California-reveries

The Escaped Goat

Fallen Halos

Looking back on this blog with cool introspection, reflecting on my youth, moods cycling out of a manic feverish highs and diving through  unstrung halos on reckless whims; brain stirred by hypomania.  I started this blog to document my troubles being heard as a writer/musician in the megalopolis of Los Angeles chasing falling halos, eyes twinkling, drugs coursing through my veins on the nights when coping was too hard or the cold was in my bones and the pavement wasn't too friendly.
 I spent a total of roughly six months on the streets mainly in East Hollywood into Los Feliz, around Western and Griffith Park and then, of course the main drag on the boulevard, and every possible stretch of it from Vine to Fairfax and over on the beaches from Marina del Rey to Malibu but mainly Venice and Santa Monica.  Back in LA proper my backpack and joint silouetting the flash-bombed imagery of the Sunset-Strip as I shot through the colorful heart of West Hollywood on a manic bender,  serenading downtown and Echo Park, feet floating through the Silver Lake hipster morass in a detached hazed dream.  They were one or two month stints over a 5 year period, with moments when I had a roof over my head and a lease signed, but most months I didn't have my rent together, blame a medical card and too many pot-shops and my girlfriend would pay my share probably 3/4ths of the time, and as a result of a hot temper and of course add my foolish pride to the mix,  and I sometimes found myself back on the streets for a few days or a week.
 So, I wanted to get back into the details of those adventures in the last couple years after we gave up the lease on St. Andrews in Little El Salvador, off Santa Monica Blvd. flesh out the rest of the story in 2008 and my 40 day stay in LA County Twin Towers in 2007, where I spent most of the time locked up on the seventh floor, where I lost the right to my yellow and blue scrubs the first day, and also my mat and blanket, which I never received, and was completely naked on nothing but steel and concrete in September and October, under blaring florescent lights that never went out, until I earned that privilege three weeks later.  There are some sordid details I want to forget, but writing them down and telling this story would be cathartic and give me some closure.

Moving past that and skimming over my life with that girl and her enabling me to try and make a little music by moving in with her, and to this point, still my longest relationship, where on St. Andrews  Louis Wylie and I recorded about fifty songs and cut a demo, on shitty equipment, and played one fucked up gig  too drunk to be coherent and definitely off key at Crane's Tavern off the boulevard on Gower.

And then the lease expired and the relationship, the first of a couple break-ups before it ended a year later and on to the longest stint I spent outside, this time mainly on the west side beaches, and then one night  Haku-- one of my partners in crime--and I , we walked north along the shore past Malibu, where we we finally escaped LA and caught a ride into Riverside and up into Santa Barbara where we spent a few few weeks beach-bummin in Santa Barbara, and luckily it was May into July in the subtropical so-Cal sunshine, and then in the middle of all that , before SB, there was also a week where my brother, always concerned, intervened and I staid in a halfway house in South Central on Cimarron that I mainly used as a storage unit while I  peripatetically perused, caroused, puffed and browsed the streets of LA, and  later met a couple OGs one of whom really took me under his wing for a few days, and I slept in his van for a night.  And then the getting back together with my girl, a tiny apartment (one room, and i don't mean one bedroom) and a crib sized bathroom, where we were living of of Pico/Fairfax in a black middle-class  neighborhood east of the luxury of Beverly Hills...And then it all snapped again and I was outside for about a month, before I hopped a  chrome greyhound streaking sleek down I-80 with her tail between her legs back east, and  I and ran home to my family's small estate here in the Poconos in Pennsylvania.   I wanted to get back into those details of the nights and long days when my ranting tirades must have scared and definitely amused (I hope) the passersby.  For entertainment purposes only. HAHA...

