Stephen van Dyck, homosexual motorist.

my three brothers / industry of death museum

2009-11-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

I have three half-brothers in their 50s. They are all introverts with MDs, a wife and kids. My father says their mother named them all after children's book characters. Each of them seems to hate me for a different no good reason. Once my father dies, they will be my only family left.

The oldest one, Peter, is a born-again Christian. He moved to North Carolina and got a Southern accent. He said my being gay is like being addicted to drugs. According to my father he was once married to a witch. Then I'll ask, "you mean, she was a really bad person?" And he says, "no, she was actually a witch." Her name was Tori and she was at least ten years older than him. I met her once when I was four, but all I recall is the mini-mall we went to. She made him get his tubes tied, and before they met she already had a daughter, who now has a daughter of her own. That girl would technically be my ex-step-half-great-niece. Tori and my brother divorced after ten years, and then he married his secretary, Tammi, became a born-again and got his tubes untied. I was recently scouting website domain names and tried "vandyck.us" which redirected me to his psychiatry clinic's site. It has a section called "ethics" which explains how his practice relies on scripture as much as anything medical. He told me he has clients whom he assists in recovering from homosexuality. He lives in a house made completely out of wood, even the bolts. My father told me recently that he was telling my brother good things about me, and then my brother asked for my address, as though he was rethinking the decision of not sending me a graduation gift.

My parents and I would travel to visit all three of my brothers almost yearly, though they rarely visited us. One time when I was sixteen we went to Connecticut to visit my middle brother, Chris. Excited and in a rare moment of talking to each other, I asked why it seemed like we weren't that close. He told me in all earnest that I was only half as important to him because I'm only half a brother. He explained genetics to me, how a certain amount of DNA moves on to children from the parent, recessive and dominant genes, etc. Then he said that human beings are more invested in each other based on how closely related they are. He said that because I'm only half as related, that he only has half as much at stake in me. Through Yale, he researches Alzheimer's Disease, motivated in fear of its being hereditary and omnipresent in his mother's family. His wife teaches a class at Yale about the brain, and my nephew is a music student there. When I turned seventeen they sent me a copy of Catcher on the Rye with a note in the front saying, "I hope this will change your mind about reading!" I'm not sure what they thought I thought, but I don't think it did, and I went on to be an English major. When I was 22, my father graciously lent me $2000 that I agreed to pay back while in school. Thus began a relentless barrage of calls from my brother telling me that that was his (Chris's) money and that I intentionally stole it from him, as though my father is completely senile and can't make decisions for himself. I had never even received a call from Chris before that. It was strangely relieving to get the attention from him. After this incident, he refused to see me or let me visit his family on the rare occasion that I was nearby in New York. In 2005 Chris bought our father's house, because Pops could no longer afford it. Now Chris charges him rent. Originally, my father left the house to me in his will, the equity of which would have been my inheritance. My father is 87; this isn't too far ahead. The house is now easily worth twice as much as it was when it was built. Albuquerque's market has continued to make a profit even through the real estate market collapse of the past three years. I found this out from Shirley Rich (that is her real name!), a realtor I sat next to on a plane to Albuquerque once. Now my father saves up his social security and retirement money to pay my brother rent, and my brother uses his frequent flyer miles to let my father visit me twice a year.

Thirdly is Tim. His ex-wife and current wife both told me that for some reason, Tim just plain doesn't like me. His first wife Jo told me this over the phone after they had separated; she was trying desperately to hold onto every strand of connection to him. Like Tori, she was also ten years older than him. They had been married ten years. The two of them lived on lakefront property on Lake Champlain right across from Burlington, where Tim and I were both born. Tim was born when my father first moved to Vermont, and I was born 25 years later, just before we moved away. My father says Tim resents me for "replacing him" as the youngest. Tim and Jo lived in a lakefront house and it burnt down, along with all their possessions and one of their two human-size dogs. Only a little over a year later, we found out my brother was with a new lady who was already three months pregnant. Now he and she live in North Carolina with their three kids. Tim works at a military hospital where he sees marines just returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Until I was ten or so, I spent all my time alone outdoors: playing in the park, hiking, climbing trees, climbing rocks, crushing rocks, New Mexico has a lot of rocks. We lived a mile away from mountains a mile higher than us. My parents prided themselves in having few possessions, and so I relied on the free goods: chunks of granite, loose cinder blocks, lizards, the layout of my neighborhood. I had cats, turtles, fish, a dog I didn't like. I cried when we got the dog. We got along okay though eventually. I taught him the command "husky!" which meant that he would pull me uphill on my rollerblades. Eventually I made friends. I always wished I had real brothers, and so of course I looked at these three cold men like they were Gods. It was a big let down whenever they never reciprocated. They're from my father's first marriage. One day his first wife left. She wanted to move to the city and become a careerwoman. My father said he would divorce her if she didn't come back, and he had to raise the three kids without her. My father is antisocial, sociophobic, rarely gave me hugs, doesn't know how to show love but has a lot of it. My mother was overbearing and emotional so I turned out okay. Perhaps this unideal upbringing led my three brothers all to become family-needing psychiatrists with no tolerance for a hedonistic art-fag half-brother.

My father has been in Los Angeles for the past week, thanks to another frequent flyer mile purchase from brother #2. Last week I brought my father to the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museum. As we walked in, this Aryan blonde woman greeted us stoically. My father immediately says to her, "I have three sons who are psychiatrists." She responds, "A psychiatrist just shot a whole bunch of people last week! I hope it wasn't your son." She denied that the museum had any connection to Scientology, though it's even tax-exempted since 1994 because of its affiliation. The exhibit is a series of maybe fifteen rooms each containing lengthy videos and beautiful, elaborate installations of old torture devices and exaggerated doomsdayish signs and images. For the most part I found their points poorly argued, "evil" quotes by Freud taken mostly out of context, and relying almost entirely on fear: 17th-Century torture devices, lobotomies, even attempts to connect Hitler, 9/11, the Apartheid and Columbine to psychiatrists. There was no acknowledgement of all the satisfied customers of the industry, and no suggested alternative. But the whole time I couldn't help but think about my brother making money from his hyperchristian degayifying. That he went to an Ivy League school, has a PHD and is allowed to rake in six digits for administering drugs to and advising vulnerable people ("sexual deviants") to continue to live in fear of themselves, it's offensive. In its arguments, the museum maybe-accidentally showed sympathy to gays and even pedophiles. I agreed with the museum that psychiatry should not be used to subdue the different and individual, whose perspectives could be of great use to society. Unfortunately, psychiatrists are paid by the hour and not through a government system. Instead of efficiently educating patients, they make them reliant on their services to rake in what they can get.

Also in attendance were Katie and Andrea, whose house (which is behind my house) was being fumigated, and so Andrea brought all her meds with her for safe keeping. She took one pill while watching a video about prescription drugs. For the last hour we were there, she had disappeared, and by the time we were done we had noticed five missed calls each from her. She enjoyed tea and a nice dinner of sushi. As we exited the last exhibit room, a culty woman encroached on us to fill out surveys. Scientologists are known for trying to dam you in, talk your ear off to convert you. I said I had to check on my car, and Katie was concerned about Andrea, so we both darted away before they could block us. Instead, we left my father there, talking their ears off with half-relevant stories from his 87 years of life, perhaps their best use yet.

Over 60 artists reinterpret public space along entire 27 miles of LA's Washington Blvd

2009-10-09T21:55:00.001-07:00

A Day in LA: Washington Boulevard Art Concert

WHERE: The entire length of Washington Blvd., from Whittier to Venice Beach
WHEN: October 11, 2009 12PM-6PM

“A Day in L.A.” shows work from over sixty Los Angeles artists in unused public outdoor spaces along the entire length of Washington Boulevard’s 27 miles. For one day artists will perform works, create installations, facilitate happenings, and make music in unexpected spaces, such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along railroad tracks and inside the audience’s cars. An official map of the day’s events along with schedules and other downloadable information will be available to the public starting on October 8 on the event website (www.washblvd.tk).

The audience can choose how long they want to spend at each spot, skip spots or drive at different speeds between destinations as they traverse Washington Blvd from Whittier to Venice Beach, culminating in an end performance at Venice Pier. Audience members are additionally invited to car pool with some artists between spots and to switch car pools at their leisure. Artists’ works include a Korean youth orchestra performance, a relational aesthetics taco tuck, human wind chimes, a reclaiming of the boulevard’s traffic islands, and more.

Building on the success of his last curatorial endeavor, The San Fernando Road Concert in 2008, Curator Stephen van Dyck seeks to investigate the possibilities of Washington Blvd as a site for artistic exploration. Washington Blvd is LA’s longest east-west street and one of the longest municipal streets in the world. This event will highlight this space as a way to view how the Los Angeles metropolis grew, and the massive in-between and negative spaces it left behind as it expanded. Additionally, this day will examine the Blvd as a cross-section of the city's diversity of landscapes and people. This exhibition/event/experiment asks, “How can we generate a new kind of LA experience, bringing meaning and attention to a collection of less obvious destinations?”

Participating artists include musicians, artists, writers, non-artists and residents of Washington Blvd's many neighborhoods: Danielle Adair, Karen Atkinson, Lara Bank, Ama Birch, Cindy Bravo, Bernard Brunon, Michael Buitron, John Burtle, Audrey Chan, Caroline Chang, Carolyn Chen, Andrew Clinco, Samantha Cohen, John D'Amico, David Dominguez, Ken Ehrlich, Daiana Feuer, Matthew Fielder, Flint, Robert Frashure, Nancy Ganucheau, Cary Georges, Mary Beth Heffernan, D Jean Hester, Julia Holter and the Open Academy Youth Orchestra at LATTC, Alexis Hudgins, Sarah Ibraham, Islands of LA, Katie Jacobson, Ian James, Kyoung Kim, Shaun Klaseus, Sojung Kwon, Andrea Lambert, Emery Martin, Anita K. Marto, Meghann McCrory, Midnight Ridazz, Joe Milazzo, Tracy Molis, Robin Myrick, Tucker Neel, Paul Pescador, Ali Prosch, Faith Purvey, James Rojas, Ally Sachs, Janet Sarbanes, Nate Schulman, Gary Schultz, Sepand Shahab, Veronica Shalom, Katie Shook, Cynthia Simonian, Mark So, Mariangeles Soto-Diaz, Jennifer Styperk, Robert Summers, Mathew Timmons, Carlin Wing, Austin Young, Luis Zavala and Yelena Zhelezov.

LA's endless streets: lavish, symphonic.

2009-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Streets in LA are so long! Meandering through so many places and non-places, night life mingling strips and industrial wastelands, taking random twists, they end up in unlikely conclusions. Like a good story, not the most resolved mode of travel, but tells a complex metanarrative through its necessary structure. These roads are like symphony-length music staves waiting to be translated to notes. Not literally, like the singing road in Palmdale, which plays the William Tell Overture when you drive on it. Just take a drive on Washington Boulevard, which brings you from suburban Whittier to vacuous concrete warehouse-land, the LA River, then strattles between Korean and black enclaves, becomes Culver City's art district and results in bourgie Venice.

This one road, all with one name, is neither the fastest nor most direct way to get to and from each end of itself. There's a certain lavishness in that inefficiency. The name is asking for some connection to be formed.

I frequently get lost in this kind of thinking, map-nerd moments, overanalyzing the geography of LA, admiring how long and aimless the streets are, which is how I came up with my road concert idea. My original idea involved reconstructing a street as scores made of found materials from the street to be interpreted by viewers-turned-musicians. But I figured it'd be more interesting to be out on the street itself getting people to go from A to B inhabiting all the in-between spaces for themselves.

In LA there are massive amounts of land that everyone skips, that are as desolate and hidden from the populace as a rural mountain road. What if those places became the destinations, to skip our usual IKEAs, 405s and Denny's, to generate a new kind of LA experience by bringing meaning and attention to a collection of these less obvious spots?

So last summer I curated the San Fernando Road Concert, an all-day arts event organized to re-imagine unused urban space along all twenty-three miles of San Fernando Road from Sylmar to Lincoln Heights with experimental music performances, art installations, readings, discussions and carpool happenings by twenty-one LA-based artists, writers, musicians. You can check it out at http://stephenvandyck.com/sanfernando.htm. It's like an inverted parade art concert. On the day of the event, audience members drove the length of San Fernando on a loose schedule, arriving at each spot to experience an intimate interaction with and/or by each artist. This year, on October 11th, I'm organizing another, on Washington Boulevard.

Add to the list of Los Angeles's glitz the extravagance of 30-mile streets. Some of the longest city streets in the world are in LA, Sepulveda Boulevard being the very longest in the world at 43 miles. Many other claims have been made, some also in LA. The prostitution and drug-dealer-wrought Colfax Avenue in Denver is only 23 miles. Playboy magazine called Colfax "the longest, wickedest street in America," but they're wrong about longest. The Guinness Book of World Records listed Yonge Street in Ontario, Canada, as the longest street in the world at 1178 miles. Sounds more like a country road to me. Some say LA's Figueroa is longer than Sepulveda. Figueroa has the longest street-span continuously in the city of LA; Sepulveda dips into Culver City. But both are discontinuous. Figueroa puts you on the 110 north before it restarts off to the side just a mile north. The city of Hermosa Beach voted to change their section of Sepulveda whicch overlaps to the PCH to just the PCH. Even still, the largest bit of Sepulveda is longer than Figueroa, Colfax or any municipal chunk of Yonge Street.

It amazes me how one iconic name, Sunset Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, even Washington Boulevard, can cover so much and so many kinds of turf. One name can have so many different meanings.

Some of the long roads of Los Angeles are so winding, even in the topographically monotonous parts of the LA Basin. Many of the lengthy LA streets originally started out as numerous disconnected streets in different towns that grew together. In 1915, the city of Los Angeles got an aqueduct, and easily convinced and annexed ten incorporated cities including Hollywood, Watts, Sawtelle and Eagle Rock. And then there are roads like San Fernando, Ventura or Valley Boulevard which were originally US Highways (US-99, US-101 and US-60 respectively) but got downgraded when Eisenhower built the Interstates. If you can imagine, most of what is now this endless metropolis was once all small towns with trolleys and orange groves connecting them. Car culture was an integral part of how LA developed, and consequently, Los Angeles has a very high concentration of flamboyantly designed drive-thrus, diners, giant statues of donuts and mechanics from the 50s, 60s and 70s. No one walks in LA, or so the song says. It’s just not reasonable unless your calf muscles outgrew New York.

It's no puzzle why Businessweek Magazine named LA the best city for artists (followed by Santa Fe, blech!). There's so much God damned space. All the old warehouses easily convert to huge studios. But kinda ironically, LA has only recently made gains as a city for public art. Because public art here is drive-by art. So either artists make works that are conducive to being seen from a quick and moving eye, or they've got to tell the public where to go. In this city, just stepping out of the car in a new neighborhood seems like serious travel.

My father recalls LA in 1948 as a city that took a day to surpass. "There were no freeways. I can remember Olympic Boulevard, Hoover Street, Vermont. Those were the main throughways of the time. The clutch went out in my car. In those days we didn't have automatic transmissions. I don't think they existed. Whenever I stopped, came up to a traffic light, I'd have to turn the engine off, because I couldn't put it to neutral. Somebody'd have to push me. In those days we had bumpers so everyone could push each other. I'd have to get out of my car and ask someone. Going through LA, you couldn't bypass it. It took hours and hours, most of a day to get past LA. The idea of driving forever and ever without hitting a traffic light was utopian, unthinkable. The merchants thought they had an absolute right to have the main roads go past their businesses. There were no bypasses."

Whenever I try to sell LA to a skeptical out-of-towner, I explain how living here is customizable, that we can get in our cars and skip all the places we don't want to see, unlike New York where it's inevitable that you will walk every block and encounter every kind of person, not that this is a bad thing. The customizability combined with the weather is why the city attracts enclaves of large diasporas (or so claimed this Armenian lady I met on the street) like Little Ethiopia, Little Phnom Penh, from mostly-Armenian Glendale, mostly-Chinese Alhambra, mostly-black South Central LA and 79.5% white Republican Santa Clarita where the KKK has its California headquarters. And yet there are also some of the most integrated and diverse neighborhoods, like Long Beach, the most diverse in America according to USA Today: 15% black, 45% white, 36% hispanic, 12% asian, if that's how you want to measure or define diverse.

Why not have an event that embraces the extravagant car-based culture that this city was built on, instead of seeing our gas-guzzling transit mess as a wrong-needing-to-be-righted?

a book, a list, a blog.

2009-06-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

It's not easy writing a book and a blog simultaneously, especially when they're pretty similar in style, both relying on wandering descriptions and tangents of varying lengths. Have I lost readers? Did I have readers? Blog writing has always varied in purpose from themed, informative and inter-referential to chaotic, stream-of-consciousness and diaristic. I'd like it to land somewhere in between, valuing transparency and rawness over gimmick, but with purpose(s). I did get a tad verbose and confessional in some mid-00s entries. I think there is something gained from the currentness and immediacy of a writing, and even the lacklusterness. In my artwork I don't commit to endings, nor can I say a blog entry is finished by the time it's posted.

Anyways, my book is tentatively called “People I've Met from the Internet.” I wrote about it on here before (see February 18, 2008 entry) earlier in the writing process, so the way I describe it now may have evolved a bit. It's a sort of coming-of-age story about protective mothers and growing up gay with the internet and being an artist. And also a conceptual writing project about narrative conventions. And also an ethnographic study of gay internet culture and its evolution from 1998-2009. It started as an OCD data collection of everyone I ever met in person from the internet. Columns include names, screen names, the exact day we met, the city and neighborhood we met, a summary of what we did, how many times we met. The list is thoroughly footnoted to the point where some pages don't even contain the list. Annotations contain dry, clinical descriptions of what I recall of the people and the meetings. The annotations are an overwhelming, endless list of mini-narratives varying from a few words to involved short stories. They range in relevance to the annotated name, occupying both the highly scientific and the personal, linking to each other and stringing together into subplots about cleanliness, the oddness of strangers/other bodies, interconnectedness of a community, my ex-boyfriend, the act of writing such a piece as this, gossip, LA landmarks, macho sex lists, a vulnerability and naivete that evades death and danger. In the piece, I constantly find myself in parts of Los Angeles I would have never otherwise gone to, almost as though I was teleported there, to meet some stranger for who-knows-why, someone I would never have otherwise had reason to cross paths with. Just like the internet is merely a device to teleport me to new people and places, the book is sort of that way, too, for the reader, into gay internet culture. I've read from it at various venues including the Silver Platter, REDCAT and the Bonelli Contemporary gallery. And I've even gotten a publishing offer! But I won't get too big-headed about it; I haven't yet finished the project even. The best parts are still to be written, I'm hoping.

On April 23rd I opened my solo thesis show, including video installations of my projects “Home Depot Artist-in-Residence,” “Bathe and Drive,” “Customer Service” and “Post an Ad on Craigslist Inviting Strangers to Freeball (Go Without Underwear) with You at a Public Place.” And I read from the manuscript. I won't ever post anything from it on here, partly because it's highly revealing of so many people, but mostly because the writing makes the most sense in non-internet physical book form. Instead I'll give you the introduction my mentor Matias Viegener read at the start of my reading:

“ANONYMOUS is the title of Stephen van Dyck's reading tonight, but Stephen van Dyck could be the title and ANONYMOUS could be the author. Stephen's title, while perhaps coy, offers us a nifty handle on his work, which is an experimental narrative on people he's met through the internet. But how anonymous is anonymous? Is it possible to be too anonymous or not anonymous enough? Most of the meetings catalogued in Stephen's thesis are with other gay men, but not all. Some lead to romance, others lead to sex, and most lead to nothing but a meeting, or a second meeting. In some ways you can read this text as an allegory of modernity, or technology. We live in an age in which we are just as likely to meet each other in real space as in non-space. For gay men, especially gay teenagers, this likelihood is vastly multiplied, because for them there are more gay men in non-space than in real space, so the internet has become the most common vector for gay boys to become gay men.

“What Stephen van Dyck's text narrates is the key moment, the transition from non-space to real space, from personalities to bodies, and from ideas to things. Its form is appropriately doubled, with a kind of database on the top, a repetitive chronological list of names with seven categories of information for each. There would be nothing exceptional about this part, except for the annotations on the bottom. The annotations run the gamut from trivial to profound and start to really test the boundaries of narrative. you can identify at least two forms of narrating here, one being the list, and the other being the anecdote. But there's also a third, at least a third, in the echo between these two forms. And like Joe Brainard's I Remember, we start to read through the lines and through the constraint to get yet another story, which like I Remember is a gay story. It's a story of a double life which spurs a kind of double writing which we then subject to a double reading.

“Stephen van Dyck project is a form of conceptual writing: writing with an idea. Or: writing which is actually about something other than what it seems to be about. Or: the use of a text in which its allegorical function exceeds its denotative function. All of these are interesting, but to my mind what most connects Stephen's work to conceptual writing is that it attempts to use writing against itself, using a kind of constraint to make apparent what is hard to see, which is the texture of a life lived both in real space with real bodies and not.

“Forty years ago, metafiction writer John Barth wrote a seminal story called Life-Story, whose central conceit was of a writer writing a story about writing a story, or more precisely not writing a story, just writing about writing a story and never really writing the story, so the writing about writing the story becomes the story. One of the most elegant aspects of Barth's story is that is supposedly written in real time, over three hours or so on what turns out to be the day or the writer's birthday, and the end is basically an interruption of the story that ends the story. Rather than continuing to unpack this, I will simply point out that many things are being accomplished at once here. In Stephen van Dyck's tale of anonymity, many other things are accomplished as well. Along with a questioning of the nature of narrative we have an interrogation of the place of narrative – does the story happen on the top or the bottom of the page, or somewhere else? It's both a list and a story, an archive and a set of anecdotes. It's also a coming out story, a story about life today, and a life story.”

date festival.

2009-04-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

In February some friends and I went to the Date Festival—the fruit not the activity—though it was definitely more overwrought with the latter. There were pig races, a newly interpreted 1001 Arabian Nights play, the 90s band the Gin Blossoms, monster trucks, and a ton of people who were either pregnant, in wheelchairs or both.

Click here to see the rest of the photos.

"he." draft.

2009-03-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

I drive upwards, then I trudge in white mud. He stands motionlessly through a yellow-orange haze with a white cloth fitting tightly around his waist and upper thighs. I am wheezing and squinting at him, leaning my head toward him and refocusing, because of the haze. He is nodding. I find a glass. Separations in the backbone pull a little farther apart so they can touch better. “It means we have fun and we touch,” he is laughing. Rotating my neck to lock my eyes with his, he blinks back, nodding. I look over and hunch more to study the patch of evaporating puddle twenty feet ahead. The asphalt is a thick rubber like the sort used in McDonald’s playgrounds beginning in the early 90s. My fingernail catches between the edges of rubber and plastic. He stretches back, tugging the cloth’s drying glue, his skin now a flat orange, the wall speckled in black and yellow and increasingly green. I get up to pour myself a cup of water.

If you’re going to ask me about inches, I’ll have to show you in miles. I say that to him. He removes a farm. “How about now?” He takes out two mountain ranges and a national park. “How about now?” He pushes a toe between two of mine. “I’m not interested in things you really mean.” I pull my toe out.

He’s playing coy again, but who could blame him? He moves with his legs hitting the ground in quick succession, galloping down the steep path smirkily, less giggling and more of his typical Bratz doll expression, bouncing every eight feet, gliding over boulders, spraying widely into a dusty billow. A warm wind starts to pull through.

I know we’re always laughing for different reasons. Sometimes the distortion between them vibrates through the wind. I have to rethink my trust in him.

It’s interesting how we make things in assortments of colors so we can’t tell what’s really on them. A ladybug is red, and suddenly I’ll be terrified of Formica. We’re on our way to a museum. All I do is wet my finger to rub off a fiber of rust. He moans while the bacteria are already tonguing the scrape. Some older styled Russian lady is pushing her husband’s corpse in an oversized stroller through the bicycle lane. She makes a gesture with her tongue, just trying to be funny and then walks by. I think it’s important to acknowledge others.

He opens the door and places his bare feet on the concrete. We’re on La Cienega and Wilshire, and he suggests we need to go somewhere for fresh air so he can breathe. He’s in front of me, going down these giant metal stairs, the last one at the bottom is so big that someone left a rope so we could rock-climb our ways down. Past ten-foot-high mouse holes there are dust balls that could form tornadoes. “I could be someone else here and neither of us would know it.” He laughs as I smile. I start reminiscing about smokestacks.

