How to live life after art school (quick first draft)

1) Go on Vacation with your wife
2) Go on vacation without your wife and wonder if you should have married that girl from your home town.
3) Meet up with your wife after vacation and note during sex that the love she once had for you is gone.
4) Apply for jobs, because you need one to eat, in any field 'cause school didn't really train you for one.
5) Get a job a job that doesn't pay much in a field you never really thought about working in, in this case television news.
6) Wonder how Art Stardom will Occur.
7)Watch in pain and shock as your wife leaves you.
8) Hang out for a while in your college town reeling in pain and shock for a few months
9) Get a few promotions at work because going to work is all you know how to do, though suicidal depression is becoming a vocation all of it's own.
10) The day you finalize your divorce papers quit your job and move home because you really need to get laid.
11) Tell everyone you are planning to move to New York. They will think you are a bad ass art star.
12) Get laid upon return home
13) Travel the east coast and spend your savings.
14) Move in with some chic and make out with everyone you can.
15) move in two months to live with some other chic.
16)Make out some more, open a business with that chic date some one else, quit business because you have made business partner crazy.
17) Move in with the girl"you should have married" from line 1.
18) Quickly see how that was not a good idea.
19)Start working for the girl-you-began-dating's mom
20)Move in two a cheap studio apartment above the furniture store you now work at.
21) Remind yourself that you are 31 years old with a college degree, Summa Cum Laude
22) Think of Hank
23)Begin contemplating suicide again.
24)Shortly after number 14 in this list get sober, again.
25) Tell yourself it's going to be ok, I dare you.
26) Through out this list figure out how to make art, but don't go to art shows or befriend other artists, be sure to stay insulated in the friends you had before college.
27) Constantly compare your life to the one before divorce.
28) List everything that is wrong with your life, create an imaginary bat for each listing, hit yourself with them constantly.
29)Note that: you are alive, give yourself a fucking break and live, each day is only as beautiful as you notice it is.
30) Have a beautiful day in your notably fucked up life doing the things you do everyday.
31) Got to go to work downstairs now, bye bye.

I Call Home (first draft)

Give me your money! Just in three blocks, how many worlds can I walk past? All the trash so early on Sunday, litter, and scents, scents of the street, evidence of consideration. Into the Starbucks, a world of its own, where every drink you had before, at some small ma and pa, independent, a word coined from corporate takeovers of what we once knew, small counters seating and food, bagels and eggs, all morning all day, college kids, rocker kids, art kids, bum kids, kid kids, whirling milk into beans with made names, midnight earth, breakfast blast, something blue, and the french and house brew and don't forget the hazel nut, all in the years before we cared about the treatment of the beans. But our conscious , our democracy which seems to never work out at the polls has shifted, changed its scope and direction from changing the world, one person, one vote to the ever so pressing one bean. Mr. Bean, Ms. Bean, did you grow in the shade, were there chemicals around you, did you sell at a fair price that most of us don't know, but some how we believe you to have come to us in fair treatment of he who brought you to fruition. If your pa, Mr.Ethiopian farmer man, Mr. Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombian, MR. Blend, Jamaican Blue Mountain, did he get what he earned from the fruits of his labor? Is he living not in squallier as the stamp suggests, as we sneak our way in, all hip and cool behind our dark sunglasses, early on a Sunday morning.
"DID I SEE YOU IN FRONT OF THE UB STARBUCKS" She screams the question to me waiting for no answer as I sit at my table in the back of one of those indie shops, but not just any indie shop, the one I once supposedly owned, was a partner in operation, until BI-POLAR BEAR, the superhero of " everyonesfaultbutminelookatmeIamavictimegivemeattentionIHATEYOUwhydontyoulikeme" turned me away, but I sit there in the late nights when super heroes should be sleeping and all that is left is me, the artist amongst the lost, those of us who know no bedtime, and haven't much in the way of being ok alone, my drawing out in front of my, it and I and the table I sit at squeezed in between the stairs and the wall, and a pencil sharpener, my pencil sharpener, screwed to the back of the stairs, within reach, my flag, the tree I have peed on,peon and waiting for no answer I know, as I answer her anyway, under her screams of "trader, trader, trader" yet there I am helping an idea with my two dollars, one that will find the fate of many before, and I am, at that moment, not traitorously , pitching my two dollars into the pool, the hands of the corporate takeover, no at that moment, I am giving one man hope with my two dollars, helping in a lie, a mirage of a boat as Mr. indie, ain't no Starbucks man stands on the roof swearing the waters not rising. I defend my actions " ofcourseilovestarbuckstheygivedentalattwentyhours", falls on deaf ears, ears not listening, a mouth just moving because we have chatted before and she thinks I am cute, shes cute to but I am allergic, 401k,benefits, vacation, a whole community getting a wage higher than all those who came before them with their darkdustymidnightmoonmorningblendstacybean.
Leaned up against the concrete, the bottom concrete of concrete I've never looked up to see just how high it goes, it just floats in my peripheral vision, as I smoke, and sip on my coffee, in a size I never said before the take over, before some San Franciscan, forced us all to have dental with our frappalatteciono (comes in a can too), i lean smelling scratch and sniff pickles among the debris in this war torn Baltimore, I can't even smell fresh air, a smell I know from mornings in years past before I threw it all away, on Sunday mornings like this, with my cup in my hand, a wedding gift I'm sure. No! I am a liar, while spending, yes spending, my wife and I spending to make our world a little better, she felt we needed a shelf, there in the box with a dot, the good box, not the blue one with yellow smiles, that evil yellow smile, they should have made it red then it would have been ok, on sale in the red dotted box, I found a pink dotted cup, a cup that I held in my hand on so many mornings when she was still there, short and cute, with the craziest hair, in my hand on mornings after she left, me and the pink dotted mug walked out of the yard and into the park that over looked the mountain, as i sipped and guilted myself for smoking "iamamarriedmannowicannotdothisiwilldieandwhatwillhappentomywife", in between puffs I smelled air, not pickles, not the scent of trash overwhelmed by natural gas, but air blowing in the biggest sky ever made as I gazed to that mountain in aw, each day in aw, as if I had not seen it the day before, in aw. And now I am leaned against the concrete that goes so high, I don't know how high, an elevator to the moon so high maybe, I have never looked up and I don't know. Now over the city scents, the trash, that gas leak that can't be good, I look on sans the feeling of aw, I look on to a fat lady in her universe as I stand in mine and I am passed by some hip cutey and her big dog as she slides into the corporate takeover on a Sunday morning, looking as if it's all just to much " sheknowsshescuteandshecantbebotheredbecauseimustbenoone". And the fat lady and another lady and another man, all white and older, but with a younger man who's black (odd since most blacks and whites don't mix in this town, they are in different universes that do as little as possible to intermingle, unless of course they are stuck working together at Starbucks as they are. And the white people, the fat lady who must be retarded and the other two odd older, almost theymusthavebeenhippieorbohemianonce looking all have the same shirt on but the odd couple seems annoyed with the retard as the fat lady asks for money and says she's going to church and the male of the odd couple says that yes the Basilica must be beautiful and the young black man, not hostile, not hopper, just black, just younger, younger then them and younger then me stands waiting, and the retard has a beard, a goatee, and the couple and the black man leave for there church they say, which is not the basilica, and the retard panhandles, wishing everyone a happy fathers day (her name is Vivian ). I have no cash to give her but others do because she is white and maybe because she is retarded. And even one man pulls out his wallet, digs around in the bills, to give her money in the wafting gas and scents, that, if you don't know, is because she is white, and maybe 'cause she's a retard, who claims to want a drink and some food from the corporate takeover before going to the basilica , the passing black man, panhandling, going to church for all we know, he gets nothing from no one, not even an audible response just shrugs, and I give Vivian a cigarette and walk up the street, questioning my moments of gratitude that I am not her, that I am not a panhandler, a retard, a homeless, but that's just right now, as I know i have no job, as I know I spent so much money last week i don't know how I did it and I didn't even pay rent, and as I know that I may be her if I can't get the courage to go back in that Starbucks and ask for a job, which I can't and I don't and I just walk on through the trash and pass a man headed for a port-o-pot, because he has no bathroom of his own and I approach what looks like a laundry bag on a bench, but it's a man, hiding in his shirt from all the sounds and sun that would keep me from sleeping and I head down the hill, through even more trash, towards the Transvestites as the barkeep, an angry macho biker in another life, but just a fat gay one in this life, leans out the door "ifyouguyscomeinandbuyafewmoredrinkydrinkswe'llstayopenalittlelongerifyoudon't-
we'llcloseiwasn'ttalkingtojustyouiwasspeaktothecrowdingenral". And I think of the man in the big S.U.V who so proudly announced he was going to church in that way that said he had done it every Sunday since he was born, and how much I want to go to church, how much I want to know god, how much I want to have faith, how much I want to be grateful I am not homeless, but really I just want to be dead. I walk through the trash knowing I am an artist, knowing my purpose, regretting the money I spent, fearing my unemployment, and hating that she left. I want top be grateful, as I think I should be from all the lessons I've learned so early on a Sunday after begging god to intervene in my life, to take my problems, to save me from myself, but really I just want to die, I hate that she left, I hate that I left, I hate the life I have been left with, I miss that mountain, the quality of my life, I am already the fat retard begging for change on a Baltimore corner. I get through the days rationalizing the lies, telling myself " allthesebadthingsaregoodandhereswhyitsgod", when i know it's a lie, it's really not good, I had it good once for a while and as with most things I blew it and it's just getting worse. How long, not long until I am a bag of laundry on a bench along a trash filled street in Baltimore, the town I call home.

