memoirs of an autobiographer

the biggest everything

2006-10-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

Last night the sun posed a riddle: great beams flashed out like tentacles as it sunk into a bank of clouds in the distance. We were each - me, Justin, Caitlin - poised on separate knuckles of rock at the pinnacle of Mt. Tam. Caitlin reclined far off - maybe thirty yards - to my left. Justin the midpoint between us, sitting upright with his back against the stone, looking for all the world as though he'd tumbled from the heavens and come to rest there, broken, postured as if life still entertained his bones, but dead, ultimately dead.

And the sun with its riddle, imperceptibly sinking like the hour-hand it inspired, exploding with cold fire across the sky, reaching with arms that would never tire. The riddle? Obscure, like the bald spot on a sheet of binder paper where a question mark has been erased. Plans unaccomplished, or even yet unconceived? A punctuation evolved past the sickle and dot, encompassing some new dimension of inquiry.

I stretched flat on my perch, an icy, moss-covered outcropping jutting upward, suggesting a point of departure, of lift-off: launching momentum that made the world breathe and tilt toward me as I crept cautiously to its edge. Feet and ankles strained to grip the uneven rock. An exhalation of thanks escaped my lungs. There was a pervasive stillness: no wind would reach up - massive invisible hand - to slap me off the mountain. I had only to worry about the unfamiliar scale of distance gaping before me, which upset my sense of balance and shook my faith in my relationship to the earth.

I sat down, legs dangling, and took the moist atmosphere into my lungs. The fog was thickening. It bloomed in cumulous tufts far down the hills. Droplets pattered the flora around me, sounds as of animals scurrying through the underbrush. But overwhelming this, and profoundly oppressive, as though it carried truer weight and dimension than the stone beneath me, was a silence so large, with origins so distant and inconceivable, that my molecules might've silently dispersed, one by one - the game being up.

The game. The riddle. That heartbreaking sunset silently detonating the horizon. Darkness crowding the edges of perception. I stretched out belly-down, chin propped on crossed forearms, soul flattened by the biggest everything I'd experienced in a very long time...

well...?

2006-09-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

of latter day MCs

2006-09-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

Praisey Sunday, the latest album by Christian superstar MC Hymner, has been perched like a halo atop the gospel Billboard charts for the last six weeks, and its popularity is growing faster than the Mormon church can recruit dead Holocaust victims. Exploiting to an almost fanatical degree the Christian tendency to praise God both in church and in daily life, Hymner has compiled a range of songs about the power of prayer and praise to transcend... well, not praying and not praising.

MC Hymner -- Praisey Sunday

1. Oh, God!
2. I Am Christian, Hear Me Praise
3. Still Singing God's Praises
4. Oh, God! (rePRAISE)
5. You're OK In My Book (The Bible)
6. Can You Hear Me Now (God)?
7. I Enjoy Praising You
8. I Wish I Could Praise You Louder
9. Though I Praise You Now, I Will Praise You Yet Again
10. Let Me Sing Your Praises
11. Let Me Sing Your Mercies
12. Are We There Yet (Heaven)?
13. Come Down To Our Church Yard, God, And Sample Our Refreshments
14. Praise (God)
15. Shall We Praise Jesus, Too?
16. Praise the Roof

ode from the list of craig

2006-09-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

another stanza bonanza from the never-boring craigslist 'missed connections' subject lines!

what to do, what to do
I have never known a guy like you
Every word in the language is needed...
my oh so classy cabbie

ok so you wanna start something?

you're the cure for jungle fever
you make me scream.........
davey jones-jump my bones!!!

I guess love isn't enough...
tell her
Candyman
LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

five six seven eight
are you sleeping?
Please God
I Still Love You

Up and up
Wasn't it wonderful?
You don't sound on the up and up

My Plea to You
Lets rewrite an ending that fits

dot dot dot

2006-07-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

I deleted my MySpace account, thus eliminating the main distraction from a life of distractions. This may be the first step toward being more proactive, toward taking stock of things as they are and not dodging telling details by flitting from job to job or house to house or profile to profile. I had been spreading myself too thin. Hands logged onto MySpace while the brain glazed over. Any sort of inspiration would flee before the dull reductive force of repetition. I'm going to have to re-train my mind to be productive at the laptop, but for now it's as if a force field surrounds it that, when stepped through, wipes all creativity and original thought clean away -- the better to mindlessly click through MySpace activities as if the flesh and cells of my body were of no different stuff than the wires and circuits of the computer.

Gone, gone, stripped away! Less and less of myself in the world... or even worse, the illusion of myself in the world. What a pacifying device! It drained the effort and soul out of my interactions with other people, rendered my social landscape a geography of insignificance.

And got me into trouble more times than I care to count.

Comes a time when it's easier to flush the alcohol down the toilet than discipline your mind away from drinking.

I felt as though a fog had been lifted, as though I had just woken from a two-year snooze. It sounds melodramatic, but I felt emancipated from a force that had held sinister mastery over me and my negative tendencies for far too long.

So while I may not be in the game yet, per se, I am certainly out of one and beginning to see just how pinched, cowardly and misguided a life I've been leading...

My new spirit punctuation is the ellipsis. I will embody the dot dot dot. A life of implication and continuation...

if heroin was edible

2006-05-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten the joy and excitement of relocating to a new neighborhood in San Francisco. The sheer volume of activities any one of the major hoods has to offer is enough to keep you sequestered there, if not at first then eventually -- the curious gravity of city life finally working its weight on you till the circles you move in grow smaller and smaller. The corner store instead of Trader Joe's. Walgreen's instead of Cole Hardware. Hanabi instead of We Be, etc. I'm sleeping in, I'm staying home, no you come here...

My morning walk to the 24 bus now includes the unfurling of the SF skyline as I scale the hill skirting Alamo Square park. The Painted Ladies give way to the pyramid building and all its inferior cousins. Here's a picture off Google that hardly does the feeling justice, but hints at just how jealous you should be:

The organic market at Haight and Fillmore has a steady supply of the seitan sticks I can eat like heroin, if heroin was edible and came in Thai Spice flavor. The corner market never runs out of ramen. My stoop enjoys the view of a street slanted at about 30 degrees, with houses shooting straight up out of it like trees on a mountainside. Very San Francisco.

Why not enjoy the cliche, the image?

I can already feel my life growing more wholesome, certain filthy burdens lifted or fallen from me. Responsibilities rising from the rubbish heap of my adult life. Friends to contact, stories to write, books to read.

Speaking of! Snagged a copy of A Liar's Autobiography, Graham Chapman's life story as told by himself and three other people, including Douglas Adams! Four capable tongues in four capable cheeks: I can't wait! Also, one of Jose Saramago's (Blindness) earlier novels, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, and Bernard Malamud's The Natural and a whole bookcase of books that aren't even mine!

brace yourself: the portland and seattle blog

2006-04-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

The BART train rocks back and forth on its tracks. I have to be roused from the inward focus our parting forced on me. It was a sudden flip, from being aware of her desire for me pressed in on the periphery, where I had been redirecting it like a stream of water, to suddenly, in its absence, yearning out everywhere at once for it and falling on nothing, like grasping for smoke or stepping up on that last phantom stair. So I stayed inside myself and rummaged through the debris, the warm spots where she had touched me, and renewed the sensations on my body by replaying scenes from the morning over and over in my mind.

But I was roused. BART whistled and slammed through its mysterious tunnels. Emerged at nowhere destinations to let strangers off and on. And finally announced in a robotic voice that we'd reached the Oakland Coliseum...

My excitement crescendoed at the airport, where finally the whole grand plan became real to me. Shoes off at the security checkpoint. Feet on hard carpet. The brief embarrassment of socks exposed to strangers. Rushed, bent-double re-tying of my shoes, labored breathing, we're sorry, but safety regulations prohibit bringing lighters onto airplanes. Gate 14. Plane departs 1:15 PM, on time, for Seattle.

Ah, Seattle: more trees. And a pretty impressive view smiling up at us as we come in for a landing. Islands strewn like splotches of liquid on a dark sea. Wide swaths of new development, acres and acres of family homes grinning like too many rows of teeth, perfect in their symmetry and only from this viewpoint yielding their blandly sinister arrangement, American dreams packed in like sardines, held in bulk, lockers where families and their possessions are stored. Neatly numbered, groomed, pamphleted, mortgaged, then cleanly, modestly lived in.

We take a bus into the city. It coughs and rumbles through unfamiliar streets, wending ponderously around corners like an overweight, asthmatic shark. 4th and Pine. Our hostel, the Green Tortoise, looks like a shit-hole from outside. The building is tired, stained, in disrepair; you can imagine the smell from across the street. It could be any number of crackhead "hotels" that litter the foul mouth of San Francisco's own Tenderloin district like cracked, rotting teeth. But the colorful interior, the walls plastered with enthusiastic posters and advertisements, the young people sitting behind the counter, and the actual smell that thanks God didn't approach the one I'd prepared my nostrils and guts for, all served to quickly ease my fears; they fell from me as if I'd dropped them on the floor with the luggage.

It was the first time I'd ever stayed in a hostel. I didn't know what to expect. Actually, that's a lie, I expected evereything to be the opposite of privacy. Large rooms with mattresses on the floor, rooms filled with strange people giving off strange odors, who'd eye your belongings sidelong while clinging close to their own. Dred locks. Patchouli. Guitars and Dylan voices singing Dylan songs, maybe even better than Dylan could.

But reality, as usual, fell short: cramped hallways, narrow staircases, low ceilings -- the architecture of economy and quantity. Every square inch utilized. The room itself is not so bad. Two sets of bunkbeds. A window looking out on a parking lot. Further, if you strain, the waterfront. Seagulls doing what they do best: crying and wheeling, wheeling and crying. From time immemorial doing nothing else. Their lot's been cast. A sink shoved low into the wall, jutting porcelain that stands on rusted spindly pipes set in the crumbling plaster.

No roommates yet. We shove our belongings into a flimsy pressed-wood locker beneath the bottom bunk, clasp a flimsier lock around the latch, and trundle back downstairs, finally unburdened, into the expansive fresh Seattle air to smoke a cigarette and get out tourism on.

Despite the run-down facade of the Green Tortoise, its location is right in the middle of Seattle's ultra-clean downtown tourist center. Macy's, Tiffany's, Nordstrom, town squares, towering glass structures, and lifting high into the brisk spring air the same din to be found in every major city, the urban ruckus -- construction, traffic, shouts, plumes of steam shooting and hissing from sewers -- bounced around and contained, amplified and warped, churned into a roar of white noise by the skyscrapers that close everything in on all sides.

We strut the streets like citizens. The layout reveals itself right off. A city with nothing to hide: simple central grid that slopes into the waterfront, the world-famous Pike's Place Market. In the other direction, pulling free from the suck of clustered chain-store consumerism, the land rises and the buildings grow steadily smaller, till from the anonymous right-angled streets emerge narrower curving avenues with thrift shops, bars, pizza joints and cafes set modestly back from the sidewalks, alleyways and courtyards, and lo! unused spaces like sighs of relief, like sudden forest clearings.

We go thrifting. Eat fat greasy slices of pizza. Tour hurriedly through the throng of Pike's Place Market, which is similar to San Francisco's own string of piers. The comparison is generous to Seattle's version, which has little of the charm ours does. We smoke cigarettes and chat with the locals. All the while a disappointment grows inside us, takes the form of barbs and jabs at Seattle's seemingly paltry offerings. The downtown area needs no further description. And the supposedly "hip" Capitol Hill neighborhood is maybe two or three blocks of thrift shops and cafes.

So far our favorite coffee has been from Starbucks.

But night-time in a strange city puts the thrill on us. We'd staked out a couple bars earlier in the afternoon, so after an embarrassing burrito (north of San Francisco, is it possible to find a good one?), it's the Bus Stop with its comforting name (Phone Booth anyone?) where we finally shrug out of our coats and kick back with pints of the local amber. Rain begins to slant hard into the pavement outside.

Like old men at the dock, we cast our gazes and wait for a nibble...

Erica has just turned 28, she is cute and drunk with thin arms and a ready smile, she is punchy, she's got spunk. It's her birthday, the reason Seth, the hot boy Robin's singled out from across the bar, is with them. At midnight we are left with him and his two friends. We are beyond drunk. We are dancing at a disco that reminds me of Queer As Folk's Babylon. I am grinding a woman twice my age on a raised platform, just me and her up there. Seth is gay and totally into me. Robin is disappointed and jealous. I am through yelling myself hoarse over the music. We leave, exhilerated, and walk home through the rain, through the strange city at 2 AM. Keys jingle. Muffled silent hallway, heavy breathing. A dark room, two figures huddled together in the other bunk...

Morning. A moment's disorientation before my senses slide into focus. Mind opens a squeaky door, steps in tentatively. The top bunk has me sheathed in a pocket of heat trapped between the mattress and ceiling. I climb gingerly down the ladder on blood-heavy ankles and slip into the hall. After a harsh piss, staring absently at my body in the mirror as the sound of my urinating hyptnotizes me, I re-enter the room, now aware of the strange odors our four bodies brewed through the night. I observe that the other couple is attractive. They spoon like in the movies. I didn't think it possible to fall asleep like that and stay in position through the night's unconscious movements.

Back in my bunk, I listen to the faint sounds of their waking, light kisses, bodies whispering. One of his hairy legs has her lower body in a grip. An arm wrapped round her shoulders. She has a full head of curly, morning-stunned hair, a face warm with blood. Awake, I can't shake the unsettling feeling of being so close to the ceiling, so I climb back down as soon as Robin stirs. We get ready for the day in purposeful, awkward, brittle silence, that is nevertheless so complete the ratchet tear of a zipper or the light friction of nylon makes my jaw clench. It isn't till we're out of the room that I'm breathing normally again and it's...

Boat time!

On Bainbridge Island a rough figure of a man stands on a rickety wooden dock. He has the half-smoked stub of an unlit cigar trapped between yellow teeth, and speaks unintelligibly around it. He may well have been born with the crude thing clamped in new gums, grim as he stands before us now. We ask whether we might rent any number of sad-looking boats bobbing and knocking against the rot-soft wood. He says something dismissive that I can't decipher, then climbs into his own small dinghy and rows a few yards out before letting go of the oars and blaspheming his unlocatable lighter. Though his mouth and beard twitch around his words, the cigar remains absolutely still. As if it is smoking him from the inside out. Bewildered, we turn and walk back to the shore. As Robin takes pictures of the boats, a disturbing image enters my head, that of the cursing seaman unravelling -- flesh, sinew, bone -- when the cigar is pulled with a wet suction sound from his horrible mouth.

On Bainbridge Island a dog named Rosie waits patiently outside a pizzeria for her owner to emerge. Living her narrow canine existence, with eyes that beg for more. Let me out! Deciding the $6.50 ferry ticket would be justified if only I spent a few minutes scratching, petting, kissing and babying Rosie, I mean really lovin' her up, I kneel before her happy face and get down to business.

A young man steps out with a slice of pizza larger than and too heavy for the paper plate underneath it.

"And what might you two be doing on a such a lovely day?"

Spoken with a courtesy that belies his age.

"Petting this cutie. We're from San Francisco. Just took the ferry out to see what Bainbridge Island had to offer."

"Not much," he says after chewing and swallowing a hearty bite. "I grew up here. But it's a beautiful day for a boat ride."

He is free with information in that absent-minded, starved-for-conversation way.

"Sure is."

A van sweeps lazily past.

The young man informs us that he goes to college on the "mainland", that he's housesitting with his brothers while his mother and grandmother are off, on a whim, in China.