It is deeply dark, no stars, no blue light, no hum from branches. We are in public. He rips apart the vacuum-sealed sediment and takes out the crank-like pipe to match the gears together. He hands me a card and keeps one for himself, putting away the extra ones. “We’re looking for penises in the shapes of states.” Something glimmers from an old hook in the ceiling panel, and my heartbeats grow speedy. We swerve and I fall into his shoulder. The joints in my hands are tired. He doesn’t pay much attention to my bumping into him, expensive as it may be. “Ooh! There’s one in the shape of Oklahoma.” We look down at the same time at our maps and he stamps his.

My hand is feeling along the gravel. His arms are wrapped around my chest, the weight of his abdomen on my pelvis, his feet skidding behind me as I crawl. “I wonder if we’ll find the Ambassador Hotel.” I pout my lips and return my attention to reading the pebbles. “Why do we still make maps?” he says.

6’2” 150 pounds. 20” screen. No hair, no pores. Lips, teeth and tongue in tact. “Pleasure to meet you.” What do you think of the asteroid belt? The question is ignorable, what with so many people whispering around us, their corners touching and different red and orange fogs. “I’m into it.” I don’t like his shoes, and I can tell he is into noble gases. I drive back onto the road and find a freeway.

“Why do people lie to each other and say they’re over forty?” I’ve never known the point. Everyone died in the 80s. “We are orphans.” I start shoveling the dirt under the tires again, knowing I can’t pretend to forget what has to be done. The next time I see my grandmother I’m crawling around on a shelf in her linen closet, curling up in a ball. I give her a hard time; I tell her she’s a phony. She tells me it’s not her decision to be capable of acting.

I look at him, he looks at me. It is afternoon. We’re watching Anna Nicole Smith’s dog running down a gravel path, ten seconds passing before each time its legs touch the ground. We both hum, trying to match the timbres of each other’s voices. We don’t say anything, but we stop. Then we think about where the land has been and where it is going. First we’re chewing it up, then we’re secreting it, leaving small balls of grout. We stand in the shadow of the only cumulonimbus cloud.

He and I are lying on a large flat grassy lawn in front of a windowless cobblestone building. “What about making a third person out of the two of us?” I remark. A woman in a shoulder-padded business suit appears and gives a list of names, favorite colors, genders and personing places. Then he says Connecticut is probably his favorite option from the last list, because someone else recommended it once, and it gives him the right feeling. “Let’s get lunch first,” he says. The woman gives us complimentary beads and suggests meeting again at her parking space at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart, then takes off.

If he likes my type then he might like me. I don’t want someone only for “love”; I have a number of scenarios that could work. In the produce aisles, the apples are always polished. If we’re going to dance, I want to hear it. I want my value.

If you’ve been talking to him, he’s not here right now because he’s been launched out the window and through the fog, catapulted beyond the San Gabriels, looking down over the same house repeating for miles on the other side. In a bed of oysters does the ugliest have the pearl, or is it the pearl? Maybe they all do collectively, or maybe he should stop looking for one. When he washes the deodorant off, he immediately goes and reapplies it.

When the door is latched, I know not to bother checking if he’s in there. My sarsaparilla sarsed, my jawbreakers broken into half-moons. He’s indulgent and I wouldn’t be shy to watch him eat. The many planets and suns swell to dimness and hang low in crisp tones around our heads and I purr like a cat.

He wraps my arms over his shoulders like I’m sobbing on his neck or looking down his shirt. He walks backwards one step, turns at an angle, then takes the other. He grabs me from the forehead to push off of him, then as I descend he grabs my hands from above my head and flings me back up. I wind around so I end up facing away from him, my back against his chest. The ringing noise from the animals is louder because we got closer. We’re frowning about the coincidence because it was a coincidence.

Whenever I hear that song about “waiting on the world to change,” I think about the San Andreas Fault and our viewing parties from the lookout point. Stucco crumbles so well, and everyone cheers and butts heads like it’s the Super Bowl. I massage the bottoms of my feet on viscous rock material to be polite.

He’s looking to be brought to that split-second moment between day and night. He’s looking for someone to relieve the embarrassment of his honesty for sharing that information to everyone. For this reason, he holds the cantaloupe in his arms when we walk to the check out, and he serves me some after I’ve brushed my teeth.

The spiny quills of dead sagebrush are stuck to my socks. From the canyon edge I can see a metal pole emerging from beneath the salt flat. This is hours before the sunset and its burnt plastic odor are both supposed to end. Now half the LA skyline has peered out, caked in nourishing dirt. The yellow fog also rises, smelling sweet of lemons and pine. I worry about getting a parking ticket for having left my car in there.

When he has important things to say, I am not on another mountain. I am sitting in front of him cupping my ears and with my legs close together. When I’m more interested in the land, I’m already blindfolded in an empty room. He is naked and I’m clothed. I’m grabbing on tightly to one or two penises in each hand, and with them he drags me around the room. Blue or yellow, any color or flavor, it doesn’t matter.

Driving toward the Hoover Dam, looking over the steering wheel I watch several people swinging on a body. I climb on. I can hear all of its memories as we go back and forth, rapidly spoken as if the audio was edited to remove pauses. Four miles southwest of Cal Nev Ari, Nevada, he’s massaging the nerve endings and prostate, unsure why neural systems and solar systems aren’t skeletal systems.

the past year in dreams.

2009-02-28T23:18:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2009:
I was at a bathhouse and asked the service lady if I could get the key to a hot tub that some guy was in. She said, “sir, you can’t have sex in the hot tub.” I explained to her that I didn’t want to have sex in the hot tub, that I’d like to have one by myself, but there weren’t any more free. Later some friends were with me, and someone asked why some of us were naked while others were not. I looked over and Katie’s butt was in my face. Poop started to come out of it and drop onto the ground next to me. Then I shouted, “Katie, it’s happening again!” She responded apologetically, “sorry!”

February 25, 2009:
I was trying to get up a very steep rocky mountain to join people from the writing program. While I was going up jagged edges, I looked to my right and saw a group of tourists who had formed a ladder out of hanging on to each other. Then the one at the bottom would climb up everyone else and get to the top. Then the new one at the bottom would climb, and so on. I climbed beyond their destination to the highest part of the mountain where I found Alex Mack and others.

February 9, 2009:
For Eric’s IM project this year, he was camouflaged in a poster and would recite abstract combinations of words while moving around and causing optical illusions between himself and the poster, while also knocking out gradient dots and making them fall to the floor as MnMs in patterns of sound that somehow continued to shake for minutes, all while my professors Sara Roberts and Hillary Kapan would run back and forth putting up new posters for him to blend into. The posters contained Daiana Feuer and Max Kim’s faces in the background.

February 8, 2009:
Jonathan was a “fartuplet.”

January 16, 2009:
I was living or working in my professor Matias’s house, which was small, one-floor, conventionally designed and in the middle of the block (unlike his real life house). Matias made and served three elaborate cakes through the dream but never offered me a slice of any. I invited a cute black guy over from the internet who Matias said was a published writer, and who according to Wikipedia was offered the job as ambassador to Ethiopia but turned it down. He came over and Matias was designing cakes and I was working on something, and he was really shy and didn’t know what to say to me. Meanwhile, Tod appeared at the door drunk with a huge grin on his face, and I told him I couldn’t let him stay with Matias anymore and slammed the door and locked it. Then he stood in the road and jumped in front of a semi, but then jumped out of the way at the last minute, and then screamed at the top of his lungs with his mouth wide open and ran towards the house, then veered away from the house and ran down the street, mouth still open. Then Matias said “that worked, but you could have done better.” Then he compared it to a man who worked at the White House for the past 25 years who hired the presidents.

I was on a road trip with my father, my nephew Jamie and my brother Chris. I had a handful of fresh contact lenses and was looking through my suitcase for something to keep them fresh. Finally, we were outside, and I grabbed a handful of fresh soil and dumped it on top of them. Then I realized that wouldn’t preserve them. After the soil struggle, I found my father, nephew and brother sitting at an outdoor table at Baskin Robbins, which was giving out a special deal of free ice cream in very small cups, but only if you get all the flavors at once. None of the flavors I wanted were left, so I searched through the pile, found and ate some gross one.

January 15, 2009:
I was in some small-ish town in Virginia and had wandered away from friends to find food. I walked into this weird little house where several people stood in a line, and eventually this old black woman would come out and say “dinner is served, come on in” and they would be ushered into her dining room. The wait was really long, as though there was probably just one dining table. When I got to the front of the line, she invited me in, and I was surprised she wouldn’t ask what I wanted to eat. Then I looked behind me and saw Katie and Andrea enthusiastically running towards me from the other entrance of the house, which was connected to a Wal-Mart Supercenter. “How many people can I have eating with me?” “Just one,” she said.

It was 6 AM in Silverlake or somewhere, and I was climbing over a fence so I could get up to a guy’s house that I was infatuated with. Brett and some other friends were there, climbing behind me. At some point I realized that there was no way we could make it up the steep hill and over the series of fences and walls, so I turned around, accidentally putting my foot on one of the heads of the people climbing with me. I moved my foot out of the way, was apologetic, and realized it was some kind of large bird of prey I had just put my foot on. Everyone else laughed and said “Oh!” and the bird’s name and that it wasn’t a big deal. Then, they all got down, and I still needed to, but went a different way, which involved walking by a house’s window too noisily. We were all the way down the street when I looked back and saw an angry man running down to get us because he heard us trespassing. My friends saw and didn’t care, moseying into a corner convenience store. I began to run, but new I couldn’t get away fast enough.

January 12, 2009:
My father and I were driving from Santa Fe and I fell asleep. When I awoke, we were in Sunland Park, near the Mexican border, and I jeered my father for being so absent minded. The ground and buildings were bright orange and the sky dusty.

January 9, 2009:
My aunt and uncle from Vermont moved to Santa Fe, and they lived in a big stucco house with fake structures caked onto it that made it look kind of like the Needle Mountains. A skylight went up through their very tall living room through the floor into a bedroom on the third floor where I was staying, and every sound I made could be heard in the living room. I didn’t want them to know I was gay, but a very cute guy was there who was apparently a distant cousin through remarriage, but I knew they would call it incest in addition. My cousin Keith lived in their garage and was a painter (in real life he works on the lumber yard with my uncle). Amarantha and I had come to visit them on a road trip. We were walking along a road that looked like the Eldorado area, and some woman yelled something at me from her car. Amarantha and I had driven back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic in a few days. While in a small town in Virginia, I overheard someone listening to “Smack Jack” by Nina Hagen in their car, and I wanted to talk to them. They parked near me as though they were expecting me, but then drove off when I didn’t approach them.

December 22, 2008:
I was speaking French among a group of people. I used the word “enfantes” when I was talking to a guy I didn't know, and then everyone said that meant “love” and that I was actually in love with him.

December 15, 2008:
I opened my front door, and just outside was a forty-foot drop because I hadn't pushed the button to activate the stairs. Daiana Feuer was down below with someone else, sitting with her legs in a v-shape like she was doing yoga. There was a lake about ten feet behind her on the opposite side of me, and the sky and water were a colorless grey. I accidentally dropped a giant block of cheese and it bounced right between her legs and then bounced really high and back and forth between walls. And then there was something whipping around that I could barely catch sight of, and Katie was in my apartment and said, "oh no it's the water-to-earth worm!" From what I recall, the worm was just an expressive hand-drawn line. The last image in my head was of Daiana’s concerned face as the water-to-earth worm bounced above her.

November 20, 2008:
Erica wouldn’t tell us, but someone figured out that she had gotten an engagement ring but sold it to a melter for cash.

November 8, 2008:
I dreamt that my new car was a submarine with five windows on each side. I had to brave the tumultuous waves around Japan, but in the dream the ocean didn’t seem so deep or dark. It was more like driving through an afternoon thunderstorm.

November 2, 2008:
I was worried that I had missed certain classes too much, just by completely forgetting I had them. I wandered into an office at school because Sam Cohen was in there and wanted to say “hi.” Then I kept going (I followed her?) and ended up in some theatre area. There was a big pool, and a lot of people began to arrive. Some of them got in the pool while others stood around and watched. We were handed ancient texts in the form of boxes, one inside another, with the script printed fancily at the bottom of each box. As soon as the performance of the first box ended, we walked to a pool diagonally below the previous one. At the second pool there were hot tubs. I was wearing shorts, and I took off my shoes to dip my legs in the water. Then, this gay guy told me I shouldn’t be in the water because I’m intruding on his leg space, like I wasn’t allowed there because there were enough people. Eventually he swam away and found an area where he could stretch out. Alex Castle came up and started massaging my back as if we were dating, and I told him about the guy, and he was angry. I was embarrassed to be seen with Alex, because he was wearing an ugly hat. After another level of pools, at the last floor, I walked alone but among people through a maze with art installations of lights. In between each installation there were huge assortments of candy on the walls, and I kept finding tasty chips.

October 18, 2008:
School was starting and I had a new living situation in a room several people shared that must have been in the middle of school, because when I woke up there was some kind of administrative line that began to encroach my bed. After I wandered around half-awake and figured this out, I crawled back into my bed and made sure the people in line knew that they were on it. Francisco and Joyce were the two last people to join the line, and when they saw me I think they felt surprised that I was being so grumpy.

Then, everyone went to this dance party hosted by Anna Oxygen. She had set up a stage that rotated on its own, and certain pieces of the stage would spread apart or spin (sort of like live mini tectonic plates). I took off all my clothes but my underwear and stood on a plate that kept getting wider and spinning, so I had to readjust my legs quite a bit to avoid doing the splits. Anna was lying still on a plate and singing nonchalantly into a microphone. Then we had to get off the stage because either no one was there yet or too many people were there already.

October 3, 2008:
Katie and I lived together on the beach. There was a monstrous earthquake, and a pit of lava formed in our driveway and swallowed up both her and her car, but thankfully, I copied her and pasted her right before that, so she continued as a copy of herself. At the last minute, I also reached into her car and grabbed a bag that had all my possessions in it. Neo-Pulchritude (a stuffed animal turtle I own) was lightly charred. We spent the ensuing moments playing with the video games installed inside him. On a screen on his belly, he could make the appearance of a bar, and he was a cheesy-digital bartender in the image. He also had features that emulated a computer very realistically, although everything was ultimately fake.

I was in Old Town Albuquerque just after sunset across the southeast corner of the park with Jackson (a guy I know from school) and someone else. We were walking around, and then cops showed up down the road, so he and his friend got really agitated and got naked and caused a fuss like they wanted to be arrested. I went inside the only gallery still open, but it was in the process of closing, and I couldn’t figure out how to get to the little shop. Alex and Bordeaux showed up, and I pretended not to be as excited to see them as I really was. They kept imitating exotic animal calls, especially Bordeaux, and it surprised me at first how they could contort their bodies.

September 24, 2008:
Erica had lost a lot of weight but started wearing a fat suit, just so one day she could suddenly appear on campus as a waif and surprise everybody.

September ?, 2008:
I was watching tvguide channel, and on the "best of tv that's not Americana" channel there was a show on called "irony" and the episode was of an attractive masculine guy who gets beat up by a bunch of guys.

July 26, 2008:
My father and I were on our way to a furniture store, or maybe it was school. We might have let Christmas pass by without our knowing. He backed out of our driveway and rammed into my car. When we went out to look, the hood was popped upwards and holes burnt through it. Later we were driving on a dirt road alongside the freeway, hoping to find an in. We might have been headed toward Arizona.

Driving through the woods, Katie and I found ourselves on the top of an exaggeratedly steep and tall hill. We looked down the other side and I thought to myself that it seemed like a bad idea. Across the way, there were some people high up in a tree that was about as high as the hill we had ascended. As she pushed on the accelerator, I leapt out of the car and swung from a tree branch. She went flying down the hill, crashed into the ground, then her car bounced up all the way to the people in that tree, nearly hit them, then came back down and crashed completely. She didn’t emerge from the wreck, and I was equally worried about her fate as well as my own, because my finger could barely hang on to the branches, and the distance to the bottom of the tree was as tall as the hill itself.

I was supposed to hang out with a fellow from the internet. We met in his neighborhood, but when he met me he walked away. I went looking for him, the streets seeming like Echo Park or Toluca Lake, and ended up at a Goodwill in the middle of residential area. He was there with other friends whom I knew through him but had never actually met. He scampered out the door while they said “hi” and were very nice to me.

Then I ended up at some party with a guy who might have been Asher’s ex, because I had been in the house before when Asher said his ex lived there. The living room was two overlapping squares with the floor of one being three feet higher than the other, but a triangle cut out of it with descending stairs to sit on, and giant pillows that worked as puzzle pieces in the triangle to refill the cavity of the square. The guy looked a lot like Joey Labriola, this guy I dated a while ago. Before we all fell asleep there, it was a raucous time in the streets. Two kids flew by, and the guy who looked like Joey said it was the latest craze. If you drink this product and wear the shoes, it makes you fly. I had all but forgotten about it when I woke up, but then it came back to mind. I searched for the remains of the drink. The Joey lookalike pointed me to some remaining residue in a glass and scooped it with his pointer finger for a taste. It was like congealed energy drink.

July 14, 2008:
Someone’s art was an image of an attractive woman posing. But she looked skeletal, and her skull was also seen in a pattern on the wallpaper behind her.

July 6, 2008:
My mother was there and gave me a hug, and I called her “Mommy” and told her that I had dreams about her coming back to life and how I would try telling her I loved her in my dreams but that it’d never work out like this time.

(Fell back asleep, had another dream.)
I was with relatives—maybe Harold and Cass?—and was forced to jump onto a train cart going down tunnels through the mountains. I kept dropping my stuff on the side of the tracks and having to stop the cart and pick them up. It held up many people behind us, but I wasn’t about to leave anything behind. Then I took buses and went all the way back to the house, in an unfamiliar city. Its layout reminded me of London maybe? It was raining outside and this woman in the house wasn’t taking care of the place at all, so I put a towel where a water leak was dripping down onto Harold’s sofa. Then I walked up the street and through a mall. It was big and palace-like and I went out the front. It was kind of like an airport or the New York Public Library. I exited through the front, and they had a line for people to leave. There was an overweight woman telling me what to do. I quickly veered away from her and found a way to get around the line and out through a gap in their system. The clouds had cleared, and the sky and trees were deep blues and greens. I ran into some fellow right there who was pretty handsome, and I got him to come with me on my walk, and we held hands. Somehow the walk turned into being on a bus with him and his relatives, and I spent a good while talking to his sister about his moving to LA from Toronto or Chicago or wherever we were, so that he could move in with me.

July 5, 2008:
I was in Texas just east of the NM border on I-40 and I needed a place to stay for the night. So I lay down in a miniature room in front of someone’s house opening towards the street. The people living there came out and wondered who I was, but they let me stay there anyway.

July 1, 2008:
I was in a pool with Matias and his boyfriend David. We were all naked, and Matias’s legs started touching mine. Katie walked up and waved and said “hi.” Then she introduced herself to Matias, and said “nice to meet you.”

May 22, 2008:
I was in a town in Utah that had the steepest average slope of any town. It was populated by people from CalArts essentially. I brought with me a huge tub of hot water that I sat in, while everyone else trudged around me in the snow and thought I was odd or wished they could jump in. When the water was too cold to sit in, I poured it out, and it made a huge hole in the town’s steep hill. One fellow led me around the hill to a secret place.

May 18, 2008:
I was staying in a house in West LA with several people, one of whom was a cousin. I climbed down a mountain in Bel Air to get there, sometimes having to make careful leaps off rocks or cement slabs to get down. The cousin and I wanted to sleep together. Sometimes he was attractive. Later I was in McDonald’s with Alex Castle. When we came back, I ate something off the floor and felt sick. Two ladies in another room of the house gave me some medicine to settle my stomach. I didn’t need it, but finished it because it tasted good. One of them used a nylon lunchbox to pick up the item, part of which I ate off the floor, and then threw it away as well as the lunchbox. I felt like that was a waste. When I looked in their trash, I saw a bunch of hoodies being thrown out, too.

Someone’s dog was shrunk to about two inches tall, and we all gathered around in an office to play with it. Its proportions were tall, long and thin, almost that of a horse. I put the tiny dog on Kalu’s back, and Kalu gave it rides everywhere.

We went to Essex Junction, Vermont. I was excited that my friends could see the lumberyard and meet my grandmother. There was a lot of snow in the road. I threw a boulder-size chunk really far, and then a car honked from a distance, so I ran out and removed it. A bunch of people showed up with me, and we were all lying on the ground in front of my grandmother’s kitchen window, which now faced south and was on the east side of Jericho Road. There were gay men kissing all around me, many of them very cute in a “hipster” way. My grandmother had some old lady friends over, and I knew they must be thinking homophobic thoughts. A lot of the gay men left pretty soon though anyways. Flint was there in a harness and some man was helping her walk up a steep hill into the woods. When she got halfway out of sight into the darkness of trees, the man pulled her backwards against a sling, and she went flying down the hill and into the air, and then a rope pulled her back down and she went flying back towards the sling, which now visibly looked like a little man, but made out of fabric. Flint seemed disappointed with her project, saying the little fabric man cost her over $2000.

May 16, 2008:
I met Barbara Guest, and she was really friendly to me.

April 15, 2008:
It was at night and I was on a big boat on a lake with a bunch of other people. There were friendly old people standing in line who talked to me. The boat was wooden and barge-like. My father walked up, and I called him “Daddy” and everyone applauded when I hugged him. I felt embarrassed.

April 13, 2008:
Jenny (girl on MySpace who talks to me but I’ve never met) was some neighborhood girl that I’d run into. I lived somewhere that looked halfway between Silverlake and my old neighborhood in Albuquerque: clean, somewhat spacious, concrete, hilly roads and big yards.

March 26, 2008:
I was taking a language class at Cal State LA (or maybe it was UNM or PCC), although it was listed under the art department and required a lot of reading and presenting and watching videos, all of which seemed to have nothing to do with language. I wasn’t paying attention, or I left early, and the teachers were mad at me. To make things worse, after one class, I was naked in the corner next to the entrance trying to change clothes. They made me feel bad about it, like I was unwelcome. I ran into Jill in the parking lot, and when I told her what happened, she was enraged. She and two friends got in two cars and chased security guards around a parking lot that looked like the old West Hollywood Pavilions, sort of. Eventually there was a wreck, and her friend (who looked like her friend Erica in real life sort of) was hit really badly and car totaled. Jill was somewhat angry about it from then on, but really just wanted me to show appreciation for her standing up for me. The next time I returned to the class, I went to use the bathroom, and it was covered in framed photos of me. To get to the bathroom, there would also be a bedroom to walk through, and that’s where the photos mostly were. There were many photos of me from my early childhood that I had never seen before. There were also many gloves, and a picture of Jeremy/Jay from my writing program. I took this gesture as a sign of an apology from the teachers as well as recognition of my birthday.

March 19, 2008:
I was driving alone and wound up in a city in northwestern Wyoming. I think it was Casper. A map I had was making it seem like all roads went in and out of Casper, and it made Casper look like a major city, even though it was small (as it is in real life). I tried taking a US highway going southwest, but I ended up going west on a smaller highway. I found myself at a crossing of the Missouri River, which was at the border of Wyoming and Idaho. The traffic was bad, and the river was on a bridge, so the cars just went under it. I was trying to turn around in Idaho, maybe Coeur d’Alene. I saw a cute guy on the street and thought I should drive by him to see him better. There was a cop, but I wasn’t afraid because my license plate was updated finally.

Somewhere in that dream, or maybe just before where it started, I was still in Wyoming, and my grandparents and aunt and uncle were all there. We were in this very large concrete building. I was looking at my uncle and thinking if I resembled him at all. My father showed up while we were all in the parking lot. He was acting standoffish and got naked, to which I responded that he was making it difficult for others to relate with him.

March 14, 2008:
I was in the house I grew up in, preparing to read stories I made through talking to my father on the phone. It was a Sprawl reading. I was up next, but I still had to do some preparing. I was rushing to gather my little pieces of purple and yellow jello and yellow sand that I eventually stuffed in my mouth. Jared Woodland from the writing program yelled out something like, “it sucks making us wait.” I said, “do any of you find it unhelpful when someone says something like that when you’re in a hurry?” And Brittany Goode and a few others raised their hands.

