$3.00

we get so used to seeing things as they aren't, that apparent change unsettles us. in coldwater canyon, laying down on familiar grass, it was significant because i'd been there before, so much lonelier then. time dies a slow death in beverly hills and now i could feel myself more alive. seven nights ago i sat watching a glass full of sparkling beer show itself off, beautiful in twisting candlelight, crisp color, senses surrounded by a bar full of voices climbing on top of one another in elevating volume. trendy stupid venice, i drank alone, oddly content with a swirl of feelings. both insecure and curious mind like silent king of the insects, when two butterflies floated my way, carolina blue bicycle, wobbly ride to rose, laughter, talk of life, genius, music, nestled on couch, adventurous bedroom, car ride smiling with heated seats, we kissed goodbye at separate times, coinciding in a moment which seemed fit for all of us, i'll never call them again.

on the grass, basking in the sun and a japanese author, finally able to read with novel done, better or worse, tired. the bark of the slender tree on the muscles of my bare feet, six mornings ago the kids and i almost caught the biggest bullfrog any of us had ever seen. they're wilder than i am, those brothers, but we're all hunters, survivors, hiking, catching blue-bellies, or western fence lizards as one of the women had told me the night before. the blue-bellies are called western fence lizards, i told the boys and they seemed to like that fact. awhile ago we had taken a scared friend of theirs on this same network of trails and we've since, on several occasions, made fun of the awkward way he was. but now, you should see him, the kid showed up again and this time he's climbing trees, shouting savage calls, leading the way, and all it took was getting him there once.

my novel is about exploring being in love and whether there's any spiritual progress in the attempt, infantile or skilled, that's what it's about.

waking tide

everything felt entirely vacant of meaning. anywhere that the city rose up from earth with human structure felt like a deformity. buildings, jobs, daily efforts, nothing that any of us had done, was doing, going to do, had even scratched the surface of meaning.

by the time i returned home, i was dying on the idea of life. hours passed by in front of the television with only a vague semblance of selfishness and vanity, everything evaporating. i tried to eat, fought the urge to smoke, waited. then my friend texted me, and in two different spectrum's of experience we related a bit, trav and i watched the lakers, ate a trader joe's pizza, trav kept me in the game, otherwise it would've been worse. savagely, i was being shepherded out of the abyss by unknowing relationships, creature comforts, and for what reason, i didn't know, care.

the night wore on, guided by the faint notion of finding rest and trying again, against my own weakness, pessimism, genuine struggle, i crawled into bed, covered my cold feet, and went to sleep.

i dreamt vividly, constructed an entire house in foreign hills unlike any i'd ever seen before, then leapt through a window screen downhill, into lemon trees.

today, i woke up early, and did what i've done so many times before, threw some clothes on, grabbed a couple tangerines, and walked to the beach. the anxious pulse from yesterday's caffeine sensitivity, nicotine withdrawal, existential angst, whatever it was, had calmed down enough that i could recognize a different path to the same place. basketball courts, sand, parallel bars, somewhere further ahead was the pacific ocean. what a patient mother, that body of water. i probably felt it everywhere on my senses as my joints, muscles, creaked into the first set of dips, IF MY BRAIN CAN DETERMINE MEANINGLESNESS THAN THAT ENSURES THE EXISTENCE OF MEANING. it happened there. This one thought, however worded, changed everything. Everything became enlivened. Everything was something, it had to be. If life is meaningless, then that very statement affirms that there is a recognition of meaning, because otherwise it couldn't be less. And if life is meaningless, that notion only guarantees a dual sense of meaning, in another form, presence, or beyond this minute experience into the vast complex infinitude regions of elsewhere. whatever it meant, it meant something to me and i could feel my soul shift, heart dial-turn into a moon bringing light.

i walked hurriedly back to the apartment, a world better than when i departed. shoes off, stepped inside, seemingly renewed. immediately upon my entrance, trav and i bickered and dueled like children with taunting smacks, punches, kicks, the immature kinds that only brothers know how to inflict on one another with perfect amounts of playfulness, humour, bite, buddhas we weren't. then i ate some toast, pumpkin butter, cottage cheese, packed up my stuff, and left to the cafe to do the thing that's always hinted to me of worthwhile investigation into this brilliant meaninglessness/meaning.

so now, i'm writing again.

