Turkey

I was traveling with a television show. We were producing game shows somewhere in Europe -- perhaps it was Greece.

I had a day off and took the time to sight-see. Myself and two other technicians hired a taxicab and paid the driver to stay with us all day.

The taxi took us to.... Turkey. In some primitive village reminscent of Algeria or something, we stopped and got out. The meter kept running.

On foot, I encountered E., who was there with her artist boyfriend. We did everything but start an affair, and the vibe I got was that he wouldn't have cared had we consummated our physical attraction for each other. The fact that she had a kid by him never entered our discourse.

I got in back in the cab with my co-workers and we motored out of Turkey and into the next country, whatever that was...

dreamt of a birthday party over the equation for creation

I dreamt of your birthday party, Myrna. It was hosted at an expanded tree house, which was attached to the back of some hipster/tres chic restaurant bar. Hmmm... the convergence of the bucolic and the urbane. If not a paradox, at least a strange and pushed juxtaposition, yeah?

I was there with a date (who knew that you were my ex-) and I do not know how we were invited -- or if we even were. As she and I sat at the picnic table under copious foliage from the mighty oak that the tree house used for structural support, you walked by.

You and I made eye contact. You nodded. I winked. That was the last we saw of each other.

During the party, I found myself in a conversation about the algorithms of the fast pace of modern life. I was explaining to another writer the equation of getting to a destination before you ever leave, which seems to be the goal of conquering/getting through the daily machinations of modern life.

It is a paradox -- the pace at which the population gets through each day, which transcends the good ol' "D = R x T" or "Distance equals Rate times Time."

I said the new equation could be written as Infinity over zero. I wrote down the symbols on a napkin. ∞/0.

He studied the semiotics on the napkin and then looked at me. Then he said that ∞/0 was also the equation for creation.

bellwether

After four hours sleep, the alarm sounded before the coffee maker switched on and it was time to get dressed and prep the bicycle for the 80-mile ride from Pasadena to Long Beach and back.

The sleep deprivation and the accompanying delirium were the results of staying up at a rock and roll nightclub until it closed, and charming some cute, lithesome lipstick lesbian and a pair of still-in-school make-up artists. The lesbian was ignoring her equally cute girlfriend, and as we talked about the field of journalism, I had to explain to her what the word "bellwether" means.

Staring at the ceiling, smelling the espresso grind brew, and attempting to focus my eyes, I closed them long enough to visualize touching your leg, kissing you on your sleepy cheek and whispering to you that I was leaving for a bike ride and would be back in the afternoon. In this vision, you giggled and pulled the covers up over your neck.

I opened my eyes again. The room was cold and the windows were socked in with fog. It was going to be a long, chilly bike ride. The warmest things in the room were the smell of coffee doing an interpretative dance up around the ceiling and the ghost of a memory that never happened.

when it stops you are dead

Before Ikky died, I loved the idea that everything is temporary and life is transitory. I mean, anything and everything have/has to be transitory, and when it stops, you are dead. That is the definition of casualty: when the spinning orb of a planet finally adheres to the laws of the conservation of energy – energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, but must merely change form -- and the orb grinds to a halt.

Ride over. Wad shot. A carousel only spins until inertia equals the thrust of the giant invisible hand of existence that gave the ride its initial push.

Before I loved the idea that everything is transitory, but now it makes me sad. But what is the alternative? If it is not transitory, it is frozen in time, like the yard lights flooding the grounds of a state prison, miles away, off an interstate highway.

azure heavens and billowing puffs of whipped cream

Hey Myrna:

You asked if I was going home for the holidays and I told you I reserved the right to rip-cord at the last possible hour and blast across America, back to Mississippi. Two years ago I did that and was so very glad to be alive… I was sailing through Arizona at three in the morning; the moon was full and the mountains were 8000 feet high and bereft of everything except snowdrifts and conifer trees and the roadsides were also plump with fresh-driven snow… I was doing 90 mph and I remember turning off my headlights, because the reflection of the moon bouncing off the snow was providing a bountiful beacon and exquisite illumination. Inside, I was sipping from a thermos of espresso and silently screaming in a primeval sort of exultation.

I didn’t do that this year. Exactly.

