Her Name Is Nona

So now all I write in is juxtaposition.  It's what I see in.

In a state in which only one arm works, everything is compared to what happened before it.  Before and after.  Night and day, it's polarizing, north and south, good and bad.  Yesterday, the office was a veritable hell with the high distorted accompaniment; a mess of doodle papers, a stolen dog and stolen sunscreen. A sunburnt wasted hick he was with an amp and a guitar and a microphone strapped to his face; the embodiment of aggravation.  Today was a quiet clean latin man with leopard pants and a Stratocaster, and he kept his mic in his pocket, and he played near-perfect renditions of Purple Rain and Stairway to Heaven and Hallelujah among many others.  His is a voice to melt pain, if you can understand that.  Remember, my arm's in a sling.

The day before I crashed, was one of those entirely wonderful days.  It was a day in which I did everything that I'd like to do in a day; a solid day, a productive day. I went surfing, I went to work, I rode my motorcycle to get some ramen, and then I drank tequila with two girls at an old late night Mexican joint.  The next day in the morning--first thing--I hit gravel in a turn on Tuna Canyon and dislocated my shoulder.

[Nona is the first of the three fates in Roman mythology; she's the one that spins the thread of human destiny.]

Blue Is The Warmest Color

I'm sure someone's said that before, or it's some quote or movie title or something of the like, but nonetheless it's true.  Do you know why?

I do.

I'm not sure where to start though.  When I worked at the surf shop we sold sunglasses that were called happy lenses--no, let's start in the present.

I work two jobs now; at a bakery in the morning and a hotel at night.  It's some miserable existence I'm sure, but wouldn't you know, I'm rather bemused by it.  I find myself laughing constantly in my own delirium.  Maybe it's the lack of sleep, mais je ne sais pas.

I have a secret weapon as it were, one that is really of any real substance in a city like LA.  It needs to be almost always sunny, and on my break in the morning, already on my second meal for the day, I turn my face to the sun and close my eyes.  There's different shades of darkness with your eyes closed, and in the sun it's the brightest.  Blind man's light, and when I open my eyes, everything's blue, the whites are blue, the grays are blue, the red are blue, the yellows too.


That's when I smile and get giddy, and I remember those times at the surf shop, selling happy lenses.  They had a blue tint to them in the sun.  In the literature, the company told us seeing that tint blue releases melatonin in our brains, which is an antioxidant and our first defense against oxidative stress, whatever that is.  It makes you happy.  But you don't need sunglasses or a pill or prescription to get it, you don't need a doctor to figure it out.  It's right there free for the taking, you just need to close your eyes and stand in the warm sun.  There's precious few things that star won't cure.  If you're not happy, it's not some grand mystery.  Ask any sad plant, she'll tell you. If I were to worship anything it would be the sun.

I'm a buffoon, I know.  It's much too easy for me to be happy these days.

Blackhat

I've been thinking a lot lately of how it all went wrong.  There was a time when we had it so good.

I ask the question: "What could I have done?  What should I have done?  When did I misstep?"

The first time she left me, the cold shock and all the lights went out, and I didn't know who I was for a while.  I gave my things away.  I wanted to die.  The ease of it fascinated me, the simplicity, the finality; just a little more pressure of the thin wedge, a little more, a little more, but I never did; just a little more weight on the pedal, faster, faster, don't turn the wheel, but I always turned.

It's not so much that I wanted to die really, dying's frightful.  It's the thought that creeps up out of the shadows in the dark corners between cries and when you squint your eyes.  It's the not knowing what comes next, like "don't loose her because then what's next," what happens?  It's numbness, what a rotting feeling.  Numbing is a terrible pain.  It's your legs falling asleep and bringing with them everything.  It's not that I wanted to die really, I just didn't want to live.  I didn't feel anything, no attachment to the living, so I gave what I had away; my precious works, my treasured chair.  I'd mucked it all up.

Not this time.  Realizations come quicker and stick longer when you learn from the past, and I try not to forget things, hence the writing.  I'm sensitive to patterns forming and repetition.  I see all the things clearly now that I hadn't before, back when I was blinded by the thought of loosing her.  And to think, even now, I still want to be with her.  Even after the concert, I still wanted to be with her.  After all she'd been through, all the damage of her life, all the late nights, the bending over backward, the thought of being by her side truly warms my heart.  I felt like someone needed me.  I felt like I belonged.  I belonged to someone.  I wish she'd understand that it's not about the sex.

