As my days march on, collapsing one into the other, into the other, into the other- I will not remember this Sunday. But this Sunday, like the ones before it: was doomed before it began. The fragile debt owed to this limitless space of doing things for a few dozen consecutive hours; it all emerges out of a place of great hope. Hope that things could be better for a little while. So this weekend I anxiously rode my bike (so anxious in fact, I flew off it) I felt the sun lay a thick sheen of UV rays on my arms and I closed my eyes to drink it all in. With this great idea that I could pack all this life into these rigid hours of play. That I would return to my bed, satisfied; satiated.

I did so, mostly. Not without first peeling the layers off piles of things once owned by strangers, pieces of their history up for sale at a dollar a piece at the San Diego swap meet. I breathed in the smells they had, the only indication that they are were once not owned by me, but by a strange I will never know the name of. 

I suffer a mild paralysis on Sunday mornings to the idea of a day: unplanned. I need to be required, I need to engage with this unquantifiable stuff of life, during all waking hours. When, by illusory definition, nothing is required of me, I hastily call upon a number of tasks to ensure that I can keep up the noise. The slow humming of the ‘something’ that I need to know is always on. I think about the ease of late mornings that most people so readily indulge in. With that, I experience pangs of anxiety, strong enough to propel me through hours of running in one direction. I am never stopping. It’s a fear I have that my hours are finite and I’m not “making the most of” it all.

 But isn’t it funny, these things that we’re doing? I’m collecting, collecting, building, destroying (just to rebuild), planning, worrying-worrying, breaking it up, counting it. Repeating. As if it all meant something, as if I could add it all up at the end and bring it with me into the stretches of nothingness, the intangible sky that spans out, uncalculated. When I leave my body, I’ll leave an unfinished list of things I ought to have done before the end of my day, and with that- a very real possibility that the world could end without my small troubles, holding it on it’s axes with its’ own quivering fingers, about to give out. If I could just memorize this laudry list, trophies, stuff all my photos with me and remember all the places I’d been so that when I die, it’d all mean something more. Something I haven’t gotten a name for yet. I’m pumping my body thick with it all. I’m spinning my wheels long enough to snap them both clean off- what good are wheels anyway when you’ve got legs. Wheels (as determined by my foolish fall this weekend) only get you into trouble if you don’t have proper brakes. 

1:17 am  •  13 December 2010

When I was a child I could tell my nose from my fingertips, it all felt mechanical, and it wasn’t mine. It was my mother’s and my father’s, it was of my flesh unto itself, and I, a passive operator of this thing I could not steer. I put my legs in front of each other at different paces, and there they would sway to take me down streets, away from home, away from the place of I was made. No order, but chaos, no rest but heavy breath. The older I became, the more these arms and these legs became foreign. They grew into strange things, longer and longer. Separated from myself, I was. Attached to this space, or floating above. It was me and these legs. But we did not know each other’s names, nor did we understand why we were opposed. I thought it was weak, and it called me a bully. Me and this body- divorced entities. I wouldn’t feed it, and it would rebel. It would tire easily to welcome a violent turbulence of fits and illness. If it could, it’d run it’s legs far from me, but I kept it’s veins and all of it’s blood, so it stayed put. It took me two decades to breathe at it’s pace, the catch the rhythm of a pulse, to trace the lines of it’s curves. Whether the nerves surrendered, or died- they left no residue but a quiet mind. Whatever thing I am, I no longer busy myself with the dream of flight, or a desire to shed and shed. And now, these days, we walk together, at the same pace. And we are in love. 

6:52 pm  •  7 November 2010

This is a story about desiring to prematurely sink your teeth into the fruits of your labour when it’s not yet your time…or something. 

My eyes are dripping from something sublime miles away from my feet. I can barely get my lids to dip below the half-way point, exposing the black to the hazy rays holding their attention. I stopped blinking days ago. “There it is” I said out loud, with the kind of breath left to say three small words and nothing else. It was like everything I’d imagined. Must you describe it, tell them it’s what they’d hoped for, and it’s something real, alright. What I’m looking at is the end of the story, a glimpse behind the curtain- the sacred burning spot reserved for a faithful few. Most give up the bodies they wear for a view like this, but it’s sticking to my eyes with a syrupy glaze, shades of rose.

