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[18 May 2009|06:04pm] |
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I'm sitting on a brown couch in my living room in Venice beach, California, listening to some old punk music with the door open, enjoying the evening breeze so much. My house is 87 years old and there are spiders in every ceiling corner of every room; it smells musty too, perhaps due to the hens in the backyard! They provide fresh eggs every morning. I like California but have really been bitten hard by the travel bug. Tomorrow I'm going to renew my passport. I sell button down shirts for a living and still drive an old Saab, and not a whole lot has changed. Everything's been smooth, so I feel the need to develop a bad habit. I've started working out a lot, and it's a real laugh. You should see me in action. Hope all my long lost friends are doing well!
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[23 Aug 2006|03:01pm] |
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I came home late last night and after a paused DVD I heard about the death of a distant 1st cousin. I wasn't engulfed in sadness, nor was I numb to the reality of never hearing any future news about him or his sons or his career or the arguments of his family. I think I might remember the last time I saw him. I don't think I said hello. It was 2002 and he was out beside the church in a northern New Jersey suburb, playing the bagpipes at my grandpa's funeral. I remember it being a spectacular sound, but I don't remember whether his eyes were blue or brown. We weren't close, but it is looming. His name was Michael, and he was less than twice my age.
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[13 Jul 2006|07:48pm] |
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I drink Tecate out of Stella Artois glasses. I sit in wooden chairs on a balcony near the beach in Los Angeles, and my view looks east onto power lines, bungalows, palm trees, and the San Gabriel mountains. I bought my first pair of hundred dollar jeans, but my predominant choice of footwear are Vans. On the weekends I work as a pool boy at a rooftop infinity pool at a luxury 17 floor residence across the street from the beach. While there, I fold towels, do laundry, arrange lounge chairs and squeegee the perimeter windows. During the week, I work at the front desk of the same building, in a sort of security/concierge type position. I answer phones, work delivery service, field questions from residents, and sweat--all the while wearing an ill fitting company issued suit. I slick my hair to the side. On my days off (Tuesday and Thursday), I almost always go to the beach for a couple of hours and work on evening out my farmers tan from the pool boy job. I've gone from disliking everything about the beach to counting down the hours until I get to go back. I often bike ride here, although my wheels at the present moment consist of only a green beach cruiser. Living at the beach, I never experience the LA smog that one hears so much about. Venice is quite a relaxing beach community, where old hippies and yuppie millionaires live amongst one another. My neighbor is a former Venice gang member named Frank, and Frank has a few children who roam the street behind my apartment and sell drugs to passing cars. The kids often get wasted and throw up in the street early the following morning. Frank and his children live in a seemingly illegal apartment that is inside a garage at the house next door. I feel like the kids keep the neighborhood "feeling real." I go out for coffee all the time, which is something that isn't new for me. Like always, I have many neighborhood acquaintances that I smile at on walks, but I haven't formed very many friendships. I hardly ever leave West LA. On evenings such as this one, I just sit out on my balcony drinking Tecate out of a Stella Artois glass. The breeze is really really nice here.
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[12 Apr 2006|01:15am] |
Malibu, California
On the final day of February, I uprooted myself and two suitcases of my belongings and moved to Los Angeles, California. In my living room, in my hometown, I stood and gave my father only a handshake, and he looked down and his eyes were wet and it happened quicker than it does in the movies. Mom gave me a wet kiss. My brother Liam drove me to JFK airport in his green american-made car, and we casually chatted about jobs and mutual friends and the idiosyncracies of our parents that we've come to treasure over our lifetimes. Curbside in Queens, he hugged me and said we'd talk real soon, and hours later my airplane descended the night sky on top of Los Angeles, which was a thrilling and humbling experience for a young man like myself.
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[25 Oct 2005|01:02am] |
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Jerry Lewis is crazy in a really, really bad way.
Whereas, Nic Cage is crazy in a really, really, really terrific way.
