5am

I wonder how many bodies are buried in the Playa Del Rey Wetlands. I wander, my heart, we're a bunch of wandering hearts searching and scanning like security alarms. Earlier on the radio, that Puerto Rican kid on This American Life made an afternoon car ride with a woman I did not love, evident. He sang, danced, blushed for an undercover cop, while this stoic woman and I had nothing but a bedroom. She was nicer after sex, usually. She left to shower. I laid in bed naked, then put my underwear on. She sat down and agreed with my earlier overture to talk. Then those tears left her eyes and I was staring in the mirror, captivated by the veins running through my forearms, wild and active as she eradicated me from her time and future. I was interested. Putting one sock on at a time as she wanted something serious. A Converse sneaker falling apart, while she knew what her feelings should have been. That it wasn't me, despite the way her body would shake and thrash under mine, she couldn't let herself caress me with a genuine adoration. I had this point later on at dinner with friends; that the intensity of our physical attraction only highlighted the deficiencies in our interests of each other and thus perpetuated the absence of an emotional tenderness that neither of us was interested in giving.

I speak like an English professor when I get drunk.

I agreed. My heart was thin. Women my age were misaligned. We had nothing in common. She didn't want to be there for me, it was intentional she said. Her energy was heavy and Nordic. I was not nearly as captivated by data as I was a story. An L.A. guy stringing along unpromising sex for his own Ego, keep pleasuring her, drive home all that affection gentle and thunderous, all that affection you have nowhere else to go, because she'd come deeply over and over again onto you, soak under your touch and you'd hold onto her arms and head and neck while she jerked and contorted almost seizure-like, soaking wet, you bringing this to her and knowing it can't go on but taking in the temporary cure, while available. You, knowing with the end, that a two week fling before departure and a two week fling after an arrival, are two very different circumstances, even if they belonged to the same two people.

I walked across the street to my car. Wondered if any of the different drivers stopping at the light were perceiving me and if they cared. Because it felt like I was being watched, with fresh-shaven after-glow flushed cheeks and the calm certitude in my stride that sometimes a goodbye is the best answer to greeting a recognizeable freedom. Janis Joplin sang Bobby McGee in my ear. "Freedom's just another word for, nothing left to lose." She had been listening to Janis Joplin a few days ago, on the phone, wanting me to come over. But I was tired, tired of her, and the act and she said I could sense things like no one else she'd ever met, except herself.

Whiskey. Wine. Oily Almonds. Friends. Prawns. Ravioli with dripping egg yolk inside. Music. Laughter. Marijuana from a vaporizer. Fish. Conversation lively and flawed. Every human interaction has its imperfections and they are supposed to be this way. They have to be imperfect, so be gentle on the memory. I slept on their couch beneath their loft bedroom. They slept with the television on. I folded the blanket. Freshened up. Went outside, my blood on fire, no perception of the actual temperature. Started my car. Drove past those wetlands and numberless bodies buried beneath the swamp.

She never asked about my dad. I made sure to include that. I didn't want a shoulder to cry on, only noticed that she was cold. Then she cried more. Explained it was intentional. Why were those tears streaming like spilling buckets down her face like that? Relief from getting away? Already? I'd hardly known anyone less and my feelings weren't hurt. I was in agreement. I was fine. Why was she crying so hard? What did she want from me? Who was she trying to console? Was she weeping for fear of her own uncertain life to come? Why did she get in touch with me in the first place? Lips like hers could find a man anywhere. I was fine. Putting one article of clothing on at a time. Stepping out into a world of potential, with a cure.

Later, I had made the responsible choice of sleeping on that couch. Sleeping it off. Passing the wet burial grounds. Lincoln. Arriving home and having art installation dream photographs. A moon made of little tiles, rotating, composed of all these little tiles, equal urine yellow. And I was alive.

getty

"That's fine, because I don't want to have babies with you either." she said, before they made love again.

Pagan Fairytales

I remember being wavy in a bar in San Francisco texting Jeff, that intoxication was all about getting to the smile. One of the old men at the cafe said today, "so often our very first memory, seems to be initiated by a traumatic recollection." He read me my horoscope and told me, I am.

I am.