The space that separates me from this land of milk and honey is a frightful fall, a canyon slipping into a blackness, producing explosive deaths for the free-falling rocks. Or no deaths at all, just a stream of gravity until the end of it all. It wraps around impossibly, a fortress making the untouchable place all the more lovely (if I cannot have her). But this place is sweet enough for me to dream it. To press my naked finger against it, penetrating the smoky clouds that protect it. My two dirty eyes are undeserving, but I make a circle with my forefinger and thumb to capture it, however small, however far away. My body is a broken vehicle. All my urges to be with it, to lose my limbs and fly to it lock all of my joints violently until no movement is possible. I couldn’t move a foot forward. What fate is worse, to know of a great beauty and lose the map to find her, or to never know of such a place at all?

Read More

12:17 am  •  10 June 2010

Let me keep you for the infinite days, as our days collide with their due expiration, your face will be sweeter each day that I am without you. Only then could you be so lovely. In the Great Death of the space two bodies one occupied, the residue of a man is but his wit, his charm, and unfailing force-nothing more. Not the cruelty, nor the words, unrepeatable. Washed with the tide. And what beauty remains is the ghost of a man, not the boy of flesh, but his valiant self, the Holy whose love still lay dormant for another woman to wake. 

What are these dream-days of our memories? Only ever fond and never rude. To retreat inside the vaults, unkept pages recounting all the days in the sun, oh, the decadence and confusion of the past! Dripping down drain pipes and wasted on the worst kind of company.  And barely any of it true. In between the dawn of this very day, and the ones of the days before blooms a place of wonder, endless graves of postcard-memories of a life, never-lived. Fiction. Truth was an ugly bore and nothing more.

But in my mind’s eye, you were burning. And I would visit you when I so pleased. On cool nights, to follow you back to the place where we would sit. And you would be mighty. And how pleasant you would be, for now you were who I meant you to be. I prefer you now, kept inside the breast of my thoughts, and nowhere else. Should the body you wore walk his feet to my door, I will not answer. Better to spend the afternoon to dream of a kind man with your borrowed face. 

1:10 am  •  28 May 2010  •  1 note

I operate inside the grand delusion that this life, or my existence, specifically, should be entirely pleasing and possess elements of romance. And yes, naturally, my reality hopelessly falls short. I refuse to respond to this kindly.  Since I was a child, I grew up with the great misfortune (or burden) of imagination, and my hope to stretch this infiniteness beyond it’s own ethereal capacity was the beginning of my revolt. If you know me now, I still very much look (and often speak) like a child. I adore, and revel in the great ideas about freedom. Within the confines of my own circumstance and culture, I am my own hedonist, my liberator! I would take it upon myself to loosen the grip and set myself free! After a century’s worth of work and study, my head had stayed down for so long I’d forgotten what shape the clouds took.

So at my first release I moved to California. California was my supreme pie in the sky. I wanted all of it, at once. It was the Pacific mostly, the way it smelled. I wanted everything to do with the authentic Mexican food made from the hands of people’s mothers, the kinds with tired faces that would make me a plate like my own mother would. I wanted sand to intrude on everything.  It wasn’t noble, but in the film of my mind, it was entirely sad and courageous, what a lovely thing to blaze and rip through the pages of your youngest years with all the laughter and fury (and terrified tears) you could collect. Lord knows I wouldn’t remember the monotony of routine work and paralyzed, disappointed weekends in between. If imaginary numbers in digital accounts are bloating somewhere, does that mean you are too?

Read More

1:25 am  •  21 May 2010  •  1 note

The ones who grew out of your grass stay mostly indoors now. They are the greedy kind, the unfortunate few who only know of the sun. Their hands are soft. Their eyes are dull to the piercing ball of fire that dips into the Pacific every late afternoon, and their skin is dark enough not to budge in the midday heat, a place where tanlines are buried to rest. Their skin is not fit for all seasons. Drunk and spoiled, they will never know of the violence the sky could bring. 

But I, I forever watch your palm trees make shapes on the sidewalk. I sink into the impossible temperature, rubbing my eyes to see the calendar day. (February!) I dip my toes into your black sand beaches and warm the balls of my feet on your slick rocks coated by the sea’s glaze. Your birds sing in harmonies. Your wind blows slightly through my balcony door making the curtain ripple and roll across the floor. Your native girls are all golden, from their toes, to shoulders to the tips of their bangs, like little goddess-girls, in their pastels and cigarettes. Your boys glide gallantly across the barreling waves with great ease. I watch you drop lemons from your trees, and make butter out of avocados. San Francisco is a lady, and Los Angeles is her daughter.