March 5, 2008:
I was with Alex S (my ex), and we were walking around a big hospital-like building, sort of like Cal Arts, but we were also staying in rooms in it. I was feeling like I wanted to tell him I was still interested in him, but wouldn’t dare (I'm not in real life). I went into his bathroom to pee, and the toilet was like a big pool and also a clogged shower floor. It had his pee in it, so I peed in it too, to make my own scent present again.

February 15, 2008:
My father and I were leaving the house I grew up in to go somewhere. We got in the car, and that’s when I started noticing differences. The car was identical except it had that fake wooden paneling. As we were driving, I figured out he got the car mixed up, and the key happened to work on this other car anyway. A bird jumped in out of nowhere, looking really frilly and iridescent and acting friendly. I was surprised. And there was an egg even bigger than this bird sitting in the back seat, and it cracked open making way for an even larger bird. We had some kind of special food to give them, and that would prove somehow that they were a certain kind of bird, and maybe the purpose of that was so we could identify the owner.

I was sitting in an audience, I think. There were gay men around me, and maybe we were all naked. I may or may not have known most of them. Katie was there but sitting in a different row. She was excited by how physically friendly gays are to each other. Some guy performing on stage had his cock out, and everyone cheered for me to lick it, so I did. I let some guy hold me, and I kept trying to fall asleep. The guy who held me and I both got up and headed with some fellow outside. At first we were driving, and I ran a red light which helped us move far really quick. I saw Anna Schmitt on the street and said to the guy with me, “that’s my friend Anna,” and then she said, “yes I am” as she walked by. We were on bikes now, definitely on the steepest hill I’d ever seen, surrounded with green and sidewalks like Echo Park. I recalled trying to drive it but failing to get to the top. I had to walk my bike because it got so steep. I almost lost my balance in a few moments. We were in Susan Howe’s house, except she was Anne Bray. We were in her living room, on some high floor, and I climbed onto the frame of the window to see out. As I did so, her son walked through the living room, but neither of us said ‘hi’ so I felt like an intruder. As I was scooting, I moved a few pieces of dead leaf, and they fell right by her. She looked up, and the guy and I both waved. I couldn’t see her face because for some reason I couldn’t turn to look that way, so she was outside the frame of my glasses, not sure why I was wearing them. We went to a floor of her house that was like a fake jungle, just fabricated landscapes of some kind. She told us about a friend of hers who died in there, and how the company who helped her build it also helped his family lose a lawsuit. I was happy for her, because I thought it was foolish he would put himself at risk, even though I didn’t really know what happened exactly.

February 12, 2008:
My father and I were living in a mansion now; I think we moved because my mother died. My room came with many odd decorations including a disembodied head sitting on a beam just under the high ceiling. This man could talk, and I worried that I had to keep his rotting head from falling down, because I cared about him. It was snowy outside.

(Later after falling back asleep)
I was at Oxy, but it was a huge mansion with many floors reserved for visitors and grad students, and it was in Burbank. It was almost like a mall, but definitely also like someone’s gigantic house. It seemed like a candy convention was happening, because all these candy products were everywhere. I stole a big gumball thing and a large bag of some kind of fluffy candy. There were security checks and guards, but I managed to make my way through. It was nighttime now. On the way out, the parking lot looked like that of a fairground. A lot of random products were sitting out in big piles. I stole a pack of tarot cards and a fancy Tori Amos picture book, both of which with the intention of selling on eBay later. All this stuff was stuffed under my jacket.

January 26, 2008:
Kalu was losing all his quills. He looked furry beneath them, almost chipmunk-like.

Amarantha and I were at a public pool next to a mall. I kept going into the mall wearing only a shirt.

I was at CalArts in Integrated Media next year. Katie was in the class, too, and she was sitting next to a weird looking girl with a dog resemblant of a rat. There were these two artists hosting the event, and at one point they got in their underwear and into a kiddy pool. They also showed home videos of them in their small bedroom that they shared. I got up and sat next to Katie on the floor, and she pushed me down so that she could massage my back while we watched the guest artists.

There were cute guys with small unerect penises, and I began to wonder if all men had penises that small when not erect. When I looked again, they had bulbous bellies where their necks should be, and the small penis dangling beneath, and then the real belly, also bulbous, beneath those.

delayed christmas entry.

2009-02-26T03:15:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve my father and I went to Garduño's, a so-so local Mexican restaurant chain with a free buffet before 6 PM with the assumption that you'll buy their drinks. We got there at 5:57 and piled on the reheated enchilada-y lasagna-y-ness with some stray chips on the side, and sat down on our bar stools. My father got me an intimidating margarita and a humble beer for himself. But he watched my margarita like he watches most things he orders me. Sometimes I ask him if he's in love with my food, or something smart like that, and he backs off. And that's all Christmas really is anymore, an excuse to eat badly. Before my mother died I was lavished. She would bake tree and snowman-shaped cookies, a new banana bread loaf a week and concoct elaborate turkey dinners the likes of which I've rarely encountered since. The first Christmas after she died was only two days after the fact; we opened gifts from the dead, almost all of them being from her, an obvious sign of what was to come. The following year I begged my father to try and make Christmas be like she did. He already got out of having to buy me any gifts by getting me a car. I told him the least he could do was make sure Santa would make a stop at our electric fireplace and fill my stocking. On Christmas morning, I woke up early with that ritual eagerness to find what could possibly await me: A bicycle? A motorcycle? A kitten? There were no presents. My stocking was lying on the fire place on its side, not bulging or overflowed with peanut butter cups or chocolate Santas. I looked inside and found assortments of nuts, licorice and dried fruit. I told my father he didn't do it right. His face lit up when he realized he would have to eat it all himself. Over the years I've adapted to his version of Christmas. There's no better or worse version. I'd even prefer the nuts and dried fruit at this point.

This year I got my father to order the gay channel on his new digital cable subscription. I watched this movie about a guy who cheats on his boyfriend on a cruise by falling in love with a girl. I watched a TV show about Dolly Parton obsessors. One guy with cerebral palsy had Dolly Parton cardboard cut-outs in his room and his mother seemed proud. Dolly liked to bring him up on stage, and it was fascinating seeing this scrawny guy with a flopping bent arm next to her and her bosom. One middle-aged man made fancy Dolly dolls, and said Dolly got him through his unaccepting upbringing. Now he lives with his lover, another Southern man his exact age, stature and baldness. My father was watching at this point and kept judging the dolls on how realistic they were. Then he grizzled, "when are they gonna get through this and show us Dolly Parton?" I watched a show about a man who woke up after being in coma for twenty years. He was 19 and had just been married and had a baby girl when he was in a car accident that turned him into a vegetable. His family couldn't afford to keep him on life support or in a hospice, so they brought him home and tended to him like he wasn't in a coma. They'd bring him to Wal-Mart or the movies or Denny's and take him out of his wheelchair and seat him and give him a menu and order him food. They'd tuck him in bed at night, they'd converse with him like he was responding, he was their comatose open-mouthed teddy bear. For twenty years they did this and never once paused to think if it mattered that he never seemed responsive. His mother said she always could tell that he was "in there" and hearing what she said. When he woke up, she asked him questions like who the president was, and he'd answer in a retarded-sounding voice "Ronald Reagan." His daughter, who was born just before he got in the wreck, was now the age he was when he was last awake. He kept hitting on her and calling her by her mother's name. The way twenty years passed him by, it matched so well with these redneck Arkansan's outdated hairstyles and conservatism. Anyhow, the doctors fawned over this man and how he could have possibly lived in a coma that long. They said it was because the mother's intuition was right. She knew he was in there somehow, and that's why he came back. I've been thinking a lot about these people: I think my parents were a lot like this too actually. They never worked a day in my life, and until age ten I had no other friends. We would eat every meal together and go on two-month-long road trips each summer. I hope when I have a lover and children that we can keep each other alive like that. Not only that, but my friends too. I love (some of) them as a family and aspire to keep them mentally and emotionally strong even if they become bumpkin pumpkins.

just got back to new mexico.

2008-12-20T16:09:00.000-08:00

Just got back to New Mexico, after a twelve-hour ride beginning at 3 AM with my middle school friend Valerie and her boyfriend (fiancé?) in a VW bug. He and I talked about promiscuity after he said that he was celibate for four years, which was after Valerie nostalgized of the time I was complaining about my tail bone hurting several summers ago when Val and I went to the zoo and I brought this guy I was seeing whom I had just spent the night with. I always make a concerted effort to date and get to know someone before sex, but I don't live up to the no-sex-until-marriage model which prompted Valerie's boo to invoke the p-word at me, which seemed a bit unfair after one anecdote. I don't think there's anything wrong with libertinism, but despite my dating a lot and tendency for full disclosure (like on this blog), I'm often mulling over wedding locations and names for children. Plus he and Val were blasting metal music, plus Val's man also thinks his LA-suburb hometown of Cerritos has a population of 1.2 million, a fact which in itself kept me from sleeping for most of the twelve hours. Nor were the circumstances conducive to sleeping when I got home and discovered cat pee stains on my bed and mouse poop on the floor. Nor were the circumstances conducive to sleeping earlier this week when I dreaded the idea that I'd be in the back seat of a car for twelve hours instead of my bed, and so I stayed up late searching the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of books on tape (in case I'd be driving myself) and not sleeping.

Went last Friday to Alex O's house for an oversize-Christmas-sweaters and no-pants birthday party. I brought writing friend Sam, her roommate Zach (I dated him — sex included —until the fact of his long-distance/distanced boyfriend finally took a toll) and Kelly (girl whom Sam might be seeing? She told her a story about how she decided to break up with ex-g/f, an older woman/professor from Italy, because she sent her a text message saying something like "if I find some fresh basil, will you try my delicious pesto?"). Alex O is the girl you may have read about with whom Tod wrestled drunkenly which caused a great chain of unnecessary dramatic events (see November 2007 entry). She told us about her new job as a vet tech, and how on the day of her actual birthday she had to assist in fixing a cat's inverted anus which she said looked like a giant brain. Her boss the vet said it was her birthday present. Alex O also told us she has a friend who works at a funeral home who stole Charleton Hesston's hip replacements and sprinkled the residual ashes into a cake that he dyed green and served at a party. At the part Alex O had a Christmas tree covered in porn photos of the singer of Type-O-Negative. On Sunday I went to the Christmas party at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and ran into people who couldn't remember me or whom I couldn't remember.

I love customer service representatives. I talked to a guy named Marcus in Sacramento who gave me $30 off my next Verizon bill. I can't figure out which one he is on MySpace, because there are six of them. There's something exhilarating about finding out what these people look like, especially after being put in a position to completely dehumanize them: interchangeable with talking machines, they recite memorized lines about how to serve you better. Once I talked to a lady in West Virginia for two hours after we both said we wanted goats. She said she could use the goat to pull her uphill, because she can't get her car up the hill in the snow. She said her house is at the top of a really tall hill and sometimes it snows on that hill even though it never snows anywhere else in the whole town. I wish I could MySpace-stalk her, too. Did I already tell that story in a previous entry? My (bad) memory makes repetition more enjoyable in life, though one doesn't get the full enjoyment of observing the slow changes the way a computer's memory could, if only it could enjoy its own ironies.

My father visited me over Thanksgiving. I can't help but focus on his racial commentary, even though it's an early 20th-Century insensitivity, and I've noticed others his age of all races seem unoffended. While in the cafeteria, he turned to the black girl next to him in line and asked how she liked our new president. On the way to my cousins' for Thanksgiving dinner, he told me and Katie how he thinks Indians from India are selfish people because they have to deal with so many of each other. In October, when I went back to Albuquerque to visit, vote and pick up my new (used) car, I brought my father to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in search of authentic Native American food. It was unsuccessful; did Navajos invent portobello mushroom sandwiches? When we entered the building, my father went up to a tall Native American man and asked if he was going to scalp us. I darted out of the room upon hearing the word "scalp," but watched from a distance: the man paused for a few seconds, then laughed and said "not yet." My father noticed a younger woman in the room who looked really perturbed. In the gift shop, I contemplated buying some New Mexico stickers, but settled for a booklet of cowboy-themed temporary tattoos. Now I'm here in "Clausteppte" again, or so my phone's autotext feature likes to call it.

my father visits la.

2008-10-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

On our adventure to get boba, he insisted on getting a giant bowl of ice cream instead.

I cooked for him.

My new cat Louise.

Stuck in a Richard Serra piece.

My father at the Silver Platter bar in Westlake. Of his experience there he said, "I liked the diversity of the people." Later he was surprised to hear there were trannies.

summer jobs.

2008-09-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

After Appalachia, I went back to New Mexico for a few days, then to Kansas with my father. He and I were supposed to drive together from Albuquerque to Wichita on the two-lane semi-truck-ridden US-54 along towering silos and cow-pungent farms. At the Kansas border it becomes “the yellow brick road,” a little joke left over from the days when US highways dominated and interstates were a Futurist fantasy. We used to take this route all the time when I was a kid, detouring once or twice to Dodge City or the world’s largest hand-dug well. This time we were eighty miles east of ABQ near Moriarty when my father’s car broke down, and I walked across steppe-style shrubbery for two miles looking for a cell-phone signal. We waited two hours for a tow truck, eventually got back to the house just long enough to turn the computer on and buy plane tickets online, then headed to the airport, stopping in Old Town for margaritas and a nicely-timed thundershower. The old stucco smelling strongly when the water dripped on to it, my last thoughts brought me back to previous times I had experienced it as I abandoned my homeland once again. Approaching Denver, a storm cell idled over the runway; the pilot flew us in circles around the airport waiting for it to move. We missed our flight to Wichita and were told we had to stay the night in Denver. We got reservations at a dumpy Marriott, but when we arrived, they somehow forgot us so then put us in the fancy Marriott next door for the same price. I swam laps in the hot tub, designed to look like the corner of the pool separated by a little tiled wall.

The next day we flew to Kansas finally and spent three long days of gabbing in the cobwebby “Cross Wind Conference Center” for the family reunion. At previous reunions I’d leave covered in chiggers and starving because of the oppressively bland food. Once I had hardly eaten the entire weekend, and when we finally left and went to a steak house, I ate twelve ounces of beef and completely lost my sense of balance and had to lie across the chairs in the “please wait to be seated” area. This time we played ping-pong a lot, and I also invented a game I liked to call Free Paddle which I played with my niece, nephew and two teenage cousins from Truth or Consequences. The idea is to hit the ping-pong ball with a paddle, but without the paddle touching your hand. Cousin Czesia and I got really good at it, doing a back and forth twice before our paddle stashes ran dry and everyone else in the room had close calls. (See the more exciting June 28, 2006 entry about the last reunion.) Before and after the reunion, we stayed with my Aunt Esther who thinks her washer is constantly saying “BarackObamaBarackObamaBarackObama.”

The money I earned from my church organ assisting disappeared to rent, food and gasoline the moment I stepped off the plane in LA. So instead of writing or arting or whatever I do, I had to find several temporary jobs: For the first one, Alex and I took a class on logic and were paid to grade the teachers. Each evening we’d pull up to a Beverly Hills hotel, abandon my too-beat-up car for the valet, and nod to the doorman confidently as we speedwalked in. We’d seat ourselves at tables covered in scrap paper, tiny pencils and workbooks in a convention room-turned-classroom of faux-students from Craigslist. We had a new teacher every hour and had to grade them each on scales from 1 to 5 for their clarity, class involvement, things like that. Alex and I gave pretty much the same grades to each one, except mine were always a point nicer. Sometimes my indecision would lead me to write “3.5” or “4.5” and then Alex would look over at me and hiss. One student, a forty year-old man in an oversized t-shirt, would raise his hand every time he could find a reason to, even though he understood everything and this class wasn’t real. During the breaks between teachers he would overzealously explain neighborhoods of New York to some girl half his age who was about to start school there. Alex and I would listen to him from afar but not say anything to him or each other. By the last day I was cruising through the workbook with my newfound understanding, figuring out all the answers and not listening to the teachmasters. My head was getting so big, I considered taking the LSAT for weeks after that.

The day after my last logic day I began my first day canvassing for a shelter for homeless teenagers. The first day as a rule is unpaid, an observation day meaning you silently watch an experienced canvasser give “the rap”—a spiel about homelessness that we would have to recite word-for-word at every front door. But I got to observe Cassity Treat, and she didn’t mind if I got a few words of the rap wrong. She was a Mormon girl from Red Bluff, California, the town where Colleen Stan was forced to live in a wooden box under the bed of a married couple for seven years and come out at night to be their sex toy. Cassity and I bonded over this topic on the drive down to an unusually patriotic neighborhood of Long Beach, if patriotic means having a giant flagpole installed in the center of your lawn with the stars and stripes so big you can barely see the house. Cassity canvassed six days a week the whole summer and also waitressed at a bar in a hotel near the Hollywood and Highland mall in the evenings. She wore a wholesome outfit: a dress with a jacket over it. When we approached one house with loud music and guys yelling, she promptly removed her jacket, baring her shoulders and cleavage and tiny waste. A wise tactic: three dudes with beers lined up at the door and each handed her a twenty. They invited us to come back later, and Cassity seemed serious about it until we left them.

Also observing Cassity was a girl whose name tag read “Felicia” although she asked us to call her “Iyah” Upon sitting down next to me on the carride there, she asked if I “really wanted to go through with this.” “Of course,” I said, wondering why else I would commit myself to a full day of observation. Later, after we got to Long Beach, I asked if she has back pain what with all that chest weight she’s carrying, and then we talked about my booty and became friends. Cassity had us alternate observing at each door, the other staying out of view so it wouldn’t seem like we’re swarming the house. Iyah didn’t follow this rule though and would pace back and forth up the driveway while our listening residents got shifty-eyed. When Iyah observed, on several occasions she interrupted Cassity’s rant to sound off on her feelings about homelessness and why it’s an important issue. After these sound offs, when I’d join Cassity at the next door, she’d look frustrated about it as we waited for someone to answer. Eventually Iyah wandered away, texting on her cell phone, and we stopped alternating for a time. When we caught up to her, she said to her phone buddy, “gotta go, my boss is here.”

I was never informed that I needed to pack a sack lunch, so Cassity was nice enough to stop at a nearby Trader Joe’s. I jumped out of her car and promised to be quick, rushing past housewives in their afternoon grocery store lethargy to grab myself a tuna sandwich on pretzel bread. In record time I was outside again, then Cassity called to me from the entrance saying she had lost Iyah in the store. I wondered if Iyah had secretly gotten her phone buddy to pick her up. Fifteen minutes passed by and then Iyah re-emerged with a giant sack of nuts. “Want any?” she asked Cassity as we drove back to the lawns and American flags. Cassity got very few donations that day, the majority of which came from the party dudes. We never did go back to that party, I thought about it as we scaled the 405 in Cassidy's car as the sun set. And I never saw Iyah again.

After that, I was on my own. “Hi, I’m Stephen. I’m with the Los Angeles Homeless Service Coalition. We’re fighting to eradicate homelessness in Los Angeles. Our coalition is a non-profit tax exempt charity formed as a union between Democracy for Change and the Los Angeles Youth Network. ... Did you know 80,000 homeless people sleep on the streets of LA every night? The homeless populations of San Francisco, Chicago and New York combined are only two-thirds the size of the homeless population of LA.” I couldn’t resort to Cassity’s sex appeal tactic; instead, I seemed like a bumbling fool with a memorized speech. I had to come up with a strategy. If I didn’t meet the weekly quota, I’d get $50 for the eight hours of daily psychological ruin: 120 small gates a day with barking dogs waiting behind them, doorbells disturbing dining families, old cranky-voiced men grunting behind their peepholes, doors slamming toward me one after another. I figured out my advantage: older women thought I was cute and could see that I was tired and thirsty, several of them offering to refill my water bottle every day. I had to play this up, reciting the facts about homeless teenagers as though I was one of them, looking into their eyes like I was waiting to be rejected and pushed back out onto the streets. I became everyone’s homeless son that they needed to bring back into their lives. On several occasions they said to me, “This is for you, really. I just want to help you out.”

I met one lady who didn’t want to help the homeless, said that they should go get a job, that she sees them every day on her way to work in Downtown LA and has no sympathy for them. She had just pulled up on her driveway as I stood waiting on the sidewalk. I said 10,000 of the city’s homeless are children and 20% of the homeless are women. “Did you hear that?” she questioned one of three rowdy children. “Go do your homework right now or you’ll end up like them.” And then she gave me five bucks. I met a woman who asked me what my religious beliefs were. When I was finished explaining moral relativism and a Buddhist compassion for everything, she looked like she was about to cry. “What’s wrong?” I looked into her eyes. “Well, I just hope you’ll make it to heaven,” she sniffled. I met an old man who had an inch-deep finger-shaped hole in his bald head. The design of his house was unornamented and fifties-ish. He built it himself. He was in the Korean War. He argued a lot of my statistics but ultimately donated ninety bucks. I met a lady who invited me in to her apartment for pizza. She works as an escrow, and we talked about how lots of houses are boarded up, even in her neighborhood. Her apartment was really messy and had lots of pink princessy plastic toys for her daughter. She told me her car was a junker, but that her son just bought a brand new guzzling truck to impress the ladies, paid for with money he earned working as a restaurant server. At one door I talked to a reverend, and he let me have an orange from his tree that I’d been eying.

I quit canvassing after my fear of trespassing worsened. The day after my last day there, I began another summer job: a test study requiring me to cover my penis in a gel every night for a week. It’s basically an HIVacide for women to prevent from getting the disease during sex. But since men sometimes enter women, they had to check that it wouldn't cause men rashes, which I didn't get. But I did get three hundred dollars. And the lady who managed me was so nice. She’d weigh me and take my height just for fun, and then I’d weigh her and we'd talk about her last boyfriend. The best part was on the last day when I had to fill out a questionnaire. “How appealing did the gel look as it came out of the tube? Very appealing Somewhat appealing Not appealing at all Unsure.” “How did you like the way the gel felt in your hand as you spread it on your penis? A lot Somewhat Not at all Unsure.” “How appealing did it look to have the gel spread all over your penis? Very appealing Somewhat appealing Not appealing at all Unsure.”

appalachia—part two.

2008-06-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

In my second week in the South we went to Roanoke, Virginia, where Asher grew up, a city much bigger than Bristol, and a bit more Yankee. The houses reminded me of New England, except with porches made for Cracker Barrel rocking chairs. According to Asher, it’s the most segregated city in the South. We went to the Roanoke Mall to meet up with Asher’s best friends who are brother and sister. I got Chick-Fil-A and a cup of water, and then we found them: at a table in the center of the food court sat a young girl with bright pink hair and thick-framed glasses talking to a rowdy four year-old blonde girl standing beside her (their sister), a young guy also in thich-framed glasses, a late-30s woman with stylish short shaggy maroon hair (their mother), and a shaggy white-haired older woman with lazy eye. The grandmother was my favorite of them; every time anyone made a joke, she would laugh and make one-eye contact even if it wasn’t funny. I just love how three generations of family would often hang out together at a mall like that. When Asher brought up at the table what places in Roanoke they should show me, all anyone could say was, "The Star?" or "hmmm, The Star?" or "how about The Star?" I love that this is all we could go do. So, that's what we did.

We also went to the Blue Ridge Parkway, a road built only with the idea to drive through 469 miles of beautiful scenic mountains uninterruptedly. Otherwise it's too slow and aimless to be useful / practical. This to me is art at its best. I kind of wish they’d build one through LA.

Plus we passed a church whose sign once said: “Stop, drop and roll doesn’t work in Hell.” We also went to Covington, Virginia, a town that Asher first described as “so calm, if you light a match the smoke sits still in the air.” In Blacksburg, Virginia, we tuned an organ near Virginia Tech. The church was putting on some huge theatre production for a kids Bible camp group. The stage props were so elaborate, it even involved a giant ball inside of which one kid would be strapped in and have to roll down across the pews. An overenthusiastic overweight lady there kept telling me how badly she wanted to get inside the ball. “It’s a real hoot,” she announced over and over. Later, outside, we walked by a lady who said, “giving blood?” Asher told her we’re fixing the organ. “It’s real nice weather outside,” she replied.

