the space we inhabit in the names we are given

I had a dream that I died, and I was floating around like a ghost missing people.

somnambulant

My brother has seen more naked men than my sister. He played minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians and hit the showers with hundreds of naked men. We talked about that yesterday at Echo Park Lake the three of us having a picnic for my sister’s birthday. And I have been feeling so down lately, like about how making my own art feels futile. And I fight back with thoughts like, how I am most attracted to people who make cool things with what they’ve been given. And I tell my girlfriend that on the phone while she is in Kuaui visiting her brother who just had a baby. Creation, perhaps it’s that ultimate creation of making new life that’s been driving me mad, that I can’t afford it yet. That I’ve written so many thousands of words but life, but what about creating life. And so there we are yesterday three siblings in our 30s with the sun setting in our faces on a Navajo blanket eating Lassens banana cream pie and talking about the things we make and the walls we keep hammering into and how my brother says there is no rhyme or reason to penis size, that he has seen the most unexpected ones on guys who you would’ve thought the opposite. And my sister takes pictures of us with her disposable camera and we make fun of each other’s vanity and the time I stole my brother’s unattended laptop from his table at Stories cafe and how I took video of him thinking it was gone, and then I did an impression of him doing it, thinking it was missing. And I was feeling so much better, I have been so up and down lately, but I felt so much better because it was oh yeah, we forget about this amidst all the waves of loss and expectations and when our girlfriends are out of town, but love the divine healing power of love, it’s not everything and it’s not a guarantee but when it works on its own time on you it works its magic. I felt like sharing something about all that

daddio it's been 3 years i love you daddio daddyo

When I was a teenager, My dad had one of those illegal satellite cards that allowed us to watch all the pay channels for free on his DirecTV and so I'll never forget how I secretly cracked his 4 digit security code on the remote (2580)(right down the middle) which allowed me and my brother to sneak watch all the adult film channels.

Love - is like this thing that's not exclusive or limited - in this moment it feels as simple as a support aide to another person as we support aide our own selves while on our independent yet intertwined journeys - that get a little less lonely because of these support aides who present us with their versions of love.

It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be physical. It could be a thought, a moment, a series of seemingly mundane interactions that add up to care and profundity.

I loved my dad in that sense. He was a criminal for having that satellite card. I was a juvenile offender for covertly hacking his passcode (2580)(right down the middle of the remote). And it's been three years since he passed on, and I have this joke that it's been hard growing up without a father.

I had one. He was here then gone, a few times in my life, no one's fault. Just people being people throwing one another off course in the names of love (sometimes support aides clash) and how the grief morphs. I can't even say I dwell on him every single day now, which makes it all the more jarring when he does reappear.

I often tell the story of how I left the front door open when I barged in to see him on his last day alive (in a heroic two year fight against pancreatic cancer) (After a heroic 70+ year fight of being a human and all that it entails) and how minutes after he died a hummingbird flew into the house. And how when I am golfing with my brother (at cheap courses with Goodwill clubs) or walking around the Echo Park lake with my sister we will see hummingbirds together. How one morning I woke up in tears needing to know he was here and an hour later my brother spotted one at the breakfast place we were at together.

I see him every day as my smile turns more into his own. What a guy. What a guy. Oh the secrets we had from one another that we would have laughed at, boy did we have a lot of laughs together for a few years together, those ones where we had finally found one another, as support aides, in every way, including the forever kind of love kind of way.

Little Randy's Unsolicited But Very Welcomed Player Card on Me

Dan Choan nytimes travel section

mangela siobhanacita

It was the night of 5pm. We were driving cuz you said to drive. The sun goes behind the mountains this time of year not the ocean. The remains of its light glimmered in salt air or pollution by the time we got to the sand and it was spectacular.

Then in slowing to darkness a canyon drive with a bookstore with a Buddha in it. An overlook with a bad violinist practicing unseen nearby as teenagers fingered each other's hearts. I held you close to me like I always want to do. We made jokes about the Valley half sparkling below us, you said everything from Van Nuys to Woodland Hills was ours.