That's my statement. I am hewed of anything that I am unable to carry. I am imagining a malarial jungle. An orange juice factory teeming with exotic spiders. The keeper of a time capsule buried in an unproduced script I once wrote.

Lincoln Blvd

and i can feel it changing. the heater on all night, dragging myself out of bed, skateboarding in the dark to another job down lincoln. music in my earphones, the click clacking of the skateboard to uneven curb ridges, i remembered people and things and i could feel a present again. i was so elated to feel the present, i wanted to write. but this, this is day time, i'm going home now to do just that. several dark mornings ago a woman named lisa came into the cafe soaked in rum. lisa had been bulldozed off the 300 block of rose to make way for progress. she was a dj, a shamaness, an energy healer and i believed her. she showed me the ayahuasca wrapped in paper towels. and her high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes gave away the southern california girl stayed too long, not that she was afraid to tell me just that. i replied not to be sad, that change is good. let's go. let's leave to mexico or detroit, some place where the rich people are too afraid to follow. or i can find my way back to paris, god dammit i want to be in paris again. and this morning when i got to work, the coffee tasted like a woman. i thought about about women all morning, like i do most mornings. the music played. etta james, louis armstrong, edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros. and they all got me thinking, that with some people, some of us just live beautiful, while together.

My Nebraska

Video by Britt Warner. Song and Lyrics by FWB.

Muddled

My footsteps echoed instead down neighborhood streets, my breath materializing beneath the thin lit night. It wasn't love but an opportunity for a warm winter. And I was rather gone in the unknown.

The other morning there was this beautiful preface, one of those tiny intro paragraphs starting the story one way, only to unexpectedly change humorously. It was about a young man and the world of love and how the immeasurable swell opens up previously overlooked doorways and larger, larger, expands everything that is known so much so that a brilliant evolution occurs. Then, however, it was with much dismay that this same young man's time in that spectacular world was about to conclude. And he was to begin.

I was reading the Brothers Karamazov when my own trio was thrown into disarray with a crime. I'd never encountered a re-questioning of trust prior, but its happened and now I know why it leaves people in such disarray. Reality, you learn, is prone to illusion. But I'm not talking about illusion in that grand metaphysical sense that lights two people up when they can relate similar terms about the spiritual and invisible together. I'm talking about the day to day, year to year, slow-drawn illusion where trusted notions are not black and white by any means but where, with time and our own wishes, we can still be utterly, vacantly, polarized and then fooled. The act is not the magician's alone, but belonging equally to those with present attention and hope.

What I mean to say, is that I've been walking. The soles of my Converse are tearing from the rest of their shoe, almost like an acknowledgement that they belong to the street. I have been alone more than anyone I don't know. I walk and observe these little bundles of marvel apporating in the scenery and in myself. Then I either let them go or figure out how to share them in some tangible metaphor but a lot gets lost in the initial process and then even further disappears in the attempt to actually bring it to another. Occasionally, I can sprinkle the gold dust of the experience to where it lights up again. And I live for these occasions.

But Venice is getting ruined like San Francisco and every time they call it Silicon Beach I want to blow up the world and I am a hypocrite because I use Gmail and this very stupid blog is of that service and eventually if given the opportunity I would live in something contemporary in these neighborhoods but not because of any boutique or industry but because I put my ear to this place and listen and climb the coral tree late at night and detect the subtle changes in atmosphere and pick up trash from the beach every morning and it's really, what it really is, is that it's different because I have had and lost and had and lost and when you lose enough of your life living in a place you tend to take an ownership of the location because it's the place that cradles you, it's the place that communicates with you when no one else will or when no one else knows to and it can happen quick or through time but it can happen and then you know yourself in a distinct way and you are someone who can not be mapped or bought or written about and you can call yourself home.

*Apporation is a mystic skill used to summon an object vocally, as it disappears and reappears in hand. Harry Potter Wiki

Motor Ave

I let my name go. Then my history. Everything fell there onto the sand. I imagined this blank canvas of a form, one spirited mannequin, opened my eyes and it could've been gone. The blue lines crystal cut, small ripples travelling, the sight before my eyes a heaven prior to the association.

