Outage

You're too much of a good thing,
I said,
And so am I.
When I talk to you, I make it sound like destiny.


I slept on a floor,
In a living room.
Lately the place has gotten
quite dusty, and
given me the incentive to vacuum.

Life got in the way,
but, but, but and but.
I never did, and pulled my
sleeping bag closer to my face
each night.

Fuck it I cried out
on the last day.
I yanked out
the chord and paced the room,
music exploding in my head.

That night I closed
the door on my clean living
room floor bed,
and did not sleep
there. Fuck my life.

Cause Of Death Cited As Steak

Back in early December, I bought four steaks for our annual UCLA-USC football game tailgate. Only three got cooked and eaten. I left the other in an ice chest for the duration of the game, then the subsequent ride home through horrific Pasadena traffic.

It was a friend's ice chest, so the steak wound up in his freezer after God knows how many hours outside. Two nights later I retrieved it from him. By now the marinade, mostly olive oil and salt with some vinegar, had compounded into a white, sticky solid, and was clinging to the sides of the plastic tupperware. Horrified at the sight, I stuck it back into my freezer, where it lay forgotten for eons...

Until a few days ago, when I came back from a trip and found a devastating lack of food in the fridge. So I defrosted that steak, cooked it today, and had the best, juiciest steak that I've ever made for myself (although meat was a little tough, probably from all the freezing).

Still no signs of death, but if it comes, you'll know what did it.

God Is Pulling My Leg Tonight

In all the wrong directions, and using what I love to do it: The New York Times. I'm an optimistic person and deal well with stress. I don't freak out. Maybe I just have two copies of a gene dealing with Seratonin that puts me in the 'low-risk' group for depression.

There's something troubling about writing off this essential part of me, that I take a lot of pride in, as genetic. It says, "hey, you can't take credit for these anymore, someone gave 'em to you and could've easily given you the two genes that put you in the 'high-risk' group for depression.

Of course, changing rails and getting on the religious train, you could say God designed this trait in me, and probably did it for a reason. I should count myself as lucky, maybe anxious to see what comes of it. I'm so jaded with religion that this doesn't make me happy or satisfied, and that's a little upsetting.

People aren't entirely responsible for the things that happen to them, but they are somewhat. Certain genes can make you more likely to get mugged. For example, if someone seeks experience and adventure, they're more likely to walk down seedy streets and encounter a mugger.

So that's me. Suddenly the kid pre-disposed to a lot more things and responsible for a lot less. This is a certain blow to the ego.

Another blow: a strange bump/cyst below my wrist. I've had it for as long as I can remember, but today it started to bother me. I should get it checked.

Band-aid

The cold night air pours in from an adjacent window, and the sound of laughter drifts from behind a closed bedroom door. I resent both. There is very little to laugh about tonight, I am a mess of greasy cheesy Cheez-Its and exactly twenty-four unopened bottles of beer. I am a mess inside, tired, but sleep holds little comfort. It is too soft or too hard, with no middle ground and very few good feelings when I wake up.

The cut running perpendicular to my index finger had all but closed, thanks to the band-aid I had kept on it for several hours and the Neosporin I applied earlier too. It took the band-aid off because it was tight, and ran my fingers through my hair. Instinctively. A thread of hair caught the cut, got underneath it, and goddamn pulled the skin up to re-open the thing. A big drop of blood spread from the newly reddened cut. I watched as the blood drop grew bigger and bigger, a case of interest fed by my own circulatory system. Then I stuck my finger into my mouth, and put another band-aid on my finger. Things have not healed.

How Long Has It Been? 6 Months?

The first time, we rode a pillar of stone into the starry night sky. The air was dirty was smog, but we still thought we could see for miles. The city was ablaze that night with shouts and protest, marches that we would soon join. But that night, we only saw the lights from the helicopters, getting closer and closer, like shooting stars suspended in that moment of time.

But the time passed, and we discovered that time was the enemy all along. Today I looked up at the sky through a narrow slit between two buildings. The sky was clear of starry reflections, just like the patchwork layers of window openings in the buildings on either side. I was a good distance away from her, and I stood and paused in this temporary solitude. The only lights in the sky, two tiny, blinking and dim, were on a propeller plane that had temporarily skimmed beneath the cloud cover. The plane was flying away.

Directions For A Simple And Successful Lifestyle

Take in more Vitamin C. Sleep the requisite number of hours. Keep your surroundings organized. Use a coaster for your beverage. Report any instances of mildew or arsenic. Pay attention to FDA recalls. Maintain good hygiene. Build stable relationships. Conserve as much as you don't need, and remember to turn off the lights when you leave a room.

Listen

Drugs, my dear, are not poison. And if it takes a drug on your plate, folded into your quiche or thrown into your salad, to make you happy, then that's what you'll have!

QuoteRelease

Time and again, he inserts two lovers inside his meticulous compositions, where they reveal passions that by virtue of their excesses remind us of how drained of life the modern world truly is.

I think I'm drained of life. I'm a reputation, I'm a word of mouth, I'm entirely defined by the vocal chords of others, all humming and vibrating and churning the different ranges of tonal sound, all saying around the same words. They are misinformed, and they hum the sweet chords of deception.

That's the most interesting thing to me, is to look around and wonder, who really knows me? Can anyone? People are so guarded, myself among them. Perhaps I, in particular, suffer from this syndrome. I tell people I'm a compulsive liar, when actually I don't think I am. That probably makes me a compulsive liar.

There's a very real comfort in this. You don't have to be anything to other people, and you don't have to commit to anything if you never reveal yourself. You can allow yourself to live in indecision forever, and if you're good enough, you can manage to come off as mysterious, even charming.

Which is all very fun to begin with. The problems start when you really get to know a girl, and spend lots of time with her. What happens, see, is you never get any further than a certain point, because you're not there enough for it to happen. It's like you walk along a sandy beach and all of a sudden find yourself at the edge of a giant cliff, with a blackness just a few steps away. You can't see past it, and you hope there's something beyond it, but really who has the time in this modern life to take that risk?

I can't remember the number of times I've met a girl, hit it off really well, then just sat in this stupor--forever sitting at the edge of the void, with nothing in your pockets.

NotWrite

Straddling that thin line between sanity and a freakout is a bad place to be for writing. You just don't have words in a time like that, and this is mostly thanks to worry. It's when the worry breaks over, you wake up and find the nightmare real all along, and now you're emotionally attached to the upper stretches of shit creek--that's when you write.