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.

Beachbummin

The weekend has drawn to a close and I find myself in thedowntown Los Angeles library fiddling at the keyboard, my stomach growling, with quite a dilemma on my mind. Two cups of day-old coffee are churning in my belly with sour belts of indigested air adding acidity to the Hawaiian Hazelnut. I need a place to stay. My stay at Toro La Roy's aka Johnny Hren has come to an end, my couchsurfing days with a section eight agoraphobe and former pornstar are over, his landlord put his velcro-sneakered foot downand booted my ass out the door. I went to my storage unit and put a suitcase in storage and with me I kept my guitar ( vintage 1970's epiphone) and a backpack stuffed full of clothes, to compound the direness of my situation I'm flat broke not even a couple of grimy copper coins to my name, but I know I'll get by, I've been In worse situations, I actually slept under a lifeguard station on Santa Monica Beach for 2 weeks in December 2006. That was part of my 3 month stint as a beachbum/vagrant in the Venice/Santa Monica areas. I had met this guy Matt Bernard, who came from a well-off family in Baltimore and he had shunned his life and was chronically depressed. He was supposed to be some big college sports star but he got into cocaine and never went off to school just spiralled into a world of drugs and excess. I met him on the Third Street promenade one night when I had been wandering around aimlessly looking for a way to spend my time and some of the tips I had earned on my last night before getting fired from the Kaiten Revolving Sushi restaurant which is now a Pinkberry, because OSHA gave it a B rating after a sanitary inspection and once you get a B on the promenade you go under. I had been bussing tables and making Wasabi sauce and dishing out tiny portions of ginger and bringing orders to the tables, (a lot more than just bussing, those stingy fucks) I had showed up late a couple times and I don't mean tardy I mean practically a no show, I came in an hour late twice, but I had been sleeping in the park in between the highrise apartments by the tennis courts by station number 26 and that's a half hour walk from the promenade. So I had that job for about two weeks and I don't think I showered once, or maybe I did once at the pier when I found out about it and I was in the food service industry and it was a swanky restaurant and it was the Third Street promenade. Anyway I was killing time, staring at the scurrying shoppers under the awnings and parapets lined with blinking Christmas lights, smoking a cheap hand-rolled cigarette wondering about what I was going to do for money and how morally vacant it was to steal food, when this tweaker named Angel I had met the night before when I was high on rock and whom I had given a bud of high-grade chronic for the amusement he had provided and the general hilarious paranoia that he eyed me with walked by. He recognized me immediately and began stomping up and down barefooted, ranting about the establishment, his mouth caked with spittle and his afroed hair dirty and knotted together was full of sand. A cruiser rolled up. Angel looked at me and with concern and said the "block is hot and I'm out" he hoisted his pants up by the beltloops and scampered down the street on his bare and blistered feet. Wondering what to do next I glanced over at the bus stop and remembered I had wanted to ask Angel where to get some cheap weed. Standing under the bustop outside the La Salsa was a kid in his late twenties wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and dirty baggy jeans. He had an over-stuffed backpack slung over his shoulder and I could tell by the way he looked that he was outside too. I approached him and offered him a cigarette and then popped the question, to which he replied he could have some in five minutes if I had the money.  I followed him down the block and we made a left down second street and headed towards Broadway.  Crossing Ocean Drive, I looked over at his unshaven face, he had square features and pronounced dimples in his smile and I knew he was smiling because he knew I was gonna blaze one with him.  He told me his name was Matt and that he had been in LA for seven months.  Doing what? I asked. Enjoying the weather and fucking up my liver was what he answered.  We reached the source of our common bond, a gap-toothed black man in his late forties wearing a blue track-suit sitting on a flattened cardboard box and leaning against the rough and rinded trunk of a palm tree. I  reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty.  Five minutes later we were smoking a massive joint and I had a partner in crime to navigate the depths of destitution with.  So back to the lifeguard station.  It was December, just before Christmas, the Santa Ana winds were blowing at what seemed like hurricane speeds, on the promenade potted plants and picnic tables were gusted over like straw hats, signs and canvasses were whipping in the furious wind flapping against each other in a symphony of fabric.  Walking along the beach was like walking in a sandstorm.  We didn't really wanna be out in the open that night so we decided to improvise with the emergency blankets the christians hand out, we had found a bunch of them and had stashed them under station number 13 right in front of Liv Tyler's house I later found out.  We draped the blankets over the cris-crossed planks and heaped hundreds of pounds of sand, (the wind was that strong) on the bottom to secure it, kind like stretching canvass over a frame, we did that to all four sides curtaining ourselves in with tattered gray fabric.  Now there are no life guards in December, but there is still a yellow pickup with flashing orange lights that cruises by on weekdays with nosy assholes in it and menacing headlights flaring in the pre-dawn darkness.  They seemed amused at first like they thought we were a band of gypsies or something peddling whalebone bongs and turquoise trinkets, in the daytime we left behind a heap of junk: canned food, porno mags, dirty clothes, random books all tented in and fluttering about as gusts of wind  pelted the rudimentary structure.  Sometime around three in the morning Wetto, a tweaker who had a mild meth-induced heart attack two days later under that same tent smoking the devil's drug out of his pookie stumbled into our little hideaway and tried to set up camp.  He'd seen it from a far.  Hotel California is coming to my mind right now: "Up ahead in the distance he saw a shimmering light, his head grew heavy and his sight grew dim he had to stop for the night"  We had pity on the skinny half-el salvadorian tweaker who eyes were bugging out of his skull like a frog wearing contacts, he was high as a kite and the wind was whipping his t-shirt almost right off his bony body, sand stinging his eyes, so we let him in the fort and just then the wind picked up even more, ripping down one side of our life-station tepee and sending a blanket whipping into the foaming Pacific. 