"That's crazy. I'll probably never see them again."

Which statement, the actual arrangement of words and the tone it was said in, and lastly its content, strikes us as singularly funny. He remains silent, either satisfied at his own humor, intentional or not, or baffled that something said so matter-of-factly has caused these two strangely-dressed tourists to drown him out with mounting laughter. He looks relieved and proud, but absent, as if searching for the key to his remark's humor so he might understand it and repeat it.

Still laughing, we part with Rosie and the boy and, breathless, puffing on cigarettes, race back down the main road after hearing our boat's lonely horn blast the atmosphere to smithereens. Smithereens being hard to com by, we collect a few off the ground before trampling up the ramp, running, running, a happy old lady holds the gate half open and waves us through. The massive ship fires up its rotors, which set the algae-green water to churning. A fine white sputtering froth. Gulls gliding in our wake. In the belly of this sad long beast, on padded bench seats amid the warm wet stink of processed food -- that chemical fume of degraded nutrition -- I fall asleep.

Seattle, we're through with you.

We secure a rental car but have a frustrating time disentangling ourselves from a confounding grid of one-way streets. Freeway on-ramps seem to elude us around corners. We spot them from inaccessible vantage points and in trying to approach them get squeezed further away. Seattle's quicksand suction, the more we struggle the further in we are pulled, until finally, motionless at a red light, I roll down the window and ask for directions.

Leaving a city is more difficult than entering one.

But the road suddenly opens before us, so straight and wide we practically tumble into it, and Portland, Oregon is now an invisible point on the horizon.

A pit stop:

There is no surer way, I'm convinced, to embed a song in your inventory of forever-cherished memories than to listen to it on the open road, in a rental car, your best friend in the world at your side. The earth flattens itself before you. An awareness slowly settles in like sunlight from newly parted clouds: that you are a flimsy, negligible thing with such a small footprint, such a silly haircut, and it's only by a miracle of combined forces that you gete to "be anything at all", let alone happy, let alone charged and inspired, in love, at work on the soul, sucking hard on jolly ranchers as you barrel down narrow highways yelling at the top middle and bottom of your lungs how incredibly hard it is out here bein' a pimp.

The silent rush of trees, a golden overexposure of sunlight quickly losing itself to gathering clouds. Layers of landscape slide, shift, rotate, cascade into view. Recede. Fields scrolling by, viewed somehow sharper tones through the cinematic panorama of the rear-view mirror. By the time we reach Portland the city looks drowsy and cold, the streets are rain-washed and glimmer dully in the afternoon gray. Our small rental car is slotted neatly into the first exit ramp. We roll silently into a deserted downtown district. Map awkwardly spread over my lap. Lazily browsing the empty avenues.

Immediately Portland has communicated a tranquility and ease that we sorely missed in Seattle. A sort of muffled introspective quality, a city that has gathered itself in for the quiet weekend. No showmanship, no scraping machinery of urgency, just the confidence of a small town that has been and always will be, no thanks to you, but come and enjoy what we've got to offer.

Which, admittedly, isn't much. Not if you're accustomed to the embarrassment of natural and artificial riches San Francisco lays out daily, spreads over its jumble of hills and shores like a picnic. So more than a unique environment, the main lure of Portland is the fact that it isn't San Francisco, it isn't entirely lame, and it isn't stressful. (Seattle really did suck our energy. The drizzly wind, oppressive drab architecture and lack of small-town feel that even SF has tucked away in certain neighborhoods. We were left nervy and exhausted, wind-blown, dry-eyed and irritable.)

The Value Inn on Southwest 4th Street is a shabby motel cut into a featureless block. The reception area is filled with worn objects that exhale stale, convalescent odors. Rehab for battered and abandoned furniture. All of which is slightly reassuring: imperfect people running an imperfect establishment means we'll be able to strike a deal. No soulless pristine facade, no untouched heavy art deco pieces, just stained plaster ceilings, despondent but real plants, a tired service bell on a sagging counter and the small friendly Indian man behind it, with a rushed but amicable demeanor. Friendly face.

A thick accent gives his sentences a lilting, dipping, swooping quality -- very pleasant -- that is unfortunately at odds with the slurp-slap hell-rhythm of his flip-flops. He leads us up a moldy narrow staircase and down a corridor that groans with the weight of our burdened footsteps. Room 44 is a large rectangle with two double beds, that he is giving us at $50 a night on the condition that we use only one of the beds. The room is also furnished with a large television set, refrigerator, microwave, heater/air conditioner and, be still my heart (art?), a broad imitation marble writing desk:

"Lovely. It's perfect."

While dictionary.com doesn't list "a shower with the water pressure of a turkey baster in a baby's fist" or "proximity to loud middle-of-the-night domestic disputes" or "the application of tissue-thin and brillo-rough towels to bare skin" as attributes of either "lovely" or "perfect", we are nevertheless overjoyed at the promise of four days of privacy and relative comfort compared to Seattle's awkward hasty accommodations. Securing the room shaved off 99% of the apprehension that trundles in on the heels of the unknown. Whatever happens, we have our headquarters.

Into the charged outside air with giddy exaltation. Portland would do right by us, we could feel it. We'd not half an hour into our visit stumbled onto her best-kept secret, the Value Inn with its truck-stop town rates. It's a matter of putting one foot in front of the other till she bestows more unexpected pleasures on our trusting upturned tourist faces.

Like, say, an incident with the Portland city police.

The sun has finally broken through and thrown off Portland's gloomy raiment -- everybody loves raiment -- and the sky is so blue you can tumble into it if you forget to keep both feet on the ground. A is lit under us. So we use it to light our cigarettes and behind these brightly burning sticks we scheme. Feeling that gravity today has been reversed, we come up with the idea to climb some lofty perch -- the roof of a hotel, say -- and take photos. An eight-story parking garage is the first such scaleable edifice we come across. Up in a glass-walled elevator that takes us to the top floor where we are exhaled onto a broad warm expanse of concrete. At the far end is a ledge that drops 80 feet down the other side to the brick-laid pavement below (as opposed to above). Robin squints out at the light-blasted city. The wind tugs and teases our hair.

I hop onto the ledge and let my feet hang over. A vertical thrill grips my sternum. Robin unsheathes the camera with that familiar scratch of velcro and starts snapping photos. I sprawl carefully and deliberately on top of the ledge, head resting on a raised pillar of cement, left arm draped lazily over the side. Across the empty expanse is a skyscraper that looms with the smug implacability of an authority figure. Floor-to-ceiling windows reveal layers like the cross-section of an ant farm. Each level toiling, oblivious to the activities taking place above and below it. There is something comforting in the sight, mute efficiency applied to unknowable tasks. Neat little office tasks. The visual equivalent of muffled construction through your closed bedroom window, lying in bed.

From the street, bustling commercial activity. People flowing like cells down the wide red walkways, the circuit anatomy of city streets. Sirens. Trains gliding smoothly and futuristically down gleaming rails. Robin fiddling with the camera in the periphery. More sirens. Strong sun, good sunlight. Healthy, happy face, warm nose...

Louder sirens...

Unfamiliar voices suddenly come into hearing range...

Two figures approach us slowly.

I think: busted! But nothing new. We'll show humility, embarrassment, explain that we're tourists and rush off with low quick footsteps and stifled laughter.

But the guns at their sides are a fast and sinister communication that they are not security guards deployed to rid this privately-owned roof of trespassers, but police officers. They keep an uncomfortable distance. We come down off the ledge and approach them, slinking sheepishly in our clothes.

"Can I ask what you two are doing up here?"

"I'm sorry, sir," my first instinct being to apologize. "We're not from here. We just came up for the view and to take photos. I'm sorry."

He gives his female partner a significant look, then steps back to speak into the radio at his shoulder.

His partner, meanwhile: "Do you have a car parked here?"

"No, ma'am."

I mentally hush the small Southern accent that wants to emerge. The accent of backwards innocence, humble apology, simple-minded purity of intent. The urge to cut my voice down to one dimension: free of implications, connotations and unconscious betrayals.

"Are you aware that people called us because they thought you were going to jump? This place is surrounded by taller buidlings. Of course they saw you up on the ledge."

The obviousness of this dawns on me and without thinking how the action might be taken by the officers, I return to the ledge and look down on a swarm of police cars angled onto the corner like metal filings drawn to a magnet.

"Oh my God, how stupid!"

Robin: "I'm sorry, we're tourists. We're not from here. We didn't know."

"Can I see your IDs?"

The other officer has returned.

Yes, sure, of course, here they are.

Two more approach from the other end of the lot and gather in quiet communication. We stare at them like petty thieves caught in a drugstore. Dumb. Tourists. Please forgive us.

One says, "Should we take them in?"

Another says, "We could give them garage exceptions."

Their gazes fall on us in unison, expressing unanimous but not unfriendly condemnation, a look of understanding and scorn. Our innocence finally wins them over. We are handed back our ID cards.

The female officer asks us how long we have left in Portland.

"Just a couple days," we say over each other.

"We're just tourists," Robin says again as if still lodged in an earlier part of the conversation.

"God, that was so stupid," I chime in.

The first officer says, "I think sending them back to California is enough punishment."

A generic laughter rumbles up out of four belt-restrained bellies, lifts into the baking air which only now begins to let up its choke on my dry mouth and nostrils. We join in, slightly offended, feeling the special breed of outrage particular to being rejected by someone you deem inferior. But the humility of our positions quickly stifles this inappropriate welling, and after a couple seconds of uncertain milling around, we step outside their sphere of gravity and, picking up speed, descend once more in the glass-walled elevator, egos slowly expanding until, back on the street, we fairly burst with excited volume. Laughter and erratic charges in our steps, huddling in barely containable conspiracy.

Another day another blog.

Let's see, the only other event of note, and it can't really be counted as an event, is an evening at the bar with the illustrious Peter, and by illustrious I mean hopelessly drunk.

Slowly his interest in me wanes, his slobbering over Robin waxes, and the end result, well, is better expressed with a picture:

Safely ducking out from Peter's loving arms, we hurry back into the main downtown area and on a whim descend the dingy stairs into a cellar bar, I forget the name, where two bros await us with the peace offering of a horizontal props-fist.

Shizzam.

We come to use the bathroom but stay for the outrageously entertaining dynamic of these two lovely specimens. One is unexpectedly sharp and witty, the other is drunk but in a non-threatening, non-leering way, just kind of beyond the normal comprehension of things and an easy target for his friend, who doesn't miss an opportunity to deprecate him in front of these strangers. We reminisce on the 90s (the main feature of which, we decide after a few moments of heavy silence, was virginity) and flirt with the obviously unamused bartenders who want nothing more than to close up and go home. We wait till the last possible moment and finally take a few photos before climbing out of the smoky den with the unique tourist pride of accidentally finding a place that makes you feel like a citizen. The ideal traveler's instinct.

And that, folks, is Portland, Oreg--

Wait! I almost forgot!

The little domestic dispute I hinted at above.

So we're settled in drunken sleep, right, which isn't real sleep, just a reprieve on the senses that doesn't dip into that cherished oblivion -- the mind is left to swerve through its endless fields of data, to churn in alcohol heat.

The first slap wakes us up, the sound stabbing some deepest animal instinct into life, so I'm on guard before I even hear the second slap, which rings in the skull like a fire alarm. An unfamiliar call to action causes me to sit up, but I am instead forced into a pregnant state of motionlessness as if balanced on the point of obliteration, listening intently for more sounds from the next room. The walls are dark blue with the artificial light from the street. They seem to breathe with the intensity of the moment. Robin is alert next to me.

Yelling. Trampling footsteps. The whole motel groans in complaint, rocks with the sudden violence as if to say "I'm too old for this." Shouts from the corridor. We rush silently to the peephole, where, while looking through it on a fish-eye, maddeningly narrow view, I very quietly, very slowly turn the lock with a delicateness that requires all my muscles to be simultaneously clenched. We take turns at the peep-hole. A small man rushes into view. He's stomping up and down the hall trying to get his jacket on.

"I'll kill that bitch. Where the hell is she? I'll shoot her."

Then silence. We return to bed, having heard the voice of the proprietor and thinking if he's involved, no help from us is needed, surely he's already called the police. But we can't sleep, our bodies are taut with tension, poised on the edge of action, and it'll be a while yet before this strange instinct loosens its grip on our nerves. Eventually, sleep takes us...

They play dumb in the morning. They didn't hear anything. As if this flimsy structure could hide the sound of its snoring termites. He goes so far as to say, "You know where to come next time."

"Yes, certainly. It was lovely. Thank you so much."

As we once again navigate a maze of one-way streets and dead-ends and bus-only routes, we realize that Portland has had us in an even deeper tangle, and after a half-hour's confused wandering, stunned as if the car itself couldn't make up its mind and its uncertainty could be read off the tint of the windshield and the angle of the hood, we are finally granted exit, spat out of Portland's admittedly well-kept mouth.

I insist that Route 101 is the nicer of the two main highways that unfurl like red carpets down to San Francisco, so we find that vein and inject ourselves into it. The coast is, of course, gorgeous, but the drive through sporadically, arbitrarily placed towns with no more culture than a surf shop and a diner, it gets tedious, so just above California's border we take a tributary over to the 5. This tributary, a long, narrow corrider of pines, with gentle sloping grades and sudden breathtaking views, re-invigorates us after six hours of cramped claustrophobia. The 5 doesn't get boring until the last awesome view of Mt. Shasta shrinks to nothing in the rear-view mirror, then you find yourself on an unendingly straight stretch of asphalt that dwindles to a non-point on the horizon. The uniform, soul-shrivelling flatness.

Flashes of blue and red.

Officer "Snook" issues me a $250 speeding ticket and sends me on my 65-mph way.

"Those white signs with the big black numbers on 'em? They're not suggestions, dude, they're the law. Now drive safely."

"Yes sir! Thank you sir!"

We drive through the night, taking turns. Stop for Taco Bell in some anonymous dark place. Roll into town at 1:30, just in time for the Phone Booth's last call.

Shit damn, it's good to be back.

Victory for V for Vendetta

2006-03-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

OK -- I think we can all learn a lesson here. V for Vendetta, a new film by the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame!), although it is set in a fully-realized futuristic London, has a lot to say about our society in general. A certain you-know-who is leading this country into an endless war with a bunch of foreign immigrants who DON'T EVEN LIVE HERE, let alone have Weapons of Mass Distinction. I mean come on, I think we would've found them by now! How many lives will it take, how many billions of dollars and Euros (because, even though our "medias" spin it differently, we are NOT the only ones fighting this war) before we learn that it is not our place to be telling other countries what to do! America is the bully, the aggressor! We cannot tolerate quaintness and what appear to us as "backwards" traditions. A mass grave here and there does NOT constitute our right to let the bombs drop! I was looking through a dog breed guide at one of the INDEPENDENT bookshops I work at, and imagine my delight when I found one called the "Afghan Hound"! I think we know what breed of dog is leading this country!

In V for Vendetta we are shown what is commonly referred to as a "Dystopia", or a very imperfect future, like the one we read about in William Orwell's "1984". Even though that book was written in the 80s, it still has a lot to say about modern life! It's a truly frightening indictment of absolute power because, as they say, absolute power corrupts TOTALLY. In V for Vendetta, there is a masked figure with a plan to start a revolution. The mask is a symbol. Symbols are very important to society. They are everywhere and unavoidable.

