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."

a bunch of lunges

and i'm sitting here eating sauteed kale and a trio of beans and i'm looking at each of these beans, scraping them up from the thin salsa pool on my plate and i'm thinking about how lucky i am to have these beans and it's stupid and new age and this kale is all so available to me and i did nothing to deserve these beans and this salsa and the temporary comforts of civilization but i'm doing my best to contribute to this world in the way i know how with the spirit of improving the experience and existence for myself and others by continuing to spread the availability of beauty and garden fare and whatever sails this seafaring ship of exploration like a trio of beans into the colors of the momentary void that we keep painting and repainting and this is not a prayer or a guilty form of gratitude, though it would be fair to suspect, it's only a fleeting thought, already blowing from my fingers and heart, out through living room window mixing with onshore winds while i'm swelling with new ideas both selfish and intuitive for activating an urgent expression of life and creation and the ability to catalyze.

this is not a metaphor (part 2)

I don't want to write this. Bad sentence. Turning back was scary. I was getting cooked on top of that mountain. No one knew where I was. The Federal government was shut down. I kept thinking that the Federal government was shut down and so, on this Federal Land, a rescue helicopter couldn't arrive or it would cost way too much money if it did. Money, I missed money up there. The pursuit of money and all the stupid things people do huddled in their mankind. Nature is horrific, is why. That's why we have all this asphalt and insulation and electricity. It's because nature is horrific. I don't want to write this. It took me an hour getting back to that big Crystal Geyser bottle. I wanted to save some for the next lost passerby but I also wanted to soak myself in a flood. Dump the water on my head and body. So I did my best at both. And I drank a little bit. I know I shouldn't have. But I was thirsty and desperate and I wanted water because mine was long gone. Yes, I was pretty close to desperate.

I did this all to myself.

Survival became about discerning the proper trail out of the many snaking paths and gigantic obstructing rock formations. I had to surmise the vaguely-recognizable landmarks and attempt to recall how I had arrived above and around each one to get to where I was, stuck, and doing all that deciding took awhile and then in one particularly large collection of rocks, I was dwarfed by the largest rocks and climbing down into a pit within the rocks. There was no way to get through and I swear to God if there were no Mountain Lions living in the dark nooks and crevices of that jumble, I don't think they live at all. I know I keep bringing up the Mountain Lions and capitalizing their letters. Do I do this to heighten the danger? Did I want to do battle with a Mountain Lion? Do road bicyclists on the narrow shoulders of the Pacific Coast Highway secretly want to get hit by cars? Are we a culture primed by a Thanatos urging? Are there simply individual impulses that crave challenging their own unique mortality, especially when everyone around us seems to be wounded or out of control in their own different ways themselves, but wait that goes back to culture so let me try again. Do some of us simply want to die?

I didn't, want to die. Not wearing cargo shorts. Not up there. I wanted to live. That much I knew. Which made navigating that maze all the more alarming.

But I did navigate. A few wrong turns, backtracking, climbing, "could it have been this long's"? and then segment after segment of confusion just to get back to the main trail five miles from what I knew to be my car. I wanted to go sit in my car and cry or take an Instagram detailing my travails or both. Man must have purpose to survive, Instagram and crying momentarily became mine. Then finally, that passed and the terrain was beginning to appear familiar. Yes, I was recognizing species of bush and their frequency of occurrence and yes, a rock to the left, above yet another cliff, and the rock was flat like a bench and I remember seeing it on the way up and it was so smooth and flat but I couldn't sit down. If I sat down, I feared my muscles would cramp and lose power. They were getting tight, my muscles, especially in the sockets of my hip joints. My legs were stiffening. I still, yes, had five miles to go. I should mention, I had a walking stick now and it was helpful (and could be used as a spear) and I grew quite fond of this stick but also my trapeziums were getting tight, so I had to drop my stick but I was there anyway. I was on the proper trail and I was relieved. I knew the path. Thank God I found the path. By the way, did I make a few deals with God to get to this point? I don't quite recall. I believe there was something about living in honesty with my purpose if I could just get the hell out of there.

I had two miles down steep uneven trail. My feet hurt with every step. It wouldn't have been so bad in tennis shoes but these five-toed Vibrams were killing me. But complaining, that's a good sign, it meant I was getting closer to the Western World. Then I saw my first person in five hours. He was practicing karate down faraway on the trail, I could see a sliver of the ocean out by Ventura to my left and down, several phases below on the wide-open familiar trail, was that guy doing karate, wearing a black beanie and backpack. I wanted to ask him for water but he kept hurrying on before my approach. And then, then, at the bottom, a young couple were kind enough to have an extra water bottle in their backpack.

"You look like you're dying."

The young man said to me. I tried to explain my circumstances through parched throat but I think they wanted to continue away from me, like giving to a homeless person. I felt no shame in their charity. I gulped the twelve-oz in two swallows and continued. Brain off. It's what got me up the long, winding, steep trail that I knew awaited the end of my struggles. And I made it up. Saw two more people staring across the valley at my Cathedral mountain peaks and I wanted to tell them that I'd just been up there and seen the other side but I didn't want to get into it and they looked at me funny and when they passed, I crouched down and almost cried but I still had another half-mile or so to get to my car. Which I did manage. The sun almost gone when I arrived, opened the door, and gratefully sat down into the driver seat. And there were no missed calls on my phone.