Myron the Magnificent

Magnificence is an utterly rare quality, though one immediately recognized.  It's a sort of combination of elegance, comfort, and personable charisma that can be embodied by anyone no matter how rich, beautiful, or intelligent.

Today I met a gentleman named Myron, and I doubt that I shall ever encounter him again, though in the few minutes we talked my entire being was moved - shifted.

I have been having a lousy couple days - though in truth I have been having a lousy couple years - I've never been diagnosed with depression, though my therapist says it may be a keen possibility.  I am always on some spectrum from sadness to anger, with choices governed by an outlook of scarcity and the resultant fear.  It's hard to enjoy anything - any feelings of "enjoyment" seem like fake projections onto a reality so cruddy that I am simply being a childish fool in denial if I claim happiness - how could one be happy in the midst of what's going on, uncertain if society will collapse and I & my (very few) loved ones shall die tomorrow?

It's all quite unpleasant, and has led to plenty of drinking, smoking, and pornography watching, the latter two of which I've stopped after a particularly miserable weekend that involved some of both.  As for the drinking I have no intent to abandon it but I also have no real desire to do it right now, and at the very least I'll avoid it until the end of the week and see how I feel then.

The lot of them are distractions & numbing agents; I want to remove them and feel the pain.  Because if I can really feel it, feel it all and have to live with it instead of slugging down another mental painkiller, I might finally realize that the work of changing and taking risk to really do something worthwhile in this life will be less painful that enduring the way I live now.

It's a strategy that worked once before, and enormously well.  It led to what was the most challenging, though readily the most enjoyable and legitimately fulfilling year of my life.  What a backslide it's been since then.

I won't belabour it longer - I'm saying all this to set you up with my mindset as my and Myron's paths crossed.  I was feeling sad, quiet, not friendly, basically worthless - I wanted to avoid people.  Perhaps it's the latent shame or embarrassment about myself.  I kept interactions superficial.

I was working with the electric company at the time, constantly going to different substations and communications sites to maintain our private safety & monitoring network for the electric grid.  I arrived at today's substation and was greeted by a few other fellows - one employee - Myron - and one outside contractor.

Immediately Myron offered a welcome, though it was not the procedural, forced greeting merely to satisfy etiquette that is all-too-common.  Rather he was genuinely saying hello to someone who he saw as a friend, if for no reason beyond being a fellow man - and if you have ever experienced this yourself, you know that no further reason is needed.  We're all on the same journey here.

I was obviously much younger than he, and so he asked how long I'd been with the company.  "Just about a year," I said, adding, "What day is it?  The twenty-ninth right?"

"Yes, the twenty-ninth."

"Well then exactly one year today."

"Congratulations on your first anniversary," he said with a smile.  There wasn't a trace of Pan-Am in it - it was a quiet, but glowing, warm smile.  It was a smile that said "You're part of the family."  It's a sentiment to which I'm all too unaccustomed.  "Now you just gotta do thirty-nine more," he joked.

Although he was only half-joking: the clear reference to his own time at the company was far from the first like it that I'd heard.  This was a place for career men, and I learned my lesson two and a half years ago: I have no interest in a career, not of that type.  To be locked into something, with no way to grow, that's the source of much of my pain now.

I may have no interest in that path, though I can respect people who have made that choice, as long as they have actually made it themselves and not simply fallen into it as so many poor souls do with their lives.  I could tell he was one who made it.

He continued his introduction by sharing what his home base is; I didn't recognize it; I shared mine.

"Telecom?" he intuited, and I confirmed.

He moved like he had all the time in the world and not a single piece of unfinished business.

Myron returned to the subject of years worked: "I'm close to wrapping it up.  Got my house, got my daughters through school, and they're having kids now."  He said it all nonchalantly, even with cheer.

"How many do you have?"

"Three daughters, and my oldest has two kids, they're six and eight, they live in Huntington Beach now."  I lived there too; we talked about Huntington for a bit.  He didn't live there but seemed to enjoy the active lifestyle and easygoing vibe.  He asked if I'm "a water guy, do [I] surf?"  I was actually impressed at the level of enthusiasm one practical stranger expressed in an other's pursuit of surfing.  I told him I had surfed, though not for a long time, and part of my own moving there was a not-so-subtle attempt to get myself back on the waves.