Oval Orifice

So I hear someone in Florida offered Sarah Palin 2 million dollars to star in her own porno. And daytime television was just talking about her own talkshow. She could be fully exposed, it's not just the View, it a full uncensored view with Alaskan snowballing and grizzly-woman jizz-mopping, and of course the Northern red-light specials for keeping the Todds on their bobs pioneer trail riding and best of all the backwoods back-scuttle, husky-style. Who wants to DP the VP. "In Alaska we have a term for that it's called an eskimo blow, two ice cubes and a walrus whisker and make sure ya use extra elbow grease when you're blowing the snow off the roof of your orifice"

This last piss on the ass-kiss mattress

So one of the Obama kids chose the Lincoln bedroom and Abraham would be happy indeed to see a black child curled up and warm resting his bones and young fragile mind in the stately bedroom of America’s most princely residence. I think Dubya chose the Lincoln bedroom, audacious of him to think he could unite like Lincoln Obama’s young daughter could have done a better job,.I think Bush should have been in the William Henry Harrison outhouse behind the mulberry bush where his beagle keeps his bones and Dick Cheney’s shotgun buried, and all the gay bottoms with loose assholes and fanny-packs full of laxatives and a political agenda could come in and give him a piece of their mind... and their breakfast. I heard that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a constant rally of demonstrators, with a few homeless sign-bearers that showed up every day hail or sleet, rain or shine, christmas or hanukah, didn’t matter what hour of the night someone was there. Imagine waking up and shuffling to the window still blinded by the half-light of sleep groping for the purple velvet curtains and as the noon sun hits your eyes (face it he’s a late sleeper) you see a sign or an unwashed ass staring you in the eyes mocking you. Staring in big black letters: you’re fox news’ prince poster child douche bag.
Anyway, I wonder what their doing with Bush’s old Mattress, putting it up on ebay to raise money for Palin 2012, maybe they’ll cut it up up and make goose down pillows for the secret service. Eight years of presidential sweat have gone into that mattress, nightmares and piss stains in the night worried about being bullied by the liberal media tossing and turning and then remembering to count sheep, heh, I like to envision wooly longhorn that’s what I call ‘em but then resorting to making poopy sounds when triple-digit numbers got too tricky. They could wring out the sweat from the mattress, it’s probably the secret to Bush’s Baked Beans and bottle it as the the musk of incompetence.

