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

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. 

The Story of How I Came To Acquire a Plastic Black Bull's Head

I said I would return it

and then I never did.

promotional material

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.

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.

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.