His second daughter had two children as well, and he enjoyed how much he was able to be hands-on as a grandfather.  He admits that it wasn't like that as much with his children, "Dad had a lot of work to do, sometimes be outta town."

We kept talking for another couple of minutes, about everything that mattered and yet nothing of particular specialty nor significance.  The big things in life really are composed in little moments, aggregated.

Eventually it was time for him to roll on.  He and the contractor - an air-con & heating guy who was strictly business and probably somewhere between numb and bored, like I would be on a typical day - were checking the air conditioners at various substations, as well as killing the weeds and other such housekeeping that goes invisible to 99% of the population, and for that matter to probably 99% of the people who work here too.

He said he'd close the gate but leave the lock hanging in it, unlatched, talking about minor mechanical courtesy as nonchalantly and peacefully as he'd talked about his dear family.  Then he wished be a good rest of my day, and a good rest of my future, basically I felt like I had been blessed.  I offered my own for him.  We said that it was nice to have met one another, and both of us meant it.  Then Myron proceeded to leave.

I walked out to my vehicle to fetch some tools, and he was in the process of reversing his truck to exit.  On any other day I would have gotten my tools and simply walked from my van back into the building without so much as a glance; I would consider the interaction ended despite the obviously still-extant physical presence.  I knew that he'd be looking to give one last goodbye, and if I wasn't looking back to return it he'd be disappointed, and as a result I'd be disappointed too.  And as soon as I would return to the room I would wonder, "What the fuck is wrong with you, man?  Why couldn't you have just turned your head and smiled, it's so goddamn easy to do!"

And so I did turn to look, and sure enough he was looking back, smile still beaming.  He waved, on the other side of his truck's window, and I smiled and waved back.  He shifted into a forward gear and drove away.

And like that I was in a good mood.  I mean a genuinely, not "I'm trying this but it feels fake and like I'm in abject denial" good mood.  Things were easy and there was a lightness to the world.  I actually...I actually could see a future, something I don't often...hardly ever, in fact.

I was possessed of the sense that what I would do for the next couple hours was a valid and useful stepping stone to somewhere good.  Maybe not a direct and obvious one, but it was motion as opposed to motionlessness, and it was in a productive direction.  All I had to do now was make tomorrow either bigger than today, or pointed in a better direction, or with a little ingenuity maybe both.

Thanks Myron.

 

May 29, 2019

You Think That Guy's in the Band?

          Three years ago some friends were coming into town for a weekend-long music festival, and there were other concerts around town capitalizing on the crowd.  My best friend and I go into a bar adjoining the music hall; we've always understood each other deeply though I have long considered him more connective & social than myself.  I'm feeling out of place, my self-consciousness playing its usual tricks of having me believe I am sticking out as an obvious square in a dimly-lit room full of talent-possessing, love-making, interpersonally-adept people.
          As we get toward the back of the crowded bar I see this tall, thin-as-a-wire guy - who looks as young as we are - with an intensely asymmetrical haircut sitting rakishly in a booth with two very "alternative" styled, patently attractive girls on him.
          I tapped my friend and said, "You think that guy's in the band?"  My friend turned to me, looked me straight in the eyes with amusement and how damn enjoyable the universe is, and in a moment of unrestrained brilliance said something that changed my life:
          "Everyone in the room is in the band."

Lowkey Brilliance and the Intimate Epic in Vice Prinipals

It's easy to use a T.V. show's host network's own confidence in that show as a marker to decide how seriously to take that show.  Television monoliths like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or Westworld get every last frame scrutinized and analyzed as they are held on pedestals like the finest works of classic literature.

And in our ever more frenetic world each of us must decide which art we want to indulge in, since there's certainly more television produced than is worth our time to view.  It's easy to overlook a show like Vice Principals, which compared to HBO's heavy hitters has a minuscule advertising campaign and could probably have the production of half its season paid for by one Thrones episode.

That would be to overlook one of the most subtly well-constructed programmes on the network, and a masterful new entry in that holy grail category I call the Intimate Epic.

These are pieces of literature (any medium) that tell grand stories of consequence (power exchange, life & death, sex) through only a tight lens on just a few characters.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might be the ultimate in intimate epics: the story spans vast physical expanses, but more than that it's the impact of the characters' actions with one another that are immensely heightened, not necessarily because of what they are but because of how they're presented in the film.