Natalie Portman plays the role of an innocent girl with a troubled past, who the masked avenger saves one night from being RAPED by the government police. I mean, can there be a stronger allegory for the US foreign policies that are being enacted ALL OVER THE GLOBE? And not just on land, but over the sea, too, and on islands and volcanoes. We all know the Earth is mostly water, and you-know-who wants to get his hands on that, too! The water belongs to everybody! You can't H2Own it!

Throughout the movie one senses that one is watching not one, but two films, one about the future and one about the present. The one about the present actually takes place in one's mind, and the one about the future takes place on one's IMAX.

One also gets the sense that one is bored at work, and when this happens, one puts one's tongue in one's cheek, and lets one's fingers do the talking.

hung over and out

2006-03-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

I am deeply hung over this morning, guts all fuzzy and draped. So naturally I treated myself to a scramble at Boogaloos, where I slouched in a booth gingerly sipping water from a plastic cup and gazing out at the world as if through aquarium glass. Across the street, a group of grey-faced -- the grey of long-suffered indifference, of resignation under the weight of tedium, more a condition than a color -- down-on-their-luck stragglers waited impatiently for the Social Security office to open its doors with an unmistakably similar resignation. Government bureaucracy will never inspire a wider range of colors. Drab and depressing, all right angles, flourescent tubing and thin worn carpet. Ceiling panels, grammatically incorrect warnings, and everywhere a hollow human element that has been emptied by endless repetition.

Living in a city with such a variety of weather conditions, it's tough to pin down a favorite, but this morning comes very close. It's grey out, threatening rain -- a tremble in the air, an agitated wind. Walking the Mission streets at 8 in the morning you hear the city's vast construction/destruction apparatus coming to life, sending up its billows of dust and smog, coughing tentatively before beginning its relentless gnaw on our endless supply of decrepit buildings. San Francisco is a screaming churning organism, as much mud and disrepair as well-kept landmarks and glimmering glass and steel. Sudden rainstorms give the city nervous showers before revealing its condensed sprawl to a fickle sun. Sudden rainstorm, nervous shower, condensed sprawl, fickle sun -- got that?

Feeling sleepful at a precarious equilibrium. If I keep my eyelids at half-mast and step carefully -- left, right, left, right -- focusing inward and keeping in time with my breathing, I just might get through the day.

D(eath)M(urder)V(iolence)

2006-03-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

I went to the San Francisco DMV this morning, never having been there, expecting a 4-hour wait before being let into the waiting room, where I would get misdirected twice and finally led to a puddle of urine on the floor where I would be asked to sit until the government developed the most inefficient and unapolagetic method of telling me I wasn't elligible to renew my driver's license because I had arrived three days too early for it to be too late, and if I wanted a proper rejection I'd have to come back Monday, the day they are closed, and give exact change to the homeless man masturbating and weeping in his sleep underneath the hot dog stand out front. Meanwhile I would deliver a baby in the crowded waiting room while dodging bullets and translating what are anyway unintelligible ID application instructions into Chinese for a blind man with no hands who subsequently can't read Braille.

After the triplets have been birthed and spanked and given the appropriate written tests for infant class stroller licenses, after I've performed a tracheotomy on the morbidly obeise mother of seventeen, who's wearing flip flops and a solid purple body suit resembling a circus tent -- the sounds of bleating seals and booming canons and the stamping of elephants as she lists past -- after the power outtage, the earthquake, the terrorist bombing, after the discovery of human fecal matter in the corner, after the roof has caved in, after the flood, the firestorm, the mudslide, famine and plague, after the pogrom -- I fail my written test, get arrested for skipping out on jury duty, become the victim of a tragic bureaucratic mix-up and spend the rest of my lonely days in jail winning my way through poker games to keep from getting sodomized.

DMV = Department of Murder and Violence

Imagine my surprise when I walk in and gaze on a vast, mostly empty interior, an elderly lady with a warm smile ready to help me at the front desk. She hands me a short application form, I tell a corny joke that causes her already generous smile to widen and give life to the rest of her face, and I am making my way to the waiting area where more cute girls than I can count on two fingers are sitting by themselves looking awfully single. I choose one and sit down next to her. Immediately she compliments my shoes. I remove them and offer them to her. She politely vomits and turns the other way. I turn the other way and wait for her dry heaves to subside. Then I write my phone number on an empty condom wrapper and put it in her hand while she's not looking.

A robotic female voice calls my number. It's my turn at window 13.

"Life is meaningless."

"I'm sorry?"

"I said, 27 dollars."

"Thank you."

"My wife got fat, my son's in jail and I can't achieve an erection any more. I'm going bald, my father has cancer and my brother escaped from rehab to resume his addiction to crack. Why was I even born?"

"Come again?"

"I said, cover your left eye and read line one."

"F E Z D P."

"My cell phone's ringing. It's probably my wife calling to tell me to pick up an enormous bag of beef jerkey on my way home. The kind that gives her horrible gas."

"I didn't quite catch that, sir."

"Take this to window B, have your photo taken, then go over there for the written test."

"Have a nice day!"

"I won't."

With a smile on my face -- of all places! -- and a bounce in my step -- make it two -- I complete the exam with Gusto, the Mexican guy in line behind me. While waiting to have it checked by the same old lady who greeted me upon entering, I notice that the relatively professional, together-looking lady in front of me has marked the first two questions differently. In a moment of panic and uncharacteristic self-doubt I dart out of line to change my answers accordingly. Happy at my ingenuity and last-second bravery, I re-enter the line in time to see her walk off dejectedly, crumpling the exam in an angry fist. Mine goes over the counter with a trembling hand and comes back with four of the 18 questions spared the red marker. I ask to take it again immediately, the old woman turns the exam over and tells me to try the other side. I do. I get a perfect score. I leave happy and satisfied.

Seattle, here I come! I mean we!

infected

2006-03-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

This might make some of you nostalgic. I've got an ear infection again. Had to cut work short, borrow money from Cover to Cover and rush over to the "free" clinic at UCSF to pay $200 (no insurance, you see) for a 30-second examination and a prescription for amoxicillin. Luckily I caught the infection before it really flared up. Let's see if I can find an excerpt from last year's blog. Ah, here it is...

Folks, it was excruciating. I thought of soldiers left to die on the battlefield, their deaths stretched into days of screaming and clawing at life. I truly did despair. I'm not one to have anxiety attacks, but this came awful close. It was a dull, thrubbing sort of anxiety that crept through my nerves with a slow, inexorable progress. This was madness. Hysteria. I was incredulous. We've got cell phones that take pictures and rockets that go to Jupiter; how could such a simple form of suffering be allowed to exist among us?

That's from January 25th, 2005. Is this to be an annual thing for me? I thought only 8-year-olds get ear infections?

My phone's getting shut off for lack of payment. I had to take a taxi to get to work on time this morning.

What else?

fallow beds of dormant lust

2006-03-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

Atlas Cafe. Where beautiful girls bask in the glow of their laptop monitors. That sick blue transparent hue -- it deserves odes, sonnets, couplets, stanzas, lyrics, and might even inspire an epic or two, depending on how often I return to gaze on those illuminated beauties. Those silent sirens who cry only with their looks and a generous portion of mystery. Oh, I am a slave to cute girls, that much is sure. Crossed, unmoving legs, tiny shoes, high hunched shoulders, eyes unwaveringly focused on their work, never once looking up! And me, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye, hell, the corner of somebody else's eye, and instantly my head is up, the words I was just reading chase away like roaches from the light, and I check each cutie in succession to make sure no glances are being sent my way. I'm positively bovine about it, like a tail involuntarily swatting at flies. Stupid cow! You are so predictable. But there it is -- who am I to rage against thousands of years of biological impulse? And the impulse is solid. I could no more deny it than sit still while the Tamale Lady wheels into the Phone Booth hawking her pods of divine deliciousness.

Why else attempt in public what should really only be done in solitude? Peace and quiet? The din of the cafe -- screaming espresso machines, plates and silverware slaloming in the bus trays, conversations, the hiss and scrape of the grill, and everything widened with echoes and sent back down on you two-fold from the high rafters -- this din matches the din in my mind, the racing scenarios of a hyper-active imagination, an imagination that is never so prolific as when I engage it to such a task.

Cafes are showcases. Fallow beds of dormant lust. A crowded claustrophobia of sidelong glances, stooped-headed intent, the air alive and electric -- tropical! -- with concentrated, squashed libido. Man, what a zoo! What a market! Of course, it may just be me. But I think I'm onto something...

It's fun. Like we're all walking around oblivious of everything but our racing hearts, the only things real and substantial inside, and they pound to be let out of our silly chests, to have the universe expanded for them, to be given the senses our brains take for granted. But, poor blind thing, poor bird, it remains perched and caged, pulling at its own feathers, squawking to be heard but mostly just fouling its home in anger and frustration.

ANYway. Go check out Atlas. It's at 20th and Alabama. Maybe I'll see you there... out of the corner of my eye.

de profundis, or what i did last night

2006-02-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

I'm done with Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, not because I finished it, but because it strayed from an irrresistible study of a profoundly troubled relationship to an embarrassing self-congratulatory display of classical knowledge and outrageous comparisons -- I stopped when he likened himself to Christ. He tackles Love and Art and Religion and the Self and gives them all their capital letters. He uses capital letters so liberally he may as well be ladling soup to the homeless, the effect is just as tedious but not as worthwhile. Let the reader know that he is dealing with an incurably pretentious author. And a vain one, too: Wilde is an artist -- no, an Artist -- and he takes every opportunity to remind us (his lover, I should say, for the letter wasn't written to be published) of this fact, not by the obvious art of his writing, which is always poetic, always concise, always a pleasure to read, but by actual written reminders ("an Artist such as myself").

Vanity is an awkward burden for a writer. A great writer will render his vanity in interesting ways, as Wilde does in De Profundis. But a lesser talent will immediately turn people away. Take the rap world: a bunch of talentless hacks making tons of money (or pretending to make tons of money) telling people how amazing they are. Like a bunch of old hollering men. Wilde's vanity, of course, is not so unwarranted. He is a great writer, and a great writer's writing needs to be read. Eventually -- inevitably -- he's going to say something important that you can't afford to miss. He has your trust. His vanity is artistic, it creates art because its vehicle is art, and so it compounds itself. Narcissus couldn't get enough of his reflection because every time he looked at it he was overwhelmingly pleased. But self-referential art is, by definition, self-contained, and can't really extend itself too far in any direction. It's tedious and it's boring and eventually you want the artist to swing the guns away from himself and toward a more worthwhile target.

Like, say, crazy relationships.

After a relationship, who is immune to looking back on things and attempting to rationalize actions that at the time seemed totally uncharacteristic of him? To shed light on those moments when he didn't seem himself? Bruce Willis, of course, but who else? De Profundis contains the most ornate, the most far-reaching of these rationalizations, all wrought with a poet's lyricism, a wit's shrewdness and a classically educated, well-read intellectual's vast store of references. Wilde delights in his own thoroughness -- who wouldn't, with such talent? -- but there is beneath it all a relentless, unmistakable desperation, and you sense a writer constructing elaborate justifications more for his own benefit than for anybody else's.

I always date talented, creative, instinctual, strong-willed girls with huge... personalities. I am drawn to them. I tag along, thinking they're the perfect contrast to my cerebral lifestyle, because give me a bed and a stack of books and in thirty minutes I'll have figured out which one to fall asleep on. I have an analytical mind that functions better in isolation at slightly below room temperature than in the crazy chaotic moment, emotions, nostrils and pant-bottoms flaring. I'm given more to fancy than to impulse. It's rare that my personality achieves full expression in social situations, because basically I am not a social person. I should say that basically I don't want to be a social person, because perhaps now more than ever I am one. But eventually this activity here, me alone in my room listening to Mozart's piano sonatas as performed by Glen Gould and typing away, thinking, putting thoughts together like puzzle pieces, holding them to the light, absorbing, processing, branching out... here's the money, baby, what I'm striving for, the reason why I want others to be drawn to me.

Anyway, opposites attract and I am the opposite of this impulsive, instinctual creature, this beautiful animal who functions on a level I will never have access to, a mode of living more delicately in tune with life, with all the higher things Wilde and people like me can only write about -- love, art, soul, spirit, self. And when the shit hits the fan we resort to our tools. Mine, this. Hers, well, she doesn't really have to resort to anything, she is always and absolutely herself, hardly multi-layered, or consisting of layers whose least interesting aspect is distinction. Everything in her is more closely intertwined, behavior and impulse are often inseparable, motives are the same as instincts and thought is one with action. My type of thinking is repulsive to this type of person. I am a shivering coward, timid, more at ease in the shadows, the periphery of life, watching squint-eyed and astigmatic from the sideline, furiously scribbling notes, trying to keep up with the pulse of real events, the true stuff, the life-stuff.

So when problems arise, as they did in the relationship Wilde chronicles in De Profundis, we high-tail it to the world of ideas, of notions and feelings as they can be described in words. I still maintain that describing the human condition with any accuracy precludes you from its true intensity. Words are removed from feeling, even in poetry, even when they cause feeling they are still used deliberately, and most of life is felt before conscious thought, most of the stuff worth feeling anyway. The trouble is, you don't eat burritos in this world, you don't make out with girls, you close out life, or, after life wrongs you, you lead it down to your cellar where you plan on walling it in with words, burying it alive. But I suppose the lifeguard doesn't get to play and swim and frolick with the little half-naked boys.

Yeah.

Just what am I getting at? As usual, it won't be figured out here or now.

One of the most fascinating notions in the book is Wilde's assertion that shallowness is the supreme sin. And that those capable of hatred, those who let hatred rule their lives and can be consumed with petty grudges, lack imagination. He accuses his lover of lacking any imagination. It seems to me that the key element to sympathy is the imagination. And since we are all basically working from the ego, it's the imagination that lets us put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, test the ego in hypothetical circumstances, and if the imagination is strong enough, we are frightened, or outraged, or somehow effected. To lack imagination, then, is to lack sympathy, and to lack sympathy is to be completely egocentric. My last couple relationships, I fell into this apathetic state, where my only mode into feeling was through my own desires, my own impulses. I grew so detached from the reality of the situation, existed so completely in my own ideals, that I suffocated my lover with unrealistic expectations. Is it because I lacked imagination? One of my major sources of grief as concerns my writing is that I believe I lack imagination. I have the words and the style to tell a story, but not the imagination to create the story in the first place.

I think I've finally run this ship aground. The weekend's here and I plan to spend it holed up with my books, perhaps making brief forays around the corner to Taqueria Can-Cun for super burritos. Why oh why did nobody tell me that I lived so close to one?

notes to self

2006-02-22T23:05:00.000-08:00

The third person is dead. The second too popular a mode for the self-righteous. I taped my name over the letter "I" on my keyboard...

To live as narrowly as possible. To take in very little, find your talents, but mostly just sleep. And not to be depressed, either, or much troubled in any way. Living simply, but not as Thoreau did, not with any noble purpose or in pursuit of notions of purity, but to seek and absorb only the easily attainable.

Of course I have never read Thoreau.

To remain poised in equilibrium but not on the verge of motion, unless, of course, it is bedward motion. To maintain nonetheless a ready sense of astonishment. Apathy and cynicism cannot coexist; the latter is unearned. So stay sentimental, enjoy the more easily felt sentiments. To be closed off to the more difficult ones, however, the human ones, those that exist between you and others. Cry during a movie, tear up at the airport arrival gate. Allow the rudimentary emotions to swell inside your breast, squash those more intimately connected to your well-being.

