franklin canyon the 2nd time

she said, josh, "i love you." in her french accent. it was late night on the red bricked stairs outside her front door in beverly hills. she was set to leave to paris for the summer. we were not lovers. she was a beautiful french woman and i watched her two little boys. we'd play basketball, skateboard, soccer, and they'd swear at me like brothers should. it was a job that saved me for awhile, from loneliness and financial ruin. she'd cook us dinners and usually give me more of her ex husband's money at the end of the night than we'd agree upon.

i talk with steve about the homeless epidemic after bumping into each other in the library surrounded by homeless people. i am a few thousand dollars away but i talk about it like an observer. for now i am. he is a working actor who spends his free days weaving in and out of the same places i do, like the library, we are both searching but neither of us knows where to go to find it. somehow he and i became trapped into the same design in this part of town for this time.

i told her i loved her back, and did. she was a wild hearted aunt, a forbidden fruit borne out of our mutual desperation for decency. the rest of the world and our lives could be indecent and so we wouldn't be that way together. a silent agreement that neither of us ever spoke of, no matter the flattery we'd hurl into each other's red cheeks. she had those european cigarettes imported in by a guy she knew, lighter, fragrant, with the grisly photographic warnings plastered on em. at the end of many nights, we'd smoke em and talk about our disappointments, the boys would be asleep, and it would just be us until we'd say goodbye to go be with just ourselves.

tremors

We were on the Malibu Pier eating the best cinnamon roll of our lives when the 4th of July earthquake wobbled the damn thing. The employees ran out and looked over the edge into the water, so we knew it wasn't a usual movement from the waves or anything. I had once read a book about how Survivors are those who recognize danger and don't remain in status quo when things go wrong, if they can help it, so my girlfriend Siobhan told me to grab some to-go boxes and we hurried off to some nearby rocks on the shore to finish our food. 

In one of the boxes we had piled both our plates high into it and in the other was our cinnamon roll. She had woken up that morning wanting a cinnamon roll and there on that pier and then in that box, was their last one. A splendid cinnamon roll. It had, the cinnamon roll, like a salted caramel cream cheese topping and the bun was still warm when we bit back into it on the shore. 

I remember the 1994 Northridge Quake, I was a Southern California kid who'd already experienced a few of them, so as I went flying up and down in my bed, I remembered thinking "I hope I remember to tell my parents about this in the morning" but they came running down the hallway to share the experience right then and there. They were still married running across a long hallway, that long pier where my girlfriend and I now ran, to our cinnamon roll, my parents to their kids. We went outside, my sister had friends sleeping over because of the Monday holiday, all of us in our sleeping shirts standing on the grass staring up at the stars, aftershocks, it feeling foreign and devastating and exciting.

We spent this 4th of July with my friend Morgan and his wife and their new baby and his family on their beach, laying there and bodysurfing, ash from last years' Malibu wildfires drifting among us in snaking clumps of debris atop the green water, a riptide nagging at us here and there, smiling, a bunch of smiling wet faces we all were. I felt happy, I felt disoriented, I felt like a kid who'd just been in an earthquake.

the ex girlfriend who i helped make a millionaire

some time after i'd given her the idea that made her a millionaire but some time before she gave me nothing for it, i had asked my ex girlfriend on the phone about all the devastating places where she had taken photographs for $600 - $1,000 a day. all the red cross tents and shelters, samoa, mississippi, haiti, i had asked her if any of the survivors had ever described the horrible acts of nature that had wiped out the very foundations of their lives, as beautiful. had they ever remarked on the terrible forces of nature as beautiful. and she said no

A Suspension of How Things Often Were

Mama I ain't alone

Mama I quit that whole sad act routine

Mama I found a love that lasted longer than either of us know what to do with

And so, Mama, we just keep doing it

And it feels damn good Mama

I'll try to call you back one of these days too

dang construction

Sitting in my parked car listening to Charles Barkley on the Colin Cowherd sports radio program saying not to worry about what people think of you if you’re rich, talented, or good looking, with $87 worth of groceries in the backseat of my car melting (frozen cherries melting) and feeling very good about the present and my future as 

(we got $5 cash in the mail today to take a survey for USC asking questions like how we do feel about our future prospects?) 

and it got me thinking about my future prospects  

And I told Siobhan to keep the $5 cuz she was the one who opened the envelope and I wouldve thrown it away and - most importantly - 

I felt like I owed her 5 

and then she said she felt like she owed me 5 

and isn’t that part of what love is about right there 

you both feeling like you owe the other one for making each other’s lives at least five dollars better