low stakes friendships

victor heights

The way our cell phone battery charger cords get all tangled together in our kitchen is one of the many reminders of us coming together under a roof of love in a studio apartment we pay very little for while entwining what it means to be ourselves

the night donny got stoned (and helena saw a ghost)

something i wrote in sep, 2016

Last night I was in a bar bathroom washing my hands and glancing at myself in the mirror. I thought to myself, I am in the prime of my life and in seven minutes my dad will have been dead for one year.

This morning I am driving up the 101 North with a hangover like I did so many times when he was healthy and when he was sick. I am picking up tax stuff from my dad’s best friend and distributing the bits of his final return to siblings.

A year ago today my dad died in my arms. As a psychiatrist for Ventura County, my dad would periodically speak to police officers about non-violent approaches to handling the mentally ill. He said some of the cops would listen, some were dicks. He said they’d warm up to him after he made a couple jokes. He loved that I did stand-up comedy. He would pitch me ideas all the time. Three days after he passed away I went to the Nerdmelt open mic cuz I had no idea where else to go. And it felt better being there. My friends, community, couldn’t have been kinder to me. Comics have the biggest hearts, chaotically so, but gigantic.

My dad died a couple weeks shy of his 75th birthday, a white man’s age to die. I watch videos on the news of young black men losing their lives at ages they shouldn’t. Fathers, sons. I have all kinds of things I want to say but I can’t articulate em, I’m not qualified, I can only support black lives mattering. I see the cell phone footage. I read the media skewing the facts. The transcripts, how they called Philando Castile, “the suspect” as he bled to death. An innocent man in a car. Compared to the atrocities perpetrated against the black community by a corrupt oppressive system, my dad dying of cancer was a luxury for me. And losing my dad to cancer was hell.

There was so much beauty in hell. He waited for me to get there. He was sitting up, who sits themselves up on the side of the bed to die. He was so strong while being quiet about it. We ran to him, held him. I had left the front door open behind me. We sat around his dead body when a hummingbird flew into the house. It circled and then left. We had asked him for a sign. Trav and Britt had asked him to send a bird that night before. All those nights before, camped out as children. All those nights before, camped out as grown ups. He sent us a hummingbird into the house. 

Here is a joke premise cuz my dad wouldn’t want this getting too serious: As he was dying I was getting Tinder matches on my phone. 

A year of mourning. I climbed Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The air was thin. 13,000 feet. It was physically the most difficult challenge I’d given myself. I got to the top, then realized I needed to go higher. I got to the top finally and I cried. My brother Trav did the same thing in Scotland. Climbing mountains and tears. Gratitude. Gratitude for my dad. Gratitude for my family. Gratitude for my friends. Gratitude for my planet. Gratitude for my body, while I have it. 

Us in this big body, a bunch of organs and veins and collections of cells arranging ourselves into something showing all kinds of hints of a creation pointing to a larger creation and it doesn’t have to be Frankenstein we can be constructing something like the love I feel for my dad today cuz this love is not mine this love it belongs to all of us and it is the only building block worth using in our construction.  

and the moon too

even then

I don't remember my mom holding up the blue sky with a garden rake but apparently she did.

I remember opening the gates to you, agony, pleasure, that expansive planet of lust. this morning. i remember it i do. saying i held open the gates while you all the while were the key.

I don't remember when the thickness of youth began to thin and how it required more of the same to create the holy spirit of inspiration, effect.

I remember you walking into that restaurant I was working at behind the bar with sheets of rain and blue gray light backdropping you, how you appeared out of that world like an alien. and i a grieving alien my own. and you a grieving alien your own. and how two aliens with slender fingers touched on each other, poking for gold and it falling out like the coins from my pockets this morning when we moved horizontally. and how this morning you joked about them being sonic the hedgehog coins.

I don't remember the price of that tequila shot, pbr, all you can eat tacos and peanuts special at the gold room. i thought it was 3 bucks but simon said it was 4. i think he was right

I do remember you at the gold room that first night we left work and wandered about echo park like the whole town was a park, a playground of loud angry cars and sad old men at the bar counter who you thought i was giving too much attention to joking about god knows what before i kissed you.

Dreams Dont Diee by le turek brothers

1500 miles

I turned 34 on friday. We went to the Grand Canyon and then our friends wedding in Tucson.

We stayed in Motel 6's and then rented a cool desert casita.

I had a head cold, the altitude descending from Flagstaff made it worse. I had toyed with the idea of dropping acid on my birthday but instead I was hocked up on Sudafed and cough drops.

I dragged around clogged ears, stuffed nose, a sore throat but eyes still wide and a heart still pried open in my chest for another year.

The sight of the Grand Canyon was too much to understand without interacting with it, which we didn't, we didn't hike to its bottom nor sleep on its cliffs, just drove obediently from lookout point to lookout point until the time zone changed but we felt little different.

But you can't talk shit about the Grand Canyon my girlfriend and I joked.

My girlfriend Siobhan she bought me pizza and two different slices of cake for my birthday dinner and was so gentle to me and my congested ass face the whole trip. My treasure. Our 2 year anniversary is in a few days and I've never been with someone so long. I've never loved so easily, and felt love in return the same.

4 days, 34 years of age, Motel 6, 2 years of continuous love. I love numbers and how they let us track the imperceptible, attempt to put order to an orderless time. Time is an insomnia in Williams, Arizona staring at my bright phone in the dark next to my dreaming lover while a stranger snores loudly through the thin walls of our motel room.

On my mom's 62nd birthday a few weeks ago I asked her what she thought it was all about, she said experiences, love and family, that there was no end goal, just to experience as much as we can. I am grateful to be alive. The night before we saw the canyon, my girlfriend and I hurried outside to take photos of ourselves in a flurry of Arizona mountain snow, like happy fools, returning red cheeked into a steak house where we ate a warm apple pie slice a la mode, and melted, everything melted - it wasn't the Sudafed nor the acid I never took, everything was just melting into itself rendering the world, love, illness, health all the same. Two days ago, three days, today, tomorrow, 15 years from now, time flies when you're having fun.

how to be

touch an innocuous door handle and it ignites a flash of memory to another place. I've been in and out and finding so much of it pleasant as hell. A burnt piece of palo santo in a room that's burning down. A Catalonian red wine spilling it's plum mineral blood down a throat.

Climbing steps up to a white adobe house on New Years Eve filled with Arizona people and music made from the neon green hides of broken aliens. Then that hidden fairy land in the corner of Highland Park with a kid telling me to feed the fire with Santa Maria wood while he spun obscure wonders and we danced like muppets.

To wonder what I'm doing here over a bowl of oatmeal in my kitchen and feeling like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, the clouds the way they were outlined out our window with perimeters of yellow bounced orange light yelling at me how I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

She says she hates waking up cuz it reminds her that one day she won't. I know. I know. Fuck, all our deaths but this is living. Fuck all the lost opportunities we're dying anyway.

I run errands, run mental circles, drive on slick pavement and thunderous potholes and traverse my city cascading with memories through fifteen mostly underpaid years that I wouldn't trade for anything.

A girl in brown high waisted Dickies and tattooed arms hugs her arms around the slight slender 20 something boy she loves before they track past me to go have unprotected sex in a youthful haze.

kemosabe

There was never no oath with the person you didn't want to be with, the person you didn't want to be. There was never no oath to take care of one another if you weren't taking care of one another as you turned into the person you wanted to be. There was never no oath with the person you never wanted to be, that's why you went on to become the person you were trying to be.