here now. we ate a bacon pizza together. she in that beauty of a city now, paris, that just got more beautiful.

the story of us

where were u when i was young

being
even

younger    i suppose

they met in a mental hospital

He might have been the only man to ever truly love you. And he didn't know how to love you but he loved you.

And he loved you. He didn't know how to love you but he loved you.

I know it and I don't know what it means to you. Cuz I feel it now. I feel it now all over again and new. And I've been meaning to explain it to you and now it's on my mind and it would only be a cause for dispute so I won't.

But he loved you. He never understood what it took to love you but with his overachieving heart in confused heaven he loved you.

And she kisses me on the face with her heavy lips. And I can't stop on hers. And time is a cloud that hovers over love. And what we spill is alchemy and brave and sizzling and leaves imprints on the planets before the rains.

And I want to keep it to myself. I want to keep it quiet and contain it like a bird then let the inevitability set it free and not wait for it to come flying back to me but rather fly after it and share the same sky with her.

And the sky is a big place and her and I can share a big place.

And I'm not afraid. I have proven myself to pain. And I let the hurt point me in the right direction.

And he loved you. I remember the way he'd ask about you so many years later. How he'd try to play it cool, like a curious ironic observer but the way his doctor's voice changed it was like a wave swept through him and it didn't diminish him it was expansive and he was a version of love in those moments and it was imperfect like all love. But he did, he loved you. And you don't need me to say it because it recognizes you.

And thank you for your imperfect love. Thank you for your imperfect love. Thank you for imperfect love. Thank love for imperfect you. Thank you love for bringing me her. Thank you love for bringing me love. Thank you love for hurting me and giving me a profound reason to live in every form.

And love is common I believe but sometimes it takes uncommon people to remind us of this fact in our nature

morning rituals

i walked around the beautiful artificial lake and fantasized about having to survive on the geese and their offspring in a world where that kind of thing would be necessary and i knew i could do it

heck...

a part of me wanted to live that way

my dad and barbara

cuz he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world but all we kept seeing every sunday morning was an average latina in her 30's shuffling out of the doors to his townhouse and saying goodbye.

cuz he said sex after the second divorce was a ten. after the third, it was her. he was much older

he said a couple of us children were love babies, made in love. we never asked what he'd call the others

i remember one afternoon in long beach he kept talking. he was winning back his eldest kids and talking to em over carne asada and corn tortillas and employing his artful storytelling and personal revelations and he could turn it on like that

and when he'd turn it on it was like a spigot into endless earth

i got video of him that i've privately uploaded to youtube, i'd take the video without him noticing cuz once he got going he was in a zone all his own

never told him about the film festivals. never told him about the financiers. never told him about the lovely girl i took to big sur for the night.

i guess you and your dad have something in common my mom told me last weekend, an admission that only scratches the surface.

driving up the 101

in clouds of smoke we remade the images of now fading '00's pop stars into imaginative disturbances and glorious wonders

esalen night waters

two nights ago i watched the sky slowly devour the orange rock moon above the blue black waters of the pacific ocean.

yesterday morning in big sur even the lizards were fucking under the trees in and out of the sun.

what i wanted to tell you: i was wrong about saying you didn't like sincere music. you do. what i meant was earnest music.

and after we made love you slept like a rock for an insomniac

anecdotal evidence

i wish i could've bought weed from you. at that calArts party where you found out your drug dealer boyfriend had been cheating. and he wanted 100 an oz. you could keep the rest. perhaps i could've been the rest.

a hot july day i remember

where i was. i was in the ocean.

where you were. you were on the sand.

how i looked. i looked back at the shore.

how you were. you were no longer looking at me.

and i felt. i felt so out to sea

los angeles

I woke up wanting to invite her to Big Sur. Like, want to drive there today on our day off together. But I didn't. I sat in my car and stared at my phone.

Last night we walked up to a cave in that kind of dark that's too thin to be dark. Like daylight on the moon. I told her about the girl I'd been with earlier in the night, how we couldn't find the moon.

But it was night. Sprinklers hit the road into the park. Heavy water bath.

She used my phone flashlight inside an Andy Gump. I watched the glow pour through ventilation holes and gaps in the plastic doorway.

She said what if a coyote came while I was sitting perched on that rock and it ate me in one big gulp and all that remained was my red Bard sweatshirt.

I said I'd assume her online identity.

We were talking about a couple she knew, guy and girl who made themselves into twins in New York City. I told her about the characters in Garden of Eden.