I guess there was some mental preparation for this. Days before as the weekend came closer it was mentioned, the morning with each other. As I awoke earlier than expected, but not before ten, I thought it may pass. I wondered where I'd be when she rose from, yes here it is, her slumber, or we could say from under her piles of blankets in her dark room, on her bed I have never touched, which sits in a very Neo-Gothic iron rod frame. Where would i be, but who the fuck cares, why did I care. But where was I? I was on the porch and on the phone, and I entered and she was there, on the sofa, entering myspace.

After hours of coffee and chatter of her friend and my crush we went to Ms. Shirley and ate in a way that honored our royalty. And on the way, in her car, in her white Volvo, from some other century, as Robert Plant and Jimmy page graced our ears, waves of euphoria caressed me. I thought to myself "i don't want to leave" and in fact I don't have to. As we drove through North Baltimore in all of it's splendor I entertained the affair I am having with my hometown, and I don't have to leave, I can stay for ever and love it for ever and be within it's fabric for years, with my wife and my kids, all of whom I have not met yet, to my knowledge anyway.
AS we rose from the car onto Cold Spring I considered how attractive we are, individually.

In the grog of breakfast longing for the warmth of her home, my home now to, the euphoria held me close in it's arms of love, it's energy flowing through me.

After the morning of my crush on her friend and our virtual flirting, breakfast at Shirleys with Marlo behind us, and hours of endless empathy in conversation, there we were on the floor, together, like cats. Her hand moved through my hair and mine through hers. Lengths of her hair taught in my head as I moved them away from her head with just enough force to cause her to jump back to the sofa, eventually, with a quick "stop", as we both knew what we had just found, on a Sunday in Baltimore basking in the grog of banana pancakes, Corso, and each others spirits.

Memories Slide Across The Plains 1 reread

Memories Slide Across The Plains

Memories slide across the plains my car just traveled, Ozarks, Indiana, Illinois, St. Louis, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tulsa, truck stops, fog, night shaded darkness, light rain, no snow, from Texas on for days, clear from Albuquerque, from mountains, from deserts, volcanoes, northern hills, mountain top nights, surrounded by crashing lighting, flashes of blue against the green pines in a darkness of nothing except for the loud drunks who came in late and drove into the forests looking for downed trees, laughing loudly about nothing as the drinking continued, drinking that lead them up roads off roads, roads of dirt and rocks, and houses on land rarely seen by most who dream from the east coast but never wake up one day after deciding the terms for a decision and honoring the agreement with god, or the universe, or nothing but themselves depending on what you believe. And on the follow through shedding there past leaving behind what once was thought important and now it’s forgotten but a memory, no evidence of what it once was, to get in the car and drive, go, go, go, no reason why just go, and cross the states never seen before, but no stopping, just drive throughs, drive through states and drive through food, with drive through music and drive through roads in fly over states, to a desert unknown, once seen, in rental cars and jeeps with dogs and ex-girlfriends, an ex-girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend, the one you, the one I can still stop my drive through life, drop everything, open the door, shed what’s left, get out get in and marry, forever and ever the rest of the life from here on out, with her, then and never now but always willing to be with her now.
But in that car and across those states to the one with a sofa and a friend, to the one with the mountains and volcanoes, and dirt and sand and low-riders and gangsters, cowboys and girls and mythical pasts of lands long before our lands centuries old before the country new it was white. Years went by on that drive to mountain tops where thunderclouds clapped and banged in the bright sunlight, across balding peaks of green grass and lakes, trees below along the trail back to cocked up campers drunk and fighting and sheriffs and boy scouts on roads trucks alone could barely climb and night fell and hours went by and days went by and years went by and marriages went by and my divorce went by and my time went by and I saw Europe and Ireland, England and France and every state west and mid but not north east and west just south and middle, three stamps in the book and one land of nowhere on that most people don’t know where, thinking it’s below a boarder it’s above with all the same people the ones from the south, the ones from the conquests past and presents the place where the bomb was designed and made to bang and flashes were seen from miles away in shear blindness followed by death on a scale never seen before in a flash, with no trenches just a few men on a plane and it all began where I was a week ago for five years and a week ago a month from now to the tee when I left to find me there in the land of the bomb and the mountains and the end of everything as it drowns in sunlight, baked into dirt and the brightest darkness.
Dee Lite in head phones, bootsy Collins on base and here we were once in the darkness as lightening strikes and I ask if we’re safe and we are as safe as any other ever which is never and always on the edge of the only known end but with headphones and a tent under starry skies, more pokes of light in the dark than accounted for the 26 years before that moment on the picnic table looking up from under Bjork through the headset but never as profound and sublime as that night years before in the woods of Jemez with her with the next c that followed the first c, but this was different it was all different it’s still different it will never be the same after the first c, that c I always long for though I will always long for the second c who I didn’t live with, who I long to live with, but our heads and our signs are the same and they won’t stop to let us in each other and we were in the woods in the darkness with nobody at the elk mountain, the lodge with the Jacuzzi and the heated floors the lodge for nudity and sex and we were there smoking, as I always smoke it will be my end among ends as we never know our end and we try to stop and play it safe and protect our end, drag out our end, assert our power and control over our end, but it isn’t ours, today is ours and where do I want to be with a c but that’s not mine to own either, I can choose here and now in Baltimore or on the road back to the desert or a train to the city of cities or a plane across the pond or any pond to beaches and jungles and ice and oceans but not to be with her or them, that’s not up to me as it may be to them I can choose to write or make art, beautiful objects to influence culture, but I can’t choose where it goes after I make it, I can’t choose how I make it, the money how much or how little, I can’t choose to hear my brain or feel my mood, I can choose to smoke, to eat, what to eat and when and whether to venture in that other cup another cup and music what I hear but I can’t choose her, I can’t choose my future, my fame, I can only hope and think and calculate and assume, assume that I wake up assume that there is another day and I don’t need to be in Aruba, that I will somehow be in Aruba, or Paris or Indonesia one day, but I can’t choose which day, I can only hope and dream as days pass me by, leave me behind in wonderment of who I am, where I will go, and who I am with, as time passes by and markers come and go places I thought I would be, riches and cities and lives dreamt that I will never live, because here I am back where I started after laying in that hammock that night in Jemez, with hippie and Indian spirits all around and there I lay with the c the next c after the first c but soon to think of the first c and obsess on her likeness for years to come as she chooses where to live and work and be and how much they’ll pay her and why can’t I do that why must I be me driven back here after leaving here to go there and go beyond to the end, the other side where the beach is, where the sun is, where the fist C is,, why did I drive this way, Kerouacian,or Kevorkian, an artist return to work, or suicide assisted through failure and dreams that never came true and rationalizations for how it will be better. Is it better here now then there then, I’ve smiled more, laughed more, kissed touched fucked and ssssss.

Grad school letter, first draft

I recently got a divorce from my now ex-wife. After a year and two months she woke up one morning and decided it was over. A few days later her parents drove out from Oklahoma with a Uhaul trailer hitched to their mini-van and packed her up and took her home. This was happened just after we both graduated from college in may of 2007 and just days before we were to move to a cozy mill town outside of Baltimore, Maryland, which is where I am from and she spent months convincing me to move to.
After she left me I hung around Albuquerque, where we lived for a few months just moving through life. I worked at the news station that hired me part time after college for eight bucks an hour. That I graduated Summa Cum Laude, have six years of production experience and a certificate in video production meant nothing to them, or anyone else it seems(ed). As time passed I got a few promotions and was offered a position in the newsroom with a contract and a better wage 28 the first year 31 the second, that is thousands a year. I made twice that with no experience and no degree at the age of twenty-one.
As I spent most nights alone, my only friends in Albuquerque were men, I often thought of suicide and woke up stressed out at three a.m., thinking of how fucked up everything was. Sometimes I would cry uncontrollably when I would try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I would just pace or lay in bed, my mind running attempting to add up my life.
I kept wanting to leave Albuquerque, and I kept coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t. Many of these reasons were helped along by my friends. Some reasons had to do with my ex-wife telling me I couldn’t leave so the divorce would be finalized; others were friends and family telling me of the importance of my job or how Baltimore was the wrong place for me to go back to or how in these times just sitting still was the answer, until things got better. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
So I continued to stay, I couldn’t figure out how to move, I believed they were right. I was also fucking scared out of my mind of ending up homeless and hungry, and I had no idea where I wanted to go or how to get there. Especially, with boxes of art, a 7600 printer, 9- 5 foot by four foot prints from my thesis show and a mattress I had just bought before my wife left.
Then the day before my new promotion started I couldn’t sleep, again. My computer had just died. Just a hard drive deal, but when it died I realized all my artwork on disc, all my back up discs, all my programs had been accidentally taken to Oklahoma. My wife responded to the situation denying she had them.
As I lay in bed that night, after crying histaricly about my life. - Sometimes when I want to die I don’t even know where the pain comes from –I relized what some of the weight was, and maybe some of the problem, or the next step.
Once my wife left I had no idea who I was, in part because I had just tried to make a marriage work for a year, in part because I just graduated school, throw in being thirty and living in Albuquerque, 2300 miles from where I had spent the first 25 years of my life. All of my work for the last four years was about my identity, my identity in the landscape of America, seeing my country was somehow synonomous with with the evolution of myself, and moreover with understanding that I am who I am, where ever I am. Yet suddenly I had no idea who I was, only the feeling that I was dying. That where I was was never to get better. That I was suddenly not participating in my destiny, that fear had consumed me, that all my rejectionist ideals, the same ideals that allowed me to give a car back to a lender so I could use my money to make art, the same ideals that lead me to throw myself to the wolves and get into movie making, the same ideals that allowed me to wake up one day and move to Albuquerque, those ideals were buried, gone, forgotten. The Midwestern woman had one, she had the whole time we were married, tried to make me her middle class parents, she shunned me for being an artist even though she was one. That I believe is why she left. She didn’t think I could care for her the middle class way. And she’s right. But I am still walking around trying to assimilate.
And it is not working. So here is the next step, here is the weight. All this material crap, all this art, this bed this printer it just must go and so must I.
So I’m dropping it off on the loading dock of the Albuquerque Museum and getting in the car and driving to somewhere in the dead of winter. I just hope the car makes it. The last time I did this I made four years worth of bad ass art, which can be seen at www.colingabriel.com. This time I want a few movies along with whatever beautiful objects I can create that never fill up my house again. Attach to nothing.
I'll have my camera, maybe I'll keep my printer (doubt it)so, maybe I'll make the next "The Americans". I have always wanted too, too bad I don't have a Peggy.
As I start this journey I have no idea where I will end up. I will be receiving mail at my sisters house, cause she just bougtht it and she doesn’t have the one off gene that causes her to up and leave. I don’t know where I will go or really that I will even make it, but by next fall I hope to be in your graduate program furiously producing aesthetic pleasure that articulates an empathetic and evocative experience. And if I survive that maybe I will teach so I can have summers off an get paid to run through the landscapes of the world figuring out the human experience.

some notes for Last Sunday

Apache glitter, 7000 feet above the sea, neal fallon screams clutch songs along the roads to nowhere, memories, thoughts, anger late mornings, too little bitterness, trapped in the desert air, wanting something else, not there, not here, sleep to appreciate the passing native lands, two dollars down to nothing, fifteen cents, but the machines won’t take change, green sea side quests crushing membranes through browns and greens blanketed with the harshest blues. No life in the barren sun soaked high desert valleys of the southwest, dreaming north shores , northwest, yippies squaking to better greendom, beliving analogies, with credit, with loans, with percentage rates, trust funds, 401ks, mutual, health care, rebel against the mainstream, in there new shiny diamond plated mainstream, white as white
Picks packed, front seat trio’s, dine grand children left to a chevy playground, elders waste away there federal aid to nowhere games, in nowhere casionos of apache glitter.
Just north as neal takes further away from anywhere haliburton sounds good to upcoming Christmas trees.

Neal fallon screams our way through seas of sage as the locals to nothing was e away there pocket change, I can’t shake my hate and anger for where I am, listening to anthems of where I’m fro, asking why


Rocks jet through the sky from seas of sage and dusty desert, arid lands of native myths games of cowboys and Indians livfe on amongst the dust and brush, landscape breaks with endless roads, dashed with ttanks and pipes, digging into the earth, sucking and filling and sucking and filling, empty nothing for hours and hours from anything near, lands of nothing in the wind, grass brown dirt blows with the trucks on the open road.

