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