Boulder Dam

We're snaking through massive lithic skulls of gray and mauve. Berry plants and twiggy little bushes adorning the path; a little phalanx of huddled cactuses to our left. Now standing in the middle of the high desert, I see a sign posting no swimming in front of me a dried up marshy looking graveyard of dead and sun-torched trees. It's like beaches on Venus. The ribbed and ashen carcasses of wind-buckled shrubs scattered like whale remains ahead. Misplaced Angelenos all around me, not just the day-trippers, but the family caravans packed for a week. Maybe LA will look like this in 100 years, all dried up. I've reached the dam and I'm standing in the evaporated soil of the dried up reservoir. Staring up at a blackened wall of rock and chipped stone I get the vague sensation of being watched... Jimi and I just smoked in the van, maybe that's why, safari-spliff ride through the park to get things started in a bright way. James is passed out in the back after Johnnie Walker seems to have run with him, they went for a dizzying stroll under the stars, he'll be puking in the parapets. The desert is full of dangers but like Hunter Thompson said we are professionals. Our van got stuck on a soft shoulder of sand last night. The left rear wheel a foot deep in the grainy quagmire waiting beside the road like an underage hitchhiker. We tried to turn around on what looked like packed sand (Pakistan?) but it was cracked sand sucked us in, stuck in a rut after sun down, we were at the mercy of the desert, at the whims of her wild wind, goners for sure. Oh yeah my brother was driving Mark's Honda right behind us, but fuck we had a High Desert Test festival to get to, art to see, people to schmooze, margharitas to shake and slosh down. And then like a well-induced vomit on a velvety morning after we were rescued and spit out of the sand by the wings of Washington (not exactly): towed out by a jock in a pick up with Washington plates, he said he did it all the time, I felt the guy needed a good Samaritan Award or least a Desert rabbit Foot hanging from his mirror, maybe it'd save him some parking tickets