Afterwards, we went across the street and had a little “photo shoot” (pun intended) in front of the school entrance sign. I made guns with my hands and aimed them at the camera, “VIRGINIA TECH” gleaming behind me. I made it my MySpace photo, and random people sent angry messages, so I took it down. I don't want anyone to think I’m happy those students were killed, because I’m not. But I don't get why this photo is so personal to people. It was obviously a joke. The media already desensitized us to the Virginia Tech shootings and appropriated them into our pop culture, just like gangsta rap made being an impoverished person of color into something fun and consumable. Which is fine, because it's a coping mechanism, just like if I call myself a “faggot” I'm overcoming the time in my life when I feared being (called) one. Unless you lost someone at Virginia Tech, there’s really no reason to be personally offended. If I pretend to be dying, no one will say, “that’s horrible! How dare you make fun of those who die!” I'm going to die, just like everyone else, and most likely sooner than I would prefer, just like almost everyone else, and it's possible I could be shot while in class and die, just like anyone else. The least you can let me do is transcend death and tragedy for a few minutes through making a joke out of a once-terribly-tragic situation. When my mother died, the most soothing coping mechanism for me was to reenact the car accident and make light of it, to gently mock the reasons it happened and to scold my mother for the easy ways she could have prevented her own death.

In Raleigh, Asher showed me The White Deer. We went to a park in the middle of a residential neighborhood, named after The White Deer. The sun was lowering towards the trees, kids playing soccer and the march of couples pushing strollers past us. We happened upon a small log building with big windows and an explanatory plaque next to a locked door. You can't go inside, but you can look in. It’s basically a living room-size suburban shrine to taxidermied albino roadkill.

Valentine’s Day billboard along I-81.

My brother Peter is a Fundamentalist Christian and anti-gay, which I learnt while having dinner with him in Raleigh Wednesday. The wife and kids couldn’t join us because they all had strep throat. Asher dropped me off at the my brother’s psychiatry clinic. While he was getting ready, I admired the Michael’s-style plastic relics and comfy couches and Bibles. As we walked out of his office, we discussed what I want to do for work after grad school. “It’s not like I really have much of a choice in the matter. I’ll get whatever kind of job I can.” I told him honestly. I laughed about how he and the other two brothers went into psychiatry while my parents and I ended up artists. He quoted the Book of Jeremiah, something about “discernment.” He brought me to a restaurant downtown; he hadn’t been downtown in so long, the streets went in different directions than he remembered; some were no longer there. From the car to the restaurant, we walked a quarter mile among late-20s couples and teenage girlfriend posses. My brother’s gait reminded me of Boo Boo Bear, his arms swinging forward, his whole back angled forward from the hip. His tiny glasses, orderly beard and button-up shirt added to a doctorly, fatherly, Christian persona. I felt nervous when two homeless guys made chitchat, their laughs so unkempt, I thought my brother must be judging them.

He wanted to know why I liked the South so much. I offered that my father and I could visit him for Christmas. He asked me, “What does Christmas mean to you?” I said, “To be with people I care about. What does it mean to you?” He said it was the day to celebrate the life of Jesus Christ, and then he rushed to clarify that it might not be Jesus's actual birthday. I told him I consider myself a moral relativist. In a calm voice, he replied, "so then anyone can just do anything they want, and then they can justify it however they want.” I said my morals were based on seeing myself in everything, and everything in myself. “Do unto others as they do to you,” I said. “That’s from the Bible,” he said. “I know,” I said. I asked him what he thought of homosexuality. He said he felt that people choose to be gay in the same way people choose to be on drugs. And, it turns out, my brother's clinic specializes in part on counseling former homosexuals back to a straight lifestyle. I told him what I tell my grandmother: that there’s no way I could choose to be gay in the face of all the disapproving people I've had to face in my life. My brother isn’t all out conservative; he repeatedly mentioned an interest in Barack Obama. We agreed that gay people wanting marriage is more beneficial to the institution of marriage than straight people getting more libertinous.

Instead of the Unclaimed Baggage Center or the Short Mountain Sanctuary (for gay fairies)—the two places I wanted to go to the most on this trip—instead I accidentally ended up at Knoxville’s gay pride event. I think the above photo sums it up pretty well.

Post-pride, Sebastian’s friend Chris shows off his handmade Dolly Parton dress he wore to a Dolly drag show.

appalachian adventures.

2008-06-19T14:44:00.000-07:00

For the past week I’ve been all over the Appalachian region of North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia assisting in repairing and tuning church organs. It’s not that I have any expertise. A friend of mine on MySpace I’d never met, Asher, repeatedly asked me to visit him over the past few years and finally made an offer I couldn’t refuse: that I could work as his assistant and he’d pay for my flight out here. His job pays for all our food and lodging. After another week here, I’m visiting my father and driving to Kansas with him. He and I still have an agreement that he pays for my visiting him, despite his being broke—he didn’t pay his taxes for the past seven years / my brother bought his house so he could afford to stay in it—I’ve been financially independent from him for two years. Thus, the entirety of these three weeks in the South, New Mexico and Kansas is completely free, plus I’m working, plus I sublet my room to Tod for the whole three weeks. Been badly needing a detox from my LA life, and thankfully I am earning money in the process.

We spent most of the first week in Bristol, on the TN/VA border. “A good place to live,” a twenty-foot tall sign loomed overhead as we’d drive downtown to sift through the few non-chain restaurant options. The sign originally said “Push / That's Bristol.” Since being out here, life has been centered around meals. Asher’s employer covers everything we eat, so I see no harm ordering the nicer food items at restaurants: I’ve had a lot of milkshakes, smoothies and freshwater fish. Hoki, salmon, catfish. No matter how local or chainy or trendy or family-owned, every meal in Bristol comes with two sides. Fried okra wasn’t pleasant, at least not the stale ones I tried. “Corn nuggets” had the appearance of a chicken nugget, but were creamed corn-filled. Also enjoyed: beer-battered chips, Mountaineer Pale Ale, grits, hushpuppies (I’d never heard of them), sweet potato fries, oatmeal cooked in whole milk and butter. At the end of the meal, they bring us our “TEEket” and we thank them kindly and we’re on our way.

At a Perkin’s we sat near an old woman with Dolly Parton hair. Her companion had a photo of her in his wallet—I could see it as he was paying for their breakfasts—her hair and face holding the exact same pose and expression as the real her, as though the photo was just taken, as though she never wanted to look any different.

Asher is 24. His computer password is a fake Celtic-sounding name he came up with for himself. Asher’s grandfather and his siblings were named Tom, Dick and Harry, in that order. When Asher met me in person, he expected me to act more masculine than I do. Whenever I do, he’ll get excited and tell me so. When I ordered a strawberry milkshake, he asked why I chose a pink drink. When we went into a bar in downtown Bristol, he was worried we’d get gay bashed. As soon as we sat down, a lady sat down next to me and said I looked familiar. She asked through a thick accent if I was Brandon from her high school. I didn’t know what to say; she receded back to her table in a rush. Asher referred to me as “hedgehog boy” to his friend on the phone. He moves his lips involuntarily when he plays “flöte” on the organ. At first I worried someone flying me across the country might expect “repayment,” but that wasn't the case.

We worked sixty hours last week, almost entirely at the same church, where we dissembled electro-pneumatic couplers, changed the leaking rubber cloth to sheepskin, then reglued the couplers with fish glue. Everywhere else we’ve just been tuning and making minor repairs. Tuning consists of me hunched over in front of the organ holding down notes with one hand and John D’Agata’s book in the other, and Asher in the organ chambers tapping delicately at the tuning collars and wires that change the pitch. Or using tuning cones, which would make a fancy meat thermometer.

On Saturday night we spent a few hours on one pipe in particular, which Asher said sounded like “the guy who sings ‘Old Man River’ garglin’,” and rattled more than any pipe he’d ever heard. He opened it up while the organ was on, and maggots flew in his face. Then we went to the nearby Wal-Mart and he bought a vacuum cleaner, garbage bags, a water hose, a spray nozzle, bleach, nitrile gloves, fume masks and a pipe brush. The hose proved most useful, as Asher used water to unstick the clog. The pipe filled up to the clog, sounding like an extra in-tune glass of water being poured, then the clog popped free, and the water trickled and resonated down the pipe, and then out with a splash came a dead bird, thudding onto the pristine church sidewalk. Maggots inched desperately across the asphalt blindly towards a churchgoer's car. I held a maggot on my finger and then put him back with his friends.

It's funny how each restaurant plays music that furthers their image: Perkin’s had oldies, Kaffe Blue had adult contemporary, The Pepperjack Grill played 90s grunge. I rarely hear country. There hasn't been much other music on this trip. I didn’t bring any music with me, so I’ve been repeatedly singing the same three songs for over a week: Dolly Parton “Tennessee Homesick Blues,” Patty Loveless “After All” and Jerry Reed “East Bound and Down.” It’s fun and maybe annoying.

At a Walgreens I picked up a road atlas to look at America, while Asher bought organ supplies. The minute I was left alone, two ladies working there both rushed up to me from opposite directions and accidentally spoke at the exact same time—they were so eager to find out where I was from. And then one of them told me how her husband used to be a truck driver and how she once rode with him in semi-trucks through New Mexico and Los Angeles, describing it like she had journeyed to the moon. “My son refused to get out of the truck in New Mexico, even when he had to pee!” Her husband stopped being a truck driver after an accident driving a 40-ton truckload of some kind of quarried rock—a car stopped in front of him on a winding road, and he went tumbling down the side of an Appalachian mountain.

Most restaurants and churches we went to were overly air conditioned to compensate for the humidity. I’d have to bring my hoodie with me not to freeze to death. Asher would tell me everyone dining must be looking at me funny for wearing a jacket. Asher drives a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible, which, when converted, alleviates the sticky of our backs and thighs and armpits. He has a bumper sticker in gothic font saying “Frodo failed, the Republicans have The Ring.” When he first pointed it out, I pretended I didn’t get it.

One time on the way back to the church from eating, a car followed us through several lights and turns and stop signs. At one intersection, Asher took notice that the same car was still behind us on the opposite side of town. We finally got a good look at the driver when we were about to turn in to the church. Staring back at us was a middle-aged woman with big glasses and an even bigger grin across her face. When we parked at the church she jumped out of her car and over to Asher’s door where she stood real close and anxiously tapped at the glass. Asher was perturbed and hesitantly put his finger on the button to roll down the window. “I’ve been following you for blocks. That bumper sticker is great! It’s such a great thing! I wanna know where you got it from.

On Saturday we set out to find the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, also sometimes confusingly signed as the Mountain Music Museum. After looping around the Bristol Mall a few times, we stumbled upon a sign in a KFC parking lot saying the museum was actually inside the mall. The mall was packed. After we pushed through the tinted mall doors, all at once emerging into view were squinty leering eyes in rows and rows pecked into the faces of fat yokel-types sitting on fold-out chairs all facing the same direction of our entrance. We finally found the museum modestly hiding behind an escalator. It was more like a CD store than anything else, but had a few autographed instruments on display. I considered buying Heehaw on DVD, but the price told me better. I put coins into a machine to get the Bristol logo pressed onto a penny. The old couple running the place was eager to make conversation. When they asked where I was from, I asked how they could tell I wasn’t from around there. The man said, “well… … well…” And then silence. They seemed impressed and horrified when I mentioned LA. The lady said of their one brief drive through New York City, “I don’t think there’s anything I left behind there that I need to go back for.”

Since my flight landed, it’s never really felt like we left Atlanta. It’s partly in my head and partly not.(Faux-) politically speaking, the Southwest was getting called “the new South” due to its recent (semi-temporary) staunch red-state-ness. I think it’s backwards actually; the South is the new Southwest. Just like the internet and cell phones have made it much easier for urban sprawl to explode Las Vegas and show up in sudden chunks in southern Utah or northern Arizona, the same appears to be happening in the Appalachians. Supersized Home Depot-Bed Bath & Beyond-Chili’s mini-malls will find you when you were wanting old bumpkin shops on the most removed Smoky Mountain roads. Thanks to the Appalachian Regional Commission, the region got a head start in the 60s in erasing its isolated local uniqueness in favor of copious freeways and chain commerce. That money could have been used better in this region than to invite everyone else and their businesses in. These communities wouldn’t be dragging their feet on globalism or a competitive economy. There’s no reason in invading those Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints communes or taking in the few remaining uncontacted tribes in Brazil and Peru. There might still be households or villages in the South who speak with a Shakespearean accent. It’d be redundant here to have to explain why local color and obscure cultures should be preserved.

On Sunday we finally left Bristol and went down to Asheville, North Carolina to meet up with another online friend, Sebastian. His house was cute and modest. He must have had every book Gertrude Stein wrote; I borrowed one. He brought me with him and some other friends to go tubing on the Green River. We drove out of Asheville, below the Blue Ridge Parkway, almost to the South Carolina border. He and his friends reminded me of myself and my friends back in LA except a decade older. His friend Heather works for two weeks every fall (when the cranberries are ripe) at an OceanSpray factory in Massachusetts. Janelle organized an arts event in Asheville for this coming weekend concerning sustainable living. One fellow wearing nicely-fit plaid pants as a swimsuit—he talked me out of the Unclaimed Baggage Center, saying it was disappointing, small and expensive. “But I’m a thrift store snob,” he warned me. They all know each other through the Short Mountain Sanctuary, where I’m hoping to go this weekend. Sebastian wore a bicycle shorts-resemblant swimsuit; he said my long loose swim-shorts looked “very California.” When we got to the river, most of his friends' swimsuits were a similar style.

Even if I got the chance to photograph the Green River, it wouldn’t have done the experience any justice. When the current got faster, Sebastian's friends wouldn't think twice to grab my hand, even before we had been introduced, to take on the rapids together. The lot of us floated and scattered at different speeds: Janelle topless, Sebastian attempting to stand on his tube and then plunging face first into the water, Hunter and Jason holding each other and kissing as they straddle between their tubes, Heather using her flip-flops to paddle by. I lay back and watched the Smoky Mountain fog wander past, whiffing the planty sweetness of pollen and ferns, reaching out at thick fuzzy vines drooping from mossy branches, the air sitting heavy on the water like it could be swam through, huge dragonflies soaring past. I could feel fish mouths nipping at my toes if I kept my feet submerged, or so the thrift store snob recommended. Yokel locals drifted by, one entangled couple constantly frowning with cigarettes hanging out. I couldn’t help but smile back, feeling some kind of bond with them in the moment.

san fernando road concert.

2008-06-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I curated the San Fernando Road Concert, an all day arts event organized to re-imagine unused urban space along all twenty-three miles of San Fernando Road from Sylmar to Lincoln Heights with experimental music performances, art installations, readings, discussions and carpool happenings by twenty LA-based artists. The event was organized as a drive officially starting at 5 PM in Sylmar at the northern end of San Fernando Road at its intersection with the Sierra Highway, and ending in Lincoln Heights at its intersection with Pasadena Avenue before turning into Avenue 20 at 9 PM. Starting the day before, a map and program of the event became available at http://stephenvandyck.com/sanfernando.htm along with various downloadable art for audience members' car rides.

Since moving to LA seven years ago I've been interested in the way this whole metropolis grew, the massive in-between and negative spaces it left behind as it spored and sprouted, and how one street could go over twenty miles and through so many kinds of neighborhoods. Valley Boulevard originally went from downtown LA all the way east of San Bernardino, twisting through seventy miles of orange groves, mountain passes and small towns. Sunset Boulevard is perhaps the most infamous of the remaining endless streets, starting downtown and passing through an ironic/iconic combination of the most densely populated and wealthiest suburban parts of the city. Whenever I try to sell LA to a friend, I explain how living here is customizable, that we can get in our cars and skip all the places we don't want to see, unlike New York where it's inevitable that you will walk every block and encounter every kind of person, not that this is a good or bad thing. In Los Angeles there are massive amounts of land that everyone skips, some spaces even as desolate and hidden from the populace as a rural mountain road. What if those places became the destinations, to skip our usual IKEAs, 405s and Elephant Bars, to generate a new kind of LA experience, bringing meaning and attention to a collection of these less obvious spots.

Why San Fernando Road? Los Angeles has some of the longest municipal streets in the world, Sepulveda Boulevard being the longest at 43 miles. Sepulveda is just too long and too monotonous for this concert though. San Fernando is basically the drive between CalArts and downtown LA, so I figure for the majority of us it would be easier and feel more native. It offers a lot of unused urban public space with a diverse array of potential spots. It has relatively few lights. It used to be US highway 99 but was decommissioned when I-5 was built. What remains is an hour-and-a-half-long journey beside metrolink tracks, below overpasses, past warehouse lots, endless residential neighborhoods and an occasional outdoor mall.

For the event, each participating artist was invited to find an outdoor spot along San Fernando Road—the one in LA, not Santa Clarita—that San Fernando Road was recent renamed as Main Street, Newhall Avenue and Railroad Avenue—and to make a site-specific work for their chosen spots. Spots could be between dumpsters, along railroad tracks, on the double yellow lines, on a bench, on the steps of a Christian bookstore, at the top of a 20-foot high street lamp, on the curb, on the sidewalk—anything as long as it's along San Fernando. Work could be a performance, installation, a fleeting interaction, reading of a piece of writing, large scale video projection, a sneeze, self-immolation—anything they'd wanna do. Work could relate to its spot directly or tangentially, so long as the spot was necessary to the work. Additionally, artists were invited to make site-specific performances or installations (or text scores or conversations or multimedia-what-have-yous) for cars as they'd go the length of San Fernando Road.

On the day of the event, the audience was asked to drive the length of San Fernando on a loose schedule between 5 and 9 PM, stopping at 12 sites and experiencing 8 pieces in their cars between sites. The event was unapologetically LA; performance times were loose and overlapped so the audience could be on their own schedule: to find parking, to spend longer amounts of time at favorite spots, to skip spots, to drive at different speeds between them, to stop at Carls Jr. for a Spicy BBQ Six Dollar Burger, to drive off-track for anonymous wandering through the shadowy depths of the Valley, to daydream or just to spend some good quality time with their cars. One friend described the format of the event as being like an inverted parade. The audience was asked to bring cameras, notepads, cell phones, tape recorders—any method of documentation they'd like—and to post all documentation of the concert on http://sanfernandoroad.blogspot.com. Some events started before 5 and were already in progress when the official concert-drive began. I gave audience members my phone number in case they'd get lost.

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SAN FERNANDO ROAD CONCERT PROGRAM:
(with added-in photos and commentary)

STOP #1 San Fernando Road/Sierra Highway 4:45 to 5:15
Stephen van Dyck “tub.” / introductory conversation
—GET DIRECTIONS HERE

Turns out my car has the best speakers to blast the sounds and conversations of baths past.

CAR PIECES WILL BE GIVEN OUT AT STOP #1
Sara Roberts “San Fernando Start Stop an' Go”
Kyoung Kim “Terra Incognita”—DOWNLOADABLE HERE
Eric Lindley “Untitled Set of Performance Instructions”
Robin Myrick “The Murgatroid Cycle”—DOWNLOADABLE HERE
David P Earle “The Strip: An audio guide to the San Fernando Veldt.”
Laura Vena “Cartographies of Water and Dust: Traversing historic Route 99”
Josh Forbes, Anna Magnuson, Tucker Neel “Untitled (A Dinner)”

Me and Katie playing Sara Roberts' game, “San Fernando Start Stop an' Go.” We spotted a woman in a wheelchair wearing a cheetah pattern outfit, yelled at pedestrians, stopped at random places, and sang along to Patty Loveless' "You Can Feel Bad" which I videotaped while driving. We won nuttybutties (Is that what they're called?) for carrying out five of these certain tasks from a list. I also videotaped us performing two of Robin Myrick's plays while driving, but I had it zoomed in, so you can only see our noses and ears. I'll upload it.

STOP #2 just south of 12723 San Fernando Road 3:00 to 5:45
Mark So
Don Lalo | Magic [2 open rooms]
2008
SCORE DOWNLOADABLE HERE

Four performing Mark So's score by standing in front of the north lot and facing away from it, both ears unmodified, sustaining simple activity (reading). See score here: http://stephenvandyck.com/don lalo magic.pdf

Katie and I arriving at Mark So's stop, or more likely departing, trying to catch future stops in advance just in case...

STOP #3 east side of San Fernando between Polk and Astoria 5:00 to 5:45
Jade Thacker “sun bathing”

Jade sunbathing on the side of a biking path. She told me she met a lot of people and got honked at quite a bit.

LOOK OUT FOR
Phil Stearns "on the political economics of resource motivated warfare"
(biking from the north to south end of San Fernando Road and back from 2:30 to 7:00)

As far as I know, no one spotted him, but he did get back to me that he successfully biked from one end to the other and back and up to Saugus where he resides.

BEGIN “The Strip: An audio guide to the San Fernando Veldt.” at San Fernando Road and San Fernando Mission Boulevard

STOP #4
bodycity (On San Fernando Road)
San Fernando Road/beneath 118 Freeway overpass 5:45 to 6:00

Experimental dance troupe bodycity performs just below the 118 freeway and later leaves chalk outlines of their bodies along with the words "bodycity was here."

STOP #5 San Fernando Road/beneath 5 Freeway overpass near Tuxford Street 6:00 to 6:30
Danielle Adair “FOR SALE”

In his review of the event, Eric Lindley described Danielle's performance best: "that amphetamine-rich man jackknifing on the corner is someone else with no-advertisement." Katie and I later climbed onto that Simpsons billboard. Photos soon.

STOP #6 south/west side of SFR between Alameda and Brand all day
Tucker Neel “Untitled (American Flags along approximately 4 miles of the South side of San Fernando Blvd.)”

Tucker Neel photo installation on San Fernando Road near Grandview Avenue.

STOP #7 San Fernando Road/Grandview Avenue 6:15 to 7:15
Daiana Feuer “clownin’”

The audience got so delayed by the plentiful art-stops and car-doings, we all missed Daiana's “clownin’.” But quite a few random passersby did get to indulge in her clowning glory and receive one of many beautiful nipple paintings.

STOP #8
Allison Carter “Play It As It Lays” 2425 N. San Fernando Road 6:45 to 7:15

We all ended up having a picnic with Joan Didion and revising her work on the parking lot of an Out of the Closet. David P. Earle's revision was most clever.

STOP #9 San Fernando Road/Future Street 8:42 to 8:43
Tucker Neel “I've Learned To Stop Worrying.”

Anachronistic, and thus, I was too busy playing ball with Carlin to remember to go to it.

STOP #10 San Fernando Road/Avenue 26 5:00 to 8:00
Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA “LOVE APPLES”

Fallen Fruit members Matias Viegener and David Burns plus Islands of LA member Ari Kletzky explaining their collaboration LOVE APPLES to early arrivers. Video coming soon. As part of a larger project, Islands of LA declared the traffic islands of LA a national park. Fallen Fruit is an activist art group that encourages harvesting, planting and sampling public fruit.

STOP #11 San Fernando Road/Humboldt Street 7:45 to 8:30
Carlin Wing "Hitting Walls (v. iv)"

I sent two balls onto a roof; I don't know my own strength. Video coming soon. A man came up to Carlin just to say that he had never seen anyone using the empty outdoor space like that in his neighborhood.

STOP #12 San Fernando Road/Pasadena Avenue 8:15 to 9:00
Jade Thacker “Dedicated to those whose sole source of indignation is a messed up trifle”

Daiana Feuer still clownin', Sara Roberts preparing to give away prizes and Jade Thacker serving bananas and cucumbers.

bath videos 1-3.

2008-05-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

Leave me YouTube comments!

a thesis proposal.

2008-05-07T04:14:00.000-07:00

For a thesis project (my internet meetings list being another), I propose a collection of surrealistic short stories (or long prose poems) in first person about a young gay male living in Los Angeles who dreams of escaping into the desert. He is pretty much me; his experiences are based on my own. I’d say it’s fiction though, because in this world he can physically move from place to place the way one dreams or jogs through memories. He can wake up to find himself holding up the Watts Towers or sleeping under an Oprah billboard or lying naked in the middle of a salt flat. The narrator is constantly aware of time moving forward and the past and his memories being lost. The narrator can’t adjust to the static loop of Los Angeles: the businessmen, rush hour, the endless streets and suburbs, image culture, object fetishism, mass production and planned obsolescence.

Each piece/poem/chunk can work on its own, but the whole mass adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Each piece maps out the narrator’s relations with other people, himself and his own body through interactions with physical places, taking the reader on a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland journey though a shape-shifting, amorphous, dreamy landscape of Hollywood, Skid Row, the LA River, the LA Harbor, the 405 (as well as desert places) as they exist in 2008. In this landscape, one feels most public in front of their computer or TV, most alone in the middle of the city, most internal on a precipice ledge, most external in bed with someone, most grounded in an advertisement or product name. This place is realer than the real world. These ironies, commentary on present day urban life, are the argument of the piece. The narrator is sorting out the feeling that people seem mostly like empty drones going about their simple routine ad nauseam. When he finds himself in bed with another guy, communication is only physical. He and the person are mostly unable to communicate or have anything in common.