Nights ago, my friends and I held hands to pray, sort of as an indulged joke, but afterwards I couldn't wipe the smile from my face.

You can't go searching for one person in a town composed of everyone. It makes no sense. I get so flawed at times but I can still feel myself leaving anger behind. And it's beautiful. There is everyone, they are all around, kinda magnificent even if you encounter an unsettling character or two. They've been unsettling lately and the lessons are louder that way but troubling all the same.

Baggage don't just come in bags.

This girl, my friend's roommate, she scared us both. She had exited belief awhile ago and was one strawberry margarita into a diatribe on, not humanity, but each individual human and their lack of redemption. I ate guacamole intent on getting her to feel improved. Patient. Because it's felt like no one around me is feeling good these days. Feel good. Feel good! She hated everything, everyone, us, contempt. Independent of me or an HBO series found disagreeable or an accidental overdose on anti-depressants or confronting this and its end, feel good! I had my own basket of tortilla chips, asked the waiter if he had change for a twenty and he offered me it in cents, two dimes, we laughed. I'll take a canned joke over an original critique. Fuck, I drank a shot of Patron like it was the origin of a tomorrow.

You wake up greet a new day like an unfolding page or a tsunami wave but a moment all the same. The way it mostly holds steady is amazing.

I'm one of these dumb suckers who believes this attempt is worth something of cosmic value. I know it's dumb but I feel it. I feel it. These last few months, I couldn't tell you how I made it through intact. I want to tell someone but the words are beyond a friendly interaction and I'm not sure if I'd be seeking sympathy or clarity. It's like, if you can manage to handle all the psychic pain, then it becomes very personal. Then the pain becomes a privacy in a wide open day and age. And I don't remember if that kid ran into my car before all this or during it. But he was fine, wearing a helmet, shaken up. We all find grace. I think we all search for an element of grace to ballet dance upon our inevitable agony. But there is no need to worry, no need to search, we all have the grace already, all of us are inborn with grace. Trust me. I had this thought awhile back, how everything exists in a state of peace and that's why violence, tragedy, natural disaster, is an event. The bad stuff is an event, because existence is dominantly good.

Even to dissect a single moment, you'd discover a dominant peacefulness amongst the minuscule pains.

It's all a wonder, for those of us dumb enough to try. It's all a wonder.

5:03 with a play count of 34 times in itunes

leaving my bed, i move quickly, imagining only twelve seconds to find a heat source before petrification occurs. my apartment is so cold in the mornings.

who would find me frozen in place?

old ghosts thrive on this time of year. i see them in my neighborhoods. i hear their silken whispers curling from my radio pores. but i'm not going on dates with them anymore. i am on my own, this body, form, blazing new trails and scorching the present with alacrity, even amidst the bleak.

yesterday i made a joke about my preoccupation with death and a love of life, even if i don't quite know what to do with it all the time, life. i love life.

i wish i could tell you what i'm working on. 

it's a seasonal thing, understand? the leaves are off the trees. even, here.

At All Defiant Risk - yesterday

We have this tendency to empty our lives of all the people and activities except for the bare essentials, my brothers and sisters and I. There is a baby crying inside this Echo Park library. An immigration pamphlet warns that the wrong help can hurt. This golf pro giving a lesson on television once cautioned that left to our own devices we sometimes master our own mistakes. I bring up the way my siblings and I clean out our lives because an upbringing without dirt makes a child prone to weakened immunity. Though we are strong, grown in soil, I'll give us that. A powerful constitution still bends amidst a hurricane. Last night, nothing was wrong, but I laid in bed absolutely terrified at the thought of life. I'd been trying everything I knew, all the tricks, profundities, philosophies I'd intuitively known and learned to get through this storm, while protecting and evading connection with anyone and their horrors, all those horrors that another person can bring, but it didn't work. We have to hug. I'm not just talking about romance. We have to look someone else in the eyes, hear their breathing, share something sensory.

garden of eden

"The young man put his arms around the girl and held her very tight to him and felt her lovely breasts against his chest and kissed her on her dear mouth. He held her close and hard and inside himself he said goodbye and then goodbye and goodbye. 'Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all' he said and his heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye."