my iron lung

As a somewhat ossified young man, despite my clean-cut with smoking which leaves me with more nervous tics than I have worries to justify them, the habits and interests that I have that I take as natural, the sort of venn diagram-like intersection of love, vice and knowledge that any normal person in their early 20's has buried under their right rib, are actually the result of very acute and distinct experiences in my young, young years that could not be replicated under any sterile experiments not administered by the tender, sharp fingers of memory. One of these particular interests is both specific and I can, in fact, link it back to one experience, or rather one of many successive, same experiences:

When I was very young, say about 4 or 6 or cinco or seminal, I was the surrogate son of one of my aunts while my mother still had her stage manager career at a large local repertory theatre. I loved my mother very much, but I was raised by this aunt and, given the largely osmotic nature of our early years, took more of her into myself than my dear matronly madre. She would take me in her small, sporty car along the windswept coastal highways of sainted San Diego and her stereo would careen around in my head and her affectionate smiles and the bright, yellow sun glazed my brain. She lived a few places when I was her charge, but, the place I remember most of all is a small, broken-down white clapboard bungalow on an island off the coast of San Diego, mainly known for it's navy base and property taxes. It was sandwiched between two large homes and looked almost like a guest house for one or the either, with it's large grass lawn and creeping iceplants. However, the focus of this particular experience, which I've been dancing around like a reluctant debutante, was a small, crowded and what I recall as a "stylish" apartment above a "cool" nightclub in downtown San Diego.

My memory is vague as to whether she lived here or simply took me here often, but..no, she lived here. We would often go back to her place after a long day of beach-going, ice-cream eating, music-listening-and-freeway-cruising because a show was going on long for my mother and my dad, who did not really exist for me before the age of 12 or so, was somewhere patrician. She would sit me down on the couch and then go into the other room and ask or yell, with the click of a dial-tone reverberating behind her words, what I wanted for dinner. Mesmerized by The Simpsons(this was pre-Seinfeld, if you can believe it), I would, of course, revert to pepperoni pizza, the only food that I consistently loved at that age. However, tonight as happened from time to time, she would clap her hands together after she sat me down and would say with a note of what I interpreted as insanity in her voice "Tim is bringing us dinner tonight!". Tim, as it would be explained to me years later under the loving but condescending tutelage of my now-retired mother, was an incredibly successful night club owner that my aunt was dating, and then later engaged to, who eventually ended up becoming too enamored with the image of his own lifestyle and had to be left at the wayside of youthful behavior and expanding age. In any event, I would wait instead in joyful anticipation rather than hungry distraction because Tim was just so FUCKING COOL. He would always bring me a gameboy with a copy of Super Mario Land, with my progress untouched, so every time he came over, I could start where I was and didn't have to deal with the inevitable adult "well I didn't know you were in the middle of something" that plagued any nintendo-addicted youth of my generation. Needless to say, I worshipped him as a god. He would climb the wooden, rickety steps that spanned the distance between the nightclub and her apartment and our nervous giggles would bounce off each other, raising to a near-hysterical pitch as he walked through the door. Of course, as soon as he crossed the portal, an infantile simalcrum of manly distance from emotion would spring up in me, presumably the imprint of my soi-distant father, and I would simply smile and ask him what he brought to eat. Inevitably, it was either mexican or chinese, which for them meant burritos and orange chicken and for me quesadillas and white rice and pork. Then, with me plenty soporified with heavy food and bright lights, they would sneak off into the bedroom, which was off the kitchen and therefore safely removed from the living room and it's encased innocence, and then they would return, dazed or wide-eyed, depending on the particular drug that was indulged in, and then Tim would sit with us and I would feel a part of something that, today, I still look for. A threesome, bound up in something that is both obvious and subtle.