The piece does not move on a timeline, it only moves back and forth between the city and desert, maybe sometimes to Albuquerque and my (narrator’s) youth and the womb. The past and future are only objects of the present. As it moves between the desert and LA, it is never clear which is the real and which is the dream. The narrator is constantly feeling unfamiliar with the most personal things (his body, his own words, etc) and fantasizes familiarity and intimacy with the middle of nowhere—the post-apocalyptic deadness of the desert (Salton Sea, Truth or Consequences, Zion, Colorado City, Needle Mountains, the Taos hum, the Trinity test site). Issues of gender/masculinity rooted in his youth are laid bare in the toughness/ruggedness of canyons and rock formations.

The landscape is full of sex and bodies. and interconnectedness. Death and sex are not gruesome or emotional or “good and bad,” just real. The narrator is unjudgmental of his surroundings. The narrator does not question the reality of his experiences, even as they become impossibly surreal. Life is like a movie unfolding over his eyes.
Images, patterns and actions accumulate and develop the way characters would. This is the real narrative, maybe. Once certain themes are introduced, the way they recur can help the reader to understand their function in this reality.

The narrator doesn’t owe the reader much. Perhaps there is even a sexual tension between narrator and reader. Narrator is coy, sassy, seductive, a trickster, intentionally confusing, not always aware of what he’s doing, even as he says he is, trying to avoid the subject of his own existence. He is never fully serious and never fully joking. Bare and detached descriptions mix with wordplay, awkward humor, and unclear, passive-aggressive observations frame each piece with a sort of topic. He’s not optimistic, but complacent. He accepts a feeling of loss when it turns out he’s not who he thought he was. Irony and humor are at the heart of the pieces and how they are shaped.

A second character, “he”? Perhaps all men in his life blend together into one. The way two people can want to become each other without first being distinct things. The two characters are always busied in a sort of dance. The two characters might really be one person, or the “he” could be many different lovers. “He” is a travel companion, a cameraman, a caretaker, God, the only person the narrator can physically communicate with. He’s a fantasy lover that never develops into a complicated character. The narrator never opens up to him. “He” is more arbitrary while the ground is more determined. Narrator seems more alone the closer physically he is to the “he.” Other characters are hardly there, more like robots or places.

The narrator dwells in the happy failures of capitalism, work life, desperation for love, mass media culture, car culture. In much of the writing, the narrator is in a car but it’s unclear where he’s going. The grotesque and absurd are a means of escape. Pop culture references are clear and objective describing tools. Science is the only way the narrator can interpret emotions. Intimate human interactions in his mind are just like interactions between any objects. The narrator is happy to guide the reader through all this, a tour of his mind and how it put together its feelings towards the state of humanity he lives in.

bathe and drive.

2008-04-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

Last night I posted an ad on Craigslist. My objective is to find a stranger online who will take a bath with me, during which I will record the bath, and then we will play it back loudly through his car stereo as we drive around with the windows down.

For a while I've been wanting to broadcast a sound in a public space from a car, and for a while I've been wanting to use the internet as a source for audience/participants/collaborators. I envisioned recording a particular sound to play through a megaphone while driving around a particular part of town, and the thought of that relationship of a drive-by sound to passersby pleased me. In the past I've used Craigslist many a time to meet guys for dates. There's always been something unsatisfying about the way it's done: trying to describe myself in such a way that filters out guys without shared interests/traits, then to meet each other and present ourselves as best as we can, going on a date, going to bed, consuming dinner and a movie, consuming each other, assuming that a second date means we've past each other's first levels. What if a date or hook-up’s purpose would be to create an action/experience, like an art project? I’m not a "hook up" type, but maybe I could be if it were an "art hook up"—meaning making something together instead of screwing each other. Online dating is even more awkward than asking out someone you know in person. It's already forced when you're both going on a date with someone just to go on a date with someone. I can only think to bring that awkwardness even farther, we might as well also have choreographed activities set by constraints, the activities resulting in a sort of time loop. If we're responding to each other's photos, we might as well instantly bear ourselves physically and mentally for each other's judgement, like really forward speed dating. And also, to not expect anything afterwards, to meet specifically for the date and to have a whole new objective unrelated to how well we get along (like a sex hook up but more satisfying in the long haul).

I thought I could even take it a step further, and try to control the kinds of people I meet. On the internet I’ve talked to people I have nothing in common with, and had nothing to say. In my internet dating list/memoir project (the bath project idea comes off the trajectory of that and other past works), I archived my history of meeting many people from online in person and the experiences that came from them. I've come to realize I might just like meeting people with whom I have nothing in common out of sheer curiosity and because I learn about myself. I’ll have an intent when I meet someone, but then there are unexpected qualities in them that I end up having to deal with. I merrily wallow in these stories: a guy who had a tattoo of the symbol of Islam just because he liked the way it looked, a guy who was obsessive compulsive and wouldn't touch me without washing his hands, a guy who was a member of the Alanis Morissette fan club and would fly to various other cities every few months just to be with other fanatics. What if I meet someone specifically because they are different than me, and try to pick out the difference beforehand?

For instance, I’ve been interested lately in the guys I see on the road who drive lowriders around or blast music loudly and bassily. It’s a popular thing to do, as are other aspects of hip-hop car culture, especially in this city, especially in my neighborhood. I’ve never met a guy from online who was into hip-hop car culture, but apparently because we probably didn’t have much in common, maybe because not many gay guys are into this, or maybe because different motives by either party prevented us from meeting. It’s kind of a butch straight guy activity, and it’s not a common kind of person for me to end up around. But I don’t think I’m from a culture that much different from lowrider guys. I grew up in the Southwest and have lived on the east side of LA for six years. Lowriding and ghostriding are a well-known part of American culture especially in the Southwest and on the West Coast. How much of America can I claim as my culture as an American, as a Southwesterner, as a white person? Maybe I want to meet people from other subcultures so I can get beyond the boundaries. I figure, if I have one subcultural aspect in common with them like gayness, maybe I could use that to bridge our differences in race and heritage. So I made this ad, and no one responded to it. I figured the ad should be short, simple and clinical. I showed my mentor Sara, and she said I looked tired and depressed, which might be true. I was afraid to use photos I always use, because I didn't want people who know me to respond, but decided if it was really going to work, I would have to be me as much as in any other dating ad I've made. The ads I usually post are very honest and revealing, so in my second attempt I made myself much more approachable and didn't limit the responders to what kinds of cars they drive, just that they play their music loudly. Besides, aren't most people fairly unlike me? I can explore our differences in the bathtub conversation.

For the event, it's important that we meet soon after the ad's posting time, and I figure it needs to happen all in one meeting (and it might be hard to get them back for a second date), so maybe it's a one-art-stand. The bath should be around an hour; in my opinion that's the duration of a good bathing. The entirety of the bath will be recorded with an Edirol R-09 24-bit WAVE/MP3 Recorder I borrowed from Integrated Media at CalArts. For a short time I will videotape using my Canon PowerShot SD800's cheap-ass video camera feature, just for documentation. I don't have to film the guy's face or genitals, just evidence to set as an example for future instruction; I don't want to botch the bathing experience with the documentation. The tub is sorta dirty, so I need to clean it first. It's also really small, and will make it hard for us not to touch. The participant can opt to have the lights fully on or lighting by candle. As said in the ad, we won't have sex or kiss or touch in a sensual way; we will bear ourselves to each other and just talk. I won't script anything, but I would like to begin the bathtime conversation by asking him about his car. Hopefully that way it will sync nicely with the beginning of the drive. I’m hoping in that hour we’ll forget about the technology recording and surrounding our little stage. Then we'll take the sound file to my computer. We'll edit the sound together, and burn a CD. Unless he has a tape player, in which I can record our bath on tape. Then, we'll drive wherever we decide to go, and I'll videotape again briefly.

The pieces of video will go into a sort of "vlog" along with my usual blog. I would like to offer this experience as a guide for future ideas to myself and anyone interested.

in a sparkling void.

2008-02-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

The other day I was strolling in front of the sandwiches at Trader Joe's when a lady came up to me saying, "May I bask in your height for a moment?" Why not? I thought. "Okay." I was confused and just kinda stood there. I looked down at my basket, then up at her, folding my lips inward in my mouth. "... Oh." I reached up and grabbed the sandwich for her that she had been waiting for. Later, at a gas station, I stood patiently as gasoline jerked through the pump and into my car, waiting for a stout lady with frizzy hair to finish washing her windows so I could have something to do. Her mother sat inside staring out looking wet but was dry. The frizzy lady had just finished her routine and was walking toward the mini mart when a huge truck honked, a quick half-second mind-numbingly loud horn. She leapt into the air in surprise and shrieked "HOO woo!" And even later that day, I was walking on Hollywood Boulevard to get post cards, one of Disney Hall for my grandmother so I could say to her "this is where I work," the other post card for a class project. I peered into the window of a frozen yogurt store and saw a man dressed as "swamp thing" maybe. His whole body and face were covered in green paint and mossy stuff, and he'd be about eight feet tall if he were standing. He was licking his lips, moaning and enjoying a cup of frozen yogurt. I felt filthy, like I had seen something I wasn't supposed to. For my class I picked out a card of a giant cat sitting amid downtown LA skyscrapers fighting off helicopters and advertisement blimps. We're sending pieces of writing to each other on them, which together will conglomerate into a book. On the way back, the swamp monster was towering above me, expressionless, seemingly trying to camouflage himself against a lightpost.

I just sent a photo of my uvula and throat to some guy online who has a thing for it. I figure I'm not worth more than this, and that's not bad. I might as well at least give the beauty of my throat a purpose.

On Sunday Alex and I took a walk around our neighborhood here in Wilshire Center. It always feels funny when we do this, because we're both tall and emaciatingly thin, while the average passerby is at least a foot shorter. We walked into this really stinky pet store with gigantic bunnies. Two of them had a biscuit between them and were tugging bitterly from either side. We walked up a noisy wooden ramp into an even smaller room, obviously originally a different store but bought out for expansion. It contained parrots, cockatoos, a whole array of exotic birds the likes of some of which I had never seen. And chickens. All at once the entirety of the bird section sang for us. We stood in a half dome of chirps as rows of birds bobbed heads as rehearsed, synchronized and deafeningly loud. One man working there was whistling the tune of the bird chorus as he organized shelves. The birds stunk. Each section of animals had a different kind of poopy stench. It wasn't just because of the efficient use of space, the stacking of cages in all sections from the floor to the ceiling, which reminded me of the original Peale Museum. In the fish section I lost track of time staring at ones shaped like plates turned on their sides. How did they feel about being so beautiful in this rotting store? There were also fish who looked like whores. They had bold red lips and black around their eyes. After some close scrutiny, we concluded they had been drawn on, made to look like that, the bodies of some having flowers or lollipops depending on your preference, others with uneven stripes like a plastic toy car. Every now and again two of them would jump at each other and meet at the lips. It was truly a fish brothel. It wouldn't surprise me if the pet store violated animal rights laws on several counts. But a metaphor wasn't needed to prove to me the slutty undertones of a pet store.

Last night I was sitting at my computer when I heard a sound of a popping, like a paper bag being burst, except a hundred times louder, which shook the walls of our building. Then tires screeching, then the sound of air coming out of a deflating hot air balloon. I ran to Alex. "Did you hear all that? Let's go see." I told Alex we were obligated. "This is our neighborhood's version of dinner parties," I told him. Alex didn't hear the deflating sound, and I've been known to have auditory hallucinations late at night. There were two SUV-ish vehicles on Beverly Boulevard facing the same direction sitting side by side like twins, perpendicular on the double yellow lines. We determined they must have made the popping sound when their abdomens smacked, one of their tires deflating at impact. And also a car had run head first into a parking meter and was smashed in the back so that the back end's middle came to a point like a "v". I can't figure out what happened. Maybe the two SUVS crunched the little car from behind at either corner? I said the broken glass reminded me of rain, Alex said salt. Then I went on and on about how the misty air reminded me of zero-degree nights in New Mexico. Every car driving through had to come almost to a stop, their tires making sounds of crunching and popping over the chunks of glass and debris. We didn't talk to anyone, because we ran away when we saw police.

Why is it so popular to say you listen to funk, but then you actually listen to Maroon 5 or Hall & Oates or something? I listen to Parliament, Parlet and Funkadelic, and that doesn't make me any more real.

On YouTube there's a strong presence of having to know who beats who, mainly with animals but who knows the possibilities. What conclusions can be generated from a poetically organized list of all these potential battles of life forms and otherwise? I don't know, and I can't fathom bothering to paste them all here. I actually tried, but here's the abridged version. I love the comments, music, titles. It's funny how there always has to be a winner, and how some feel the need to declare the winning over and over like we couldn't see it for ourselves. I hope this list will clarify a new world order and an ultimate food chain.

Jaguar versus Caiman
Anaconda versus Caiman
Jaguar versus Anaconda
Jaguar versus Pig
Jaguar versus Fish
Jumbo Jet versus People on the Beach
Polar Bear versus Walrus
Grizzly Bear versus Caribou
Dog versus balloons
Tiger versus Crocodile (featuring 50 Cent)
Shark versus Crocodile
Shark versus Zombie
Shark versus Octopus
Bush versus Beyonce
Praying Mantis versus Mouse
Midgets versus Camel
DNA versus The Book of Mormon
Bear versus Caiman "Bear totally destroys and owns Caiman."
Bear cub versus Hyena
Hyena versus Seal Pups

internet meetings list.

2008-02-18T18:41:00.000-08:00

In July 2006, I started a list of everyone I ever met in person from online. Real name, online name, website we met through, day we met, city and neighborhood where we met, what we did, their age, amount of times we met, what we did sexually if anything. Pretty cold data. I've been meeting people for about a decade, so the list is pretty long. In November I began footnoting the list to write whatever was memorable from each meeting, usually the oddities about these people or how they have a continued although maybe peripheral presence in my life, playing between the factual, emotional, spatial and digressive. The weird neighborhoods I've driven to, the passing of time between encounters with a person (daily for weeks, or once every nine years), physical deformities, odd behavior, the things I put myself through. The kind of information on each person varies widely. For example, one annotation only goes into the way a guy had a clear case of OCD, washing his hands constantly, refusing to hug when we said our goodbyes, making me explore a soap store for an unhealthy hour or so. Usually narrative is backed up with data, but this is the reverse.

So far, the writing is twenty pages in 8-point font single-spaced. I envision the final product being a physical book on 11” by 14” paper, wider than tall, and not in such a tiny font. Each page of the writing is divided between the list and its footnotes, although the footnotes clearly override the list. It doesn't need be read from front to back; it offers the reader a chance to skip around while holding the same meaning. There are no quotes or photos or any research. It's an archive of original material all from memory. I took it to my mentor Matias worrying that it's a bit gossipy, and he said, "Well, isn't that the point? Gossip is a literary form." Talking about a third person enhances the relationship between narrator and reader, bonding over their similar reactions about the weirdnesses of the third person, these reactions being physical in addition to mental. In that regard, gossip is along the lines of porn and horror, using our embodiment as a literary form.

In the three years since my ex-boyfriend, I really haven't had a substantial relationship. But in that time it's not like I was never trying. More than half the guys I met for dates were during this period. This piece of writing is what I got instead, a "he" in every footnote stringing together like one guy with a lot of problems that I can't seem to get rid of. The truth is, the writing is about me. I’m on a trek of trying to understand myself and wanting to find something mostly unattainable, whether I’m aware of either of those or not. This work is a window into my life. I’m better able to explain myself through who I’m not.

Up to age fourteen I spent most of my time outdoors alone, biking to Tijeras, mapping out the systems of walls on my block for "spy" use, smashing rocks apart and organizing their powders by color. And all at once at age fourteen we moved to a bigger house that my parents designed in a not-so-outdoor-friendly neighborhood far from my friends. And I became a sexual being. And we got the internet. Add that to the factors of my conservative ultra-Christian high school and potentially homophobic mother. I'm really not into technology, so it's not about being a nerd, which I wouldn't mind if it were true. I don't even own an iPod. I do mind technological fetishizers, the kind who subscribe to magazines just to cum all over the features of the latest Mazdas, Razr phones, iMacs, innovations in plastic surgery, self-cleaning refrigerators, etc. I've met a few of those types online, in fact, and didn't care much for their interests. I'm currently an avid user of Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Gay.com, Amazon and other e-places. This blog itself exists on MySpace (the most readers), BlogSpot (the best design) and Xanga (been using it the longest). I've lived the better half of my life inhabiting the online world as much as the "real" one. I hope this writing will be a legitimate source for how gay internet life has evolved over the past decade, and how a person would evolve alongside it.

Clusters of annotations work together to create their own mini-narratives. A few of the earlier ones at the beginning explain how I entered into the gay online dating world at age fourteen, and what the climate of the gay internet world was like at the time. In other clusters, it becomes clear that I met several people on the same night, or that we all knew each other even if we were never all in the same room at once. A larger narrative gets told through interweaving mini-stories. The piece addresses the “small world” scenario, the way everyone seems to know each other or have little traits in common that turn this mass of random meetings into an archive of a community.

These connections through the internet often led me into parts of cities I would never have otherwise seen. I have a strong awareness of geography / relationship with my location. In one annotation, I’m brought to Happy Valley and contemplate its name while trying to u-turn in a tiny cul-de-sac surrounded by barking dogs and a woman who stares out her window as my car lightly bumps hers. In another, at a time when I had lived in Albuquerque almost my entire life, I’m brought to the South Valley for the first time and am overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of foreignness in my hometown. Those kinds of feelings are expressed in the descriptions of places rather than said outwardly.

Many of the footnotes are excuses to go against the reader’s expectations of a footnote altogether: to say something altogether unrelated, to digress from the original topic (the person I met), to make general observations on life. I hope that sort of freedom works nicely when juxtaposed with the rigid listing of facts on the upper half of the page.

One fellow student observed that since the footnotes below override the staunch list above, and since I play a submissive role both in my meetings and in bed, that it is a memoir of the bottom.

I do my best to stay diplomatic and objective, although the opining and emoting boils through. I’m not afraid to address the horrific and honest details of what I observed. The narrator is stoic and dry, not analyzing the awful things. There’s no psychologizing. This world and this lifestyle are thought of as normal. There’s little anxiety in going through with the meetings. I avoid making judgments; I just observe and know what aspects of the stories are important.

I was worried about how to address the current moment of writing as I talk about the past, since the current moment between annotations isn’t static. My memories now could be completely different than the ones I'll have in a year, when I finish this. Writing this piece will strongly influence those memories, too, although I don’t yet know how. I decided to give the list a cut-off date of March 31, 2008, to honor the decade anniversary of the very first meeting. I could come out with a new version in another decade, and in the meanwhile, I'll feel free to change the things I wrote previously to reflect the way I think of them now (as in then, in the future). I could have an online version that morphs through time as I change my memories to reflect new realizations. Or I could just continue writing in the present and not worry about the way memories shift over time, which is a concern of the current piece. These are all hypothetical “part twos” to this thesis project.

As an only child entering adulthood I already was coerced into becoming particularly aware of my differences with others. Perhaps going through these extra lengths brought me to develop a liking for being around people with whom I would never have one-on-one conversations normally. I've definitely developed a taste for the thrill of having to sit down at a coffee shop with a mostly anonymous unlikely acquaintance to listen to his life story. It's become a kind of social fetish. You never know whom you might have a lot in common with, or whom you might end up forever regretting meeting.

I'm not quite sure what to do about the use of real names. I hate the idea of making up fake names. It would go against the point. I could black out the names with a marker, or cut them out of the page, but that seems like a rather violent turn of events. I could make an impossible effort to know where all the copies of it are going. I've wanted to mentioned these meetings in my blog, to show how strange and fascinating they are, but haven’t mainly out of fear the met people will see it. Not that I'm truly afraid of that, but I really am trying to respect their boundaries just a little. You could say it's a venting of my blog's limitations, not needing to make nice, just showing people for how I remember them.

[This entry was revised and "bettered" on May 6, 2008.]

whales.

2008-01-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Looks like Hillary will win California on Super Tuesday. It matters to her because it’s the most populous state. The red cursive of its name doesn’t hide all that extra blank space on the hundreds of license plates passing on the right. Los Angeles has more Bulgarians than any other city outside Bulgaria. Ethiopians too, and Samoans, Cambodians, Armenians, crossing trenches, fault lines, double yellow lines without noticing. They’re just the letters of a word on white plates now. I’m still a yellow landscape and hot air balloon.

Initially, cell phones can feel ice cold to a face, despite radioactivity. It’s a corporate trick. Bush could be x-raying our brains in a special Verizon deal. My horn doesn’t work, so I talk to the cars. They can’t hear me, so I talk to Pamela. Her rasp warms my ear with a promise to cancel four overdraft fees. Pen in hand, knee on wheel, phone on shoulder, one car per green. Colliding with a Toyota Tundra would be bad news. If they can off-road on an iceberg in Irkutsk, they can grind through my tin can shell. General Motors bought out LA’s trolleys so that I could die alone to the Bank of America theme music’s forty-second loop.

I looked into getting the whale plate. You have to pay $50 a year. Some of Arnold Schwartzenegger’s cars are hybrids. I bet he shelled out for the whale plate and that it automatically deducts from his debit account.

The whale’s tail is overfilling. Vibraphones and trumpets are the new trolleys. Seahorses with little clam castanets and swanky air bubbles. Pamela rides in on a manatee. Sorry, there are no vegetarian whales, she explains. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

I can’t remember how I felt about the blankness when I first moved here. Was it a compromise? A stand-in for grey? The more ice cubes that plop into a glass, the more its contents rise. Whales don’t know this. Whales have never been ripped off on their gin and tonic or lived in Sacramento.

an update on my dreaming life.

2008-01-22T23:52:00.000-08:00

I'm overdue to update you on my dreaming life.

January 22, 2008:
I was yelling at my mother, "It's been eight years since you died! Stop telling me how to live my life!" We were talking about my dating life while in the car deciding which ferry to take across Lake Champlain from New York to Vermont.

January 9, 2008:
I was back in New Mexico, and in my two weeks there I was stressed out about how early I should wake up so that I could get done what I needed to. But late at night this fellow I was dating would keep me up. He looked kind of like Robert the cop on Everybody Loves Raymond. But he and Robert (my cop whom I was dating in real life) had dated in the past. It was this fellow’s birthday. We were in a public building of some sort, and I think the room we were in had lockers. Eric and someone else were there to celebrate his birthday with us, but they ended up watching and cheering us on while we had sex for the first time. I was worried that my butt was dirty because I hadn’t been digesting very well. He poured way too much lube, and then I complained it was too much, during which Eric eagerly ran away and came back with a container to take half of it home for himself. The other person was some girl, maybe this cholla that the real Robert and I know in real life. I felt awkward people were watching, but just as we got started, I came like a hose without even touching myself. The fellow made some joke about what Robert (the real one) would do if he had been there, and I felt insecure that I wasn’t as sexually open minded as they had been together.

January 6, 2008:
I was with someone in a park, and I had a toy that I would wind up, and it would play classic songs. I held it against a tree, and we enjoyed the way I based us at the tree, and that was a romantic thing. I wanted to take the chip out of the toy and make something new with it. As the dream progressed, “I” wasn’t me anymore, but my father. I was convincing the guy on the date to live with me, wooing him, and I would talk about my stories of the Old West. The guy had all his belongings with him, in the park, and his father, too, I think. At one point I sat down far away from him, and so he just assumed he would have to move all his stuff over to me. But I walked to him to show that I wasn’t seriously being selfish. We were listening to “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” by Celine Dion, but it wasn't coming from the toy.

I was at school in the writing program with everyone else, except the environment looked completely different. I can’t think of a place that it compares to. Maybe Room 359 in the Oxy library, or Inez Elementary School, where I briefly attended. The light came into the room in a specific way that meant the windows were facing south. I felt I was being taken advantage of by my fellow students for giving out too much personal information about myself all the time. Jenny Mitchell (in real life a former student of my writing program) walked in late, and I took her hostage so to speak. I was trying to find something that people took from me, and I felt her up in every which way. She was telling everyone to file rape charges. But later when I explained myself she wasn’t offended at all.

