Bleach

Something about the way the light is in Southern California.
Something about the way it bounces off the cheap facades,
the grandfather cool, the googy designs. Something about the
way you bake, standing on the asphalt burned transparent by the
spotlights. It's all hour light casting black pitch shadows where
you lose it all.
It bounces off dirty buildings and vagrants, it rolls through
gutter piles of needles and dreams before stealing your face,
leaving you,abandoning you,a remainder that can't be recognized.
A basic unit ready for reprogramming. Trial by fire, trial by despair.

* Bleach is what I saw, bleach marks on fabric.
Onto patterns byzantine with internal logic
expanding, collapsing, intertwining then
eradicated by the annihilation of color.
Bleach. This is what is happening to us,
we are becoming similar, same, identical
empty. Bleached. This is how I felt out there.
This is how it ended for me.

Bottle baby

It's too hot to live.
That's what I remember thinking as I stumbled under the magnifying glass that is the Southern California Sky. The thermometer was pushing up over 100 arid degrees, and the real estate value of shade was enjoying it's mid day boon. On days like this sometimes I hide in the back of the fiction section in the Central library. It's quiet, it's air conditioned and by and large I am left alone. Sometimes I get the call from one of the friendships and we sail on down to The Standard or The Boneventure or any other of the numerous downtown hotel pools. That's always refreshing, bathing all beautiful with our beverages and our sun blinds over our eyes, high above the rush and hustle, high above the toil, perching feloniously with the rest of the leisure class lavishing in the sun.
If only.
If only everyone could lose time off their lifeline in such luxury.
Most days, honestly, I don't roll so ritzy, most days I'm on my own to find salvation from time and temperature and I end up down at Manhattan beach, body surfing and laughing to myself; I stuff my pack with water, apples, and reading materials and I while away the time till the sun disappears and I can move around again without fear of melting or losing what remains of my perspective on consensus reality.

This one day though things were different, I couldn't find a way out, couldn't find my escape and so I improvised a solution to the heat and loneliness. The sun was going down but it was still sweltering and I couldn't find a place to hide. I wandered over to the neighborhood liquor store and bought myself a quart bottle of Pacifico, my favorite cervesa, and I climbed up the walkways high above echo park looking down on the city. I sat in an out of the way spot, the sun had vanished a while back and it didn't seem like anyone was around. I cracked my brew and began to drink it down. I let the cold fresh taste cut the sweat from my face and I shivered a bit there, in spite of the heat. Sometimes my head gets on top of me, I start to dwell, I could tell this was going to be one of those nights. It must have been a weekend or close to it, because I could hear them having fun down below, could see the girls in their fluorescent colors and angle cut hair, brazen, brash, and drunk with youth and possibility. I could see the boys with the tight jeans and striped shirts smoking their cigarettes with loose gaiety and I could feel the hollow point in my stomach and tried futilely to fill it with beer. It isn't easy to be in a city so full and so alive and feel like you exist outside of it, like you're only a phantom.

The Ghost. That's what my mother used to call me, I came and went silently. I was sneaking, I was avoiding scrutiny. I didn't want to be noticed, i didn't want to be seen. That's how i exist to them, a boy who lives his life in the shadows. For awhile that's not what the rest of the world got, I only hid myself from the family, so they wouldn't have to watch me burn. Now here, in this new place, I have completely disappeared, and so I'm left to myself on top of a hill, alone with my velocity, a cold bottle of poor man's medicine, the swirling cloud of anxieties, apprehensions, and the weight of failure so acutely manifest in my 28th year.