Unfinished Story

Wilma Frick leafed through the paper, knifing its transparent spine with pink-polished thumb and forefingers. Unfolding it over and tucking its rustled, unruly corners over each other, she felt numb and bland irked by the whispering lonely ghost of solitude that haunted the angled crooks and corners of her house, spooking behind the lattices, staring back in the mirror, creaking on the hallway floorboards under a single pair of languished steps, brushing the linoleum echoing the numbness of a void. She stopped at the sex-classified and looked at its ashen and ebon Ferris wheel of desire letting the wheel of words tickle her brain and massage her doubts like pastoral promises. There, nestled between the boxed headlines offering ten-inch members or a caged anorexic transgender, under the wan light of a moth-colored light-bulb, her eyes caught like brambles gripping a clothed ankle, and fixed on a 2 by 4 inch ad: “Man seeking woman between 25 and 40. “Wilma was 38 and had long since started to get desperate
She had not been on a date in four years and spent her days marinating in the distilled haze of talk shows and apple martinis, her mind scrubbed with soap operas and their bland one-cell tissue of scripted melodrama. Evenings she spent in self-doubt doused in doses of wheel of fortune digesting her Lean Cuisine entrees before perfunctorily switching over to run her nightly marathon of sitcoms. Her mother began to call her frantically on Saturday Mornings, and then Tuesdays as well before her shift at Grand View Mental Facility. And then of course nearly every day she would call to hoarsely rebuke her churlish ways and remind her that she did not want to die alone. Now she steeped in fear of expiring all by herself like some abandoned china-doll rocking off-kilter in her forlorn cracked-paint cradle, there she would lie in her own bed, as alone as a fetus in the womb whacked out of her mind on Percoset and diet pills convulsing between sticky, soiled sheets when the maker sent his reaper.
Wilma glanced back at the paper sensing a chill flare down her spine as outside the heat wave blistered on. Looking up, she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply letting the smoke cloud her lungs. Wilma got up from her slouch on the seat and shuffled over to the kitchen where she fixed her fifth or sixth Bloody Mary, clasping up the glass and swirling the pureed red pulp inspecting it with a quizzical look on her chubby face before she put it down with girlish satisfaction. Then she yanked open the cabinet door on grinding hinges and put the capped Grey Goose into its murky, stacked- geometric interior. She grabbed her glass leaving looping rings of moisture on the Formica counter.
Walking over the fuzzy brown carpet that tongued with lint-sponged steps like an angora sweater cushioning her bare feet. She heard the crunch of glass and cried out in pain as thin jagged glass stabbed into her fleshy left foot. Cursing aloud, she bent her corpulent frame like a huge flesh doughnut being rolled up and began to examine her foot. In between her toes bristled bits of a broken filament fixture she was planning to install over her waterbed to get the feel of a tropical beach bar minus the palm fronds. Wilma reached over and plucked the glass out like she was plucking quills out of porcupine. She awkwardly tossed the blood-tinged fragments into a wicker wastebasket adding to a menagerie of apple cores, hairnets, balled tissue paper, and fruit flies. Scanning her cramped living room her eyes fell on the tented section of the newspaper she was reading gabled upwards and flapping like a curtain in a draft, swishing as her perennially gyrating fan pelted it with gusts of sour, sweat streaked air. She wanted to finish reading the ad she had started about a possible male caller, a princely, star-struck suitor blowing the queen of hearts in a wet, sloppy kiss, a fat hairy, perfect match to scoop her up from her soup-can cluttered kitchen on the fringe of North Hollywood, or at least lay her on her alpaca downed couch (That she had purchased at an Alpaca ranch in Palm Springs before her nineteenth nervous breakdown) and man handle her like someone breaking livestock, chafing her peach-fuzzed thighs against the downy lama fleece of her couch. But she was not ready to confront the outside world with even a praying, finger-crossed phone call. Roosted on her reclining settee she had strategically placed mere feet from her forty-inch TV to bear her through an unending campaign of sitcoms she flipped through a TV Guide with the attentiveness a poet memorizing a divan. On afternoons like this, battling the dry heat she hustled between the refrigerator and television like a general in perpetual retreat and re-assault, sitting down and waving the remote: a frenzied conductor for one instant navigating the TV tower surf and then in the next surrendering to her ubiquitous appetite scurrying her rippled frame to the icebox for another frozen entrée. She scampered around the house like a caged fox but never beyond the kitchen or front door; the smoky apartment was her sole turf as she suffered from crippling agoraphobia, she would timidly gaze out the window but always let her glance fall back on the TV with its mothering arms and reassuring chatter. The TV was like a placenta nurturing her ignorance, in rays and electro-magnetic emissions, nursing her in its fuzz-crackled stare.

So many homeless...

A latticework of streets that merge the crosspaths of the unfortunate, overgrown with the layering of societal runoff, here in LA alone 80,000 homeless according to census, probably more unaccounted for behind dumpsters, in the concrete basin of the LA river, under bridges, on rooftops, on beaches, in parks all scattered like beach umbrellas, cracked out reaching up to unscrew light bulbs under construction walkways to break in half and smoke meth out of or desperate and violent living under a tarmac on skid-row going out at night to rob people for crack; to dam the river for a while and catch a fix, medicate their loneliness and placate the sub-human standards enmeshing them and keeping them trapped like caged animals cloaked in the heat of LA fishing for refundables “canning”—a vagabond vocational term or “spangeing” for spare change, crowding the streets, sprawled out on the boulevard drunk holding cardboard placards like business cards, pushing beaten shopping carts laden with life possessions for the most part listless and complacent like it’s their unavoidable fate, ultimate defeatism, why even bother to get around it. Santa Monica is the patron saint of the homeless and if your going to be living outside might as well go west where it’s warm, like a pilgrimage to a holy site, with services, meals in the park and showers under the pier, sun shining down, lounging on the beach perfect for practitioners of indolence and sloth, the escapists who want only to shun life’s responsibilities and avoid the cumbersome reality of decision making and job security.

