BAKERSFIELD, CA-

A few months ago I took photos of a fire engine and ambulance outside of the Centre for Neuro Skills live-in facility in southwest Bakersfield. I wondered, What’s going on here? Did one of the staff members finally get severely injured or killed?

Maybe the powder keg had gone off. Maybe one of their clients was hurt? (They don’t call them patients). I didn’t call. There were no reports from emergency services or from other media outlets. Deep down I really didn’t want to know.

The head-injured walk in a fog, literally. I often see the facility’s rehabilitation assistants walking with clients down Gosford Road, or along the tranquil park adjacent to the facility. The clients don’t often get very far, though a few have been known to run down the street, evading their caretakers. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

El Camino. 1984. V8 engine. 350. I never had one and I still don’t. But my just-graduated-son Landen gave me and a six-year-old punk girl named Jai Ann our first El Camino joyride. Destination: McDonald’s.

VIDEO: El Camino Cruisin’

It goes like this: We hit Gosford Road and flew like the Furies were chasing us. Clouds rolled past. Time slowed. This was our video game. Pull out the joystick. Hit the fire button. Blast some asteroids. Jump like Frogger. Fly like the Pacman family. Donkey Kong it. You get the picture. Soaring Xervious adventure. This was old school. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s summer. You’re lazing on the patio and you’re ready to escape to another world. But you haven’t gone to the bookstore for your summer reads. In fact, you’re not even sure what to buy. You just know your mind needs to take you really far away. Don’t worry, your summer reading list has arrived:

Action-Adventure: Back in the 1970s, reading “Jaws” (or watching the movie) kept your grandpa out of the water and in a paranoid fit. Look no further, the fourth installment of Steve Alten’s MEG series was recently released. We’re talking 76-foot sharks and a lost world of monsters tucked away beneath ocean plates. Turn on the grill but make someone else cook. “MEG: Hell’s Aquarium” is an addictive heart thumper. When I asked Alten to describe his book in a short sentence, he said: “The most frightening sea monsters in history…are no longer history.” Yikes. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Get your iPod. What if you could take a collection of memories, weird and otherwise, and put them on your device? Then people could scroll through and play them back at their leisure. Would some play in loop mode?

Nick Belardes iPod Memory List:

Child screams for a purple balloon. As mom drives at 45 mph a purple balloon flies into car.

Driving through parking lot a bird flies in a car window and gets tangled in woman’s hair.

Downtown Las Vegas midget Charlie Chaplain twirls his cane while an Elvis impersonator slams on his brakes, nearly running over a hapless pedestrian. (more…)

People have been wanting a place where they can go to read the Twitter novel “Small Places” without clicking through the reverse order on its Twitter page site. Right away, this post is for “Small Places” readers and new fans, and people who want to discuss literary innovation, because here, they will get 14 chapters (of the 25 posted), and a whopping 358 tweets of the nearly 600 posted.

But first, what is a Twitter novel?

A Twitter novel is sent out in verses. Twitter is a social networking micro-blogging site tied to cell phone technology (140 characters or less per entry). That means people can receive updates on their cell phones, thus making ”Small Places” a mobile phone book. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

She was a head-injured quadraplegic at a nursing home. I took care of her sometimes. The other assistants who cared for her brought her Playgirl magazines. They’d open them up to a photo of some guy’s package, which brought a big smile to her contorting face. A former Cal Trans road worker, she had been smashed by some kind of vehicle. She couldn’t talk, only smile. She couldn’t eat except through a tube that dangled from her side. But she loved porn. You could see it in her eyes. I had to turn her constantly to keep the sores off her body. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I don’t know what happened. I could be one of those people who black out, who say things in moments where there’s no clarity, no real consciousness, just daydreaming –  starwalking in silent dreams during schoolyard bells.

The bus dropped me off near Geneva Avenue — that’s on the southside of Bakersfield. It was a poor blue collar street with stray dogs, tumbleweeds and the shitty kids I grew up with.

