Grilled Cheese, Tomatoes, Avocado

When I give up you'll know my name.  Then we'll meet beneath that old elm tree atop rustic rolling hills above a sea waving washed out golden wheat and you'll flatter me with compliments of days we'd spent, with attributes I'd forgot. And I'll marvel at your eyelashes, lips, the way your eyes involuntarily expand and contract based upon the activity of your blood. Intermittent breathing between oceans of space then synaptic gasps. You have millions of tendencies recollected each time we meet and I know so many of them and will keep a few secrets so you don't ever watch them and try to change. You said come find me. That there will come a time you'll disappear and that we may get lost but to come find you. We made a plan for a place in which to leave a letter.

Phone call.

Talking on the phone with my dad. Gossiping even.

true detective

I'm eating my mixed greens more and more using not a fork but fingers. The wind is shaking the palm trees like maracas tonight. Jostling the soul from hibernation, dance, life, dance. A work uniform, laughing at the waste of it all, mortality. I told my brother on the phone, it might be temporary but I'm glad I get to share it with you. The Indian food guy asked for my money first this time. He could see my red eyes from crying to the thinning light, knees on the sand, burying a bunch of feelings in tears. I told the Swedish girl, later that night, at a bar, that crying feels good like a completion, an emotional orgasm or something. I wept for the right reasons. Could feel it becoming a truth. And it was sad. And lately my doubt has been a liberation. Like if none of it happens the way I ever wanted it to happen, it would all still dim to the awesomeness of a true moment. And I'm wrapping my heart over and clenching a moment, devouring it like an octopus, satiated and underwater. It's one thing to talk about the concept, an entire world to know a glimpse. Maybe I found God. Maybe I drink too much. Maybe I stared despair in the face and butchered it. Maybe this is all a spell cast and acting itself out from delayed voodoo. I have been to Hispaniola. I've made love and given my heart and fluids on an island while taking nothing in my bag but a card from an intimate 500 year-old hotel where pilgrim nuns once slept but her and I barely did. I used to think that people had to read this stuff of mine to understand but it's becoming less and less relevant to my purpose. Maybe I'm just supposed to keep trying as hard as I can, bringing my passion into it as massively as I can, misguided or not, because it's about doing it in obscurity or tied to my Tolstoy chair beneath a spotlight and it doesn't matter which. Maybe it's about losing and waking up again and again. I keep having flashes now. I keep having the strangest flashes of life memories. It used to be so active, it consumed me, reflecting and delving deep into the past, actively. But now it's all happening in flashes, like it's been neglected and is chasing me, like it knows I've moved on.

a favorite rain

It doesn't take much but curiosity. A drive north. A new cafe recommended by a friend from the old cafe. It doesn't take much but a used book sale at the Beverly Hills Library. A bucketful of titles duplicate and unread carried to your car with energy. The same car that brought you up the resolving California coastline. Your nervous system calming beneath a gigantic eucalyptus tree across a river from loud rambunctious frat guys camping together. You, playing guitar sitting on the provided picnic table, Sierra Nevada Torpedo tall boys cold, warm campfire alone, thinking up adjectives to express the more stars than sky white cut above you. The stars, enough time looking at them and they become an answer. The same as any single thing. Night-bathing with floating naked strangers. A mountain lion on the premises as you opened your arms wide with a couple of towels provided. The stars again, revealed after a passing fog, ocean crashing beneath you. Up on a cliff. A young woman's breasts. An old man's dangling penis. A black and white German couple. The sheepish way that blonde beauty looked into your eyes before giving you permission to rival the constellations. Prayer. How it melted you back into primal colors and numbers. The conversations with god and a guitar and the unexamined mid-blue of those powerful waves. Fat slob elephant seals, bringing a smile. Zebras. The San Simeon pier with those two finger picking chords capo on third fret. Returning with wild curiosity. Going down with a couple martinis. Rising up with a few hours helping Jeff lift his dresser upstairs for him and his love with baby on the way. Then carrying your mom's stuff up her steep driveway into another moving truck, knowing that love is the only way to identify yourself in truth. Tallulah's tiny freckles perfect on her nose, cheeks, beneath splendid knowing blue eyes. Seeing a woman emerge from the baby I once saw born. It doesn't take much but it turns into something overflowing abundantly up and over your heart spilling itself fertile onto whatever soils of the universe. Sunday breakfast with your father at a restaurant in Malibu, once frequented together in another lifetime, the two of you smiling over morning quesadillas. It doesn't take much but when I drive up to Big Sur I have this tradition of leaving the radio off and listening to the wind letting itself in rapidly through the windows, my thoughts sorting out all over place, watching the television of life participating through the windshield, and the up and down levelling of my enlivened pulse dialing to the correct setting. I'm at this new cafe that reminds me of ones from older experiences but it's entirely new and the coffee is delicious and it doesn't take much but a beautiful rain outside and a nose for an adventure.