a primitive man describes meeting someone special to that very someone with the rain pouring down outside of a cave while the nearby glow of two eyes belonging to a saber toothed tiger haunts the periphery (painting drawn with smeared berries on crude tree bark)

excerpt

28

because the santa monica pier is the most photographed image in los angeles but no one gets it at sunrise.

because it's my birthday and i do dramatic things like this and quit smoking days ago, i ran here.

because this is my favorite time and place in the city and i've never taken a girl here this early in the morning so it's not covered in memories of what was, instead only, what is.

because 27 was as difficult and tumultuous as advertised and i'm grateful to be older.

because irony works this way, that the one time i forego spiritual clarity and bring my camera here, it's overcast, you can't see now, but usually the ferris wheel stops glowing just as the sun rises fiery red in the east, over the city, splitting sun rays through buildings hills and across the ocean while the pigeons clap their wings in applause, fly together in unison, almost like they're celebrating the entrance to another new day.

then i had this thought, looking at this, that life is but a game. powerful, humbling, scary, fun, rewarding, ugly, beautiful, but a game.

cold-pressed juice

i'm escaping addiction in all forms. i've saved some music, kept it hidden, distinct only from a time and place, of intense feeling. push play. it's clear to me now, that we're all given a bundle of unmanifest energy, libido distorted by context, sex drive pure, and then we have to figure out what to do with this concentrate, otherwise it overwhelms us. here it comes now, rushing like a tsunami onto virgin shore. healthy or unhealthy, nicotine, booze, eating disorders, self-abuse, drugs, medications, temporarily removing the cancer by also cutting the best parts around the cell, and sometimes to save themselves, people just go numb. i've seen it, been hurt by disappearance, played my role like a self-mythologizing tortured saint, but, there's also the healthy, feeling, sketching, painting, sculpting, writing, lovemaking, travelling, talking, listening, engaging silence, working, giving up, yeah sometimes, keep going, changed, skipping. and some can put morsels into millions of cubbies and are deemed well-adjusted, while others piss it away entranced by those chemicals or fixations, but then there's the brave, brilliantly pouring themselves into singular quests of motion, staring dragons in the face, illuminating great darkness, inner/outer, violently crushing apathy with a form of love independent of grasp, the wondrous, peacefully enamored by heightened discovery, whether bound within emotional systems, limited or infinite, moronic or genius, sick or splendid, time will tell.

you won't be sad

cigarettes, alcohol, the rising skyline of my humble city. this isn't about those things, they've been said already. i mine memory for it's blessedly flawed interpretations and the present for unabashed expression. but today is about fresh lungs, uncertainty, and opportune shadows. right now through the crooked window, there's an entire flock, circling, where there's usually only this one massive seagull, above a trash dumpster where i catch my breath. and these birds, they're riding the delicate changes of the wind, sort of like i did last night in my dreams. and it was almost casual, my realization across the waking line this morning, that my arms aren't capable of flight anymore. but they are, i am, thinking there is no vacation from the brain, tropical beaches, hollywood nightclubs, opium dens, it's a blessed constant while it functions and catalyzes for meaning. and this jovial guy named nestor told me never to trust a skinny chef and the same can be said for casual fingers on a wordsmith or serenity on the face of a beast.

santa monica/sawtelle

and sometimes you wanna collapse. sidewalks, grass, sand, people walking their dogs at night, fat kids on scooters zooming along your crooked line of sight. you're often saved by simply listening to someone else's story or lighting someone up with a little energy. an irish pub or a place in santa monica reminiscent of the roaring twenties in t-shirts and miniskirts, he said i was on fire a couple nights before and i seemed to recall something about a french accent, candle on head, sprint home. then i was talking to some girl about napkins and heritage and before long it's god and desperation, how we relate to ourselves, others, why it's not just a personified man with a white robe and beard and i made a joke about the pool table and told her i'd see her later on because the night was young and i was drunk and never assume you're going to meet someone again just because the two of you aren't strangers anymore.

santa rosa plums

lucien painted naked pictures of his daughter, rose. she posed for him on his couch, strong muscles, wide-open legs, hair in all the places a woman has hair, self-involved.

the line i punched into my cell phone last night: i was retrieving my tool kit, when she drove away on three wheels.

my words, written for me, dropped, message in a bottle for the sea and foreign eyes, are not for anyone to own. whether arranged in mocking betrayal or overflowing heart, i'm emblazoned by the imperfections of dancing. do not read this as an excuse, read it as a conversation with probabilities both imagined and real, filtered through conditioning, perception, but with angst to occur.