With each swallow I tried to sink, letting the thoughts rise, the regrets, the pain. They would come up whether I wanted them to or not, so I went down. The parade of ex-girlfriends, swallow, sink beneath them, the Matches, the losses, the disappointment, swallow and sink beneath them. You trade with the bottle in your hand. You let your emptiness seep out as you drink the freeze in, so that by the time you're done, your heart is numb and your belly is full; in your hand you hold a bottle brimming with hurt which you can handily smash onto the asphalt, letting the contents run down the sidewalks and into the drains where it mixes with like sentiments from the rest of the city. I got what I wanted that night, I couldn't feel the heat, I couldn't feel my heart, and for awhile I sat there silent, listening to the laughter and the screams, watching my wicked city glitter off into the horizon. Somewhere in the night I was able to find sleep, shallow and uneasy but that's a lot better than I do most nights. Most nights I don't sleep at all.

Slumber party

We live in the greatest calm and grey, a nowhere thought, forcefed sucrose confettis sprinkled down from our mediated starbound elite. There is no politick for us, no struggle or division, we are woefully of one mind, constantly debating between the hemispheres of our own self interest. Feigning attempts at social progress, we become Nihilists, star stripped elephants and asses. We are the great slumber suffering the world a slow and eventual crib death, smothering the minds of the young, dowsing the fires of creativity, relegating the process of social invention and critique to the pompous privileged few who have only yet to inherit the american dream. Oh that wicked eventuality, that resignation and surrender...to close our eyes and sleep, to fall under the illusion that our lives of luxury are righteous, are deserved, and are not bought with blood.

the Hundred Peaks

I didn't care anymore, so I just wandered down the twisty incline to the sound of water hitting rocks. I gave a wave to the Mexican guys who were smoking through pinched fingers with their thick legged girlfriends. I was done avoiding people out here, I needed to be clean.

Three days before my car was overheating on the road up, I had pulled over in a turnout and was obsessing over my next move. I couldn't go back down to the city, I needed to put oil in her...why hadn't I put some in before I left? I have coolant and water I'll just put some more in. When I popped the cap of the radiator, scalding hot antifreeze sprayed out, I had my faced turned away so it only got my body and hair, but I was now covered in hot sticky green ichor.

The first mountain I ever climbed I did so by accident. I had set up camp and had a lot of daylight to kill. I packed my bag with tools, a knife, water and strapped my trail boots on. I headed out looking for a signed trail that seemed to have promise but wandered around and took an alternate route to nowhere. I didn't feel like going back as I didn't really have any destination in mind. I was boiling inside, I needed to break out, I needed space, and so looking up at the hill in front of me I started to run. Up shaley sliding rock and sand, up through Pines and Furs, up and up until my legs cramped and my lungs burned. This was a way I knew to make it stop, to make it quiet, to stop the argument that is constantly occurring in my head between the many mothers and fathers of my personality. Seven thousand two hundred and twenty eight feet later I stood watching the sun sink into the west with nothing but the high screaming of the Santa Anna Devil wind and the vast bodies of the sleeping great surrounding me. On top of my small mountain I was a little closer to heaven, alone, and quiet. The sweat dried cold on my skin and I let it get dark before I found my way back down.

I looked down over the ledge, into the shimmering blue and green. It looked deep enough. " Go for it Bro!" Yelled the taller guy. " Is it deep enough?" I asked him
but I don't think he heard me. They stood on the river bank below and intermittently glanced up at me and gathered their things to leave. I took off my shirt and hat, laid my things by the side and stared down at the pool created by the deep point beneath the waterfall. "I'm going to break my legs" I said to myself as I walked over the edge.

I carefully refilled the radiator with fluid and water and drove back down the mountain, back into La Canada and onto the 2 towards Echo Park, right back where I came from. I stopped at the car wash and washed the fluid from inside the engine and off the hood of my car, then I bought some oil and put it in. I didn't think about it, I didn't say anything, i just did it and headed back up to Angeles. I was doing what i said I was going to do.

