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Write about a museum with an exhibit that no one wants to ever leave.

2/14/2018

“So I saw your book tonight, and I just wanted to say, you should get a better typesetter.”

A kind, generous, regular said that to me when I came in on my day off.
I was the typesetter. I hid my head and laughed.
Three years ago I was dumb enough to think that the small percentage of the public that still read creative fiction didn’t care terribly about the typesetting of a book. I thought they cared about the thoughts that carried epiphanies into the finish lines of their hearts.
I thought about the bent corners of scuffed envelopes that carried divorce papers, the love letters written on broken typewriters.
I was wrong.
I was a real Peter Pan, full of stupid amounts of foolish.
I still am.
I think often about presentation. I think about marketing and demographics, and I don’t care for it, not in the very least.
This is most likely one of my most known flaws.
I understand the practice of marketing, it plays to the hand of a larger audience. However, when capitalism studies other peoples wants and desires it feels to me selfish and somber and cold and sterile and commanding and lonely, among other things.
I'm not ready to integrate my thoughts of art with those greedy strategies, though it is, as all of these things are, inevitable.
            Then there are these modern abstract paintings, they bend and distort their canvas for the heart and soul of their undying truths. There are songs that are layered with sample tracks of cardiograms. I would never assume my writing to hold the sharp beautiful urgency of these pieces, but I want to write letters that discount typesetters and the MLA as a whole.
            I want my writing to transcend the MLA with the urgency of honest gasping emotion. It never does and it never will, but setting impossible goals is what being a writer is all about.
            There must be broken lithographs somewhere that are currently being studied without the currency or implication of formality, if only for their absolute truths. If they are the free running horses of literature, I can only strive for the eyes that stare unconditionally upon them.

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I have a new wristwatch and it's skeletonized so I can watch it's gears ticking and cranking and I like to call it my hummingbird factory, because it's so busy.

2/9/2018

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   It is very interesting to me, to be able to convince a complete stranger to read one hundred and seventy-five pages of your thoughts. However, I don’t find it strange as a reader. I’m currently reading What is Not Yours is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi and though I find myself lost at times I know, I know a thousand times over she is having exceptional amounts of fun with language and mind and imagination. So when I lose her, I think of people that can’t get words out of their mouths because they are laughing so hard; I think of that kind of joy.

   I was having a rough night and I thought reading some of my book reviews would cheer me up, when they only confused the hell out of me.

   “An original read. His style reminds me of Nabokov and I found myself re-reading certain sentences just for the pleasure of their phrasing. I was surprised and delighted by this sparkling collection.”
   And.
   “I guess these stories are kind of like poetry. Some made sense, most did not. I think the whole meaning was out of my ability to appreciate people who write stuff like this. Not making much sense.”

   Some nights I can totally love the first review, but I love it like a child loves Superman. I love it’s limitless nature.
   Most nights I swear my entire life is the second review. I guess if I hit myself on the head and forgot I wrote the book and then reviewed the book I waver half my days writing the first review, and the other half the second.
   What does that say about me, to waver as such, am I adapting and evolving between optimism and reality, swinging back and forth like a pendulum? Am I depleting brain chemicals, one surplus, one well, and then the next?
   They both read the whole book though, complete strangers, owed me nothing, cared nothing for me, but word after word they read it all. Who knows, one hundred maybe two hundred maybe just twenty wrong words in a row and they could have thrown it out, never bothered. It’s so strange to me.

   I thought I had a new job, a third craft beer bartending job at a third bar, for exactly a week it was guaranteed. It fell through and I had no way of seeing it coming but boy did I invest in something that wasn’t certain and that’s foolish.

   I’m fairly certain someone else is having some fun at my expense, to which I suppose I also find entertaining, though I am not sure why they would bother it still marks me as foolish

   And their I am again, wavering, between hope and intelligence, I am both someone who convinces strangers to read one hundred and seventy-five pages of my thoughts alone and someone who falls foolishly into traps set a foot by other peoples thoughts.

