walking home

At night the palm trees are ink blot silhouettes against wax paper sky beneath the streetlamp moon as I make jokes about yuppies in my head and Janis Joplin intones "you're out on the street lookin good but baby deep down in your heart..." And I can choose the past present future or I can just allow the beauty.

shining on my knees

The numbers are solving and collecting themselves in one long formula and we are them. Divided, multiplied, added, and subtracted. The equation is always finding miniature resolutions within the larger. I don't know enough about math to get into this subject with any depth of know-how, but the numeric likeness to the way we live our lives is becoming more and more evident. It's obvious that I am rolling through the violence of finding an answer and so are the people next to me. And maybe it's why we had to learn algebra in school.

Aunt of the Bride

I watched the people dancing. Shimmying. I imagined a matronly in-law waving me over to the dance floor to nurse a song or two. You've seen it before. Two lonely hearts at vastly different points of their reproductive years, defying predicament together. The two of us, generations apart, dancing together in lively unison at a wedding. One unlucky in love duo showing friends and family a glint of optimism despite it all. That all we have is the moment.

There she is. She is, big hair, big jewelry, big dress. And it is happening. She is asking me to dance with her, offering the aforementioned opportunity to throw caution to the wind. Let me start by saying, I am not that easy. I will not go quietly into mass movement. I have my limits where mutual motion is involved. Which is why I'm first refusing her with a smile and side to side head shake like "no, better not". Not tonight. Like I'm charming or something. But Surprise, Surprise. She, the matronly in-law, is not easily dissuaded. She responds without hesitation and waves again. Like, get over here mister! It's only just begun. There is an engine on this woman. She is throwing everything at me but the kitchen sink. Her focus is zeroed in. She is the Washington Wizards version of Michael Jordan and I am the long retired Toni Kukoc. She is casting a dazzling spell with mustered torso gyrations and still-got-it hip thrusts, albeit limited in their range of motion these days but still potent. Potent in the way they draw authority from the eye. Watching her amplify her sexuality from the near-bottom floor of post-menopause, is almost like being involved in miracle. A resuscitation not unlike CPR in an episode of Baywatch. I can't precisely explain the phenomena. It's almost like the stacked against cards of her diminishing biology seem to imply a gigantic reason to indulge a lady, or G-d. But I have my reasons. I'm stubborn too. I've told you that. I will not go quietly into mass movement. I've told you that. I'm cooly responding to her by miming that it's very much appreciated but still a no-go. And I'm almost sorry on the inside. I'm almost sorry.

It should be over soon.

Then it turns. She decides to play dirty. She's winning over the crowd's attention. Their faces are like floating masks. Indigenous floating masks of festive island people. Like the discombobulating movements of insects. A fluid cavalcade. A wasp's nest broken open and spilled outward. Their warped expressions communicating assuredly that I'll soon be joining them. It's only a matter of time. She is the de facto queen, by virtue of her energy, and I am a flower, by virtue of my roots. What a woman. She is brash and confident. She is pushing all of her chips into the pot. It's all in. Checkmate. I am cornered. I am as good as hooked. She is sauntering towards me like, c'mon, it's just one song!

The final move is grace, and desperate, and perfection. She is Hawaiian luau side-stepping between the tables and never missing a beat to the music. It's all in harmony with the wedding universe. Two forces must meet and now she is inevitably close enough to me that she's bridging our distance with an outstretched hand, nails done, about to arrive on my arm. And me, I can hear myself. It sounds like someone else but it's coming from deep inside. I know this to be true. Rattling my lungs. Altering my foot sweat. I'm yelling, way too loud for privacy but defiantly angry, NO! I said NO! What don't you understand about that?! Before I know what's happening I'm yelling NO!

And me, I'm standing there. It's silent. You could hear a cuff link drop. As men do in movies, I'm buttoning my blazer buttons, top and bottom, and then unbuttoning the lower one. I am not Don Draper. I am looking around like, the gall of some people. And she is, she is crouched and side-stepping away, wounded. And me, me I'm withdrawing a comb out of my back pocket and brushing my used car salesman head of hair. The follicles feathering up in soft waves.

And the party, the party is still quiet, band stopped, you could hear a life of broken promises and domestic agony drop if not for the messy gigantic body-convulsive-weeping of the tender-hearted, matronly, in-law who only wanted a young man to come out of his shell, cut a lil rug, and make a memory or two. And there I am, getting escorted from the premises by a usually good-natured uncle who smells like martinis. And there is applause. You make me wanna shout. Kick my heels up and shout. Throw my hands up and shout. They owe it to the night, to themselves, to forget.

