free wine

So here is how it should be

I didn't write much from the heart this year

I lived from it

So much from it I can't write it

I always said there is a time to live and a time to write

I have had lead in my blood, laughter choked somewhere in my gut, a slow impulse to letting things out

As all this overwhelming lush entity floods in

And I gasp expecting something worse than these beautiful sunrises and sunsets

God Bless you America while you last

The damage truckers on the 5 freeway can do to a relationship

We met on a rainy day in the crucibles of our own grief. We had both lost men who happened to have the same first name. Hers a year before mine and a lover not a father. But then my father was a lover too I guess, just not my lover. But he had made me that way, through loving.

And in the chaos of loss and the certainty of more of it to come butting up against all of the uncertainty as to when it would happen, we threw caution to the wind, messy like a liquid but lucky like a ridden wave. It would, we decided, be messier, all of it, to do nothing about us at all. And so we turned ourselves into that us and wrangled all the beautiful things that felt effortless like a wildflower bouquet in the hands of a child who had just crossed miles of mud to get it

mama there goes this man

You, I, worry about all the things that could happen to make it end. The uninhabitable Earth. The plague of physics at high speeds. What people can do to people. And what people can do to ourselves. And then, it all ends anyway.

This right now here and now is a recognition that I am letting my brain wander off as the confetti pours down all around me. This is me getting everything there is out of life at this very fragile moment and labeling it joy.

And as we made love I felt your spirit and mine and I realized I loved you on every single day of your life

xo sio

How she makes cookies out of dust. How i make the bed after us. How we keep having less and less of things and finding more and more in each other

and how now that we have met i am already always where i wanna be

2 years since

My dad died two years ago today tomorrow. 

My dad died with Trump still just a joke. Not an evil joke masquerading as president.

My dad died two years ago and our relationship lives on. I talk to the guy. I was up at 5am the other day running up my hill and walking next to the freeway talking to the guy. I was getting pumped up. I did it Dad. My damn script finally got made into a damn movie. Fuck Dad. All those damn phone calls and conversations and bucks lent to me keeping my dream afloat and it’s almost unrecognizable but it finally got made.

My dad died believing in me. He wrote me this great email a couple weeks before he passed. He watched a short film I made with my brother Travis and a couple friends. He said I was good. He said I was exceptional. He said he forgot it was me acting in the film I wrote. It wasn’t me dad. It was me hiding in a story up some mountains with my friends trying to create while you were wasting away in physical form. He said stay positive in the email. 

Earlier this year I was thinking Dad I wish you could see how well I’m doing for a haunted man. Now I’m thinking Dad I’m not haunted, I’m full. I’m full and scared but full of life and living it even if it feels overloaded.

My dad died telling me to hold out for love that made my head spin. Dad, I found that head spinning love. I like her too. I know you’d like her too. It’s so wonderful liking the person you love. Like, I liked you Dad. How like it had a bunch of bad in between time for us but how you and I found each other and liked each other again.

My dad and his friend used to call each other with ideas for Seinfeld episodes. I remember hearing his laugh down the hall from my bed, when Seinfeld was airing originally. My girlfriend always brings up episodes. I call her, she says she is watching Curb. This is all early. This is all before she knows how much I love hearing it.

My dad died drugged and distant from laughter. His sense of humor shrouded by painkillers. In that pain was the humor but he felt neither those last few days. I remember helping him off the bathroom floor after he fell and couldn’t get up. I remember him brushing his teeth the day before he died, like he was going to need them where he was going. Maybe to show them during laughter.

My dad died and yet he is right here. It’s amazing how I hear him when I groan getting up from a chair even though I’m not old yet. I groan like he did, that comical groan.

My dad how nice you were. A sarcastic asshole at times but how nice you were. An ironic remove at times but how nice you were. My dad how you and I laughed when we found each other again. How we used to make fun of Lakers back up power forward Vladimir Radmanovic and his interest in snowboarding.  

I wrote this joke on twitter today cuz I have been obsessed about this crazy world Dad. You wouldn’t believe this crazy world Dad. Yes you would. You made a living trying to heal this crazy world. One individual at a time. 

Dad I made this joke on Twitter today said if I have a son I am going to name him after you dad. I am going to name my son Dad.