   To be honest the novel is on an indefinite hiatus, the person that it was dedicated to and inspired a large amount of it is no longer in my life.
   I did go to Portland and wrote two new short short stories which are in the editing phase and I think last I read them I was still in love with them.
   I will be attempting to publish them and as soon as they are rejected I will post them here.
   I love them because I do not fool them and they do not fool me, we are parties of mutual entertainment. We are parties with a relationship so well defined it is spelled out, and that kind of communication is, I think, mutually admired.

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You can choose who the first to lose is.

1/8/2018

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Before Craigslist and After Fatalism

   It is safe to say we were all a little guilty when the police finally showed up. In the history of authority, I will say, guilt has never before been granted such slack, and lost its contention with such ease. It has never been such a delicious and ambiguous pie shared, so often, it is simply an oyster swallowed.
   Every year in July, in this college town, exiled students that become reformed interns and then perhaps model citizens lay their Goodwill bought household instruments upon the sidewalks for us to peruse. They are placed in cardboard boxes and labeled free and if our ice cream cones are aggressively elusive to our tongues on our Sunday night walks we will spare the drippings to the sidewalk and spoil these curbside goods with a little sugar and cream.
   It is interesting throughout the years, and the years past, how we have come to know these suburban blocks like school halls, for example: “There seemed to be so many distrusting lawyers on Pine Street this year, I think, at least, because of all these thrown out second-hand lamination machines.”
   Broderick Street was teeming with free and poorly built terrariums. The cul-de-sac off of Fifth Street was littered with enough oversized drafting tables to hold a figure drawing class right there, right then, we just needed someone to stand in the middle of it all, and pose.
   It wasn’t until we turned down the steep thirty-degree Arch Street, on some glorious sugar high that we stumbled upon this strange marriage of the leavings of both the students of the academy of fashion as well as the department of culinary arts.
   Everyone buys frying pans when they go off to college, but the culinary of arts students, they buy the eighteen inch woks on a whim, and student loans.
   The woks were covered top to bottom in cooking grease from a semester of ambitious meals, and our hands were sticky from that night’s cheap pharmacy ice cream.
   I would say the cops pulled up after eight or ten runs down the street. The neighbors said that we were trailing sparks as we piloted these second-hand cooking woks down their steep block. At twelve years old my thinner one hundred and five pound frame and a running start pushed me past four or five houses, and for some reason we figured we would go faster and farther with capes. So we crafted capes with the leftover reams of fabric from the fashion students, I remember mine was gold and blue.
   Apparently the neighbor that finally phoned the police was worried that with our capes we might catch fire, and we would commit some sort of high speed self-immolation.
   As a child I did not subscribe to such a generous exaltation of faith. Yet, when I was speeding down that hill I did feel something thrilling, and with ease, I can say, my fate was abdicated.

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Something worth valuing

12/31/2017

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The lighting is softer than the fibers of the muscles that vibrate when a cat purrs while it sleeps through a miraculous dream.
The camera plays your eyes kinder than perfectly clean.
it's hard to want to find focus at all.

So you lay in a field of grass in the Berkeley hills, you brought a blanket and a sandwich.

You read that this field was once full of deer and bear and elk.

And as you lay down and eat your sandwich you try to listen to the place that you are,
except before you got there.
You try to listen to the past,
in a field,
on your back,
still,
you just wish she said yes.
Not for any reason- other than a second opinion,
whether bears can growl mad enough to break through time,
or if the wheat shakes from centuries of dear trouncing through it.
Just a second opinion, something worth valuing.

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Its not that they're ghosts, its that they're haunting us.

12/26/2017

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This is just to say I'm reading another piece that Quiet Lightning was so kind to publish at The Wave Organ in San Francisco on the first of the year. Info for the show can be found by clicking on this sentence.

I have also been asked to read on the 6th of January at The Octopus Literary Salon. Some guy from some press called Vegetarian Alcoholic found me and after looking it up, its a pretty awesome lineup! Info by way of clicking here!

