it's quiet

A crow squawks, “Hear that? Those are my children.” my mom says from her bed in the living room of a Seattle apartment. My little sister tells me my mom feeds the crows peanuts from the window next to her bed. That she dislodges the window screen to do it. 

I am up here for the first time in my life. My mom and little sister moved here six months ago. My mom found out she had breast cancer two months ago. Stage 0, the best of the worst case. She had a double mastectomy yesterday. I drove her home today, “Home sweet home.” she said when she climbed into bed, a dozen pillows awaiting her.

The surgery went well. “What size breast did they give me?” she asked not long after we were able to see her.

We were talking about moms on the phone and I told my girlfriend my mom gives me creativity. That when I am shut off toward her, it shuts me off from a source of chaos and wonder that has fostered me in many ways. It’s amazing to feel so many ways toward a person as if splintered through a prism of thousands of sides existing in different times.

My upbringing was strange and chaotic and full of a lot of dramatics masquerading as love and a lot of love true to itself as simple love. My upbringing was at the four hands of two separate people doing the best they could with themselves as they were giants in my mind and sorcerers in my heart. Gone and present shifting and rarely interlocking and gone and present.

And now here I am drawing closer toward middle age while watching my mother sleep in an apartment near a city I don’t know while feeling full of despair about my lifelong pursuits and a relentless gnawing energy toward them anyway. I am talking about art or the bastardized versions of  the art that I practice or don’t.

When my mom got out of surgery she said her “throat was dry like the frickin Sahara desert.” When my dad got out of surgery three years ago he took all the cords and tubes in front of him and he said “spaghetti.” When my mom got out of surgery she mentioned my father was funny. It was one of two things both my parents would agree about of my father, that he was funny and that he was great at putting in an I.V.

Drugged, before her surgery yesterday morning sitting before me in a pre-surgery room with no cell phone service my mom told me it wasn’t just selfishness that informed her reasoning for having six kids it was also that she wanted to make us out of love and joy.

-Josh Turek

feb 28, 2018

orange light

my sister had a husband and she was so nervous when they first lived together that every morning she would wake up early and walk to a nearby coffee shop to use the restroom. and one night at christmas dinner they told us about this and how they didn't do this anymore. how they were comfortable they told us.

i haven't been married. i haven't had kids. i haven't been involved in any accidental pregnancies. i only recognize that i am becoming more of an exception when i speak with old friends. for my showbiz pals i am right on schedule, delayed, now moving on schedule in things.

i still find nights to stay out late and still put myself out there in vulnerable places to try to stretch the bounds of my creation. i still have energy and it is troubling and it wastes plenty of time realizing how it's both trying to outrun death and remain humbled toward its inevitability.

life, what a difficult proposal inherent within itself for a human being. not a novel thought, the ones who think about it a bit, know this thought. and yet we go. and yet we go. and yet we go.

not too far.

oh how grief shifts our minds

I dreamt I took acid on a bus and drew my brother

I guess for awhile it became my calling to be filled with vapors for the antagonists.

Scratch that, it was my breeding that lead me down such a path. Scratch that, it's my back, you scratch mine and I'll scratch yours. See. That is the difference now, you see. How I am able to receive giving and soak up loving and not drive myself nuts draining myself into that acidic state beyond loving, yeah, loving.

Oh yeah, now we're rolling.

parental guidance

I talk to my mom about her breasts for an hour on the phone cuz that's where the cancer is.

The doctor says if she has to have it than this is the type to have, slow moving, doesn't appear to be spread.

I took my girlfriend up to the land I grew up on with my mom when we lived in a trailer for those few long years with no electricity in our trailer except for that 3 pronged extension cord our kind Catholic neighbors ran down to us through one of our sliding windows. And there is a real house on foundation there now and a few big mature trees that took me a second to realize were the same once small slender trees my mom had planted in that intricate garden all those years ago.