Heard a man say, "To each his own? More like, to a few from most." They stole the vote, of course. Swindled it, the thieves. I'm left sipping mimosas at noon, pen trembling across the page scrawling spider-leg letters, daddy long-legs the kingpin of the arachnids. My guts are aflame, all caffeine and alcohol, nerves twisted and clamped and turned in on themselves, setting themselves off, oh mutinous body, oh obsalescence of such dramaturgy -- that may not even be the right word.

all nerve and instinct
eye and hand
all impulses accounted for --
artistic, sexual, nurturing

Long ago his fingers exploded at the cuticles, the flesh there stays ripped and reddened, often bloody, and it was due to the ferocity of his determination, his furious scribbling. Room littered with capless pens, the caps themselves nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he tossed them out the window, perhaps he fed them to the unhappy cat.

In the age of plenty, of feasts, buffets, everything available and within grasp, everything possible, it is something to say "no thanks." No thanks, I don't want any. You sure? Please, no thanks. You're telling me you don't want any? I just had any, now I don't want any, so fuck off.

I didn't dream it, though just to make it more real I would have liked to -- a testament to the weakness of thought that it measures flimsy against dreams -- so it was a notion, that of sitting in front of a mirror for an entire day, never taking my eyes from my reflection...

She suffers a terrible panic when alone with her againg, and refuses or simply does not know how to relinquish her vanity...

After all, you don't pass a note to the man whose nose you'd like to break, on it written "Your nose is broken," you walk over and you break his nose with your fist.

klee shay

2006-02-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

I'm burning bridges with the midnight oil, the candle at both ends, a hole in my pocket. A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, but the Yen Ta Fo at Thai House Express beats all. Atkins said: no grain, no gain. Love and hate aren't so different. One involves happiness and sex, the other bitterness and lonesomeness. Come to think of it, love and hate are totally different. Training myself to walk like an Egyptian on eggshells. I'll jump down your throat, to conclusions, the gun, and in with both feet. If everybody's a tourist it's no wonder no man is an island. You can lead a horse to water but not water to a horse.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, no totally, like I firmly agree. I speak Braille with an accent because Justice is blind. All for one and one for all until once and for all it's all at once. I'm just a dreamer asleep at the wheel of the rented economy-sized sedan of life. There's no "I" in the team I'm always chosen last for. The ball's in my court but I'm on the bench making my benchmark. Been there, done that, got a parking ticket. It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the world, but there's a helluva buck to be made carpeting the world. Especially if you're a ... carpeteer? I'm the big cheese, big as a house, bigger than life, and lactose intolerant. I've got a huge head, heart, mouth, ego. And a big wig. It's time to bite the bullet because the bloom is off the rose and heading straight for you...

Watch out for that bloom!

help me if you can i'm feeling down

2006-01-28T20:39:00.000-08:00

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me?

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then I feel so insecure,
I know that I just need you like I've never done before.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me, oh.

Help, I need somebody to step in, was there an understudy, a girlfriend in training? Come, fill an emptiness, give presence to absence, try on this shirt. It belonged to the ex, you fill it so differently, my mind is reeling! But there it is, like so many aspects of my life I need to reappropriate, conquer singly, by myself, a couple of one, you'll be more help than you can imagine. But don't gesture too wildly, move with modesty, you'll never match her for zest, just fall asleep on my arm, let your breath warm my skin.

Help, not just anybody gets the role. In a world of options, a staggering number of options, options weighing us down, dragging us under, I say in this world you must have standards, I've got a couple of my own but nobody would argue they haven't lowered. You're everything she wasn't and I'm not in love. I've got work to do, mind you, important work, none of it's been done but I have a lot in mind, gears are cranking as they say, soon I will be in motion. But here you are now, asleep in my bed, a stranger as she now so inconceivably is, I'm not mourning her, I merely mourn for myself, my self scooped from myself and I was left with nothing. Or little. Probably more than I figure.

Help, you know I need someone, help wash her away. A friend said it, I forget who, in order to get over somebody you need to get under someone else. But oh, the host of problems this rains down on you! Sends me gibbering into the day, guilt-ridden, appalled at a vacancy I never knew could open up inside me, here it is, I've had cheap, anonymous sex, sex I can't remember, and after troublesome sleep woke a stranger to myself.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, to say I was clueless is a profound understatement, that there should be clues at all would never have crossed my mind, oh the vast innocence of youth, an innocence that sometimes causes me grief. I get choked up, a jealousy takes hold in my chest, there are those who partied away their adolescence steeped in drugs and sex. To all this I remained ignorant, instead I slept, snoozed through rapid change and growth, recently I awoke, I came to San Francisco, this is the culmination of four years of moving around, loving around, dashing and retreating and hiding and sallying forth, clunky emotional armor in tow.

I never needed anybody's help in any way. Did I know this, no I didn't, but the subconscious worked it out for me, look at my closest friend, now judge the distance between us, it is great, the ex used to say it alarmed her, how little I cared for my supposed friends, well there it is. The help I needed would come from within, it sounds cheesy, let it settle, now I'm left with an inner hardness I've needed all along, cliches hold truths you just need to whittle them into a custom fit.

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self-assured, loneliness transforms a man, strips him to his essential self, perhaps companionship is the transforming factor, that powerful warping force, we raise ourselves to these challenges and do not take them lying down. The bed is a coffin, don't step off the conveyer belt of life, eyelids carry the weight of the world, sometimes the hardest thing is staying awake.

Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors, this last time I actually heard them shut, emotional hinges creaking with neglect, I ought to keep them well oiled, a closer eye on the maintenance of the self, or perhaps they're worn with too much use. I say the doors are open, come in, darling you look great in that shirt, let's fuck in it. Yes, step right in, don't get caught, the door shuts quick, and even if you're through how can you be sure which side you're on? I've let in a draught, the candle's out, fetch the matches they're in the bathroom on the toilet, there's condoms behind my bed, I reach behind without looking, feel the strain in my ribs, stomach pressed hard against the rail, lungs emptied of air.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down, if I seem distracted it's with myself, a grief turned rage turned grey scratchy nuisance, a corner-of-the-eye glint, a fuzz in the throat, it's not you, here let my personality strain at this weight, it will come through I swear, give me your smile.

And I do appreciate your being 'round, don't get me wrong, you see my dark baggage in the corner, nobody can be blind to these things, I never was a good actor, my emotions are written on my face and more the woe I can't see the bloody things myself. Just this connection we have to work with, the translation from me to you, from you back to me, and in this way we work toward some common ground, we grasp for words and accents to strike the right chords, sometimes all is dissonance, sometimes dissonance is what we need, bed down in the chaos and let the world churn around you. It's the language of the body, the animal physicality, speak in tongues, speak with your tongue, the taste of your tongue on mine, the jarring clash of teeth in overzealous passion.

Help me get my feet back on the ground, the ground is where all real business is carried out, let us walk there, taste of the earth, clash with it, intersect with life, gather genuine life-data, not data of the heart or the mind, these are processing tools. I mean let's get down to it, fuzz from a stained carpet embedded in the shocking white skin of your back, put your nose in it, smell the decades, the stamping long-gone citizens of this room, this drab geometrical space cut carelessly into the air, three stories up we are, windows open on a world of voyeurs, I lower my mouth to suck in your breath.

Won't you please, please help me? Now we hear the cry of desperation, my nails digging into your flesh, particles coming off there, I'll leave with something of you, more than a notion and more than a smell, I will have your skin here, a strand of hair, dead shavings, DNA quickly fading but the pieces themselves still glowing with life-force. I duck into a crouch embarrassed at my new panting nakedness, condom hanging from that primitive limb, don't look, now you know me but you don't, such shocking startling familiarity rendered out of nowhere, now we must face it, we've done the inevitable. My sober mind rises to giddy confusion, what's that sound, I can't believe I'm laughing.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways, what I experience is only minor displacement, these are the ghosts of vaster reforms, I must prepare for reconfiguration and propulsion into the world if I am to face it, for now pull a sex-warm leg over my torso, kiss my neck to keep me shaking, the body is all inside-out nerves, let no heat escape.

My independence seems to vanish in the haze of this milky warm entanglement, that's Ravel's Sonatine if you're unfamiliar with it, favorite piece by one of my favorite composers, I once read his biography cover to cover on the fourth floor of the main branch of the public library, you've never been, be still my heart, watch for the roving homeless and the trails of stink they trace through the thousands of dusty stacks there. A breathy fluttering cough, a tremor in my chest, your entire body shifts to allow more skin on skin contact.

But every now and then I feel so insecure, these are surface accomplishments, they don't touch the spirit, the spirit is what ails and when you're gone, perhaps even while you're here, it might happen while I'm inside you, she enters my mind or there rises to contemplation, I am reduced, I am me with her, that is to say nobody, it's all I can do to yank myself back to the here, the now, stay planted in time, Davi, the moment is your weakness, conquer it.

I know that I just need you like I've never done before, I mean you in a general sense, I need independence from the word 'you', in general, a reliance on the self, after all is said and done physical attraction is fleeting, I am the one I'll be left with, nobody will enter the world for me, nobody will do my work or remind me it needs getting done. There it is, some men objectify women, to me you are a symbol, not of sex though my body still pulsates with the memory of it, but of abdication from the throne of co-dependence, so comfy up there swaddled in the care of another person, mind slumbering, spirit dull and warm, an impenetrable snoozing indifference to the world.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down, I wouldn't write this otherwise, I am communicating with a muse, calling collect if you will, I haven't got much artistic currency, it's been spent frivolously until now and I may forever be in debt.

And I do appreciate your being 'round, at the end of the day the warmth of another human being is incomparable, it can't be replicated in the folds of the mind, we are physical human creatures, slaves to our biologies, subject to the workings of cells and synapses, blood-filled surging organisms.

Help me get my feet back on the ground, pull me down to cheap romance, grime after all is real life-data, the stuff of fear, here I am in the thick of things, a gnarled tangle of grievances come together with good intentions, one of them is lust, let's stew in it for a while until our psyches are inextricable.

Won't you please, please help me, I've got to crush you closer to my body, don't mistake this grab for overwhelming love, it's an involuntary tensing, a desperate clench, a move to envelope you entirely.

When I was younger, so much younger than today, in my diminished form, a crude figure in the world, operating on unsophisticated impulses, hurting and getting hurt, exploring a landscape of false simplicities, oh how much easier things were, grief was one-dimensional, tears were at the ready and I was so much closer to instinct. Now look at me, completely out of touch, notions pile onto notions, there's a massive complicated web of revelations I've yet to sort out, one lifetime will never be enough.

I never needed anybody's help in any way, never have these words rung less true, the question has never been one of need, but one of who can provide the help. Whether I wish it or not the cast of characters in the drama of my life is constantly changing, the result of a poor director, the main ones throw their scripts down in frustration, angry they should let themselves be flustered by such an amateur, their emotions glued to a man who holds them like foreign objects in his grubby hands, the understudies, this is you my darling, don't wake up, you step tentatively onto the stage and mistake my grief for vision. Don't stick around for my recovery, your promotion to the role, the script in your hands will soon flutter to the floorboards like the rest and the curtain will fall on angry tramping footsteps, exit stage right.

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self-assured, watch as my convictions whiplash in the space of a few minutes, you can almost follow them with your eyes, look at my face where these expressions rise through murky gloom.

Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors, don't bother removing your shoes, I've kept an unclean house, don't let the carpets disgust you, they're dirty but the dirt doesn't come off on you, I really am embarrassed, but look, isn't my room nice, the walls a pleasant green and spartan with decoration, the mysterious photographs taped to the back of the door, heaped clean and dirty clothes behind a shut closet, let's inhabit the floor for a while and contort into uncomfortable sitting positions, have you heard this song, it's called Chicago by Sufjan Stevens.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down, I mean real down low, I don't know if you've been here before but man it's hard to breathe with a mouth full of gravel, a mind fatigued with tortuous exertions, the will in tatters from too much action-at-a-distance, sometimes the world just slips through your fingers, you lose control, you grasp at anything, everything, here you are, try on this shirt but move with modesty.

And I do appreciate your being 'round, I really couldn't do this without you, I may even be of some use to you, perhaps we come from the same dark place, these shadows of the real thrills, the thrills I'd be feeling from a healthy standpoint, that faraway sunny place of clarity, still leave their stamp on the soul, still have their thrust in the body, my skin prickles.

Help me get my feet back on the ground, there's no other place for them when your face is in the dirt, you crawl with the earthworms, learn their creeping ways so the next time you get cut in half, I mean really severed from yourself, you can regenerate, it's nature's way.

Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me, oh, now I've done it, the look in your eyes, the look in mine, this is no landscape, this is no web, this is steel on flesh, the roller coaster car, arms inside the vehicle, hearts left down below in square anonymous lockers, the car set in motion, nothing we can do now, but you look great in that shirt, sure, not as good as she did, but I won't deny the taste of victory, oh, what a sight, but please please please, move with modesty, you'll never match her for zest.

fuck you

2006-01-27T00:38:00.000-08:00

Cab driver the fare is $5.55 here is a twenty may I have twelve back. Somebody across the street whistles. It looks like you have another fare. I don't know if I have change, oh wait, yes I do, the man before you gave me ones. I have my change now, twelve dollars, a crumpled ten and two ones, here comes the man from across the street. I open the door and his voice arrives comically drunken. Oh you're leaving are you! I don't stop to watch what proceeds but as the front gate key slowly finds its way to my fingers I hear the drunk man's voice once again, after the cab has left him at the curb. I am very very drunk, I am depressed, this is me talking not the drunk man, believe me when I say tears came to my eyes at the Phone Booth. Never can predict when they'll come. For reasons other than movie manipulation my emotions welled and the tears rose, trembled on the verge, and were re-embraced or evaporated in the dense smoky air. I thought of her. I thought of her fucking somebody else, her body tensing around him, the same cries of passion, the same ropy muscles in her legs spasming, the crescendo of breathy exultation, the labored breathing, the physical release and relinquishment, orgasm, closeness, aftermath. I get home and clean cat vomit from my carpet. Hard red chunks. They were snorting coke in my room last night, this is what I heard. In comes me with my wholesomeness, a tub of hummus, a stale loaf of french bread, shattered hopes, deflated lust, a dark dark mindset and the stale wretched unmistakable stink of desperation. It was a shitty day. Fuck you.

all things grow, all things grow

2006-01-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

Forgive me for being so late to the game, but Sufjan Stevens has created the most amazing concept album ever with "Illinois", the second in his state-by-state musical project, to be completed, at this rate, by the year 2053. Never have I been pulled so quickly and completely into a musician's fabricated world. After listening to Illinois a couple times I feel as though I can claim it as my home state. His musical renditions of Chicago (the city, not the musical) and Decatur are frightfully moving/uplifting. The man plays almost thirty instruments, arranges and orchestrates everything. The melodies are strange yet touch you in a way that leaves you feeling warm and familiar. Think "Peanuts" meets The Shins meets a Wes Anderson film soundtrack meets your unprepared face. May I suggest a horizontal position upon your first listen?

Concurrently, my unrivaled dance moves are winning me more and more friends. I just may make it big with these. The circular locked-arm fist clenched "watch me produce unprecedented centrifugal force by combining this motion with the motion of my hips" move is so versatile I can order drinks in seventeen different languages with it. I'm building bridges, baby. Big ones. With no toll booths. No, these bridges are free. Welcome.

let's get cellular

2006-01-20T16:14:00.000-08:00

let's get cellular

I am too sharply attuned to the sound of my cell phone, am constantly trembling in anticipation of its familiar ring. But there are so many other sounds that occupy the same frequencies, especially in the urban score, San Francisco's unending clamorous orchestration, that my heart often races and my mind often whiplashes at the high whine of a MUNI train or a distant strain of music from a restaurant terrace or the doppler arrival and departure of a car stereo, pitch bending with changing proximity. Either I should turn the cursed thing off or change the tone to something less likely to be replicated in my travels.