Big Sur

Saturday

Isabelle, I should write this to you. Let this be my reply to your previous letter, since you are the only one who reads this thing and because I desperately want to jumpstart some words into the Universe. Remembering that summer day at your aunt's house in the Valley, it must have been 100+ degrees and I was lounging on the outdoor furniture like a lazy dog. You were making us a beet salad. Meanwhile my brain was wandering with a foreboding or maybe arriving at an answer from all the years of clutter and clamored experience gone by, those instances carving my formation while blowing past. We are not our histories. My friend once told me that on the phone. It was a dream of a day. You and I were in a jacuzzi. You were suspecting yourself of being a bad person in your relationships and I was disagreeing. You had been making such a human time of it in Los Angeles with those months, even after the first parts of your arrival began flat on the beach with every afternoon. Healing. The significance of feeling like sand, then heating to a solid creating a new window through which to see the world again. Those days at the beach, you were identifying with the contours and individualities of the sand to reform. All those friends you made in those meetings and beyond were, you, decorating a renewed whole, changed cells in all different colors and arrangements. The end of a romance humbles us in the most primal of ways but allows opportunity for a fantastic rebirth in spirit. At some point in water, under the sun, you said I seemed older than I was, but maybe you should've seen me without my beard, what's reflected now is an even stranger age. I remember the staggering temperature of our afternoon. It's no coincidence to note that to cast a sword, the blacksmith first melts iron into a mold then begins hammering it into shape.

I tried typing this via email but it's only working here. Hammering and being turned over, hammering, like in the movies. Thick metal on heat and artistry. I am enduring.

Then we lay down in a bedroom cool and calm. A topless friendship. Gentle and lazy. Sometimes when we talk, you occasionally suggest that perhaps it's better to follow my own lead and go with an abandon into the physical realm, but not always. Never black and white. In our case, you've been right. You were smart that day to keep us closer to innocent. I say that not to insult the sparks that may have lain down the other road but to compliment the enduring quality our friendship.

I went to the bank last night and ended up drinking alone at a nearby bar. The music was great. A DJ with a shirt that said "Venice" and a bunch of songs we've all heard before set to endlessly intoxicating arrangements of unique rhythm and beat. The Lakers were beating the Celtics. Each team is at the bottom of their divisions this year. The bartenders were all dancing and I was wondering where women all learn to dance like they do. And then I imagined a ballerina behind a bar, elegantly lifting and gracing herself in movements of purpose and pose and then a surf movie came onto the televisions and I watched the waves for awhile and drank beer until I'd had enough. I came home and took a pill that wasn't mine, to sleep longer and farther. With bleary eyes, off balance, I woke up and began again. Ate alone at the French Market Cafe while reading George Saunders. Checked my phone. Thanks for your Anais Nin quote. I read Henry and June years ago because Miller was/is one of my favorites. Those words were spot on, spot on, infused again in a bit of what I just wrote you. Oh, and that beer thing you wrote about was entirely yours. It had shades of things that I like, but it was all yours. We're all one sweeping influence. In that spirit, I want to type that quote from this morning and preserve it here because it's so especially true to the moment.

"Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

5am

I wonder how many bodies are buried in the Playa Del Rey Wetlands. I wander, my heart, we're a bunch of wandering hearts searching and scanning like security alarms. Earlier on the radio, that Puerto Rican kid on This American Life made an afternoon car ride with a woman I did not love, evident. He sang, danced, blushed for an undercover cop, while this stoic woman and I had nothing but a bedroom. She was nicer after sex, usually. She left to shower. I laid in bed naked, then put my underwear on. She sat down and agreed with my earlier overture to talk. Then those tears left her eyes and I was staring in the mirror, captivated by the veins running through my forearms, wild and active as she eradicated me from her time and future. I was interested. Putting one sock on at a time as she wanted something serious. A Converse sneaker falling apart, while she knew what her feelings should have been. That it wasn't me, despite the way her body would shake and thrash under mine, she couldn't let herself caress me with a genuine adoration. I had this point later on at dinner with friends; that the intensity of our physical attraction only highlighted the deficiencies in our interests of each other and thus perpetuated the absence of an emotional tenderness that neither of us was interested in giving.

I speak like an English professor when I get drunk.

I agreed. My heart was thin. Women my age were misaligned. We had nothing in common. She didn't want to be there for me, it was intentional she said. Her energy was heavy and Nordic. I was not nearly as captivated by data as I was a story. An L.A. guy stringing along unpromising sex for his own Ego, keep pleasuring her, drive home all that affection gentle and thunderous, all that affection you have nowhere else to go, because she'd come deeply over and over again onto you, soak under your touch and you'd hold onto her arms and head and neck while she jerked and contorted almost seizure-like, soaking wet, you bringing this to her and knowing it can't go on but taking in the temporary cure, while available. You, knowing with the end, that a two week fling before departure and a two week fling after an arrival, are two very different circumstances, even if they belonged to the same two people.

I walked across the street to my car. Wondered if any of the different drivers stopping at the light were perceiving me and if they cared. Because it felt like I was being watched, with fresh-shaven after-glow flushed cheeks and the calm certitude in my stride that sometimes a goodbye is the best answer to greeting a recognizeable freedom. Janis Joplin sang Bobby McGee in my ear. "Freedom's just another word for, nothing left to lose." She had been listening to Janis Joplin a few days ago, on the phone, wanting me to come over. But I was tired, tired of her, and the act and she said I could sense things like no one else she'd ever met, except herself.

Whiskey. Wine. Oily Almonds. Friends. Prawns. Ravioli with dripping egg yolk inside. Music. Laughter. Marijuana from a vaporizer. Fish. Conversation lively and flawed. Every human interaction has its imperfections and they are supposed to be this way. They have to be imperfect, so be gentle on the memory. I slept on their couch beneath their loft bedroom. They slept with the television on. I folded the blanket. Freshened up. Went outside, my blood on fire, no perception of the actual temperature. Started my car. Drove past those wetlands and numberless bodies buried beneath the swamp.

She never asked about my dad. I made sure to include that. I didn't want a shoulder to cry on, only noticed that she was cold. Then she cried more. Explained it was intentional. Why were those tears streaming like spilling buckets down her face like that? Relief from getting away? Already? I'd hardly known anyone less and my feelings weren't hurt. I was in agreement. I was fine. Why was she crying so hard? What did she want from me? Who was she trying to console? Was she weeping for fear of her own uncertain life to come? Why did she get in touch with me in the first place? Lips like hers could find a man anywhere. I was fine. Putting one article of clothing on at a time. Stepping out into a world of potential, with a cure.

Later, I had made the responsible choice of sleeping on that couch. Sleeping it off. Passing the wet burial grounds. Lincoln. Arriving home and having art installation dream photographs. A moon made of little tiles, rotating, composed of all these little tiles, equal urine yellow. And I was alive.

getty

"That's fine, because I don't want to have babies with you either." she said, before they made love again.

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.