Happy Pigs and Butt Sex

The pressure pulsing my ears , the road winding between corduroy colored hills and low-shelved-cliffs. I'm eating a yeast-flavored roll we bought at at a food 4 less in redlands with other sundry food items on the last 28 dollars of my foodstamp card, state funded sandwiches for hikes in state parks a full government sponsorship program. I'm sitting on a Navajo blanket in the back of Jimi's Volkswagen Westphalia, the most German sounding automobile known to man, culture clash, plus I got a bag of canned refried beans I bought from a toothless white trash clerk at a food 4 Less in the REDLANDS, we're in the blender here all shook up on a jolted hi-way ride. What treaty was signed in Westphalia in the north Rhein valley? I forget. Was it something to do with Wurmms or Schnitzel? Veal, little calves slung like a ball and chain. Prop 2 passed here in California. No more chokin' chickens. No on 8. We want happy pigs and butt sex.

I Wasted my smart water on a Desert Oasis

I'm about to head out to the high desert, Joshua Tree, to be exact for some reason I wanna say that that's where country singers go to commit suicide. Oh yeah Gram Parsons. Apparently the early settlers saw the eponymous tree and thought it so welcoming, limbs akimbo, leaves and bright yellow flowers fluttering in supplication that they named it little Joshua. Joshua Tree is a great place to look at the stars and I'd like to get out of Hollywood to do my star gazing.

In the beginning...

The goat don't chew cud and shoot the shit, he eats trash and shits out fecal statues. Giles the goat, lived on the funny farm well he ate a bad can of Campbell's T-bone chunky, morphed into the Scatterbrainchild, got infected with mad-cow now there's a BSE-strain worming through his fevered noodle, the sponge-brained goat was gonna be put down and mashed into meal for the bovine ranches up north, until he made a ram turbo-charged run for the fence and grabbed life by the balls. What is this chicken run for the four legged horned and hoofed billy-goat? you may be asking yourself.

Blue and Yellow don't make Green

"Taxation without representation" to borrow the old Thomas Payne quote. Well, if you voted yes on Prop eight , than "my friends" (to borrow a more recent quote) you have also voted against the revolutionary ideals of our forefathers who founded this great nation on justice, equality, and a Gideon bible in every motel. If you aren't represented then you don't pay tax. Now, I understand the definition of representation is a congressman but it could also be viewed as how we are represented in the eyes of our legal system under the unforgiving arm of the law. Why should they pay taxes if the constitution is amended out of their favor if they are in the Declaration of Independence guaranteed equality. So until Prop 8 fails no tax for gays.
Now I understand there may be a couple bible-thumping sketchy-eyed priests right now fidgeting nervously thinking oh God, the fags are getting tax-free anal lube, they could get it by the bucket- load grease up Mount Rushmore and shoot boiled potatoes at it from a blowgun.
Anyway to continue where I started, ever wonder why the only political parties invited to that party on the hill, the C-Span shindig are the rubbies and demis it's like an even match between two teams in their blue and their red jerseys, there's no green in there, but I know Bill inhaled, who could resist, no seriously , we have a green party in America with constituents and canvassers and fund raisers but no representation, no seats in congress, no slice of the pie any way you cut it, maybe, Sarah Palin will have a midlife crisis think she's a beauty queen again and start regurgitating some of the pie, "cause in Alaska we play for keeps that's the Palin doctrine (SNL)"
There's only room for two it seems. The Red party. The Blue Party. Two Primary Colors, they duke it out for majority rule leaving purplish smears when they cross paths. We Need a Yellow Party then we'd have the the electric kool aid acid test in congress.