Some trace of the sun north made the sky red, it was dark but the sky was still somehow red now over the mountains. I felt inspired, what a ridiculous thing to say except for the fact that it never happens that way anymore. That inspired feeling was like a generous lighthouse in youth until I took it for granted and it became the default but as the default there became no lift from it.

A haphazard bar we swung our car back toward on Ventura Boulevard, I had spent thirty plus years missing it but with you we were found. The bartenders were part time porn stars with incredible personalities while the old ladies in heavy make up got rowdy and cat called the forgetful gentlemen sinking into their seats at the old tired but alive counter. It was so alive in that old establishment no matter how dry the carrot cake or dire the karaoke.

We played darts at the place next door. I would've paid to make that feeling stay stay stay but you know how it goes - to appreciate them you have to let them go and all that - so that they return and all that - the way those darts sped through the air and stuck to the straw or cork like bee sting arrows thrown by pleasure hunters talking in between our throws about our pains. It's like, they are only just starting to creep in here this morning in late September but it's like the Santa Ana Winds the way I love you, gentle, warm, powerful and strong right into the eye of chaos, a fire in Malibu started by them, I grew up in a trailer on a burned down lot at the top of a hill in Malibu, and I love you like a fire in Malibu.

b u n n y h u n t e r

in florida once a few years ago i met this big blonde firearms enthusiast. she had a ridiculous name on her business card just above "firearms enthusiast" and she had a nice face and some hateful things to say that she seemed to be believing less and less. She was a youtube personality but it seems like she isn't anymore. her internet presence is gone. i said she seemed to be believing her talking points less and less because i could see the way her eyes would grow dull and sad as the hate left her mouth. and i would watch as she listened to things i said that were not centered around us and them. she listened and i knew there was a soul like mine, so deep away from all the surface materials. untouched, the soul. untouched the woman. her friend was on coke and losing it and she needed to take her home. a couple weeks later she asked me to follow her on twitter, and i didn't.

friday afternoon

I think about my old Jewish dad and his last girlfriend, Barbara. How she was a Mexican single mother many years younger than him. How he bought her pink gold jewelry at Costco and saved the receipts. How she called him her man and her amor.

I think about them laying in each other's arms in a hotel room in a beach resort in Cabo smelling like saltwater. I think about him as I lay with my beautiful girlfriend in my arms. How she and I caress and laugh and fuel a feeling of euphoria with our young strong bodies. I think about how grateful he was, to have that young love in his life one more time.

How they'd share a Subway sub. She was a social worker for the County and he was a mind doctor. How he kept trying to learn Spanish. And she showed him her favorite places in Oxnard where they both worked.

I think about his hairy chest when my girlfriend is up against my own hairy chest. And we are free from pain. The way our bodies move we become free from pain.

This roving pain.

organic kombucha

hey its me

hey its me the dusty boy

my parents were assholes so i sought the dirt

i was an animal and so i sought the dirt

i feel my hide

my dusty hide

ya know like those cows waiting out their lives on the side of the 5

stop at an in n out with a selection of lovers up and down the coasts like all the young people do

my girlfriend and i dragged ourselves into a mcdonalds

and she dipped her fries in my vanilla ice cream cones

on our ways back from santa cruz

i dont wish to raise me anymore

my parents were assholes

but they tried

i'm just a dusty boy

a worn thin hide

i'll chew on cud

i'll eat her fries

i'm just a crusty boy

alone alone alone not i

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

-You know how as you spend more and more time with something you are prone to losing your taste for that something as though the repeated contact between you and it leads to a greater loss of thermodynamic energy in your heart toward it as an entropy, a slow death, how it turns you cold? Well that never happens with pizza. If anything your affection grows, you start calling it baby names, you learn its nuances in shapes, moods, how to know when it’s your turn to do the dishes. We live together in a studio apartment and it doesn’t feel too small. It’s almost been a year.