-Josh Turek

Watching music videos

I wanted to ask how were you wounded

I wanted to hear an answer

I have all these visions plaguing me of all these people I've known

and

Recognizing in my mind

memories of times they described that just didn't sit right

And me, too oblivious to peer in,

And ask them

Who was it you were when you were there and were you wounded

And what did it become in you and

Who are you

Who are you without the wounds

Who are we when we are becoming true

I don't want to breathe anew

I don't want to breathe anew

I am tired

I am blue

I am no longer new

I don't want to

ever be new

not ever again

El mes de mi padre

mother maria

what i wrote when i wrote it

el chubasco

Her parents met on fishing boats. She, the daughter of fisherman, Costa Ricans, Alaskans, Santa Cruzians, Oregonians, and I remembering when how she walked in through that door, a gentle daughter of light. How she said she was gonna go to the Women's March the next day or something. I remember last night and how close we could touch and how long and how deep and how enormous the bridging of our energy. I kissed her face this morning. She reached for me with her arm. The drunks on Sunset cried at each other as we held and melded and I got up and closed the bathroom window and then returned to her, quiet and calm

how he bled black blood out of his nose and we cradled him in our arms like we had been all this time

Travis my boy

yes what is it josh

Travis my boy do you remember when

josh, yes, of course i do. i will never forget it

No but

josh i know what youre gonna say

But Travis that hollowed out haunted stare that i am trying so hard to hide that you are trying so bravely to preserve it is about--

i know what it is about josh

I know but Travis you must understand it's a miracle how you and I can still confide in each other and share space and orbit one another after all we have been thr--

josh i know. i know josh. so well. better than anyone on earth can articulate at times when i try

But Travis

josh

Travis do you remember how

it is  on my mind constantly

How we... do you remember

i remember josh

Do you remember how we watched a man die together

yes josh. he was my best friend. of course i remember

Travis, sometimes I wouldn't believe it was real if it hadn't been the most real thing I have ever had this life to know

i know josh i know

winsome

The wind whipped in through your windows. Your apartment is a nest atop the branches of echo park. Your underwear in my mouth. I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say

she said

she said it would turn her on to get hit by my car

or maybe anyones car

she said there was a name for it. even a movie for it. the wanting to get hit by a car in an erotic fashion

she said when she was a little girl in paris a car hit her. and her asshole father cried and held her on the street and that his emotions were closer to pure than she ever saw

i brought up the dots that connect the two. she probably knew. it's her story to tell. so i won't tell it. she, her brain, will tell it better than mine anyway. what an intelligent brain on the young woman. it wasn't the provocative youth that poured out of her ripe curves it was her provocative brain i objectified in my worst views, and melded into in my bravest, and bumped back and forth with - in my favorite, and then scattered from in a manic dash to find quiet

she said don't romanticize female sadness. but i cut a coconut in my kitchen this morning and gulped the cold gray water inside of it for my hangover. you don't understand how i am the only shape i am because of this female sadness. my outline is traced by it

recently, another woman, said let me inside your apartment just for a little while

recently i saw a picture from last summer of her laying on my bed back when my bed was on the floor

recently, another woman, said let me show you the way the sun sets from my windows

recently, 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 105, women said let me fall into your lap.

and so they pour out of the windows and scale the tall buildings, plague the streets and crawl all over me

and i do everything to encourage them

an explosive tree

how even my fingers are tired and you
had oatmeal in your bathtub
birds chattering by your windows above echo park
a breeze pushing in
and the everly brothers singing something about kissing someone or something

when you said what i said
you have this knack for remembering things i said
and they're things i liked once saying
like a pleasurable radio station
you told me a story about your hawaiian cousin leaning out of the minivan window on hollywood blvd asking people on the sidewalks
what that star say?

waking up grateful and surprised

I can't really do anything these days without other people, maybe I never could.

I am 73 years old. I don't know how to make love anymore cuz I am missing the desire to do it

I was walking home from work and bumped into my two friends and they accused me of not being sad anymore and they were right

I made it. I made it older than I thought I would. I am 80 years old. I sit on a bench and I watch the birds float atop the water. I used to do these things as a younger man which is funny

I can run. I can fuck for hours. I can play tennis and I can breathe. My body does everything I ask of it. I am a living miracle

I am 82 years old.  Everything is second by second. My eyes blur the image but my trusty old heart knows the story so well. It beats on a couple more times and then says its quiet goodbye

when an old guy dies

he lived alone. his things were out in the hallway this morning. a tattered bookcase with bad books on it. the kind of bad books you find at the goodwill. there is likely a closed circle of bad books coming and going from the goodwill as the nearly-dead people who own them and buy them for a quarter each die and buy again and again. he likely died. what were they doing. they were renovating the dead mans apartment. it wouldn't be his apartment by the first of the month.

a morbid feeling along the crosswalk that passed upon arrival to the sidewalk

I know these women who try to look like stone. They are going through mud and want to look like stone.