She said she didn't want to be with anyone for a while, and I told her I understood.  She told me I was very important in her life, she told me she makes bad decisions with men when I'm not around, and I'd have to agree, and I told her I could be her friend until she was ready.  I asked her to do one thing: never to friend-zone me.  I told her I wasn't going to be around if she met someone new.  She got upset and said it was shitty that I would only be her friend if she belonged to me and no one else.  I said of course because to me it was so simple.  I already belonged to her. I had naught to say on the matter, that's just the way it was.  If she suddenly gave herself to someone else, it would be shitty I feel.  Let's just say she has that tendency.  She's never satisfied.  Something must always be wrong.  She's impatient and self-certain to let's say an obvious fault.  I know that now.  I realized it tonight at the hotel, in the midst of seventy-two hour work week, when I finished my nightly movie, Michael Mann's Blackhat.  She had gone to see it with her rich older ex while we were together.  She'd said it was no good and they'd walked out in the middle and went to a bar for drinks.  It's actually a pretty wild movie once you hit the turn.  Michael Mann films are always slow to start, that's his style.  Anyone who enjoys Michael Mann movies will tell you.  He mixes pace for contrast.  I know this, and I also know what friends are and what they aren't.  I have my friends, both guys and girls (more girls actually), and I know that her and I will never be friends.  We never have.  We're (I'm) too romantic tragically.

Friends don't belong to one another.  Friends don't go grocery shopping together each week.  Friends don't come over after bad dreams and hold each other like lovers do.  After I let her borrow my car because she'd crashed hers, she said we were never going to be together.  She'd said that before.  So I took back my things, my lovely chair and my flowers and my frames and my sailboat and Paris, and I said goodbye.  I'm miserable again, but there is no numbness now.  It's a feeling instead of not being good enough, and nothing lights a fire in the soul like not being good enough.  Nothing makes the horses push harder.

That was my last time backing out of that driveway I think.  It's time to move on.

Femmes: Les Chats Noirs

Fleur looked at me with devilish eyes; devilishly blue and British.  I've always loved English girls.  "You know," she said, "the whole thing with black cats, it's not true.  They're not bad luck or anything like that.  Not if you just see one.  If it crosses your path, maybe.  But just seeing one?  No, that's actually good luck."

I smile. "Is it now?"

"Well, there's different beliefs on the matter, all kinds.  Some believe that if a black cat crosses your path left to right it's actually a good omen, that only if it crosses right to left it's a bad omen.  Or wait. It might be the other way around-"

"You sure know a lot about black cats."

"I love black cats."

"More than other cats?"

"Black cats are the best cats. They're beautiful.  They've just got this stigma about them.  It's a shame."

"Maybe it's part of the beauty."

"They just get a bad wrap is all.  But they're not bad, I don't believe that."

"I guess they are whatever you want to believe them to be. Make no mistake though, they're certainly that."  Olivia looks at me as I speak, cocking her head.  "Anything's only as true as you believe it to be.  And the exact opposite can be equally true to me, if that's what I believe.  It's just a matter of belief darling," and I put out my cigarette.

*****

Whoa, hold on.  Where am I?  We're not there yet.  Let's back up here.

*****

I had a layover in Moscow, two hours.  Now I know that sounds a little out of the way to get to Paris from LA trust me, I know.  When you look at a flat map, it sounds stupid, I know.  I'm not an idiot.  Why fly all the way over and up to Moscow just to get to Paris?  Well for one, it costs about five-hundred dollars less.  For two--and this is important--when I followed the flight path between movies on the plane (I watched Sicario and that god-awful Batman Vs. Superman), I realized something: this world is not a flat map.  We live on a sphere, a globe really. There's an infinite curve to it's surface, and this can be complicating to some.  Things aren't always straightforward on a curved surface.  There's a third axis in play.  That can fuck with belief systems.

It's actually quite a quick flight, LAX to Moscow.  About the same as it is to Iceland, ten hours, although you probably wouldn't believe it looking at a flat map.  Look at a globe, and you'll see what I mean.  You don't always have to go half-way around the world to get from LA to Paris.  Sometimes you can just go over the top.  It's tricky though, it fucks with you right by the north pole.  You cross a lot of time zones in a very short distance up there.  Like I said, it fucks with you; makes you think crazy things.