I was having coffee on Monday evening (the 19th) and the phone rang with an unexpected invitation to go to Death Valley the next day… the truth was that I had been mulling over that very same adventure myself, but was not necessarily in the mood to travel alone (a circumstance that has never stopped me from jumping in the car before, but this season is different somehow…)

I told the caller she was reading my mind… all I needed to do was to proof a finished manuscript one last time, fire it off in the post to the printer, buy some new tread for the Chrysler, and tune-up the bicycles in case we both wanted to ride bikes out by Zabriskie Point and Dante’s View. We agreed to leave at 9 o’clock the next night – always a great time to travel.

And just like that, agendas merged and it was a go. A finished book was out of my hands, but the blowzy dawn of the Mojave badlands was within our grasp…

But I was more than aware that no matter how spontaneous, charged and upbeat this journey was, that it would also be fraught with a whisper of the melancholy. No matter how uplifting and necessary this holiday, there would be a co-efficient of the bittersweet…

Aye… I immediately remembered this ridiculously long and wonderful phone conversation you and I had, Myrna, when I told you about the Tecopa Hot Springs. Through the ether, you told me that would be a place that the two of us would visit together. If memory serves, I was somewhat cautious in agreeing with you about the inevitability of that trip, but I knew at that moment it was something I wanted as much as anything in my life. But the winds blew in a different direction, I guess, and so come the yuletide and the winter solstice and a different companion and I settled on that very same destination – the one you and I romanticized over the phone – for lodging and bathing.

And I was right about the bliss of this trip tempered by the element of my having to stare down a certain black cloud re destiny unfulfilled. Whether in Baker or in Tecopa, I dreamt about you both nights, Myrna Munster, and the first night the clarity of the dream even roused me from my sleep and had me staring at the vacant darkness.

I am not trying to imply that this expedition was a downer. By day and for most of the night, the notion of our (yours and mine) trip unrealized didn’t get under my skin. Besides languishing in the sizzling sauna of the mineral baths, my co-pilot and I ran up a bunch of miles in the car, a total interrupted by hiking up the steep, silty neopolitan ice cream cones known as the Artists Palette, scampering across the solidified salt and the barren void of Badwater, before we re-assembled the bikes in Furnace Creek and rode until the sun set over Zabriskie Point and the Panamints.

But it was somewhere between Dante’s View and Death Valley Jct. that I had my moment of epiphany, Myrna. There my companion brought up the mysteries of what motivates people, and I said the relative imminence of death was the catalyst for the creative process. One glance out the windshield at the glorious stripes and colors of a billion years’ worth of geological ages and we know how trivial, ephemeral and infinitesimal our impact is on this planet…

I don’t believe in any stinking afterlife, I tell her. The only way you live eternal-like – and I was pointing to a sand dune for emphasis while telling her that the dust-to-dust bit is the only thing religion ever got right – is to create something people respond to and will continue to share after you are otherwise done.

Legacy is ego-driven. Body-of-work is paramount. That is why I continue to attempt to manipulate the publishing world to my own end. My companion got what I was talking about. But I didn’t tell her what I was really thinking at that moment: that Myrna and I were destined for a legacy, albeit now unrequited but eternally worthy of any desert panorama. This is a point I made to you, Ms. Munster, on the night you told me you couldn’t see me anymore. But what I didn’t realize then is what I realized on the road to Death Valley Jct., while pointing to the mineral deposits stacked to the sky, capped by azure heavens and billowing puffs of whipped cream and anchored by sand dunes. I realized this: You and I not being together is not my loss, nor is it your loss, Myrna. It is humanity’s and the universe’s loss. Even so, despite its loss, the winds will barely shrug and continue to blow and make sno-cones out of molten lava, I reckon.

Anyway, I talk too much.

But I ask you: Did *you* go home for the holidays? And what exactly *is* home? (Or even a holiday?)

fuzzy math

Myrna Munster tells me she can't see me anymore, as she wants to know what it is like being in a relationship with someone her own age. I am 44. She is 32.

I dreamt I was working on a game show for college students. In all of the hullabaloo on stage after the show wrapped, I saw that Myrna Munster was there, as she knew one of the contestants on the quiz show. She noticed me too. Neither of us was surprised to see the other there. But because of issues of standards and practices, we both pretended not to know each other.

It became apparent that Myrna was in a thing with one of the college students. I guess it is my experience that with the fuzzy math and logic of most folks, forsaking a relationship with somebody older than one, for a relationship for somebody younger than one is equivalent to having a relationship with somebody one's own age. Or something.

As the contestants and their guests continued to mingle, Myrna discreetly held up the screen of her laptop, in order for me to see some graphic or text. This screen contained the directions to a rendezvous point for the two of us. Was this to tie up loose ends?