Neal fallon screams along alien landscapes far from the rivers and oceans we all once shared, no estranged twenty three hundred this way seven thousand another, up and above looking down on nothing familiar, sudden silvers and grey sling from endless brown with dots of green, a tuff green a green with no water, a green against the wind, a green battling the brown, wayning , wanting to give in but just not enough, a green of danger among dull blue patchy field s of sage
Café escrito, no doors, no windows, no gas for days that weave into weks and months and years becoming the past, shacks stand on land never wanted, nbot now, not then, not later,

Too much car, too much truck, never enough clutch, miles, hours, from anywhere at all, life lives, breaths apache casinoa, cash in the earth, cigarettes in tents, neal fallon screams across roads to nowhere, quick uturn, the head west past the café Escito, no lunch today for many days of many decades, just steel shacks, no ins, or outs, window look upon days gone by, thirty, forty back tail swings, dead ended tanker in fields of sage, seven thousasnd go hire, round and round a trail of dust, go higher. Up and up and bam, like a ton of bricks, to the west to the east, cowboy dreams of mexico and Indians, booty under tredes bad mans in band lands, sage brush and burritios, greens challenge browns, along graying b lues now all beaten by vista views.

last sunday draft 1

That’s the thing with the middle of nowhere. We were out, way out, far north and south and east and west of anything other than a casino in a tent. A quick left off a long road onto a path to tankers, land not mapped roads for oil, south of monuments, east of the res, no power lines, but there were homes, four walls with roofs and dogs and cars in the driveways and older cars, parts of cars, stoves and debris, even remnants of the last house, out there in the desert. But for now it’s just dirt trails to tankers, no maps, but he remembers where he went and we climb and wind up a big pile of New Mexican dirt, we rise and rise and suddenly off the map, of the road to the right and left, God. The proof that something divine exists, the proof that if you’d just get out of your own pansy fucking way, stop following each and everyday the road that’s paved, if you’d follow an aside, a path to something you just might find what you didn’t know you were looking for, what you never knew your life needed before you departed, if you just trusted and followed, went along with something that wasn’t sold to you, something that was not even in your gut,
You’d find a moment in time that was beyond your wildest dreams, and probably better than your Sunday plans anyway. So there we were, Neal Fallon screaming some clutch songs, bellowing Baltimore on some desert back road under a flag it never once acknowledged. And off to each side was a canyon grander than the grandest one in that Arizona parking lot. Rocks, hundreds of feet below teetered high up on narrow earth like Greek ruins piled in Athens. Not just a metaphor, on the edge of a cliff, rocks round; long and broken like sandstone concrete pillars.
Smooth rocks from oceans far gone scattered across the mesa that stopped and fell through formations defining spectacle, the sublime. Notions of the sublime, conversations, debates all stood in awe through the shrubs of a desert forest and across vast canyons that emptied smoothly into plains for miles to d’chay.
Hours of awe on the canyons edge, scouring roads snapping souls of indains gone by, maybe a cowboy too, into flashcard files, dust blown trails marking our path to families of Indians out in their yards, as much electricity as teeth and literacy, but pick up trucks, old and working on, each day, sure it’s not just a special Sunday after deed, new trucks pass by on roads to nowhere, no Indians but Spaniards, the modern day Marlboro man, no smokes just beer. Dusk cam down on the arroyo and we returned to south in which we cam, in which so many came, in which those early generations of Spaniards came, long before the white man, long after some Indians passed by, no predicated with ancient, only to land north and never be seen again,

Saturday -first draft, 1 reread

Curves and turns, twisting through mountain roads in upright modernity, small orange, almost box on four wheels the four of us, upright, crammed inside, burrito stench, breath trapped in glass, as we cross through Spain in America, handed down, occupied by the grown children of grown children of grown children, books, politics, theoretical thoughts fly through the air with memories of the last time, in the last life with that last lady, while with another lady, further through the American Spain into nowhere, remnants populated with passerby’s all traveling to nowhere in modernity, following paths followed by two legs on four legs, to remnants then modernity, of worship, conquest, the passing of information, now passed in cables and air, then where we are now, where our orange box on four wheels brought the four of us, to the remnants of information passed by two legs on four legs with swords, spears, dogs and guns to the houses where god was claimed to be the provider of information passed on by men selected to pass on selected by god to pass on information from men said to be selected by god who have given information to pass on to be said to have come from god. Across oceans, up rivers, through mesa’s and dry arid dust bowls of miles of nothing and everything fighting to be the fittest, to survive, from heavens through the sky across oceans up rivers across dirt dust and wind the with swords, slaves, trade, buildings amongst snakes they stood in a land far from their own, to pass on the word of god, in modernity, among the remnants of the word of gods travels across oceans, through deserts, up rivers, to men of other languages, men who’s gods spoke other languages, the remnants, roofless towers of dried mud, squared and stacked and stood, standing longer then the men and their information brought across oceans and up rivers, still standing in nowhere, once somewhere, but still Spain in America.

Starbucks cups amongst stacked dried squares of mud once used to claim territories for countries far from where we are now, from where I am now, from where my trash, my remnants of this morning’s consumption, lays among the remnants of many centuries old conquistadors, far from where they came from, far from where they are now. I am where they were far from them now, on a countries land, far from the country it is now. As she walks amongst us, me and the remnants, as they walk amongst us on the foreign soil of our home land, are our thoughts foreign to the soil. Does the soil remember the thoughts that were built among it by men from soil far from the soil they built upon. Were they foreign, were they thoughtless, did the soil recognize them, did it care, did the soil pick and choose, knowing who the natives were, or as the soil travels through the wind, did the soil believe the men did to, those who claimed the moving soil, stating it was here, did they blow through the wind as the soil did. Did the soil they claimed, move on, believing an American Spain was where it blew to as it landed miles away. Is Spain outstretched through miles of America, is Spain outstretched to the oceans that break on the Shores of America, did the soil of Spain in America blow to the ocean and rock away in the waves to Spain, did the soil have any reason to believe the men did not blow through the wind. D id the men blow through the wind like the soil but with words and swords and spears and dogs, boats, ships, horses, cars, planes, trains, bombs and rhetoric, are we all just blowing through the wind pausing long enough to believe we are doing something different. When we return to the soil we will blow through the wind as we always have, as our words have, as our memories have, as our conquests have, our bombs have, bullets have, hate has, love has, loneliness has, fear has, homelessness, wealth riches and gluttony, prayers and urine, sweat and sleep, these remnants stand, what is left, after what has left has blown through the wind and what stands blows through the wind as we blow through the wind upright, in upright boxes believing we are not blowing along with the wind, along with the soil.

And then there’s suicide... first draft, unfinished

And then there’s suicide...