Before the flight, I was planning to kill myself somewhere in Europe, not sure where.  Maybe Spain, I thought.  Maybe jump off a pretty bridge in a land I'd never seen before in the south.  I'd found a little less than a dozen of them, pretty bridges, and I slowly started culling the herd in the terminal by a combination of height and how pretty the surrounds were.  I certainly didn't want a mediocre last curtain.

Yeah sure, maybe everything was ash in my life at that point, and I was just going through the paces, and I had no will to live, and the whole world felt like a yolk on my shoulders, but for Christ's sake I still had my dignity.  If I was going to turn out the lights you better believe I was going to be looking at something beautiful.

I should warn you: this isn't going to be a pick-me-up.

*****

This Paris.  This feels like some star-crossed love affair, like I'm Gregory Peck and she's Audrey Hepburn.  I'd watched Roman Holiday with Claire, right there in the middle of everything falling apart, before she'd broken my heart, but maybe not before I'd broken hers.  Such a wretched time to be watching a love story true, but it was something to hold on to.  Love stories can be miracle workers sometimes.  Sometimes, not always.  And usually with those individuals unlike myself who aren't absolutely miserable timing-wise.


I remember this.  Waiting for a girl I've never met on a Paris street in the 14th.  I've done this before.  I'm seasoned.  Still, the building code doesn't work so I have to wait outside until a lovely Japanese girl who doesn't speak much English arrives and lets me in.  Still, I have no idea where her room is.  My phone's on airplane mode, it always is when I travel, and I don't have any wifi connection.  I do have Elena's phone number though, written down right next to her address.  Lot a good it does me.  I haven't seen an operating pay-phone in years.  Lucky for me, the Japanese girl who doesn't speak much English walks through the lobby again eventually, this time on her way out.  On her way out at 12:30 in the morning.  It's Paris after all.

I say, "Excusez-moi, je peux utiliser votre telephone? S'il vous plait?"  I hope that works, and I smile.  A smile usually helps more than my butchered French.  She looks me up and down for a moment, she sees my desperation, and wholesomely obliges.

Elena picks up on the second ring, "Oui?"

"Elena! It's Brian!" I say.

"Brian! Yes, are you here?"

"I'm downstairs.  I didn't know what room was yours."

"Oh, no! I hope you weren't waiting to long.  I'll come down."

"No, not long at all." I smile again at the Japanese girl who doesn't speak much English.  I give her back her phone, "Merci beaucoup."


[stop]


All the while I'm following Miss Elena, I'm thinking about, hm, she's probably fucking that other guy right now.  Right this moment, in his Audi coupe somewhere in LA.  And this girl I've never met is leading me to her flat to sleep; a small studio it turns out, a box with a bed, a bathroom, a terraced window and a kitchen and a table.

I haven't had proper sex in months, maybe since Claire.

Femmes: The Flamethrower (Alice) Semioli

She has an old gold digital watch and hair dyed blonde some months ago, and a wonderfully patterned rouge scarf, it's Paris after all. Denim jacket and doe eyes when I catch them. Her full lips parted for just a little teeth to show. She's beautiful. We're alone now in a familiar room, familiar now like an old dream on repeat, an old scene on repeat with different actors, similar do-overs, and a tap in her foot as she thinks of some new thing to feverishly write in her notes, we're racing now it seems. She's Italian.

"To the end of a brief episode
make it one for my baby 
and one more for the road."

Femmes: More Black Cat

Well at least the last scene, which I guess can always be a wonderful place to start. It ends in death of course, just like all things: two strangers set at a cafe, one man, one woman at St. Michel, two stupid tourists maybe. They see a black cat. Our guy sees the black cat, he's at the curb with his love. The black cat draws him across the street, into the path of a bus.

The same crossing where his love saved an old woman from the path of a bus a year before.

The cat is let out by the landlord. The door is not locked because the cat broke something as a patron comes in with her bottle of Chambord from the store downstairs. The patron is never satisfied. She dies a slow death of poison in a bare room trying to get to her treasure of jewels with her black cat looking on. It's the last thing she sees.

The last thing our guy sees is his love. He's finished the unfinished script with the other girl, he's fulfilled the passion with his love, he's complete.

The patron has amassed all these jewels for sale, but hasn't sold them, she's even priced them and imagined the holiday with the money. She loves money. She breathes it in when she sells something.



*******


OPEN on a BLACK CAT from a flat looking down from a terrace window, looking down at a coffee shop where GUY and GIRL work.

