I had
a dream
that i wrote this song
it was real easy
it wasn't hard at all

There
are many cars
on the freeway
but only one
is being driven by OJ

His white
Ford Bronco
with him at the wheel
did he ever
get in trouble
or just a citation

Cuz I
had this memory
of news helicopters
and him being followed
on the freeway

I was just a little boy

chinatown public library

You were wandering
like most wonderers do
one foot in front of the other
shoe
the other shoe

in shays car

The main difference between New York and L.A. is that there is a big cemetery near Park Slope that my girlfriend and I toured in an old blue Jeep in the summer of 2017 that her friend drove us around in through the cemetery roads and under its old trees like we were on a safari of the dead and around one turn all the buildings in the distance suddenly rose up like large versions of the tombs doing the same in front of them and the buildings appeared like the tombs of the living while the tombs were like the buildings of the dying and where earlier in the day we had had a Lyft driver in a beekeepers mask who told us that apartments were really just storage units for our bodies and our bodies just storage units for our souls and then toward the end of our ride she got real quiet and asked "Do you like sweet chicken?"

old haunts new life

How to tell my girlfriend the night we pulled over to sleep in my car for a few hours on the side of the road on the dirt atop the cliffs of Big Sur but between a guard rail and wedged in by huge safety rocks secure enough under the raining stars and in each other's arms that the way we made love I was welcome to anything the universe wanted to make of us

How our date that night at Esalen was nude in body nude in heart

How to tell her I've never been so blissfully nude with someone and electrified all at once

How to tell her as we make our home over and over every day in a shoebox of an apartment that expands and contracts in size with love and space and all the terribly nice words that leave our mouths in whispers, mock yells, moans, and sing song dream noises halfway between sleep and being wide awake

taco bell kfc hybrid

I'm fascinated by desire paths. Once in while I get reminded of them, they are those paths created by footsteps aside from the paths laid out in public parks, walkways, nature trails and the like. You know the ones. Where the walk path is moving along circuitously but one a natural flowing whim you cut the distance by walking off straight across a nice patch of grass and then maybe eventually back onto the path that's been already laid and maybe not, maybe you just keep going til you discover a moonlit ledge and down below are a bunch of elephant seals barking their love calls into the crashing waves of night

the alamo

My mother taught me the ability to dream, to live inside the insulation of an imagined construct. Aside from the escape, it's worthless in this day and age. This day and yesterday it's felt like something, a core part of a thought I needed has fled. I told my brother something feels like its missing, he said something along the lines of welcome to the club.

Once in awhile I worry I'm still flitting in and out of my mother's fantasies. And when, in, trapped. That I never actually escaped. That my story of myself is a fiction only in my own mind, the one given to me that is, not the one I'm trying to write. My mind, a splintered cell from all the others belonging to the same, a few splits away from the woman whose womb I resided inside of back when she was inside her own mother's womb.

All the way back that far. I was an egg in 1957.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I helped make a baby boy of my own and he had deep dark eyes and faint blonde hair and I held him and I felt warmth wash onto me and I cried saying this is the happiest I've ever been in my life.

my giant

How to tell my girlfriend that even as I am able to see a little less beauty per blink these days it's all so much more beautiful than it ever has been due to her magnitude

the space we inhabit in the names we are given

I had a dream that I died, and I was floating around like a ghost missing people.

somnambulant

My brother has seen more naked men than my sister. He played minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians and hit the showers with hundreds of naked men. We talked about that yesterday at Echo Park Lake the three of us having a picnic for my sister’s birthday. And I have been feeling so down lately, like about how making my own art feels futile. And I fight back with thoughts like, how I am most attracted to people who make cool things with what they’ve been given. And I tell my girlfriend that on the phone while she is in Kuaui visiting her brother who just had a baby. Creation, perhaps it’s that ultimate creation of making new life that’s been driving me mad, that I can’t afford it yet. That I’ve written so many thousands of words but life, but what about creating life. And so there we are yesterday three siblings in our 30s with the sun setting in our faces on a Navajo blanket eating Lassens banana cream pie and talking about the things we make and the walls we keep hammering into and how my brother says there is no rhyme or reason to penis size, that he has seen the most unexpected ones on guys who you would’ve thought the opposite. And my sister takes pictures of us with her disposable camera and we make fun of each other’s vanity and the time I stole my brother’s unattended laptop from his table at Stories cafe and how I took video of him thinking it was gone, and then I did an impression of him doing it, thinking it was missing. And I was feeling so much better, I have been so up and down lately, but I felt so much better because it was oh yeah, we forget about this amidst all the waves of loss and expectations and when our girlfriends are out of town, but love the divine healing power of love, it’s not everything and it’s not a guarantee but when it works on its own time on you it works its magic. I felt like sharing something about all that

