Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere's Fan

"Puedo resistirlo todo salvo la tentacíon."

"I can resist everything except temptation."





Now ain't that the truth.  How weak does that make me?  Who knows, but I never said I was strong.

I do sympathize with her.  I really do.  I've lived in those shoes before and it sucks.  Being there, everyday, in both situations.  One person, two different pairs of shoes.  When I knew Callan, I had these shoes right?  And she had these other shoes, a little bit newer looking, but whatever.  I'm not a girl, I don't have twenty pairs of shoes in my closet.  I have just one pair that I run through , in and all around these four corners with.  I wear them 'til they wear out most times.  Then I got out and get a new pair.  That's more or less the routine with me.

Callan moved in when Mike moved out.  In the winter, just after New Year's, and Mike moved back to LA.  The homeland.  Winters aren't so bad down there.  Winter in the North are wild.  Santa Cruz ain't no big city, it's small-town.  Surrounded by green all year.  In the winter the beast in the woods and the beasts of then sea and the sky wake up too, and everything's darker.  More dangerous.  Berating.  Debilitating.  Humid cold.  And we were dead broke and didn't want to shave that extra money off the paychecks for the room heaters.  Not in the living room anyways.

Instead, I bundled up.  The air was always cold.  Maybe that's why I smoked a lot.  Yes, I think I'll blame it on that.  The cold in my bones in the wet raging winter is the reason.  I only had Vans from back home.  Thin canvas, I needed to keep my lungs warm.

Callan's were more boots built to last.  Things you take in to get repaired.  Or you just do it yourself, you know?  Like a man.  Lock it away.

She moved in with no money.  We both lived off the food from Kelly's.  I mean Monster too, and sometimes Mikey, especially when we were high.  But for the most part it was Callie and me.  Two different sets of shoes.

[I'm listening to No Doubt in a t-shirt at a café in Buenos Aires in August.  Es una bella dia.]

She's in my shoes now, or the ones I had I should say.  Me, I've grown I guess.  I've got thick soles and tough black leather on my toes now.  There's no holes.  The water doesn't get through, and there's nice padding too.  They're nice to walk in, and they'll last fucking forever.  But sometimes I step on someone else's toes.  Temptation is a two way street.  

[to be continued]

Winter's Wild South

LA as a city, really, changed since last I remembered it, like really lived in it.  It was still the same LA, the same one since childhood three years ago.  Before university, before Europe.  The waxy poetic type would be all like, "or maybe it's me that's changed through these years, maybe my eyes and my mind betray me."

Pero no.  I mean, maybe sure, maybe I changed, that's possible.  Probable? Definitely.  But I'm telling you man, that city changed too.  Just like we all did, some more than others.  For me, it was moving away from being the city of my youth (mind you, that will always be in sight, in the street signs and the lights), and slowly becoming the city of my life.  It was still my youth, I told myself, but my definition of youth had changed, from something in high school, to a part of adulthood.  We were adults now.

At least some of us were.  I went back to living at home, sleeping under my parents' roof and working at the surf shop.  I didn't know what the hell I wanted from life, but it was summer in Los Angeles, summer by the beach in Santa Monica, which doesn't leave one wanting much.  Especially with two ounces of weed from Josh - one of Sour Diesel, one of Blue Dream - sitting shotgun in the old weathered wicker basket.

Yes, those were good days.  After-work specials with Savanna, a delight.  So were the nurse and the ad agency girl, but for much different reasons.  I loved Savanna.  It just so happened to be that timing was never our thing though, so instead we have this beautiful friendship instead.  Come to think of it, that's happened with a lot of girls and me.  Maybe timing was never MY thing.  I'm sure Savanna's is just fine.  She knows a thing or two about rhythm.

But here's the thing.  I know a thing or two about rhyme.  It's a comfortable mix.  Things came easy between us.  It was a good thing we had when I came back to the shop.  She had an on-again/off-again boyfriend, and I had recently discovered my charm in Santa Cruz.  Or something like that.  Whatever it was that had come to me, women weren't a problem like they had been.  Neither were girls for that matter, but I was always curious.  We went to lunch sometimes.  I had questions about girls.  She had stories about guys.  And her eyes always flirted with mine.

BsAs: I'm Back With Helen

It's  a stoned, starving bus ride on the 110 out to Palermo.  Off on Scalabrini Ortiz, through the park, to the big windows and the worn wood chairs and square tables to match.  The temperature in here is just perfect.  The light's just right.  The mood's fit and I'm hungry to write.  Not before some eggs and salad though.  I got a front row seat.

The old soft-cover's done.  I've written it's last pages.  For now anyways, and so it's on to this new hardcover for good now.  Too be true, I already started it.  It's been a back and forth.  I've never done that before, start a new notebook before the old one's done.  Well, people change I guess. Sure, boys will be boys, but those boys got to turn into men someday.