I could not make out what the screen said. Then it was closed shut and Myrna continued to socialize and gadfly with the college students. She looked happy, as always.

expect nothing...

and be okay with nothing...

moving and the menstrual cycle

I moved down the hill this week. While schlepping the bed out of the U-Haul and into the bedroom of the new house, I noticed faint remnants of menstrual stains on the mattress from the day in 2001 when Pamela Palmer and I were making love like tigers.

It was probably the fifth or sixth time we had sex, and nothing as simple as a cycle in nature was going to stop us. For an hour I was her tampon, although the seal was not exactly seaworthy.

The menstrual fluid had ruined one of the sheets, which I tossed. I tried to get the stains out of the mattress, and scrubbed it clean with a scouring pads and brushes. This cleaning technology was no match for the power of a woman.

The stains triggered a pleasant memory. It made me smile.

lions and tigers and the deluge

There was a flood that created a lake between my house and the neighbors across the street. In it, massive sea beasts were swimming upstream. They were walrus-like, with the tusks of mastadons and the disposition of seals.

Down the road, walking home from her commute, was a show business junior executive, a rather fetching black woman. We chatted. She said she had forgot something that day that she needed for her job. She kept walking as we talked. As she fjorded the stream/lake that ran through part of the street, I called to her and said what she forgot was her canoe. She laughed as she swam.

Later, there were snakes, coyotes, and mountain lions that traversed the water and the wilderness. The mountain lion had the build and countenance of an African lion and not that of a cougar.

dirty, dirty

So I dreamt that I was making out with the girl I can't get over. For some reason, we moved off of her bed and onto a hardwood floor, where I began to go down on her. We stopped after I complained about how dirty her floor was. With the back of my hand, I swept up a little and picked up a few small piece of trash before we moved back to her bed.

We resumed what we were doing, but the rhythm was gone. So was the point of continuing.

I used to routinely clean up the back yard of her apartment building, which her neighbors had turned into a dump. I once suggested she move in with me, but she said she could not see herself moving into a place where the neighbors kept their trash on the street. (My neighbors were doing reconstruction and had a temporary dumpster installed.)

Often, real life lacks the logic of a dream state.

center

My uncle tells me to fear any woman who has no center. I tell him I do nowdays, but I never realized that was part of the problems with some of my affairs.

"You are so right -- a lack of a center leaves a vacuum," I tell him. "And we all know how nature feels about a vacuum."

paratology

n. An empty statement composed of dissimilar statements in a fashion that makes it logically paradoxical.

just because...

just because one can do something doesn't mean one should; just because one can't do something doesn't mean one shouldn't...

live! from the observatory

I was riding my bike on a mountain road in Griffith Park this morning, trying to get some miles in before it started raining again. There I was, covered in mud and grit from the tires and the wet, alone on the ridge between the Observatory and the Hollywood sign. The road was slick and dicey with gravel and I semi-cautiously rounded a corner. There in the mist, up with the hawks, was Mary Woronov, walking her dog. We smiled at each other.

I wanted to yell "Eating Raoul!" or ask "Hey! Do you ever see Paul Bartel around?" but I didn't.

punk rock and caviar

This afternoon during a half-nap, I dreamt of the upper, upper middle-class poseur punk rock girls I knew in college, who smelled nice, had liberal arts degrees and would shoplift Iranian caviar from import shops.

I bought import vinyl and would pay for it.

Our tastes in music were very similar, and senses of style almost converged, but it was of course easier to dress like a boho weirdo if you could afford to. I couldn't afford not to. It was torn clothes or the fucking Izod sweaters that came as birthday and xmas gifts.

These girls mostly ignored me. On campus I would have lunch with an Iranian girl. Because of the hostage crisis, she would tell people she was Persian. She knew they didn't know the difference.

I wonder if any of these chi-chi, high society slumming punkettes are divorced nowadays. Nowadays our stations in life have probably just about crossed. Man, the rich girls were stunning. So stunning that I acknowledged and yet overlooked the pose. They couldn't overlook my poverty, though.

Bang a Third World Gong

*FLASH*... While ordering an expensive cup of jake and simultaneously admiring the form and color of my coffee server, I have just realized that I want to spend my evenings with a girl from a third world country, who has a reasonable grasp on the language and a mild thirst for knowledge.

Dark skin and a bulbous body, but not a caravan of junk in the trunk.