daddio it's been 3 years i love you daddio daddyo

When I was a teenager, My dad had one of those illegal satellite cards that allowed us to watch all the pay channels for free on his DirecTV and so I'll never forget how I secretly cracked his 4 digit security code on the remote (2580)(right down the middle) which allowed me and my brother to sneak watch all the adult film channels.

Love - is like this thing that's not exclusive or limited - in this moment it feels as simple as a support aide to another person as we support aide our own selves while on our independent yet intertwined journeys - that get a little less lonely because of these support aides who present us with their versions of love.

It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be physical. It could be a thought, a moment, a series of seemingly mundane interactions that add up to care and profundity.

I loved my dad in that sense. He was a criminal for having that satellite card. I was a juvenile offender for covertly hacking his passcode (2580)(right down the middle of the remote). And it's been three years since he passed on, and I have this joke that it's been hard growing up without a father.

I had one. He was here then gone, a few times in my life, no one's fault. Just people being people throwing one another off course in the names of love (sometimes support aides clash) and how the grief morphs. I can't even say I dwell on him every single day now, which makes it all the more jarring when he does reappear.

I often tell the story of how I left the front door open when I barged in to see him on his last day alive (in a heroic two year fight against pancreatic cancer) (After a heroic 70+ year fight of being a human and all that it entails) and how minutes after he died a hummingbird flew into the house. And how when I am golfing with my brother (at cheap courses with Goodwill clubs) or walking around the Echo Park lake with my sister we will see hummingbirds together. How one morning I woke up in tears needing to know he was here and an hour later my brother spotted one at the breakfast place we were at together.

I see him every day as my smile turns more into his own. What a guy. What a guy. Oh the secrets we had from one another that we would have laughed at, boy did we have a lot of laughs together for a few years together, those ones where we had finally found one another, as support aides, in every way, including the forever kind of love kind of way.

Little Randy's Unsolicited But Very Welcomed Player Card on Me

Dan Choan nytimes travel section

mangela siobhanacita

It was the night of 5pm. We were driving cuz you said to drive. The sun goes behind the mountains this time of year not the ocean. The remains of its light glimmered in salt air or pollution by the time we got to the sand and it was spectacular.

Then in slowing to darkness a canyon drive with a bookstore with a Buddha in it. An overlook with a bad violinist practicing unseen nearby as teenagers fingered each other's hearts. I held you close to me like I always want to do. We made jokes about the Valley half sparkling below us, you said everything from Van Nuys to Woodland Hills was ours.

Some trace of the sun north made the sky red, it was dark but the sky was still somehow red now over the mountains. I felt inspired, what a ridiculous thing to say except for the fact that it never happens that way anymore. That inspired feeling was like a generous lighthouse in youth until I took it for granted and it became the default but as the default there became no lift from it.

A haphazard bar we swung our car back toward on Ventura Boulevard, I had spent thirty plus years missing it but with you we were found. The bartenders were part time porn stars with incredible personalities while the old ladies in heavy make up got rowdy and cat called the forgetful gentlemen sinking into their seats at the old tired but alive counter. It was so alive in that old establishment no matter how dry the carrot cake or dire the karaoke.

We played darts at the place next door. I would've paid to make that feeling stay stay stay but you know how it goes - to appreciate them you have to let them go and all that - so that they return and all that - the way those darts sped through the air and stuck to the straw or cork like bee sting arrows thrown by pleasure hunters talking in between our throws about our pains. It's like, they are only just starting to creep in here this morning in late September but it's like the Santa Ana Winds the way I love you, gentle, warm, powerful and strong right into the eye of chaos, a fire in Malibu started by them, I grew up in a trailer on a burned down lot at the top of a hill in Malibu, and I love you like a fire in Malibu.