What these guys are doing isn't all that important to anyone other than them, yet the way director Leone uses every cinematic tool available to display these events in the movie makes the audience feel like the consequences of the titular characters' actions shall be of universe-altering magnitude.

Kill Bill is another peak intimate epic, with the film bending us to believe that all of reality hinges on nothing but one person's hunt for five others.  What happens at the end of the film is no surprise - it is given right in the title - but knowing that makes no difference.  What makes Kill Bill riveting and immensely rewatchable is how it gets there.  We get to see and hear moments of intense drama unfold between all these key players, events that reach across years and continents.

When our hero does finally kill Bill, a simple and low-key death becomes as climactic as the explosion of the Death Star because of everything we know about what led to it, and because we know how important it is to the main character.  The world will still turn, wars will still be fought, and billion-dollar deals will still be struck tomorrow, but in Kill Bill that all completely ceases to matter as the film manages to shrink our perceptive scale of drama down to the intercourse of just a few people, and that is the essence of the Intimate Epic.

Vice Principals has tread some important new territory in this vein, and I hope this article can help establish it in the annals of great television-making that is worth your time in today's oversaturated tele-visual market.  Principals brings several novel characters to the screen, such as the flirtatious but not-stellar-looking writer Brian Biehn and the batshit sociopath who's managed to remain functional thus far Lee Russell.  About them and others an entire article could be written, but what I want to focus on here is the use of an ordinary, relatable, and - for those reasons - totally mundane setting in which the show occurs.

Previously I'd assumed part of what imbued an Intimate Epic with its epicness was certain qualities of the setting.  It had to involve locations that commanded attention one way or another, perhaps being exotic (the Far East, jungles of South America, islands in the Caribbean), or exclusive and rarefied (Swiss chateaus, modernist houses overlooking sprawling cities, penthouses and boardrooms amid metropolises, government agencies or top-secret facilities), or simply unique in their extremity & beauty (vast deserts of the spaghetti Westerns, curving roadways along the Mediterranean, hostile mountains).  Settings that were unusual immediately capture the viewer, saying "hey, this is not a regular place, the people that are here are doing special not-regular things."

Vice Principals dispenses all of that for a setting with none of those features.  Instead the heightened importance of everything comes from the way it's shot, the way it's edited, the usage of music, and of course the writing itself.  This is one of creator Jody Hill's calling cards, as evidenced from a similar style in Eastbound & Down.  The cinematography, often coupled with slow motion, transforms high school hallways into backdrops for deceit, love, scorn, alliance, and betrayal.  These two men are mid-grade losers working at an obscure suburban high school, yet as Vice Principals progresses they carry on as though the rise or fall of nations is at stake.  Make no mistake: there are full-bore personalities at war here, and the show expands their conflict to fill our brains' scale of what a conflict, at its greatest, can be.

The final nail in the coffin is always the closing music and cut to the credits.  Viewers are left, episode after episode, with the notion that something big has changed, something bigger is afoot, and whatever goes down not everyone will come out of it well.  In short, the musical selections and perfect cutting at the show's conclusions haunt, and that is just about the finest thing that can be said for any piece of art.

This latest episode - the penultimate in the show's punchy run - leaves us with Neal Gamby and Amanda Snodgrass together again, as Miss Abbott looks onward, crushed, while the dreamy, spacey tunes of Roost's Big Black Delta play over everything.  That final shot of her lingers just a little longer than you expect, and combined with a little hint they dropped a few episodes ago when she was shopping with Gamby, my money's on her as the shooter.

Half-Literate

Mar 15 2015

 Knowing how to read it but not how to speak it
sometimes feels worse than not knowing how to read it at all.

YOU SUCK

APR 8 2015 2

If you think I laugh too much, it's not true.  It IS true that I laugh at all jokes.  That's because there is something funny to be found in all jokes.  Perhaps you actually told a good joke.  Then I laughed spontaneously.  That's best; good job!

Maybe your joke wasn't good, but seeing as it was a joke, it should've been.  Therefore, I laugh at you for thinking that a shitty joke would work.

Be Being Been

JUL 27 2017

I'm SLOW and INEFFECTIVE at generating things because I believe that "I can't BE there unless I've already BEEN"

In other words, it's my mantra - "it can only be found by those who already know where it is" - being applied onto myself, destructively!