Then there is that particular special ring that no longer sounds. The one that can wake me from sleep at low levels even when outside louder noises compete at disruption. This one tune, Beethoven's Fur Elise, that haunting beautiful heart-smashing bit of music familiar to almost everybody on the planet, pushes its way through my thoughts many times a day. When I nap, as I just did, it comes to the forefront and causes irritated dreams, of needing to answer my phone and being unable to find it, of thinking my phone is ringing and causing me to make a conscious effort at waking up, at holding me on the precipice, on the verge of her voice.

Gotta change that one, too.

gallimaufry of ablutions

2006-01-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

And so on, in the vein of delicious words. Voluptuous verbiage. A sentence struck me as I listened to a song somewhere, perhaps the force of the sentence itself has wiped away my memory of where I was and who I was with, but the sentence, or rather fragment, was this:

The rustle and spit of a brush snare.

Of course I was listening to this rustle and spit, it may have been at the video store. Yes maybe it was in a movie. Anyway, these words strung together seemed deeply appropriate as if I had merely uncovered them, or had inadvertantly happened on some common knowledge or attribute of the brush snare that I had until then been ignorant of. Anyway, the next time you hear a brush snare in use, see if these words don't apply.

Currently reading Jose Saramago's The Double. As he accomplished with Blindness, I am immediately pulled into his world by the overwhelming charm and confidence of his narration.

with a friend like davi...

2006-01-18T17:08:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting at home watching Woody Allen movies. Today I saw Radio Days and Broadway Danny Rose. The last couple weeks of my life have been dominated by his films -- the music, the dialogue, the timing. I've stepped into pace with them. At Cover to Cover I listen to ragtime, a collection of Django Reinhardt's greatest recordings. At Phoenix it's the Crumb soundtrack I put on repeat so as to sink into the haunting tones of its 20s-era jazz. My mind is a slapstick reel, my flip notebook a collection of scenes to expand on, random snatches of dialogue, scenarios and situations.

Last week I saw Match Point, his new film in theaters now, and also Crimes and Misdemeanors, Stardust Memories, Alice, and any number of others I'd already seen a thousand times, including Annie Hall, Love and Death, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Sleeper, Anything Else, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Take the Money and Run...

I really thought I was going to write more about my trip to Maryland and New York over the holidays, and during my time there I took a couple pages of notes, but since I returned to San Francisco I've had little desire to flesh them out into a full journal. In fact, I need to post what little I did write so as to get it finally off my mind. Any unfinished projects are too distracting when my eyes are currently on a much larger prize. That is, I've been screenwriting, and the task is big. So, here it is, I am jettisoning my notes. Get from them what you will.

***

Airports are much simpler than I imagined. If you travel as light as I do – one small carry-on duffel bag to last ten days – then you needn’t check any luggage. You just go straight to the security station with the boarding pass you printed out online, remove your shoes, belt and coat, place everything in the little rubbermaid bin that reminds you of the boring part of department stores when you were a kid, and voila! You are standing at your gate with two hours to kill, no procedure or precaution left to delay you, just you and the floor-to-ceiling windows, you pulling into your lungs that thick sweet sickening brew of aromas from processed foods, carpet, rubber, steel, the irritated breath of strangers.

And the tourists swirl around you. They parade – coughing, sneezing, crying, arguing, looking worried, irritated, brought down to their knees with inconveniences, with family burdens, with inexpressible grievances toward the airport and its employees, toward taxi drivers and hotels, waiters and business partners and babysitters. They are germy and bloated, gassy. Their bodies rebel against them, heave under awkward layers of clothing, strain under the weight of bags. Their backs, legs, feet, shoulders ache. And while all this chaos demands far more attention than they can give, yet their minds are thousands of miles away, at destinations, at home. Cast on the anxieties or the relief of the near future.

Still others show excitement. The children who aren’t crying or sleeping or vomiting are instead staring wide-eyed, open-mouthed out the windows at the huge mechanical sleek-eyed streamlined beasts resting impossibly on tiny wheels. Their magnificent bellies sunk low to the ground, those vast fiberglass-and-steel surfaces meant for scraping the heavens. One taxis slowly, ponderously to where a telescoping walkway meets its cabin door with an accordion mouth. The mouth intimately attaches itself to the jet’s temple.

Or your eyes follow two jets heading out on the runway and recede into the early morning drizzle just as they turn to pick up speed. Those huge things lifting themselves into the sky! Hurtling steel and flesh forty thousand feet into the air, through clouds and streams, onto invisible tracks of air, these sky currents or sky tracks.

No, I hadn’t flown in more than fifteen years.

Hushed claustrophobia of the walkway. Illuminated, cramped interior of the airplane. Muffled engine works. Soft carpet below, off-white plastic above, squished accommodations left and right. I discover that Seat 20B is a middle seat. In 20C (aisle) is an older gentleman already decked out with modern devices, wires crisscrossing his torso from lap to head, connecting various gadgets of communication and entertainment as if these are his vital organs and the wires nerves or veins. A sort of technological anatomy. The Wall Street Journal is folded and tucked between his legs, a political magazine spread across his lap table. The miniature television screen set into the seat in front of him displays the plane’s current altitude – five feet while still on the runway – and speed – 0 MPH.

It takes him a couple minutes to disengage himself from this web of comfort and allow me through to my seat. 20A, the window seat, is still empty. It remains so long after the plane has filled and the flight attendants have finished delivering safety instructions. Slowly a conviction grows inside me, that if nobody claims 20A it will be mine. I make the jump – quickly, quietly. A flight attendant arrives with a checklist and asks me my name. “Is this your seat?” I explain that it isn’t, I just switched because it hadn’t been taken. She nods and smiles.

Thirty seconds before takeoff another passenger boards. Breathless, red-cheeked, awkward under the weight of her bags, she stumbles down the aisle, passing many empty seats but looking only at the aisle numbers labeled above them. She powers through to aisle 20, gives me a look that says “There’s no way I’m giving up that seat,” then says “There’s no way I’m giving up that seat,” and I am replaced to 20B – scrunched, unhappy, jealous.

I can’t help but steal glances at the gentleman to my right and the magazine he’s reading. The font looks familiar, maybe it’s the New Yorker or Harper’s. But each page is decorated with a photograph of some businessman or politician, fat, heavy bags under the eyes, diplomacy-worn, powerful, cold teeth, thick jowls. With dark eyes surrounded by spider webs of experience lines. White hair receding from view.

The woman to my left has heavy Israeli features. She holds a brief cell phone conversation in rushed Hebrew. Her voice is thin and hoarse, with the high strain of frustration and fatigue.

Finally the plane lurches into motion. The television readout claims we are moving at 12 MPH, though it seems much faster. We taxi out along a stretch of asphalt that runs parallel to the runway. A doorbell rings and the seatbelt light comes on. The seatbelt itself isn’t as confusing as I thought it’d be. I cinch it tight around my waist as my pounding pulse travels up through my rib cage to settle in my throat and eyes. Through the tiny, rain-streaked window the airport and its swarm of functional vehicles retreat into the fog. The plane slows as it turns the corner onto the runway. Then it straightens out, reaches 12 MPH once again, taxis further…

… and with a blast of its jets more than quadruples its speed in a couple seconds. I hadn’t expected such a huge leap in velocity. I thought there would be a slow gathering of power as the engines whined to life. Instead, the vertical tracks that raindrops had made on the window whiplash into horizontal ones and there is a sound as of a rocket blasting off. After it leaves my ears the engines have taken up their crazy scream.

***

And that's it! Or wait, I did get a little poetic about my brief foray into Times Square, but again, this didn't turn into anything:

***

Acres of looming television screens aimed down at a sea of stunned faces. Faces gone pale at the sheer spectacle of it all. Not an island of rest for overwhelmed eyes. All is flash and illumination, a sickly night-time daylight. The huge congested human flow spills onto the streets, where traffic -- mostly taxis -- makes creeping honking progress. More than an exaggerated take on the ugliness of American consumerism, more than an easy symbol to hate us by. Times Square is an abstraction, a blaring tumbling heaving circus, a boast, a gathering of logos, icons, familiar names, faces, slogans -- a door open on our overcrowded collective subconscious.

***

And now, in the soft gloom of the evening, in what was to be a contemplative silence following the end of Radio Days, my roommate's stereo pumps forth vocal jazz with high trembling trumpets and slow plodding basslines. I just completed a large chunk of dialogue that I'm pretty happy with and now am pondering the ethics of using real-life situations, real people I know and real experiences I've had for inspiration, or even for direct replication in cinema. Something tells me it won't win me any friends but it is, to the best of my ability, in tune with the world as I see it, and I guess that's all I can hope for.

my favorite steak is made of meat

2006-01-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

I don't feel like cursing myself this time by over-hyping current creative projects, but let's just say I'm very satisfied with the way my energy has been channeled into this specific one, and am eager to begin the actual physical work. It's exciting. It's invigorating. I'm formulating plans, tentative plans, really only the spider legs of plans, vague but growing more substantial as momentum for the project builds, and these too are exciting. 2006 may be the year after all, you never know. Disparate aspects of my worldview are coming together in this medium that combines all media. I should've known. So, here's to lasting inspiration, unflagging motivation and the birth of a new ambition. Shizzam.

of muffled inertia, countless long lonely hours, and full inward existence

2006-01-09T10:54:00.000-08:00

I'm packaging the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary to send off to my father, whose new best friend has been walloping him with triple word scores. I noted the tone of desperation in his voice as he inquired whether I could locate a copy. I sensed the letter 'Q' was being laid down before him in an array of all seven of his partner's letters, or some other such catastrophe. The whole ordeal reminds me that I ought to relapse into the Scrabble addiction that turned me into a daily patron at all the cafes on Clement street. I don't own my own board any more and I'm woefully out of practice, but I know there're some masochists out there willing to let me reacquaint myself with the game by taking them on. So, if anybody has the Scrab collecting dust on a closet shelf or knows of a cafe with its own box, holla at ya boy.

Oh no he di'in.

Consumed two bottles of wine and a pack of cigarettes toward the end of last night's Video Wave shift and got fairly soused. Somebody came in and said "I smell alcohol," and would not be deterred in his investigation by my claim that we use 2001 Shiraz to clean soiled DVDs. However, he is a longtime customer and merely aimed to get our goat, which was easily gotten and then released. The goat sustained minor injuries and is expected back at work by the week's close.

In other news, the new albums I purchased recently have been fully assimilated into my headspace, and it's time for more. The music kick just may start up again. I haven't bought music regularly since High School, when I was making (cringe) almost twice as much as I do now by sitting in front of a computer looking like this and producing similar sounds on the keyboard.

Strange, this lapse. Throughout my emotionally repressed adolescence I listened only to electronic music. Recent hindsight suggested this was because I couldn't handle the exaggerated emotion of actual songwriting, and so dealt only in abstraction. The music I listened to certainly comprises part of the overall muted tone of this era. Of muffled inertia, countless long lonely hours, and full inward existence. Yet it must have been more inspired than my San Francisco years. I bought upwards of five new albums a week. When I wasn't listening to it I was hunched at the computer trying to make it myself. This is before I knew relationships, before I really knew myself or had hit on the notion of knowing myself. Self-discovery through only the self? Impossible. And so, alone, I was channeled into this obsession.

But since I've been here, over the last four years or so, I've purchased maybe ten or twenty albums. There was a brief infatuation with solo piano music which yielded a nice little collection. I realize now that this bordered on the abstract as well. The music held me in awe; I didn't understand it. It spoke to me at many removes, or maybe in some language more fundamental than words? I'd like to think this. Anyway, obsessions with bands like Belle and Sebastian or The Shins are limited just to those bands and don't spill over into a desire to branch out, to discover a genre, to map influences or styles.

Maybe what took over was my single-mindedness about writing. About discovering my favorite authors, tracing their life trajectories and superimposing them on my own. Culling reassurance and encouragement from their many thousands of pages. But there must be room for more than one source of inspiration. No man is an island but that doesn't mean you can't dig a mote around yourself. I've been fairly closed off. Museums don't have much of an effect on me. Nor monuments, nor much of any kind of man-made artifice. How truly shut to inspiration! I've become a bit of a sentimental high-principled snob. The opposite of the art-house elite. How do I reconcile this with my early gravitation toward the abstract? Now I have no stomach for it. I've got to see color and life behind it -- a book, a song, a painting, a film -- some hope or optimism despite the darkness of its subject.

I don't laugh at wanton violence. I don't smirk at rape. I don't get wry at depression or insanity. These all fascinate me when treated with... respect, I guess, or with uncommon erudition or vision. Basically, tell me something I don't know. You get no credit for showing me what I already see.

All right, I have no idea where this all came from. I guess that's the point. Yearn toward release, lean into it, approach the exit.

So yeah, Scrabble. Holla at ya boy.

chock full of tall tales and rhapsodical rhymes

2006-01-08T10:27:00.000-08:00

My buddy Jamieson picked up my coffee tab this morning with a nod from the back where he gets his bake on. We have an understanding, me 'n Jamie. He comes into the Wave and leaves loaded down with free flicks. Then he takes care of me at the bakery. Once he handed me an entire loaf of fresh-baked sourdough, brandished it first as if it were Exaclibur. And indeed I did rule mightily over my lunch break by wielding its doughy goodness until hunger, that nasty foe, was vanquished.

Now "Love Fool" by The Cardigans is looping tinny inside my head. Only to be usurped shortly by any number of genius Decemberists songs. Of course, "Picaresque", chock full of tall tales and rhapsodical rhymes -- oh, that master rhymer! -- will gently lure me into the day. A day that otherwise dawned bleak.

Match Point was sold out the other night. A certain part of my soul remains nulled until I see this movie. Such dangerously high expectations! If this truly is Woody Allen's return to form, such incredibly high form, then the world is a much better place for it. Allen's films are my comfort blankets. Annie Hall, Love and Death, Sleeper, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig, Bananas -- in all these he examines the most dismal and difficult aspects of life -- rejection, aging, infidelity, failure, death -- and turns them on their asses, making us laugh.

And I am peeved at having left my copy of The Adventures of Augie March on the airplane (yes, people really do this!), and would like to take this opportunity to ask if anybody has a book I absolutely have to read. Because dammit, it's pretty tough to impress this twice-over bookseller.

