ordinarily

i go snowshoeing across past terrain beneath snowstorms. i wear a vr headset and stare at a spacescape dotted with emotions. ride in my car listening to knx 1070 news radio like a detective to a case i wasn't asked to solve. crawling through canyons of my youth all the while nursing a wound. topanga canyon you were supposed to be my gold mine. up in those hills where we hid in the sage dust holding paintball guns. i was shot, it bruised my skin. i'd get stomach aches from oreo cookies and run up and down the steep hills to the toilet. victoria secret magazines and my mom's lesbian erotica sitting on the linoleum floor. 

i was supposed to be somebody. i remember her telling me she just knew i would, just knew how special i would become. she says it, less and less, now when i bring myself up, seeing the way the light goes in and out of me like it never used to do. 

i used to be more slender, used to carry an unrealized weight, disturbed and fathoming the beautiful. i was always scratching and clawing my way into the beautiful, and i did, i did find it, so often i would have to remind myself how beautiful it was. 

sometimes i wonder if this blog is the only true thing ive done, and whether the internet will house it much longer. 

i am sorry, is all i want to say sometimes to nobody in particular, to those i've hurt, to the ones programmed to believe it's necessary to feel hurt always about someone and something. 

when my mom followed her therapist into those hills up las flores canyon, we went with her there too. we learned that we were never enough, that the ground will slide away from us until one morning our road is washed away. we learned our dad would show up every tuesday and thursday, every other weekend, we learned how to shake him down for twenty bucks and he taught us that the uncomfortable distance would be fine for awhile. 

if i could go back in time i would show up there just to say i didn't want to be there, like a boy who sits in the corner of the party staring at his phone because his eyes don't feel up to the task of meeting another pair without a guarantee they will care.

it was her who taught us we were animals. my siblings believe themselves to be gods, planetary something or others, and i just see us like animals. snuck out of cages, packing crates, escaped from the circus to roam the same fucking land we first dropped out onto with primitive dreams to storytell. 

so here's one:

when my girlfriend and i first started hiking together she would say how i looked like the earth, i would joke, the dirt. her and i climbed up to a waterfall and sat on a stone in front of it bringing each other to pleasure. years later we climbed up another one and watched little birds in a nest creviced into the stone wall of a cave. the little birds waiting to be fed, the mother dashing in and out doing so, trying to do so. 

est 2009

if u go back to writing of mine on here 10 years ago

u will read someone who assumed he would eventually be read

but now this guy me isnt so certain

certain they will find me
certain they need to find me
certain i need to find them

my girlfriend in the other room laughing deep and hard to her friend on the phone
finding each other

lost numbers

sitting here every day waiting for the grim news of the world to change. firing reactions from my information box. spinning on the notion maybe it's time for me to revolution turn. i go out into my front yard and sit there sweating in the sun for 11 minutes. sweat trickles like little bugs on my neck rolling down my forehead. i accept that i am my enemies. i am the loudest voices in my head, my regrets, the breeze of the winds, the breeze from my neighbor's cars driving past, eyes closed, eyes closed to the world for minutes it's easier to see where neither of us end and begin

fred the landlord

my brother and i watched a man die together.

that man just so happened to be our father.

there were other witnesses.

it's just none of them inched as close to the wreckage as my brother and i did.

we were so close the medicine was in our blood.

the port was in our chests.

you may not believe me.

when my father was sick with cancer my brother went to the ER more times than he did, suffering from many symptoms but ultimately a broken heart.

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my brother and i lived together for much of our 20s. i spent my 20s living in venice beach where i learned nothing. there with my brother. hanging on for dear life and goofing off, fighting the sounds of leaf blowers and barking dogs.

i remember the first day we moved in he asked me now what. i told him this is where we grab our laptop and go to the coffee shop. and that's what we did. that's what he did, still does.

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my brother and i lived in santa monica together in our early 20s. the lady next door hated us because we acted hateable.

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we used to make our family laugh at the dinner table. my brother eats his piece of meat like a caveman. i follow, a clueless monkey savage. grunting, tearing at the meat. family roaring in laughter, the only scary way to take that razor blade of borderline emotions running through the house and juggle swords with it.

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he brought me back to my dad. said my dad missed me. gave me money. how our family never could speak directly until we were old enough to fail at it ourselves. the middle man. a middle child who has always been able to see through our parents.

---

how to be strong. my brother and i, we are always looking for ways to be strong, even smart as we are to recognize the inevitability of a weakness

in the garden of citrus

Dark Comedy in the Pandemic

a handwritten letter

Dear April,

How are you? What a time to be alive, eh? I hope this email finds you well and in good health. Mental, physical, spiritual, any kind of health, as I realize that we can't always have all of em at once, all the time.