Of course I KNOW the whole being-->doing-->having method of things.  Yet I constantly believe that I must have ALREADY BEEN somewhere to be valid in pursuing being there (what moronism)!

How did I get into motorcycles?  I just joined the class and I bought one.  Boom! Now I'm a biker, because I ride a bike.
How did I get into swinging?  I just attended events.  I mentioned that it was an interest to girls I was into, I got onto SLS, I said yes to the opportunities that existed.  How did I get to make furniture?  I just made it.  How did I get to be an acid head?  I just took acid.  The doors were all open.  It was merely my prerogative to walk through them, but for some weird reason that's the part we humans find difficult.

So how do I get to be an artist?  Just make art.
How do I get to be a lover?  Just love.
How do I get to be a fit muscle man?  I just exercise regularly and eat well.
How do I get to be sexy?  I just be sexy.
How do I get to be rich?  I just make money.  I find things others value but  aren't doing, and I do them.
How do I get to be a leader?  I just lead.
How do I get to have fun?  I just enjoy doing stuff, and pick fun things to do.

Note the shift from 'be' to 'have' on the last question there, is there anything worth exploring in that?

How do I get to have my dream house?  Just build it, get the people needed to do so.
How do I get to have the life I want?  Just be the person who'd have that kind of life.

What's bigger than pornstar, or The Pleasure Man, since those haven't been drawing me forward.  The Maestro's part of it, so is the Powerful Man, but they're not there just yet...what's the magical thing that'll go DING and make EVERY LAST THING from the past disappear, leaving ONLY the beingness of this supermaster present.

What do I REALLY want?  Who do I REALLY want to be?  That would have the self-respect to pull off anything and everything I desire, no stoppages or excuses or shortcomings or justifications for why I don't have it.  I'm talking that Mad Max, Don Draper, Baron Flambeaux, Cary Grant, hard-rocking, brilliant, sexy, art-shitting, OUT THERE rockstar who just burns the world to the ground with his very gaze?!  The kind of guy who'd set sights on a girl and ultimately get her to a choice about him, and satisfied with her choice, but nonetheless having made it....rather than quiet in the corner, HOPEFUL (god what a vile word!).
The guy who's got a big, shit-eating grin on, whose Miami-neon swim shorts ripple in the wind while he holds open the throttle on a cigarette boat loaded with acid and amplifiers bound for some atoll off the coast with guys & girls of highest caliber.  He doesn't need to be the best..because they're all the best.  He's a god, yet he's among gods.  And he pulls others toward godliness.  He understands other perspectives but does not adopt them.  He is the Lizard King, and his presence throbs with a gentle, torquey unshakability.  Others may lob what they have at him...their cheers or their jeers, their tomatoes, their empty bottles at the back of his head, their roses & soaked lace knickers, their condescending tones & disapproving looks, their mind tricks, their delusions, their awe-struck compliments, every mechanism they have, and he shall not be deterred from his course.  For he knows it, and it is true, and true to it he stays with an authenticity purer than hydrogen.  There is only one sin: doubt.

He is.

I am.

"I am," he declared, and thus it was law in the universe.

Tales from the Intersection

     I sat there, at the helm of the machine, rumbling & grumbling in the misty night, waiting for my turn at the intersection, as the motor throbbed in anticipation.  I strained and in the distance I could hear the echoes of Spitfire pilots over the Channel.  A pink cigarette died in the ashtray.
     The red light disappeared and with nothing more than the slight twist of a small metal plate the beast came alive, all sound and fury and chrome and hot leather.
     The smell of female had suffused the cabin, born of the soaked upholstery, but presently it fought off the invading scent of premium gasoline.
     I howled down the boulevard, a blue streak, fully possessed of the moment.  It was all rich, clean energy, and it reeked of a man dealing with reality on its truest terms, namely: no terms at all.

The Heart of Elegance

            Complex solutions were not necessarily arrived at by complex means and only from the minds of geniuses.  They are typically derived with unwavering attention at the exact point that needs it, and a solution is ventured upon that point that may or may not work.  It probably won’t.  But there’s a possibility it does, and one can get good at guessing which solutions shall work and which shan’t.  All it takes is observation.  Reperepetitio est mater studiorum…

            And after that there’s a second pattern to notice: sometimes, one solution solves not only the problem being focused on but in its same course solves a second, yet unresolved problem.  It’s here that one can become even better at predicting the solutions, striving not only for merely a solution that works rather than one that won’t but instead for solutions that solve two problems rather than one.  It is just as the separation between an average golfer and a good golfer: playing from the same distance, the former aims for the green while the latter aims for a particular spot on the green.

