LAS VEGAS, NV-

The Girls of Bromidrosis

The first night I arrived in Vegas I ate fried-chicken and drank beer. Under normal circumstances this is not a good combination. Hell, it doesn’t even sound good. Fried-chicken and beer. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I had just arrived home after living over three years in the South where nothing - and hardly anyone - made sense to me.

So, I wasn’t looking for harmony. I was looking to gorge myself and get drunk.

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DENVER, CO-

Rejection letters are always a drag; whether they are negative responses from job opportunities, university admissions boards or literary journals. However, there is nothing quite as spirit-crushing as a rejection letter received after submitting a poem. A short-story rejection slip is depressing, but not devastating. You manufacture a story in your head, create some characters and make them talk. Fine. So you didn’t like my characters. Their dialogue is unrealistic. Their motives are questionable. Fine. They aren’t me. But a rejection letter from a poem is, for me, the equivalent of standing out on a street corner naked and having passers-by hand you terse little notes reading, “Your penis is unconvincing,” or “You call those nipples?” or maybe, “You have an affected buttocks.” And that kind of stuff just breaks my heart. You pour it all into a poem: your skeleton, your bile, your oozing primordial remnant—your private parts. To be told that the fundamental you is not up to snuff—that’s hard murder.

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SARASOTA, FL-

When I first heard the words “bipolar,” I figured the shrink thought I lived on the North and South Poles. That may sound like bullshit, but I also wonder whether there really is any such thing as bipolar, except in the most obvious cases (you wake up and dress like Hitler, making speeches in town square, which no longer exists).

I just don’t know. Rapid cycling? I don’t ride a bicycle.  Doesn’t everybody have rapid mood changes?  Listenting to grocery story music can send me into a mini-depression during the length of one Elton John song. Sorry has to be the hardest word? No, “You’re a billionaire with the world’s worst wig” is not a word, but it’s much sorrier, and to pare it down to the analogy, I’m sure “wig” would do the trick for you. (more…)

LOS ANGELES-

Last night my wife and I went out and had drinks with Lenore Zion and Rich Ferguson. We were at this place called Bird’s, on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, right across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Centre. It was me, my wife, Rich, Lenore, and Lenore’s sex buddy, Jason. That’s what she called him, anyway. I think she was kidding. She has a boyfriend right now, and it isn’t Jason. This new boyfriend, apparently he doesn’t brush his teeth before bed, and he leaves turds in Lenore’s toilet. He flushes once but has a tendency to leave remnants, she told us. They haven’t been dating for long. Lenore was like, “He’s a total misogynist, but he’s a really nice guy.” And Jason was telling us how when he first moved to LA he almost took a job at a nude housecleaning service.

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MADRID, SPAIN-

She is standing on the sidewalk, three floors below me, holding a plastic bucket over her head. We use the bucket for the mop—we clean, sometimes. No cleaning now. I sit out on the balcony, three floors above her, smoking, shaking hands, laughing nervously at a joke in Spanish I don’t understand. They tell the joke in English, I understand even less. Some joke about a priest. I look over the balcony and try to aim the best I can—don’t want any wine to spill on her, or miss the bucket. I upend the glasses of wine over the edge of the balcony to the awaiting girl and the awaiting bucket below. He sure drinks a lot of wine, they’re saying. And I do. For every glass I empty, some going in the bucket, some going on the street, much going on her head, I drink one. “This is one really special night. Hector is going to really shine at Stanford. Thanks to you,” they say. “No, no. He did it all on his own. He’s a smart kid—really. I have to go soon. This is one hell of an apartment.”

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LOS ANGELES-

I heard a great story the other night involving alcohol, feces, guilt, innocence, and a bathtub. My wife and I were out to dinner with some friends. Our friend Betty was the one who told the story. (And yes, she waited until after the meal to unleash it upon us.) Betty, just so you know, is a complete riot. She claps when she laughs. Always. I find this charming. She’s a tiny little thing, cute and petite. And she’s an easy laugher, a big laugher, really loves to laugh. And as soon as Betty starts laughing, she starts applauding. A matter of reflex. I find this tremendously enjoyable.

Betty was born and raised in the Middle West, in small town Illinois. Went to college in the Middle West, at Wisconsin. On holidays, as a college student, she would return home to visit family and old friends from childhood. These return trips were always festive. Betty and her buddies from the Land of Lincoln were at the height of their Bacchanalian collegiate excess. Anything went. It was youth. And it was a reunion.

