my dream last night

You’re a freestylin’ machine. A good, honest-to-god flower-picker and frivolous thinker when your shit is down and out. You take pride in the intricacies of being simple… you know when you’ve done your fair share of good.

La Cienega Boulevard

When you’re driving up the 405 (headed towards LA), there’s a small but fitfully irate section of the freeway that spits you into a congested procession lasting about 30 minutes (if you’re driving at a luckily clear hour). The area that I’m talking about sits just past LAX as the highway begins to curve and you hit La Tijera Rd. I’m not too sure why this part of the freeway creates such confusion for people, it might be the sudden curves in the road that hug the tiny hills and cause ill-view, or it just might be caused by those regretful drivers who try and look into their rearview mirror to get one last glimpse of the giant planes passing over the eight unlucky lanes on the 405. For those of you who have driven LA’s hardhearted highways one-too-many times, and for those of you who know friends who have driven LA’s hardhearted highways one-too-many times… you know better than to sit in the clusterfucked throes of the 405. You know to take La Cienega Blvd. This, my friend, is the grotesquely large vein on the back-hand of all the traffic charlatans out there… yep, you know who you are.
The amazingly wonderful thing about La Cienega Blvd, is its atmosphere. Not even a mile east of the freeway, and you’re suddenly transported into an urban/desert milieu, with telephone wires littering the sky’s backdrop and rusty god-knows-what occurrences of metal structures (one thinks of abandoned factories) rolling away into the dust-brown hills. And everything seems SMALL. The hills seem too small, the houses that sit up near your left shoulder seem to small, the traffic lights and street signs and factory pipes and dead shrubs. All too small. So you feel HUGE. Like you’re driving away (no, escaping) into this miniaturized Hollywood set that frees you from your real life congestion. Leaving behind the ocean of coupled, red lights that do one thing only - they’re telling you to stop.
And then you hit the ‘highway’ section of La Cienega. An undersized freeway that slips underneath your car’s wheels at maximum speed of 70 mph. Two lanes (not including yours) on your right, and three more on the other side of the road dividers. You’re sharing the road with the traffic charlatans, and damn it feels good.
You then drive until you hit Culver city (a small sign on your left in the shape of a movie clapboard) announcing “Welcome! To Culver City!” But, just as you’re getting used to the depressurized feel on your car’s brakes, the highway descends into the LA basin, and everything is shit again. The ocean of red lights resurfaces and you roll down your windows in the 5-10 mph wind your car now creates. There’s another ten minute drive until you hit the 10 freeway, and fuck knows why there’s a street named Rodeo Rd (named after, and instead of, Rodeo Dr). Bootleg. You sigh and begin your daily dose of introspection while crawling through the streets. The 10 freeway slowly makes its way towards you, and then suddenly… you realize that for the past 15 minutes, you’ve been living in a stage set. The miniature hills, the fake highway, the movie clapboard, Rodeo Rd… all part of this grand charlatan scene. And JUST as you’re about to reach the climax, the orgasm, the peak of this SUPER important introspection, the lights turn green...

...and you’ve forgotten everything.



I don’t know why I felt like writing this other than the fact that I took La Cienega this past weekend on the way to get my hair done.

Ann Richards

the here and now is all we have and, if we play it right, it's all we'll need.