It's a shame the music stopped.  I was just going to start writing.  Oh wait, there it is.  Soft jazz.  I can barely hear the bass and the loud keynotes only, and the trumpet when it's there. But it's most certainly there.  Behind a high chorus of life around me en español.

Stevie Nicks, thank you for helping me see the light.  And the white pinto bean of a car across the street too.  Thank you.  Old Citroen, thank you.  Classic sticks around a little longer here in Latin America.

People still read books!

Less cars are new, and more are older in condition.  Of course there's a number that are absolutely wrecked, on cinder blocks in the street.  There's also no stop signs on many intersections.  They're smarter than that, I guess.

It's the Wild West(South) out here.  Á Helena's Resto.

BsAs: Start Winter

Primero, permítanme decir que mi español es mierda.  Todas mierda.  I don't know Spanish any more  than a fifth grader knows physics.  It's strange to say that I love writing so much, and to think that the English language comes easy, and yet, every other language is a stick in the wind to me.

The one thing I've never tried to do, is be something I'm not.  That's a lie, of course.  The last time I did, I ended up with a certificate in Design.  What I'm saying is that usually, I see my weaknesses.  I understand them.  And I rarely try to pursue them.  I'd prefer to chase my strengths.  And so, I'm writing again.  In English, as always.  A siempre.  It was a lonely year on the west coast, and presently, a wild winter in the South, past the equator.  I'm in the Spanish melting pot of Bueno Aires.  Y mi español, mierda.  Yes, it's a pity.

But that's what keeps me focused.

[this is a story about hypocrisy]

Winter Is Cloudy

It's a foreboding way to start the new year.  In the back of my car with a girl that fucked me in the port-potty straight on through the end of the show and everybody leaving.  We'd come out and everybody'd been gone.  Even through the insane MDMA high, cold dread crept through my fingertips at the sight of the empty warehouse and the grip of that girl's hand in mine, and my lips whispered, "Fuck."

Someone had taken my three hundred dollar Kenneth Cole peacoat too, but that was the least of my bothers at the time.  I chalked it up to the ticket price that I hadn't paid, it was gone, and there were a number of other left-behind jackets lying around so I just picked through them until I picked up one that felt right, and i ended up with a black sleeping bag of a trench coat thing.  A puffy cape pretty much, and I immediately fell in love with it.  It wasn't hard, to fall in love with that thing.  It was economical, and cozy, and warm and comforting, and my heart was flooding at that moment, and the girl latched onto my arm, saying words to me that I didn't hear ("hey, what should we do now? let's go somewhere, take me somewhere, somewhere for just you and me"), wasn't near enough worthy of what the dam of my emotions was holding back.  I gave it all to the coat.  She just tagged along.  Something absolutely horrible had happened somewhere in the last two hours, when I was dancing high and blind in the middle of the thick crowd by the stage that night.  Both our phones were dead.

I slept in that coat that night, on the flat back of my old trusty Sport parked up a hill four blocks away.      I put the back seats down and opened the jacket up, and we both slept on it, that random girl and me, because my phone was dead, and hers was too, and it was late, after 2:00, after 3:00 even.  All alone with everything closed on New Year's, no where to go except my car, which was a long walk from the pier as the drugs were wearing off.  With this girl.  She wanted to play still, in my car, she put her legs behind her head, "See? Come on, take it."

But I told her I was too high and rolled to face the beige plastic and curled into a ball and cried under the guise of deep drug breathing and withdrawal shivers.  I'd lost it.  I'd lost her.  Last night in the blind white of haze of the high and the lights, I'd lost sight of what I really wanted.  The who and the why had escaped me for just a few hours.

Life's funny like that though.  I'd been hooked.  Enamored again by someone I knew I should not be in love with, what a horrible idea, but it always looks so good at the time, feels so right and universal, like it's meant to be, before anything real happens and everything is a possibility still.  It looks so good then, blonde hair, blue-eyed by my side.  It could happen.  It could've, I should say.  Not after this.  The whole stars aligning to bring us together bullshit, if that's actually a thing stars do in collusion amongst themselves up there, if that's true and real, then that alignment for us was that night, last night, with me and Callie, and in those few hours I'd missed it.  Our courses had crossed but didn't change, headings same, but away now, away from each other off to the mountains with my thoughts.  That course was a dark one.  In winter.

Spiraling out.

BsAs: Belgrano Afternoon

I better write this down before I forget it.  And as the clouds evidenced this afternoon, things can change in nothing more than a flurry up the stairs at Freddo to the terrace.  Sunny outside to cloudy in the blink of an eye.  Two flights up.  This will be my curse, I'll always wish to have had my camera out sooner.  That and beautiful women.

But ah!  There, like I said.  Things like thoughts are fleeting like the clouds and the sun outside.  So if you want to remember it, write it down.  Guada said, "You can live a different life out here."