When I opened my eyes this morning my first conscious thought was to kill myself. AS I remember, when I went to sleep last night I was romantically ruminating about the end of a shotgun in my mouth and blasting myself in the face. I thought of the landlords reaction when they heard the gun go off and their floor, my ceiling, get hit by buckshot and blood.
This morning I asked myself why do I want to commit suicide and my response to myself was time, it just keeps going by. Well time always goes by, it never stops, days turn into years but I don’t always think of suicide. If I stop time by going to Walmart and getting a tool, that frankly scares the shit out of me and place it in my mouth one evening while consumed with fear and depression what time will I have left?
But the root, what is the root? What is the fear and what do I think suicide will control? And moreover, why does my coffee suck and why do I keep going to Starbucks to get a bigger, better coffee? That sounds tangential but it’s not. It’s all closely related. Starbucks costs at least two dollars a day, which is then at least sixty dollars a month. Yesterday I spent twenty-three dollars on gas, four dollars on coffee and another three-fifty on smokes and a soda. The total means I consumed or spent more then I made. So here comes suicide. I went to work. I worked four hours on the clock and another two off the clock training, writing my first vosot, which is a script for the anchors that includes video and audio, it got killed in the show but that’s neither here nor there. Oh yeah, I spent another six dollars on dinner because I was training. While on the clock I earned a very meager wage. This is all bringing us to the equation; these are all parts of the equation that are currently adding up to my desire to die.
Today I have a dentist appointment, but I am going to skip it because I cannot afford it. Other than suicide, in the back of my mind is a print I need to work on that will half my rent. I’ve been putting it off; maybe I’ll get to it today, maybe I won’t. I’m thinking of having a yard sale tomorrow in preparation to move to Baltimore. I have no place to go there, no job lined up; I just have friends there and in New York, which beats here. I have three friends and no life except sitting at home and either making art, wallowing in depression or plotting to move and wishing I had more money, all while smoking endlessly, a task my doctor told me never to do again a year ago, yet I still am.
So I am going to die a painful death of emphysema anyway.
I won’t exercise but I’ll worry about my weight, hoping that I’ll magically lose this stomach. I won’t talk to anyone new or flirt or get laid. I simply do the prior and go to work and get underpaid and fret endlessly about money, disease, death and my front tooth falling out because the gum is receding.
While at work, while working for free to learn how to produce the news, I’ll wonder why I’m investing the time and possibly six dollars for dinner since I’m just going to move. But how am I going to move since I can’t fit everything in my car and a lot of what I can’t fit is my art, which has cost me a large amount of money to produce and I hope it will make me famous or at least turn into income generation. Meanwhile, I’ll make lists of what needs to get done, since I have no life and I have plenty of time to do the lists, but time passes as I wallow in depression and smoke cigarettes, which I shouldn’t be doing because I’ll die a painful death that I purchased myself.
Are we getting to the root yet? Or are we just reiterating the saga in my brain, the questions I can’t answer and the mathematical equation that voids faith? And once the root is found will that assist me or will it be another unanswerable equation? My answer is to say things like fuck it and buy the damned coffee. A Short term, fix until I feel like taking my life because I can’t afford the fucking coffee. Or get another job to afford the coffee but where and why if I’m moving, but then why waste the six bucks, why train if I’m moving? But then stay? Train and hope I get a producer job? But then where does my savings go and how the hell do I have a life?
As I step forward each day, because I do. Amongst the daily tapes playing over and over again in my head, completely unaided by my wife, who is to soon be my ex, who says I should stay to make sure the divorce she is filling from Oklahoma goes through. As I step forward making art, going to work, selling my crap, plotting and planning, I can see a glimmer of an unattainable answer. It’s as if I could snap out of this and make some sort of hour-by-hour schedule and be this productive monster of happiness and success. I made one yesterday, I did the first thing on it, smoked some cigarettes and then wrote for two hours about my marriage. I wrote until it became rambling, chronological bullshit. But, I like to write. I really like to write. I really like to make art. I really like to write, I sit around work waiting to get to rewrite twenty minutes of crap with lead sentences such as “Aliens are attacking the earth” followed by “and Microsoft plans to make millions” or “Here come the lefties!” and “Move over Hollywood... Here comes Albuquerque”. And my grammar sucks. But while at work I avoid leading my sentences with and, although I really like to do it at home as I feel it sets a rhetorical tone that best exemplifies my head.
On a side note, everywhere I go to avoid the sun puts my laptop in peril as left over rain drops fall from the trees and I have just smoke four cigarettes, I’m on my fourth right now.
Then there is faith, the corruptible belief set engrained in so many Americans heads, or at least mine. Faith is a mother fucker. It tells me everything is going to be ok. It tells me screwing my list and writing for hours is healthy, beneficial and what I “should” be doing. Of course my head tells me it “should” be the list, it then tells me I’m failing and I should die. My head tells me I should get another job instead of smoking myself to death and writing about my brain. Then faith tells me I am a boheme, and fuck a job, “everything will be ok”. (until I starve, because I don’t know the rules of grammar as well as I should).
But if I got the producer job, a producer job, and I worked from two in the afternoon until ten at night I could write and make art guiltlessly. See there is always a catch. I have guilt, I have poverty and If I stay here I have no life. But faith, rearing it’s ugly head, which looks just like a mother fucker, tells me that not only should I learn how to use this thing -, I have no idea where a – is appropriate, but that I should also just split town and hope for the best. As if I’ll just show up on the east coast and earn a livable wage, get laid, have a life, make art, and write and actually rewrite, come back to my writing like three times, four even, make it smooth and successful. Maybe I’d even learn where these – things go.
There is no end to this essay. It just rambles on. It can’t stop. It can only stop if I figure out if faith is real and if “everything is or will be ok”. I have a feeling if I knew that I’d be Jesus.

"Dear M" first draft, unfinished

Dear M,
Go fuck yourself.

No no that will never work. I don’t think I really think I felt that way anyway.

Dear M,
I wish I never met you.

Sometimes I feel that way. But it’s probably not exactly true either.

Dear M,
Are you fucking nuts?

That is far more suitable, though only because she left me. Leaving me may have been the only thing that showed she had any fucking sense at all. Among all the reasons we could have theoretically worked well together there are at least as many reasons why we can’t seem to. And that is not including the symptomatic behavior of belittling each other, being mean, shouting yelling, distrusting, arguing over everything, never seeing eye to eye, and of course, the classic punching myself in the head syndrome.
Yup somewhere along the line last fall I began regularly punching myself in the head. It’s a behavior that became more and more frequent and intense. I first would do it on Sundays, withdrawing from nicotine, when I quit smoking for a few months. Then I started doing it in arguments, and then, eventually, at the slightest thing that appeared to be the entrance to an argument, I’d give myself a good slugging. At some point all I had to do was roll my lips in my teeth and M's face would drop to terror and disapointment knowing I was about to punch the crap out of myself.
I could have picked another spot like a leg or my chest, like an ape. But no, the face and head harnessed the best results. What ever feeling I was looking for, that was somewhere in the family of a suicidal tendency, was in my face and head, slaps, full on punches, a barrage of ones and twos on the ol’ noggin rocked out for the moment. Such an act quickly turns every situation into a bad one. But I guess, somewhere in my mind, the whole deal, each day and each moment were weaved into one timelessly bad situation.

I’m not saying I have permanent damage, but the right side of my head pretty regularly feels funny, kinda like swelling or that something is wrong with my eye. But as far as I can tell nothing is wrong, at least my vision seems ok.

I guess I did all this because the whole thing was fucked up. Maybe it should have never happened, the marriage and all. I think she probably feels the same way. Maybe she doesn’t, who knows the fucking truth. My friends like to think she’s fucking nuts and I agree on some things, mostly how she sees reality. Her world view and her view of what is actually happening resists a bit of logic. But not everyone can see things realistically Again this opinion has little to do with blame for leaving me. And Again, that decision was probably quite sound. Someone had to have the balls to admit it wasn’t going to work. Evidence of M's lack of logic is in expecting me not to move from Albuquerque so we can resolve the divorce. If someone needs to be here it can be her. I’m not attempting to be selfish about this I was two weeks away from moving home before she decided she didn’t want to be married anymore and was not willing to attempt to work it out and then had her folks come to Albuquerque and move her and her stuff back to OKC. And now, for the sake of the divorce, she wants me to stay. Fucking my ass.