I snapped out of it and watched them dancing. Shimmying. Having imagined this premise, I could hardly contain it. And so I walked outside, where people were smoking. And I imagined one of the grandfathers asking me to dance.

wedding

the grass was an undulating mattress of rolling hills and generous acreage, zigzagging blades of green, surrounded and lined by silver walkways and golden sporting fields. the earth was communicating along the length of my spine. beneath a tree. pinned by gravity, cradled by soil. looking for shapes in the tree branches. listening to ringtones of tiny chirping birds, beeping perfections, sharp chortles. the afternoon sun a delightful nuisance against the playful park noises. my head was resting on a tale of two cities. the book. already preparing myself for that night's dreams.

being in a paris-like version of paris with a train stop that, on weekdays, stepped out onto onto a floor of the building within which I was staying.

everyone thinks i'm being looked at but me. oblivious. i was on stage in santa monica and i caught one. this girl, she was beaming at me through hours of sierra nevada consumption and i can still see her smile. it threatened to break free from the edges of her face. she shined light on me. in front of the crowd i told her i'm not used to seeing young vibrant women at these things, so when i see you, i see you. i see you. where have you been hiding all this time? the best place when we were young was in the clothing hamper or that dark little closet in the back of the walk-in pantry. now it's trickier, like driving around los angeles, looking through the windshield for an opportune place to make love in the car.

day 24

stark-raving sober is what the guy called himself before recovery. nevermind is misspelled because of the nirvana album. everyone is in pain because pleasure is apirational and significant in forwarding evolution. i almost made it to thirty years of age without being invited to a proper wedding. i asked the salesman at men's wearhouse if that was impressive or sad. a little bit of both. he said. like everything in life. i said.

surrounded by genius.

remember to first bring you

and just like that, the blood wakes up. it's spontaneous when the senses meet a stimulus. you walk and talk about the complex interrelated mystery that is a family. and it's strange how a comedy I wrote five years ago could still dramatically hold true. she drew a circle around us in the sand. nights ago, a girl from my childhood grabbed a rosebud and threw the petals over my head, white with pink edges, they splendidly dispersed, swayed and floated like remembrances or opportunities. she gave me a tiny yellow flower. i grabbed a bundle of jasmine. the full moon dilated within a powder lavender sky that lowered to the same hue of blue. i have no shadow and then i do. my dad said, his lungs are clear, his heart beats slow and strong. my mom told me, she's glad i figured out the things she didn't, as early as i did. my sister held guardian over me as i drunkenly slept on a lacma lawn, her a fawn. my sister's loyal chihuahua guardian always runs to me excitedly, with it's little brain and everything, so long as my sister stays in the room. my sister and i hung out at mission beach and listened to her teenage punk music and she thought girls were looking at me, while i thought she was a lion full of love. i am an amalgamation of the people in my life. i am heart wide-open getting pummeled by their energy. i stand on my own two feet. in sand. dirt. piles of crumpled papers and notes written on old-fashioned pale green diner tabs. i see faces. talk like a depraved sailor. marvel at the nuances of vocabulary. fumble inane half answers when a customer asks me where the salmon's from. find the line to get a burrito at whole foods. note the climate change. record temperatures hitting the southland. i will adjust again and again to the climes. somehow building upon that which can not be stated in any rational terms of certitude.

Marble Countertops

People. You see the same people in the early morning cafes around town. Recurring faces, characters. I've served them coffee and food and I've been one of them. I can't speak for those sleeping-in folks but the a.m. crowd is a group haunted by loud dreams, nights, memories.

Austin, Texas was strange. I had ridden the Greyhound bus there from another town. One Saturday morning I awoke frightened by a ghost I couldn't shake and we paced the entire city and there was nobody alive but me.

Queenstown, New Zealand I did the same, I was younger and there were people and a cozy cafe. I had a perfect plate of French Toast.

Paris, France I was exhilarated. I'd saved one baguette, chomped on it while I dragged my bag behind me on roller wheels along bumpy sidewalks. Snuck on the train. The sun ached up burned and aged behind the suburbs. I hurried behind a man to get into the airport and held my breath. Then I took off back into all the space.

That's it, the space here, it might be too much. I think I might do better in a city where people cover me from head to toe.

i follow rivers

She's married now but I liked making her laugh. That'll begin the novel about women. For now it's just a line and a remembrance. She was living far off the wrong side of Centinela in a little house that got robbed by someone a psychic later told her was the culprit. The gardener with a brick, not the riled up ex-boyfriend of her sister. What a woman. I liked her and was equally happy to see her go. It's nice being graced by a presence that's never meant to be yours longer than a moment during a larger experience. She was in a large experience herself that was inside an even larger experience who she ended up having a beautiful child with and marrying. I was in the midst of a larger experience soon to enter a large experience posthumously within that half-life of the larger. Nonsensical, stick with me.