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SARASOTA, FL-

Sometimes I wonder. I wonder a lot. “Why?” is almost always a futile question, with one answer contradicting another, if any knowable possibilities exist. And in this case, I’m not sure they do exist. I used to wonder about the “Why?” of my own failed ambition. Then I realized where publication had gone and how it could only descend into an even worse abyss. “I was addicted to cocaine” must be the first line of a thousand memoirs. (more…)

SARANAC LAKE, NY- 

The plan might have been flawed from the start.

What you might have seen, if you were driving along Highway 84 in Montana that day was a Subaru Outback rental car so new it had no license plates, followed by a Toyota pickup circa 1982, so old it had no shocks and no fixture on which to hang the license plate.

Seven innertubes undulated in the wind, occasionally breaking free and flapping against the rusted side panels of the truck.

You might have been cursing their slow progress or witnessed the convoy pulled over on the side of the road, a huddle of muscled women trying to retie the load with a single, thin rope.

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I’ve just moved.

Not just houses, but cities and entire lives. It’s exciting and new, a bit like the theme song from the Love Boat, but with no Gopher, no dancing girls and no stopover in Rio.

Bummer!

For posterity’s sake I kept a bit of a journal of my first week in San Francisco and have decided to share it as a peek into the inner sanctum of my life. I’d call you all voyeurs for reading, but in actuality I’m just a hideous narcissist who wants to show you photos of my closet.

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MILTON, FL-

1. Why We Went

A couple of Fridays ago when I got home from work, my husband Kelly said, “Matt wants us to go tubing with him tomorrow.”

Matt is Kelly’s coworker. They’ve become friends

Until Matt, I’d never seen Kelly make a new friend before. I used to think it was because he was shy, or didn’t want new friends.

Now I realize it’s because he felt like crap pretty much the whole time we lived in Utah.

Kelly was never hot on living there. And after his son Kody moved out of state, he expressed his desire to leave regularly and emphatically. I was the one who insisted we stay so long.

Now I feel sort of guilty about that.

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MIAMI, FL-

I am really hungover.

I stayed up late last night, doing blow and talking shit.

“When in Rome….”

Miami makes me behave like this guy-

Of course, I’m only joking. In actuality, here in Miami, I tend to be act more like most of the other residents. The blue rinse and pinochle set. But without the blue rinse. Or the pinochle.

My time here has been lovely. Two weeks of sun and friendship, late nigh (more…)

MIAMI, FL-

Hello boys.

Does this post even need words????

Personally I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean I won’t add some. Stringing words together is a compulsion of mine, and when they occasionally make sense I go bananas with joy.

Let’s try.

Nudity- n, (noo-di-tee, nyoo-)

1. the state or fact of being nude; nakedness.

2. something nude or naked

Hold on a minute, dictionary.com!! Nudity is not just a state of undress, dudes, it’s a frame of mind.

Being naked is freedom, a release, an abandonment of insecurity and self-consciousness.

In a world gone mad with prudish behavior and political correctness, a world where bare breasts are taboo but dressing like a slut is permitted for eleven year olds, I propose a new way, a fresh perspective… a return to a more natural state.

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METAL, NC-

Up until I was around twenty-five I went to concerts. I saw some great shows. The US Festival (I was in the 8th grade, hustling stickers and pins for KMET). Queensryche on their epic Operation: Mindcrime tour.

Soundgarden in the early nineties. Ice Cube on a sunny and very stony Orange County day. Satchel. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Tori Amos. Steve Vai in Hollywood which was probably the best singular performance I ever witnessed.

I saw Korn in Vegas with fifty other people at the Huntridge Theater. No one knew who they were except for us transplanted Californians. I got drunk with them, helped load up their equipment in their U-Haul with the Deftones.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

In 1995, I was a junior in college, a film student at the University of Colorado.

I took a documentary film class. I believe it was a documentary film class.

One kid, I remember, was from Pacific Palisades.

His class project?

A faux interview with Kurt Russell.

He was interviewing Kurt Russell, and all of a sudden he started asking him if Goldie Hawn was good in bed, if she was a screamer, and so on. (more…)

THE QUEEN CITY, NC-

My neighbors like to party. They just moved in around a month ago. I saw their house being built. My dog used to shit where their house now stands. So did a few other dogs. There was nothing but woods. Tons of trees. Hawks and croaking frogs. Deer and raccoon tracks pressed in the dirt.

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