Waldorf

I wonder how old the name is.  It means something, Waldorf.  It holds weight because of the one in New York, but this isn't New York.  The years progressed down a different path here in Venice.  They were a bit wilder on the west coast.  More callous, more crazy, more cock-eyed.  The elegance left decades ago, but the charm is still there in the dotted sun-rooms on the north wall, and in the white brick, and in the old penthouses on the roof and the old fire escape. It's a magnificent building.  I take a stroll from the property on Breeze to check up on things like a worried mother. 

The ground's wet in then night and when I look at the streetlights there's water in the air.  It's not raining though, it's not falling from the sky, kind of like the drops aren't sure of themselves, and they're just blowing back and forth and swirling in the wind.  The moisture collects on my skin as I walk through.  It feels like silk curtains.  There's two homeless men wrapped up in windbreakers staying dry under the eaves.  They're listening to a recording. It's not music, it's a something else, and one of the men is reciting it word for word, both sides of the dialogue.

It's Gone With The Wind.

We're Racing Now

I get off work at midnight usually and bike down the empty boardwalk with the black sea to the west of me.  I can't see it, but if I hold my head to the side when ride so the wind's not rushing past my ears  i can hear it sometimes, if the water's really moving.  If each wave is taking sand away with it, I hear the crashing, muffled through the night air.

It's brisk, nice for a ride home.  Really it's always nice for a ride home, save for the rains, but it almost never rains in Venice.  Even this, an El Niño year, has been only a handful of days, maybe two.  Besides that, I'd been at another job recently, and I was in my car mostly.  It was one of those jobs that you take on a leap with an uncertain step and like an albatross slowly circle back to the one that you love.

Now I'm back and it feels like magic.  It's hyper-nostalgia of all the things I remembered; the people, the weirdos, the workspace.  The life on Windward at night, it's a Friday.  I usually just ride by, sometimes slowly to see the people in their line at Townhouse, see if I recognize a soul.  I rarely do nowadays.  I'm getting old, I guess.  The kids smoking cigarettes in the street look like high-schoolers, and honestly the last thing I want to do after work is queue up at a desperate sweaty bar entrance.  I used to love that place. Oh, well.  I used to love a lot of things.

At the intersection of Windward and Pacific, I swing over to the side by the curb to look into The Bank for an old friend.  She still works there, I think, but apparently not tonight.  The light's red.  People and cars are swirling around me, and through the din and unfocused clutter, I man rides up next to me on a road bike, like poof! - out a nowhere and he stops next to me and says, "Hey, that's a nice lookin' ride you got there! Schwinn World Sport, an oldie!"

There's a snap and I come to out of the dreary daze of solitude to respond with a pause and, "Yeah, thanks man! I wish I would a taken better care of it. It was in mint condition when I got it two years ago."

"Well it still looks good to me, man. Good find." We sit there on our bicycles, and we talk.  The light turns green and then red again, and then the young bucks and anxious ladies cross diagonally to the far corners and across, then green again, then red again.  He's a delight.  An older gentleman, white hair, but strangely he's young in the eyes and speaks quick with spirit.  In fact, he looks like Sir Richard Branson in that split second whenever I happen to blink at him.  He tells me about his bikes on the boat he lives on in the Marina, and about collecting and projects that fall by the wayside.  Something resonates.  I can relate.  I tell him about my surfboards, but not about my writing.  Then red, then green again.

"That's my light," I say.  "I just got off work, I'm heading home."

"All right. It was really good talking to you."

"Likewise brother." I shake his hand with a smile.

We both start cranking, slowly at first in low gears.  We both cross Pacific neck-and-neck, ahead of the pedestrians, and I laugh a little to myself.  Goodbyes are always a delight when you both leave in the same direction.  Jokingly I yell, "Oh, we're racing now!"

He smiles a wide Richard Branson smile.  "It's been a couple years since I raced, I'm up for it. To Abbot Kinney then?"

I look at him, "You're on." So I push down hard on the pedals, even stand in the saddle for a few strokes to catch a quick rhythm.  We fly around the circle, past Hama, and when I look back, he's right there at my eight o'clock on the same beat.  I can't help but start laughing.

I'm in the right place again.

GTA

There used to be an octopus beck here, but it's gone, replaced by dull taupe wall.  I guess they say the color's soothing.  I think it looks dull, like hospital walls.  Looks like they carved it off with a surgical knife, the octopus, clean scrape so that if you didn't know, you'd never know it was there.  Call it a sign of the times.  It speaks in thirty year leases.  BEWARE.

It wasn't some ordinary octopus either.  In this alcove used to live a spotted octopus with a fox head among the stars like the shadows on the ground in this alcove.  You know this word, alcoves?