I'm walking to an open-mic in Los Feliz. It's today. Sunday. I pass by this damn wannabe Frenchy cafe with authentic marble tables and furniture that's still California wild enough to be more charming than a rip-off. And I can't believe it's here. Where it is, because I'd passed by it so many times since I'd been here first, oblivious to its actual location. Could there have been another location? No. It's the one. I drink a couple IPA's with my grilled cheese on sourdough (feta, cheddar, tomatoes) and I sit first at a table by the bar then snag the small table in back with the drawer that people leave notes inside of, the only outlets are right there too. But they deadened them, the outlets, the cheap money-grubbing bastards. But the food is good, sweet potato fries, the beer is deliciously bitter and crisp and the table behind me is where I first met an experiment of the large within the larger after we had initially encountered one another two days before at a night party.

I told her everything. My parents. My anger. My love. I spilled it out because she was listening. And she had texted me, while on my way there, asking what I wanted to drink. Anything but Stella, I told her. I don't recall the beer that awaited me, but a nice gesture. That was all, the whole thing was. A nice gesture, an entrance into an enormous cavern of beauty and pain, briefly, then an exit.

Two beers at 10% alcohol level shouldn't have an enormous effect on a big guy.

That girl, simply granted me access to a primordial sense of my green lava bubbling originations. She was a symbol. And, I, was a bagel counter number in a secretly crafted revenge, while her looks could still pull off such a numerous feat. She had many more to go after me and I realize some cases are best left unsolved and that poor damn thing could have been a princess in every sense of the spiritual word. But some people are going to be links in life and still incredibly valuable, to us, to themselves. Prized humans.

But it was within the larger but not the largest that I was living when I met her. I don't know the largest yet. I'm getting there. The larger, she was not a link, but the journey, fundamentally so, there was no other path without her, I'd never considered it since we met and won't now that it's suggested. She brought me the final steps to acknowledging God. What does that mean? It's invisibles, we're dealing with the invisibles here. So I can't explain. it's big, but not the biggest. I'm only thankful. That we met that we shared that we ventured onward, even though it hurt like a motherfucker.

When the large universities buy our our contemporary author's archives, will they get their cell phone notes?

Women, what do women do? They inspire, fascinate me. They are continuous and truthfully barely notice my presence within their spectral potentialities. I am lucky to be this other yin/yang individual able to have a moment or two in the sun and under the moon and stars with em.

And Britt, speaking of women, one of the best, another note on Blue Is The Warmest Color, Britt, that we never talked about, was the end. The end, I was thinking about the end a couple days ago, weeks after seeing it and the end. She meets the guy she had a spark with and maybe could have had a world with, she meets him again, but what I think that crafty French filmmaker was saying is that, unlike the time Adele first saw the Lea Seydoux girl then met her again and they both knew it was only a beginning, fate wasn't gonna smile upon love in the same magical way it did the first time. That guy, the spark guy, he wasn't gonna choose the correct direction of street to find her at the end of the movie, because fate or God or the patterns of things, it said, for the betterment of all, that she was gonna have to earn it this time.

And, but, I think she will.

Van Halen

The dream was about sex, dangerous swimming pools, a Night at the Roxbury actor and I bonding over sadness. Waking up teary eyed. Yesterday, my mom was telling me about her visit to the torture exhibit in a San Diego museum. Swimming with the leopard sharks in the summer. She called them tiger sharks. I told her the only difference between the two, was that one kills people and the other doesn't. She was wearing a Baby Bjorn and walking on the beach as we spoke on the phone. She said it was both fascinating and difficult seeing what people could come up with. That the very creativity of the devices was the sickening marvel. Who sits around thinking of these things? Sadists, probably. Was my answer. Some regulars at the cafe, after a brief delving into my history told me I should write about my family. I told em it was all still too close. That I'm only capable of biting off little bits at a time, kind of like a sadist. I'm kidding. We were a family, are one, that sits around and digs into whichever depths it takes, to get a laugh. That's why that girl the other night, telling me I was the most serious person she's ever met - she must have been upset that we were alone in her apartment drinking tequila and staying on separate sides of the oak table. Occasionally, my ego is good for something. I can't sleep with everyone, especially if we've done it already. It's been three days since my last drink.

That girl the other night read me a lovely poem. Something about hoofbeats running away. My mom told me the water was so clear she could see to the bottom, the rocks and everything.

Grilled Cheese, Tomatoes, Avocado

When I give up you'll know my name.  Then we'll meet beneath that old elm tree atop rustic rolling hills above a sea waving washed out golden wheat and you'll flatter me with compliments of days we'd spent, with attributes I'd forgot. And I'll marvel at your eyelashes, lips, the way your eyes involuntarily expand and contract based upon the activity of your blood. Intermittent breathing between oceans of space then synaptic gasps. You have millions of tendencies recollected each time we meet and I know so many of them and will keep a few secrets so you don't ever watch them and try to change. You said come find me. That there will come a time you'll disappear and that we may get lost but to come find you. We made a plan for a place in which to leave a letter.

Phone call.

Talking on the phone with my dad. Gossiping even.