-My boss, the manager at the pizzeria, found out I do stand-up comedy and now he thinks it’s funny to ask me if I’m going to kill myself, “Not yet” I tell him with a little less certainty each time. 

-Kids are being torn from their parents while slices of pizza are being torn from the whole by Father John Misty. He comes into my work at the pizzeria in a large, crisp, white button down shirt. He wears sunglasses with moody colored lenses. His friend is as handsome as he is, and they chat. Children are being torn from their parents. I was born on this side of the line, the last slice of pizza is grabbed on this side of the line. There are no easy answers. Father John Misty doesn’t say thank you for his pizza when I drop it on his table and I hate the President of the United States. The ignorant tribalism that buoys his power. But I dissociated from the zeal in which I hate him awhile ago. 

-Payless Shoes hurt your ankles and feet if you use them in ways they were never designed to be used, such as wearing them regularly to work.

-One night at the pizzeria I was telling my coworker about how my father died in my arms and how ten minutes after it happened a hummingbird flew into the house through the front door I had left open behind me but then the owner/chef of the pizzeria interrupted us and told me to get back to work because life in the city is about young money not old death. I shared this anecdote before on facebook but it is what I do. I try to tell the same stories over and over again until I don’t have to worry about them disappearing forever. So many memories hanging on by a thin thread these days, a lucky occurrence that draws them out of the depths of my forgetfulness and it’s too long to remember it all, so I tell these stories over and over again. All to be forgotten but I still tell them

-The manager at the pizzeria I work at is Argentinian but he goes out of his way to pronounce the Italian foods like and Italian in a mobster movie.  Prosciutto becomes Prrrrro-chuuuuu-toeeeeee-aaaa-mama-mia

-A mega successful film director comes into the pizzeria I work at almost every day and he orders the same thing every time, a marinara pizza, eggplant parmesan, and carafes full of red wine. I think is this it? Is this what I am working toward? The opportunity to dine alone like I always have but with more wine? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone with goblets of wine. I don’t. I don’t.

-It’s this town where the pizzeria I work at is, I like to blame this town. We’re all a few slices short of a whole. In my worst moods I dream of worse relations with North Korea. In my worst moods, I think that a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t be the worst thing if it took out all of humanity, only so that it was even. But that is only a brief flicker of thought from the powerlessness in being a single inconsequential person among a mass perversion of mankind and all its atrocities upon itself. It’s knowing love and fearing that all these systems mankind has in place are there to thwart love, and how exhausting it is to hold onto a belief in our time on this Earth. I don’t want a nuclear apocalypse, I want all the lovers in the world to live forever. 

-I am the prototypical build for a food runner in a pizzeria. I have long legs to stride across the restaurant, long arms to reach plates in and out of tables, and dead eyes so as not to disturb the customers from all the fun they’re having. You don’t want a Food Runner with a glow in his eyes, cuz then you wonder what he just did to your food. But dead eyes, dead eyes you can trust.

-You learn working in a pizzeria that the people you work with are mostly good. That the people you work with are all doomed cogs in a system that trades pennies for time and devalues our energy into a weak commodity meant to feed an impulse. I heard that it’s not fair to judge our pain in comparison to another’s pain because it is all relative, as though the system is only a facade for the down chemistry. I don’t know, I’ve starved a couple times for a couple days in my life and it’s easier to suffer with a little grease in my belly. I trudge up my steep hill late at night, up to our apartment, my final indignity I jokingly call it after circling my block and the surrounding ones for a parking spot. My tired bones, my eyes red with flour and dust, I am the pizza delivery guy, from kitchen to table and back and forth again, what I have learned is dispensable and gently disposed of as I close my eyes each night, in bed next to a lover I marvel at, smile with, laugh hysterically alongside of, discuss the day and how it rises and falls, how it changes, like a pizza pie-aaaaaaaaa!