I pointed at the tallest mountain in my eye line, and said " You. You're next." I had quickly scaled another small mountain and I had gotten an early start so I had all day to bushwhack, trail blaze and take down the biggest kid on the block. I walked around it's base and followed the beaten path. I got to a wash in the path and looked up, it was steep as fuck but do-able. I wasn't about to follow someone else's path up this thing, I was going to take it down on my own. It's funny the way a mountain tricks you, you can only see so far in front of you, and so you always think you are coming to the summit when in fact it's just another plateau. I started running up this one like i had the night before,but soon I was checking my water supply and calculating the risk of continuing, the risk of dehydrating myself out here, a good 20 mile hike from my camp. I decided to keep going and half delusional from the altitude, exhaustion, lack of water and hunger, I arrived at the peak, the highest point south in the hundred peaks section of the Angeles National Forest, and I saw all the way into the desert beyond the mountains, to Palm Springs and Nevada.I knelt down and cried into my hands as The Devil Wind sang its song unabated.

I hit the water hard, and my legs folded up as i hit the bottom. The Water was alive, fresh born from a snow melt and running young down the creeks and streams leading to this pool where I emerged and screamed to the sky. Cold like new, cold like young and unspoiled, cold like renewal. The kids on the bank cheered, I swept the hair from my face a smiled at them, shining like silver in the dying day.

Come down from there. Come back into the black acrid grid and try not to gag. What can you take from a place where your mountains are manifest and surmountable, to a place where ghost people dream silent and desperate? What are you doing there? What are you doing? Climb the hard way, just as long as you climb, kid. Get to the top half dead if you have to, just get to the top, see the glory from upon high and know it's cold quiet truth. There are many roads to the top of the mountain they say, sometimes you have to make your own.

Massive Authority

At some point I just stopped doing what i was told, and that's probably where it all went wrong. Or right. Depending on who you ask. I stopped trusting what i heard or saw, started seeing people trying to gain benefit from my obedience.That subtle exploitation is what turned me into a bad son, a bad student, a bad employee, a bad citizen, and a bad boyfriend. I can't wipe the smile off my face and i can't stop staring at the train wreck, I point my finger and fire off my big mouth regardless of it's obnoxious intonation or awkward phrasing. I'm a troublemaker wandering listless in a carefully constructed, but fragile, maze of concrete glass and good intentions.Here you go kids, here's a prime example of what you get when you don't follow the rules, you get a spot outside in the rain, the freedom to come and go as you please and no promise of help if ever you should need it. Do i bely the social contract or am i exercising my rights to their fullest extent? Am I living a life more examined or am I refusing to conform? Is this a dream I'm living or a misguided delusion? Time, the great arbiter, will be the judge i suppose, will show if my path was downward spiraling trajectory full of misery, disappointment, and self induced loneliness, or if from the the outside I find myself inside and making a needed contribution if even in the smallest of ways. Good luck kids, going your own way is long and unpaved road, get ready for the wear and tear.

Over and Over

When I write long winded diatribes on how our lazy nation needs to hang tough in tight quarters, for our honor, for our sanity, for the salvation of our souls, I do not do so lightly. In fact I haven't been able to completely reconcile myself with my own opinion presented in the earlier entry entitled "Riot Face, Strong Heart". It starts off a recollection of my youthful activism and left leaning "soft" radicalism, while the tail end advocates a course of foreign policy akin to that of our current neo-con administration or that of presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain. As you might imagine I am not comfortable putting myself in bed with these kinds of people...








So in order to assuage my own riled nerves and constantly revolving thought process I will continue to examine this problem in a typical spiraling calamitous Jack fashion. Feel free to skip to the next entry.