CUT to GUY and GIRL working on a script. It's ambiguous, not related at all, but the GUY suggests that a character kill himself in the final scene. And the cat looks on.

GIRL: "What are you doing tonight?"
GUY: "I'm gonna see about a girl."

LOVE, she's going to see love not for dinner, but for a drink. There's a back and forth of wild eccentric friends, one, well, you'll know.

GUY: "I love the fat pigeons here, the elegant ones.

CUT to an old French lady, PATRON, alone in an auction house, for a live auction, an estate sale. The auctioneer is a little confused, or maybe pissed off. PATRON buys what she pleases on the cheap and thanks the auctioneer.
<<OR>>
PATRON and a senile old woman are to lunch at an old lavish country home. PATRON has a notebook and she's interviewing the old lady. PATRON checks her watch, they're talking about Weimaraners for a periodical. And then the senile old lady's head lolls back. PATRON, much quicker than she looks, gets up, shuffles quickly into the house. Two Weimaraners come up and she gives them treats and goes through the house emptying jewelry boxes. There's no one else in the house.

[SENILE had kept calling to her husband for tea. They talked of her children. They visited every other weak and called regularly.]

PATRON doesn't take all the pieces, just the ones she wants, which is most of them, maybe half. She goes to the kitchen and procures a tea-bag with a gloved hand from her attache and puts it in a tea-tin with an evil smile and an air of devilish pride.

CUT to CU of SENILE. She comes to in a drowsy fluster and looks around. Across the table PATRON is scribbling feverishly in her notebook with her eyes down. Without looking up she says something to the effect of: "That just about covers it. I'll mail you a copy of the article okay?" SENILE walks PATRON to the door. PATRON thanks her and her husband for the tea. She shuts the door, calls out to her husband who isn't there obviously. There're pictures of him in the hallway.

SENILE: "She was nice."

CUT to PATRON at a train station in Marseille, on the platform. We see the train is going to Paris. With a rush the train is off.

CUT to bus rushing by to reveal GUY on curb. He checks his watch, and crossed the street, turns a corner to a corner cafe, and a young blonde with daring eyes takes notice as he walks towards her. They talk about, you know, each other, if she's working at the coffee shop tomorrow.

LOVE: "Why? Will you come by?"
GUY: "Maybe to flirt with you some more."

She's English. They talk about spritzers and the difference between Aperol and Campari, if there even is one. The bartender's a dick. After a spritzer, they go somewhere else for dinner, maybe talk about belief systems and politics, right and wrong.

GIRL: "Have you ever stolen anything?"



*******


More than anything, questions ask people. The more people a question asks, the more interesting they are. And remember everyone farts.


*******


CUT to PATRON in a familiar-looking apartment, that of the cat. She's reading a newspaper, the obituaries, and she farts.


*******


They put menus behind the crosswalks in Paris.


"How about here, how about here and here. Here. Here."
     - The Avid Father Photographer

Femmes: About the Black Cat

There's a curious duality on the plane with me back to Paris in the form of two Russian twin flight attendants; deportation. Something strange is happening to me. I started and shuttered a book in one day, all in Russia, Russian author too, and for the first time ever I might say, but then again I'd never been deported either. It could possibly be the subtle insanity of fluorescent that hasn't escaped me since Paris, since going under at Temple. I was sitting with Olivia and her friend Nate and an acting acupuncturist not long before that, and like the color sinking with the lines into a Polaroid before my eyes, I see the image now crystallize.

Black Cat, second story window.

Olivia jumped with delight as I pointed it out, all the while that slow still sinking feeling flooding over me. I thought it'd merely be the layover.

I think it was Elizabeth of Lili and the Dirty Moccasins who said she once considered the thought that we could be cursed; said she thought she was at one time.

It's important though to know that for her it was a passing phase. She didn't believe it anymore and maybe because of that, the lack of a strange maybe misguided belief, because of that she was better off.

Maybe she was. Maybe it's safer to think that, but really a rejection of one belief only leads inevitably to another; in this case one of coincidence; a belief in randomness after all is still a belief. It's to believe that the things in our lives are not connected. And then that's how is has to be. A belief above all things no matter what it's in, is absolute. It has to be, otherwise you don't really believe it, do you.

For example, I haven't abandoned my cursed nature, not yet. I believe in the connection of things, in their meanings, in the meanings of everything, everything that holds in my mind. True, sometimes I choose to ignore it (which specifically isn't to say that some things don't mean anything), that simply means to me that I was too lazy to grasp the meaning. Do you know what I mean? It makes sense to me. I'm a very lazy person when I choose to be.