I am currently earning a meager eight dollars an hour, part time at a local tv station in town. I have six years of production experience; I recently graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BFA, Summa Cum Laude no less. I am not going to waste away in this shit hole. To add to the exigent desire of flight would be that I have three friends here, far more there and hell there is just life out there that I need to go live. She left almost two months ago. That is more than enough time to file a petition for divorce. And to top it all off, she has the petition in OKC, she is just sitting on it, waiting to sign it, taking her time. This is why this stuff is fucking ugly.
I’m not trying to be ugly about it. Nor am I saying she is either. But not being in her mind I can say little about what is going on in there. I have just tried to be passive at best, I don’t really know how else to be. In the week it took for her to decide to leave, she announced once, recanted, then days later announced again, I begged, I pleaded, I offered the ends of the earth with all sincerity. She was a no taker. Once she left I guess I decided, that A) it was real and over and B) it was out of my control and to allow it to proceed with little intervention of my own. That decision was also amongst the desire to only attempt to control my own life, which has proven a strange task.
I have had little contact with her, a couple phone conversations, a few IM’s and a bunch of emails. I can’t really handle it. She calls to be friends, to see what is going on, how I am doing and what my plans are and I have little to say, it makes me want to just nap. I don’t get angry about it or at her, I often cry, it’s often the only time the feelings rush me. But yesterday I got mad, when she stated I shouldn’t leave and if I did I could pay for the divorce and on and on. On a side note I haven’t hit myself since she left, but I almost did yesterday. Thus, hitting myself is a perverse and either immature or animalistic reaction to a feeling of lack of control. I prefer to think it’s the latter.

But, what went wrong? How did this union go so awry? I want to say that it was a union that should have never occurred. Maybe that’s too easy or maybe that’s too honest. I knew early on that we had vastly different world views. I also knew I was extremely attracted to her. And although I cheated and left her and all that, the attraction continued. I loved our sex life; I loved it more than any other sex life I was participating in. I could feel my soul attempting to connect to hers when we made love. I could never get in deep enough and every time the goal was to touch her heart. Time ceased to exist and our sex life continued this way until shortly after we got engaged. And this is where it got complex.

I don’t know exactly what happened but I think by in large it was the beginning of the end.

Somewhere in there she started taking birth control. She didn’t want to really and she was totally freaked that it was going to make her fat. She swears it did, but no one else could tell. Did I mention she was a dancer, the modern kind, not the stripping kind. So here comes some fucking honesty, ready? While on the pill she was having trouble having an orgasm. Maybe she’d never had one, maybe it was just then, I’m not sure. Nonetheless, I think she also made a comment of an inability for me to find the clit. Now, hang on, maybe I should have just proven to her I knew what I was doing. But man, she knocked me right off the fucking box. For those of you who know me this needs absolutely no explanation as to why but for those who don’t I will indulge you. I’ve spent a large number of years prior to my engagement with Meredith researching the female body, researching my penis and most of all just plainly womanizing as those who are just plain haters like to claim. Nonetheless, my reputation preceded me for many years in many cities. I loved sex and I loved women, and I arranged my being to get as much of both as I possibly could. In that, I felt I was relatively capable of finding the clit, wrapping my tongue around it and pounding the young guest of my mouth into orgasmic euphoria and I had many return customers for years. So this little bit of premarital honesty, slammed my confidence in a way I was fully unprepared to deal with and I think shaped my perspective, I either should have immediately called love line or walked away from the relationship, because to bring the swelling down on my bruised ego I just thought what the hell does she know, this inexperienced young woman, how dare she. And from there our sex life quickly began to cease. There were other complaints such as why we had so much daytime sex. I personally love daytime sex to no end. And I have found when you live with someone sex tends to be good that way, it keeps it interesting and spontaneous, but it also seems like, while, co-habitating schedules change and you end up reading more at night and fucking less. Maybe it’s just me. But when you don’t live together you do your thing all day and accumulate sleepless nights meeting for a good romp. When you live together so many things begin to settle. It’s an unavoidable truth that I have yet to begin to take on. It needs taking on though ‘cause it fucks everything up.
This leads directly into the rest of the collapse and what may have collapsed the relationship with Cybil, the first girl I lived with. The wisdom of Chris Rock says, married and bored, single and lonely. Currently though, I am single and married and bored and lonely. The nut that I have to crack and want to crack is how to have a fucking relationship and not feel like I am trading off the whole fucking world. Once Meredith and I moved in together, which was once we got engaged, it’s like I automatically gave up all my friendships, especially those with women and not just because I was fucking them. But there I was, sexually in a bad spot, slowly throwing my friends away and attempting to play the same god damn game of house that I played in nursery school. What then was the purpose of all the experiences between four years old and what 29 years old? Clearly, none.
So, there we are, two big kids playing house in nursery school, with real rent and real bills and planning a wedding in all of five days, having lived together for a week and never really seriously dating. What I mean by seriously dating is they way some of my married friends lived together for years and years, but they weren’t much of players, they weren’t out there smelling the flowers. I was, I was smelling every fucking flower right up until I got engaged. For me, that’s how I knew I wanted to get engaged, thoughts how I knew I loved Meredith, I systematically debunked the myths of many women in my head, except for a couple, who still haunt me to this day. Wrong or not that’s how it rolled.