January 5, 2008:
I was in Alaska to see Mike Gravel speak. He was on an iceberg, and a huge audience watched from the shore. I was stuck on the iceberg, too. Some pre-teen singer kid performed after he spoke, and the iceberg would tip in every which way. I kept getting tossed underwater, and the audience didn't take much notice as I swam around below the singer.

December 15?, 2007:
I dreamt that my grandmother and mother met Robert. They were both homophobic, and then my grandmother said “Oh, he’s the top?” and then they both felt relieved and so much better about him and my sexuality.

December 2, 2007:
I was at Terence’s house (a guy I once dated). In addition to his usual roommates, he was also living with Alex S (my ex-boyfriend), Bordeaux (Alex's boyfriend) and Michael Pisaro (one of my music professors). I was shocked and delighted. The place was multistory and in Long Beach. It looked like one of those San Francisco Painted Lady houses, except spirally. Maybe the same dream, or maybe it was later when I was napping. Still in Long Beach. I was with several people. It was kinda post-apocalyptic and we were having to climb walls and run across freeways to get to where we were headed. I wound up on a beach, and Anna Oxygen was there. It was neat how chairs were sitting on sand underwater, but the water was placid and transparent enough that it almost wasn’t there. And these little strips of dirt were like underwater walkways. Anna introduced me to several girls who looked like the ones in my friend Jennifer’s dance troupe Body City. We were talking real estate about these cute little floating huts along a roped bridge above the same pretty water. I had my camera out and was photographing them.

November 20, 2007:
We were leaving the mall. My cousin Richard and my nephew Jamie were now father and son. They had a stand for various foods. Chicken that you pick with your hands like fruit. They were on a boat, and had many tasks to do, leaning it over and letting down the surface on which we were standing in a wheel-turning moiotion. When we went down for the arrival, all was fine, but Jamie was new at it, so everyone was a bit nervous. But it was Richard who made it go too far, and Uncle Rom and Aunt Sheila fell off the back side of it. Uncle Ron looked okay, and then as he was reaching and wedging himself up, he fell backwards and banged his head on concrete before falling even farther in.

November 16, 2007:
I went into the house realizing a bunch of people were about to come in. I didn’t want them to realize my mother was dead, so I went into the kitchen, where my mother was making food, and I told her she needed to make them see her. As each person walked in, she did some weird very fake looking spell casting like from "Bewitched," and they would say “hi” to her casually. The layout of the house in the dream was very accurate to how it actually is set up. At some point this situation became a party, and everyone had paired up. Alex Castle and I started making out.

Another dream I had earlier this morning: I was living in Albuquerque, but it was much more populous. I was walking around to get my errands done. I was at some bank or restaurant or somewhere. I complained that the lady in front of me was slow, and then she told me I could go elsewhere. And then a security guy and I got into a fight. I definitely didn’t lose the fight but still had to go elsewhere.

November 5, 2007:
The dream was like a movie or TV show, taking place in the old house I grew up in. My mother was dead, and I missed her, but I suspected maybe I could talk to her if I tried. I was lying on the floor or looking between couch cushions when she came and said she was still around. When she left, someone else in the house said “bye” to her, but my father couldn’t see her. It left this thought that maybe she was only dead to certain people. Some old rich man came to the house—someone’s father—along with other guests. The rich man used something of my mother’s, a fingernail clipper maybe, and then kept it for himself. I told him he had to give it back, and I got very upset because it was something my mother left when she died. Then, suddenly, he was choking and being held in positions that inferred like in a movie that a ghost was doing it. At some point he was laid out dead on the floor.

Older people saying 60s houses were called Kitsch Style, and that it was my style. And 70s houses were called Punk Style. And we were maybe in Old Town Pasadena, and we walked by a New England looking house with some circular designs, and they called it Japanese Style.

November 3, 2007:
A bunch of people came over to my house, including Katie, Brett and some big tough guys, including the ones I kicked in the face at the party last week (real life event). They were all here to antagonize me actually, and after the big guys were threatening me, Katie would say “and we’re not friends anymore!” We ended up on some kind of hill where there was a party or congregating of people.

October 15, 2007:
I had this new boyfriend, and he was slightly overweight, but that wasn’t a problem. He was in the writing program, and the moment we met I was so tired as I was going to class that I was mostly naked as a protest. And then we went over to the pool, which was a lot more elegant than it is in real life. And it was maybe night time but it looked like broad daylight and there was a security guard, but he either didn’t see us behind that bush or didn’t care. And we just kind of fell into the position of sex. And then there was a nasty earthquake, and the water in the pool was moving in waves the way it would. We walked around and enjoyed the way the world seemed in motion. A helicopter, perhaps for safety warnings, flew above us with a spotlight, but it got caught on a telephone pole and wrapped around it on some kind of cord. When it was still it was hanging upside down and probably really damaged. Then we went walking and I found Katie and Brett and others, and I had to give everyone a ride home.

October 13, 2007:
I had a gay cousin named "Wiscunsin." My grandmother was spelling his name to me over the phone, and he lives in North Carolina. I was hoping she said South Carolina.

I was working a special role in some kind of banquet. I had to help carry platters back up the stairs like I was one of the demons hosting it. Everyone thought we had super powers. But one of us really did, and I wasn’t sure whom.

October 10, 2007:
I went to a party uninvited, and they had a giant pizza and cut me a slice that was five feet long. I was acting shy and brooding because there were guys there that I liked.

Kalu was dead and then he’d come back to life.

We were living far out in the desert, and I was home visiting for Christmas. My parents remodeled in such a way that I had to move from where I was writing to let them change things. We had just celebrated my birthday and then my mother redid everything to celebrate Christmas. I wasn’t satisfied with my birthday, but then there were suddenly all these Christmas presents. My birthday party was yet to happen though, and I had one day left, so that evening I was expecting guests. Someone pulled into the driveway and bumped into my father’s white car. I could see it was this Asian woman who had been stalking me. Then she went into reverse and smashed through the window to my room. I chased after her barefoot through broken glass to get the license plate numbers. It was a California plate. I could read the first two-or-so numbers, and she drove really fast around the house. I decided to go backwards and see the license plate by tricking her. The license plate was in full view, and then she turned around and pointed a gun at me.

October 5, 2007:
My hedgehog Kalu and some guy I was in love with were flying off a tower.

October 4, 2007:
I was at Daiana’s house, and she was writing a poem using musical notation as a starting point. It had words on long lines going across the page, and musical indicators in boxes at certain measure breaks. There was some kind of criminal act that was being taken care of, and a police officer pulled over to solve the situation. This was just outside Daiana’s apartment, and we watched from the second floor balcony. The officer pulled out his gun and aimed it at the criminal, but then turned it to his own head and shot. And then he said something like, “who wants to come with me?” And fired at all the onlookers. I dropped to the floor of the balcony and crawled, worrying that the farther back from the balcony ledge I got, the easier I would be to hit. But it was the opposite (which would be true in real life). I waited until the police officer’s own blow to the head would finlly bring him down and cease the firing.

Julia and I were at someone’s house, lying on segments of a bed with an animal, maybe Kalu. She chose to lie down between me and the animal, and for most of the dream I was bothered that her butt was in my face.

Chris and family were visiting me and my parents in an apartment we apparently had to move into. I was being clever and quick and felt that I was surprising and impressing Amy with my humor. Jamie acted like a little kid and would interrupt what I was doing or tell me a related story to something I was saying even though it wasn’t. (Like my professor Michael Pisaro’s son during our meetings in real life.) I kept accidentally breaking my camera, and Chris insisted it was his, as if that were okay. I pulled all these little bits out of the carpet hoping one was the camera piece I dropped. The apartment was small, and I felt embarrassed.

September 19, 2007:
Some members of a program from school (Integrated Media or creative writing maybe) slept over at my house. As we were waking up, I noticed others had come in through the night, such as my friend Katie and people she brought. She and her group were sleeping standing up in poses exactly like how they appeared when they arrived. Eventually the room filled up with the class, and my father was up and being funny. I don’t know how it correlated with our house, but the room basically looked like the Integrated Media room at school, except it was connected to little offshoots that were houselike. My father was like some kind of entertainer all of a sudden, and everyone was cheering for him after every time he’d yell out from some obscure place. I said “where is he?” and the people sitting on the floor all pointed towards a closet area to the side of the big open white space where they were sitting. There was this weird chest-like cave area like something from Disneyland with crazy colored lights pouring out of it. I felt really bored with the routine as I opened it, knowign exactly what would happen. My father flew out and did weird smoke, light and magic tricks that looked really produced while making his typical humor.

Afterwards I was talking about Kansas with two country girls in Integrated Media who seemed to really hit it off, as well as this other one with a Southern accent. I told the Southern girl how I was jealous of the first two girls, and then I suggested maybe she and I could be like the first two. The whole time we were talking with our faces really close like we were going to kiss. I was implying that she and I were both country girls, and then she said she was, even though she was from Chicago. And I wasn’t really from Kansas but was trying to impress her. She had a face mask on that had letters of some writing in cursive that couldn’t be read from her face, and the mask had the American flag on it in a cheesy way, as though it should say “god bless America." She had beautiful platinum blonde hair. We were about to kiss, and she seemed really into it, but then she left me there because she needed to talk to others.

September 9, 2007:
Apparently I had forgotten all about the fact that I had made other living situation plans a long time ago in case the current one (in real life) didn’t work out. My professor Sara Roberts was supposed to be my roommate, and we chose a very small apartment closer to the west side, either near UCLA or in West Hollywood. But we had to share a bedroom. The room had this depressingly empty, grey feeling, like a small back room of a house. Then, something about watching a movie, except it was a live video feed of our own burglary about to happen, and I kept rewinding so that it wouldn't happen.

September 7, 2007:
I was at an art gallery and Anna Magnusson was there. She showed me her art work. There was a sculpture, which looked more like a terrain. It seemed like planes of paintings that formed a topographical re-creation, but they were made of icing. At this point she started to become Daiana for a little bit. She told me to try any colors I wanted, and they all looked so tasty. Then I asked if I could steal her idea, and she said I could as long as it wasn’t an exact copy. Then she showed me another piece she made, which was a trough of fluid that smelt like cake, and was called cake. (Similar to a mixed drink recipe Katie talks about in real life.)

September 4, 2007:
I was with a guy and also Oprah. I kept stretching a wig over her head that made it look like she had a crew cut. It looked good and real on her, and I said she should wear it all the time, but she didn’t like it. Sometimes I’d grab the end of it from the front of her head and stretch it over my knees, and Oprah would get upset and say she couldn’t see anything.

September 3, 2007:
I brought my father with me to class. He kept raising his hand and asking questions that were completely unrelated to anything, and it finally made me so mad that I started yelling at him. Then, Michael Near (a medieval English professor at my undergrad) appeared and scolded me for being rude to my father. And then I yelled at him and told him to mind his own business. Later, I apologized to Michael Near, and we hugged. The hug lasted a really long time, and it was difficult getting him off me.

August 31, 2007:
My family moved in across the street from my childhood friend Ronnie’s house in the cul-de-sac where the Marksteiners (a family of Catholic military Republicans in real life) also once lived. We lived in the house where this old friendly man used to live (in real life) and who recently died (also in real life). I was up in a tree when Ronnie saw me through her window and then I needed help down. Also up there were some man and his kid, and I was being friendly and smiling to them. The man looked at me like I might need his help getting down, and I looked to him like I definitely needed his help. In the end, I think he did help me, but I also think I just fell to the street. Someone else moved in next to Ronnie, maybe Quinn? I was excited that we were all living so close. I had a party, and some fifty people showed up, and we all hung out outside. Then, either police or weather forced us all to go under a porch with only enough room that we had to lie down. I woke up a few hours later, and we were all still under there. Then I went on a date and came back and most people had left. I was really disappointed they had left.

Later, my mother had come home to that same house. I confronted her about the fact (of the dream) that she left me alone for several years as a child. She wouldn’t be sympathetic about it, and she was barely receptive to my hugs. But she would listen to me, and we went walking while talking about it. We got in a bus from behind, almost like an ambulance, and I shouted to the whole bus that my mother was a bad parent. My mother stayed silent. One lady was kind of giving me a “so what?” reaction, saying that her mother was a bad parent, too. Sometimes in the dream my mother was briefly my grandmother. Throughout the dream it was implied that my mother left me alone as a kid because she wanted to party and drink during the times she was gone.

August 18, 2007:
I cuddled with Melora (a cat I used to have) inside the dryer.

August 16, 2007:
Matthew Hodgson (my ex's ex after me) put old desserts under lacquer instead of throwing them away.

August 8, 2007:
I climbed up a tree in a park, to get away from something, and I saw a huge amount of strange giants living in a neighboring tree, that no one could ever see from below.

I ended up at Katie's house, I think unannounced, just walking around in it, and some guy had moved in, and they were cuddling on the couch when I happened past them. (In reality, Katie recently posted a blog that sounded like she was in love with a guy.)

There was a baby that just came out (maybe of me?), and the guy who was nearest to me said that it was unsalvageable. The baby was tiny, like the size of my finger. It ran away. It turned into a cat that I was looking for, worried that people would steal it, since it was so pretty. In the morning, there were several cats, but I knew which was the one.

August 7, 2007:
My father and I were in Connecticut visiting my brother Chris and his family, and then my father wanted to go back to New Mexico, but my guilty conscience told me we should visit my grandmother in Vermont before she dies. And I was really just being lazy and wanting to go home and do nothing back in New Mexico. But since I was making a vacation movie, I thought it’d be a waste of film to end it now. When we got there, it turned out she had just died, so then my father was waiting outside in the tiniest sports car rental, the size of one of those remote control cars, and he was ready to floor it.

Somehow I ended up in Flagstaff and was waiting for my father to pick me up along the side of the freeway in a strip of land between the freeway and a tall fence. There were corpses of dead animals, types of diseases that only existed there, famous murder spots, a very long fence of death and danger. There were graffitied words, long quotes, that made the spot well-known. The local church just got out of service, it must have been a Sunday at noon, and some lady came out to convert me. I told her about my fears being there, and she and I hugged. I guess my father would usually pick me up at this location. Then, we went inside, and just as I was reading about “dirtnadoes,” one happened. Because it was made from the ground, it was much stronger, and I feared it would rip the roof off the church. I could hear it sear across the roof. The lady said no one had ever died from one, and I told her that I experienced one of those every time I passed through the town. The church in the dream then became my CalArts dorm, except almost everyone was black, and I kept going into people’s rooms and looking at their stuff and sometimes photographing it. The bathrooms were full of self-portraits, all of them looked like they were drawn while the people were outside the diagonal windows toward the ceiling with their heads poking in and facing downwards into the bathrooms. Everyone shaded the drawings of themselves with green and purple marker. They had a list of those who didn’t put up artwork, and at the top of the list were Stephen van Dyck and Tod Jackson, followed by Tony (my friend Leah’s ex-boyfriend). One black guy was being funny and hanging from really high in his drawing, and I looked above to where he must have been when it was drawn, and then the dream flashed back to when he drew it, and he almost fell.

July 30, 2007:
Katie and I were photographing the Albuquerque sunrise, even though it was where the sun sets. Then we were at CalArts, but the building was skyscraper-sized. We found someone’s dead body and were going to save it for some kind of art project of mine, but then they caught us and told us to put it in a bag immediately and give it to them. The body had a carrot lodged in its forehead, the reason of death, and I unconsciously took the carrot out and started chewing on it. When I realized I was eating it I got really grossed out.

July 29, 2007:
I was in Austin, Texas, out of some kind of persuasion by Tanner (this guy I know from online in my awake life). When I was there we went to a museum that wasn’t the same as the one I went to when I visited (in reality I never went to one). He was constantly groping me and trying to find a place where we could have sex. At some point, I think we were north of the Bay Area, yet still at the museum. Tanner became Alex G (guy I was dating at the time), and later RuPaul in male form. There were amusement park rides underground, and we stood waiting in line for our ride. It was as though we were waiting in line on the side of the freeway at night, and heavy traffic was going around a giant loop. The dream ended when a truck went right at me.

July 25, 2007:
School started, and I had another Hillary Kapan class. We had to fill out some worksheet, and he didn’t think I did much work on mine. Then other students started standing up for me, saying I had written a poem on it that was deep in meaning.

I accidentally went into some lady’s house when I thought it was mine. Then she followed me curiously to my place. It was Los Angeles, and it was snowing a lot, and I was rolling around in it out on the sidewalk.

I ran into Mrs. Marksteiner (Catholic military Republican woman who was the mother of childhood friends I used to have), but she was the lady from Home Improvement now, and Tim Allen was waiting at the curb. I really wanted to tell her I was gay, just to get her reaction, but she kept kissing me, and I liked it, and we might have made out.

We were driving around the West, and we came to an amazing city that was like a missing link between Louisiana and the Southwest. All these New Orleans-style old steeple buildings were sitting amid a valley next to a giant ragged stone cliff. Each building had its own clay or rock formation growing out of it like they had been covered in rock and then the rock mostly eroded off, but not all. The town was called something like Voy-Korsakov, it was in southwest Kansas, and it was around popularion 10,000 and in the desert.

July 21, 2007:
I visited Amarantha in Orange County (she doesn't actually live there), and she had all these little creatures crawling all over body. I got the impression she made them in Taiwan. One of them had wing-like horns and a third snouty horn on his face, looking much like a statue I made when I was twelve in real life. It had two spirits in one body though, so it had a double-word name. Two others were counterparts to each other—shared a spirit—and their names combined made a single word. They didn’t move on their own; they just kind of knew what Amarantha wanted them to do. I was skeptical that maybe Amarantha was claymation-animating the creatures, even though she was with us in person. I think Katie and Brett were both with me when we visited. Tucker Neel was in the dream, and he had tortellini hair.

July 1, 2007:
Jerry’s brother Craig was back, but he had changed his name to Ben, and either he just got back from Thailand or we were living there and he arrive there, too. Jerry was sharing bunk beds with him. He had had surgery to get piercings across his chest so that it seemed almost like a heavy long metal clamp had come down on him. He had a board going across his pelvic region, and penis going through the board, with two others installed at either end, but possibly rotten.

Later I went with Valerie and Jerry to a Nine Inch Nails concert, and each audience member was given a square platform seat to sit on. I left my bag by the hallway wall. It disappeared when I wasn’t looking. By that point, everyone had moved onward, and it was like a giant museum installation. I was alone in the room and it seemed as though Trent Reznor was still performing on that stage, which was so small it might as well have been a video. Looking for my bag, I walked around through the halls and rooms as though I were in a gallery. There were huge displays of candy, and large wall videos that Trent had made. The music was more like art-music, like the music I make. It was as though I had stepped into an artsy Chocolate Factory kind of place.

June 28, 2007:
It was the first day of class for fall 2007 at CalArts. I slept in and at the last minute chose a random class to attend because I was so lazy. In class, I sat down next to Nate (a guy I know through David Feldman whom I think has HIV, although that aspect of him wasn’t true in the dream). He and I talked a lot, and he distracted me from my worries about not knowing what classes I was taking. Every now and again, the professor—a woman whom I admired a lot, but I can’t remember whom—interrupted our talking because she realized I wasn’t doing the meditation position that everyone else was following. By this point in the dream, the guy and I were on a large bed in the back-center of the room, hiding under a comforter so that she wouldn’t notice that we weren’t paying attention. And we had sex in there. And later, we woke up, and everyone was gone, but we were in the house of some girl from the class named Annie, and it turned out she was friends with Katie before moving to North Carolina and Quebec and finally here. And Nate knew her too, although I think he had morphed into someone else by this point.

June 26, 2007:
It was a sunny, warm day, and Katie and I were in front of CalArts singing and dancing really gleefully in a circle with people we barely knew. Some kind of event had happened, I presume some sort of graduation event. Anna Oxygen walked up to us, kind of looking distracted yet wanting to acknowledge everyone’s presence (the way she usually does). I waved and called to her, and she responded smilingly, and then I told her she should join us, which I knew was something she’d really like. “Are you sure it’s okay if I join?” she asked politely. Then, Katie intercepted Anna’s question with “No, it’s not.” And then I said “Yes, she can join us.” And then Katie said, in a very assertive way, “no, she can’t.” And right at that moment, with one hand already holding one of Katie’s, I grabbed her other hand and started swinging her in the air in circles above my head. I kept swinging her and swinging her around and around, and then I walked over to an area that seemed like it was under either a gazebo or an overpass—something that formed a kind of outdoor ceiling with the front of CalArts. And then I let go of Katie and she flew into a top corner inside the ceiling and burst explosively into dust.

June 17, 2007:
Dreamt that my old dog DJ was erect. And I gave Katie a disease through an inky pen.

June 4, 2007:
Alex and Bordeaux were finally moving, and I had to come back to LA to face the new reality. The apartment was a disaster where one room had been divided up amongst people and had boxes upon boxes of my clothes sitting like cubbies against walls with maybe one pair of socks in one, or two pairs of pants in another. I had just taken a nap after driving home from Pasadena, where I witnessed a gay group (support group?) meet from afar in a parking lot. Or it was just some guys who were friends. Actually, all I remember is walking into a parking lot and seeing cars full of guys (parked) staring back at me like I was invading. And now that I had napped, the landlord reminded me that I was expecting a call from Alex because Bordeaux had already left from Vietnam, and now Alex, some Mexican guy and I were going to have a threesome. And now Amarantha had come to pick me up to take me out, and then we turned back when we realized neither of us had money on us. The whole dream had a strong 2002 feeling.

May 29, 2007:
Dream within a dream:
Reality: Sleeping on an air-mattress in Dallas with Katie.
Dream: Sleeping on an air-mattress in Dallas with Katie.
Dream within a dream: Raped by a woman.
Dream: Afraid of waking Katie.

May 20, 2007:
I was in a house with Eric on a second floor, and I came all over myself. I put up one of those electric hail Mary signs at the base of the fancy master bedroom jacuzzi. It was early, but I knew Alex S’s mother was awake and around, and probably already saw me naked walking into the bathroom. And in there, I was suddenly with Channon and Tiffany (these obese girls I dated in middle school in real life) in a hot tub. They had made a special kind of drink, tea maybe? It was reminiscent of the jelloshot Anna Magnusson gave me last evening (in real life), but in liquid form. I said to Channon, “remember when we were 13?” Then I turned to Tiffany and said, “remember when we were 12?” And then I kept going back and forth until I hit zero. And then I said something like, “remember Tod?” And then Channon said something that implied that Tod was the square-root of six. Then people started showing up with towels who joined us in the hot tub who resembled CalArts undergrads. They heard us talking about Tod, and asked if we knew some girl. They said she hung out with Tod. I was worried that they knew who Tod was because of his wild ways and that I had been too much of a gossip in my blog.

And before that, I dreamt something about walking around the blocks in Santa Monica in the right order to be in style.

May 13, 2007:
My father was offered some kind of land deal in these green mountains under low hanging clouds in Tibet, although I’m skeptical that it was actually Tennessee. I was at Occidental (my undergrad) and could see one project from a site-specific class from CalArts ESP students from last year going on. One was happening on the roof of a building with a courtyard that doesn’t actually exist, right next to the library. And then Anna Oxygen’s project involved rollerblading alongside traffic on roads in Hollywood, and we were following her in a car. She was singing a cheesy early 90s dance song with backup skaters, and then it went into a store. At this point, something was directed at me, and I was no longer in a car, just walking, with no transition.

May 7, 2007:
I was in a class where the teacher, who was a combination between my mother, Sara Roberts (my mentor) and Cass (my cousin Amarantha's step-mother), or actually might have just been my friend Anna Schmitt’s mother, was in the other room digging up information while I told the other students to ask me questions about my childhood or geography trivia. When she came back, she described what she would usually teach in her 4^th grade classes (or a year like that), saying that I would sing and was good at the music theory. Then she announced the first award goes to Katie for singing. And then the second and third awards went to me for other things.

May 6, 2007:
Alex S. showed me photos he took of a 1950s style hotel or lodge (101 Diner-style) where he took boulders and set them on the brick pillars of a fence going in front of the place. On the boulders he had each letter of a word—I forgot what the word was. It only had six or so letters and directly addressed the difference or contrast within the photo.

April 19, 2007:
Alex Castle said something to me that rhymed. Something like “I didn’t contribute to the cookie fund / I didn’t make fudge or have any fun.”