I find myself coming to a grinding halt, screeching to a standstill, muddled thoughts and preoccupation with a stale situation and joblessness that leaves me broke. Its sapping my happiness and sense of self-worth leaving a hollow feeling, a gaping vacuous void that is slowly devouring my life and gagging at the insipid taste that my bland life leaves lingering, the meaningless flavor of a deprived and starving existence, the self-pity and sadness that accompanies it, and the stigmatization of government handouts. Too much to bare, scraping by, the long winter of my discontent, unmotivated and lackluster, thinking back on my late father's partial memoir and documentation of post-modern alienation and his ode to his estrangement from the generic repetition of art and pop culture and the sense of not belonging, his elegy to the slow descent of our culture into the quagmire of mediocrity and a bedrock of haughty smugness , a rejection of American values as a whole and the implosion of our aesthetics, cultural suicide and synchronized worship of mass-produced plastic idols , disillusioned iconoclasm and doomsday pessimism. Kind of depressing, the extreme realism or existential brooding of a disenchanted starving artist. The familiar repulsion by materialism and greed, self-preservation and obsession with wealth and fame, the sensationalist vomit and fear mongering horseshit of inscrupulous media moguls and rightwing pundits with over-exaggerated senses of self-righteousness. It sounds like a climate that would spawn the Joker, nihilism and mayhem, fascination with destruction, schadenfreude succumbing to the depressing reality of newsreel tragedy, discrimination and violence, bank failures and economic woes spiralling out of control. But everyone refers to the impertubabilty of the American spirit, the defiance embodied in our heritage, a liberated revolution of tolerance and extension of freedom to the oppressed people of the world, the soothing injection of Americana and television-escapism replacing our self-reliance and survivalism, making us pampered and rosy cheeked, fat and middleclass, the threat to this complacency becomes an all-emcompassing fear generating cutbacks in personal spending to be replaced by big government spending to bail us all out, injection of the almighty dollar to bolster our failing industries and inflate our pride, Uncle Sam taking the reigns, guiding with unitarian determination and quasi-socialist governmentalization, the call for hope, instead the bureaucratic disintegration of the seemingly straightforward process of democracy. We hear the call for collective rejection of partisan strife and togetherness, and still Rush Limbaugh runs his mouth, pumps more fear into our collective unconscious, tears down liberal steps forward and pines for the conservatism.

Night Flight

Wednesday night, back in the cold embrace of Hollywood. I left Johnny's pad after taking a nap with the blurry television bickering in the background, a taped Law and Order from Saturday night just what I need before I brave the mean LA streets alone all night: homicide detectives trying to unravel a murder mystery; a man stabbed to death in an alley. Arrogant, dick-eyed detectives sleuthing around with pistols and fancy monologues and the same hard ass Christopher Meloni speech at the end of every episode. He was on OZ playing a prisoner not afraid to bare it all in the shower now he plays a cop, God he's so versatile, I kid, it's like Shaquille O'neal doing Othello. After eating a tv dinner whilst ignoring the tv I packed up my Yamaha guitar I had purchased in one of those Persian-owned music shops on the boulevard after I had bartered the owner down to 100 dollars and no tax , I had broken the b-string on the epiphone that afternoon while tuning it before I had even got a chance to play and besides I did not want to lose my vintage guitar if I was going to be out all night. I filled up a 200 ml vodka bottle with coffee (only bottle he had) said goodbye to Johnny and grabbed my pack and guitar. I walked down to Hollywood/Western Metro station and shuffled down the steps into the stale and musky underground. I had no money for a ticket, but my luck had been good so I did not worry about it. I exited the train at Hollywood and Highland and walked up the three flights of stairs out into the neon night. The streets were bustling with people, the celebrity mascots or look-a-likes or whatever their called, the super-heroes and costumed picture posers, the musicans the cd-hustlers, the beggars, the poetry peddlers, the performers and dancers and of course the drug dealers but worst of all the fuzz stationed along the curb in the black and white crown vic with the red lights flashing and some poor soul handcuffed and head bowed staring solemnly at the ground. LA cops are the worst, they're notorious for beating up innocent but maybe slightly crazed individuals and for using excessive force on people, but the deputies and sheriffs, the green shirts are worse then the police, they are human garbage, scum, all of them, they're all young and look like rookies and subjective analysis has deemed them unfit for a badge and they need something to prove, these guys are former bullies and locker-room towel-whippers. I've had my ass kicked by the Los Angeles Police on two occasions, and once I was bumrushed and then dogpiled by seven or eight Santa Monica Police officers for drunken conduct in a park and then had my face mashed in the dirt and my head bloodied and kicked in and was hauled off to jail, where they scanned and photographed all my tattoos for like an hour to compare them to the ones in the gang tattoo data base while the whole time I asked for water and was told repeatedly to shut the fuck up. Anyway, I crossed Highland and sat down on the corner resting my pack under my knees. I took my guitar from out of the cheap cloth bag I had it loosely wrapped in and started playing some blues and then after a while I decided to play something with a little latin flare to it, with no pick. I kept having to get up and walk fifty feet up the street behind the phonebooth to take a leak and that kept messing up the flow and I was losing my interior rythym and I started getting bored so I decided to walk over to Famima!! and sit outside and write something. There were a few people sitting at the tables outside and one homeless man with a notebook with extremely meticulous notes written in small, neat handwriting was sitting at one of the tables drinking out of a coffee-stained dixie cup that had left brown rings on scattered pages of notes lying all over the table and I asked him what he was writing. He told me it was a business idea for a cafe, I wanted to ask him more, but the next instant the shift-leader came and told hime that he had been nursing that single coffee for five hours and it was time to go. The man gathered his papers and scattered belongings with desperation in his eyes and an utter look of disheveled abandon. Cramming them in a plasic bag he meandered down the street in hole-riddled sneakers. So, I took the spot he left behind got out a notebook and wrote a poem. I decided then that the next day I was going to go to Santa Monica to go see Matt and see what the west side streets were like these days and if Venice was any good for street musicians. Feeling restless I got up and thought that I would walk over to Cahuenga and see what was going on at the bar scene over there. When I got over to Cahuenga there were two cop cars that were blocking off the street. Wondering what was going on I crossed over and in the distance I saw a school of fire engines parked up and down Cahuenga from Selma to Sunset and then noticed the glow of a fire coming off one of the buildings. The ladders were arching out of the trucks like errant limbs leaning up the facade and mustachioed yellow-coated fire-men were shimmying up them extinguishers in hand. A crowd had gathered and outside the Spotlight, which is a gay bar, I got in a conversation with a man who asked me if I would play my guitar. I told him I would, but I had to take a leak, he pointed in the direction of the fire and said you're fluids are needed over in that direction, I laughed and said I would return. When I got back we some how got on the touchy subject of where I live and I told him I don't have a place to stay. To which he replied you can stay on my floor and don't worry I'm not gay I have a girl friend her name is Roxanna. I Knew he was straight even though I had seen him come out of a gay bar. I welcomed the offer and thanked him very much, saying we could jam at his place because he had told me he was a composer. So he ended up buying me a Heineken inside and I got in a conversation in German with Stefen some German from Munich that he knew who was sitting at the bar. Then I was verbally assaullted with a barrage of flirtations from a buck-toothed queer with horrible breath, made it out with Martin, who was feeling very sentimental and very drunk and was hugging every third person. He was also very hungry but nothing was open so we tried walking trough the drive-thru at McDonald's but the bastards ignored us until he spit at the window then they came up to the window, but he had walked off, and God knows they would have spit right back in the burger. So we went to his place and smoked some of Humboldt County's finest and I had my first good night's sleep in a few days.