Walking home, I remember a short Asian-Mexican boy with a cleft palate. His face always looked angry, distorted. He had a mouth like a pumpkin scar. He was in the group of kids following me, encouraging the boy at the front of the pack to get me. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

Nearly 1,000 miles from home, it was just us and the two Norwegians in their blue pick-up. We took a road out of Santa Rosa that headed away from the red-banded hills near town and into the Chihuahua Desert. I felt a sense of wonder and satisfaction as the truck flew down the highway on what seemed an adventure never before undertaken—deeper into the New Mexican desert than anyone could ever venture. Not even Coronado’s tears could penetrate this place. Far away we drove to a moonscape, a desertscape, under a red glow of sun and blue wisp of desert day. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

There’s a Star Wars kite that flies through my imagination. It fights a plastic parrot kite over a lonely section of the city. Cars zoom past and we all ignore them. The kites dart and dodge. They batter one another. They’re  not really even there. But I can open the front door of my apartment and see them flying across the apartment tops in a pool of blue sky. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I’ve been working on this book, “Random Obsessions” and it has me creeped out.

Mothman and bizarre West Virginia tales of glowing red eyes and giant winged 1966 Horus-headed birdmen. An interview with someone in Hell Town, Ohio talks escaped 1944 Peninsula python, mutant men and an Indian mound cemetery hill of crystal skull energy. An anonymous source relays a story with an old woman on the Fiji island of Rotuma. Is it true? Are the Cannibal Islands still picking the flesh off their enemies with forks that look like bug mandibles? (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I didn’t know there were going to be robots.

I stood on top of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I had just sat in a red metal pod with Brenda Knight. “There’s going to be pods,” she said. She was right. There was also a swimming pool. A girl slipped into it, glided through the water. Buildings crowded all around. The U.S. Bank Tower with its thousand lit windows looked like it could grow feet, step over the Standard and run into the ocean. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

“Write about each other,” I say. I’m not sure Erika was listening. She got fixated on some strange Colorado party where the local book club dresses up like characters from novels. She’s some slinky sex kitten out of a D.H. Lawrence book. Why not? She was chased by a giant moth on some Chinese beach. That’s sort of D.H. Lawrence-ish. Maybe not. We debated the moth sighting for half an hour. I Googled to no end. I didn’t even know there were giant moths on planet Earth. But she’d nearly touched one.

I think she was having a Peter Pan dream. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The glue was pink. Barrels of thick pink glue.

Pink liquid poured through tubes, was sucked into basins where rollers whipped through them, coating pads. The rollers spun like little worlds on their axis. The pads, if you used your imagination just right, were shaped like continents and dripped with pink goo.

As each piece of paperboard shot through the rollers, pads would leave their marks. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I’m wondering if writers in my Generation X age group who contribute their talents to various sites and newspapers, and yet don’t feel like they’re a part of a literary movement, might feel a kinship to this particular piece that I have never shared publicly until now. The Dead Generation is an excerpt from chapter 9 of Citrus Girl, about a third of that chapter, and was written sometime between 1996 and 1998. Could all be drivel. It’s up to you to decide…

It’s 1996 and I’m thinking about Malcolm Cowley, one of the ‘lost’. There he was back in America and in the early 1930s writing of ‘mansions in the air’ and ‘blue juniata’, you know, contemplating future generations. Because back in America he realized an entire lost generation would eventually come back home to the cities, hillsides, countrysides to where innocence escaped them, to where in America, “somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood.” Those literary enclaves—the lost generation—the beat generation—any generation, generations inspiring non-writers and non-literary minded to become just as lost, or just as beat. After a while someone probably said, “You don’t have to be a beat writer or bop musician, or to have known any of the famous beats to be one” —and soon a generation having already took root, expanded, appeared in pop culture, subculture, counterculture, mainstream culture until all they had to do was just look like a beatnik, act like what they thought was a beatnik…

And now today’s dead generation—lost, but never forever lost and never completely forgotten—where are their slacker rebel origins? (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The bus rolled out of Bakersfield and went straight to Los Angeles. We crept out of the Central Valley, past cornfields and vineyards. Alfalfa lands sprouted purple wildflowers. An ascent into the Los Padres and over the San Andreas Fault meant an eventual descent with the bus like a rocket onto L.A.’s dirty streets. The grimy Greyhound station was in neighborhoods covered with graffiti and barbed wire. I expected smoke stacks on a cutting horizon, glowing neon “Blade Runner” umbrellas held by half-Chinamen and steam-faced cyperpunks in leather and make-up. This was 1998. No 1999 party yet. No new Millennium glitter. Just the excitement of the L.A. bus station, its high interior walls, addicts, travelers, pickpockets and lost souls. We were in a reality that steps over sad-faced women huddled around piles of clothing and bums sleeping on benches covered with the L.A. Times. (more…)