b u n n y h u n t e r

in florida once a few years ago i met this big blonde firearms enthusiast. she had a ridiculous name on her business card just above "firearms enthusiast" and she had a nice face and some hateful things to say that she seemed to be believing less and less. She was a youtube personality but it seems like she isn't anymore. her internet presence is gone. i said she seemed to be believing her talking points less and less because i could see the way her eyes would grow dull and sad as the hate left her mouth. and i would watch as she listened to things i said that were not centered around us and them. she listened and i knew there was a soul like mine, so deep away from all the surface materials. untouched, the soul. untouched the woman. her friend was on coke and losing it and she needed to take her home. a couple weeks later she asked me to follow her on twitter, and i didn't.

friday afternoon

I think about my old Jewish dad and his last girlfriend, Barbara. How she was a Mexican single mother many years younger than him. How he bought her pink gold jewelry at Costco and saved the receipts. How she called him her man and her amor.

I think about them laying in each other's arms in a hotel room in a beach resort in Cabo smelling like saltwater. I think about him as I lay with my beautiful girlfriend in my arms. How she and I caress and laugh and fuel a feeling of euphoria with our young strong bodies. I think about how grateful he was, to have that young love in his life one more time.

How they'd share a Subway sub. She was a social worker for the County and he was a mind doctor. How he kept trying to learn Spanish. And she showed him her favorite places in Oxnard where they both worked.

I think about his hairy chest when my girlfriend is up against my own hairy chest. And we are free from pain. The way our bodies move we become free from pain.

This roving pain.

organic kombucha

hey its me

hey its me the dusty boy

my parents were assholes so i sought the dirt

i was an animal and so i sought the dirt

i feel my hide

my dusty hide

ya know like those cows waiting out their lives on the side of the 5

stop at an in n out with a selection of lovers up and down the coasts like all the young people do

my girlfriend and i dragged ourselves into a mcdonalds

and she dipped her fries in my vanilla ice cream cones

on our ways back from santa cruz

i dont wish to raise me anymore

my parents were assholes

but they tried

i'm just a dusty boy

a worn thin hide

i'll chew on cud

i'll eat her fries

i'm just a crusty boy

alone alone alone not i

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

-You know how as you spend more and more time with something you are prone to losing your taste for that something as though the repeated contact between you and it leads to a greater loss of thermodynamic energy in your heart toward it as an entropy, a slow death, how it turns you cold? Well that never happens with pizza. If anything your affection grows, you start calling it baby names, you learn its nuances in shapes, moods, how to know when it’s your turn to do the dishes. We live together in a studio apartment and it doesn’t feel too small. It’s almost been a year.

-My boss, the manager at the pizzeria, found out I do stand-up comedy and now he thinks it’s funny to ask me if I’m going to kill myself, “Not yet” I tell him with a little less certainty each time. 

-Kids are being torn from their parents while slices of pizza are being torn from the whole by Father John Misty. He comes into my work at the pizzeria in a large, crisp, white button down shirt. He wears sunglasses with moody colored lenses. His friend is as handsome as he is, and they chat. Children are being torn from their parents. I was born on this side of the line, the last slice of pizza is grabbed on this side of the line. There are no easy answers. Father John Misty doesn’t say thank you for his pizza when I drop it on his table and I hate the President of the United States. The ignorant tribalism that buoys his power. But I dissociated from the zeal in which I hate him awhile ago. 

-Payless Shoes hurt your ankles and feet if you use them in ways they were never designed to be used, such as wearing them regularly to work.

-One night at the pizzeria I was telling my coworker about how my father died in my arms and how ten minutes after it happened a hummingbird flew into the house through the front door I had left open behind me but then the owner/chef of the pizzeria interrupted us and told me to get back to work because life in the city is about young money not old death. I shared this anecdote before on facebook but it is what I do. I try to tell the same stories over and over again until I don’t have to worry about them disappearing forever. So many memories hanging on by a thin thread these days, a lucky occurrence that draws them out of the depths of my forgetfulness and it’s too long to remember it all, so I tell these stories over and over again. All to be forgotten but I still tell them

-The manager at the pizzeria I work at is Argentinian but he goes out of his way to pronounce the Italian foods like and Italian in a mobster movie.  Prosciutto becomes Prrrrro-chuuuuu-toeeeeee-aaaa-mama-mia

-A mega successful film director comes into the pizzeria I work at almost every day and he orders the same thing every time, a marinara pizza, eggplant parmesan, and carafes full of red wine. I think is this it? Is this what I am working toward? The opportunity to dine alone like I always have but with more wine? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone with goblets of wine. I don’t. I don’t.

-It’s this town where the pizzeria I work at is, I like to blame this town. We’re all a few slices short of a whole. In my worst moods I dream of worse relations with North Korea. In my worst moods, I think that a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t be the worst thing if it took out all of humanity, only so that it was even. But that is only a brief flicker of thought from the powerlessness in being a single inconsequential person among a mass perversion of mankind and all its atrocities upon itself. It’s knowing love and fearing that all these systems mankind has in place are there to thwart love, and how exhausting it is to hold onto a belief in our time on this Earth. I don’t want a nuclear apocalypse, I want all the lovers in the world to live forever. 

-I am the prototypical build for a food runner in a pizzeria. I have long legs to stride across the restaurant, long arms to reach plates in and out of tables, and dead eyes so as not to disturb the customers from all the fun they’re having. You don’t want a Food Runner with a glow in his eyes, cuz then you wonder what he just did to your food. But dead eyes, dead eyes you can trust.

-You learn working in a pizzeria that the people you work with are mostly good. That the people you work with are all doomed cogs in a system that trades pennies for time and devalues our energy into a weak commodity meant to feed an impulse. I heard that it’s not fair to judge our pain in comparison to another’s pain because it is all relative, as though the system is only a facade for the down chemistry. I don’t know, I’ve starved a couple times for a couple days in my life and it’s easier to suffer with a little grease in my belly. I trudge up my steep hill late at night, up to our apartment, my final indignity I jokingly call it after circling my block and the surrounding ones for a parking spot. My tired bones, my eyes red with flour and dust, I am the pizza delivery guy, from kitchen to table and back and forth again, what I have learned is dispensable and gently disposed of as I close my eyes each night, in bed next to a lover I marvel at, smile with, laugh hysterically alongside of, discuss the day and how it rises and falls, how it changes, like a pizza pie-aaaaaaaaa!

"one morning this sadness will fossilize"

in the dream i had last night my dad had bought a tan all terrain toyota open air truck vehicle as a gift to himself before he died and my brother drove it with him in the front and we were high on a hill overlooking some stunning water city that we drove down into and i was sobbing in the backseat sobbing at the prospect of him leaving me and i wanted him to see cuz i dont think i showed him enough how torn up i was cuz i didn't want him to think giving up was an option and i was wrong to think that tears were giving up but for a time it worked for a time we called him iron mike even though he was actually just a gentle sadist

the walkstreets

I dunno

What do you mean you dunno

I thought about my old landlord fred and his jealous boyfriend. those two men living in a venice bungalow with their dogs and that one who died, toast.

The dead dogs name was Toast.

Sayrogate

https://vimeo.com/265277861

the brothers turek

https://vimeo.com/265277861

sio my lover

1. This is the joke we had after leaving the Shake Shack near Central park:

"Excuse me, do you know how to get to the Shake Shack near Central Park?"

2. Yeah you just go through the side entrance of the Natural History Museum and wander the science center unable to figure out how to get to the top of the walking curving timeline of the Universe exhibit so one of you goes the opposite direction (starting from 13.7 billion years into) while

3. the other one of you takes the elevator to the top of the exhibit but somehow ends up above it and unable to enter through the theater that leads out and onto the beginning of time and so frustrated meets you back near the second floor restrooms that you both use and then

3. continue wandering the animals of North America exhibit intrigued that there are indeed jaguars in the deserts of Mexico or something and then both of you go have a seat next to the Teddy Roosevelt statue and engage in mutual existential crises while both soothing and

4. falling apart in front of one another until you are ready to wander through the natives of the Pacific Northwest exhibit and somehow be sad and scared for and the native ways of life gone and the cries they might be playing over the loud speakers or imagined so you

5. hold each other close, closer than you already are holding each other close and you realize that you don't have the patience or legs for this museum anymore that you donated five dollars each to enter cuz you both realized once you got to Brooklyn that you we both

6. were broke and panicked but happy and panicked and happy so happy as you got out of the museum on the other side and started walking and across the street from the near the northwest corner was a Shake Shack and everything about that sounded good both the shake and the implication that

7. a shack would be a place of affordability if not nothing else and so you both went and ordered and oh how I wish I could remember the flavors we got but somehow I know she knows if I just ask her her memory is like a sponge and we felt like sponges walking in the humid heat

8. filling ourselves with cold thick sugary dairy through two straws trying each others milkshakes and wandering back into Central Park as we saw a man eyeing our shakes and we imagined how we would tell people our directions to the Shake Shack from there like the ways we just mentioned

it's quiet

A crow squawks, “Hear that? Those are my children.” my mom says from her bed in the living room of a Seattle apartment. My little sister tells me my mom feeds the crows peanuts from the window next to her bed. That she dislodges the window screen to do it. 