And yet, I was just deported back to Paris. There's a reason for that. I cut my finger with my old razor today, and there's a little red scar on it, my finger, the middle right, and it looks like a tear-drop or a rain-drop or maybe an eye.

I wonder what it means.

Femmes: Elena/Ellen

I wonder if she, in reality, is two people, one for each name. Maybe I met them both, the one in the black dress, the one in the flowers. I wonder which one loved me, if either of them did, this English girl. In all the ways, she said yes. She let me kiss her of course, with regular frequency before the very end, before she left me for good on the metro. But I didn't see her look back. She didn't watch me off, no, she turned away. It was quick, with a rush of wild blonde and blue eyes turning quickly gray. The wild flowers of her dress blurred at the squint of mine as the train pulled away. I'd be her's, the both of her, always.

She'd be my favorite
song if she took me
as her own.

I'm the kind of man that can throw all of me into her, easily. And I shall. It's the best thing I could possibly do, truly. She's true beauty, body and soul, and in her smiling whisper comes the waves of adoration, undulation, admiration.

I'm always impressed by a girl from the Isle with a love of hard drink. It's the curse of me, among more sporting things.

Femmes: Jac Capra

This shall be called Jac Capra And The Curious Premonition of Over-Indugence And No Control.

I simply can't say no. One of these days it's going to get me into trouble, like real trouble.  So far the worst has just been awful morning-afters and head-splitting hangovers.

Real trouble?  Hardly.  A few questionable decisions, sure.  Heartache, of course, but always tied to the best of times and the craziest of times and the most memorable and I hate to say defining, but it's true.  So many sleepless nights walking back home or biking back fast in pace with the sunrise.  This never happened when I was with Claire.

(That's a lie.  There was that prime acid on a Wednesday night with that fucking wildcat drug mule Andrew, but they were so few and far between back then.)

God, I love flirting.
I think I might like it more than the sex on some occasions.
Maybe it's just been so long since I've had any worth writing home about.

She tells me, "Maybe the anticipation is better than the fact."




********



It's raining in Paris on my last day. They're playing Fleetwood Mac in the cafe; Australian cafe in Paris in the Marais.  Je sais.

"Thunder only happens when it's raining."

Why
Do I always love to dive
Into girl's minds

Whatever happens to you over the years as you change and things fade and time slips away, never, never, never forget these moments and the feelings you had in Paris, especially now in the rain on this last day and the deep surging from the pores and the flashes white of what comes of doing everything you can for a person; the wonderful weight of anticipation, like I could explode into light at any second and that would be all right.  There's no name for this feeling, I know it, not in any language.

Femmes: James Joyce Nigga

I told Olivia I'm drowning in a sea of women again.
Like a favorite old record, this place is.
What a wonderful repetition of the soul,
Let's say.

God, that's so cliché.
What would James Joyce say?

Maybe "Mother-fucker, it's crazy this life!"
And "Even our little histories tend to repeat themselves."
They certainly do in mine.
It's divine, the invisible hand of chance.
It's beautiful to recognize.

Femmes: Sylvia's Library

It's quiet-ish. I've been here before. I forget it's summer now, not the lonesome cold of late fall that I remember, and so I'm not alone, no, far from it.  It's not just Sylvia and me set alone with her books today with the windows closed against the biting cold.  I see none of her webs, I hear none of her whispers in the silence.  It's hot outside.  Tourists hush about taking pictures in front of the "Please Do Not Take Pictures" sign.  I'm not depressed like I was, which makes things different and the only free seat is by, you've probably guessed it dear reader, a fucking writer type; or maybe it's just a sneaky mirror.

There's a furrow in his brow.  I know it, I don't even have to look up.  I can feel his messy corduroy pants angst on the humid French from the whispering tour guide, and the Paris air and he's had enough, he's gone.  Good riddance fucking tortoise-rimmed glasses and knapsack bag.  Good riddance to the iPad too, that's what all the writers are using these days, the real ones with their tortured souls and their "poetry"

Perhaps I spoke too soon.  Have you got a grasp on my thoughts now? Have you? Do my feelings pervade?  Good, because we must part ways now, there's a beautiful girl sitting in the corner and we keep making eyes at each other.  Take a picture of her dear reader, lest we forget, the Irishman from the cafe is a photographer after all.