Thank you for commissioning this letter. It's meant a lot to me, knowing I have to do something. Now, the fear of having to do something! 

You asked me to say something about siblings, what a subject. Do you have any siblings? I have a bunch of them and as I now (today in fact) firmly hit my middle 30s, it's been amazing as even the most ironclad bonds with my own have melted over and over again only to find new attachments. 

Mathematics says that our longest relationships in a natural lived life, are with these people born of our people (or raised alongside of us), those blessed monsters afflicted with the same issues and plagued oftentimes by the same DNA as ourselves, navigating outward while speaking the same emotional language, or something similar. Scraps, second hand clothes, talking til we fell asleep, walking to school, fighting, waiting for our mom, sacrificing, teaching, talking, misleading, getting drunk and high together, going to meetings later down the road together, grieving together, living, acting like magnets circling and repelling and attracting when we've needed it, as children, teens, and adults.

My mom said that none of us grew up under the same roof, that's true. All told I have five sisters and two brothers. A few of us are in the same territory of life, what we want out of it, how we've chosen to go about it, but largely we are all different. We all have a similar sense of humor, look, disposition, tendency toward gloom but even how we go about these things is uniquely our own. I sometimes wonder if we who we are can be traced to the origin gaps fought over and left to us by our siblings. That we push and pull and merge to chisel our behaviors out of the same raw material in hopes of finding an identity that suits ourselves. To make one of oneself distinct and remote enough to strike a tone of independence, yet interrelated and familiar enough to maintain bonds with those we love. What about an only-child? I would reckon they'd compensate by applying this same thing to guardians, relatives, friends, more intensely. My dad said I started eating faster the more kids that showed up. Calorie competition. I ended up the tallest, so I guess I won? Although, I've heard it's not good for later in life health to be too tall, so maybe not? 

It's also been interesting as the luster of youth gets stripped away, how each of our charms become a bit more fixed and less charming. How without the sheen of potential and suggestion of growth that youth provides, I am forced to confront that these people I grew up with are not on some pathway toward self idealization and neither am I. Family, so conditioned to view one another in such narrow perspective to maintain emotional order in who we ourselves are, valuable reference points we all serve to one another, until we swerve. I've noticed it with my siblings toward me too, how I am viewed as who I am to them but also given less patience if I turn to agonizing over the same old things I always have, or behave in ways I always have.   

Today is my 35th birthday. My siblings have called and texted me then started talking about themselves. The one whose birthday it is, becomes most importantly a listener to those doing the happy birthday wishing. I wouldn't have it any other way, I don't think. All told, my greatest illuminations, multiplications, lessons of self have been alongside and through my siblings. It's been a brilliant safeguard to learn and practice learning with people who ultimately will allow more leeway than anyone else out there. Sure there have been falling outs, silent cold harsh periods, arguments, creative dissolutions, disagreements about our parents, and all the rest of the dramas, but there has been love, and care, and someone to play with most of the time. A bond, a terrible one that exists even after all the breaks, where the invisible threads snap and still something remains implanted and communicative. What a difficult proposition being a human, how much nicer to have a few going through it with us, siblings, parents, relatives, friends, authors, performers, musicians, just people.

It's times like these (unifying surreal conflicts) my attention centers in on how important people are to one another. After enough bad experiences where the world just keeps on going, there has been something profound about everyone having to more or less slow down for each other. In the midst of all that we clash about, it is still only us, and I hope we can find our way through. It's a lot to ask of a bunch of billions of people I don't know or even necessarily tend to like, but I like to believe in a larger thing that doesn't take into much account my pettiness. 

I've spent my day with a low pulse, relaxing and eating with my girlfriend. We went hiking the other day behind the mountains where my siblings and I grew up for a time, and her and I picked up some allergies that have lingered the past few days. Back when we were kids up there, we didn't know we had allergies even if we had them. It was an extreme part of our childhood. We lived a few years in a trailer with no electricity above the ocean up in Malibu with our mom, it was wild and strange and returning to it a few days ago under the same energy of newly bizarre circumstances felt whole. I remember so vividly how we'd run around the foundations of burned down homes, barefoot and aimless, skateboarding in empty pools, sleeping on our trampoline in the summertime and how the other day my girlfriend and I laid on a picnic table high up there, alone, where my feral siblings and I used to roam, and still in my mind, do.

I hope this finds you well and staying sane and feeling all right out there.

All the best,

Josh

*during the Covid-19 quarantine*

lil somethin

Don't you go there

little old dreams

new ones

ones where i spoke honest

with peace 

with peace