            That is the heart of elegance: single solutions that simultaneously, intrinsically, solve several problems.  It leads to the association of complex solutions with brilliance, for there is the true heart of genius: not just to pull something off, but to pull it off so elegantly that it appears effortless.

Imagine A Penny

MAR 26 2016

Imagine a penny.  If you're like most people, you know just enough about a penny to distinguish it from all the other coins.  "Ah yes, the red one!"  If you know any of the following, consider yourself part of a rare breed:

• Which direction Lincoln is facing
• Where the year is stamped
• Where the minting facility is stamped
• How many times total (both faces of the coin) the words are "One Cent" stamped

These are stimuli that occur to us but which we filter out because they are unnecessary information: while your perceive everything, you only regard the minimum necessary to satisfy a situation.  Because you never need to know these details of the penny, you find yourself unable to remember them right now, even though you see pennies all the time.  Or if you don't, imagine something else that you do see all the time.  Money & credit cards, plant life around your home, or the architecture of buildings along your commute but which aren't ever your destination are all common examples.  It is this ability to filter that allows us to navigate complicated city routes without knowing the street names: we don't know what the front of every building on every street in the city looks like, but we know just enough to navigate using a few landmarks.  Our brain has boiled down the entire town to just a small handful of landmarks for a given trip and in the process saved much time, certainly an evolutionary advantage.

The marvelous perception-altering nature of LSD is such that you perceive the wonderful patterns, textures, and details of all sorts that're all around us - in nature, in machines, in people's faces, everywhere - which we normally ignore as extraneous stimuli and simply discard any notice of, let alone appreciation.  It is a way of seeing (and hearing, and tasting, and generally experiencing sensations of all types and origin) that we have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps not since before we can remember.  But to experience the goliath, unyielding continuity of reality with an adult brain and understanding is nothing short of breathtaking.

Lightest I've Felt in Years

The truth is you're treating them like enemies, to be bested, because that's all they've ever been to you - competition or non-threats - when what you really want is to be friends.  You want it so dearly.

And realizing that was the lightest you'd felt in years.

Haikus in English are Patent Foolishness

Y'all don't know each other.
You smile.  She smiles back.  Life's gold.
'Murican haiku.

Originally written October 21, 2013

The Lindbergian Fantasy

Every time you drive a car, crank up your stereo, use a blender, or even romantically dim a rheostat (part of your mind is loving how much *power* you have, wielding electrons at whim).  As your television warms up, those few seconds are like the opening scenes of the space odyssey: we're in awe of how plain fucking awesome we are.  In our own little ways, every day, we live out the Lindbergian fantasy: man & machine, coming together greater than the sum of the parts.

The Rear-Ending That Wasn't

I rear-ended a girl for the first time today, though not in the normally good sense of that phrase.

            I sat waiting at a red light on Santa Monica Boulevard, headed East towards Rosewood.  The light turns green, people start moving forward, everything's going normally.  I notice a Star Tours bus coming the opposite direction, fully-loaded.  I decide to remove my hat and wave it out the sunroof at them.  When I look back down in front of me, there's a car, almost stopped, not twenty feet ahead.  I stab the brakes, they lock up and I skid, but it's too late: I can tell I'm going to hit her five feet before it happens.

            It was only a gentle crunch.  We both pull over.  The worst part isn't that my flawless record's got a wart, the worst part isn't that the front of my car's a little bit fucked, the worst part isn't that it's going to be a long time until I can afford to repair the car, or even that my insurance rate will rise.  The worst part is that there's no way I can deny – to myself, that is; I'll obviously never admit it to insurance or anyone else – that this was entirely the product of me being a complete dumbass.  By choosing to give some idiots on a bus a show they'd forget anyhow, I delayed myself and the driver of the other car by some twenty minutes and caused myself what I'm sure will be a great expense.