Femmes: Corners (or Sauce de Piment)

Ah ha! And to think that I'd almost forgotten about my dear shitty Chinois! The microwave heat, the sitting still water oh, the memories.  This was real Paris to me those years back when a floor was suited just fine for sleeping on.  The city's been flooding back all day, walking past Bastille, past the metro at Filles du Calvaire and the corner at Rue Bretagne, the one with the ATMs, where I'd waited for Olivia that cold, cold November night ago.  I'll say it's much different in the summer sun.  No chill in the bone, it's a sweat on the brow instead, and nostalgia, and Cafe Charlot.  It must be the company that a memory clings to; her long fur coat, her deep rouge lips.

I have to smile.  I had been writing in a shitty Chinois that night too.  I was so, so young, pacing in circles in the tangerine light, freezing from fingers to toes right down to the core of me, wishing for her to be there, and suddenly she was, I remember.

It's these muses that cross our path, like glue that keeps the sand from sieving through, they're the heavy anchor in turbulent seas, I remember.  Beige jacket, red pants; of course I remember Rachel when I see the galleries.  They may be different now (JR's long moved on to bigger and grander iterations), but really it's the corners, life's intersections where the streets meet that are most clear and familiar.  Walking with Rachel I remember right where the broken toilet was on the corner across the street from American Apparel.  That memory might well outlast the facing storefront. After all, it's been six years nearly.  A lot can happen for a fashion brand in six years.  A lot of mistakes can be made, but it's still here.  For now.

Femmes: Cafe Shakespeare

I have a knack for meeting people, I suppose.  Maybe it's only when I'm traveling. Yes, for a second while this beautiful girl beside me twirls her hair.  Yes, it's my favorite thing, serendipity.  It's the way a woman in proximity, knowing not, has her hand on the faucet of my words, my word.  Is that a bit too garish?

Twirl, twirl, twirl.  She's a beautiful young thing, young brown hair, young legs, deep blue denim jacket, yes.  She's busy with a highlighter.  That's right, a student no doubt.  I can't imagine highlighting passages just for the fuck of it.  Her face is easily forgivable though, and when she looks up, I look back down of course, to stop from staring.  I've come to the curious revelation that my hand may write -- impressively straight I might add -- for some time without the consult of my eyes.  It can be a subconscious thing, and then I become the weird guy staring.  It can't be a strong look, but in my periphery I can see that she's smiling; shaking her head, but still she's smiling.

Ah! The line between muse and distraction is razor-thin sometimes.  Serendipity though, yes.  Not only fun to say, serendipity is a wonderful scheme.  There's no pretense, there's nothing really, it's free.  All it takes is a little perception and attention to detail.  That costs nothing, like singing Soundgarden songs to the babies waiting in line.

A recreational smoking habit helps as well.  I met the guy behind the counter two hours ago on a not busy street in the Marais.  After all, it's a Marais day.  An empty street I remember because of the clarity of the only few voices in the air, a whisper English in my ear as I walked by and the name Haim as he and a friend lit cigarettes.

It was Haim and the cigarette smoke that drew me to a decided about-face down the block to bum one.  If you smoke cigarettes at all, I swear, you need to come to Paris and walk the streets.  It's one of the simple pleasures in life; walking through Paris with a lit cigarette to drag on.

Anyways, they were Irishmen.  God I love the Irish.  They gave me three cigarettes when I told them I hated the Lumineers; real DB music, the Lumineers.  And we'll all race to marry the Haim girls. "On bended knee as soon as I see 'em!" I'd said.  I'm turning a corner with this Shakespeare place.  I'd left six years ago in the winter with such a sour taste for writer types.  Now it's iced chai on my tongue and familiar English in the air.  Maybe I'm thawing in the summer heat, maybe I just enjoy the company at the cafe better.  I'll poke into the bookstore shortly for a bit, see how Sylvia's doing, weaving her webs in the quiet parlor upstairs.

Femmes: Place D'Aligre

Against all odds and varying degrees of je ne sais quoi, let's call it scatter-brained indifference, I've woken up in Paris once again, and for only the second time alone.  It's new to me this Paris, not the 14th, my familiar stomp, nor the 7th that's familiar from Lili.  No, I'm holed up in the 12th now, not far from the Marais and Sacha's flat and still, entirely different. No, the 12th is a much more generic, wholesome humble Paris.

I arrived at Gare de Lyon late last night, near midnight, and walked myself north to the tiny square of Place d'Aligre. Only by good grace did I make it into the building without the code. A kind woman let me in, an older blonde, but ah, it's always a woman with me.

