Wednesday, December 23, 2009

When Good Things Happen to Bad People

Specifically, people who have treated you poorly.
These are the times when God might as well be whispering (as you learn of their happiness),
"Crawl back into your mother's womb."
Certainly, no one deserves anything.
And fairness was not promised by anyone.
(Justice is a pretend idea.)
But to know that somewhere that person is happy
while you are still caught in their terrible wake
is more than enough reason to face the fact that
The Universe is Indifferent,
and we are all just stuck here
shitting all over each other
and the last roll of toilet paper is out.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Smiths and I own the Town.

I went out with my puffy, vintage, red jacket from Father and Son's.
even though there was a chance of me getting shot.
But after two guinness and some baily's at the "flat", all alone, dancing to Quasi on the wooden floor, in the light of the octopus lamp,
I felt like the world was my fucking bitch.
So I strode all over the sidewalk and owned it.
I owned it so hard, no gangster or hobo, or hipster said a word
but it was all false and my ears were swimming with The Smiths and
the promise of some other, new bar to visit. I have not been out in a long time.
I considered myself retired. but visiting was on my mind tonight.
So I did--Uptown. And it was not that great. Lots of older people. Crowded. Some couches. I know why a douchebag liked it. Cuz it's a douchey place. Nice bartenders, but douchebaggery all around.
A jukebox without The Smiths, and they were exactly what I wanted to listen to.
The only thing anyone said all night. A fat man walking from a bar,
doing a little hand jive like I was on the pavement, to the tune in his ears,
"Orange is your color!"

Sunday, October 25, 2009

I am glad you made that mistake all night long.

well I told you I lived right, but you just kept making left turns.
You turned left all night and when it was a dead end, you went straight. 
then we were up a hill and that hill had hills and that was fenced in
and I said "just drive straight over the guard rail because I live down there"
but you said "no no no, that is the direction of my house."
20th was 18th and 18th was 23rd and things were all labyrinthed around. we laughed until we found ourselves ass to ass with three other cars up a hill's hill and a taxi behind us. somehow after backing down with the parking break still on, we crept up near a park and struggling with the gate lock, the sprinklers came on and soaked our shoes.
"it's an alarm system!" we ran around in circles until we jumped the fence.
well, you did. i found another gate and walked in. 
there were swings there, and they overlooked the city and all of its chumps. there were vague flickerings of waterlike movements on the horizon and cars passed so fluidly it is a wonder they are mechanical inside at all. 
the moon was out, just peeking through a hole in the trees, and the swings made creaks out of our names. I heard a thump and thought you might've jumped off early, but you'd thrown your day-old-second-hand gold and white purse into the sand behind you and stretched your arms out at the apex of the swing arch.
the city could've laughed in your face and you would not have cared.
but damn it, why don't you turn right when i say so

Monday, September 7, 2009

the plan.

we'd have to get out of the south.
or we could get so far up in the south that it didn't even seem like the south anymore.
around those mountains up near the ash town.  
but let's do something different. just because we can.
 i have the northwest in mind for foggy and damp days and tiny, cozy homes with christmas lights all year. i would make sweet tea often.
we could have friends over for olive oil, garlic and crusty bread. with flowers and candles on the table. when they left, we would make a song and finish the coffee and chocolate tasting beer and creep around in the dark until we find each other next to the wood stove and slide into a quilted bed. all of our furniture would come from rich old ladies' garage sales. 
there'd be a studio attached, or in one of the back rooms so business would go uninterrupted. we could get part time jobs at record or book stores. i'd take bass lessons. we'd have a tv, but wouldn't turn it on. 
 the film people from the institute and i would and go on excursions to the tidepools. i'd come back with reels of footage and sand dollars and pinecones in my pockets.  you would chop wood for the fire and fix your bike up and make music with your friends. you'd use the dark room and smell like chemicals all day, but you'd have so many good shots turn out, you wouldn't care. if you were so inclined, you would visit one of the myriad strip clubs on the corners of the southeast side of town. you would take a polaroid of a stripper's boobs, and give it to me later that day. "thank you for the souveneir." I would say and I'd put it in a second hand frame.
we would laugh about the blueberries you grabbed from some hippie co-op and put them on cornmeal lemon pancakes. then we'd make mobiles out of sticks and sand dollars and pinecones and hang them above the sink in the kitchen.  i will have fed our giant black cat or dog what was left of the bird from last night, and attach a tiny wishbone with string to the mobile.
there'd be a garden out back. i would grow sage, peas, black eyed susans, basil, and roses. i would make a gross compost pile.  i'd cut up clothes that were too small and use them as colorful flags to keep birds away.
 we would go to parties on people's back porches on the weekends. they'd have houses with chipped paint, too. we would network and meet all kinds of interesting mother fucks. people who read. people who write. people in bands (and everyone is in a band.) people who make things. and people who do nothing but drink and trip and hang out under the cities' bridges. 
from them we would (on occasion) procure certain drugs, which we would do after we got back home, and put on an edith piaf record. we'd look at a book of picasso's blue period and read sad pablo naruda poems until they made us laugh.
the windowpanes would always be spiderwebbed with rain drops.
and the bed would always be warm. 