She would order the plants out of a paper book catalogue.

free wine

So here is how it should be

I didn't write much from the heart this year

I lived from it

So much from it I can't write it

I always said there is a time to live and a time to write

I have had lead in my blood, laughter choked somewhere in my gut, a slow impulse to letting things out

As all this overwhelming lush entity floods in

And I gasp expecting something worse than these beautiful sunrises and sunsets

God Bless you America while you last

The damage truckers on the 5 freeway can do to a relationship

We met on a rainy day in the crucibles of our own grief. We had both lost men who happened to have the same first name. Hers a year before mine and a lover not a father. But then my father was a lover too I guess, just not my lover. But he had made me that way, through loving.

And in the chaos of loss and the certainty of more of it to come butting up against all of the uncertainty as to when it would happen, we threw caution to the wind, messy like a liquid but lucky like a ridden wave. It would, we decided, be messier, all of it, to do nothing about us at all. And so we turned ourselves into that us and wrangled all the beautiful things that felt effortless like a wildflower bouquet in the hands of a child who had just crossed miles of mud to get it

mama there goes this man

You, I, worry about all the things that could happen to make it end. The uninhabitable Earth. The plague of physics at high speeds. What people can do to people. And what people can do to ourselves. And then, it all ends anyway.

This right now here and now is a recognition that I am letting my brain wander off as the confetti pours down all around me. This is me getting everything there is out of life at this very fragile moment and labeling it joy.

And as we made love I felt your spirit and mine and I realized I loved you on every single day of your life

xo sio

How she makes cookies out of dust. How i make the bed after us. How we keep having less and less of things and finding more and more in each other

and how now that we have met i am already always where i wanna be

2 years since

My dad died two years ago today tomorrow. 

My dad died two years ago and our relationship lives on. I talk to the guy. I was up at 5am the other day running up my hill and walking next to the freeway talking to the guy. I was getting pumped up. I did it Dad. My damn script finally got made into a damn movie. Fuck Dad. All those damn phone calls and conversations and bucks lent to me keeping my dream afloat and it’s almost unrecognizable but it finally got made.

My dad died believing in me. He wrote me this great email a couple weeks before he passed. He watched a short film I made with my brother Travis and a couple friends. He said I was good. He said I was exceptional. He said he forgot it was me acting in the film I wrote. It wasn’t me dad. It was me hiding in a story up some mountains with my friends trying to create while you were wasting away in physical form. He said stay positive in the email. 

Earlier this year I was thinking Dad I wish you could see how well I’m doing for a haunted man. Now I’m thinking Dad I’m not haunted, I’m full. I’m full and scared but full of life and living it even if it feels overloaded.

My dad died telling me to hold out for love that made my head spin. Dad, I found that head spinning love. I like her too. I know you’d like her too. It’s so wonderful liking the person you love. Like, I liked you Dad. How like it had a bunch of bad in between time for us but how you and I found each other and liked each other again.

My dad and his friend used to call each other with ideas for Seinfeld episodes. I remember hearing his laugh down the hall from my bed, when Seinfeld was airing originally. My girlfriend always brings up episodes. I call her, she says she is watching Curb. This is all early. This is all before she knows how much I love hearing it.

My dad died drugged and distant from laughter. His sense of humor shrouded by painkillers. In that pain was the humor but he felt neither those last few days. I remember helping him off the bathroom floor after he fell and couldn’t get up. I remember him brushing his teeth the day before he died, like he was going to need them where he was going. Maybe to show them during laughter.

My dad died and yet he is right here. It’s amazing how I hear him when I groan getting up from a chair even though I’m not old yet. I groan like he did, that comical groan.

My dad how nice you were. A sarcastic asshole at times but how nice you were. An ironic remove at times but how nice you were. My dad how you and I laughed when we found each other again. How we used to make fun of Lakers back up power forward Vladimir Radmanovic and his interest in snowboarding.  

I wrote this joke on twitter today cuz I have been obsessed about this crazy world Dad. You wouldn’t believe this crazy world Dad. Yes you would. You made a living trying to heal this crazy world. One individual at a time. 

Dad I made this joke on Twitter today said if I have a son I am going to name him after you dad. I am going to name my son Dad.

-Josh Turek