Everything about you is slow, and forgiving. Your mountains are silent bodies, like guards to line the state, shoving those who surround you to their deserts and wastelands.Your redwoods are resilient. But mostly, you are loyal, lighting the entire sky with tangerine hues just before your final farewell, every evening, and each time, more sad than the last.

You gave me a place of rest in the breast of your Southern land, and for that, you are my friend. The last of the Great Americas.

Every artist has written his ode to you, and I am eternally yours,

Impatiently,

Nada 

10:41 pm  •  5 May 2010

Before you came around, I thought the sweater on my back looked just fine. I thought my impossibly swept hair would survive the mediocrity of it sitting on my troubled head. I longed for nothing. I hungered for nothing, because I’d tasted it all. Before my eyes had the misfortune of tracing the outsides of your lips I could sit quietly and happily in my own solitude, disrupted only by the swelling tides of the sea outside my door, and nothing more. I was a man, tamed. Spent my life breathing cautiously, and fearing the late-night hours and what thoughts they would invite. If sadness were to subdue my restless heart, I would write poems, not of love, but of great places my feet were yet to meet, and sing the blues long enough to cool the jets of a primitive man. Impressively, I gathered encyclopedic data of all the things you ought to know at my age, and in turn, published only the most riveting narratives from the honest-to-goodness truth about youth and young manhood. I sank into satisfaction and pride, uninhibited. The burdens of the lust-bitten many were a pile of bricks. But I was free of the toil, and the failures of love- at least I thought. Before you, there were days spent endlessly in the silent sands. There were the ghost-cries of Whitman, Thoreau and Hemingway. There was all the bed a man could want to stretch out like a cat in the shade, and with abandon to wake with my eyes swollen from whiskey with no mirrors to tell me otherwise.

Before you, there was me.

Read More

9:06 pm  •  3 May 2010  •  5 notes

andreadyer:

4:37 pm  •  30 April 2010  •  10 notes

this will be a short film. 

Breath ran out of lungs as if someone pricked the two balloons underneath my ribcage. I was wheezing these ginger ale inhales that burned my throat. Nothing worked. I couldn’t catch it. I watched the air float upwards and all I could do was outstretch my arms to the moon watching pockets of air retreat just out of reach from sweaty palms. Like a sucker punch that pummels the wind out of you. My flashlight began to flicker and fade. A blanket of dark occupied the ground that I stood and poured over my body before my eyes could adjust. And there was darkness. It happened in twelve swift and holy seconds. The only real evidence that I existed was that I knew. I knew I was real.

And this wasn’t the first time.

I experience these episodes every once and a while that I imagine would feel something like dying. I’m not sure, I’ve never been dead and I don’t know anyone who has. But man, what an adventure. The idea of nothingness is something I could spend an afternoon thinking about. My disappearances, however frequent, are calming now. He calls the shots, but what can you do? Nothin. You never asked to be here, but look at you now! You don’t seem to ever want to go.

Read More

3:31 am  •  25 April 2010

This space, although originally intended to house mostly creative short stories, has unintentionally started to show it’s wear, leaving traces of myself too close for comfort. It could be too soon to tell, but I’m self aware enough to predict the early urges to quote Hunter S. Thompson. The journal entries and crises so common to people my age, tucked comfortably and typed without restraint by the fingers of the fattened ‘new’ bourgeoise, the kids with the newest everything, and an infinite enyclopedic knowledge of all unknown things that are yet to unravel on the internet. For good measure, talk of God is expectedly thrown in as well. For whatever reason, scratch that- l-o-n-e-l-i-n-e-s-s, it has become celebrated, even necessary to shed both the most sacred and mundane details of existence. I fear I’ve become something of a nihilist.

 All the while, it feels as though I’m nursing a gaping wound spilling from outside of my own brain, and no one, not a damn soul is concerned with how very immediate, desperate and fatal the situation really is. The efforts that I make to appear fine are a poorly placed bandaid. Doesn’t just about everyone feel this way?

Read More

5:36 am  •  24 April 2010