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Friday, August 7, 2009

the girl cannot catch a break

While walking around Valencia street yesterday, my head generally disarrayed, thinking about how much I hate interacting with people and their damn brain problems and wondering if I will ever have any kind of relationship with anyone that is ever balanced and fair where I am not giving too much and they are not expecting too hard and we are just fucking having a great time being our godamn selves...
My head full of these bullshitaria thoughts and I hear this squeeky-squeeky, like a bathtub duck. squeeky-sqeeky! I was in the crosswalk with two terse looking construction men who had eagerly been discussing what I could only assume was adultery or money laundering, with such faces as the asphalt we walked on at that very moment, frowny and cracked and ready for something hard as hell to happen.
squeaky! sqeeeeaaakkk!
This girl on a bike whizzes by making this crying-clown sound like a birthday party in the pool and everyone gets some icecream cake. and these two men turn to eachother and smile and start laughing, and that makes me laugh and then they smile at me and we are all grinning like fools in the crosswalk as the light changes because this girl has squeaked us right out of our cesspool minds and for a split second we are just laughing at the sound of a squeaky horn.

I saw no less than four pairs of love addled hipsters acting generally like ass holes on my way back, after failing to find the necessary paperbacks at Dogeared Books.
I was mentally adding up the meals I'd had alone in public recently (7), the number of times I'd heard from people I care about lately (2) the new friends I'd made so far (0) and the goals I have accomplished (0). Then dividing that by how long it would take to work up the nerve to fall out of a window (17 days if all of them were spent not thinking about falling out of a window). 
When I saw an expensive car with the headlights on and thought with annoying predictability, "I hope his fucking battery dies." 
A block later, I was literally shit upon by something in the rafters of an overhang.
On average, it was a better day than most.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

exercises in futility pt. I

i passed a grocery store with balloons in the window.
cold wind. alcohol flavored. i had not been drinking. 
i don't know why the city had been.
pale red sphere. dirty yellow ones.
 dolphin shaped ones. birthday cake ones.they were floating. 
abandoned to a florescent humming light.
tomorrow maybe someone will buy them.
week later, they will be deflated. 
day after that, garbage.


i doubted and i doubted and i doubted all day
and i waited in the car
and watched a spider walk on telephone wires above my head
a gray sky behind him
got out to see
then i locked my keys in the car.
and paid forty five dollars to a mexican tow man
who cut me deal.
'usually it is sixty five, but 'chu know.'
i stared at him. i did not know. i thanked him.
i got back in the car (little spider, telephone wires)
and waited, waited.
lost my shit
then i waited some more.






Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The answer to your question, check out guy

My face just looks this way.
I am never thrilled to be in the grocery store.
So please stop making sarcastic comments.
And also stop asking if I am all right.
I am fine.
I just want to check out with my boston baked beans.
Here are the faces I am capable of making to prove that I can.

The general public, especially those in the service/retail industry 
feel the need to tell me I look sad, or ask what is the matter.
If I told them everything that was the matter they would most likely lose interest, but ultimately go home only to be plagued by the dark horrors I have seeded in their minds. 
Everything is the matter.
And it is all the time.

Monday, June 1, 2009

the secret signs

Maybe it would be easier to communicate if I used the secret signs.
But it would probably just get me into trouble.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

In my defense:

I am just as God made me, sir.