I wonder where the guns come from. "Their" guns, "Their" bombs. Of course you'll tell me they come from Iran; yes, granted they have passed through the Iranian borders, they may even have been purchased by Iran coiffures, but who made these weapons? Russia, perhaps? Give me the name of the company, I want the NAME of the conglomerate responsible, and with that a list of stock holders, trustees, and board of directors. Who OWNS the munitions factory? When I buy RPG's from some plant in Vladivostok who ends up pocketing that cash? What other companies do they own or hold stock in? Show me the tangled web of intrigue that exists in the modern age and now seems invisible and ignored, where the men who built the guns sell them to the people his own country is fighting against. Tell me straight to my face that this condition doesn't exist in American business, tell me that American purses don't get fat from the squabbling revolutions of Africa or the suicide car bombs in Gaza, tell me that the yolk has been loosened, tell me that I wasn't born, unfortunately, outside of a class of elites, so foreign and alien to my lifestyle that they might as well be from Mars. Tell me that my endless toils and aspirations, no matter how noble and diligent, aren't for naught; tell me I have a shot at happiness, peace and changing this corrupted institutional greed and slavery into a world more like the fairy tale one promised to me by my Saturday morning socialization programming and my positive attitude "can do" icons decorating my sugar crusted, over processed, breakfast cereals.
C'mon just tell me
tell me
LIE TO ME.

Where I make a plea to the conscience and humanity inside of the American public, to not let the good and innocent people of Mesopotamia suffer for our lack of heart and perseverance. Our leaders call for the same action to prolong their unrivaled profits or to further destabilize the area for future plunder and exploitation. Where I feel a duty, as a strong human being and true man of the west, to defend those who cannot defend themselves, Our leaders are not hampered by such heartfelt idealism, they see only dollar signs, feel only the yoke of their masters upon their throat.

My friend Mark Lennon once gave to me this profound truth after a weary discussion of our political woes in the dark year of 2001, he said this " There are no conspiracies, just follow the flow of capital and you will find the truth" he may have borrowed it, he may have conceived on his own, it makes no difference, it began a firing in my imagination that became the cascade of simple undeniable truth to the sorrowful state of mankind presently and ever in the past. Greed is the sole motivator of all humanities evil. Greed for money, for land, for power, for status, all other things fall beneath it as the father of our suffering. So when I make emotional pleas for self sacrifice to benefit the people whom we have needlessly victimized under the banner of "liberation", I do so out of the foolish dream of turning the next corner in the evolution of civilization. To grow as a society out of the infantile squabbling and greed laden, land and resource grabbing, into a more mature and enlightened state, one that isn't afraid to admit it is wrong, one that can exert force but may also yield, an advanced technique in all games of strategy, in interpersonal relations, but not in the affairs of nations?

I want to make my case to the grey faced career politicians who are are content to be carried along by the currents of financiers, bankers, and the industrial military complex, and not by intelligence, conscience and a DESIRE to see things made BETTER. We are cursed to have our finest and noblest lead lives of poverty and charity while the gilded crowns and thrones of the Earth are occupied by unenviable slime and detritus from the fecal afterbirth of Mammon. Their chains of persuasion and control emanate from every media source lulling my friends and fellow true hearts into a static filled sleep, an apathy that casts them adrift, lobotomized from their creative faculty, hope for the future, essential divinity and power.

These are the conditions that induced me to wander, that have instilled me with an almost insurmountable ennui. This is the world that I live in and love and yet cannot bear to look at, this is the cruel bitch mother that I will never forgive. I would shed my humanity and run the hills like the desert dog that I am, if only I could choose a transmutation of form over this eventual withering of spirit and gradual defeat of my most shinning hopes and dreams for the world. I have had my eyes blinded by the glory of the lie that I live under, that I tell myself, that we all whisper before we go to sleep to keep from going mad and throwing ourselves onto the roadways, into the nuclear reactors, onto the rails and electrical lines.
"Sleep" we whisper "Everything is going to be alright."