As for- as of late, well let's just pretend we're in High School and describe the way we feel with songs.

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If you take a step, I will make sure that you take the next.

11/28/2017

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Oh me oh my, I’m featuring at this reading on Thursday. I’ll be reading about artificial hips and medical studies that measure disappointment. Oh and Christmas trees, also about a doubtful psychic and the importance of smell when building trust with someone. It sure sounds like fun right?

Inside Story Time- Layers
Thursday November 30th, 7-9, Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St, Oakland, CA.

Readings, accompanied by the music of Makram Abu-Shakra, from Zubair Ahmed (City of Rivers), Sean Taylor (Your Smallest Bones), Ammi Keller, Nancy Au, and Teck Sway-Bien.

Click here for Facebook Event Info

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NEWS!

10/26/2017

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Of up and coming monarchs!

-Friday 10/27 covering the incredible Kat Robichaud's Misfit Cabaret presents Horror Show at the Great Star Theater, click for link!

Monday 11/6 Quiet Lightning has asked me to read a short short story of mine that they are publishing at the Peacock Lounge on Haight, click for link!

Thursday 11/30 InsideStoryTime has invited me to read some new short fiction with music backing it at the Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland, click for link!

And last but not least, something that I'm super excited about, I was offered two tickets to see a Japanese adaptation of A Christmas Carol on December 1st for opening night! Suppose I should link to that as well.

As for tomorrow, well I'm going to try to make a lemon chamomile honey wine that should be ready in three or so months.

Here's a song that I can't stop listening to...

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Old Lovers in Dressing Rooms

10/14/2017

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   There is this aggressive use of a kind hearted tone that taxes every note ten pounds too heavy. I’m a complete fool for it.
   I remember a waterslide when I was a child called The Abyss. It was pitch-black for the first twenty-seconds; we couldn’t see our feet in front of us. Then sporadic holes drilled through the black plastic tube gave us this illusion of speed as they chased our eyes abilities to adjust to the complete contrast, to a sharp sudden degree of brightness. As the ride went on we sped past more and more pinholes of light, and our eyes slowly caught up, until we were born again into a pool of water and the daylight at the bottom.
   Keaton Henson’s words and his notes are pinholes of light through a dark dark tube of a song, or of his songs. And often they don’t end up bathed in light, but I find myself going back to them for the illusion.
  It’s interesting, the five dollar words Andrew Bird drops, the top shelf metaphors Sam Beam mutters in casual retorts, and Keaton just exhales. He exhales this weight, a weight that places ten pounds on all of his notes.
   I’d like to believe that if I study these strengths then I can tease them into haunting me. But how do you articulate a tone that is shadowboxing naked in some great quiet unknown?
   It was never spectacular or overproduced, the smile that I made when I slid past those first pinholes of light on that waterslide The Abyss. I can’t say for sure what it (my smile) looked like but if I wanted to recreate it as best I could I would lie on my back in the dark and listen to Keaton Henson.
I think it was genuine, when completely alone.
   I’m not sure how else to pin down why I so value what he has released, or why this singular feeling, this singular relief, is worth so much to me. Perhaps it is the beautiful surprise of perfectly timed contrast between silence and a kind hearted tone. It’s nearly honest enough to be psychosomatic, like an illusion of the senses, like light through pin holes on a water slide, like good art.
   And for that I thank him.

^Honestly the sound of her shoes in that video destroy me.^

I told a friend the other day, no matter how sad you get, you'll never be as sad as a Keaton Henson music video.