I am up here for the first time in my life. My mom and little sister moved here six months ago. My mom found out she had breast cancer two months ago. Stage 0, the best of the worst case. She had a double mastectomy yesterday. I drove her home today, “Home sweet home.” she said when she climbed into bed, a dozen pillows awaiting her.

The surgery went well. “What size breast did they give me?” she asked not long after we were able to see her.

We were talking about moms on the phone and I told my girlfriend my mom gives me creativity. That when I am shut off toward her, it shuts me off from a source of chaos and wonder that has fostered me in many ways. It’s amazing to feel so many ways toward a person as if splintered through a prism of thousands of sides existing in different times.

My upbringing was strange and chaotic and full of a lot of dramatics masquerading as love and a lot of love true to itself as simple love. My upbringing was at the four hands of two separate people doing the best they could with themselves as they were giants in my mind and sorcerers in my heart. Gone and present shifting and rarely interlocking and gone and present.

And now here I am drawing closer toward middle age while watching my mother sleep in an apartment near a city I don’t know while feeling full of despair about my lifelong pursuits and a relentless gnawing energy toward them anyway. I am talking about art or the bastardized versions of  the art that I practice or don’t.

When my mom got out of surgery she said her “throat was dry like the frickin Sahara desert.” When my dad got out of surgery three years ago he took all the cords and tubes in front of him and he said “spaghetti.” When my mom got out of surgery she mentioned my father was funny. It was one of two things both my parents would agree about of my father, that he was funny and that he was great at putting in an I.V.

Drugged, before her surgery yesterday morning sitting before me in a pre-surgery room with no cell phone service my mom told me it wasn’t just selfishness that informed her reasoning for having six kids it was also that she wanted to make us out of love and joy.

-Josh Turek

feb 28, 2018

orange light

my sister had a husband and she was so nervous when they first lived together that every morning she would wake up early and walk to a nearby coffee shop to use the restroom. and one night at christmas dinner they told us about this and how they didn't do this anymore. how they were comfortable they told us.

i haven't been married. i haven't had kids. i haven't been involved in any accidental pregnancies. i only recognize that i am becoming more of an exception when i speak with old friends. for my showbiz pals i am right on schedule, delayed, now moving on schedule in things.

i still find nights to stay out late and still put myself out there in vulnerable places to try to stretch the bounds of my creation. i still have energy and it is troubling and it wastes plenty of time realizing how it's both trying to outrun death and remain humbled toward its inevitability.

life, what a difficult proposal inherent within itself for a human being. not a novel thought, the ones who think about it a bit, know this thought. and yet we go. and yet we go. and yet we go.

not too far.

oh how grief shifts our minds

I dreamt I took acid on a bus and drew my brother

I guess for awhile it became my calling to be filled with vapors for the antagonists.

Scratch that, it was my breeding that lead me down such a path. Scratch that, it's my back, you scratch mine and I'll scratch yours. See. That is the difference now, you see. How I am able to receive giving and soak up loving and not drive myself nuts draining myself into that acidic state beyond loving, yeah, loving.

Oh yeah, now we're rolling.

parental guidance

I talk to my mom about her breasts for an hour on the phone cuz that's where the cancer is.

The doctor says if she has to have it than this is the type to have, slow moving, doesn't appear to be spread.

I took my girlfriend up to the land I grew up on with my mom when we lived in a trailer for those few long years with no electricity in our trailer except for that 3 pronged extension cord our kind Catholic neighbors ran down to us through one of our sliding windows. And there is a real house on foundation there now and a few big mature trees that took me a second to realize were the same once small slender trees my mom had planted in that intricate garden all those years ago.

She would order the plants out of a paper book catalogue.