Everything is not going to be alright and we know it. All our lives we have been fed the "America the beautiful" line of bullshit, about the triumph of capitalism and democracy over the forces of tyranny and exploitation. All I see is rule of money over the battered peoples of the world, no government is above its influence, no individual unable to be bought, borders have become arbitrary distinctions of land masses, for the arms and meddling fingers of the wealthy reach from the industrialized food industry of the American mid-west, to the blood diamonds of Africa, into the forges and factories of China. The masters of the world sit high upon their limitless treasures, and they have become like the devil himself and have convinced the world they don't exist. The beauty is they are not a conspiracy ,they do not have an agenda outside of creating and keeping more of the worlds wealth for themselves, wielding more influence in the arenas of governance to further this aim and living above the rule and laws of man, behaving how they see fit.

I can't see anyway out of this situation but what was done before, to realize them, the god kings of man and go to their homes one and all to drag them into the streets, opening their well fed bodies up from balls to brain and turning their insides out, for the feast of rats and wild dogs; To tear down their palaces and redistribute the riches they have hoarded, but how to keep things from returning to their current state? Isn't it in human nature to want one more morsel of bread then the man next to you? And so I despair, because in the end I can have no answer, my desire for revolution and retribution is fed by my own jealousy and desire for the power and status denied to me by fate. This is why I wander, this is why I cast off the burdens of the world and sit amongst the flowers, this is why giving up has never been so close, the final tap out to the world at hand, where I turn my back on the ways of society and wander into the wilder realms of experience alone and speak only to myself. What is there to do that is worth doing? How can the truly world weary ever overcome his vision of the futility and purposelessness of a human life? I have long needed a reason to go on living, and nigh has one ever been ready, but I persist as per our fundamental function, and I wait to one day cross the path of meaning in this world, so that i might have something new to cry about. Instead of oppression, corruption and cruelty, I can whine about having too much work to do. What a blessed day that will be.

Galactic Pizza

I wanna know when I'm gonna get my pow-wow with the crystal shard machine elves that live in the walls of my closet. Not that I actually have a closet but regardless, there is whole multi dimensional megaplex back there full of swirling fractal reality and a couple of next level Keebler motherfuckers cooking up coincidence cakes and sugary syncronicities. Last night they were kicking up such an unholy racket that my Stevie Wonder record kept skipping and my phone was blowing up with calls from a low pressure system that wanted to come piss on the Basin. I wanna know when those shiny pricks are gonna sit down and tell me why I can't get a good slice of the live stuff and why I can eat tacos on every corner of this god forsaken grid, yet there isn't a decent sandwich shop for twenty miles. I'm not asking for some kind of Outer-Ring Stellar Subs, or Big Time Galactic Pizza, I just want a thick slice piled high with the goodies and maybe one corner deli or bodega that can throw some Boar's Head on my sangie for fucks sake. These little mojo gremlins are tinkering with my life line and you're telling me they can't maneuver me into the realm of nominal culinary competency, what am I some kind of jerk? So I think I may have no other choice than to batch up a brew of Ms. Aye and go frog swim in the kaleidescope madness in between breathes, that way i can kick these shimmery union ass clowns in their shiny Elvin asses and set the world to rights. Don't fuck with a Rhodie when he wants a square piece or deprive him of his cold cut compensation, things be gettin' heated in the multi-verse. Don't even try to pull the old "beyond my comprehension of three dimensional space and time" routine, cuz I can whoop some ass and you, my mischievous crystalline friends, are fucking with my num nums. Best rectify boys. Best. They don't call me Dynamo because I DON'T drag Old Testament ghosts through the quantum fracture in my "Return of the Jedi" wallpaper and slap them upside their glistening grey-scale approximations of anatomy. No. They Call me Dynamo cuz I'm the only motherfucker on the block who will kick down the doors of perception just to go knuckle down on some astral tricksters and boot their sorry jewel encrusted hypers-faces back to the larvae belching, insectoid mother of creation and all her panorama bubbles of shared consciousness. Takes a tribe to raise a child right? Takes an Action Jack to get some decent food around here...or so it would seem. So get on the ball you wonky star brats, I am straight starving over here and the Twinie bomb is calling my name.
Tally Ho.