In this mix somewhere was the weight loss. Who knew weight loss sucked so bad. By accident I lost about thirty five pounds in the fall prior to getting engaged. Sounds great right? Made me hot and attractive. Really, I just looked like a cancer patient. Nonetheless, I had to buy a new wardrobe and was constantly in fear of gaining more weight. Further steps into the downfall, along with having my manhood questioned, and entering a household, moving into her house, with a different world view, I had shed who I knew I was and had to redress it. Way too much vulnerability right there. There was a brief period in all this in which I felt like some strange Vietnam vet. My hair was too long, I was wearing to much brown and was starting to get angry. Then I really felt like a retard ‘cause I cut my hair too short. And then the fucking semester began. All this came together during winter break. A few nights after fucking Min- a graduate student, much older then I, who was the worst kisser in the world but was hot as hell- I called Meredith and we went to meet her parents in Oklahoma, discussed marriage, I went to Baltimore, got my grandmothers wedding ring, flew to OKC again on Christmas and proposed in Albuquerque.
The semester began, I took one of the most humiliating classes of my academic career, questioned all my choices and the snowball began to tumble. We were married by the summer, I didn’t invite half my family and we were well on our way to misery. I was trying to get past it. I was trying to get past the little things, the control, how she had to decorate the house. I was trying to get past her Baptist dad and Midwestern family that believed in proper -there version anyway, M seemed to think I had no understanding, of course, I was raised in a house by my english grandmother, so I had a whole other understanding.) and thought I was a freak. It was impossible. You probably shouldn’t marry into a place where you don’t fit. We went to OKC like once a month or they came to Albuquerque. They thought I was selfish ‘cause I didn’t like anyone talking to me in the morning. The reality is I didn’t like them. Just before we got divorced I began to like her dad and her extended family. But I was still this odd ball. I had no space. Meredith never worked, her family paid for her, the summer we got married we were stuck in the house together all the time. She began questioning my ability to be an artist. The things I would confide in her about my own desires, the questions I had about life and career she used against me. Trust and safety were slipping away. I wasn’t looking like a man, I was looking weak. Our world views were so vastly different they endorsed my weakness. She saw her parent’s life as utopia. I knew there life was death. They were as middle class as it gets. The safety of jobs and insurance and good credit, I could give a fuck less. I despise the corporate structure. I want excitement and adventure. I hate working for people. I like to read and think and make art and hang out and discuss the world and all it’s elements. And my wife, she wasn’t much of a reader.
I blame my mom really, genetics, upbringing. I began listening to NPR at 3 years old. Probably earlier I just don’t remember. I was Ronald Reagan in the third grade. I loved politics and war. My folks were hippies. They lived in communes and my dad served time for going awol. As much as I want to fit in the club, married with stuff, I just can’t, my experience, what I know, what I’ve learned, who I have been won’t let me.
And the arguing rages on… Those apposing world views clashed again and again. She could no longer trust that I was capable of holding a job, even though I always had one, the same one actually. My fox like interests in the world lead her to believe I was to be nothing. And after she went to a dance residency for a month in Boston, she returned, we had sex and I could tell the attraction was gone. I had fucked it up, hitting myself, yelling at her, arguing to hard. Though it wasn’t me it was us. Her distrust caused many fights. Her belief in her midwestern background constantly put us at odds.
But how do I, how does the world accept it as us, the fuck up, we? It was just me. What was I thinking? Why did I marry someone I barely knew? It was clear she was so different. I saw an interview with someone famous the other day and they said they were going to get married, they hit the point where they would have married who ever he was dating, he just lucked out that she was the right one. I think I relate, I was searching hard, I didn't want to be single and lonely, I wanted to be married and bored. I wanted to marry a women who respected family as much as I did beforfe mine fell apart. Unfortunately she didn't respect me. Unfortunately she was just a little too uptight. It's hard to say how she should have been. I have no idea what other personality is going to work with mine. I say all the time I will always regret not marrying Cybil. I do know and have for years. If only I knew then what I know now and on and on. It's true though, it's not greener grass. But if "I only knew then", then how can I or we, the world, how can we ever have a god damn relationship? I am not sure what I know, or think I know about Cybil can be applied anywhere else, it's not the same permutation.

The Sun Is Not Compatible With Sadness (1st draft) 2007

The sun is not compatible with sadness. I wish I awoke to dreary dampness, grey skies, and low lying clouds. To feel the drizzle on my face, the cool dankness in my joints, I would feel welcome in my sadness.
I don’t know if it’s American or if it’s just the human condition, a spawn of religion, I don’t know why we must feel the need to change when we are sad. To feel better. But I feel fine in my morning tears, I feel good in my bed, unmotivated to face the day, I’m ok today in a cave of darkness and air conditioning free of the desire to accomplish anything. If only I could smoke indoors and if only I lived on a cliff in Ireland, then the world would nod its head at my state of affairs and I would know the stars intended this day.
But I am in the desert, the southwest American desert. I’m sad and lonely and frightened in the sun. I feel its heat, I fear its heat.
The blue skies look down on me as if I’ve shunned their healing powers. The suns beams blanket the land, there is no shade in this sudo urban landscape or beyond, there is no coolness. My dismal demeanor is just brought to a boil in this late summer New Mexican afternoon.
I dread my days here. I dread them through this time and I felt dread for them before. Freedom was but around the corner, only to never happen. And now I’m stuck here in the bright, dry, desert daylight, destine to miss fall and miss winter and miss my life as it passes me by.
I should have gone without and taken on great burdens and worked to the bone to make rent. If I had I could have woke each day and stepped out on the roof to see fall. I would have seen yellows and reds, turning leaves in the millions. I would have smelled the dank dead leaves rotting in the streets, streams and yards.
Had I gone I could have spent my last dollars on gasoline and driven to the end of the country. I could have stepped out of my handed down Buick skylark with a hub cap missing and walked carelessly across the sands. There I would have stood, staring at the waves, looking across the water to Europe. I would have been held in a blanket of sound and felt the warmth of the waves breaking at my feet.
But here I lay on a dreary sunny day, in a bedroom I can’t afford, in a shity desert hideaway.

The Sun Is Not Compatible With Sadness, A Week Later (1st draft) 2007

The sun is not compatible with sadness, but perhaps god is. A week has past since I had wished I’d woke to dreary dampness, grey skies, and low lying clouds, and today I have. Maybe this empty entity, this being, known only to belief, lives and maybe, just maybe, it’s not the bastard I think it, he, she really is.
I guess when I cry and beg in pain, that leads to sleep, preceded by thoughts of ropes around my neck, cold steel in my mouth and shots in the dark, as I cry to the heavens in selfish pity and feel the end, as if the end of the world is upon me, and I have no where to turn, perhaps, just maybe I am heard. And maybe I too believe, maybe I know I will be heard and maybe that’s why I don’t decide my fate. Maybe that is why I sit back in my pain and sleep the day away, or drag myself to work or call and cry to ears who could probably care less of my pain and surely have no answer, no resolve to my anguish, to the conundrum, the equation I can’t seem to wrap my finite self around or at least feel good in my decision. As with all my decisions, the next day, hour, minute or moment, I begin to guess again.
I have no faith that is conscious, unless skepticism is the new religion. But deep inside I have a motor that won’t stop running, a motor that believes I’ll make it, a motor that thinks I can achieve and it will all be ok. But on the surface that’s the hardest sale to sell. On the surface I think it’s a lie, belief, love, marriage, contentment, serenity, happiness, all to me are frauds, something someone else wears in hatred and anger to other people. As religious practice I think it’s all a lie, life is cold, cruel and short. It’s nothing but a fishing line, I’m biting at a lure only to get stabbed in the head just when I thought my hunger was to be filled.
Life is the strangest thing I’ve been involved in. When I go to work today to do the noon news I’ll thank Steve Stucker, the morning weather man at my station, for the clouds and dreariness that has made my soul glow in it’s refuse from endless days of the desert sun. Last week or the week before I thanked Larry Rice, the evening meteorologist, for the cool breeze and the quickly descending evening temperatures, to which he responded “I’m in sales, don’t thank me, I’m not the management.”
Each day Steve ends his newscast telling the viewers to get out there and do something that makes their soul happy followed by a god bless. Fuck Catholicism, maybe it’s all in the seven day forecast. At least these guys don’t touch kids.
Maybe they are in tune, all their looking to the clouds, the wind, the earth, their personal understanding of what makes each day the way it is, their knowledge of it’s impermanence and knowing things could change, their not right, their just guessing with what they have at hand.
At night, when I fall asleep with the light on I feel the fear of what they have embraced. I’m alone now, my life’s little bit’s of certainty were removed in a day, in a single act of another person who took an oath of certainty. I fall asleep with the light on in fear, in fear of the uncertainty; I drag through the day with depression, seeking to turn known unknowns into known knowns. I do this for my sanity, for my soul, to find happiness, only to create more sadness and anguish and depression, because I don’t have what it takes to be weather man. I don’t have the resolve to take the information at hand, decide what it means and say it out loud, and move on to the next day whether I was right or wrong.