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An unwavering grace of exhaustion

9/23/2017

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   I’ve been a little obsessed with Frances Cone the past two weeks and I think I’ve figured out why.
   Originally I assumed she sang with this great exaltation of having just finished some heavy lifting. Her songs, after all exhausted, are written with quite heavy topics, and are never scant on hard hitting truths.
   The tone and strength that she carries always feels incredibly close by, and personal, it is never an echo or a yell.
   There is an honest, loving, sacrifice to them.
   My current conclusion, however, is her tone, her incredibly sincere tone, reeks of how a fireman sounds when they tell you that they rescued your children, but the living room collapsed before they could save your cat.
   She harnesses that exact feeling.
   It is one that I am swimming in, it is one I am living in.
   A reconciliation with myself, one that comes with a broken handful of consolations.
   There is something about our ears and our minds. Let’s say there is a raging fire twenty feet in front of us and someone tells us something important in a soft normal volume, for some reason we will hear them as if they are yelling.

   It is the beginning of something copacetic after chaos.

   It is the imperfect homemade cookies that, when delivered to a hospital bed, spark the first happy tear after armies of hopeless ones.
   It is so important that they are imperfect.

   It is the nagging honesty of a deep smile while coughing after hyperventilating.

   That’s what I hear in Frances Cones voice.

   In these two weeks of listening to her I looked up her live videos on youtube and was happy to find her happy. I long for the day that I get to see her live but until then it seems the biggest obstacle to her singing is to hold back her smile.
   And that makes me happy.
   It also rings true to a line that I’ve heard and believe in, that the greatest part of writing is to have written.
   I think her songs are mementos to these conquests. Her voice and her tone wear the gravel of the hike, they wear the smoke and torn muscles of life, and they do so with an unwavering grace of exhaustion. One that she celebrates, as we all should, after surviving, and upon revisiting.

In her words, "maybe I'm unraveling, but it calms me, to let it go."

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What kind of lonely is your lonely?

9/4/2017

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“Do you smell smoke?" and, "Does anyone smell smoke?” were the most commonly asked questions on the hottest day of the year. Some things are so alien to us, we will seek out tragedy to explain them.
   When he asked her to move over in bed, he didn't ask her to move over, he said, I can hardly breathe.
   Hypochondriacs are much more likely to overly self diagnose in times of extreme weather. She felt ugly, or maybe it was just unattractively old, when the heat expanded the tissue in her joints and her favorite moving parts became cumbersome and sluggish. She spent her bathroom breaks in the walk in cooler looking for her youth. She found that the bright green bits of broccoli sprouts held the most promise. Hearing his sorted request, she was happy to move over. She shared a queen bed with her two younger sisters through her childhood, and sleeping on the edge of that bed kept her alert and thus demanded only the most worthwhile dreams to be projected upon her mind, and in her head.
   It’s much cooler over here.
   Good.
   They spent all day talking about the heatwave. First on the commute, then at their desks, then at lunch, then in the meetings, then at happy hour, then at home on the phone with their mothers, then at home with each other and the seven o’clock news.
   It was something fun when they emptied the contents of their freezer. The ice cube fight that soon escalated to a frozen pea frenzy that warranted an ice cream truce. There was talk of watching March of the Penguins. Instead they soaked cold water cloths and laid them out on each other’s backs in the widest part of their living room. He drew a map on the cloths on her back by running his longest fingers through them. When she shivered, his map suffered earthquakes. The cold water gathered and ran in rivers where he left pressure. He crossed her spine carefully, fearing a flood, crafting waterslides. He was a city planner, a creator of aqueducts, and he smiled from time to time. Where he saw puddles she felt relief, and his fingers splashed in them, splashing in her relief, childishly.
   After a cold shower they stripped the bed, opened the windows, closed the curtains, ran the box fan, laid on their backs and tried to sleep.
   He looked it up earlier that day, he looked up the coldest part of a common day.
   He had all night to tell her it wouldn’t be the coldest until half an hour after sunrise.
   She kept on telling him, it’s getting colder yet, let’s cuddle, can we cuddle yet?
   But the warmth made him irritable, his bones vibrated and her joints throbbed.
   And he couldn’t tell her, it’s the coldest after sunrise.
   He just kept on saying, I can hardly breathe, when he just wanted her to move over.

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