Love.

stay low with them

2006-01-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

Feeling low again. Sunk into purposelessness. How easily my faculties slumber! I wish I was more receptive to the world. I wish more would capture my attention. Instead I'm surrounded by a fog of indifference. Moving quietly through life, stirring little in my wake. I get home, lie down in bed and feel the pressures on my heart. From inside pushing out. Protracted panic in the moment at the wild uncertain future. I see other people so thoroughly engaged in their surroundings, with stores of genuine energy and earnestness. But I for the most part remain outside, as if waiting for something more. What? Paydirt? The ring of my shovel on something significant? But I'm not even digging! Barely even on the lookout. What I need is some ambition. To get back to school and study something, anything! For I am profoundly lacking in self-discipline, and will get nothing done without a deadline. A whole lot of thinking, yes, and a few good ideas here and there, some even that strike me as very important. But they undergo no further examination, and merely fade away after leaving their faint stamp of satisfaction on my ego. I really gotta buckle down. Wrangle these notions to the ground and take a good long look at them while I've got 'em by the horns. Stay with them, stay low with them. Take them to bed, to work, to the dinner table. Give them voice or weight on the page. And it might do me some good to lower my verbal standards. Allow a more natural voice to come through, one closer to the meaning of my ideas, if not as pretty. OK -- that is all. I'm off to see the new Woody Allen film Match Point. To absorb at least is a start.

false start

2006-01-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

I made a false start into the day overestimating the amount of energy I had after only five hours of sleep. My body must've thought it was a nap, a taste of things to come, especially after losing three hours because of the time difference. The yawns came violently and frequently, so it seemed my jaw must come unhinged and the muscles in my neck snap and whip about. A profound lust for the bed came over me. Perhaps it was MUNI, that soul-sucking means of carting the physical self around this city, that brought me down, down to the dirt, drained me of any stamina for the day. Sunshine on the skin, instead of invigorating the mind and electrifying the limbs stamped me squint-faced and battered me blind. However it wasn't all downward motion. The tuna sandwich at Blue Danube (4th and Clement) is one of the most amazing takes on a simple classic recipe to be found in the city. At least my taste buds shared in the joy of the day. For there was joy around. We San Franciscans are struck giddy by the sun's fickle rays. Here it is beginning of January and we've got 65-degree weather, perfect sunshine and a breeze coming in off the ocean that's practically nutritional. I stewed for a bit in my brain, feeling my own gravity, gums, hands and feet heavy with blood. But again, the call of my bed. Returning home it is always the call of the computer which cries out loudest. I must exhaust its tediums first before the mind can relax in its presence. Thus the blog. And now, to sleep...

feelin' blue

2006-01-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

Slightly hung over, 70 bucks overdrawn on my bank account, room an absolute mess (container of rice overgrown with mold, chunks of candle wax, heaps of clothing, bus transfers, shopping bags...), yet outside San Francisco smiles broadly on my return. The sun's out, the sky a pure blue, temperature rising...

I should go around collecting the three paychecks I have coming. I should tend to this room of mine. Instead I think I'll head out to one of my favoriter cafes in my favoritest neighborhood in San Francisco, that is the Blue Danube in the Inner Richmond, and gather myself for tomorrow's full-on reassimilation. I can't handle Noe Valley or the Mission right now, though lord knows I need that money and I could sure use a Pancho Villa burrito. In good time, these. In good time.

Thanks for the warmth, SF. I'll need it for the thaw. NYC was frigid and sleety. The faint bloom my breath registers here is a welcome sight after having to hold my breath in Manhattan to clear my vision.

turning point

2006-01-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

I'll start out by saying that this blog is being written to the sound of rain lightly tapping the windows. Windows that look out on Manhattan, that give view to the Empire State Building and the magnificent St. Marks Cathedral. From the 9th floor I am at eye level with towering brick tenements. Behind these rise knuckled Gothic spires belonging to I don't know which buildings. A fog segments my depth perception. Everything within ten or so blocks is crisp but steeped in gloom, dripping grey. Unimaginable tonnage sagging in its foundation. Beyond, a thin white mask punctured by the outlines of scyskrapers. Clouds of steam rise from rooftops. An enormous clock with thick, ornate hands keeps heavy time.

My last day in New York. A couple stories to tell, some conclusions drawn, and a very happy return to San Francisco. Hopefully to a new year of productivity, self-discipline and emotional maturity. 06 will be a turning point, I can feel it. The year of reckoning. Being here has lifted a protective barrier from my chest and I can feel the prickly future with its barbs of uncertainty pressing in on me. Something must be done. I must make headway, achieve focus, branch out! Write that short story, that novel, that article. Go back to school. Work less retail. Eat and live and love better.

Seeya soon SF!

seasons gratings

2005-12-25T07:02:00.000-08:00

It's 6:30 Christmas morning and I'm shaking violently. Those rough pre-dawn shivers. Mine are a mixture of anxiety -- I'll be taking to the skies for the first time in more than 15 years -- and fatigue. I've worked at least ten hours per day these last four or five days, often jogging between jobs with little time for rest or realignment.

In about twenty minutes my airport shuttle will be here to whisk me away to the Oakland International Airport.

The last airport I visited was SFO, about three years ago. I was supposed to pick up my girlfriend at 9 PM but I'd arrived a couple hours early to be safe. I remember being humbled by the immensity and sterility of the architecture, the impossibly long hallways whose only purpose, it seemed, was to have people zipped through them from one end to the other.

I rode the computerized, infinitely looping "air bus" around the entire perimiter for two hours to calm my nerves.

Once settled at her arrival gate -- identical to all the others -- I was brought to tears by the reunions I witnessed. Flight after flight arrived, loads of passengers wandered into the vast room like refugees -- stunned, glassy-eyed, trodding slowly with their burdens. Upon recognizing loved ones their faces instantly sent out beams of elation, or twisted into weeping relief. It was one of the most moving things I've ever witnessed.

Off to New York City! Yours truly! I can't believe I'm finally going to see the place I not too long ago lusted after. The place that captured my heart without my laying eyes on it. That heart was easily recaptured. But now I bring this writing itch to that metropolis. I'll dip my pencil like litmus paper into its chemical mix and see what turns up. I won't have my laptop and doubt I'll be signing on to here, but if I've got any presentiment of what's to come the words will be piling up. One must hope.

Now I'm going to collapse backward onto the bed and listen to my heart pound, the cold creaking of the apartment building and the lonely swish of cars down the rain-soaked street.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and godammit: Happy New Year!

frozen inventory

2005-12-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

Have a look around my room. Probably the first thing you take in -- the walls. A warm green, so the chill that hangs in the air seems out of place. But it is frigid in here. I bed down in a refrigerator. Truly it's profoundly cold. My body acts as the sole heater. A two-inch aura of warmth surrounds me. I stay in one place long enough -- hunched at the computer, say -- and the aura thickens. Then I move slightly and my flesh is brought into the frosty atmosphere once again. So you will mostly find me in bed, underneath three quilts and a sheet, blood-drained extremities pulled close to my chest, reluctant even to expose my hands to hold a book or magazine.

In this position, prone to wallow, the brain nevertheless remains sharp. If I can call it into action, that is. Which is increasingly difficult with the influence of music -- now The Decemberists -- and the whole tricky past with its clustered mass of unprocessed data looming up to press down on me.

However, it's not all that dramatic. Only when I allow myself this voice, this tone, do these imaginings become real.

Next you see the wine bottles, empty. And half-filled glasses on the floor and trunk and desk. Dust motes and other debris float in these perfect red pools. From the angle of my low bed such artifacts seem to rise up like cactii, like natural formations. For the first time in my life my surroundings have a theme, a look, or rather I am more visually aware, so objects are either out of place or not. Let's say I can tolerate fewer visual incongruencies. The wine bottles fit, so do the glasses. The theme includes my own emotional strain, a sort of hardened independence. Yet, whenever I look around myself, take in all the evidence of what is very obviously happening to me, I feel as though an effort is being made at persuasion. I gather these symbols at night and wake up in disbelief. Perhaps the only out-of-place element is myself.

Then there are stacks of books. After all the unloading, the purging and selling, four or five stacks yet remain, some in front of others so that I forget certain volumes are in my possession. For instance, an issue of Granta I now remember I picked up from the Dog Eared sale cart one impossibly distant, warm San Francisco (city name as season) day. Or Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz", an acquisition from another era entirely. I never could bring myself to finish it. Phoebe Gloeckner's "The Diary of a Teenage Girl", which I bought and giftwrapped for a friend's birthday more than two years ago. I never went to the party and it remained wrapped on my bookshelf -- at three different houses! -- up until recently. I remember unwrapping it after feeling uninspired by the rest of my collection, flipping through, reading the first two pages, and finally setting it on top of the torn, folded wrapping paper. I haven't touched it since.

Makeshift, black linen curtains nailed across three tall windows. They're not so thick I can't see through them onto a flat, out-of-focus view of Church Street. Here there is little commotion. The only noise coming from a few yards away on 30th where the J train scrapes its tonnage around the corner. Or the whine and groan of the 24 powering up the hill, robotic arms snapping the wires above it. Everything passes unseen. All is transition, gradation, spinning round this room with the momentum of outside life.

But in here! Boy, it's gonna take a while. Certainly not much progress will be made while the temperature remains arctic. But the symbolism works perfectly. I've been exiled out of warmth -- physical, emotional, pyschological; cast away from my coddled existence into this fucking tundra of a room, where my very bones rattle with the cold. I can picture my lungs riddled with icicles.

Gah, here I am burning the morning oil again. I have a haircut to get, a stomach to fill, and a late shift at Cover to Cover to show up for.

reversal

2005-12-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

My heart, it seems, is through playing Atlas for the day. It has unburdened itself, or rather fate has stepped in to lighten my load. Matters with the ex still lump themselves beneath the rib cage and leave a certain soggy pull on everything. That won't stop for a while. I can thank the cold cold weather and the holiday ginger-reek for that. Symbols of love abound. I am not immune to these, in fact I am especially susceptible. No matter how much buttressing my cynicism provides, a couple holding hands or a head on a shoulder can smite me in my tracks.

But on my way to PastaGina (gourmet deli), I found a 10-dollar bill to alleviate the growing anxiety concerning my 79-cent checking account balance. Karma be damned, it's a two-way street. An opportunity to accrue future favors is also an opportunity to collect, so I cashed in.

Some back-story for the next one. The whole reason for going to New York City over Christmas and New Year's (by the way, I'm going to New York City over Christmas and New Year's) was to be with Zenaida (the ex) in Maryland and to visit with my NYU film student friend in Manhattan. Now that the former has left the scene, I am stuck with a ticket to Washington DC instead of New York, arriving 5:35 PM Christmas day. Amtrak tickets to Manhattan would set me back 85 bucks. Greyhound -- 35 and a guaranteed hellish ride. So I posted a bulletin on MySpace (I knew it'd come in handy) and within minutes somebody e-lerted (patent pending!) me to the existence of something called the "Chinese Chicken Express". Intrigued, I googled said Express and came up with thousands of low-budget restaurant websites, and one fetish site. After I bookmarked the fetish site I asked my benefactor for more details, and he informed me that it was indeed a bus service connecting all the major Chinatowns on the east coast, including Washington DC's, New York City's and Philadelphia's. I went to their website and discovered a direct line from DC to Manhattan, one-way for twenty bucks! And the busses are touristy, not Greyhoundy, which means some level of comfort.

Lighter and lighter.

I took the J-Church home. The J is one of the milder trains, containing little to no sketchy element, except during certain one-hour windows weekdays when Mission High School lets out and the cars fill with teenagers who look in my direction just to witness my famed involuntary fetal curl. It is a sight to behold. A cursory glance as I boarded this evening showed I might be in for a scare, as pants large enough to house a travelling soccer team were in great supply. I seated myself and stared at my knees. After a few minutes -- the time I allow everybody to size me up and resume their business -- I looked up to observe them more closely. What did I see but one of them knitting a scarf while two more stood around him talking about computers. Then further back were two girls huddled together, arms thrown over each other's shoulders, reading aloud from Octavia Butler's "Kindred". Still more sat in silence listening to music, quietly humble.

Lots of data that needs sorting here.

cooking tips for men

2005-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Crazy dreams about the ex leave me frazzled, on edge. 9:30 in the morning, up and shivering at my laptop, trying to figure out how to blunt these feelings. If I don't take care of them now the day will remain slightly crimped. Perhaps coffee will do the trick, the black liquid fire that daily smooths out my veins and runs a general systems diagnosis on the body. I tried calling her in the middle of the night and ended up leaving a message, then I fell asleep to images of her being affectionate with a friend of mine. I asked somebody whether they were serious and she said "they've been cooking together". Why do I think that if she had said "they've been fucking" I wouldn't feel so devastated?

a knot in my heart, a lodged pit

2005-12-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

A midnight showing of David Lynch's Lost Highway seemed like a fun prospect if only because the wholesomeness of moviegoing would be a nice contrast to the succession of wine-drenched nights I was eager to put an end to. And while I'm the first to snub the dauntlessly revered arthouse directors like Lynch and von Trier (sorry Ing) as being incapable of telling a story and having absolutely no respect for their audiences, I'd yet to see Lost Highway and what the hell, I liked Dune despite the nose-upturning expressing this causes, and a midnight movie is a midnight movie -- suck it up and go.

My review:

Fuck you, David Lynch, and your blind masochistic pretentious sycophantic followers, too -- friends excluded. I love you guys!

Anyway, now I'm at Cover to Cover listening to the Decemberists do their loud rollicking earnest delirium thing on "Picaresque".

And there's a knot in my heart, a lodged pit.

soggy brontosaurus (short fiction)

2005-12-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

So here I am in a cafe, suffocating inwardly. The relationship two weeks over and I'm girl-crazy. Not in an extroverted way; that's never been my style. I lust and lust, get closer and closer -- in this case I've changed seats three times already to position myself directly behind her -- until my heart is ten thousand pounds of intention, and surely it will make itself known?

But desperation is the body odor of the soul. People sense it and cross the street to avoid you. They've got troubles of their own. However, try and make somebody aware of his own stink. Some emotional alchemists can turn desperation into a sort of delirious confidence. Some still are perversely attracted to it. Anyway I'm drinking -- have been since noon, and it's already dark out.

The trouble is -- and it really pains me to write this -- the trouble is that I've got a bald spot, and it's slowly growing larger. It breaks my heart, it really does. The other day I sobbed. I just couldn't take it. Such an irrefutible sign of decay. My virility had been in question to begin with, and now this! I'm running out of time; my every move is desperate. It squats on my head like a weight, like a splotch of bird shit. I am constantly aware of its dimensions, of who is in a position to see it. I can't sit down without my back to a wall. Public life has become pinched and hectic, one prolonged, nightmarish, relentless cringe.

And not yet twenty-five!

Why, then, have I sunk low into this seat, with my back to this stunning girl, who sits a good foot taller, who could turn her head but a few inches to conduct an intimate study of my exposed scalp? I mean really have a look, and I would never know?

There are distractions. The barista, too, is cute, and every once in a while she saunters by to remind me of this, lowering a smile to where I am hunkered down, slouched. My God, I haven't even mentioned that I'm reading! That's because not a sentence has stuck, not a single word has registered since the stunning girl walked in. It doesn't take much to disarm me, to strike me dumb and inert.

So the imagination fires up like a rusty reel to reel projector and scenarios unfold in which I actually approach this girl, this myth. I'm still sitting right where I am as my pulse rises, my hands begin to sweat, and my face contorts -- all as if I'm actually performing these amazing feats of confidence! Motionless, undisturbed, I run the spectrum of human emotions, and get nowhere.

My Caesar salad arrives. I'd forgotten about it. The croutons are fresh. I spear two with my fork and shove them in my mouth, chewing violently, drunkenly, admiring as if from a distance the churning efficiency of my own jaw, my crushing molars. That I've never had a cavity in my life is a fact that arrives out of nowhere to offer consolation. There is primal strength in perfect dentition. Something fundamentally sound in your genetic makeup.

But what's this? Italian dressing on a Caesar salad? Ruination! Folly! Damnable incompetence! The fat, grizzled, beer-stained, yellow-grinned, freeloading curmudgeon inside, who enjoys these obsolete theatrics, roars to life. The Italian dressing is but an asterisk in the universe's encyclopedia of ill-will, but one card of the many stacked against me, and just look at the state I'm in!

I really should stop drinking. Three pints of sangria? Hello? But my head is too light for self-reproach. And there remains the following dilemma: namely, how to breach this mere half-foot of air between myself and Stunning Girl.