treadmill dreams

Today I went looking for something I lost a while ago. I don’t know why I did, there really is nothing left to find anymore. The satisfaction of searching though, the satisfaction of looking inside the spaces in my head for some sort of consent, some confirmation of this lost thing was what made my pursuit malfunction from the get-go… because, of course, I can not ever find what I was looking for.
While I was in Israel, after getting piss ass drunk and watching my friends smoke an enormous amount of Israeli hash, we all stumbled onto a field in this small town just north of Tel Aviv (the name of which right now I cant remember). The field was hidden behind a hill, shying itself away from the town lights and traffic sounds… a completely obscure treasure in the middle of the desert. We rolled and staggered down this hill, only to find ourselves stunned by the sudden change in atmosphere - the wind had been blocked, the light had suddenly vanished, the cold had set in, and we were all looking up at what looked like a goddamn photograph of the kind of shit you see on the NASA Channel. I sat down, my head spinning, and exhaled a thick cloud of air. I don’t know if being stuck in the hotel room with all my smoking friends had somehow affected my perception (the theory of hot boxing keeps raising flags), but I could’ve sworn to you, that sitting there under the sky and looking at the universe was beyond transcendence, it was a fucking liberation, a death, a birth and an enslavement all at once. I realized that all the shit we live in everyday: the fucking myspace, the cliques, the networking and high heels and fucking bullshit we find comfort in is such a waste of our time… just another sorry way to delay the inevitable truth that we cant control shit. Not to be overly dramatic or anything, but here’s my point:
We all find ourselves in a situation like this at one point or another… whether we’re looking for something lost, or something we haven’t found yet, there’s always that search, that ache of somehow being able to distinguish and understand our past, present, and future. Our existence. We manifest ourselves through what we perceive is truth - religion, government, nature, society (you see/hear/believe everything you choose to), so you create a cultural demographic of good vs. evil, and pick your side. The bottom line is that there really is no past, there really is no future, no good or evil or heaven or hell. There is no definitive answer. This line of time that you’re living in is constantly leaving and coming, constantly fluctuating - you’re running on that treadmill, and if you don’t keep the pace, you’re going to start falling off sooner or later. Live in the present. The present is yesterday’s future and tomorrow’s past. Live. Don’t remember or prospect. Live. Now. Now. Now.

That night in Israel put my life into perspective. Today I put things back into perspective after failing horribly in trying to revive my past. I don’t even want to. No one can anyway. So I’m feeling pretty good as I start to release my past and just let things happen as they come. Nothing else.

headache.

i have one.

Communications Studies

Im sitting in my Comm class, a medium-sized auditorium dedicated to psychology and communications lectures - a giant poster of the periodic table tacked onto the north facing wall. The room slopes upwards toward the back of the classroom... we sit in mustard-yellow chairs (the kind that have the pull-out desk on their sides) and theres hardly, if any, elbow space between these seats. Im not sure if its a student or a teacher... who is seated in my row, on the opposite side of the room, and being overly-exciting with the professor. Laughing a little too hard. Giggling too much. She's blonde and very OC. She seems to take quite an interest in gender studies ... the type that happens under the sheets after a first, emotionally constricted date night out. She's trying way too hard to make an impression on this guy. Why is this teacher so goddamn good-looking??
Im waiting to have the classroom fill up - the volume of conversations picks up every minute. The more people come in, the louder it gets. I can hear the typical "Oh my god!" scream from the girls who partied too hard last night. The usual "when is the test?" Class starts in 6 minutes, and i cant wait until im walking out of here.

I need a change of pace. Life is way too typical.

archaic and tired

I’m sitting here with way too many thoughts running through my head - typical of a slow night, just out of the shower and my hands are terrifically dry from the soap I’m using. There’s a Citronella candle burning in the opposite corner of my room (isn’t Citronella only supposed to burn outside to kill mosquitoes?), and the yellow reflections from the candle’s surrounding glass jar impatiently wrinkle the surface on my walls. I can hear Mayer in the background… Gravity… such a fucking good song. But, of course, most of his voice is drowned out by the droning uproar going on inside under all this goddamned hair.
I’m actually pretty sure Citronella is only supposed to be used outside. Something about the way the candle burns… too thick to be dispelled modestly inside the home. At this point, I figure that my shit cant possible get any more clouded. Fuck mosquitoes. Fuck cobwebs and dust and this excess amount of shit clogging my air (figuratively speaking. I already blew out the real candle anyway)… There is a division of thought inside my head that keeps preventing me from being overly careless or carefree for that matter, especially under circumstances like this. I (try to) keep that solace of autonomy locked up in a cobweb-y corner of past recollections, behind boxes of nostalgic compensation and futility, titled “Shit”. There are rows of rows of these ideological manifestations - old love(r)s, great restaurants, high school rumors, too-tight jeans, parking tickets, etc, that remind me exactly what to enjoy, what to avoid, and most importantly, what to let go of. The problem with titling each of these thematic tribulations is that I begin to develop a sense of subjectivity: this is a really classy way of saying that I become too fucking sensitive and wary of everything.
Another over-sophistication of my behavior: I like the word Indolence. It makes my laziness sound tres tres chic.

Jesus it feels good to write like this once in a while.
There really is no point in running away from any one thing. Fuck its cold right now. Hoping this racket wont keep me up tonight. I wish I could just empty everything out. Just like the avant-garde old days. Slap a leech on your temple… suck all these fucking thoughts out of my head. Please!