Turbo-Prop

I'm writing to the droning croon of a tiny single-aisle, four-seat-across, metal tube turbo-prop from Portland, Maine to Newark.  Snow's scattered and speckled on the soft ranges and tributaries and lakes below.  It reminds me of flying back from Paris.  Of Kerouac again and Jack London.  It's the cold north.

On the runway, taxiing, I remember.  What's life without a question in the air.  What am I doing here?  Is it right?

I don't know.  Which isn't to say it's wrong, it's just uncertainty.  The mind doesn't always know what the gut feels unless you ask it.  I try to ask often.  After all, it's not a calculating hard-pressed process of thought that always guides best.  Not for me.  No, it's instinct, a killer autonomy within that leads when I relinquish the reins and let it carry me towards a purpose.

That's when I speak without words to that all-presence.  I think it's the being that some call God.  It's usually those that never hear him though that give him such reverence.  They're usually shouters, self-righteous, and almost always strict church-goers, enveloped in what they believe to be right because it's what's been fed to them by voices that travel through the air.  Off the pulpit.  They can't fathom the sanity of those that hear the silent ones.  Or perhaps they just aren't listening.

Ah, yes.

A smile creeps across at the lost rambling.  I've found it again.  A warm comfort, and I remember.  The runway.  The taxiing turbo-prop, and the question.  I don't ask of myself because alas, like I said, I don't really know.  I just ask, I throw the question out to be reflected back by the universe.  Today he's Matthew McConaughey.  I ask, "Is this good? Is it right? How'm I doing here."

He smiles and says, "Alright, all-right, all right."

It feels good, like some purpose, that one I've been searching for.  It's a crisp fresh air with Claire.  Thanks Maine, I can't wait to be back againe.



[this is right, this is well.  I can do this]

Phone Free

There's an unrest that's settled within me as of late to the tune of a loss for words.  Unsettling indeed, the pages aren't filling themselves as they used to.  It's a thing that's startlingly poignant in my life.

Well, I should say mind not life, as the life of mine has seen the whirl of speed that becomes of a man in over-drive.  I can't even complete the word, see.  It's turbulent times, these days, but there is a peculiar relish in it.  A giddy strength of sanity, a grip of the reins that I'd all but forgotten and feel now again in the deep depth of the core of me.

My chi, amidst this calamity.

The Race

Quote of the Day: Free Style

"Literary style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality."

                                                                                              ~ Walter Benjamin

Flume Radio

Valleyheart

And here,
at the end of all things
of the valley
and the heart,
the brown is the leaves
and the ground,
and green is the trees
and the leaves
are yellow too,
and so is the end.

Diamond END over red.

And a telephone pole.
And an empty concrete river.

The ghetto birds thump.
The 101 roars with the trees
and so too do the leaves.

Leave.

I've been here too long,
I must leave.

When Winter

When winter turns to spring turns to summer fall.

The summer falls like a feather, slowly through the later months.  With sweet emotion, the taste of which comes on the Indian winds, the off-shores.  The south swells fade west, but nothing really from the north just yet.  The water's still warm.  Spring-suit weather.  Two millimeters of neoprene and short sleeves.  Just to keep the warm breeze of a windchill off in the early morning or just before sunset.

What a lovely time to be in LA.  The summer crowds are pretty much gone after Labor Day, the kids are back in school.  The tourist are always around though, but less so after the turn, and it's more international now.  Americans only travel in the summer.  The morning fog flies off for the winter early.  And September and October are beautiful months, working at the shop, dinners at Mike's house, bars and house parties on the weekends.  Jessica, Megan, Emily the boxer, that trio of Italian girls, that German girl, and at the very end there Madelyn.

I met Jess when she came into the shop looking for a wetsuit.  By the look of her, she was a size 4, and I've always had a thing for size 4's.  It's a great size.  It's the right size for me, I'm not a big guy.   She looked good in the suit, she was a skinny girl.  Cute, delicate face.  Soft-spoken.  Frail's not the right word, but it wouldn't be far off.  I imagined I could probably break her if I fucked her hard enough, and when I ran after her to give her my number scribbled in pen on a piece of receipt paper, she very innocently handed me one of her business cards in return.  It said she was a writer, very innocently.  We had dinner the next week, Sushi House, I think, she lived just a block down from the place.  Then she took me home and we got high and watched Yellow Submarine on her little laptop because she didn't own a TV.  We watched it on a tiny couch in her living room that pulled out into a mattress sort of thing without the metal framed one would usually associated with a pull-out.  the cushions were all connected, more like a plush tongue rolling out to ready for an acid hit.  There was no acid to be had that night, we just took hits of some good weed from the the tiny pipe she had, and when the movie was over, she rolled onto me, and things got very, very physical, but no one's underwear came off.  "I'm not going to fuck you on the first date," she told me.

I said, "That's fine. I understand."  Two weeks later we were fucking for hours at a time.  We never once used rubbers.  When she was on top she rode quick with quick hips and short tight circles like she was trying too hard to get hers.  Trying too fast.  Moving too quick.  She liked it when I fucked her hard, and she could see me in the closet mirror.  She liked it when I fucked her in the kitchen when she was thirsty and trying to pour a glass of water.  She liked it when I fucked her while she held onto the door-frame to keep from falling over.  She would always go weak in the knees if I thrust into her particularly strong-like.  I did it all the time.  It felt good.