Somebody thuds into the back of my chair. My heart races before I can even wonder if it's her. I turn around to look, and am confronted by the back of somebody's head, too large and too close and too real, with a bald spot that puts mine to shame. Surrounding it are embarrassed, resentful tufts of curly black hair. Hair that looks betrayed. I get the notion that the bald spot has been placed before mine to deflect its beam of self-pity, or else to overpower it with its own. Suddenly I see my beam -- blue for good and true and noble -- battling his, which is red with streaks of fiery orange -- undeniably evil.

The bald spot speaks to me. It says: I have seen and heard more than you, and I have less to lose. My case is more urgent. Obviously time is shorter for me, so just sit and wait your turn, buddy.

Then the man's real voice comes out low and smooth and confident. Such a voice issuing from below such a bald spot, it leaves me feeling disjointed.

"What's that you're studying?"

"Huh? Oh, Chemistry."

Her voice -- well, what can it be but a let-down? It is female and nothing more. I continue to eavesdrop.

"Writing a paper, I see. I used to be fascinated by molecules."

"Yeah, I've got so much to do, it's crazy."

"I remember the only teacher I got along with in High School was my chemistry teacher. Brilliant guy. Always wondered why he wasn't in some lab somewhere doing more important work. Not that teaching isn't important. But I doubt any of those kids gave a damn about atoms and quarks and the periodic table. Me, I was fascinated."

"Huh. My professor's all right I guess. This is the final paper I'm working on. School is so crazy right now. So much to do."

The man is undaunted.

"Can't be all that much. So many things to do? Count them, I bet there's only three or four, or five. Life's easier if you don't get too dramatic about things. You tell yourself that you suffer and then find yourself suffering. But are you really? Is it necessary? Sometimes I wonder. I take things pretty easy myself. What's this paper about?"

He lurches up from his crouched position and sits down properly on the floor. The man is going nowhere. I shake my head in disbelief, even chuckle out loud, half hoping Stunning Girl will see or hear me and appreciate my sympathy. Instead she surprises me by asking the man if he wants a chair. He rises excitedly, grabs one from the adjacent table, twirls it around and sits on it backwards, facing the girl, legs akimbo. What a specimen!

The commotion allows me to twist around and get a good look at him, at both of them. They lean in toward each other and my heart does a pre-emptive flip, then drops. They kiss. On the lips.

I turn back around and laugh and cough at the same time. I close my eyes as the anxiety quickly drains away. The man's bald spot floats before me. It has a face with a sleazy grin and a nose bursting with black hair and two lazy brown eyes, one of which winks at me.

I'm still drunk. The barista is still cute. So I continue reading and the words finally register and I am once again myself, head buzzing. After another half hour I notice that I've been dog-earing the book out of excitement. I've got to remember these passages! And relate them to others. Then I think: I'm starting to allow flaws into my life, perforations, blemishes, evidence of my existence. Normally I hold a reverence for the objects around me, and like to leave things as I find them. But here I am folding the pages of a book, underlining sentences in pen, even writing notes in the margins. It feels scandalous. I confess it feels great.

I set down the book and think some more. I'm so close to a solid metaphor about the relationship just two weeks over, though of course it's too late -- always too late. It has something to do with those little blue pills. Drop one in a cup of water, go to sleep and wake up to a soggy brontosaurus. Something about working my way into her life as small as possible, then, once inside, expanding to fit every crevice and squeeze out every last bit of air. It came down to suffocation.

blurb your enthusiasm

2005-12-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Lying flat on my back in bed, watching my breath turn to steam and bloom and dissipate before me. Thinking thoughts about writing. That from where I stand, or lie, the effort to achieve "writerliness" might be akin to a sperm wriggling, drilling, struggling its way through the surface of an egg, and meanwhile its head is stuck below. The advantage that the sperm has, of course, is its single-mindedness, or single spermedness, if you will. Meanwhile I must devote the bulk of my energy to other matters, namely working and eating and matters loving. Holding ideas in my head long enough to properly examine them or even figure out a way to express them is like reaching out to touch the little squiggles that sometimes slide across your vision. Even these similes have the unmistakable tinge of inaccuracy, of flailing. There is some disconnect between meaning and expression. A crack, gulch, rift, chasm.

It occurred to me also that such behavior -- lying in bed, listening to hours and hours of music -- might be a form of wallowing. While I don't feel depressed or even especially sad or dark, the inactivity has seeped a bit into my demeanor, and I feel the ol' brain muscle settling into atrophy. The other night, writing that short short story was an exercise in inspired creative release, a burst of energy, and not the result of bedridden soul searching.

What I would like is to be more involved in the literary "scene", if such a thing exists in these parts. Readings, conventions, open mics, etc. Bar crawls, book clubs, writing groups. I need an in. A community in the absence of school.

Anyway it's time to get my frigid body over to Cover to Cover to help them unpack and shelve books.

eschew carnality for banality

2005-12-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

Give me hummus -- a man needs his hummus. Should it be spicy, even better. Nothing suits the solitary man like spicy hummus. He kisses nobody, holds no close conversations. I say bring on the spices, the garlic. Here it is a wasted aphrodisiac, though I'll settle for the blood thinning. This particular tub contains forty spices, or so the label proclaims. That spices exist in numbers greater than two or three (let's see... there's pepper... is salt a spice?) is wholly new to me. I am familiar with the symbol of the chili pepper used in the margin of chinese food menus. Forty spices? Noah's hummus, this. An ark to navigate an angry god's wrath toward the salvation of my taste buds. Little known is that God commanded Noah to rescue both spices and species. I will start a non-profit (naan prophet?) organization to help spread the word. But a man cannot live on hummus alone. Nay, for surely there must be a vehicle. So I purchased six slabs of whole wheat pita bread to raft it down the hatch.

Inspiration has fled me.

recognition (short fiction)

2005-12-05T21:57:00.000-08:00

***whipped up in twenty or so inspired but artless minutes on a cold cold monday evening with recordings of rachmaninov playing his own and various other composers' music in the background***

Who sits down to a nice meal thinking in a minute or two he'll enter a world of trouble? Thai food. It was roast duck on a bed of spinach swimming in black bean sauce. Large flat onions I extracted and set in a pile on the edge of the dish. A huge tomato slice that looked as if it belonged to a different recipe from a different ethnicity altogether -- I cast this aside too. The aroma warmed my nostrils. Outside and across the street a group of people waited for the bus to arrive. Outside...

Immediately I was pulled into a state of anxiety. As if swooped down on from above, gripped in its talons and dropped on a plateau with no way down. The limit of my vision and the darkness outside kept me from knowing for sure whether it was her. I stared and stared and as if I had willed it she turned, slowly, to face me. Even so I kept my gaze. If I could've seen her pupils I would have looked away. But as the ostrich thinks itself safe with its head buried in the sand, or a child believes he is hiding by covering his eyes, I pretended I wasn't looking directly at her, though I was, and she must have known this. She looked away and hugged herself for warmth, tipping on the back of her heels.

I rescued a soggy leaf of spinach with my fork and held it eye level. With my tongue I pulled it off the fork and into my mouth. A black bean had been caught between the fork's prongs. After I chewed and swallowed the spinach I put the fork back in my mouth and pushed the bean up with my tongue. I closed my lips and with my tongue I maneuvered the bean to the front of my mouth so I could mash it with my front teeth.

Nevertheless my anxiety rose. At a table to my left a couple -- two women -- sat with two young boys and played patty cake. At a restaurant no less! Some people are so in their own worlds. The boys shouted with glee and smiled the kind of smiles that would cause an adult to cover his mouth with shame if he accidentally produced one. Their skin-slapping racket was setting my nerves on edge. And the girl outside may or may not have been my ex-girlfriend.

Certainly she was shaped like her. That much was obvious. It must've been her shape that had set my heart racing to begin with. But at this distance there was no hope of my being sure. Perhaps if I moved a few feet closer, just a few. Instead I stared at her intensely and would not let up. If I could catch some familiar mannerism, some stance perhaps, a tic. She gave me nothing. The only thing she expressed to me was her shape.

Then I noticed that maybe her butt was a little too large. Certainly it wasn't that size when we were dating. My ex-girlfriend had been skinny, and even if she had gained weight she was relatively buttless -- it wouldn't end up there. No, this person's behind had a definite dimension that my ex-girlfriend's never had. But still, how could I be sure? I hadn't seen her in over three years. People change. Memories erode. Perhaps I was remembering her wrong. Certainly I had changed a lot over the years. Would she recognize me with my beard and thinning hair? Me twenty pounds lighter? So insubstantial against the cold winter wind?

The patty cake stopped. Across the dining room another couple sat with their very young child. Couldn't have been more than three; barely talking. He stood up on his chair to eat. As he shoved fistfulls of noodles with little accuracy into his big red mouth, he stared out with wide glistening eyes at everybody but his parents. His face held an expression that on an adult would be taken for vacancy, but on him it meant the opposite. His mother used the same phrase over and over and over to get his attention, and failed. It was a gentle, prodding phrase without the least strain of impatience, or personal warmth, for that matter. There was nothing in her voice to distract the little boy, who at that age was more curious about the world than the familiar sound of his consistently present mother. The father said something plaintive and worked his hands over the flesh of his face. Probably he was too accustomed to the tone his wife was using. Probably she used it with him. Mothers and parrot owners get crazy like that, directing the baby talk at others like an out-of-control flame-thrower.

Outside the girl paced around. Did my ex-girlfriend ever pace like that? I could imagine it, yes. But now I was growing so desperate for certainty one way or another that my mind could have been furnishing details just to get me to calm down. With my fork I slowly stabbed a fatty chunk of duck as if administering an injection. I gave it a generous lick as I put it in my mouth. I began to chew and was immediately disappointed by how dry it was. None of the other pieces of duck thus far had been dry. Was it possible that it came from an entirely different duck altogether? Was it a sour disposition that made one duck drier than the next? The amount of unfinished business it left behind? Did the chef perhaps have a container (the word 'bucket' made me cringe) full of duck meat gathered from hundreds of different ducks? Or could it be that this one particular duck had an injury somewhere on his body where the muscle had atrophied? There was a very good chance I was eating a crippled duck.

My waitress came to remove an unused appetizer dish from the table. She asked me whether everything was all right, and would you believe I said no? She smiled but caught herself. I doubt anybody had ever given a negative response to that question without elaborating. She looked lost, irritated, jolted from her routine.

"What's the matter?" she finally said.

"I'm trying to figure out whether that girl across the street is my ex-girlfriend."

I pointed outside and the waitress, mouth open on a nervous grin, moved her eyes in that direction but did not move her head.

"I'm sorry?" she said.

A familiar person really ought to communicate more than her shape at a distance. People have a certain feel. I hesitate to use the word vibe. It is a diminished version of that phenomenon which allows a mother to recognize her own son even after she hasn't laid eyes on him for forty years. And it had only been three years for me. So I would be sure whether this was my ex-girlfriend and not somebody else. After all I had lain in bed with her, I had scrubbed her bare body in the shower, I had licked the deformed pinky toe on her right foot.

She had gotten me over my fear of sex in public places.

Something like madness clutched at my lower vertebrae. Inaction in the face of such agonizing uncertainty -- which could be swept away merely by getting up and walking outside -- was unbearable. I had to do something. Yet each swell in my conviction had the adverse effect of ensuring my immobility. I would not get out of my seat. The mystery was my own and it would become the defining characteristic of this meal. This meal which otherwise would have been short and pleasant and unmemorable.

In a moment of detachment I saw myself sitting still, staring out the window, and was horrified. It was a horrible condition to find myself in. I imagined the catharsis of strolling toward the girl, the relief only to be folded in on itself when I realize that this is not my ex-girlfriend, but now I am walking directly toward a stranger, staring her in the eyes, smiling.

The patty cake family stood and after a brief but comforting din -- a confusion of chair-scrapings, nylon coat friction, guiding instructions delivered in singsong by the mothers -- opened the door and filed out. A gust of cold wind stole in and set my teeth aclatter. The girl outside continued to pace. More people were waiting with her now, every one of them engaged to a cell phone. They all performed television signs of impatience. It was indignation theater. But the girl who might have been my ex-girlfriend stood apart off to the right, her back to the crowd.

I teetered at the edge of a precipice. If I moved my head even an inch in her direction, the limit of my vision would take in her facial features and I would be immediately relieved, unburdened, enlightened, freed! Just do it! Move closer! Tear out and rush over there! Grip her head between your frigid hands and stare! Then it was just my heart sitting there pounding, expanding, suffocating, fogging my senses, drawing me toward delirium.

The check arrived. I figured the tip while listening to a familiar sound. It was the sound of a bus. With uncharacteristic restraint -- I confess it was cinematic -- I looked first with my eyes, then slowly turned my head. The girl took a window seat on the side facing me. She looked directly at me and smiled and waved.

It was her.

viva la revolucion.com!

2005-12-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

San Francisco weather has found its teeth! Cold bites through to the bone. Fingertips clatter over the keyboard like crushed ice over kitchen tiles. Cover to Cover is frigid. The books huddle together for warmth. Outside, a buzzsaw buzzes (and, presumably, saws), a bird's shadow passes quickly over the bar across the street, a homeless man begs. All is peaceful.

A terrible mixture of last night's alcohol and this morning's coffee sets my guts agurgle. Acid brews. I can picture the froth gnawing away at my intestines for I haven't eaten a thing yet. Thus, I would love to eat a thing. Infallible logic makes for unbearable reading. I am staring at a large container of dreidels thinking how strange it is to see certain objects in multitudes when we only ever encounter or consider them singly. For instance, think of your favorite stuffed animal. Now imagine you have hundreds or thousands of them, each an exact replica of the original, complete with blemishes. Or think of your mother. Nothing more -- just think of your mother.

(Extracts tongue from cheek.)

I have just joined the blogspot revolution. Previously I have kept journals on MySpace and LiveJournal, but this didn't make me popular enough. After I read about how Che Guevara kept a blog while organizing a revolution in Cuba, I had to see what all the fuss was about. Also, I perused the blog of Samuel Pepys, who lived back when blogging technology was really just a rudimentary idea that nobody would have for another four hundred or so years. I have one friend on here so far. This is her journal.

Below are some particularly salient (read: recent) entries from my livejournal. Enjoy.

manifestos before hos

2005-12-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

(November 2nd, 2005)

For all our supposed admiration and respect for modern sophistocation and dignity -- our faith in the cool, tempered, "higher" brain -- it is not the politician (the ultimate, if caricatured, representation of poise and composure) or the intellectual who holds our imaginations or captures our hearts, or indeed who has any sort of inexplicable power over us, but the mystic, the artist, the insane and the criminal and the childish that grip and paralyze us, that set us in orbit around them, jaws unhinged, analytical faculties over-excited, pens working furiously to keep up with overwhelming amounts of raw data, life-data -- life as we claim it exists but find ourselves incapable of experiencing first-hand.

It should be obvious that 'us' refers to writers, or those who try to write. We choose to exist, or helplessly find ourselves existing, on multiple levels, and we are marginally present in the here and now.

The artist that holds such power over me is slightly insane. The quotient of insanity necessary to every artist is not exclusive to her art. It is not an accurate weapon, but instead scatters over life's landscape like buckshot, embedding those around her with with the shrapnel of inspiration. It often does harm. It cannot -- should not! -- be tamed, though we may spend our lives trying to pin it with words. I think we could do better by merely hitching a ride. Grabbing hold where possible and minimalizing our own weight, fitting ourselves to its form. In short, getting closer and closer to life as she lives it, because we will gain no distance through artifice.

