May 2012
1 post
1 tag
Slogging through
From chapter 2 of Billy Budd:
“And here it be submitted that, apparently going to corraborate the doctrine of man’s fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to...
April 2012
1 post
2 tags
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable...”
– - Raymond Chandler
March 2012
1 post
1 tag
Closure
I dropped everything I carried and stood, gazing up at 1307 Whippoorwill Road. There were fifteen more years on it, fifteen stubborn and remorseful years, a sodden two-story mobbed by tall grasses and lived in only by small animals. The country was always wet around here, and the house hadn’t aged well.
I didn’t need the city’s yellow Unsafe sign to tell me our family...
February 2012
1 post
1 tag
Nemesis
“Ugh, Charlie, can you kill that?” Annette points at the corner halfway up the wall.
“Leave it alone, Annette. Probably a wolf spider. They help keep the house pest-free. They don’t hurt any.” He bobs the packet of tea up and down in his cup, trying to pull strength from it into the hot water. She always wants him to kill spiders.
“Doesn’t look like...
December 2011
3 posts
Anonymous asked: What is your favorite place to eat mexican food?
1 tag
2 tags
Things to Read
My brain still performs a melodramatic little swoon (replete with arm draped over brow and Victorian-era couch in readiness underneath) when faced with the idea that someone, somewhere, chose something I wrote out of a collection of others. It gives me hope that I’ll get more words between the covers of a book, like in Bianca’s hoodie pocket above.
(Do those books have my words in...
August 2011
1 post
2 tags
Displaced
I am scheduled to have two wisdom teeth evicted tomorrow, by force, and am feeling apprehensive about it.
More than apprehensive. Such a procedure typically uses general anesthesia, which is a fairly common thing to be phobic about, but which I have never in my adult life experienced.
A secret truth about this shell I inhabit: I have a poor memory, and an abject fear of memory loss. This is...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
March 2011
2 posts
2 tags
2 tags
February 2011
1 post
1 tag
Oak
The oak tree probably doesn’t need me at all; it’s been there for generations. But it’s alone on this plateau, and it’s special. I’ve watered it every few days, laboring under this arid sun with a sloshing bucket in my hands. Today’s the last day. Sam Conrad’s come back to Rainbow Gulch, and Sam Conrad needs to die.
I straighten up and wince....
January 2011
1 post
1 tag
One Sentence
From Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s “Children of the Sky”:
During the day the mud on their bodies dries and flakes off but leaves a residue of grime on their skin like a darkening mold that might not ever be expunged, just as their own destiny on the streets, which fate has forged, cannot be changed even if they bathe one hundred times a day in the slowly moving river whose dark...
December 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Optics
I haven’t been myself, not really, not since my eyes shorted out. The first time they went on the fritz, anyway. That was the big issue with those early versions, the Infralites and the Windsor Ultra-Hue v20s. They tended to surge when they got wet or when you walked into a high-rad area, and your eye sockets started to smoke.
Hurt? Hell, yeah, it hurts. Feels like someone’s...
1 tag
Other Ghosts
Life is in layers. Death, too.
This is why ghosts appear behind you, or before you, in the mirror, against the far wall where handprints glow.
(Filmmakers understand this.)
Ghosts do not manifest by your side, do not walk next to you. They cannot.
Worlds can be slid into sideways, in fact must be; life and death must be entered, or exited. A threshold is not a threshold if you can pass...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
Xmas Musak and the Urge to Kick Puppies
So upon wrestling with the local laundromat that plays KOST-FM’s seasonal barrage, and then having my errand-filled day completely aborted by the trafficked and chaotic presence of the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which raised street barriers all the way down to Santa Monica, I was feeling particularly sour. The holidays have come banging on our collective doors with unhealthy fervor this...
October 2010
2 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Function
Life was not okay, but it was dormant for now. Mark could move in the world without feeling guilty, without judgment by his peers and his betters. He was the type of young man who lived his life as if on a breaking ice shelf, leaping from floe to floe, afraid to slide into the icy deeps of the world and its responsibilities. He had just given up a lifestyle, left a world behind.
...
August 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Anonymous asked: Plumber's Apprentice????
2 tags
Sitting outside the Thrifty Wash on Hyperion
I look up from reading while colors tumble.
Hundreds of birds wheel in dozens of directions, in front of the daytime waxing moon.
It has an eerie chaos, such that Frazetta might have painted it.
With extra serpentine coils to menace womanly flesh in the foreground.
2 tags
2 tags
Broken into little therapeutic shards
I haven’t been creative much lately. Poke my head in, shake it to clear my day, grimace, and exit without commentary.
I haven’t written, I haven’t sat and thought. I have been tired, and sickly, and in pain.
Partly this is due to my working schedule, which can be busy and long and spasmic and unpredictable, and I have a good/bad habit of keeping my email open long after I...
July 2010
10 posts
Anonymous asked: Why Polarbeast?
1 tag
All our icons are leaving us
Since we’ve lived here, Silver Lake has wrestled with a balance between its mythical, paradisaical art-colony vibe and a swelling hipster gentrification.
And all the while we’ve watched the things dear to us perish. Our neighbor across the street, the elderly, Peter O’Toolesque Mike, passed a few years ago, doubtless followed by Spike, his comfortably rotund pug. Bingo the...
2 tags
Barbering
Some few places provide me an instant, smiling serenity when I walk into them. A reputable cigar shop with a well-maintained humidor. A certain unpretentious local Sicilian restaurant with Americanized red sauce and a scent of childhood. A thumping, uninhibited goth-industrial dancefloor. Hidden alcoves in Los Angeles where black silhouettes of palm trees are attractively marred by power lines.
...
2 tags
Tropical Los Angeles
A warm morning swells upward from sleep, blinking and sticky.
Thinking itself in the monsoon season, it rains, sideways, for a handful of minutes.
It stops, confused.
Birds take up a cautious song.
The dryer upstairs snaps and clanks in its busy way.
Anonymous asked: How can any self-respecting bibliophile leave a cigar to die unfinished? Is this not blasphemy?
1 tag
A Letter of Resignation from an Apprentice
Dear Great and Worshipful Master Martin Greenbones,
It is with some regret that I must tender my resignation as your apprentice. While I realize that I signed on for a goodly number of years, and I am thankful for the scraps of knowledge that have fallen into my hands, I feel it is best to take my leave of you now before something even worse happens. I feel that I am simply not cut out...
Anonymous asked: If I was an alien, would I choose you to take back to my planet?
2 tags
1 tag
“A man’s age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached...”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944 (translated from French by Norah Purcell)
1 tag
Half-Empty
With a dreamy sort of inspiration I decided to create a new blog, one that doesn’t try to find new ways to say “decadent” and “tasty”. This is meant to be a dumping ground of me, whenever I’m electrified by or irritated with something. I’m supposed to grow, here.
And I keep running into the nothing-to-say wall. Nothing to Tweet. No status to update. No...
June 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Father's Day
Bianca and I visited Dad today, or at least where his name is stamped on the ground.
She had the excellent idea of bringing along a miniature bottle of gin, which I sprinkled over the grass although one probably isn’t supposed to. It was Beefeater, not Tanqueray, but our thoughts were good.
We stood a while, thinking and squinting in the sun.
There’s a lot we never discussed.
...
1 tag
Mental Stumbling
I see the usual strip of customizing icons, the fields, the broad expanse of waiting.
I’ll begin the shoveling process eventually, but I think it’s a good thing.
I need to pick a direction. Actually, no. The direction is meaningless unless movement is established.
So, hello, rabbit hole.