the voodoo that you do so well

i am wiped out.  5 days in new york is a whirlwind experience.  especially when things like swizzels and pickle backs are involved.  good lord.  my liver must hate me...  but my diary sure loves me.  ;)  there are tons of things i will write about but i think they're better off confined to the nebulous curves of poetry and prose than a blog post.  at least for now. besides, i'm still trying to re-acclimate to being home.  this time around, i was actually ready to come back to oakland.  i wanted my own bed and my friends and my music.  i wanted more than two pairs of pants and two tshirts.   i wanted to sit for a minute and write.  i really have gotten to a place where if i go for more than a day or two without writing i begin to feel very anxious, very displaced.  i need the slip of ink to reel me back in to the Here and Now.  words hold me in place.  they hold me together.  it isn't enough to take pictures.  i need a deeper sort of record.  i need a place where i can roll around with my experiences.  i need the license of poetry, the lens of art and romance, the flex and freedom of language itself.  on my last night in new york i finally got to sit and write for a beautiful hour and a half inside a diner in the Bowery.  i had fish and chips and a pina colada for dinner but ordering food was really just a smoke screen for claiming a warm place to scribble.  it was so cold that night.  the air was frozen and it shot right through the front of my jeans to sting my thighs horribly.  i am not used to a little thing known as the wind-chill factor.  california doesn't have that shit.  not even close.  and that shit is real.  not just real, but really ridiculous.  it can basically make an otherwise pleasant evening feel like the 7th circle of hell.  several new yorkers laughed at me for my reaction to the cold.  apparently, it was warm there for this time of year.  hooooollllly moley!    it doesn't necessarily curb my desire to live there though, i'll just need a better wardrobe.  my leather jacket wasn't the best foil to such weather.  i was ill-prepared at best.  my return trip did work to cure me of my love-sickness for New York though and i am thankful for that.  i was so heart broken after coming home last time.  this time, i cruised the streets less frantically and with far less need to hunt down a reckoning.  i felt at ease this time.  i knew that i could come back and would come back.  i knew that it isn't as hard as people make it seem.  an inexplicable thing happened:  i ran in to a girl i went to art-school with in this tiny tiki bar called Otto's Shrunken Head in the Lower East Side.  she moved to Brooklyn a year ago and just so happened to shoot over to the city that night.  i walked in the bar and heard someone call my name and it wasn't my friend anne.  fucking wild!  she and i had studios right across the hall from each other in school!  small weird world!  and anne and i had just been stumbling around directionless in Brooklyn earlier than day!  we watched a musical tribute to Queen and drank pina coladas and ate voodoo chips at the bar.  in fact, it was these particular pina coladas that got me to order a pina colada at the diner in the Bowery.  i haven't had one in years but something about the chill in the air and being with a great friend in New York City and feeling completely at rest, completely free and festive made ordering such a drink make perfect sense.  as a child i used to always order virgin pina coladas whenever my family would go out to a restaurant for dinner.  it wasn't that often so the drink seemed so special to me.  it felt right to revisit that feeling in New York.

 pina coladas

 voodoo chips

drunken bathroom portrait photography

i want to fuck your brains out

circles of water on the floor next to the bed.  my glass gladly cries as i listen to the song in the post below:

my sweating Greyhound. 

i haven't been home in three days.  off on some sort of adventure through suburbia.  these things come out of nowhere and who am i to say NO?

unexpected and totally welcome, i didn't have these adventures when i lived in a suburb.  i was wound up way too tight for that.  or maybe i had snooty standards?  or maybe i just had the correct reading on life in the suburbs and knew those aristocrats cannot be trusted.  i mean no offense, y'all just believe in too false a God.  i must breathe more honestly than what your picket fences allow.  i'm grown enough to know that human beings are a strange, strange species and there are no easy explanations for anything.  we are (i am) driven by a need to find some sort of comfort after enduring such a steep and horriffic sadness...  and we tend to find said comfort in the glass confines of an illicit bottle if denied the soft mouth of another.  and so, i learned the hard way, again, that drinking an entire bottle of Korbel bought from a Wallgreens at 1:45am will, if drunk by a single individual (me) (even if over the course of several hours), result in such a tormented stomach that the act of eating itself becomes the most torturous experience there is... even days later.  the only sparkling wine one should drink should be the real thing: champagne.  at least then the resulting horror story might possess an air of romance (though, if i may remind you, i am never without romance.  i am a romantic human being and i know how to create romance wherever i go.  if you are ever in doubt as to how one accomplishes romance i have two words for you: back scratch.  simply scratch the back of whomever you are with, especially if it is a friend, and you have abolished all trashiness from the current situation.  trust. ).  and so tonight, on a ravaged stomach, i made myself a Szechuan dinner and it was the first thing i've really eaten in days   ( ...should i really be telling you this?).

still, we breathed at each other's mouths.  we panted at the open wish. we stared at each other, point blank, and he asked me if i was an atheist.  i said i didn't know.  i confessed to him that i had once been thoroughly convinced that there was a God (for my entire life) but, when watching my mother die, He died as well, right before my eyes.  he ate a bag of chocolate malt balls and i listened to his ideas about humanity.  as i poured another damned glass of Korbel we discussed mortality and i pulled the shoes and socks off his feet.  we sat across from each other in deep hotel armchairs and i massaged his feet like a Christ.

i loved listening to him.  he had such a slow, lovely southern drawl.

these are the strange rooms i sometimes am lucky enough to stumble in to.  i am granted the honor and pleasure of witnessing the humanity of another.  i learn.  and then i come home and pull off my worn clothes, i listen to The Smashing Pumpkins and think of a bed in New York, blues guitar and the delirious dreams that followed on the echo of those plucked strings... 

and i am left wondering what the hell the world is trying to teach me.