What I should've written in that essay:

The California Dream
is attainable, beautiful
it is
shot out 
through the muzzle of a pistol
into the brains of the blessed
shot up
fine and pure
into the veins of the prosperous
spread open wide 
like the legs of a whore 
too tired to pretend to come

Monday, May 11, 2009

to be fair

it is not so bad.
but it is not so good, either.
i have made an essential list of what i need soon:
-thunderstorms 
-fireflies
-cats
-nabeyaki udon
-cha no yu
-a giant, civil war graveyard
-guitar lessons
-a library that smells old
-physical contact from someone who does not utterly disgust me 
-a warm day without 18 mph cold wind 
-stimulating conversation
-silence
-a room so dark, it is always night

Sunday, May 10, 2009

For Me Mum

Sunday mornings, coffee and ink from a fresh page of colored comics. I would wake up late, pancakes. 
Now I am awake at 9 because I live with too many people. It smells like garbage. My "friends" hit my car, scratch the paint,  play their music very loudly.  At night, too. 
I am up early and down late. This has taken a toll on my mental state. 
I was never a positive individual. But I wasn't so starkly negative that I would insult strangers before getting to know them. I do that now, to save time. All the same cookie-cutter-self-absorbed-types, I can shoot them down before they have a chance to aim. It is too easy to be mean. I do not feel regret. If people had feelings, they would consider mine. 
My mother is an optimist. It takes someone special to be positive in the face of bullshit. I only learned recently that positivity was not always my mother's tendency. She said she had to work at it. 
I am not a hard worker.
I am not special.
At best, I am mediocre in everything I attempt. 
I can pass. 
But I cannot excel.
My mother is better than everyone in this city combined.

Friday, May 1, 2009

blood sugar attack


When we went on long car rides, we would travel with granny smith apples in the back seat. I was unsure how I felt about this. On the one hand, apples are fun to toss around. On the other, this particular type of apple is bad to eat on an empty stomach because it makes the inside of you feel like it is made of acid. Also, when it got too hot, the apples would smell up the car. Like hot apples.
But sometimes my father would get mad. He would say"GODAMNIT!" more than once every five minutes, and my mother would turn around in the passenger seat and say, "Get your father an apple, he is having a blood sugar attack." My father can eat an entire apple in three bites.
We would play the radio, but when it rained and the wipers had to be turned on full-force, my parents would turn the music down because they had to "concentrate on the road." 
We'd get to the mountains, or the beach, I would wake up and be glad to stretch around outside. 

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Friday, April 10, 2009

bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that 
wants to get out
but i'm too tough for him,
i say, stay in there, i'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

charles bukowski

Friday, April 3, 2009

They are going to Delirium.

There are new tights, and fifty degree weather to go out in.
Rum, coke. That once novel puke-y alcohol smell of bars,
 and those same Joy Division songs are out there.
And I guess I think some of the jokes are funny. 
But the night seems very futile to run around in
when I know what I want 
and what I want is far away.
It doesn't exist in any of these Friday nights in The City.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

portland,oregon/spring, 2009




Portland and I get along very well.
It both encourages and discourages me. 

Friday, March 13, 2009

Shoes and Suicide Watches


Here is a story that should not be true.

A girl with one of those schizophrenic disorders came to visit her friend in the city, and left her shoes in a housemate's room by accident. The housemate wore these shoes to get the mail, and set them in the corner of the room to wait for this girl's return. She'd be back, she would usually come and visit frequently. A week or two passed, the girl went missing. She'd disappeared before, adding drugs to the equation of an already unbalanced brain and a lonely personality. Things were looking bad.  Three or four days later she was found and put on suicide watch. During the panic, the housemate could only think, "What if I have a dead girl's shoes in my room?"

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Your Friends Are Assholes.

I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to hurt your feelings.
But I have a feeling you will find it out for yourself sooner than later.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Be sure to never try too hard..

just hard enough.

This is the cake my dear cousin Sally made me. 
She is a busy lady, and it was delicious.  
If only I had been named something short.
Like, "Chard."

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Those Are The Hardest Days

There are some days when I wake up in a room where the is sunlight blocked by the trashy roll-up shades that I cannot roll up because my bedroom windows face the street, and there are people out there who will look in the window and see straight into my heart. On these days I open my eyes and remember that there are people in the world who get off on "vore" and "furries" and "furries who like vore". 
Then I cannot get out of bed for another half hour, at least.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Looking kind of spooky and withdrawn

I don't like to party so much as go to parties and stand in a corner and think about the Holocaust.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009