Her shoes were not walking shoes but we walked miles.

We had just walked through the bat cave. It was while she was perched on the rock imagining coyotes. Cloud covered the entire sky. I said, what if there never was a moon. What if I only dreamed it. Without missing a beat she said what's a moon?

what liv said

I have a good awareness of other people's motives but sometimes I'm not willing to acknowledge my own

new york

an idiot and his improper use of the word namaste

We met at a bar called Snake and Jake's Christmas Club Lounge in the uptown neighborhood of New Orleans. it was a glorious shithole. Popular, like all glorious shitholes these days. We like em, glamorize em, ruin em. Why? Cuz anything that smells like rotten beer soaked wood appeals to us over the synthetic cleaner days of our chemical laden youths. Linoleum. Clorox. Granite countertops if we were lucky. If we grew up in dirt, then it's a nice little reminder of it. My favorite little dive bar was the womb.

She said naked people drink free at the bar. She said she and her ex-girlfriend, the burlesque dancer on ice, drank there topless one night. It wasn't my problem. She said she might enjoy drinking a little too much sometimes. It wasn't my problem. She said she met the lonely fifty-year-old man slumped over the bar, she said she met him on New Years Eve and that they spoke for hours that night. She said he told her to be careful when I walked in. He gazed over at us, in love with her, or drunk, same thing maybe.

We touched hands. Hers were warm blooded. I paid for our Miller Lites. Takes a round or two longer to hit that ten dollar minimum when drinks are cheap and the night started hours before elsewhere.

She drove us to her place. I left at four in the morning. She said stay, I said we won't ever sleep. I wanted to stay as long as I could but never return once I left. I had the airport waiting for me in the morning. In the light. We were two candles melted and reformed. The bonds that can be made in a few hours of something like honesty.

The driver was majestic. We were talking about the sunsets in California. He brought em up. Maybe so he could bait me. To tell me about the most beautiful one he'd ever seen. In Iowa. I didn't ask him what he was doing in Iowa. He was eating in between two lakes. Watching the sun disappear below one lake to his west. While the full moon rose over the other lake to his east. He said it was green and purple at first. He pronounced "silhouette" in a magical way. He spoke for ten minutes straight, bragging but also possessed by what he had seen. He had seen a lot but that this was unlike anything else. That as long as his brain works, he will remember it. That a camera couldn't have shot east and west. A camera couldn't tell it like he told it.

None of it was my problem. I walked the Garden District. I saw my awesome friend Morgan earlier. We ate with his girlfriend. They saw me do comedy, it's fun in the south. It's fun everywhere. Then, on a whim, I met her. Met the driver. Slept a couple hours then got on airplanes to Florida in the morning. I was my only problem. The way all my organs hurt except for my heart.

I was with my dad last year. And the year before that. Now he's with me. Now I'm with me. Last night I was with her. It was only one night.

predatory features

i should write another novel. another sad one. ah, but fuck. no one read the last one. plus there are all these other stories i want to tell. but, the time. and the notion that my best might involve people skills. ah, but fuck. i am not running. she said i was running.

ok. i am running. but it's not from something, like she was implying. i am running simply to run

ah, but fuck. new york, that jaywalker's paradise. volcano national park and the noise the black crater made scraping and crunching beneath my wet boots. mexico, and that drug dealer's circle spinning eyes. the angry way the small guy snorted his own product next to the marina. then tennessee, the shark's restlessness

zeus

the big guy, Trinidad, we made a short film with him. cuz he looked like a gangster. and he was out of his head but a softie. and i looked him up awhile back and he had died of a heart attack, on valentine's day. i don't know what made me think of him

the after party

https://vimeo.com/159534500

times square times square times square

I wish I was better with faces, so I could remember yours

pao de queijo

when people smoke cigs here it makes more sense than i'm used to. it's not that the buildings and density block out the eyes of the sky on them so much as they already insulate the lives in death.

i said there are no periods in the sentences of life only commas, so,

but this is neither. this is my cheekbones in a storefront window reflected back at me. this is my cheekbones on display in a skeleton exhibit. these are my organs donated to science. an aquarium of knowledge swimming in fluid. a sandwich with butter, cucumber, cheese, salt and pepper. a young woman who says her mom was in africa in the '80's backpacking and making sure her moments were interesting even if they didn't add up. how much more beautiful then, to not do it for the math, but the moments and

he came he saw he loved life dearly dearly

little skips

two women with pink hair
one cut short
one up in a bun
go walk dude
go walk

hey i haven't seen u around

Once in awhile it works out for the good guy. That's what he thought w/ a smirk on his face getting onto the airplane. They gave him a better seat for being patient about having to late check his carry on luggage. They gave him a better seat for being less meddlesome than the woman who was trying to steal a seat in first class. He became their confidante, in a way, waiting for his seat.