While coming to this conclusion in this chain coffee establishment, "Bang A Gong, Get It On," came over the muzak system. I looked over at the coffee server and saw her waiting on a homeless skinny, old woman. The poor transient marched in step to the snare drum and guitar riff. Maybe she was waiting on a key to the bathroom and could not even afford a cup of coffee at this store's prices.

Didn't Marc Bolan crash a car with a Northern Soul negress in the passenger seat?

likes and dislikes

I figured it out yesterday.

I like individuals. It's people that I dislike.

show me state

Don't show me something that -- no matter how hard I work for it -- I can't have. Show me something I can have, even if I have to work for it.

I don't mind working for it. Just let me have it.

no sleep 'til catatonia

I can't sleep. I can work myself to the point of exhaustion, but I can't sleep. I can shut down and miss funerals, but I can't sleep.

Catatonia: the new flakiness?

I am

the tree in the forest

In this house that i call home

I have been pre-approved to buy the house I live in.

I have made an offer to the current owner, and it appears we can come to terms.

With a lot of the futzing around with lenders and banks seemingly handled, the scenario makes me a little sad.

Partially, because I once ramped up emotionally to buy a home with the woman I wanted to share my life with. And that came apart.

So even progress in so-called quality of life is fraught with tender feelings, I guess.

dreams of agents and parking at the drag races

Somehow I ended up having lunch in a dimly-lit restaurant with a literary agent I fired last summer. Even though I found this person to be a hindrance instead of a help, the fact that she entered my dreamspace is a reminder on how much effort it is to work outside the system.

I also dreamed that Roy and JD had gotten ahold of a decrepit, beater motor home and took it to the drag races. I had scammed on VIP tickets and parking passes, and while attempting to negotiate traffic at a busy intersection at the track, the motorhome stalled.

While attempting to re-fire it, it created quite a scene.

dreams of sex and death

Two nights ago, while lying on a bed in a motel room in Death Valley, I dreamt of fucking my girlfriend from a couple of years ago. I was entering her from behind, a position she didn't seem to really care for, if memory serves. But she was enjoying it in this dream, and we were both into it and talking dirty to each other. When our rhythm got really in a groove, my cock slipped out. We lost momentum, but I re-entered her and we tried to get back to where we were.

After the interruption, however, it was not as great. It is never is.

I also dreamt of a blonde I know, and with whom I had a brief, torrid affair.

Then I dreamt of a Chinese-Argentinian gal with whom I envisioned spending time in a hotel bed in Furnace Creek. That may even come to fruition.

Last night, while driving back from Death Valley to Los Angeles, I heard on the radio that Hunter S. Thompson shot himself.

I got home at 1 in the morning, after not blinking for four hours and missing a turn in Ridgecrest, which made the drive a half hour longer.

Upon sleeping in my bed, I dreamt of my friend Ikky having committing suicide and i was dispatched to claim the body. (Ikyy died in real life a couple of years ago.) The body was not in the house, but buried under a mound of dirt outside somewhere. Ikky's old girlfriend told me she recognized his body from his toes, which were sticking out from the mound of dirt.

sick

I have been too ill with a bastard of a cold to do any cycling.

This -- more than anything -- explains why I have been feeling depressed.

Sheesh. I was tempted to write "blue" as the adverb. "Depressed" is a far better word than "blue," no?

Interestingly, knowing which word to use for "depressed" makes one less so...

Knowing that one can climb back on a bike in a day or two also makes one less, ermm, "blue."

*****

My last ex-girlfriend is getting married. After teasing me with hints, she insisted upon telling me about the engagement, even though I let her know I was completely debilitated and was not in the mood to hear such news just yet.

I wrote her back and wished her well. I signed it "xo"

She wrote back to ask I refrain from using "xo," as we are just friends.

I used it to be polite and magnanimous. The truth is I am very glad someone else is marrying her -- I am relieved it ain't me.

Honestly, the cheekiness of some people.

the wrong move

I am starting to find Valentine's Day as throat-tightening and oppressive as Xmas.

I want to send her an e-mail wishing her a Happy Valentine's Day, but I know that would be completely the wrong move. For all I know, she is married now or at least has a boyfriend.

To send her a Valentine's greeting would undoubtedly be the wrong move.

Something being completely the wrong move has never stopped me from doing it before, but I'll probably have restrained myself on this occasion.

Probably.

Time

 We haven't been together since January of 2003. Even making it that far was a struggle. But I have not been the same person since.

I miss her. Sometimes terribly. And I get older every day. And the possibility of attaining the same sense of romance and transcendence seems more fleeting every day.