(I say 'artist' and mean it universally. It should be obvious that 'she' refers to her.)

It is not so dangerous to shore up one's own puny life-presence in the company of such a force. My (goodbye third person) supreme satisfaction has never, will never occur on her level. What I taste of her life is a treat, an excursion, a foray to gather data. It is also never so dull as my words imply. The truth is, her experience is awkward in my hands. I fumble with it, finding my other "levels" naked and exposed. I am much more comfortable now, alone, surrounded by the flotsam she leaves in her wake, prodding her lifestyle with my fingertips instead of grappling with fists and heart

I am constantly coming to terms with this discrepency. If I exist at several removes from reality, or at least have a minimal presence there, then being with somebody like myself would make our collective real estate -- reality estate -- dangerously neglible. I must get rid of the illusion that I'm the one tethered to the ground as she floats above it willy-nilly. This is a false and easy image. When she falls down, as she did this morning, it is knees and elbows, nerve and bone that hit the floor. When I fall I spend the next few hours banging out the dents in my ego by contemplating man's relationship to the earth, examining the comic effects of such a circumstance in written and visual form, and talking like a pirate.

I speak of discrepencies and realize that a physical differentiation must be forming in your head. I am not claiming to be "above" anything. I'm not speaking of an intellectual hierarchy. Rather it is an experiential hierarchy, and my assertion is that some people are simply closer to life, to real life -- are on more intimate terms with instinct and nature and creatureliness -- than others. And our compensation for being further away is the opportunity for the brain to step in and observe. Not all brains are up to the task. I'm going to spend my life training mine

The obviousness of why my type of person is attracted to her type of person does nothing to make her power over me less intangible. That is why I name it 'power' and not, say, influence. There is nothing lateral about it. It comes from a place I'll forever envy and admire, as only humans can fall asleep on an airplane and still dream of flying, free of artifice, like birds. This image pleases me. It may be helpful to think of my "condition" as being trapped in or dependent upon vehicles of inspiration. Where I get online, purchase a ticket, hail a taxi to the airport, stand staring up at a grid of arrival and departure times, board the plane, stuff my luggage into the overhead compartment, take my seat and arrange myself comfortably for flight, she forgets to put both feet on the ground and finds herself soaring

Yet I ask: why do I fight so viciously in her realm when I know I am outclassed? Part of me (again with the segmentation) fears that she has no superstructure like this to fall back on. That any dissatisfaction with me will be tolerated up to a certain point and beyond that point there is no system of justification. But this area is so murky. How do I separate her way of thinking from mine? The obvious modes are easy to distinguish but at the base of it all we are human beings operating mostly from the heart. We are still together. She has found it necessary to justify our relationship just as I have. Maybe her reasons, were they revealed, would depress me. Maybe my distance from reality has caused me to endure a state of unhealth.

I fight because I am proud. I am unwilling to give up my paltry bit of reality estate. The man who owns a small piece of land will fight more viciously to preserve it than the one with acres he's never even set foot on. And to extend the metaphor, the wealthy landowner will look down upon the peasant's squalor and hold no respect for him. There may be something uniquely imperialistic in this dynamic. I'd like to think I assert a similarly enigmatic, if not equally powerful, hold on her, thus levelling the playing field.

Now the physical metaphor of reality estate has thoroughly confused me. I doubt you are much better off.

Pride may be universally ugly (if sometimes practical), but there are varying degress of ugliness depending on the way you wield it. My type of person should have no business with it. When it comes to examining our own motives and feelings we are lost in the moment. The moment is her property, she owns it part and parcel, and in it I cannot compete with her accuracy of emotion. Here's a strange concept -- "accuracy of emotion". But I think it works. From where I reside, emotions enter and must first be distinguished from the fog of data or intellectual commodities -- let's call them certainties, or tangibles. But she lives in them, exploits them, is in constant dialogue with them, and subsequently they manifest as completely familiar entities. Mine, they warp and transform during the long journey from heart to head and come out base, blunt, completely unsophistocated versions of themselves. I end up trying to shove the square block into the circle hole, and would do better to throw a tantrum or start weeping than to defend assertions that I know (or feel) to be unfaithul to my true emotions. But pride doesn't allow it. I must soldier on blindly. I must make my unhappiness known. I must turn this grain of sand into a pearl of intellectual superiority. Basically I must have the last word.

The aftermath, that is mine. I thrive in the wake. I pull the settling dust into my lungs with gusto. The silence after a fight is when I slowly begin to compose myself. My enraged state is a fog over judgment. Whether judgment is all it's cracked up to be is another issue altogether. However, it's all I've got. Here, in the post-battle calm, I become once again familiar with myself. Let me introduce you, Davi, to your emotions. Here's where you went wrong. You blundering idiot, if only you'd said what REALLY needed to be said! Or, as is most often the case, just kept your mouth shut. But I am guaranteed no access to articulation while clinging to my bit of reality estate. There it is. Once the outside disturbance has vacated I can climb back into my brain, emotional curmudgeon that I am, and sort things out.

The thing is, I can be a very sentimental person. I do not rely solely on my brain for strength. Nobody does; nobody can. Those who try are obviously weak. But sentimentality, I'm beginning to realize, also has varying levels of purity, and an intellectual interest in it can be just as false as my haranguing and pontificating about artistic impulses and nature. When I am taken unexpectedly by an emotion -- overwhelmed when watching a movie, say -- I revel in the unfamiliar state. But the very act of reveling reestablishes my detachment. It appears I cannot exist there for long. And keeping myself there is like trying to hold a lifejacket underwater or trying to commit suicide by holding my breath. Impossible.

I think (and think and think and think) that no matter how small my claim on nature and reality, on instinct and impulse -- no matter what percentage of me dwells in the here and now -- that balance between intellectual and emotional states must be strived for, even if I know an equality will never exist between the two. Mere acknowledgment of the power such ten-thousand-percent-here-and-now people have over me does nothing toward this end. Writers have always -- always! -- been slaves to muses. I am working to cherish the awkwardness such people bring out in me. I don't think it's such a stretch to say that writers write in order to justify their inability to achieve these purer -- there, I've said it -- states. I feel slightly dirty and even guilty to find myself so profoundly handicapped. But at the same time I am so strengthened by the existence of such people -- pianists, painters, engineers, authors, singers, mathematicians, hobbyists -- that I can think of nothing more frightening than to imagine myself incapable of rendering their magic -- and all other magic, including love -- with words.

requiem... review... rebirth

2005-12-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

(November 24th, 2005)

Morning brought me into a new San Francisco. Or I was brought, new, into the same city that's astounded and depressed and surprised and confused and inspired me over the last four years, that has often disappeared into familiarity only to reassert itself with a breathtaking view or an angle of sunlight or a biting wind. An era has ended with a relationship, I can feel them passing, feel myself and the world around me reconfiguring.

I did try hard to justify, didn't I? I wrote my way into and out of troubles. I called on my tools. All to no avail, except maybe to provide the sense of accomplishment that pushes me along, amplifies certain fading signals of individuality and artistry. But the satisfaction was dangerous; it tacked positive feelings onto problems that probably weren't resolved, only elucidated with who knows how much accuracy. Emotional turmoil, domestic strife, confusion, darkness -- these often give rise to erudition, to ideas that strike me as new when they form in front of me on the computer screen. In the process of turning them into words I remove myself completely, forget my involvement as a human being, and begin the arduous task of squeezing every last drop of insight from them. But even as I do this I can never be certain I'm learning from them. Of the over three hundred entries here archived, the great bulk of them introspective and investigative, how much have I appropriated as guiding wisdom? Belle and Sebastian: "I'm only lucid when I'm writing songs."

So for all the progress implied in these writings I don't seem to be changing much as a person. Developments in the non-writing world take place independent of my inspired moments of creativity or self-exploration. Epiphanies arrive, shock, inspire, flee. I am left satisfied but unchanged. If writing is an act of self-justification, perhaps the most powerful one, what then is the importance of self-justification? In Saul Bellow's case it produced lasting art. But was he any better for it? If anything, I am in danger of growing dependent upon the negative patterns that give rise to this familiar inspiration, and to work toward change would be counter-productive.

So that's my cargo. All my belongings have been collected into four bags. I am temporarily homeless. I can feel the lightness. Flimsy in the material world, insubstantial, I have a very small footprint. I float between my three jobs with a yellow satchel thrown over my shoulder -- one-fourth of the entirety of what I own. Four years in San Francisco have come to this. The city has whittled me. I've been diminished, stripped, unburdened. Now, when I throw everything into a task, it is not much. Everything is very little. I bring only my convictions (scant) and my faith (unquestioned) in a single letter of the alphabet: 'I'. It seems to be the only well I draw from.

That needs to change.

But for now I am satisfied with myself. Rare periods inbetween relationships probably yielded similar writings. I am certainly redundant. Maybe those with little weight in the world rely on repetition for strength. What little I know I will tell you over and over and over again. When something new comes along it will be incorporated. Probably more time has been spent re-reading old stuff than writing new stuff. I'm taking stock of my history like you might take stock of your senses upon waking up. Yet I am never overwhelmed by a sense of tedium or pointlessness. Somewhere out of all this a purpose will emerge, a pattern, a direction, a theme.

Oh, what I'd do with a theme!

I'm in Davis now. The town is warm, so are the people. Tranquility prevails. After a grueling, standing-room only train ride from Emeryville, I plodded, stunned and befogged, to my favorite small cafe and ordered a triple shot latte to combat a cresting headache. Outside in the cool gloom of evening, I sipped gingerly and settled. Think fresh linen hanging from a clothesline. I'd let myself out to dry, and clean, pure air moved freely through my pores. Fatigue set in. I called my dad, he picked me up outside Borders and we went to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. Over eggplant parmesan and linguine with clams we discussed his theories on religion and science. I was engaged. The check came along with an overwhelming urge to fall asleep. We rode home in silence.

The shower here might be confiscated for riot control in a more tumultuous city, so I stood under its pounding spray for a long time, relishing the abuse of scalding hot water at outrageous pressures. Thus purified, I stretched out on the living room couch -- my bed -- and read a couple articles out of "Poets and Writers", a magazine I'd purchased from Borders while waiting for my dad to arrive. The cover advertised an article on Saul Bellow, which I read along with an article on John Updike -- one of the most prolific and perennially praised American authors, about whom I know next to nothing, of whose entire body of work which consists of more than twenty novels I have read a single short story.

I'm home for Thanksgiving and it's obvious, if you've gotten this far (God bless you!), that Davis and Family are working their peculiar melancholy on me. However I enjoy the inner calm, the distance from turbulent, transient, high-traffic city life. This distance reveals my own private paradox of urban existence -- that it is at once unbearable and absolutely necessary.

Tomorrow is my favorite holiday of the year. The only day you'll find me unabashedly enjoying football and crude male camaraderie. I can't help but feel effeminate with my uninformed outrage at bad referee calls and gleeful exaltations at masterfully executed plays, but the more I indulge (and the more I drink), the more my self-consciousness beats it flat-footed to the locker room.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I can't wait to get back and rediscover my city.

reading can be fun

2005-12-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

I was at my grandmother's house tanning leather when either a novel idea or an awful idea came to me -- it was a particularly noisy cow and I couldn't be sure. Immediately I dropped the tanning hose, removed my protective tanning waistgear, and telephoned Fleming, my agent. In my excitement I accidentally dialed Li Ming, my Asian. I took a deep breath -- to this day I don't know whose it was -- and soon had Fleming on the other line.

"Fleming, it's me. Have I got an idea for you!"

"How am I supposed to know!"

It took me a moment to realize that there was static on the line and my exclamation point had come through as a question mark.

"Are you free for lunch?"

"You should ask before assuming."

"I'll meet you at three o'clock!"

"Either you will or you won't, which is it!"

"Three it is. Goodbye?"

"Oy?"

I decided to hop a bus downtown, but to my everlasting chagrin I landed awkwardly on the other side. Luckily, the upper and lower halves of my body sustained most of the heavy injuries, and I was out of the hospital hailing a cab before you could finish a 16-month jail sentence.

As we pulled up to the building I remembered I'd left my wallet with a mugger.

"Gimme whatchoo got,"the cabbie snarled.

I handed him a crumpled five, which he thought was quite unfare. He did not appear pleased, so instead he disappeared, displeased.

I strolled into the lobby. The doorman, with no small amount of discretion, informed me of a bounce in my step. Eternally grateful, I tipped the kind man, who I knew would have no trouble getting back up. Ruth, and old fling of mine, sat at the front desk. She had moxy to spare. In fact that's how we met years back. I went next-door for a cup of moxy, and she had some to spare. Our romance was brief but long, and after we split I went through a Ruthless period of self-destruction.

"Where you been, lover-pants."

She always had a way with words -- the wrong way.

"Came down with appendicitis, toots."

"You can't fool me. You came here alone."

I leaned in close for a whiff of perfume and a slap on the behind. After she was done I tried to do the same to her, but she pulled back, feigning modesty.

"Now now, no whiffs, hands or butts."

"Fair enough, darling. Tell me -- you seeing anyone?"

"Ain't none of your business."

"You are, aren't you. Tell me his name, toots. What is it?"

She smiled coyly.

"Kyle Smoilee."

Why kinda crazy name was that? But before I had time to ask she waved me through to Fleming's office and pretended to answer her stapler.

Fleming was a huge man, especially around the body, and today was no exception. He sat, for the most part, behind his desk, but certain bits were stored behind him in large refrigerators.

To break the ice I told him about my cousin's mishaps in Germany.

"Miss Happs, his elderly speech tutor, found him one day wandering the streets, pointing furiously skyward, yelling 'sieg heil... sieg heil...' at the top of his lungs. Years ago he'd had the bottoms of his lungs removed after a botched snobbery attempt. Poor Miss Happs could not get him to calm down, and eventually somebody called 'The Police' arrested him. He was booked on charges of fascism. It took Miss Happs four months to convince a judge that my cousin merely had a speech impediment and was in fact beseeching the sky to produce his most favorite form of precipitation -- hail."

"Get to the point, will you?"

An assistant was called in to help Fleming look impatient.

"I've got a new book proposal for you."

"Let's see it."

I slid a sheet of paper across his desk. On it, in letters that would put the alphabet to shame, was written:

"A Rheum of One's Own: A True Story of Dishonorable Discharge"

Fleming's expression changed from one of detached boredom to one of bored detachment. With typical Shakespearean bombast he yelled:

"Get thee to a punnery!"

Then he produced what was later diagnosed as a chortle. As I was politely escorted from the building via a strong shove out a second-story window, I wondered if it was a bad time to bring up my idea for a children's cartoon called "He-Mensch, Master of the Jewniverse".

Dejected, I skipped home, pausing now and then to jump rope. On 36th Avenue I ran into and old friend, Lewis Carlyle. I ran into him again on 37th and again on 38th, and by the time I arrived at my apartment I realized we'd been reminiscing.

"Those were the good old days," he said, skillfully dodging a baby elephant.

"Say, why are you alone, Lewis? I can't remember a single day you didn't have some disastrous-looking dame depending from your elbow."

"Ah, I'm my own best friend these days."

"That so?"

"Well, at least until I caught myself in bed with my girlfriend. After that I stopped returning my calls."

Sensing Lewis was about to cry, I ran full tilt in the opposite direction, and haven't seen him since. This was fifteen minutes ago. By the way, if you haven't seen him since, you really ought to. I hear it's quite a sight. They say nobody sinces like Lewis -- nobody.