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[26 Sep 2005|02:15am] |
dad called this morning. he sounded exhausted and heartbroken. dad told me that they were expecting rain soon, that he felt it in his joints. i told him that i missed him, and he called inside for my mom to pick up another receiver. mom sounded sad, anxious, and lonely. she asked me if my hair had grown in, if i had a girlfriend yet, if i could write her a letter and answer just a few of the questions she has ever asked.
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[09 Aug 2005|08:40am] |
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[09 Jun 2005|06:26pm] |
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my dad has started smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of 63. he doesn't inhale. it's pathetic.
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[01 Jun 2005|05:05pm] |
( ny ny )
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| The Secrets of Summer |
[10 May 2005|05:21pm] |
It is 81 degrees this evening in upstate New York, and for the past several days it has been warm and I have set aside at least a small chunk of time to lay on my back in the grass near the lake at my college, listening to rolling stones songs, barefoot with my pant-legs pulled up, an arm across my eyes, charging. I think about the people I see around me every where I walk and every where I sit, and I ponder where they are from and what they hope to be and if they like the rolling stones, too. As semesters tend to unfold, at the moment I find myself in a foreboding 70s library on a sunny may day, feeling out an argument that lies between the summers I read of and the summer I dream about. I am wearing gray and shock blue and boat shoes and I’m wondering what it’d be like to be 21 in ’61, ’71, ’81, ’91. Summer. What would it be like to be comfortably ‘in-the-black’ and have the leisure to sit back in a row boat on a medium-sized lake and read The Informers on a partly cloudy day that threatened evening thunderstorms? I would lounge for four hours and then head into town and have a hamburger at the local A&W and drink a root beer and go home for a nap, waking up around 9:30 to go driving with friends on a clear night after the rain, listless, aimless (yet with hints of happiness)—comfortable , like a VW commercial. And, of course, on the flip side: What’s love got to do with it?
“That was the summer we went to Saratoga and saw the Cars and, later that August,
Bryan Metro. The summer was drunk and night and warm and the lake.”
I am not amusing myself when I say that this will be the best summer of my life.
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| IN THE FOREST(with my favorite sweatshirt) |
[07 May 2005|03:41am] |
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( bulletin )
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[31 Mar 2005|06:30pm] |
OH NO
If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit
for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places.
-robert creeley, 1956
Robert Creeley died yesterday morning. Mitch Hedberg died late last night. The past three days I haven't had a single vocalized conversation with anyone. I have not taken a shower in four days, and I really want to shave, yet I've been too apathetic to do either. My good friend and roommate has been away for a week and I go back to my apartment after school and I close the front door behind me and I stand in the middle of the kitchen wondering to myself what it is that I'd like to do today, as his girlfriend's cat rubs up against my leg and meows. I was walking down a dark stretch of Elmwood Avenue a couple of nights ago listening to the verve and I was mulling over some of the concepts of death and friendship and happiness and travel and love and disaster. I thought about the actions of avoidance and apathy, about how friendships of mine have dissolved and how some seemed never to want to start. I also thought about the ways I have made it incredibly difficult for new people to come into my life and to approach me. I suppose that all along I've thought it ideal to make due with the friends i've got, to imagine that maybe the more time a friendship lasts, the more they grow and become even better, which i've learned isn't the case at all. And i've also tossed around the idea that people will go whichever route they want, and if it so happens that I am not a part of that route, then I can't really hold a grudge. Besides, who wants to hold a grudge? On that walk of mine, I wondered just what the fuck I'm getting out of my life spent living it like i've been living it. I have neglected others, am being neglected in return, and continue to neglect myself. I may get wrapped up in confusion and concern on just why I cannot make connections with people whom I've tried time and time again to connect with, but i'd be a hypocrite to not admit I have done the same. The entirety of this past week has led me to ponder these thoughts. I woke up this morning, three hours past my alarm clock, and learned two more of my favorite artists have died. Two more voices that remind me that I'm wasting away unhappy, waiting for peripheral influences to nudge me along. I've read entries like these on my friend's list before and i've rolled my eyes and thought, "Who cares?" I was foolish.
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[15 Feb 2005|05:14pm] |
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tuesday's
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