Still no wifi, but that's not important. I tried at the cafe but the password didn't work. I don't really care. Fewer and fewer things faze me now I'm beginning to realize. Perhaps it's a Paris thing.  From a space beyond interconnectivity it takes on the specter of a master and hostage reality. We have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to our technology. We've been enslaved so long now that the thought of being free is frightening.

But free I am now, at least for the moment. The mind is open to more important and more beautiful things to be thankful for; like this market right outside my door, and the smile it brings to me, and more discreetly so, the dawn of thought that has come to me as I walked up and down the stalls of old antiquities and fruit.  I was searching for something more to buy her, but I found nothing, and perhaps that's because I need nothing else to give up to her; not a trinket, no jewelry or a shiny stone, not my love, and certainly not my life.

It's exhausted, finally, this merry-go-around of holding on and letting go and so the comfort, I should say, is only natural.  Its the little things; an old pencil and bound paper, a borrowed cigarette, a table to myself outside on the corner, and an espresso in Paris.  Paris is a power like that.  I can only find this here.  I might walk all day around the city I think, and let my feelings fly again through the streets like they haven't in such a long time.

The soul is whole again; anything is possible.

Femmes: Sunflowers at Sunset

I'm beginning to notice with more increasing regularity on this train all the people together: the couples, the families, the friends travelling together.

My eyes glaze over those alone--the commuters, the weekenders--and they focus on the relationships of those that know one another and illicit emotions.  Perhaps because solitude is silence, my ears pricks at conversation and my eyes follow.  It's usually the sound of love or joy or happiness, being carefree.  I wonder if eyes glaze over me.

Maybe people see the way I see, or maybe I'm one in a million, and no one understands the constant fireworks in between my ears like Bastille Day, Sacha's birthday, on the fourteenth of July.  It's curious that my oldest friends, both of them, were born on days of independence in July.  There's probably a story in there somewhere, and I wish I just had a mountain of speed with which to write it down.  With that, it wold only take days, smashing through the excavation.  What would Steinbeck do with that motivation?

I like reading his journal, or I should say his collection of letters to his editor.  Today he balked at Roger & Hammerstein's The King And I, calling it a thin show that covers it's thinness in luxury.

He said:

"I believe you can only be unafraid if you find what it is that you fear and you conquer it."

Not about The King And I, mind you, but about a more general kind of living.


*****

Whatever be the problem,
sunflowers at sunset
in South France
is the cure.

They have a powerful magic
at this time as they suck
on the last sunshine
of the day,

sunlight in the sky.

I hope when I die I wake up in these fields
to wander through forever.

Femmes: Love Sex Dreams

Only when I check my phone do I realize what train I'm on.  It's the 4:20 train to Paris.  Right on time, and away we go.  I know small details always fall by the wayside which is why I write them down.  Some things I don't want to forget, especially when I'm back home, back in Venice by the beach in the California sun and the weed haze, trying to remember everything.  The feeling of craziness tickles the peripherals of my mind yet again on this leg, Barcelona Sants to Gare de Lyon; French, Spanish, English, German all flying around the car.  I'm glad I'm on the second level, to be closer to the heavens, higher off the ground than before.

I smile at the thought of having wanted to throw myself off a bridge when I first got here.  I was desperate, which drove me, as it often does into the serendipitous.  An older English angel guided my hand in Barcelona and Andalusia, kept me company, kept me busy and away from the darker thoughts, French angels in France also, friends and young lovers, they always seem to be my saviors. I'm nowhere near suicide now, but still, I'm rocketing away I'm afraid.  Oh well.  Sanity's for the mundane and the overrated.

I'll think back on Seville and the curious Alberta (Elysia) I... well, that's just it.  It's curious isn't it?  What was that?  It was a laugh, a gas.  I wouldn't call it a riot, but it sure as hell was something new.  She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, she doesn't eat cheese, she doesn't drink tea or coffee, she doesn't eat meat on the principle of animal endearment, but everything else is attributed to having the pallet of a fifteen year old girl.  We didn't have sex.  She talked about her ex constantly and how she'd ran away from the only guy she ever felt anything for.  Her parents hated him because he was a dreamer.