            That having been said, there are more upsides than downsides.  I was in my S-Klasse and she was in a new Audi.  It was pure German-on-German, so hardly anything happened to either vehicle.  My grille, which is mostly plastic, got bent but my bumper's fine.  Her bumper somehow looks miraculously untouched, save for some light scratching.  I had expected it to be totally crumpled.

            This girl who was driving was cute in a cold, Scandinavian way.  Icy eyes, pure blonde hair, and a pretty rack.  I could tell by the rest of her – thin, far too thin for my taste – that the airbags weren't factory standard.  We both call our insurers.  After a while on the 'phone, during which I'd been looking the other direction, I turn back towards her car and notice some other, to be honest quite more attractive girl had suddenly appeared.  Evidently, she had a passenger that I'd not noticed at all before.  The driver – Nicole – had what you might call the ultimate blonde hair, but the passenger had what can only be described as golden hair.  She was even lovelier.

            Perhaps it's simply because it wasn't her car, but the passenger had a warm, completely natural smile.  She also had tits that readily outclassed Nicole's.  That's not to say hers were bigger – though they were slightly – but by god was she perfectly suited to them and vis-versa.  They looked natural, too, no sense of stiffness.  It's an open secret that I love big bolt-ons, but there's an unrivaled hypnotic majesty to the fluidity of god-given boobs in motion.  If I went to Central Casting looking for a believably though uncommonly attractive Beverly Hills girlfriend, they'd have given me this girl.

            If all goes well, and I expect it to, I'll have my Cadillac back in a week or two.  Perfect timing.  God bless that Mercedes, but it has got more issues than I can afford to deal with right now.  As a Benz brother once said to me at the golf course – he'd owned a diesel too – "Wonderful car; everything’ll break but the engine."  I've been learning that is the truth.  Door handles, window motors, locking system and other vacuum leaks, it all goes to hell and shipping parts across the pond ain't cheap.  But those five cylinders will crank until long after the last man breathes his final breath.  This thing was respectable with rough edges before, but after this crash it's looking trashy.

"I WANT MY CADDY!"

                      -Woody Harrelson

            I must have lied earlier when I said that the worst part was how this collision was my fault.  The worst part is that I'm not fucking both of those girls right now.  Particularly the passenger.
            It'd be great to have accidentally, moronically hit Nicole's car and then hit it off with her friend and us have this fun night while she's still stewing about minor cosmetic damage to the bumper of her A4.  But that fantasy has an ever-so-mildly cruel, vindictive touch.

            No, something better might go like so: Nicole is discombobulated by the unexpected alteration of her otherwise uneventful afternoon, but she handles herself well – she asked me after several minutes on the wire with her insurer, “Want to call your insurance company too?" at which point I realized that's what I should've been doing all along; this was my first time at this particular rodeo (something I made sure to tell my AAA agent, verbatim) – while her friend is surprised but laughing *with* the universe and *at* Nicole & I.  Meanwhile I appear to the passenger as a suave-yet-perverse stranger, rather than the milquetoast inconvenience I'm sure I ended up being in reality.  I would hit it off with the passenger, the effect of which is doubled to Nicole since she's surely thinking I’m [il]legally retarded for banging her car.  The fact that she drives a current-model-year sportscar & I hit her with a junky yet somehow miraculously operational black luxury car with black seats and black windows while wearing dickshit shades and a sheriff's hat says to her that while I've clearly yet to find my place on some sliding scale – maybe that of money vs. taste, though more likely that of 'trying to be cool' vs. 'actually being cool' – I evidently somehow know what the hell I'm doing enough to afford to be driving through Beverly Hills in the middle of the afternoon in a Mercedes, even if the driver door handle's broken and the brake pads are worn to the metal and I actuate the starter with a screwdriver.

            This peculiar aspect of reality unmistakably turned her on.  When I was younger I would've been too stupid to realize that this particular aspect of my reality was eggs-actly WHAT turned her on.  I'd then suggest that we pull off Santa Monica, since the trip from the 405 to West Hollywood that'd normally take fifteen minutes damn near doubled thanks to our halving the number of open lanes.

            She was driving a new Audi through Hollywood during work hours.  She and her friend had tits granted by Santa Claus and if not God himself.  It was all predictable, but as network television and Samuel Goldwyn can both tell us, predictability is nothing to be afraid of, if anything it is something to which should be clung.  Nicole quickly realized she didn’t' want to go home to thousands of square feet and constant bickering.  A half-Olympic pool with custom underwater speakers and imported bottles of brandy wouldn't erase the banality of sleeping next to a man who barely expressed passion for signing thirty-five million dollar contracts, let alone coming home to a gorgeous naked blonde woman backstroking in his half-Olympic pool.

