outside erewhon

 

benito

 

illegal fwd motion

 

a batch

 

shevy

 

A Pantoum to Fill a Room

This is how you explained it to me on our knees

that you had never prayed for a miracle

but wrote a signed letter in your heart to God,

switched into lotus pose for a transmission of thought.

That you had never prayed for a miracle,

in a life lived off stage while raging like a performer,

switched into lotus pose for a transmission of thought,

how our desire is to merely be an illusion confirmed.

In a life lived off stage you raged like a performer.

We met as your fires blazed uncontained.

How our desire is to merely be an illusion confirmed,

is that why we were indistinguishable from my place to yours?

We met as your fires blazed uncontained,

1920’s studios along the same beat up strip of pain

It’s why we were indistinguishable from my place to yours,

bed bugs, flooded sinks, laundromats and creaky floors.

1920’s studios along the same beat up strip of pain

Slumlord tenants we met in the rain

Bed bugs, flooded sinks, laundromats and creaky floors.

You grew up in the church but had never prayed for a miracle.

Slumlord tenants we met in the rain

got jobs at the same place and felt our way.

You grew up in the church but had never prayed for a miracle.

That’s how you explained it without ever saying.

Got jobs at the same place and felt our way

drank coffee, ate pastries, felt love summon itself

that’s how you explained it without ever saying,

How our tiles of grief were rearranged into a pane.

Drank coffee, ate pastries, felt love summon itself,

gently melting, tires screeching, horns blaring,

how our tiles of grief were rearranged into a pane,

this is how you explained it to me on our knees.

-joshua turek

community college assignment

Why I stare at my phone. A few nerds my age decided to market visual systems appealing to my base level urges, release chemicals in my brain, and rewire my thinking to require their sensory input on a daily basis. The hunger for information became insatiable when my own self interest, vanity, was threaded into the experience. I stare at my phone because I was taught convenience as the hallmark of progress when my dad would melt his ice cream in the microwave just enough that he could scoop it out of the carton unabated. I was alive before there were phones to stare at. I used to memorize my friend's numbers, even my first girlfriend in my early 20s, I called her the day after she gave me her phone number at a bar. I don't remember her phone number now. I couldn't tell you my mom's phone number either. I stare at my phone but never to learn the combinations required to call my mother should my phone ever fail me.  You only need to memorize a couple phone numbers in case you end up in jail. I know my girlfriend's phone number (Santa Cruz area code) and my brothers (currently not on speaking terms but he'd owe me one for picking him up there one time). Why I stare at my phone, it got bad when Instagram arrived or maybe it was when my dad told us he had cancer. Leaving his chemotherapy appointments in the Valley near his house to drive ourselves to our apartment in Venice, my brother and I would go to our separate rooms to stare at our phones. The world is curated in the phone, chaotic outside of it. The world is curated to chaos inside the phone too but it's my chaos. It's the chaos I've told the algorithms I'd like to see and so they show me it between their advertisements also geared to me. My phone is a commercial and the content between it is my own interests serving as products of myself to myself. I heard Christopher Hedges on public radio late one night years ago driving home to Venice saying image-based societies tend to destroy themselves. I parked my car, sat there and listened because this was before Instagram, before my dad was sick, when I was full of unbridled strength and a head thick with curly hair. I listened to this thinker think out loud because that's what we did back then, we listened.

-joshua turek

 

what i think about

in

the

california

desert

before

instagram

my

friend

james

and

i

climbed

sand

dunes

looking

for 

the 

perfect

emptiness

to

make

a

movie

but

instead

saw

the

sunset

behind

a

dried

out

lake

bed

and

he

ended

up

shooting

the

script

in

the

jungles

of

new

zealand

movie review #1

"Cleo From 5-7"

1962

Dir. Agnes Varda

starring: Corinne Marchand

a vain woman waiting for medical results, “spoiled but never loved". what a heartbreaking line, the way she said it. 

life begins in tears, her day trying on hats to see what fits, identity. meeting her ironic music collaborators, her friend modeling nude for sculptors, riding around in a car with them signaling turns with their arms. 

then the man at the park, who knows interesting things and is interested by her, the humanity that warms between them, animates. how it does that, human connection when we need it most, how it catalyzes us into a world of health, medical diagnosis, mortal flesh be damned. 

f o r e s t l a w n

ordinarily

i go snowshoeing across past terrain beneath snowstorms. i wear a vr headset and stare at a spacescape dotted with emotions. ride in my car listening to knx 1070 news radio like a detective to a case i wasn't asked to solve. crawling through canyons of my youth all the while nursing a wound. topanga canyon you were supposed to be my gold mine. up in those hills where we hid in the sage dust holding paintball guns. i was shot, it bruised my skin. i'd get stomach aches from oreo cookies and run up and down the steep hills to the toilet. victoria secret magazines and my mom's lesbian erotica sitting on the linoleum floor. 

i was supposed to be somebody. i remember her telling me she just knew i would, just knew how special i would become. she says it, less and less, now when i bring myself up, seeing the way the light goes in and out of me like it never used to do. 

i used to be more slender, used to carry an unrealized weight, disturbed and fathoming the beautiful. i was always scratching and clawing my way into the beautiful, and i did, i did find it, so often i would have to remind myself how beautiful it was. 

sometimes i wonder if this blog is the only true thing ive done, and whether the internet will house it much longer. 

i am sorry, is all i want to say sometimes to nobody in particular, to those i've hurt, to the ones programmed to believe it's necessary to feel hurt always about someone and something. 

when my mom followed her therapist into those hills up las flores canyon, we went with her there too. we learned that we were never enough, that the ground will slide away from us until one morning our road is washed away. we learned our dad would show up every tuesday and thursday, every other weekend, we learned how to shake him down for twenty bucks and he taught us that the uncomfortable distance would be fine for awhile. 

if i could go back in time i would show up there just to say i didn't want to be there, like a boy who sits in the corner of the party staring at his phone because his eyes don't feel up to the task of meeting another pair without a guarantee they will care.

it was her who taught us we were animals. my siblings believe themselves to be gods, planetary something or others, and i just see us like animals. snuck out of cages, packing crates, escaped from the circus to roam the same fucking land we first dropped out onto with primitive dreams to storytell. 

so here's one:

when my girlfriend and i first started hiking together she would say how i looked like the earth, i would joke, the dirt. her and i climbed up to a waterfall and sat on a stone in front of it bringing each other to pleasure. years later we climbed up another one and watched little birds in a nest creviced into the stone wall of a cave. the little birds waiting to be fed, the mother dashing in and out doing so, trying to do so.