I met a girl outside a bagel truck in Silver Lake. She never texted back. I met a girl at the airport in Dallas-Fort Worth. She offered me a bite of her food. I once told someone I got fucked up to dim the staggering brightness of my pain. And I've been sober for a couple months. That was before this one little painkiller, I'd been sober for two months.

But I get it, the little slip between the pain. Where humor & death is found. Cuz pain, the truth is that pain anesthetizes us to death. Pain is an immunity to death even though it physically draws us nearer. It is still different than the drunk sadness of this never happening again.

She was eating Asian food. Tofu, rice, broccoli, drenched in what was surely a thick sweet gooey sauce. I'd had a turkey burger and that one little pill cuz I was bored and my face hurt, like I had a bunch of pressure in my cheekbones & my nose & it is anxiety like a brick. And I'd just been bravely been dealing w/ it.

I thought we were in the air but we hadn't even taken off. She said in high school she wrote a play about two pencils falling in love. She looks like my ex-girlfriend did.

two women

one light, one dark. tone. not lovers, just something else. extremes. new friends. my therapist says i'm about to find clarity and it's going to be large and a lot to handle. and i remembered my friend isabelle walking me through a meditation for clarity weeks earlier. it came up twice. and the two women, we both visited that same park where she did that. and one was light. one was dark. two extremes. and dark is not always bad, the yogi in puna told us we should stop using it that way. just as light is not always good. but then in westwood a woman in our circle said she was grateful for both the light and the dark. and then i brought the dark to the light and realized it's not that dark. and the light has already shown me her shadows and admirations of the absence and what a relief. and i wanna be the light and the dark, but more than that i wanna find myself tolerable and brilliant with life within this eclipse and tolerance

in my prius

what did i listen to????

i listened to a song by feist called the park. like an obsessive

" a sadness so real that it populates the city and leaves you homeless again"

i listened to it on the way over there, that morning.

i listened to it after for awhile too but i haven't in awhile.

"steam from the cup and snow on the path, the seasons have changed from the present to past"

i wrote my newest script in shock. and now that i'm not. it's tough to dig into it. but i have to get it done. it's about all that

"the past"

anyway, now i'm listening to all kinds of things, i'm listening, i'm listening, i'm listening, i have to or else i'll go crazy

so i'm listening and getting all kinds of peace in all kinds of dazzling pieces

methane noir

My publisher commissioned a piece of erotica centered around the Porter Ranch disaster. The whole thing gave me a headache. It were too early to forgive the SoCalGasCo just like it were too soon to forgive myself for banging on the cracks until they became holes. Shit, my publisher would probably like that last part.

Porter Ranch, El Coyote closing its doors, I thought of those mythical margaritas we soaked up that fiery hot day, damn, it was all over.

I brung a metal detector up to Porter Ranch. I knew it were stupid. I knew it were an excuse to make something of nothing, treasure of dust.

It sucks missing a place that the other person doesn't even know is gone

fast talkers and mexican coke bottles

I thought the signs were nowhere in this city but they're everywhere, clamoring for attention er... awareness

Trav said he is writing two at once, that made sense for this moment. 

I drove home an old man was selling junk from out of his truck bed on the long hill up Sunset Blvd into Echo Park. We talked, I got him down to $50 on a table and chairs that fits perfectly in my kitchen. His name was Miguel. He and an old Bank executive, a black guy walking his therapy dog started talking to me about the old days. The dog owner, whose name I forgot, bought his house in Silver Lake for $78,000 three decades ago.

