Filed under: Uncategorized
“You know man, this just isn’t meant for either of us.”
The pale smoke dragged from his lips as he spoke, his 27 a bright contrast against the foggy ethos that was Fisherman’s Wharf on this particular Saturday. My friend is hard to describe: sort-of Dylan-esque, depending on the day, with a shock of brown hair and seemingly permanent five-o-clock shadow. Usually dressed in Salvation Army’s finest, and today was no exception: a linen, frayed blazer over a cornwall-blue button up that someone may or may not have died in. He looks tragic; he didn’t always.
Usually, he doesn’t wait for any kind of pregnant pause, or any other pleasantries in conversation, but today he seems tired, and lets the last syllable drag off in a cloud of smoke, gliding in peals from the corners of his mouth. He twists a vagrant curl of hair and pulls a pained face before extrapolating: “We just can’t stay around here. This whole place”– at this he gestures vaguely back across the bridge, through the narrow hills beyond which we both reside– “it kills your soul. We need to be places where people are really people, man, not just this geriatric bullshit.” At this, he spat.
Sitting there on that cold bench, I knew all too well what he meant. I flicked idly at a seagull as it made a lunge for one of my bright orange shoelaces. I hated that skin-crawly feeling I got every time I piloted my hulking wreckage of a car back from my apartment into Marin county. It was always hard to explain, sort of like the feeling when you’re sure you’re being watched; hackles raised, looking subtly in every mirror, I would careen time after time into my hometown, with a lurking terror rising with every clockwork heartbeat in my chest. To hear him express this feeling, too, was at once highly relieving and disturbing.
“I mean, really,” He said indignantly, tossing the burnt filter from his right hand into the gutter and standing suddenly. “We’re too young to be as cynical as we are now. I can’t even go home, because my family has the emotional strength of a five year old right now. This is fucked, man. We need to get hell and gone from here.”
Suddenly, he yells. Nothing distinguishable, but an anguished, timeless cry, one that you could identify only upon its utterance. Mist seems to pour from his mouth as he bellows into the salty breeze, emphasizing the ghoulishness of his actions. The street is empty, except for some seagulls pulling a half eaten happy meal from an art deco garbage can. Exhausted, he sits. “Fuck, man,” he rasps, pulling a fresh cigarette from his breast pocket and lighting it with a banged up Bic.
Filed under: Uncategorized
At once, I watched my world come crashing down around me. Hung over, I awoke with the sticky movements of one who can remember, in sharp clarity, the spinning, drunken antics of the night before. Walking slowly to the bathroom, I scraped lazily at the stubble on my chin, and through greasy, beer-spattered glasses, vaguely sighed at my reflection.
Peed. Returned to the couch, where everyone was sleeping in a tangled pile, and remembered vagaries still danced like spectres in the wavering light coming from the ambling shades. My phone. Cold. Vibrating merrily on my bare leg.
The barefoot dance to the porch. Painful, still hazy. Nearly drunk. Rubbing fruitlessly for a while at the “Slide to unlock”, I realize that I’m sliding the wrong way, and finally answer. The voice on the other line is the same voice that I imagine calling to tell you that they’re very sorry that you have newly discovered cancer, honey dripping from every syllable like fluid from an IV. Don’t remember the beginning of the conversation well, just name, rank, image. 20-something female, probably curly haired, the cutesy, lookatme-allgrownup type. Probably drives a Volkswagen, if you get my meaning. Unfortunately, miss-twentysomething must inform me that someone, somewhere, doesn’t think I have enough experience to live abroad, thereby live, this coming year, but that I should try again the next year, because I sound like a prime candidate. Anything I can do about it? Nope, they’ve “tried hard to think of a reason for me to go, but golly, they just couldn’t think of anything.” That’s fine, I choke somehow. Have a nice day. Head now practically awash in a sea of alcohol and epic failure, I lean back against the wall of my dirty porch, and watch the cold sun rising over the jagged redwood teeth lining our complex.
The rest of that day was a miserable blur, a cigarette burning quickly towards the filter of another drunken evening. Don’t want to talk: just crack a beer, light a fire in the pit in my backyard, and wait for night to fall. Sleep, a welcome reprieve from a still beer-soaked, slowly turning world. The next couple of days even are fuzzy now. Lots of tragic thought, with even more brutally painful music. Lots of blastbeats, in high volume, at high volume.
