b u n n y h u n t e r

in florida once a few years ago i met this big blonde firearms enthusiast. she had a ridiculous name on her business card just above "firearms enthusiast" and she had a nice face and some hateful things to say that she seemed to be believing less and less. She was a youtube personality but it seems like she isn't anymore. her internet presence is gone. i said she seemed to be believing her talking points less and less because i could see the way her eyes would grow dull and sad as the hate left her mouth. and i would watch as she listened to things i said that were not centered around us and them. she listened and i knew there was a soul like mine, so deep away from all the surface materials. untouched, the soul. untouched the woman. her friend was on coke and losing it and she needed to take her home. a couple weeks later she asked me to follow her on twitter, and i didn't.

friday afternoon

I think about my old Jewish dad and his last girlfriend, Barbara. How she was a Mexican single mother many years younger than him. How he bought her pink gold jewelry at Costco and saved the receipts. How she called him her man and her amor.

I think about them laying in each other's arms in a hotel room in a beach resort in Cabo smelling like saltwater. I think about him as I lay with my beautiful girlfriend in my arms. How she and I caress and laugh and fuel a feeling of euphoria with our young strong bodies. I think about how grateful he was, to have that young love in his life one more time.

How they'd share a Subway sub. She was a social worker for the County and he was a mind doctor. How he kept trying to learn Spanish. And she showed him her favorite places in Oxnard where they both worked.

I think about his hairy chest when my girlfriend is up against my own hairy chest. And we are free from pain. The way our bodies move we become free from pain.

This roving pain.

organic kombucha

hey its me

hey its me the dusty boy

my parents were assholes so i sought the dirt

i was an animal and so i sought the dirt

i feel my hide

my dusty hide

ya know like those cows waiting out their lives on the side of the 5

stop at an in n out with a selection of lovers up and down the coasts like all the young people do

my girlfriend and i dragged ourselves into a mcdonalds

and she dipped her fries in my vanilla ice cream cones

on our ways back from santa cruz

i dont wish to raise me anymore

my parents were assholes

but they tried

i'm just a dusty boy

a worn thin hide

i'll chew on cud

i'll eat her fries

i'm just a crusty boy

alone alone alone not i

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

10 things you learn working as a Food Runner in a pizzeria

-You know how as you spend more and more time with something you are prone to losing your taste for that something as though the repeated contact between you and it leads to a greater loss of thermodynamic energy in your heart toward it as an entropy, a slow death, how it turns you cold? Well that never happens with pizza. If anything your affection grows, you start calling it baby names, you learn its nuances in shapes, moods, how to know when it’s your turn to do the dishes. We live together in a studio apartment and it doesn’t feel too small. It’s almost been a year.

-My boss, the manager at the pizzeria, found out I do stand-up comedy and now he thinks it’s funny to ask me if I’m going to kill myself, “Not yet” I tell him with a little less certainty each time. 

-Kids are being torn from their parents while slices of pizza are being torn from the whole by Father John Misty. He comes into my work at the pizzeria in a large, crisp, white button down shirt. He wears sunglasses with moody colored lenses. His friend is as handsome as he is, and they chat. Children are being torn from their parents. I was born on this side of the line, the last slice of pizza is grabbed on this side of the line. There are no easy answers. Father John Misty doesn’t say thank you for his pizza when I drop it on his table and I hate the President of the United States. The ignorant tribalism that buoys his power. But I dissociated from the zeal in which I hate him awhile ago. 

-Payless Shoes hurt your ankles and feet if you use them in ways they were never designed to be used, such as wearing them regularly to work.

-One night at the pizzeria I was telling my coworker about how my father died in my arms and how ten minutes after it happened a hummingbird flew into the house through the front door I had left open behind me but then the owner/chef of the pizzeria interrupted us and told me to get back to work because life in the city is about young money not old death. I shared this anecdote before on facebook but it is what I do. I try to tell the same stories over and over again until I don’t have to worry about them disappearing forever. So many memories hanging on by a thin thread these days, a lucky occurrence that draws them out of the depths of my forgetfulness and it’s too long to remember it all, so I tell these stories over and over again. All to be forgotten but I still tell them

-The manager at the pizzeria I work at is Argentinian but he goes out of his way to pronounce the Italian foods like and Italian in a mobster movie.  Prosciutto becomes Prrrrro-chuuuuu-toeeeeee-aaaa-mama-mia

-A mega successful film director comes into the pizzeria I work at almost every day and he orders the same thing every time, a marinara pizza, eggplant parmesan, and carafes full of red wine. I think is this it? Is this what I am working toward? The opportunity to dine alone like I always have but with more wine? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone with goblets of wine. I don’t. I don’t.