And now it's worth millions

gurl

i want to be the one middle aged guy dancing in the Zumba class that is your heart

the who what wha

writing sucks, i think i only do it to please an insatiable void masquerading as love. comedy is the same. here, i am, doing it again now

one grain

A fresh papaya doesn't taste like vomit. Two Canadian women will invite you to sleep with them in their camping tent for no other reason than to talk American politics as raindrops pitter patter on the soft cathedral roof of the shelter. A guy next to you in a crowd will use the term "infinite crescendo" to describe the musical acts of the love fest. You will write it down in your phone, infinite crescendo. You and a girl will sit at the edge of the world calling each other things like lovely as the unnamed constellations do what they've been doing almost like this existence is not a miracle. You will write at some point in your phone "I don't know why I'm here but I love it". A kitchen cook will explode in rage that you sent an omelette with tomatoes back to him. You will get zenned out again and then be yelled at on the drive home by an angry local making a left turn in his truck while you're peeling a quick right in front of him. You will cry three times. Once on the plane there. Once on the top of a volcano summit. Once on the way down its road where it meets the trail when finally after dozens of cars speeding past your worn out thumb, a Japanese tourist offers to give you a ride back up but then a couple from Lake Tahoe stops and gives you a ride back down to your car. You will realize that most tears aren't from the sadness of loss but from the gratitude of what's had. Your chest, the one that's felt like an elephant has been sitting on top of it for months, it will release and allow the heart to open for awhile. I can travel sober. I can lose my mind at altitudes sober. I can dance in public sober. Dancing, I always said I needed to find mine. My friend said she cried at the stupid vulnerability of intuitive dancing and I understood but then I pounded the floor, jumped thousands of times, made myself move until conditioned tension all spilled out of me and I could breathe again. Then we drank a bunch of foraged coconuts. Earlier that morning, I walked naked on a black sand beach, shriveled, and glorious on this earth for a time

from the elements

The couple beneath the umbrella are everything that's good about people. I wonder if they'll ever know that while they were huddled beneath that lavender instrument, they were also out there dancing in the rain together.

trav and i

Today my brother and I left our apartment in Venice for the final time. The one we shared longer than anywhere either of us have ever lived. It was unceremonious our departure. We got the hell out of there. Too many bad memories. Too much struggle. Too much of nothing. But we were there together even as so many things crumbled around us, and we created as much as our inner and outer circumstances would allow, we wrote quite a bit of good shit actually, and we never took the ocean for granted, and we laughed like hyenas, and I'll cherish that longer than I'm alive.

tom robbins awhile back

script

FELICIA: My dad is sick. I told you. Didn't I tell you that? Well, he is. And he's gonna die if I don't help him.
MATILDA: No one can help. Trust me.

Matilda shivers and her face is sweating profusely.

FELICIA: You don't have to be nervous. I told you I'm not gonna hurt you.
matilda: It doesn't matter.

FELICIA: Yes it does.

i'm fine

My liver is fucked at the moment. From food poisoning, too much drinking this year, or Tylenol. They don't know. It's not that bad, but I can't drink until the next test. I can't consume any food either, not without it bubbling up in my chest, a separate problem that I can't take medication for cuz of the liver.

No problems on this earth are really separate.

And it's difficult figuring out how to be a human being without the little creature comforts of consumption. The food, the drinks, whatever we rely upon as crutches against time and space. And it's difficult figuring things out knowing that whatever I really am will be jumping ship from this body at any moment. I guess that's what's so miraculous about people, our ability to so intimately know of our impending demise while still innately feeling compelled to live. So I'm exercising more, I'm drinking apple cider vinegar and water with every meal, probiotics, and I'm not eating anything after six pm. And it's helping, it's helping, a little bit at a time, and for awhile, it's helping. And that's a damn fine thing, staving off defeat. Anyway, I should get out of my parked car now. I've hated Sunday nights for as long as I can remember, and I'm grateful to complain about it.

oh man look at those cavemen go

I'm like 28 and I've been listening to the Bewlay Brothers by David Bowie on repeat for days and days and I can't stop listening to it

I get like that on songs sometimes, I get stuck

And there's this Swedish-Nicaraguan girl I'm seeing. And her and I are all dreamy eyed for each other cuz she's leaving to go home soon and cuz I still have a week before I find out that my dad has cancer

And one morning I'm taking her back home from my apartment to the house she's been rooming in with a peaceful Sikh family who has a little blonde boy who is in love with her

And I'm driving us up that hill that wraps around the Santa Monica Airport's southern end into Ocean Park I think the street is still considered Walgrove

And I turn on the Bewlay Brothers song again and it sounds crisp and is pitched clearly

And then she reaches for my hand and she holds my hand

And I feel placed

And after that moment I don't need to play the Bewlay Brothers on a loop anymore cuz now it found its location in my heart indefinitely, with her hand on mine

"And so the story goes they wore their clothes they said the things to make it seem improbable..."