And then, sudddenly and without warning, I changed. I metamorphosed into something altogether new and terrible. I no longer mourned the death of the life I’d planned, a year of bliss and knowledge away from the itching monotony that had become my everyday life. Not that I really had much to complain about, but then again, it’s hard not to complain when the work of an entire year is instantly and unceremoniously thrown down the garbage disposal. This new thing, this hard, black mask that was now my face: it hurt. The people around me suddenly knew it: this mask was after me. It poked holes in my face with it’s obsidian fingers, mocked my soul with a lashing tongue. My only two reprieves were my music, and my computer, or when that died, the small moleskine I had taken to carrying, it’s pages now stained with words of anger and estrangement. Every moment spent awake was under this mask, a leering grin plastered ivory over the supposed mouth, the eyes red rings over hollow craters. Only when I fell asleep did I feel relaxed, and even then, I’d have dreams that meant to bring me pain, or make me think of what could’ve been.
So the time, as I begin to write this, is 12:34. Ironically, I can think of several people I know who would tell me to make a wish, or at least would smile suggestively at this particular time. Every time besides this one, I have struggled to think of something to wish for. Thus far, my life has seemed pretty damn good, and honestly, when it comes to wishing, I can never think of anything to really want or need that is either a) realistic, or b) not ridiculous, like a narwhal. But tonight, I know exactly what I want. Ready? Here goes:
I want to change. By that, I mean I want to stop feeling so strung out all the time. It’s not like my life is hard, really. It’s like I overreact these days to small shit, because of the utter lack of large things to react to. I just want to not panic, in the words of Douglas Adams. I want to be able to be like Ford Prefect; I want to live with the realization that there are many things to enjoy and experience in life, and while there are also those which will bother you and try hard to make you feel bad, they really aren’t as important as all that.
I feel like that’s something I’ve lost a little in the transition from youth to adulthood, and I could use a little more of these days.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Looking back on it, Philip came to realize that that entire month leading up to the leg incident had been nothing special, if not dismal. Up until the three days before he woke up on his lawn, in fact, he had wanted nothing more than the just live out his days doing fairly little, solitary and quiet in his 3 room house in Pacifica, the front yard surprisingly well-kept considering he did nothing to keep it up. His life was, without being sad, empty. He had no love, and didn’t look. His waking days were spent working in a decrepit independent film theatre in the Tenderloin district, and his nights were spent at the bar or alone at home, selling drugs occasionally when times were tight, but mostly just carrying on as best he could– which, as it turned out, didn’t involve too much action. Rather than feeling a void, however, until recently Philip hadn’t worried himself with what could be: after all, what could be didn’t matter, only what was, and what was was just fine by him. He didn’t have any hobbies or pets, but he did enjoy occasionally driving to Fort Baker right before sunset, when the breakers from the bay would come crashing into the rocks, splintering and spraying all over the tourists and other sightseers drawn to it’s destructive beauty.
His co-workers at the theatre, as it turned out, were much on the same page as he was. Many were dropouts and other bohemians who, rather than pursue a career, prefered to smoke weed, doodle, and talk about how they loved the horrible state of things in demure tones. His boss, an alcoholic, didn’t tend to be around very often, even when things went wrong. Then again, the theatre’s patronage, a steady torrent of around 5 or six senior citizens nightly, didn’t cause too much of a scene, except once when one, a tottery old man named Clarence, toppled headfirst from a fire escape into the arms of a crack-addled hobo. Needless to say, the action was short-lived, leaving the hobo bruised and deranged and poor Clarence with a brain hemhorrage, but it was enough to be writ as history within the walls of the ancient building. The building itself seemed, much like both its patrons and its employees, to be going absolutely nowhere. Dubbed “The Tree of Life” by one hippie or another in the late 60′s, it’s art-deco interior was in bad shape, and the architect who designed it must’ve had only one leg, because from the outside the entire building seemed to totter precariously on the edge of the cracked sidewalk. The locals hung around under its many eaves when it rained, smoking cigarettes and looking from side to side as if expecting some sort of attack, but never ventured into the building it seemed, not that any of the employees minded, or blamed them.
Philip Black awoke this particular morning as many of his generation did: on his front lawn. This was not entirely peculiar, as he vaguely remembered falling from his car– also parked on the lawn, door open, interior lights now dead– and onto the grass with vodka on his breath and blood on his forehead. This was all accounted for, and Philip woke, wiping dirt from his face as he went, with a sardonic smile. Still reeling from what he could only assume had been a fun night, he rolled onto his back and attempted to get his bearings. The now-cracked luminescent face of his cheap Casio wrist watch struggled to read “5:30 AM” through the tangled spiderweb of cracks, acid green on its otherwise smooth surface. Yep, thought Philip, this all makes sense to me. I know how I got here: by car. I know what I must’ve been doing until just now: drinking to die. It all adds up. Not even the least bit peculiar. The morning itself, he noticed, wasn’t anything truly spectacular; the San Francisco skyline, usually a glowing, monolithic wonder in the fog-addled sunrise, was more low lit and unbecoming than usual, which was nice, since bright light was something, Philip thought, that almost never helps with a hangover.
The sudden onset of the spins caused Philip to groan and, grasping his forehead with one hand, he rolled back onto his face, letting his other hand swing limply in a slow arc, coming to rest squarely on the calf of someone else’s leg. This leg was nearly bare, except for the thin, figure-tracing diamonds of acid green fishnet stocking that adorned it. Decidedly, the leg was not his own.
Needless to say, it took Philip in all his euphoric incapacity a couple of minutes to fully grasp what had just happened. Still perplexed and face down in the muddy tire tracks that now constituted his front lawn, he addressed the leg as best he could from his position, murmuring slurredly into the lawn, “Whose leg are you?” No reply, he thought, as is customary for a leg. Having given up on speech, he groped around for a second leg, perhaps one that would speak back. Venturing up from the calf to the thigh, however, he found that the leg ended in a brutal stump where it should have met it’s owner’s hips.
I’m currently sitting in a Tully’s in Seattle, right off the University of Washington campus. The beautiful things about Seattle:
1. People in shops are incredibly nice, so much so that I find myself wondering who might rob me while they are distracting me with their niceties.
2. There is a coffee shop for everyone. Literally. There is one around every corner, inside every store, restaurant, library, head shop, bike store: The on-campus library is not only beautiful, but is the library “slash espresso bar.” The fact that I’m sitting in a Tully’s seems almost unreal.
3. U-Dub is gorgeous. The entire campus feels, stereotypically, like a college: Gothic buildings, Anti-Israeli-Palestinian Conflict protests, trees with brown leaves newly fallen, fields that look perfectly made for frisbee and hacky-sack… the list goes on. Not only that, but it has a sense of humor: there is an alligator head in the fountain that follows you where you walk, and most of the campus edifices (the flock of crows in the library that carry letters in their mouths, the modern art in front of the law library) have either little metaphorical purpose, or their reason is entirely unknown to their student populace. The squirrels are batshit crazy, too.
4. Public transportation that runs on a timely schedule. The buses are nice, too, as well as their drivers.
5. The people are colorful. All a little nerdier looking than your average Nor-Californian, but most happier-looking, despite the fog.
6. They post the BAC limit (.08%) as a speed limit sign near the UWA campus, with a foreboding tow-truck sign below it.
7. BIKERS ARE EVERYWHERE. It’s not the exception, its the rule.
8. People are carrying musical instruments on the street. Bums are okay. Downtown looks like Berkeley’s telegraph, just a little less stoned.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I thought I would post a link to a lot of the art and artists I love. Though the list is not nearly complete, I thought I’d start with these:
1. Spider Murphy’s Tattoo
Though only a tattoo parlor, the artists within are golden. Located in San Rafael, CA, the shop keeps 5 or 6 extremely talented artists who specialize in “old-school” and sailor-jerry-esque art, as well as oriental and tribal designs. Check out their art below (some of my favorite stuff is by Theo Mindell.)
http://spidermurphystattoo.com/
2. Obey Propaganda
For years, and since I was a kid, I’ve seen Shepard Fairey’s art, and wished I could do it. The distribution, similar to Zoltron and Banksy-style graffiti, is somehow more refined, and Fairey himself gained serious PR recently with his design of the famed Obama “We can do it” sticker. Definitely worth seeing, if you haven’t already.
http://obeygiant.com/
3. Drew Brophy/Son of the Sea
Known for trippy designs and vivid color in association with wave art and pop culture, Brophy has been making amazing art for years, starting as a design creator for …Lost Surf Co. Beautiful, and inspiring, both for surf and art.
http://www.drewbrophy.com/
http://www.lostenterprises.com/prod/drew.php
More to come.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I get serious Haptodysphoria. Those of you who know me best know that I grate my teeth around cotton balls, and can get largely uncomfortable when even thinking about it. I just stumbled upon the definition of this wonderful word:
“It relates to the uncomfortable sensation one gets when touching soft things, like cotton balls or peach fuzz. I just love that a word exists for such a feeling; also, I often experience haptodysphoria, and it’s nice to have a word to describe it.
ajb
Bryn Mawr”
Thank you, oh patriarch of the internet.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“Hello world!” seems like an ideal opening to my crippled, washed out return to the blogosphere.
So hello! I’ve found previous to this that I am not very good at blogging, but as the new year rolls around, I am going to try my hardest to apply my loves of photography, writing, and all things humorous or bizarre to this cyber-parchment. Here’s the beginning!
Mutts