Eventually, he would leave and we, my aunt and I, would trundle off to bed. I think I packed pajamas. I would then wake to sunlight and usually a comatose mass of drugged nerve-endings and expended adrenaline to my left. I learned to make coffee, something I learned on a roadtrip with my grandfather, and would proceed to tap the coffee pot with an index finger and stare out at the beautifully blossoming San Diego morning. She would stumble in, often in a long t-shirt, and I would pour her a cup into a chipped porcelain mug and I would pour about half another cup full with milk and white sugar and top it off with just a dollop of the same coffee, a habit that would reverse itself under a cloud of alcoholism. Then, she would dress and I would pull on my cargo shorts and my "I belong in the zoo" shirt and we would often go downstairs together, the morning after for her and the day of for me, and she would drink a tall glass of what I interpreted as tomato juice while I sipped on orange juice and kicked my legs against the bar, the man behind the counter smiling indulgently and the blissfully ignorant liquor board doing the same. Then we would do it all over again or she would drop me off at my grandparents, where my grandmother gingerly hugged me and my grandfather taught me how to play poker until my dad came home and hugged me tight and dissapeared once more behind a t.v. and a glass of bourbon


Older now. I met Tim once more, at a show I attended at his still-very-hip nightclub the Casbah and he smiled and remembered me, told me I still looked so goddamn young. My aunt and I eventually parted ways and she has her own boy now, who resembles me in so many ways I wonder if it's Fate's way of making a comment. I would say what this experience did to me, and how it made me the man I am today, but if it doesn't make sense without extrapolation, I don't particularly care to tell.

and that's how i knew he was a special child

Listening to the Slack Album, probably the first time in over a couple'o'years, reminds me of driving around San Diego, buying expensive clothes for Camille and eating pastries. It's funny, when we're given a pure shot of memory into our veins from a particular song or smell or taste, it erases all the grim bitterness of repression and false polish of nostalgia and gives us unvarnished truth. When it's good, it floods your senses and brings tears to the inner canthus. When it's good, our brain yells and attempts to lock it away, pin it in back down into the depths where the distance and the haze can keep it locked away. It also takes away the sting of loss, because even if I wanted to go back there, go back there with her, I don't need to cause I have the memory, I've had that experience.



I may have a terrible recall, but, that's just so it can all come rushing back and give me the best high a man can ask for.

when i die, i hope to be a better man

blood is not blood. it's not made of oxygen and cells, it's composition is not what it appears to be. it's made of clover honey, thick and threatening, bringing toxins and love to your extremities, keeping you slow and sluggish but ready for a knockout blow or it's vinegar, thin and sour, keeping you limbs ready to move but slow on endurance and easily blown over. it carries ideas, some foolish some brilliant, into our minds and when our lips caress, it's the metallic honey i taste, and my lips remind you of summers on the coast, picnics with fish brining in special tins your father made for the occasion. he's dead now, and so are we, but, our blood pools around us and tells a story our love never could.

i finished the savage detectives.

You're good at talking shit. Let's see how good you are at backing it up.




Someone tried to take my photo at work today. I heard the fake "camera" noise from the phone but I think all they caught was my turned back and the fist-raised-with-the-middle-finger. I hope, if it makes it on the internet, I can make it my default picture.

this line is metaphysical

We danced. It was the last time I would see her, but, neither of us knew it, and, visions of gaudy, expensive rings and dresses ruined by salinity danced through my head. She clung close to me, her head resting on my protruding sternum and I moved more fluidly than I ever had or have. It was a song by Serge Gainesbourgh and, ocassionally, his daughter would chime in with lilting, etherial notes and in those moments, she would cling even closer, her small breasts crushed against my chest and the blood rushed to my head. The drinks we were using to bring us to this point were quickly discarded, our bar tab forgotten in the sweltering heat of the top floor of this old warehouse-turned-dance hall. I can't say we were in love, but, who knows? Maybe for those few moments, our legs intertwined, thigh against thigh, maybe we were. Maybe love is never a permanent feeling, maybe love is not a birth-right, maybe it is just a few fleeting moments that remind us that we really are fucked from birth to death and we might as well appreciate the few small blessings we're given and not try to manufacture something divine in nature.

I left the next day for the sweltering green and she stayed where she was and we never answered each other's phone calls.

a real revolutionary

According to List, who was personally familiar with the brothel, mi general liked to screw in the most out-of-the-way room, which wasn't very big but had the advantage of being at the back of the house, far from the noise, near this courtyard where there was a fountain. And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn't read



Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives