why i quit my job

I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency. I want to be on a love frequency.

wally,

he
said
that
stupid
people
are
wise
for
dancing

everyone tells me i look like someone else

I write to redeem myself. Like a coupon against time. I spent my early years setting up little plastic green army men for a war that finally came. Also, I'm bad at the game of Stratego.

I'm waiting to pick my sister up from school remembering that my mom used to arrive so late after school to pick me up that technically I am still waiting for a ride. It's probably the reason why I'm so bad at standing around for other people. That's not true, I've always been like this, craving singular locomotion.

So out I go. I go by car. I go by plane. I go by foot. I like nights that begin with myself but end entwined in somebody else. Their story. Their body. Their goodbye. I like adventures. What kind of adventures?

He said nothing else matters but this moment. He said that the only problem with Magic Johnson is that he was not born a Mexican. He bought me a Tecate tallboy and he, his son, and I, toasted before they vanished.

I imagine a movie trailer moment of that btw. Where the character like me says: I like adventures. And a calmer type with mild curiosity asks: What kind of adventures?

Flash to a character swaying down a walkway majestically walled up on both sides by urban hedge appearing through seasisde mists ancient. Reflections of a face from a stream travelling down the middle of an alleyway. Hordes of ghosts blowing like walking kites on skid row through the windshield. On foot, dancing in silver light. A smack. Of an ass. A punch. Of a face. A smile that looks like the saddest clown in the world. Four feet dangling off the edge of a miles high skyscraper. Two pairs of eyes lit by moon. Hordes of seagulls clamoring like an apocalypse above Hollywood Boulevard.

She said my zipper was still down and hooked her finger in it. Her apartment smelled like the end of being young. The cab driver had been up all night and didn't know what else to say when he deposited me downtown into the morning.

the idiot

borrows the title from a book he's never read. the idiot goes dancing alone. he roofies himself with vodka and soda water and beer.

and the idiot acknowledges the law of diminishing returns, almost. until he meets a girl with blue hair. he kisses her in a photo booth. there is a photo booth involved with a picture the next day sent to his phone to prove it.

and at differing flashes in the night, the idiot goes up to a bunch of millenials and they are dancing and so is he and he tells them that we have to dance we have to dance because they forgot to tell us to do so as children and so now we must.

and it takes him forever to realize the wedding at the church downtown is on valentine's day. it takes him forever to connect the significance. he eats a pizza with egg on each of four slices and watches the wedding through windows while drinking a beer.

sure the idiot likes to get a little drunk before going to the bookstore. sure he rushes out when he sees the same girl from the week before. sure because the mirror seemed better in his head. like all mirrors do.

then haphazardly is time, the way it moves with the drunkard in the raiders hat next to him. he says "her money is my money and my money is also my money." and the idiot gets him going on one of those agreeable stretches of drunken sermon, amen, amen, and he has the raiders hat guy in amen agreement while the idiot in his idiot clothes delivers something sinister in his elocution masked in exactly the same tone but unmistakeably biting in it's precision, and it shakes the room

and even after nodding to the sermon all this time the drunkard notes the words and stops, can't help but stop even as the room orbits, lets it linger, "i mean it's not like we're gonna be on this earth much longer anyway, right?" the idiot says heartily, chuckles as though nothing has changed, smiles big raising his beer up to take a cheery glug.

"right?"

the idiot didn't feel great about it. about the way the drunkard's face fell. but he didn't feel that bad either. it needed to be said. reminded. gratitude needed to enter the world. and the raiders drunkard melted away because this new guy to his right, this ladies man to his right with those lady killing bright eyes on tan ethnic skin, is with a lady, a pretty lady who else? and he asks the idiot what he's been writing in his notepad, cuz he's been thinking of writing too.

and the idiot gets tangential about art and expression and he needles the conversation around in figure 8's until he finally finishes his routine in a way that's not all that bad actually, when he says

if you want to do it bad enough, you'll do it.

and the idiot does, or maybe he just did, i don't want to bore you with time, the time is haphazard and he does a stand-up set at another bar downtown and he gets convincing on stage. and it's not all that bad either. and the energy is not all that bad.

and so he goes back to the bar with the gigantic white horse on it and he dances. he dances because it's about that time to dance. and the ladies aren't loving it at first but it's not about them. and it's not about the parents. it's not about the finite nature of living and all beings. it's about being. it's simply about being. and while being another human being lights up his eyes with her dark eyebrows and oceanic blue irises and chemically dyed attractive boyish matching hair, he - in this fluid state of moving being -  he steps off the stage and finds her and they sway, they dance and shake and press lips and knock hips and mumble and whisper and yell over the music and scoot away to enjoy the space and it ain't pretty and he is an idiot but it is poetry and everything is swaying

and days later he is on the beach in the morning jittery but profound in digging deeper and digging into himself and sand and picking up litter everywhere cuz there is three-day weekend litter everywhere on the beach and he dislikes it but is grateful for it in his hands and in his heart and in the trash can with a lid on safely over it and he prays for the long loving health of his loved ones and the fragmented ones and all the ones until they are one and he brings them all whole in his heart as best he can

and the idiot drives to get a burrito and laundry coins, quarters is what he calls them, like everyone else he calls them quarters.