Kermit the Hermit

This blog should be about Los Angeles Libraries. I've been to almost every single one. I'm now sitting in the Hollywood regional branch where at 9 am on weekdays they serve bologna sandwiches and coffee, 75 percent of the patrons of this library are homeless it's unbelieveable. There is a a stench lingering in the air and almost everyone is carrying a sleeping bag or has a pushcart crammed full with blankets, plaid and camouflaged bundles of clothes tied in a twisted knot. Shaggy haired vagrants and veterans sit at tables conversing resting their bearded chins on interlaced fingers, their bags unpacked beside them as they glance around shifty-eyed and suspicious. Some of these guys even use these computers to masturbate; it's disgusting, surfing porn sites like carrion clinging to rotting meat; the odor of malt liquor wafting from their mouths like cheap incense as they surreptitiously beat off thinking nobody sees them.

Last night I was walking around Hollywood with no particular aim in mind just wanted to make it through the night. I stopped at the corner of Hollywood and Highland and was approached by a scrawny looking dude in his mid to late thirties who asked me what I was up to. I could tell right away he was homeless and he looked like a Punk-rocker and I also needed something to do so I let him entertain me for a while. He had short bleached hair and was wearing some kind of beige spandex cord around his noggin, to complete the outfit he wore a red and black pleated kilt and plaid Vans one of which had the Sex Pistols written on it the other just said "pretty vacant''. He was carrying a yellow shopping bag from Amoeba records with a vinyl record inside. I asked him what record he had bought and he showed it to me. It was an L7 record from 1994 called Hungry for Stink. Now I'm a big fan of grunge so I figured maybe I could hang out with this guy, maybe he knew how to play an instrument maybe something would happen, maybe he could join Scatterbrainchild, naive I guess, delusional I guess, the guy was a nut. He started telling me about a symphony he had been working on since 1994 and I asked him what knd of symphony and he said it was a maelstrom of the universe and that he had to have it finished and that he was running out of time, next I wanted to know why he had bought a record if he had no turntable on which to play it. He said maybe he would give it to a girl he liked, "I gotta find Megan" he kept saying, "she wants me to find her, she gave me the straight sign she'll give us a free yoghurt sample at pinkberry, this symphony is my gift to the world it's in my head I published it in a poem at the Unitarian church it's about all the women I fucked and now they all wanna kill me, one day I'm just gonna twist one of their heads off. He was starting to creep me out a little, but I was also feeling sorry for him and I couldn't seem to shake him. Then he started complaining about his hunger and we busted a left onto Las Palmas away from the light to get away from the people. He stopped and spread his legs and just started pissing, urine splattering up onto the curb and onto his ankle and dirty kilt. I smiled and mumbled something about how easy panti-less crossdressers and scotsmen must have it. We walked up the street and he fished into a box and scooped out two packets of chicken-flavored Ramen noodles. Next began the quest for hot water. After several rejections and moans from him about his worsening hunger we finally scored at Mel's 24 hour diner on Highland. Along the way he also found four half-browned miniature banananas and a bag of stir fried vegetables dated November 2nd. With nothing else to do I figured I'd keep him company while he ate, so we walked over to Famima! and sat out side on their cold and dirty stainless steel tables while he mixed the brittle cellulose noodles and LA tap water and then sprinkled on the MSG and then finally tossed in bits of vegetables that were best before two and a half weeks ago. A brave man indeed, and a lunatic as well, oh yeah his name was Kermit.