April 17, 2007:
I was with Alex S (my ex). We were on a ship just off the coast of L.A. There was a weird touristy attraction to climb down this tube and stand on a precarious rubber boaty thing from the ship. It was about as clear in the dream as in my explanation. I kept worrying that it'd drift far away, so I insisted Alex join me going on it. The ocean was stormy, and we climbed through a rubber tube like in a playground, except it was large enough that we could stand. And when we got on the boaty thing, it broke off from the main boat. It was no longer protected from water and drifted away from the coast. Then, it hit a point where it was static, and at this certain point, the water wasn't water anymore, but snow-glazed dirt-like-looking. Apparently, when you get far enough out to sea, the water no longer moves. It hasn't broken off to hit the coast. And the dream was very silent at this point. I could see mountains that would later become waves, and a water tower. It looked like New Mexico in winter.

April 16, 2007:
I was with my parents in our old house where I lived from ages 6 to 14. We had been selling the house to Chris—in reality my father is selling the more recent house to Chris but will still live in it—and Chris was apparently also moving in. I asked my father about the other house (the one he actually lives in in real life), because apparently we had both. We parked in the right side of the driveway—two vans and my father’s white car were on the left—came in through the garage to find a note left by Chris. Immediately my mother led my father into my father’s old bathroom. I heard them talking, and my mother was remorseful to Chris. I was in the kitchen trying to figure out why any of this was happening. I finally went to where they were, and I approached walking backwards to give Chris respect, but there were mirrors on all sides of me. He told me it didn’t matter, so I looked over. He was a fit-bodied Asian man with a nice tan, lots of tattoos and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The wall that would have been facing the park from the room in real life was instead a large window showing a cave-like spot that the house created by being U-shaped. Some Mexican guy was walking into there, and I pounded on the window telling him to leave. He responded in Spanish, not understanding me. I said, “salgas!” which I didn’t think was correct in the dream. He said, “no, tu salgas!” And then he was threatening me and my family. Everyone else didn’t really care to notice, except my mother who calmly said I shouldn’t have said anything. The guy said he would get us later.

I got lost in a mall and ended up on the roof.

feisty, faggy, vomiting kkk member.

2008-01-16T03:10:00.000-08:00

Last week I threw a book at a guy's head. It was really sudden the way I pulled it off my lap and lunged it at him, it fluttering into his face and ricocheting another fifteen feet past. Fifty Places To See Before You Die, or something like that. I felt really proud of myself at the moment, for having such good aim and reflexes. He had no idea it was because he dropped the book into my lap too hard, and I had no idea he hadn't done it on purpose. Sometimes I don't realize my own strength. I worry I could try to slap you, and then realize I just punched you flat on the floor.

Quoc came back to our apartment again on Wednesday. He called me a KKK member and accused me of starting the war in Iraq. He needed to stay with Huan again. This time Huan made sure Quoc told his whole story in front of Alex and me, and then Huan would feel like he wasn't just hearing things and that he was right that Quoc has grandiose delusions. Quoc immediately told us how he was originally the first choice to replace Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations. He communicates with Bush and other politicians through the TV, he said, and following this was one of those moments where it transitioned back to seeming like he was probably joking. Then he talked about how he never felt racism until he went to Austin to go to pharmaceutical school. All the white people would go to the parties, and the non-whites would stay in the non-white building together because the whites wouldn't include them. And he thought then-governor Bush was gay at first. He talked about how he went to Camp Pendleton last year to meet with the president (see December 18, 2007 entry), and how all the marines were blond-haired, blue-eyed and beating him up for being some trespassing weirdo. Quoc told us he was back to stay with us so that he could stop the Iraq War. I told him upfront that I don't think he was even considered by the UN, and I may have been kind of forceful in my talking. Later, at night while I had been alone cutting my hair, Quoc left the couch and came banging on Huan's door, yelling "I have to sleep in there with you." While in there, I could hear him referring to me as a KKK member and asking why Huan would ever want to live with me. Eventually I came in, and Quoc told me I should try letting a black man live in the apartment. And that's when he said I caused the Iraq War and that I'm what's wrong with America. The next day he left, and Huan hasn't heard from him since. One police officer friend of mine suggested Quoc could try to kill me.

Today I couldn't remember if it was spelt "nucular" or "nuclear" and felt like a proud American.

Recently being dumped begs questions like: Do I always take too long to order a meal? Do I have my head up my ass? Am I too feminine? Am I nothing like my blog in person? My father suggested said fellow might wish I wanted to fight or argue more, but I suggested my sometimes feisty attitude would be enough for most. This was after I listed the following times when I received disapproving vibes from said fellow, so that we could delineate why he decided to be through with me: when I received a dismal reaction to ABBA coming from my car stereo, when I seemed really indecisive because I was searching desperately for music that wouldn't be disappointingly faggy, when I was wretchedly stomach sick and vomiting and shitting all over myself and barely had the strength to wipe and had to lie on the floor to catch my breath and felt like my abdomen was exploding with disease and pain, during which he told me not to complain so much, when I could barely eat the next day, and when I took too long to order a meal. His reaction to all of these was often barely noticeable, often not communicated in complaint form or in that same moment. When the reality of our future was made known, it was 2 AM and we had been in bed being sexual, and at that point we were still tipsy and wet with saliva, and after the statement he acted like he was falling asleep. I got out of bed and said I wasn't tired and would be back in a bit, then went to my car where I sobbed, ate a pile of pulled pork that had originally been in my sandwich at lunch, and listened to my bad synthy early-80s music. Ten minutes later I returned and he was fully dressed and packed. Annie's car pulled into the spot he had been parked in, dropped off Alex with me, and we got back to LA at 7 AM. I still miss the said fellow and his saliva. Katie just suggested I tour policemen of other Newarks. There are eleven more in America. And what's so wrong with ABBA? He's like a Village People reality TV show.

Otherwise, it was an enjoyable trip to San Luis Obispo with friends. Always visible from town, the hills' contours are like that of a well-toned body, except for the large craggy tumors, more resemblant of the mountains down here in "the southland." The town doesn't seem to allow big business in, but has big unfriendly store chains of its own, so was it even necessary? We spied enough jocks and bimbos to reproduce the population of the whole town in babies. On our last evening before the trip was curtailed, Annie insisted on giving us a tour of SLO's many bars, restaurants and shops. We also strolled through an alley plastered in used chewing gum (see photos below).

truth or consequences.

2007-12-31T21:46:00.000-08:00

I spent a couple days in the Truth or Consequences area last week. I met a fellow through the internet named Tommie and stayed with him in a trailer in Elephant Butte. I drove three hours into the night, the rectangular and triangular mountains looming over me and the Rio Grande as I retraced a conquistador's path through freezing desert vacuity. Roads barely paved shook the car, in dead silence minus the metal chains of wind-blown swing seats and the perfectly visible array of stars lighting my way through. As soon as I arrived at Tommie's trailer he had me read a story about a man who pleasured himself from sitting at the bottom of a pool on a suction valve until eventually the entirety of his intestines were pulled out. There was no heater in the trailer, but luckily the water bed was plugged in, so we spent 90% of our trailer time platonically sleeping or watching movies, which I don't honestly like doing much, but I was faced with a dilemma that rarely hits me, one of absolute boredom and few options as soon as the sun set. Even the favorite nearby gas station was closed at 8 PM. Out of the slim pickin's I made us watch The Fight Club, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, The Good Girl and Babe. At the end of Babe I actually cried, the reason for which I cannot justify, but it will either support my often frantically explained notion that I laugh and cry without much reason, or else further exemplify how pathetically and spontaneously oversensitive I am. The trailer we stayed in is only a few doors down from a lot where a trailer once stood that belonged to David Parker Ray, New Mexico's most famous serial killer, who murdered at least sixty people, but he lost count. Tommie used to see him all the time at Pat's, the local tackle shop and convenience store.

Tommie's grandparents used to live in the trailer, but his grandfather died in 1988, the grandmother a decade later. They were responsible for the majority of the decorations, but the deer buck head was a later acquisition. See the rest of my T or C photos for a lovely photo of a photo of the grandparents.

Tommie grew up a "military brat" and was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the trailer was a clock made out of a tree stump that he thought looked like Alaska, which reminded me of a tree stump clock in my friend David's mother's house that David would insist was in the shape of Australia. As a map nerd I can tell you neither clock looked enough like those places that they could have been intentionally shaped that way. One night a mouse was running around the trailer and kept crawling around in my luggage and I couldn't sleep. I woke up Tommie and complained, and he said he would take care of the mouse because he liked the way I whined.

It got down to nineteen degrees at night, the air inside the trailer just as cold and dry as it was outside. I had recurrent dreams that I was running around the bustling streets of LA with my cats and hedgehog, trying to make sure they didn't get lost under the sidewalk or between walls. In the trailer fridge was bacon, eggs, some kind of artificial orange juice, not much else, all of which had been left behind a month ago when his mother last visited. We ate most of these items. For one meal I had saltines and peanut butter, since that was nearly all there was left. Finally we stopped at the Food Basket, one of two grocery stores in T or C; the other is called "Bullock's." We saw old women in motorized wheelchairs, a gang of men in cowboy outfits and two women in their bathrobes. I was also quite fond of the giant cigar display, the likes of which I had never seen without glass in front of it. We made sandwiches, and I made us guacamole. In two days we barely ate enough for one, which was okay for Tommie, but I was busy fantasizing over my father's sturdy Kansas breakfasts.

On the shore of the lake there'd be clay that we'd play with when we were little kids, pretending it was currency, and molding it into animals. We came down at least once a year to visit my cousins Richard and Ruth and their three kids who are my age and younger. Elephant Butte Reservoir is New Mexico's largest reservoir and most popular state park, recreational area and seasonal vacation destination. Over the past decade the reservoir has been drained to 7.5% its capacity, and some say it might go down to the point that there's not even a lake any longer. It's because of a terrible drought in New Mexico as well as Texas, and Texans keep making new deals to buy more of the remaining water from the reservoir. See the fourth-to-last photo in my T or C photos for a house that used to be on the shore.

The Geronimo Springs Museum in Truth or Consequences. When we went in, there was a family of Brits with massive noses questioning the gift shop lady about which private hot springs had the best deals. It seems to me Europeans are the biggest tourists of the American West. I notice in guest books at places like these that everyone who signs them is either from New Mexico or Europe. The man working there, his eye looked like it was about to fall out, and he couldn't tell me of any hot springs that were free or that we could hike to. They're all bubbling up directly into people's indoor spas so that they can charge you for the experience.

There were settlements of Paloma Springs and Geronimo Springs in the late 1800s, but the real growth into a town happened when the dam was built in 1916, at which time the settlement for dam workers was incorporated as Hot Springs. In 1950 the town voted to change its name to "Truth or Consequences," because the host of the show of that name said he would do the program from the first town that renamed itself after it. When I visited my cousins this time around, they were saying they'd rather it had kept its old name. I can't understand that; the name change is so beautifully absurd and fits so well with other nearby rural places, like Why, AZ or Superstition, AZ. All of these names and also the post-apocalyptic nature of the Salton Sea area (see May 20, 2007 entry), the Biblical regions of Utah, like Zion and Moab, the generally unfriendly landscapes of Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, the Needle Mountains, the deadliness of Death Valley and the Trinity Test site, the spiritual vortices of Sedona and the hum of Taos, the aliens of Area 51 and Roswell, the phenomena of the White Sands and the Painted Desert, the way we're all going to leave these desert cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles) due to fires, earthquakes or because we'll run out of water. The Southwest is a land of cruel and unusual wonderment that Truth or Consequences belongs a part of. After all, T or C is not too far from where the first nuclear bomb was set off, and closer still to the site where the first spaceport will be. They've already test-launched the cremated remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan.

Dr. Munger was apparently a crucial part of the history of Truth or Consequences, or so the Geronimo Springs Museum must think. Apparently Consequencer boys often got munged as a rite of passage.

Calamity Jane and I listening intently to Geronimo. See the rest of my T or C photos to catch a glimpse of him mid-sentence.

On Saturday, our last day there, we were driving around Truth or Consequences when I decided we'd find my cousins. I remembered the exact location of their house, just below the water tower where 2nd Street dead ends. A woman pulled up behind us in her pick-up, and I asked her if she knew where the Claassens lived. She happened to be the mother of one of Cousin Richard's tenants. I followed her to his door, and he leapt when he saw me, and said "Stephen!" and wondered how the lady and I were affiliated. And the whole family all happened to be home and doing nothing. I hadn't visited them in almost a decade, since my mother died. She always arranged our visits with them. In fact I only saw them once since her funeral. My father suspected this is because they're religious and we're not. But I doubt that's true. Cousin Ruth brought up the long-time-no-visit very awkwardly, even referencing the awkwardness of it, but still left me wondering. We did finally go out to eat, and I had steak and rellenos, which was more in one meal than I had eaten in two days, and they did thank the Lord for our meal.

"Big Food" Express.

ruminations over a kansas breakfast.

2007-12-25T14:37:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas morning (or really it's afternoon), and just like every morning that I've been home in New Mexico, my father just made me what he calls a "Kansas breakfast" including a massive steak and barely cooked bacon and eggs with bacon grease dumped on buttery toast, and blackberry jam to put on top of it. Except I can barely eat now because my nose just started pouring out blood like a faucet fully turned on. I missed it though—the feeling of my own redness running out of me until I'm not feeling it, the liquid material of "you" but removed from "you" and coloring a toilet bowl boldly. The high elevation and arid climate aren't doing the trick until they make your nose bleed. Growing up here, March was blood month, like clockwork every morning for thirty-one days. I'd be late to school and get out of my mother's car with a rag hanging out my nose. Who knows, maybe it's also due to the way I eat here. I don't remember. Did I always have a fat-fried steak? Sometimes I forget it wasn't me who cooked this steak or hitchhiked to ranches or wore a washcloth over his mouth through the Dust Bowl. Sometimes I think I try too hard to make my visits to Albuquerque into visits back in time. I was so outraged when we got a Trader Joe's, and then an Elephant Bar, and now a 52-acre movie studio in Rio Rancho. Los Angeles is invading New Mexico, I always worry. And sometimes I feel really anti-immigrant and wish Albuquerque's booming suburb Rio Rancho would stop growing. Why should I be happy for population growth or economic growth or earth being devoured by the human virus or my computer telling me to upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox? At least the nose bleeds never change. Some guy online just offered to lick up the blood and then my pee.

I just heard my father in the kitchen making the sound of a gagging cow. It's kind of amazing that he's still alive and so cognizant and in this era. We were at the boot store two nights ago because Robert gave me boots and my feet just don't seem to fit in them. My father tells the eighteen year-old shoe expert, "we walked across America in those boots." But to get to discuss things like "late capitalism" with someone who watches The Grapes of Wrath for nostalgia. Or that he's painting in a German expressionist style in 2007. You can see his artwork at waltervandyck.com which I made for him. He's been mad at me for writing a "bio" for him on it, worrying that people will judge his divorce. And he made me remove information on his being a conscientious objector during World War II because he thinks people support the war in Iraq. He just said to me, "don't say I'm the tenth of fifteen children, it sounds like I was born in a litter." Thankfully he doesn't understand the full extent of what it means to have a MySpace or he'd make me take that down, too. He's able to look at his website though, and check his e-mail and stocks, has a cell phone, stays up late. He was at the casino playing poker until 2 AM last night. He does something spacey and people suggest to me he's senile. I explain to them that he's been that way since my age, which means things aren't looking so good for me. Maybe I am biased; constantly hearing his life stories growing up, I'm more fascinated with them than with the paintings. He just wants me to put up information on the three disparate occasions in those eighty-five years when he bothered to be exhibited, and not bother mentioning how he's designed and built two houses, been a beekeeper, a hunter, a certified pilot, cattle shipper and a chef.

My father raising the blinds so we can look at the snow.

living with quoc.

2007-12-18T19:09:00.000-08:00

A man named Quoc has been living in my apartment for the past few weeks. The day before he moved in, Huan, my roommate who is never home, vented to me about a mentally instable friend of his. Huan said his friend thinks he's got a deal with the US government worth a hundred grand to divulge his secret-recipe strategy to resolve the Iraq situation. He wrote Bush a letter every day for several months until finally getting a reply in the mail saying he should send his ideas. With no mention to anyone, in the middle of the night he drove himself to Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base halfway from LA to Mexico (the one obstacle keeping LA from claiming San Diego as a suburb), approached base guards on duty and declared his association with the president. The guards nodded and said they would go talk to their higher-ups. They came back fully equipped with back up strength, questioned and escorted him out vehemently. I imagine him bruised under an expressionless eye, wearing ripped clothes, being dragged by each arm by uniformed men and dragging his feet through the dirt of the desert.

The next day I got a voicemail from Huan saying a friend of his would be staying with us a few weeks. I didn't bother to call back; I was tired; I had no objections—Huan pays and is never around. As I walked in, on our couch an unfamiliar late-30s Vietnamese man was heavily engaged in Dancing with the Stars on one of the many TVs dispersed tornadically around the center of our living room. He made a lot of eye contact and said nothing. The next morning Huan was gone and Quoc still there. The first thing he said to me was a comment about our messy kitchen. Alex and I laughed that we were trying to see how filthy we could make it, Alex's area of the counter piled high with garbage and dirty pots, my side cluttered with rinsed bowls and glasses lined with orange concentrate residue, no room not even for another. Quoc turns from leering at Alex Castle, looks to me and says in his Vietnam accent, "Is this what they do in New Mexico, throw all their trash on the ground?" When I glared back at him, Alex sighed "ohhh nooo" and put his hand to his brow. Quoc also said I was from the "boonies" even though he's only been through Las Cruces, and remained unfazed when I explained how Albuquerque is ten times bigger than that and one of the forty largest cities in America. He seemed more impressed that Alex is from Orange County. Since then, Quoc has given Alex a blow job and a hand job, watched more TV, scattered his shoes all over the floor and probably eaten some of my cranberry almond cereal.

Tod spent the weekend with me and Alex. Everywhere the three of us went, we brought Quoc along. I spent the whole PM that Friday working on my memoir and at midnight scrounged up everyone to go to some gay Christmas party in Hollywood. There was strip twister, whiskey, guys I already knew from online, a lesbian I kept complimenting, Quoc standing alone watching us, and the host who told everyone to leave at 2 AM, except he probably meant just us, since Tod and I were both definitely approaching rowdy finger-pointing drunkenness. Quoc drove us home in my car. The next day we brought Quoc along for a shopping excursion. He hardly said anything and looked expressionless. The day after that, we were leaving to go somewhere to eat; Quoc was clearly hungry; I lied badly and obviously he wasn't invited. I heard from Huan again about a week after Quoc arrived. "How is everything going with Quoc?" Huan said Quoc's parents keep calling him up worried to death because he just doesn't act the same as he used to. He's a bit uninhibited with his opinions, I told him, but mostly he just seems depressed. The last time I really spoke to Quoc, we were watching a Will & Grace episode where Will is dating a cop. I clearly wanted to watch the episode, but he spoke over the loud TV to tell me the story of his friendship with Huan. He told me about Huan's best friends in middle school, Huan's best friends in high school, how Huan "had it all" and how Huan would seem depressed. At one point, the cop and Will had an intimate moment, and I shushed Quoc.

Since Friday I've escaped back to Fremont to be with Robert, the cop. I called Alex today and he said he thinks Quoc left the apartment for good because he hasn't seen him in a while.

on holiday with the law.

2007-12-01T04:58:00.000-08:00

For Thanksgiving break I carpooled with Eric's girlfriend Heather up to the Bay Area for a visit, my fifth time there in four years. More and more friends of mine keep winding up up there. But I stayed with Robert. I met him through the internet. He's a cop. He looked up all my information, and I was in the clear. He told me my license isn't actually suspended in California; I've just been banned from getting a license here. On Tuesday, when I arrived at his condo, he wasn't back from work yet, and we had not yet met in person. He knew I like orange concentrate and had a bunch for me waiting in his refrigerator. I lounged on his couch finishing a thick pulpy glass of it and awaited a rapping at the door.

Wednesday, Robert let me ride along in the cop car for a few hours. He brought us to Newark's always troublesome motel where a woman named Rosie who was banned from staying the night refused to leave the grounds until she got a room. The other cop on site gave her a choice between scheduling a court date and then leaving the premises *or* going to jail for Thanksgiving and seeing a judge the week after. She would say, "I want to see the judge." The cop finally just pretended she said the first choice. She was slow to walk away, and every now and again would stop and peek behind. "Goodnight, Rosie!" the cops would yell back each time. I started to feel a bit enamored with "the law" by the end of the ride-along. And a bit jealous when I would see Robert handcuff or restrain any other felon.

He gave me bullets. He gave me a tour of the police station, including the control room, the locker room, the lounge rooms, the microwaves. He gave me official police department stickers, evidence tape although reluctantly, biohazard tape, a psychiatric evaluation form, a county coroner reportable death form, field sobriety and chemical tests, an official key ring, I put the key to his apartment on it, which I still have. He stamped my hand with something official. He showed me the city council room, which is in the same building, since the city of Newark, California, is so small. I found a gavel, but it turned out to be a croquet mallet. I tried to use it as both. I pretended to be councilwoman Marla L. Blowers. He gave me an official Newark Police Department box of crayons. He gave me his trading card: Officer Robert says, "Choose your friends carefully."

We got home and watched "A Shot at Love", an MTV reality show where sixteen men and sixteen women are living in a house, competing to fall in love with some annoying older Asian woman named Tila Tequila. I found it deeply bothersome and yet really amazing how all of the contestants would say they were in love with her. In one episode, after they all go swimming—there were only maybe ten left at this point—Tila's make up is washed off, her hair looked scraggly—she looked so hideous. It's hard enough to believe a diverse cast of barbie girls, manly lesbians, army guys, effeminate imported Italian boys and cholla hoop-earring girls could all be in love with the same person. But that ugly mess Tequila? And why didn't any of them fall for each other? It's kinda amazing how the show kicks up a notch the obvious fakeness and makes no apologies. They really seem like they're in love, I almost believe it. It's like social surrealism, if there was ever such a thing. I wanted the really tall Courtney Love-looking girl to end up with one of the cute guys.

Thursday, my friend David picked me up (one of my best friends in the era between my mother's death and my move to Los Angeles, employee at Google and a huge fan of Xena Warrior Princess). We drove to Petaluma to have dinner at his father's girlfriend's daughter's house. David's father's girlfriend's daughter's husband used to live in LA, and asked if I knew the hospital he was born in. That's the hospital where a friend of mine went to when he overdosed on heroin, I said. I also told them about the S&M dinner I went to (see February 15, 2007 entry). Canned cranberry sauce always seems better every year; did they always have whole cranberries buried in the can-shaped gel? David's father's girlfriend must have been fairly drunk, or else she's a pretty cool lady for age sixty-four. She put a whoopee cushion on her belly and farted it into her boobs. Before I left, she gave me a list of Chicano artists, and we made a deal to all hang out in Albuquerque around Christmas and to bring my father along. I think he needs friends like them. Right now it's 9 AM at the McDonald's on Juan Tabo Blvd every day with a bunch of Mexican Republicans.

Friday, Robert and I went to the Bone Room in Albany. I was slightly disappointed, because I heard there was an actual room full of beetles eating meat off bones. But I was too tired from our late-night bonding time to be concerned. We ate Nepalese, after that. In San Francisco, we took three taxis, and I talked to all three drivers. The first was from Brasilia and knew about the Mennonite communes in and around Paraguay. The second was Persian, and Robert's police instincts were sure the fellow was on heroin. He may have also been lying about being from Iran, since all his answers to my questions were decidedly vague. "I'm from the east." The third was Russian. He was driving around 50 MPH when he purposely came within a foot of hitting a woman on the crosswalk.

Drove up to Sutro Bath Ruins on Saturday. Sutro Baths was the world's largest indoor swimming pool complex, built in the late 19th-Century. It got burnt in the 1960s, just like everyone else in San Francisco. It was beautiful walking on walls of nothing at the beach. Anything can be considered ruins these days; why not use government money to preserve or give tours of that abandoned warehouse in Glendale? Or maybe I'm adapted to LA's unofficial "get rid of everything old" slogan, and can't fathom the valuing of one thing over another. It's terrible how they tore down the beautiful Ambassador Hotel where Bobbie Kennedy was shot, just to put in a high school for the retarded. Or is it? I wish I could have been to Sutro before the fire to swim in one of seven swimming pools with differing degrees of salinity. I spotted a Sikh and immediately took his photo (below). (My roommate Huan gave me a bracelet three weeks ago and told me it was from India, and last week at an art event some half-offended girl told me it was a Sikh bracelet.) "Hey! I'm a Sikh, too!" I said to the Sikh. And he nodded in a heh-heh-yes-I-can-see-that sort of way. But we both knew I was missing the other four Sikh items of faith, the comb, long hair, underwear and sword. After all, I'm no Xena. Speaking of which, David and his father met up with us at the ruins. When we all first spotted each other, they were walking down the hill, and for comic effect, David's father acted as though he was slipping and about to fall over the edge.