i've encountered things and people who defy sense and logic and this uncertainty has it's inspiration, proof, of a mysteriously unknowing sliver of universe.

unpredictability is what she taught me, through months of invisibility, ringing taunts, the arrogance she met her body with, time.

i let it sit. i think i was waiting. we happened, existed in something magic for a moment, spent all this time planning our escape, then i became flustered, she ran away, never together realizing. the pain isn't even a faint echo no more.

as for you, i know you, in between the moon and you, i hope you are living, breathing, feeling, trusting your gorgeous intuition. i was driving somewhere, i can't remember the street, when the impulse of love returned--not the sadness, egoic futility, taunting glimpses of what was and could have been, but-- right-there-i-can-feel-it-for-the-people-in-my-life-again, love. nostalgia dims love, it wears the mask of love but it's grief, regret. love is only momentous and accessible in acceptance for what is, what is, no matter how alone or together we are, love wakes us up to ourselves, here.

i'm not enlightened by what i know, feel, i'm strange. i'm not centered because i'm a mess, only, somewhere in this scattered crazy moving internal/external reconciliation are pieces of warm life evidence and ability. i do know, that in this town the best truths are improvised moments between characters stripped of their costumes and dreams, naked with each other in a thai food restaurant, standing face to face at a venice handball court counting numbers with a dreadlocked guru, finding evidence that someone's been with us the entire time, teaching girls to skateboard, climbing sandstone peak for a new year with that sunset, huge moon, yelling at strangers, drinking wine, an owl, drive home in peace, lovemaking, a cafe here, a cafe there, my independence zigzagging a flowing trail through paths both paved and wild, in this grid and chaos, flashes of brilliance woven into the fabric of a city founded for it's light, climate, proximity to the edge of the world.

i was born in van nuys hospital, i picked my brother up somewhere nearby twenty-something years later, all my siblings keep picking each other up all over the place. my mother's childhood lives in that valley, says she feels most like herself gathering stones at the beach and swimming in the ocean. my father's los angeles begins working at a prison hospital east of downtown, living above dodger stadium. i'm shading in all the space between, then coloring beyond their lines. i grew up eating blood red plums, summer juices dripping down my chin, warm on the outside, dripping with refreshing pulse within, minerals coursing through earth, tree, body.

i'm continuing with change, unfolding in glaring inevitability and stark reminder, contrast, opportunity for growth, recognition, spirit. and now, awakening to the next impossibility, another skin of life, new.

sitting in this achingly beautiful room, on a somehow forgotten block of bohemia, i am grateful again.

flukes in the cosmos

tonight the moon looks like a vanilla bowl of ice cream. there is no typo in any statement. she used to eat fat little worms when she was a child. i told her that time was a lake and she reminded me that rivers  bring them water. lips, a tiny dog named elvis and calm and bone marrow. i wound down a hollywood hills stream resurrecting myself in my jewish deli city. alan watts returned to late-night radio, some indie station programmer brought his voice again; the illusion of separateness, buddha is an awakened one, sansara is a rat race to which we slave. outside, my friend and i were smoking and talking about meeting women and the distance between the nucleus and electrons, relative to a football stadium, ourselves. without the charge, we are soup, alone in december we can survive anything. still stars in the sky during the day and night is a prize if we can remember our moment. feeling thin, adult, meaning, bringing bunches of meaning, filling the plate with meaning. a christmas party, american spirits, basil whiskey, and little themes repeating themselves in new spirit.

"metaphors are dangerous. metaphors are not to be trifled with. a single metaphor can give birth to love." - milan kundera

she's passionate about tomato soup, prop. 37, and old people. i told her about the lady i rented a room from in franklin canyon years back. it only took abby three marriages to have the same last name as her street. she laughed. abby had an oxygen tank, swollen legs, flaky skin and a dark sense of humor, loved the syncopation of my guitar, watching tennis, and kept a tiny prison bed in the miniscule nook she sublet a teenager who spent his nights wandering the neighborhood, drinking whiskey, wincing from the hollow burn, improperly smoking cigarettes and smelling cooking from houses belonging to families and stoves. they weren't good days or bad, they were mine, simple. but we don't include those details because they arrive later and are inconsequential in comparison to the spark of interaction.

elvis reclined on her lap, head hanging back like a kid upside down or a playful bat.