Suffice to say, I could relate.  He grew up surfing in South Africa, I grew up surfing in LA.  Alberta (Elysia) showed me the other side.  She pushed me over an edge I needed to get over.  Maybe it's frowned upon, but I have to laugh at the fact, thinking back, that if it'd been me and myself in Seville, it might've been me having to do the pushing, and the edge maybe much more physical.  It's insanely hilarious.

I feel better now, much better, like I accomplished what I came over here to do with her.  Sure my balls feel like boules from the not cumming for three weeks, but I'll sort that out in Paris.

Fuckin' life is grand, isn't it.

Femmes: What's In My Head

The Fuzz song makes me think of Savanna; Ty Segall and Savanna blaring in my ears.  I'm writing to the music again like I used to do.  It feels good.  There was a feeling of the glow only a few minutes ago, that full body insanity when my fingers itch for a pencil, gripping and tapping and stretching and popping.

I wrote once after a long hiatus that I needed to write again or I was going to explode; that kind of glow, my hair stood on end.  They're all at attention now on my arm, I can see them listening on my leg because it's hot outside in summer Spain.

I just left Madrid.  I was in Andalusia in the morning, I woke up in Seville.  Tonight I'll rest my head in Paris again.



*****

The shadows of the
lines running beside
the train flick back
and forth across my
pages like windshield-
wipers as gold fields
and patches of purple
fly by outside.

It's because they're 
not totally taught.

I wonder what they're
wiping away.

I hope it's thee
anxiety.

Femmes: Elysia

(At Hotel Fernando III)

The ways things work out man, I swear. It's like a goddamn--fuck, I don't know the word.  No well, I do.  I've probably got it somewhere, but I just can't think in this Spanish heat. I remember it was 41 degrees Celsius when we stopped in Cordoba for dinner and a look around.  That was yesterday.  I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but let me tell you, it's fucking hot.  Even by the pool now, it's fucking hot.  I'm sweating in this umbrella shade.  There's no wind, the air is still.  I can't imagine if everything had gone according to plan though, and not meeting Elysia out here.  Can you imagine?  Alone in Sevilla?  In this heat in some shitty AirBnb private room with some stranger next door and in the living room and the kitchen every day?  No thank you.

I was so worried about money.  Now look at me.  At a 4-star hotel in the old town, laid out in the umbrella shade by the roof-top pool, old tile roofs and bell-towers all around me, and some beautiful British slag at my side.  Sure, there's nothing in the way of sex between us, despite all efforts, but still, she's fucking good company, it's incredible.  I haven't felt down a day since we'd met up in Barcelona, and then too, the drive to Sevilla.

And to think: I'd wanted to kill myself in Andalusia a few weeks back.  It's the randomness in life that leads the way for me, not the safety of routine.  It's what keeps me alive, and always stunning beauties in proximity.  Like this other London girl in the pool with her pretty friend.  They're not too posh, not like Elysia, I wonder what side of town they're from.

And of course the Spanish girls.  God, if someone told me being alone kept you young, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.  Adventurers always aged well.  Writers too. Or they died young.


[stop]


Strange, I've barely moved today, absolutely no plans and it seems the words are just sweating out of me, about whatever.  Maybe nothing obviously, but it's a good feeling, like all my worries have melted away, and I'm young again, head in a cloudless sky.

(I'm writing to fill pages again--)

Femmes: Irene

She says to me,
"You know you're crazy right."

I say to her,
"Tell me about it, lady."

I've known this for years.
I'm also--

And the sailorly bartender
Barkeep from El Vaso del Oro
with Irene.

That look she gave me
for what might be the last
time I ever see her,
who knows,
but the look;

I'll not be able to stop
thinking about her anytime soon.
The rush will make me
remember things,
I'm sure.

Like the French girls
on the metro at San Marti,
and the way Irene flips her hair,

Femmes: Biscuits

I'm a wreck.  What am I doing.  How did I get here.  Let's say it's serendipity.  No, I use that word too often.  As the greats would say, this is fate.  I'm simply destined to be tortured by beautiful women.

Now even here in Barcelona, I find myself somehow in bed with a bombshell that wants nothing to do with me.  I should've known.  Six months ago she wanted to marry me for a green card.  Now she's here, sharing a shitty AirBnb in outer Barcelona with me.  We're close to nothing so we rent a scooter.  The scooter's actually the best thing to happen thus far on the trip.  Her idea, and not that bad of one. In fact, it's been an excellent idea.  I haven't been on a scooter since Bali.

She's weird and English. She doesn't drink coffee or tea, only coke, and she calls cookies biscuits.