-It’s this town where the pizzeria I work at is, I like to blame this town. We’re all a few slices short of a whole. In my worst moods I dream of worse relations with North Korea. In my worst moods, I think that a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t be the worst thing if it took out all of humanity, only so that it was even. But that is only a brief flicker of thought from the powerlessness in being a single inconsequential person among a mass perversion of mankind and all its atrocities upon itself. It’s knowing love and fearing that all these systems mankind has in place are there to thwart love, and how exhausting it is to hold onto a belief in our time on this Earth. I don’t want a nuclear apocalypse, I want all the lovers in the world to live forever. 

-I am the prototypical build for a food runner in a pizzeria. I have long legs to stride across the restaurant, long arms to reach plates in and out of tables, and dead eyes so as not to disturb the customers from all the fun they’re having. You don’t want a Food Runner with a glow in his eyes, cuz then you wonder what he just did to your food. But dead eyes, dead eyes you can trust.

-You learn working in a pizzeria that the people you work with are mostly good. That the people you work with are all doomed cogs in a system that trades pennies for time and devalues our energy into a weak commodity meant to feed an impulse. I heard that it’s not fair to judge our pain in comparison to another’s pain because it is all relative, as though the system is only a facade for the down chemistry. I don’t know, I’ve starved a couple times for a couple days in my life and it’s easier to suffer with a little grease in my belly. I trudge up my steep hill late at night, up to our apartment, my final indignity I jokingly call it after circling my block and the surrounding ones for a parking spot. My tired bones, my eyes red with flour and dust, I am the pizza delivery guy, from kitchen to table and back and forth again, what I have learned is dispensable and gently disposed of as I close my eyes each night, in bed next to a lover I marvel at, smile with, laugh hysterically alongside of, discuss the day and how it rises and falls, how it changes, like a pizza pie-aaaaaaaaa!

"one morning this sadness will fossilize"

in the dream i had last night my dad had bought a tan all terrain toyota open air truck vehicle as a gift to himself before he died and my brother drove it with him in the front and we were high on a hill overlooking some stunning water city that we drove down into and i was sobbing in the backseat sobbing at the prospect of him leaving me and i wanted him to see cuz i dont think i showed him enough how torn up i was cuz i didn't want him to think giving up was an option and i was wrong to think that tears were giving up but for a time it worked for a time we called him iron mike even though he was actually just a gentle sadist

the walkstreets

I dunno

What do you mean you dunno

I thought about my old landlord fred and his jealous boyfriend. those two men living in a venice bungalow with their dogs and that one who died, toast.

The dead dogs name was Toast.

Sayrogate

https://vimeo.com/265277861

the brothers turek

https://vimeo.com/265277861

sio my lover

1. This is the joke we had after leaving the Shake Shack near Central park:

"Excuse me, do you know how to get to the Shake Shack near Central Park?"

2. Yeah you just go through the side entrance of the Natural History Museum and wander the science center unable to figure out how to get to the top of the walking curving timeline of the Universe exhibit so one of you goes the opposite direction (starting from 13.7 billion years into) while

3. the other one of you takes the elevator to the top of the exhibit but somehow ends up above it and unable to enter through the theater that leads out and onto the beginning of time and so frustrated meets you back near the second floor restrooms that you both use and then

3. continue wandering the animals of North America exhibit intrigued that there are indeed jaguars in the deserts of Mexico or something and then both of you go have a seat next to the Teddy Roosevelt statue and engage in mutual existential crises while both soothing and

4. falling apart in front of one another until you are ready to wander through the natives of the Pacific Northwest exhibit and somehow be sad and scared for and the native ways of life gone and the cries they might be playing over the loud speakers or imagined so you

5. hold each other close, closer than you already are holding each other close and you realize that you don't have the patience or legs for this museum anymore that you donated five dollars each to enter cuz you both realized once you got to Brooklyn that you we both

6. were broke and panicked but happy and panicked and happy so happy as you got out of the museum on the other side and started walking and across the street from the near the northwest corner was a Shake Shack and everything about that sounded good both the shake and the implication that

7. a shack would be a place of affordability if not nothing else and so you both went and ordered and oh how I wish I could remember the flavors we got but somehow I know she knows if I just ask her her memory is like a sponge and we felt like sponges walking in the humid heat

8. filling ourselves with cold thick sugary dairy through two straws trying each others milkshakes and wandering back into Central Park as we saw a man eyeing our shakes and we imagined how we would tell people our directions to the Shake Shack from there like the ways we just mentioned

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