Two Shorts

1
Outside Power Plant Live, we sat in my black Jetta at two am watching streams of look alike state-school girls and boys pour onto the red brick street from the club. Chris G. tall, thin, covered in tattoos, a local star, sitting shotgun, Ian, Asian-Irish, snotty and spoiled, dressed in the split second latest fashions, we called him the “Little Prince”, I think he goes by illustrious now, sitting in the back. Then came Brittney across the bricks, as we pondered how anyone chooses a date when everyone looks the same. To this Brittney proclaimed “I’m dating the dj”.

2
“Ten thirty and eleven degrees in Baltimore” the Pilot announced as we descended through the moon lit clouds and snow. Courtney’s dad greeted me with a hug almost as tight as hers. Court and I made it to her downtown apartment through the slush covered streets around one a.m. sipping coffee over two trays of brownies she had just made for her work party the next day. Huddle together naked in each other’s arms drifting to unconsciousness around five. The brownies were still moist and chewy at her Aunts house Christmas Eve.

Usually we turn left on Denison

Usually we turn left on Denison, Billed pulled over to the right, I knew he was short. I knew he was short the whole way down Edmonson. Burnin’ ‘em in Chadwick’s one thing, we never go down there. But Denison, we’re here everyday!

Same blue pick up same to white dudes. Us! It’s not like in any other car they can miss us anyway. I weigh 250 and rock a purple Mohawk. Not even a hats gonna help me out. Does he really think 4 lanes to the right is a whole ‘nother world?
“Your door locked?” Bills only verbal warning.
“Ya”
“2 for 15” he says across me, out the passenger window, to the middle aged junky serving rocks on Dennison this fine sunny Tuesday summer afternoon.

They exchange cash for product. As the junky we just burned figures out its only six bucks we lurch forward to make our escape. 20 feet and we’ve pulled a bit from the corner to be stuck in rush hour traffic. My locked door opens as the middle aged black man tries to get his rocks back.

Our car is still not moving,

I grab my door back and hit this guy with it, as the light ahead turns green and we begin our descent further down Edmonson Avenue. Just as fast the man grabs a gas can from the back of our truck and throws it at us, it hits the cab of the truck and falls away. The boys on the corner either aren’t with him or could give a fuck less about the loss, amused by the quarrel but unwilling to risk a scene in rush hour over 9 dollars, or they figure the old junky has to come up with his end either way. It doesn’t matter to us as we round the corner deeper into west Baltimore to make a get away. A block and a half down the road and we know we’re free, free enough to pull over, stand around, shoot the shit and never cross the path of the hoppers we fucked over.

Johnny Rockets (1st draft) 2007

Maybe I was being desperate. Maybe I was forcing a fire to ignite that was barren of fuel. Maybe it was foolish to jump back in right before she went across the country to the left coast for graduate school. Maybe it was something lacking in me, which needed to latch onto her in the name of love to start life again in L.A.
But it was what it was. I couldn’t stop thinking of her; I couldn’t stop dreaming of her. I was with another, a lot of others, but one in particular, which I wanted to be with. And lying next to her I’d wake up consumed with dreams of another. Dreams of C. and
I pushed, and I pushed, and scratched and scratched the match and it lit only weeks prior to her departure. And she went, and there I was in bed with C one day, and after she got on a plane I was back in bed with the other.
But there we were in Pasadena on her dollar, looking for places to rent in the California sun. And still I wondered if this was real, if she loved me, if I loved her, and I did and I do. And at a Johnny Rockets, somewhere outside of L.A., looking for change or a card or something, it fell through the air, straight from her wallet to the table to my eye. I stared at it and Son Of Sam stared back at me. What had I done? What had I been thinking? Why had I ever left, what had gone wrong? How could I put her through so much when it was clear, well over a year later, that she did, it was true, it wasn’t a lie, there wasn’t a question, she loved me.
As I stared at the movie stub staring back at me, I flashed through the prior five years to the day I pulled up in my Vdub, to her town home on Eutaw Street on the edge of hell. I was dressed up, in a black button down with baggy black non-denim dress pants made only for members of the underworld, a different world and she entered the city through her gate dressed up as well, in a tight black button down, tight black dress pants, thick black sandals, and the toes painted black on those perfect feet, together we knew it was official, this was a date!
Years later at that Johnny Rockets somewhere in our minds we may have known it was destroyed. We may have known that all the applications we filled for apartments were wasted paper, that before I earned the 3 grand as planned to float on my return to California, the relationship would end. But at that moment, and at many moments after, I was filled with regret. I was filled with grief. And I look back always wanting to know how my life would have been different, wondering what is fate, and what is faith, and knowing, under it all, that you can make the wrong decision.

They'll Be Here Till Tuesday (unfinished) 2007

I could title it They’ll be here till Tuesday. But I know I’ll never take the picture of their embroidered towels, Judith, Brad, Allison, hanging over my toilet. As an image it will never fit into a series. Where would I stop if I began? Would I photograph all their stuff, the room they’re sleeping in, them asleep, them awake, all day, in front of the TV? No, I’m not that kind of photographer. I like a catchy image, a photo joke, but not from me.

My friends saw it too, the photo, not as art but as my grief. The grief of having my apartment invaded for what I thought would be two days and three nights, by Ma Black, Pa Black and sister in-law Black. But of course, for my graduation, I got a little something extra, their Thursday arrival, followed by their announcement a day in of their Tuesday departure. What are a few extra days?

But what good did my child-like fit in whispers to my wife do, the same it did aloud over a period of weeks as they manipulated their way into our apartment. If the $230.00 they saved by staying here really did go to our graduation gifts were they really only going to give us $145 smackers each?

The money meant nothing anyway, I was where so many married men find themselves, in defeat. I was defeated long before the argument began, long before they asked if they could stay. As a married man I was defeated the day I thought about getting married. There should be P.S.A.’s made to warn, the gospel should be rewritten to spread the truth. The man is a selfless being the day she says I do. Of course it begins long before that but whatever. And I don’t want to sound spiteful or hateful. I’m just saying the way it is. Many men have said this before, single people laugh, and laugh, and take the warning as seriously as they take mine.

I awoke the other day a wreck. I don’t dream but I did. I dreamt of her. Her ears must have burned so much over the years she doesn’t even notice as her name falls from my quivering lips. I dreamt of C. No relationship since we lived together has gone un- compared to the idealized representation of C. created in my mind. And yesterday it was proven, marriage was no match for her, as I spoke with her dad in my sleep, walked through the moonlit woods with her in my arms and in dream time her clothes seemed to vanish, wearing only a blanket, we spoke of how we could never be together. And I burst into tears feeling sanctity in knowing the amount of my heart that she has taken has been wasted on something we both know won’t ever occur again. But then she said, as I wept furiously on her shoulder, “you won’t get me back doing that anyway” and as fast as the tears stopped and my head jerked up from her shoulder, ready to make my move of reclamation, I awoke, in my apartment packed with in-laws. I lay there wrapped in my blanket hiding from the life that I have, wanting so bad to go back to my dream. Wanting so bad to rewind quickly five or 6 years to never let myself leave her, to rejoin her knowing the weight and regret I would feel if I left her and using that knowledge to cherish her more. I quickly assessed all the things in the world that would be different, had I been able to stay with her, if god would only let me return to her, no loss seemed to matter as I only care to be back in her arms, to admire and idolize her as she deserves.