Life's always roundabout like that, Travis will tell you.  He should know I hope.  Maybe...  He's got a sharp eye.  He remembers the Omelette Parlor and Wildflower and Joe's now too, and if he doesn't, I do.

[For WEST, what if she ends up with the therapist...]

That's what you call a plot twist.  Remember, just because it's one season doesn't mean everything can't change.  Convictions roll in and out like the moon tides.  That's important.  Things are certain until they're not.  That needs to be conveyed from one point to the next.  Some things creep along and other things just crash into it, but nothing is set in stone, nothing, not a job, not a person, not an outlook on life.  The magic's there throughout, but it's always changing, and everything definitely means something.

Or it doesn't.
C'est l'ouest.

*language plays a part*

Old Habits

I'm having one of those nights again.  The restless waiting kind, waiting for sleep to come find me and the million thoughts in my head.  When I used to sleep alone with a notebook next to my bed, I'd simply turn over, fumble for a pencil with some lead still in it, and stop waiting.

It's a big word--like "enigmatic"--that only feels proper in describing the sensation, like I could just keep writing and writing and writing until the lead's run out and the sun's come up and the heavy rains are just stains on the walk.  But I won't.  It won't drag on for nearly that long.  Not even close.  

No, not too many words more now.  The pressure's been released just like that.  Life's familiar again.  I have a notebook again.  This is the first writing by hand this year.  The last one's run out of pages months ago and for a while there I lost myself.  I'd forgotten the smell of the pages, the sound of the scribble in the silence.

Like a lullaby.

C R A Z Y

It's not crazy to think, "What if I had a million dollars... What would I do..."

That's not crazy.  Everybody thinks that at one point or another.  It's called dreaming.  Everybody dreams.

What's crazy is to think, "I'm going to die. What should I do in the meantime..."

Say it out loud and people look at you, concerned, like something's wrong.

BIG FISH

You will write this tonight.
The planets are aligned.
It's a sign.

My father told me a story.  I was visiting him at the VA, he used to be a soldier.   The impression of mine had always been that he'd never been deployed.  He'd always said he was about to go in, one of the last flights over there before they called the whole thing off.  I always saw in my mind him on a Douglas airliner heading over the Pacific on the way to Vietnam and landing to hear that everyone's going home.

Turn that plane around, captain.

Mais non, he was having dreams again, he said.  When he told the doctor, he said they started a few days ago.  He told him they were about things he wasn't supposed to talk about.  Silly me, I thought he was having sex dreams.  They were about classified missions.  About an explosion knocking out his legs and getting beat on, but also about a man running down a hill at him shooting a kalashnikov, and him drawing his sidearm and killing the man.  Three shots: groin, sternum, neck.

I saw him laugh.  I like seeing him laugh.  I make sure he laughs at least once every night, and I always leave him smiling with a smile on my face.  It's important.  It's healthy.

"It's funny at the time, I remember thinking what tight shot pattern, well horizontally anyways.  I was all over the place vertically.  But my legs weren't working so I don't know how they got me out a there."  He was looking out past the TV screen, past the curtains and the walls.  "It was one of those no-man-left-behind units."

"Active duty?"

He looked at me with reluctant apprehension, and a dart of the eyes around and away.  "This was active.  I can't really talk about it though... I'm not allowed to."

"Classified?"

"Mhmm."

"Where?"

He shifted a little in his hospital bed, and a twitch ticked the side of his face.

"Well I mean, Europe or Asia."

"Oh, this was Southeast Asia."

Of all the stories of his that I've heard over and over again, I'd never heard about Southeast Asia.  I don't think he's told anyone in over thirty years.  That's why death unsettles him.  He's seen it.  He knows hospital wards.  He's woken up in the one you're not supposed to walk out of.

"It was very nice," he insisted of the terminal ward.  He's always had this thing about respect, about loyalty and love.  It's off basis, totally, and it's absurd, sure, but it's there, and sometimes I see the crystal ball in his eyes.  He loved his father, who was an engineer and built aircraft during the war, so he became an engineer.  He'd been an air traffic controller before.  That's why he bought all his property in Inglewood instead of by the beach.  He liked watching the airplanes line up on approach.  The constant parade right there from our porch.

When I was young, I hated him.  To this day, still, he's the only person I've ever hit out of anger.  He was hard on me, he got frustrated with me and yelled, and took off the belt a few times.  I was certain he hated me too.  But I'm older now and I know better.  He loves me, maybe more than he loves anything else.  He always has.

POEM 1.22

Every once in a while

Not very often
Something grabs hold of me and shakes
And I yell Fuck!
From frustration
Pound my fists.

Pace back and forth
And pull my hair.

Every now and again
I smile;
Something glows inside me
I quake so slightly
I walk lightly

Back and forth
Relax my lips.

And I want to write it all down, everything.