Email from Hollywood (July 2007)

Good to hear from all of you.  My stint as a telemarketer lasted less then
>half an hour when I found out the company was legally bipassing the law
>through some loopholes that had already been outlawed in 14 states.  I was
>supposed to lie to a secretary/receptionist and ask her for the model
>number of the office photo copier assuring her that I was a representative
>of the xerox company (as long as I didn't drop which one and said I was
>merely a mailroom clerk sending out an updated instruction manual.  The
>jist of it was to send them over-priced toner and ink cartridges with a
>correct invoice that would ultimately be cheaper for the company to keep
>(since they were the right parts) then to send back.  A truly noble cause I
>was championing with an apathetic completly conspicuous and bogusly
>see-through tone that afforded me not one secretary friendly, stupid, or
>pitying enough for me to jot down one meager model number and make my
>commission.  It took me half an hour to figure out what we were doing,
>being kept in the dark we were not aware of the complete moral absence of
>our profession or its charlatan tactics.  I worked in a cramped, moth
>colored room, furnished with old school desks and antiquated office phones
>alongside a phone team of West Hollywood crystal meth-heads,
>hermaphrodites, mexican queens, and black transexuals with curling
>plasticine nails of pink and orange, sounds like srgt. pepper on tweak.  So
>after I quit the job assuring Carmen (the redneck loiusinana bayou boss)
>that my moral qualities were not consistent with the nature of the work and
>that she should reconsider the way she promoted it on Craig's list, then I
>told her I'd wrestled with bayou alligators that were nastier than her.  
>Walking through the bright sunlight down Melrose avenue where the hordes of
>yuppies flock like peacocks to strut their pre-tattered fashion clothing
>and scoff at the unwashed and unfortunate lying in gutters  (oh wait those
>rips in your jean were't purposely stitched in by the  designer, OMG), or
>pushing rusty shopping carts down the streets, or the hippies, punks and
>drop outs and old Vietnam vets, The van that I slept in has been
>towed, repossessed and will be auctioned off at the end of the month, it
>sat on the roof of Hollywood towyard winking at me with sun glinting of its
>battered bumpers, as I said goodbye, taking my possesions and piling them
>into a vietnam vet's car, he said I could store it there until I get a
>place, which won't be too soon as desperate as I sound, because I have a
>decent-paying job, and actually he gets an SSi check for 1000 so I may just
>split rent 325 a piece for a month ( no lease) and then with the money then
>saved up, I'll get my own single, I coudn't live with an old man for too
>long, he'd creep out potential cock-suckers and cum starlets (i think i've given up
>on a romantic notion of love), especially since he lost both sets of toes in 'NAm and walks with
>a cane with a gait that crosses between a Charlie Chaplin two-step and a
>charles bronson swagger, it's kind of like he's walking on hooves, so I
>have dubbed him Pan.  Yeah, it's pretty sad becuse he has terminal cancer
>and was expected to die last year, but he keeps on nursing his sclerosis
>and making sure I don't drink alone, but I never really know if I'll see
>him the next day, so I try to make the best out of each fleeting moment. 
>Then Angelo's got the pick-up across the street, also a Vietnam vet, 214th
>airborne division, gunner and paratrooper sole survivor of his group of
>friends, but he's the true Puertorican version of Chuck Norris meets Cheech
>and Chong with a joint hanging from chafed purplish lips.  I don't think he
>handled the war too well but he likes me says i remind him of someone,
>but Angelo gets amped and manic and has a lot of trauma that you only see if
>you look for it like one of those 3d puzzles  that hung on the white walls
>of JFK.  He also surfed in 'nam like that crazy colonel Robert Duvall
>played in Apocalypse Now.  That vision alone makes me smile, cheers me up. 
>But the agent orange fucked up his liver and he's dying too.  He is an
>aspiring fashion photographer and is about to get his degree, he used to be
>a real- estate mogul, until his wife fucked him out of everything.  Now he
>lives under the camper shell of a beat-up Chevy filling his days with
>dreams of what will come when he opens his fashion studio in Vegas, but
>never will because face it this is America and good never comes to those
>who wait, or serve their country.  This is the land where the spoiled
>children of wealth and privilege amass more and more to the plight of the
>working man, the poverty divide gets more staggering, "dog men and their
>mean women pulling poor blankets over our soldiers".  So it goes.  I weighed
>myself today.  I've lost 32 pounds, hungry, I've really got to go find a
>food-line until I get my check.
>take care,
>yours truly the phoner pirate, swash-buckling, drunk vagabond drifter known
>to those who still care,