and he talks to his little sister on the phone and he hears the unbelievably perfect tone of her voice, even as she is home with the flu, the tone of that pure hearted child who won't ever know how pure hearted he knows her to be because she is too pure of heart to play at it and he loves her for it

and he drives home with groceries in the backseat and invisible tears of gratitude streaming down his face in rivers unseen

and he thinks to himself to the point of writing it down

I am so happy. I am so happy. I don't know why but I am so happy.

a flunked haiku tea ceremony

alien magic. i wanted to write about alien magic. like, an alien magician. a magician on his own planet. kind of an extraordinary alien even to the technologically advanced members of his race. but he is an excommunicated alien magician. and he is teaching people on earth alien magic.

i dreamt of a one-way dirt road that kept encouraging me forward like an airport flat escalator. whaddya call those things. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies no return. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies no return. the thing about the one-way road is that it implies, no return.

feel like the internet is mining our brains. extracting experience to build its own. i guess much like the movie her. i guess i am just copying the movie her. saying that reminds me that the concept is very much along those lines of her. but did her mention the word; mining. the internet is mining our brains.

i danced so hard last night i tore my underwear.

i have this thing with parking meters and street signs about: kind of: looping around some of them. even when i don't have to be doing it: i do these loopy around things with my steps: steps.

girls. and here's what it is about girls. when laying in bed with one or appearing and disappearing in flickering moments of pulsating beams and kinetic music or among the buoyant renderings of candlelight in a cozy bar downtown, a guy is getting bombarded with these memories and thoughts and feelings that slip in and haunt him in the most pleasurably crippling way that also devastates the moment. and few girls, few, he can tell em what just happened in his brain. cuz they were dually part of the combination to not only unlocking the combination lock but also revealing its presence. and most girls, he will just take it on the chin. and get through the hauntings alone. because saying them is what infuses people of two. saying your ghosts out loud to another person is the bones of love.

and you are still going. and you are still going. and you are still going.

blood oranges

he holds a bag of them. the blood oranges. it is the citrus time of year. pomegranate season was spoiled by the uncharacteristic early rains. die pomegranates.

he walks home with a bunch of green onions he bought for a dollar. chews on them for the spicy. he eats a mandarin. a cherimoya. a guava. the guava tastes buttery and has seeds. he swallows some of them and spits out others. the cherimoya seeds he spits all of them out. they are nice spitting seeds.

the universe wants people obsessed with it.

the ballad of the faded red button down and the mr gray thermal

There is a specific kind of man at every cafe in Los Angeles - maybe even the world. He is not the only kind of man. But a specific kind. He will smell bad. Have his government finances in just enough order that he will have a roof over his head at night. An RV camper. Low-income housing. Rent control. He will get by in a low effort way that almost inspires jealousy. And he will have another kind of dimmer man who needs him for a ride to the courthouse.

But this kind of man. He will want to sit with his less-organized friend for an hour or two first before doing anything. Acting out his idiosyncrasies for all the bland civilized to see. Idiosyncrasies. Like shutting the open door no matter how little it is left cracked. Like drinking a huge glass mason jar full of sudsy water every morning. Like smelling as bad as he does. He probably has a half-baked theory on why soap is bad and pheromones are yada blah whatever. And his shutting of the door is especially maddening because it stuffs the coffee fuming room with his thick sweaty balls odor. His thick sweaty balls odor.

And when you believe that you can not stand him anymore, this man will widen his presence just a bit more with worthless possessions or the obtuse angle of his legs. And this specific kind of man will hold court. He will unquestionably be holding court. Establishing his mini kingdom for the morning. You can tell. The way he is lording over this trash heap of a kingdom for all to see in that delinquent bohemian grandeur so loud it could almost be mistaken for unintentional if it weren't so blatant. And you will pray to have a fate more active and meaningful than this man.

You don't know what any of this means, life, you get that there is a profound path of least resistance to living it, honorable and simple and pure. But this specific kind of man is not it for you. The way he sways within the folds of living by willing an urban apocalypse of inactivity into existence.

So you believe it is not out of malice that you want to turn heads and hearts more than this specific kind of man. Not out of malice so much as it is a natural intuition speaking, shouting, yelling until hoarse that I don't want to breathe in your smell! What I want is to step outside of this fermented human pungency and be closer to one with the fresh air and brilliant energy of it all.

And you think to yourself, that there is also a specific kind of man at every cafe in Los Angeles - maybe even in this world - who is trying like hell in his scraggly corner to figure it all out. Furrowed brow. Usually headphones on. And he is not the only kind of man. But a specific kind. And sometimes it makes this specific kind of man a bit of a grumpy dick.