san seabass

hillcrest

the old man rose from his chair got halfway across the room then forgot why he had. "oh well, guess i don't need it then."

nearby, his son thought about how when our memories abandon us, at least we still have the strength of character to forget about it.

the festival of music

I first went to Paris 6 years ago. I had been paid $4,500 for a screenplay option and I felt incredibly rich. Before then I had always told myself I'd be a cliche and go write in Paris with my first writing check, and I lived up to this very pleasurable promise. It was a magic time where I met magic French kids who danced with me and took me to parties in empty apartments and festive bars as music played on every street corner during the Festival of Music. I remember reading an email from my dad that he had gone to a Dodgers game and witnessed a brawl, he was checking in on me and laughing about some youtube videos I had made about a disgruntled German boy who only notices the industrial elements beneath the Eiffel Tower. This was months before my dad told us he had the pancreatic cancer which two long years later would claim his life. It was a few years before my mom was diagnosed with the breast cancer that she would kick at a heavy cost on an island away from home. My girlfriend and I have been here in Paris for six days now and it is a gorgeous time. One of love and interest, conversation and taste. We used our tax returns in February to buy the tickets. We made that money the long slow hard way. This city now, it's a magic but a different one. Gray has entered my beard and some regions of my heart. Her and I met in the later throes of our own separate tragedies and have done so well to thrive through em during and since. But Paris now has morbid edges I didn't see six years ago, and yet it is still magic, a passionately intimate one with my lover and also a slow and thoughtful one that requires me to look my self in the face and recognize change. We have no wifi where we are staying, so now I sit at a nearby bistrot scrolling through my instagram feed,noticing how all my old friends are now pregnant and raising kids, where six years ago I used to be one.

oct 20, 2019

how the bright flowered mattress topper from india cheered up our bed

i know i am about to fall asleep when the voices in my head aren't my own. like newscasters being turned up on a dial. fragmenting in and out of the static that is being awake. each night i go to sleep with a little less hope than i used to have but with a little more peace and quiet in my soul because of it. you kids turn off that racket, hope. i can feel the days bleeding into one another like the old folks used to warn. nightly episodes of a re-rerun public broadcasting television show, lo-fi, outdated, tired and inquisitive, aging and living a number of days is like my body is rick steves in europe. speaking of which, we used our tax returns from last year to buy a couple cheap flights back in february. gonna go try to breathe a few new days in october and november.

whose fault its not

any of the jobs that have paid me too little to wear down my feet and knees.

the colleges i never tried to attend but that now in hindsight reek of opportunity.

the people who never answered my query emails.

my mom and dad. i let them off the hook. run. run. before i change my mind.

the famous screenwriter who yelled at me when i was 19 trying to get a read.

the magic of what i felt when i did it and did it well.