I told this lover, unrelated to the women close to me looking like stone, i told her we know we are going to lose eventually and that's what makes our desire to keep surviving beautiful. That we keep trying even knowing we are going to lose. And i told her this because she has survived so much more than me and here she was a miracle over and over again a miracle

This is the place where women come to drink alone

The incandescent shimmer of muddy clear high end vodka. It doesn't have to be, it can be the cheap shit too.

Don't read the news. Don't read the news.

Women are leading the charge. Women are leading the resistance. Women are being what they wanted her to be and they are being her themselves.

Don't read the news, you came here to be, to be alone.

I look to the one to my right thinking about how martinis make me regretful of the feelings I no longer hold in my hands. I would love to tell you more about these feelings but this story is not about me. So I disappear into the warped reflection of myself in my glass.

This is the place where women come to drink alone.

in prague

Three months ago in Prague I meet her in a three level steampunk nightclub on the outskirts of the city. We walk the wrong direction back to where I am staying. Like all cities, I think I know where I'm going when I don't.

Finally she calls a cab and we ride in the backseat together to her apartment.

Up many flights of stairs, she invites me into a studio that is sparse and simple. For a pet, she has a Japanese fighter fish. She shows me how when she presses a compact mirror to the aquarium, the fish starts instinctively attacking its own reflection. The Japanese fighter fish smashes its head into the glass over and over again, hellbent on destroying what it thinks is an enemy, but is only itself. She slides the mirror off and the fury subsides. Then the fish drifts off and melts into all the other abstractions of the room.

She whispers stories to me of her time living in the mountains as a kid when the communists were in control.

I walk home the next morning with lazy bones hingeing like antique doors. As with any morning after making love my body and mind feel more receptive to what the world is trying to tell me. So here is what I am noticing before the world falls apart again. Here I am walking in a foreign city I won't ever truly know. The election is not for another month. I am all alone and faraway like I want. All I have to do now in these moments is concentrate on moving through the space that time is affording me while in this functioning body. All I have to do now is find the determination to not go hurling myself at whichever version of me appears next.

broadway joe

I have been having these vivid malarial dreams but it's just the coffee

and i ate too much sugar today

and then i got the blues

dammit

or

or what?

or how my brain fragmented from my brain

almond yogurt

Honey yes honey you said if we were good enough if we were good for a long enough time that we could fuck other couples honey is what you said

Honey no honey you misremembered the way the tea went cold in our cups that day out there on the dock of that small tiny lake out there that one summer eve

And I get so terrified fretting about my life. It is wearing itself away like my chipped up teeth and I don't want to go honey I don't want to go.

Oh honey you will never go you will never go

erewhon organic grocer part 2

You would always insist on coming outside to see us off on Sunday evenings. Sometimes I didn't think it was necessary. How we would go back and forth in conversational bursts before I would finally get into the car and drive away.

Usually you would tell me to wash it, my car.

Dad, I now know I will never get over you. The way the memories of you come in, only a little at a time. Only in little bits and pieces I know I can tolerate. The whole of us would drown me.

We are such average people Dad, it's amazing how such average people can have such profound pain. We were not kings amongst men Dad, only amongst each other. And I want to tell you something, I want to tell you how I wish you could see me.

I wish you could see how well I am doing for a haunted man.

we just wanted to see the sunrise

Up against cave walls we smelled like animals. I grabbed your hair. You groaned like the earth. Animated bones. Collapsed pervading tone. Our story is not a story. Our story is a window. I am one side of the pane. Your hot breath and fingers draw shapes on me. It cracks. I grip you in thin reflection. I feel my mind rippling.

I wipe food off customers plates. I eat food off customers plates. I get fucked in the face and everyone couldn't be nicer about it

erewhon organic grocer

Will being old feel like a dream. Will my mouth chew my lunch slow and cautious. Feel the bread from my sandwich distant on my tongue. And will i mind

Cuz i was struck yesterday walking. About how we treat a body when it dies. How we have to lift it on out of the house. How the life becomes a symbol in the hearts of those still beating but the body is worthless to anyone.

So i watch them lift him out of his bed and bring up on the stretcher down the two mini flights of stairs and outside and into that van and the doors shut. And it drives off to the valley, another vehicle in traffic on the 101 heading south

How i drove the other direction 6 months later still full of life in my body, north. We climb north while alive, we fade south for death.

How he, whittled to skin and bones, brushed his teeth the day before he went. Like he was going to need them where he was going. Maybe he was going north