From 2007 Bush was driving me mad still...

I found this in my archives from last year, I think it's all over...

This country is falling apart under the reign of a masochistic college flunkie with an oil drill for a penis and brain that make you wonder if texas bovine have mad cow, grade A-hole angus beefcake patty, gungho >plutocrats and imperial jingoists. As usual the GOP has managed to >overweigh checks and balances which seems to be an antiquated concept of a >time of lore. No one can talk to these bastardized Ness-like untouchable >western cowboys fighting for justice under the inscrutable cry and caped >garb of bureaucratic jargon, riding at the head of lynching posse to >decapitate the statue of justice, look up her skirts and chisel away all >the civil leeway we have made since the sixties. No one can talk to Karl >Rove, fuckin untouchable master of puppets in the Georgie playtime hour, >hey Karl move the arms bitch. Puppeteers always gotta be behind the >curtains I guess, the facade pulled over the executive branch, and yes >executive privelege is a totalitarian concept, one man turning over hours >or days of bicameral discussion. The Patriot Act; shoved on congress and >approved by the red army of idiots, longer than War and Peace, preaching >war not peace on our liberties at least, read this, you have till tomorrow, >you can skip the small subtextual print if you please and just sign the >fucking bill. 1400 pages documenting the extenuating albeit almost >imaginative circumstances that have led Walker Texas Ranger speeding >forward on his doped-up horse carrying himself and an apocalyptic >Revelation thumbed bible preaching like Cotton Mather about wrath from from >an angry god and how if we let queers marry we'll be burning in hell like >their own flaming assholes, or back to the point, he had his quack squad >sinew together a 1400 page legal loophole spaghettifying civil liberties >like a black hole, shot us through a worm-hole into Dimension Dubya where >swastikas hang from the houses of holy and his Gestapo is out riding under >a bad moon serving the secrets with lockjawed silence and goblegook. This >country apparently allows wiretapping (it's for our own good they might >say, think bill o'reilly--"one of our own", dosed with the old moloko >ranting about cucumbers and anal sex), spying on ethnic households, racial >profiling and other murky beasts of the deep wading through this moral >morass and political quagmire. The old westpointers sitting in a circle >strategizing every possible warpath, a trip through the annex or drill down >the desert, it all amounts to the same: unjustified intrusion of a >sovereign nation with a reaping hand of doom: don't trust the Midas touch.>They managed to purge the legal system of a liberal level-headedness and >left a rash of rightwinged boils blistering like old dead Nixon's >power-drunken nose on a three-day bender.

Meth is on Fire

Well. It's Tuesday and the sun is shining. The Sayre fire is 66% contained but Chritopher Lloyd's 11 million dollar mansion in Montecito burned down. I didn't even know he had 11 million dollars. I haven't seen him in a movie since a shitty disney martian movie, but I'm sure he's done a few. Maybe he can go back to the future or something, I apologize I'm still waking up and quite hungry. I was watching flames engulf a trailer park yesterday on the news, nobody was hurt, although mother nature did do some redecorating for the better, a white-trash cinder-block barbecue with kingsford and kerosene, fluffy marshmallow thighs running in bunny slippers, so bring the rubbernecking and oogling ballbark wieners they're seamed and blackened sides splitting like a guffawing couch potato. I saw a couple meth labs go up, green and blue smoke, crystalline fragdals rocketing into the sky tinging it with shards of filament and loony tweakers hopping after them on pogo-sticks in day-glow painted flame-retardant-suits, one of them was wearing an astronaut helmet, two others were fully outfitted in World-War II gasmasks and zoot-suits, yet another was braving the heat in a scuba suit complete with bright green flippers and an oxygen tank, those crazy fucking tweakers, I swear, if they invested the amount of energy they did in getting a fix into getting somewhere they could put out that fire with their penises and a truckload of Poland Spring.