Stormin the Mormons like Normandie D-day

The gays are marching on the mormon temple in westwood. Colorful signs of neon pink flourescent greens acid yellow, tangerine, all very effeminate waving in the air like a queer mannerism They'll tear down the gilded statue on top and rape it with glittering star spangled hard-ons, smack lady liberty across the chin with a big rubber cock, ride her down the avenue of the stars and up the constellation, past the Hyatt where the Democrats just staked their victory in an official shabang like a showering roman candle of red, white, and blue. Yes the queers have spoken and they ain't happy and they ain't done yet.

Good BYE GEORGE WALKER TEXAS STRANGER

OBAMA, NO COMMA, MIDDLE NAME HUSSEIN BUT NO LLAMA JUST THE VOTE FROM YO MOMMA. FROM GHANA TO KENYA AND BOTSWANA we cheer together and SMOKE GANJA.

I thought I'd start off my blog with a little nonsensical rap in the political vein. Welcome to the wobbly world of the Scatterbrainchild escaped from government testing facilities off the coast of Alaska... hibernating now in the depths of cyberspace.

Somewhere in the Aleutian Archipellago an eskimo named CrazyBiPolarBear pulled on his orca skin boots and fake rabbit fur mittens, purchased at a Mervyns close out sale in Wallatoo, Idaho and hopped on his "crotch popsicle" his kawasaki skewer-skiied snowmobile so he could go jetting off into the tundra to look for Todd Palin to inform him that his vision quest had come to an end. No matter what amount of euphoria-inducing-hallucinogens he smoked the fact would remain the same; cold and bare staring him in the face like a wine-cooler hangover: the dream of executive complacency had come to a bitter end. He would not be the Jeremiah Johnson he had so desperately dreamed of posing to be, the sidelined bearded hero, maybe he could have even been a hockey coach, the VP's bitch on ice; morning show reveries and discussions with the Christian Science Monitor with his gun-slingin' wild woman bald spread-eagled, arms wide open in a Cesarean grapple at the helm of the senate to paraphrase her congressional misunderstanding. Was it the unified voice of a re-liberated America that finally brought the change so many of us all so desperately hoped for. You can't blame it all on the scariness of the McCain-Palin ticket however, 8 years of Bush has pushed us to this choice. The agony of the IQ-challenged president stammering through press conferences followed by a translucent pile of goblegook and double-talk revolving on rehearsed questions taken by what seems like the bi-monthly press secretary position, ephemeral and ever-changing, standing with a shit-eating grin and a Kenneth Cole suit to add interpretive non-conclusive jargon, specious cover-up stories and interpretive and contradictory statements that mask and sugarcoat the policies of a flawed administration.
What faces our majestic hero, if Bush was the Christ-caped-crusader than Obama is surely the man of Steel with a black sarong instead of red undies, what faces the black knight who so valiantly rode in on the resurrected race horse of his party that 4 years ago got shot because of a doping I mean voting scandal and a horse named shrub. In the upcoming years our afroed, b-ball-bouncing prez is going to face challenges that go beyond the half-court buzzer beater (after you spun in a circle ten times cause the pom-poms were waving, No! Those days are over! put down the baton George...) Of course he will confront issues that transcend the black and the white, the red and the blue somewhere in all the shades of gray in between that complete the visual spectrum. America has voted, heaven has opened and its raining cool November rain from the ballot boxes, I look at the spectral sky, we've reentered the blue period so to speak the finger painters are almost on time out and someone like Picasso is gonna paint again.