And for the first time in a long while I thought to myself, "But I don't want a different one.  I like my life."

I'm not running away, I'm running towards something now.

Cowboy Birthdays in the Winter

There's a respect for good food among cowboys.  Not in the gourmet sense though, no.  It's in a sense of making a good tasting meal lout of the most barest of ingredients.  The minimal essentials.  Simple meat on fire.  Beans overs fire, or soup, and charred bread, but only lightly charred.  It takes a certain and particular skill and a refined hand and timing.  There's an affinity with fire for a gaucho, for a real cowboy.  Fire and smoking.  Rough cigarettes.  No filters, black tobacco, the darker the better because that's what flavor is.  In the darkness, in the black crushed pepper of things.  And in good food too, don't forget.

I know a thing or two about dark flavor.  For my birthday I smuggled an older chocolate ganache cake out of the bakery at the end of the day.  Well, I didn't exactly smuggle it.  There was a gaping crack in the smooth exterior of it, this rich chocolate wheel on its side, and it was my birthday, so Emily let me have it.  "We certainly can't sell it, no one's going to buy this, here. Happy birthday," she said.  It took some charming though, I told myself, and I loved flirted with Emily's hazel eyes, loved to watch the dimples in her cheeks grow as she smiled.

I also took a full pint of lentil soup, there was a lot left over that day.  It wasn't like the clam chowder, which was always gone come 7:00.  That's not to say it wasn't good.  All the soups they made at Kelly's were amazing, definition forms of their names and of the richest lip-licking flavors, and never overdoing the salt, which is cheating, but also a bit difficult with the more mundane varieties.  Like the lentil.  But Kelly never disappoints.  She somehow brings the vegetable flavors out to the forefront, right alongside the lentil, and some other spicing that I know is there, I can taste it, but I can't quite make out what it is.  There's real skill in her recipes, Kelly.

As always, I also grabbed a full bag of pastries; gingersnap cookies, chocolate chip, some scones, some almond buns, and, my favorite, a handful of powdered apple slippers.  It was my birthday dammit!

Matt's delivery shift ended just about the same time mine did, and he brought over my favorite pizza from Pizza My Heart, the walnut apple one, and a gift from Josh.    "Josh rolled them, but I put the whole thing together.  Oh, and the thing between the legs is a little hash dick."

To be concise, as closely as I can, it was a marijuana scarecrow made of spliffs and toothpicks with a little photo-copy of my face taped to the top.  I think I still have the skeleton of the thing in my dad's old briefcase somewhere.  Four spliff limbs and a little hash dick.  It wasn't so little though.  And there was a big fat nugget of Blue Dream in the middle as the body.  "Oh and he said one of the spliffs he dipped in hash oil, so... Surprise! Happy Birthday!" And he gave me a lanky long strong Matt hug, the kind I'm accustomed to, the one's when I know he really means it, and kind of squeezes the breath out of me.

Max and Chase Knowles were up for the weekend, and Taylor was over from the city, staying with Sasha.  It was a three-day, for Martin Luther King, Jr.  After more than a few too many shots of tequila and shotgunned beers, we all wore onesies out to the Blue Lagoon for 80's night like the good old Western/King Street days. Thank god we had enough onesies, which is to say thank god Monster had a rather superfluous and questionable collection of onesies.  Nobody was asking questions that night though.  It was my birthday.

I opted for the hooded pink zebra-print onesie.  Monster wore her white tight sailor onesie, and Chase wore her mother's 80's onesie with the black stirrup tights and the shoulder pad denim top all stitched together somehow.  And he'd just buzzed his head before coming up.  More like he Bic'ed it really.  He looked like a bald lesbian with sunglasses on.  He's that handsome.  Matter of fact we were all handsome.  And pretty.  And beautiful, like good friends should be.  And we smoked one of my legs before we left, and all wore sunglasses out.  I forget who drove, probably Mike, with Alix sitting shotgun, and the rest of us packed into the back seat and the trunk of the Black Mamba.  He pulled into the lot on Cedar with a lurch and the slightest screech and luckily there weren't any cops about.  There never were, which I guess was wishful thinking and dumb luck, but it happened to be true.  We were damned near locals in that little town by then, we knew all the side streets and how to get downtown without so much as seeing another headlight.  Easy-peasy.  Good drunk-driving practice, and we piled out of the Mamba like it was a goddamn clown car, ten of us.  Buzzing.  High.  Lively and loud and ridiculous, slugging more beers, as many as we could before getting to the bar.

Birthdays at the Blue Lagoon were always great with everyone was a little high.  And free drinks, don't forget.  Well, not free, but I certainly didn't pay for them.  I don't think.  I don't remember much after midnight, except a kiss from Callie on the cheek before she put me to bed in the living room.