When I think of her, the word that comes to mind is mousey.  A brown-eyed girl.  She was smart, and she worked for a small advertising agency, and the slight signs of stress and work and life showed in the corners of her eyes and the red veins that would spider across them.  I will say this: she was adorable and her skin was olive smooth. And I was addicted to fucking her for some time.

At the same time, I was seeing Meghan as well.  I'd met her at the shop as well but she was different. I only sport-fucked Meghan, but she loved it.  We were each other's sex toys.  And she lived two blocks from the shop, which was highly ideal.  She wasn't skinny like Jess.  Her hips wouldn't dig into me while I was digging into her, so I fucked her even harder.  And all she would say was, "Fuck me harder, fuck me harder, fuck me harder."  So I would try to oblige, and it felt good and we both sweat through the nights and the early mornings that I spent there.

She wasn't shy like Jess.  She didn't look it either.  Blond hair, sharp blue eyes, loose red lips.  I'd caught her eye-fucking me, and she asked me to reach a dress that was too high for her.  The way she said it made me want to fuck her right then and there, middle of the store on a Sunday.  But instead I taped my number written on a piece of receipt paper to the clothes she had me pull down and put in a dressing room.  She texted me while trying stuff on.  She texted dirty things and told me to meet her after work, which I did, at the Irwin hotel.  There's a bar on the roof, and I ran into her on the elevator up, white lace dress, and we just started making out.  She tasted like vodka drinks, and when it got dark she took me to Gjelina's for dinner.  "Let's get a bottle of nice wine," she said.

I said, "I don't think I can afford a bottle of nice wine.  Not here."

"Stop it. Just stop it. Let momma take care of you."  She was a nurse.  She covered the whole tab, which came out to around $150.  I returned the favor with what I could back at her place, all leg squeezes and shudders and eyes rolling into the back of her head.  I even threw a back massage in for good measure.  She deserved it.  And she was dirty, and she liked it rough and athletic.

When it rains, it pours in Santa Monica.

The Good German

BsAs: Dangerous Winter (Invierno Peligroso)

"And what about me?"

"You... You my friend, es peligroso!  Haha!" Fre turns to the Columbian girls and talks in Spanish to them, gesturing towards me, making a flatline with his hand.

I look at Guada.  "Peligroso?"

"Dangerous," she smiles. 

Fre screams back in, "You're dangerous, my man. I was telling them. You're so cool.  Nothing effects you.  Very in control.  It's intimidating, man.  You're swagger.  No matter what happens."  Flatline.

"Oh, stop it.  I'm not dangerous."  But the Columbians are looking at me now.  So is Guauda, and so are the two Angolans.  "I just don't get very emotional that's all.  Control of one's emotions is a sign of maturity," I say very matter-of-factly.  Maybe it's because I listen to so much fucking sad music all the time.  Or the jazz.  What I like to call good music.

Fre nods, "No doubt."  Already he's more muted.  Just slightly.  He's a smart man, Fre, maybe the most articulate one I've ever met, being fluent in six languages.  English, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, Italian, and of course Bantu, a tongue native to Angola.  He likes to read books and cook good food and enjoys good music and quite obviously loves fucking futbol to death.  A fanatic, he calls himself, but he's an intelligent fanatic.  He likes poetry and sometimes he talks to Guada about Jorges Luis Borges, the Argentine writer.  According to him, poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. Poetry remembers that it was first song.  It was music.

*****

Winter's a good time for music.  It's a hard season, and something like music can carry you through if it needs to.  In Santa Cruz, we still had the festival bug from Europe, from the show in Nice and the Berlin forests.  We wanted it still.  We wanted the music.  In the middle of October there was a festival on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.  It was very appropriately named Treasure Island, this festival.  Matty had gone the year before and convinced us to go.  It didn't take much.  Just the promise of grand music and haywire molly.  The whole house was on board, and Max and Chase were driving up from Orange County for it, and Taylor and Dylan and Matt Swartz and Nikse were all going to because they lived in the city now.  Tay and Dylan lived together in a nice quiet building out in the Richmond.  Close to Ocean Beach so we stayed with them.

The usual mischief.  Miss Molly as always.  For Max Mike and I, the last outdoor concert we'd been to was in the summer in Southern France, and before that Berlin in the summer too, and LA and in the spring Indio.  They were hot affairs, the lot of them, so we dressed according to that.  But the seasons were turning, had turned already even to fall.  To fall in San Francisco.  It's not freezing, by any means.  It's still California.  But let's just say it wasn't fucking tank top weather in 2010.  But that had been my wise decision.  Max's too.  Mike went with a t-shirt, just didn't bring a jacket, and he was chilly.  It wasn't bad though.  What we lacked in layers we more than made up for in drug use and dance sweat.

Through the day wasn't bad, but into the night we'd snake our ways to the center in the front.  For the warmth.  And we danced close on girls with the same ideas.  Through Miike Snow, through Kruder, through Deadmau5 and LCD.  And in the in between times, walking between stages, put a chill in the bone.

And then it started raining.  Right through the middle of LCD Soundsystem, it started drizzling.  Lighter than that, maybe misting.  Whatever it was would melt, burn off before it touched the ground, or even our skin sometimes, if the drops were light enough.