            Many hours, bottles, and positions later, Nicole and her passenger sat splayed on my wall-to-wall rugs.  Well, my common-law aunt's wall-to-wall rugs.  My name wasn't on this place's title, I just lived here.  They were juicy and so was I.  At least girl-juice was clear; grease wasn't: you should've seen this place before I rented a professional-grade rug-cleaner.  Gross.  The girls smelled good.  Five years of sloppily transported Filipino food didn't.  God Bless You Rug Doctor.

            It wasn't the best.  It sure wasn't the worst.  Maybe there's some personal bias, but those Scandinavians know what they are doing.  Must be in our genes.   Nicole and her passenger and I were nothing special, we were just another set of people in the thrashing confluence of humanity, which while incomprehensible at large can be at least marginally understood by focusing the glass on Los Angeles.

Rock n Roll

We've all had that moment.  You can't tell when you look into our eyes, but we have, trust me.

We've "needed a moment alone," or "had to do something," or "taken a quick break at the bathroom."  It's a low moment, when it happens, but it's a soul-restorer and power-giver the instant it's over.  We feel like we're on the verge of heaving, and more times than not we actually do fill that ratty porcelain throne with things we'd previously ingested.

And for a split second, our entire history dissolves, our image - of which we are well-aware - is nowhere to be found in our consciousness, and our concerns number zero.  We exist, almost as another person entirely, in that moment, purely alone and purely at peace.  We're wholly absent from care about the opinion of a single other sentient creature, and we exist purely in that tiny haven.  We are glad to be alive, not from fear of having been dead, but simply from utmost relief and being so comparatively comfortable, tender from shifting twixt these existential sensations so rapidly.

We flush the toilet, wash our hands, take another swig of whiskey to gauge our level, slug a few pegs worth of water to trim the sails, and place our hand on the doorknob.  The transformation happens, from the temporary vessel of random humanity back into whoever we are.  Then we're ready.  We twist the knob and step through the portal, greeted by compatriots, embarrassingly transparent wannabes, advisors, and select genuine comrades, all refreshing our momentarily forgotten personality, all unaware of the horrors transpired behind an unassuming door.

We're champions once more, immortal for having purged signals of our weakness, gods shedding their mortality.

Impractical Lovers

My hand wants to grip that wood
or leather
or in dirty cases even plastic.

To take her out
first being gentle
letting her warm up

giving her the time she needs
to get comfortable.
For her to be rightly lubed
cooled
warm
but cool
for this dude.

And once she gets going
she likes to run
even gallop
Three hundred some wild horses
chugging and loving
under my thumb.

She's strong as a dragon
but sensitive to part of an inch
and she'll bite
right when I won't take it
knowing I'll be back
'cause such beauty I can't not forgive.

I love our wrestling matches
but I don't ever want to fight.
Anyone could be a sadist for such majesty
and I pity he who couldn't,
he who prefers comfort
over alertness
and values simplicity in seduction
over reward of success.

The street runs both ways.
I turn her on
slowly
wondering how much she can take.
She returns the favour
Accelerating my pulse
as fast as I accelerate hers.
Our breaths getting denser
as the strokes mean more.
She screams with pleasure
and I can only amplify mine
by pushing her further.

Some ignore
some sneer
some double take
and some give compliments
to which I cannot instantly respond.

But some know
and acknowledge
and give a smile and sign
and I return the same
to them & theirs.

Ends justify the means
but I pity him
whose doesn't see enough romance in the ends
to justify impractical means.

Younger Than You

When I was young

maybe eight

or ten

I had a conversation

with my mother

at the club.

“Two times in your life

are strange”

she said,

“the first time the president

is younger

than you are,”

whereupon she paused

affecting drama

finishing:

“and when first the same

could be said

‘bout your doctor.”

I believed.

It sounded strange

and far off.

Something

about which I would know

nothing

for a very long time.

Those days are yet to come

while one she failed to mention

has already come to pass.

I speak of the day

when you first know

you’re growing older

The day the pornstars

are younger

than you.