In the evening, we met David-minus-dad at a bar in the Castro. He took Ambien and got so drunk that he spent a good while hugging a fat Asian man from behind, and after that I didn't see him again. We were outside when a friendly homeless woman came up to one of David's friends and asked if he was from around here. He said he wasn't. She asked where. He said, "not here." I saw all this and thought she seemed sweet, so I butted in. "Where are you from?" and buzzedly pointed at her. She walked up to me and said "you're cute" and we held hands and swung our arms back and forth like we were ten. Robert was right next to me, and I had my shoulder against his chest. She told him I was cute, and asked Robert if I was his boyfriend. He said, "yes." She was very cute, and she tried selling us an old sandwich. Then, David's friend said he'd give her money for her silence. She was paid, and she walked away like we'd never spoken.

purgatory party and aftermath.

2007-11-19T03:55:00.000-08:00

The Saturday before Halloween this year we threw a Purgatory party. The invitation promised: "as soon as you enter the apartment, you will be filled with anger, semen, cheesecake, self-love, self-loathing and more!" For decoration, I brought in two mattresses off the street, put some opened (unused) condoms on them, at first representing Lust, later more known as jumping and wrestling pads, make-out spots or sleeping places for many a drunkard. For Vanity, Alex collected the strangest assortment of light bulbs to install above his mirror; I added a dry erase marker for writing on the mirror. Those were the most conceived sins. The rest of the connections were more shoddy: Tod's old tourniquets, snorting pens and syringes mixed with lollipops, gum balls and tootsie rolls. Another friend made a confessional booth. Alex's new tower of TVs in the living room also debuted, playing Meet the Feebles throughout the party, a horrible film by the guy who directed Lord of the Rings about muppets succumbing to drug addictions, prostitution, STDs, porn-making and sodomy. After much deliberation on costumes—coal miner, boll weevil, Robert Falcon Scott—I settled on gay terrorist, most appropriate for the party theme, the costume replete with a Korean War-era hard hat glazed with glitter, plus Vietnam boots which I have been wanting anyways. My three gay terrorist weapons were a dildo, a box cutter and a glitter spray can.

To make the party additionally insane, kinda as an experiment, I invited all my Facebook and MySpace friends, over a thousand people technically, although most don't know me or live close enough. It had a lot of potential in a way that I could never predict, so the suspense was a kind of rush that I'm already longing for again. In my Facebook invitation, I posted a photo of a close-up of gay bareback sex which got me temporarily kicked off the site, but only after almost everyone had seen it. In the mean time I made a new profile, and upon the old one's returning, turned the new one into my hedgehog Kalu's profile. A bunch of people must be surprised to see him as their friend.

For the most part I was a warm host, approaching tenderly and immediately zapping my prey with glitter, unknowingly permanently soiling their clothes with tiny gay sparkles. Two drunken men entered the apartment who looked so out of place that I immediately sniffed them out as party crashers. Who invited you? "Ughhm, somebody," they responded. You think you can waltz in here and drink all our alcohol and lie to me? Get ooouuttt! And thus began my rampage, pushing at them, screaming at them, high octane, eventually knocking one of them to the feet of party-goers just outside the front door. And as Tod and others tried to restrain me, I kicked one of the crashers "in the nostrils," as one witness described. Vietnam boots and all. After that, there were sightings of the two crasher guys coming back up with a sharp shiny metal object, one described it as a knife, another saw it as our stolen can opener. There were these two big tough dudes at the party whom Tod met and instantaneously invited earlier that day on the streets in downtown LA. One was missing one of his two front teeth. I ran to a closet and drunkenly hid out, while the two tough dudes protected the building. They ran into the drunk crasher bums in the street and had a little skirmish. The crashers thought they were seeking revenge for having been attacked by several people before; I had the impact of a whole pod of defenders, I guess. The two downtown dudes stood guard at the entryway for at least an hour; I watched them from the front door still in my tiny bicycle shorts. When they came in, like a servant I hunted down cigarettes for them. In gratitude. They saved me from my own can opener. I never expected Wrath to inhabit my body for the evening.

Tai, ice-cream maker and Scoops owner (easily the best ice cream in LA), showed up with vegan beer ice cream. Even weirder (to me), someone brought a 24-pack of energy drinks. No Glutton could be more satisfied. One friend dressed as Jesus and was inside the confessional for a stint. One guest came as Envy; his green glittery eyeshadow was a pain for Alex to scrub out of his bathroom sink. Envy later passed out on the prairie couch. Eric appeared as Sloth, an amazing interpretation that went between the idea and the animal. Before Sloth was a sin, there was Sadness. As Sloth, Eric's fabric heart bled Mardi Gras beads in memoriam. His girlfriend Heather was dressed as Greed; there was a second Envy and maybe a Lust. No one portrayed Lust better than Tod. No need for a costume, he was abuzz and ready for the mattress upon first stumble. With one girl he spent a good hour involved in a sexual wrestling match. This girl shoved her hand down Tod's throat several times, his reaction with enjoyment only begetting the next mouthful. At some point, Mark So would smilingly put his hand in people's faces, then, as they smelt shit, he would smilingly point at Tod's ass, gesturing that his hand was just up it, Tod too drunk to notice. Eric later joked that he hoped Mark and the girl shook hands inside Tod.

Tod being restrained after choking some straight guy.

The residue of the party was more than just spilt Bourbon. Andrea, Tod's girlfriend, slept in Alex's bed through the second half—the debaucherous half—of the party. The next day, we—the six of us—don't you hate how parties just keep going and going?—enjoyed the photos of Tod and his fist girl. Andrea took it personally, although it wasn't immediate. She actually seemed really casually amused by the photos at first glance. Later in the day she stormed into the apartment like a banshee, raising bloody murder, having a hairy canary, as my parents would say. She first lunged out at me (verbally), saying I shouldn't have been photographing Tod cheating on her, that instead I could have woken her up. She asked why I didn't. In my three seconds to react to all this, I said "I thought you wanted a bad boy." And that was the core of our misunderstanding. She yelled at Tod for a while longer and ended with "I hope you overdose on heroine and die." And then left.

That night while I was sleeping, Tod got soaking drunk and gave Alex a black eye. I heard a door being banged on in my sleep. Alex locked Tod out of their room so that he could go to bed in peace, but decided to unlock the door after Tod's ceaseless pounding. According to Alex, after that, Alex went to bed, and Tod continued to talk at him for a full hour after he fell asleep. Tod laid down in Alex's bed, held Alex, called him "Andrea" and asked her (him), "Will you make me your bitch?"

The next day a gossipy girl in the writing program showed Andrea that I had posted the party photos on Facebook, and then I received histrionic phone messages from Andrea threatening to sue me for sexual harrassment for posting photos of Tod with the other girl. And before I even got the messages, she also talked to Student Services, her lawyer father and several professors in the Writing Program at CalArts, including Matias who is my mentor and also Andrea's. She also apparently told the whole story to just about every fellow student she ran into. I was even on the phone with Eric when she suddenly came up to him, completely disregarding that he was on the phone, and he held it open as she took twenty minutes to explain to him every exaggeratedly negative detail she could come up with about me. Eric bashfully repeatedly responded to her, "that's terrible." I wrote her an e-mail that night saying she could have just called me up and asked nicely and I still would take them down. And I did take them down. I saw my mentor Matias at the Machine Project art gallery the following Sunday. He came up to me and said, "I heard you were a bad bad boy."

But, for your viewing pleasure, the entire party's photos are up again in full unedited glory if you go here.

That Tuesday, the day after Andrea's lawsuit threats, a saddened Tod took all his antidepressants and painkillers at once just before hopping on the subway to his work serving hot dogs in an art gallery downtown. He could barely function, repeatedly leaving the hot dogs for the bathroom to vomit up pills. He never told me outright, but from our conversations, I assume he was fired. The following Saturday he got very drunk, and that lady down the street—Melody (see October 15, 2007 entry)—called him up looking for a drug connection, and he went over there to help her. Well, he came back missing half his clothes and covered in his own blood. He apparently pissed off some guy on the street and got punched really good in the face. His lower lip looked completely split down the middle. When he arrived home, I was listening to Klezmer music and in the midst of mopping the kitchen and foyer, and he drunkenly trudged all over it as I screamed like a 50s housewife. Melody showed up, chased Tod back and forth across my fresh-moppéd floor and had a fighting match with him outside, yelling "I hope you get arrested" as she left. He repeated the same words at her on a loop at the top of his lungs, almost like a weird dance song. We tried asking him what all happened. When drunk, his talking is always mathematical. "A whore B whore C whore." "A + B + Kenmore." "I was on the corner of Kenmore and heroin." (Kenmore is the next street over.) All this as Alex said nothing, and I listened while mopping still to the Klezmer. He's still mourning the boots he lost that night, perhaps both his most valuable and valued possession.

Tod tracking blood on my freshly-mopped floor.

On Sunday Alex and I gathered around Tod like parents, and trying diplomatically to represent one drunkard and two exhausted friends, I called for a substance-free household, like something out of a pamphlet or a morally themed 80s sitcom episode with the cast sitting together looking serious at the camera at the end. That afternoon we went to a friend's birthday gathering in a park; I climbed trees. Andrea called Tod; he looked at me; I told him, "answer it." He took the Gold Line to the Red Line to her house. From what I heard later, they got drunk, physically fought, and she called up some big GI-Joe-tough-guy anonymous friend of hers at four in the morning to have him remove Tod from her premises. Tod awoke around eight half-drunk leaning on her locked front door. He came home and pounded on the apartment door here to wake me up to let him in. I always tell him to carry a key... Anyway, I could barely sleep after that, and spent the whole day exhausted. In my fatigued seething I drove home from school talking to my father; he said I was Tod's enabler, that my putting up with him has been a huge waste of time for everyone involved, and he would be surprised if I could bring myself to get Tod out of there now. I told Tod he had to go. The next day I woke up and his key was left on the coffee table.

That evening, I talked to Tod's mother on the phone for twenty minutes, and she was completely understanding and happy with my decision. Tod later came home to grab some belongings. Tod was to spend a week in San Diego with his sister, after which he would move back in with his mother and family in Parachute, Colorado, population 1,186, and attend rehab or AA meetings with mountain miner men.

I wasn't angelically sober this whole time myself. On the real Halloween, we carpooled to West Hollywood with Huan (our fourth roommate who's never around) because there was no way I would find parking any closer than our apartment six miles away anyhow. He played us pirated unreleased demo tracks from Madonna's new hiphop album, and they were the worst thing ever. I hope Timbaland fixes that shit up. Trudging through the drunken gay cattle of Weho, I had to call a friend to sign on to my MySpace to get the address to find the party we were headed to. When we got there, they had Jägermeister and Wild Turkey and I was instantaneously drunker than I've ever been in my life (first time I suffered the next day from alcohol). Then the party dispersed out into the Weho cattle. I must have made out with like fifteen people in under two hours. I still remember most of their names, due to the fact that I apparently exchanged numbers with all of them. I had a certain fondness for a fellow named Zoran, an attractive-at-the-time Serb who moved to the US and now styles hair for a living. His Polish friend was going mad as Zoran and I made out, and demanded that Zoran had a boyfriend. Zoran and I kept in touch and met again the following week back in Weho. It was one of the only times I've had any sort of "date" arranged with a person I initially met in real life. We really had nothing in common. He gabbed on and on about Britney Spears' new album, and the others who were there got very interested and knew all the song titles, and I couldn't believe I was the only one who didn't care. Zoran was also kinda ugly. I see no stigma in meeting people through the internet. Obviously. It's easier to root out the ones with entertainment industry affiliation or who don't speak English enough to understand my jokes. In person I'm quickly inhaling store-bought alcohol in the car to avoid the expense of bars as well as the awkwardness of approaching or being approached by strangers.

Surrounded by drunken demons.

Back to the Tod story. Andrea called me up a few days ago, told me she missed Tod, that she called him, forgave him, cried for hours with him as he watched The Ring, admitted she acted too hasty. His new plan was to go to a rehab facility in Acton where he would live for three months; it was near Andrea and not Nowhere, Colorado. The next day, Tod was back, and I agreed to let him and Andrea stay here for a night. Upon their arrival, I learnt that he wouldn't be going to Acton after all, because the facility would not allow his cell phone. They would make him be disconnected from the world for sixty days. At 5 AM, I heard the fridge door open and a cabinet door shut. I knew it was my liquor. I got out of bed and found Tod about to pour my Caxaça pure and on ice. I could tell he was honest when it wasn't what it looked like. He was really embarrassed and followed me to my tooth brushing and almost had a panic attack at my feet. He said Andrea was desperate for a drink and couldn't sleep. He couldn't ask me for a drink because he didn't think I would believe him. She then came up to us bawling and told me she hadn't gone to bed without a drink in ten years. I poured her the drink myself. The next night we went out to a bar, and Tod was sober and the designated driver of Andrea's car.

firechasing.

2007-10-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

Last week I journeyed to a craggy wonderland in peril.

In Val Verde, CA:

I don't actually smoke.

Trajectory of the trucks.

The aptly-named Buckweed Fire.

In Santa Clarita, CA:

Yellow sky above ice cream.

Rain here is accidental; fire is natural.

In Castaic, CA:

The men.

Doomsday.

Release.

Worried citizens.

Newslady.

Extinguish.

Go here to see the rest of the photos.

meeting the neighbors.

2007-10-15T04:26:00.000-07:00

Since the first of the year I've resided in my current apartment near the intersection of Beverly and Normandie officially in the Wilshire Center district of LA, although it's ambiguous enough an area to sometimes be labeled East Hollywood, Silverlake, Westlake, Little Armenia or Koreatown, the last of which was what we called it for the longest time, even though it's the furthest away of those options. Since I moved in in January, eight other people have lived here at one time or another. The apartment is conveniently close to just about everywhere in LA-proper worth going to (in my opinion), only ten minutes or less from Silverlake, Echo Park, Downtown, Los Feliz, Hollywood, Skid Row and Museum Row. The neighborhood is mostly Spanish-speaking, although it's "gentrifying" poco a poco. When I was hunting for subletters, every girl who looked at the apartment said they didn't feel safe walking on the street. I don't see what the problem is, although sometimes it smells like rotting flesh out there—we think there was something dead in a piece of furniture. The street is often lined with used cabinets, tvs and mattresses, usually in usable condition, sometimes enough that we take it in. It also sometimes smells like liquorice outside, since the driveway is lined with five square yards of anise or fennel, right next to a useless dirt alley of nothing. I personally don't think it's ever going to become "nice" in this area—not in the next decade—and I prefer that it doesn't.

In the past two weeks I've met two neighbors from outside our building. The first is Melody, who lives just down our street a ways, who originally met Tod when he was drunkenly waltzing down Vermont Avenue with a huge bottle of bourbon and then collapsed curbside all in her view. The next day he told us he had been walked home by a straight couple, and that he must have given them his number, since he got texted to see if he was alright. A week later there was a rapping at the door, and Alex and I let in this bulbous late-30s woman with a pony tail through a baseball cap carrying a six-pack of Budweiser who soon identified herself as Melody. She sat down and offered us beers, although she later admitted she didn't like beer, and was gladly offered some of Alex's Charles Shaw. She told us how she and her friend spotted Tod as he collapsed on the ground. They came up to help him. Melody told him, "Well, you've had enough to drink," and upon hearing that, Tod nodded and threw the half-filled bottle at the street. Melody told us she was really sad to see all that Wild Turkey go to waste. Her friend that was with her on that fateful night was not gay, although Tod hit on him, and he whined the whole time as he carried Tod home. She said she hung out in our living room for a little bit, which was weird to me, and she spent that whole time trying to get Tod to sit down, but he insisted on standing up.

She said Tod drunkenly told her she looked like a lesbian, which turned out to be true, and then we talked about the L-Word with her. She's lived in this neighborhood her whole life. According to her, although most of LA has changed drastically in her life span, this neighborhood hasn't changed much at all. She said there have been two murders here in the past two months. She said there need to be nicer restaurants if it's really going to gentrify around here. She has two kids and lives in the house she grew up in with her sister. She told us about her ex-husband, a prison guard whom she met while she was incarcerated, and they married soon after she was released. Her ex-husband turned out to be gay, too, which she figured out one day coming across a closet full of costumes, nudie mags and dildos. And if that wasn't enough confirmation, she set up a motion-sensitive spy camera in the living room and caught him with lots of various men. She told him she'd show his jail guard coworkers the tape to embarrass him if he didn't get as far away from her and her children as possible. What I don't understand from the story is: Weren't the dildos enough proof? And second, why was she so harsh on him for being gay when she was, too? She invited us to come over and have another drink with her sometime soon.

Last night I was sitting at the computer around two in the morning when I heard tires skid, then cars crash, then another, then another. Then, as I was running to the balcony to see, I heard one of them trying to restart its engine, and then finally doing so, but not sounding so good. And when I finally got to my balcony's edge, I saw an old 70s-style car turning onto a side street in a hurry, while a man on foot chased after it. I went down to investigate as firetrucks arrived. Already gathered and watching were a young white woman, a tall middle-aged black man and a Hispanic lady of the same age, his wife. They all knew each other and live in the building back-to-back with my building. The white lady went back to bed, and I spoke to the Hispanic lady while her husband was investigating more in depth. Her name is Angelica and has lived most of her life in LA, although the first five years were in El Salvador. She and her family have been in this neighborhood for seven years and have bore witness to the slow gentrification process taking place. She and her husband made a point to meet everyone living on their street, although it took a while. She said a month ago there was a man shot and killed at one in the afternoon on the corner of Beverly and Normandie, and a local vigilante group was responsible for the killing. I said I sometimes think I hear gunfire but am probably paranoid. She said, "if you think it is, it probably is." She also seemed a bit jealous that I've felt two earthquakes in the past two months, which I blame on the way my room hangs off the end of our building over the parking lot, supported on tenuous beams that will probably snap and bring me to my doom. The guy driving that hot old car that caused the crashes, he must have been really drunk. First he hit a parked car, then a moving pick-up truck, but hard enough that whoever was in it had to be put on a stretcher with a neck-brace.

Speaking of car accidents, the tunnel pile-up inferno thirty miles north of here on I-5 has given me an excuse to avoid class tomorrow, although I could probably find a way there if I was desperate. It doesn't surprise me at all that thirty big rigs collided in that mountain pass, considering how I play roulette with death every day on the way up there as those trucks completely disregard all us vehicular shorties. What does surprise me is that the news coverage doesn't mention the nasty downpour that happened on Friday night, the likes of which haven't happened out here since February. I can't help but be delighted that the ensuing traffic chaos might draw attention to the nonsense of having twenty-two wheelers on the same turf as private passenger vehicles. In Albuquerque growing up, it was commonplace in the evening news to hear, "family killed when a semi ran them off the road." Why can't we put all the goods back on train tracks?

all this in one day.

2007-10-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I woke up around one in the afternoon and went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology to meet up with my class. I've been there several times, and was originally supposed to go to New Mexico this weekend, but I went hoping to get some useful talking done with the class. I sat and chatted with David Bunn my professor and watched a movie about Russia and micro-miniatures. Sometimes the subtitles would keep rolling even when no one was talking, and sometimes the narrating lady would pop into the screen from below the camera frame, in an odd transition. I liked the point of it, the dryness and the ambiguity, but I still fell asleep for five minutes. At the front desk I asked where my class had gone, and this weird lady looked at me with such intensity—I thought she was mad at me for cutting in front of her or interrupting or something. And then she bursted out with "Stephen Torrential! You don't remember me?!" I went up to her like an unfamiliar animal and blatantly stared, trying to figure her out, while she went on about how her hair has changed. It was Nadine Rambeau, fellow CalArts creative writer, recently graduated. Then, our class plus Nadine went to the India Sweets and Spices (Culver City location) just next door. It's as good as the other one, but in different ways—no rasmalai, but better meal selection. Also pricier though, and a smaller market. And the mango lassis are better. I was the last to sit down, and we were all gathered around a table outside. The wind blew strong, so when little feelings of wetness hit my face, I rightly thought it was from the forks and spoons of others at the table. I went and grabbed napkins, wiped myself off, then continued eating and talking. I still kept feeling tiny amounts of splattering on my face, or noticed something fall near my food. Finally, a big piece of something splashed into a girl's curry, which then splattered on our professor's face, and into my now-empty plate, and we all became silent and looked bewildered. The curried professor mutely motioned upwards, and we all saw: on powerlines twenty feet above us, a flock of fifty-or-so pigeons. Later, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, I was still horrified and began to whine about it, and this girl in my class said when it happened I had this look on my face that made her want to cradle me in her arms and rock me.

Came home after that and talked to this guy online who previously told me in confidence he has HIV. In the original context, it was in a sentence also containing "it's good we've never had sex because..." I asked him why his profile still misleadingly said "HIV-" on it. He said it doesn't matter because he doesn't put anyone at risk and hasn't had sex since he got it. And according to him, at least half the gays in WeHo and online in LA have it and lie about it. I've heard that statistic before and wouldn't be terribly surprised if it were true. He also said he hasn't sought medical help, and plans to die "the Philadeplhia way." I told him that's like driving drunk on purpose and that he was a fool.

Fell asleep for two hours, and when I awoke, Alex Castle and I journeyed down to Long Beach to go to a pool party that I was invited to accidentally by some guy on MySpace. The invite said things like "Heated Pool, don't pee in it!" and that it was clothing optional, so I was there. We pulled up and parked; the house was directly across from the beach and looked like it was designed by Thomas Kinkade. We let ourselves in, since no one was inside the house. We walked from room to vacant room, leaving it to the imagination what kind of people we were about to encounter, feeling like burglars. Then the doorbell soon rang, and Alex went merrily to the door, and we were rich people for a few moments as we let in two guys who later turned out to be party crashers. Next we went toward the pool area where everyone was at. Within the first five minutes of meeting the host of the party, he told us how he was in a relationship with a French guy and made him get circumcised. You the reader may or may not be aware of this: adult circumcision is a painful process that takes over a month to recover from. Your penis gets bandaged for several weeks, and every time you need to piss you dread it. Shortly after this guy went through that for him, he dumped the guy! I was inwardly outraged, and his only defense was that he paid for the procedure. Then we sat by the chips and I got fat on French onion dip, and then we jumped into the pool (in swimsuits!), well into jacuzzi temperature. A big black girl with huge boobs was fully naked in the water, and when I conversationally praised the nice warm pool, she cooed "uhh huhh!" They were blasting the same playlist on repeat, songs by Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and "California Love", during which these dancing naked guys would contort around the fire and shout along to the line "Long Beach in the house!" For me it was a formal welcoming to Long Beach a long time coming. Soon a bunch of people arrived at once, and the host said he didn't know a single one of them. After they were told to leave, I yelled out "Don't leave, we like cute crashers!"; at this point I had had my fair share of Jägermeister and lime juice. It was true though that they formed a big line at the alcohol and in no way blended in: a bunch of tough gangsta Latinos in a faggy fairie nudie party. One of the crashers called out to a friend that they were going to "the lot," and then Alex and I wanted to go with them, wondering what kind of place "the lot" was.

I was about to succeed in trying to convince this one guy to get naked in the pool with me when the host came up and said, "oh no you don't, you need to go to the hospital." What? I thought they were tricking me into drinking more, but when I got to the kitchen, there was Alex Castle with blood pouring out of his head all over his body, smiling and surrounded by the drunk and concerned. He had diven head first into the pool. He felt fine though, even if there were two gashes in his head, one one-inch-long, the other two inches, perpendicular like a cross. They thought I was too drunk to drive and called an ambulance. When the fire department arrived, they argued with the host guy as to whether the ambulance was entirely necessary. The fireman made it sound as though it was a waste of energy, resources and our own money to get one if Alex could be driven or have a taxi. The host guy was mad that the guy wouldn't just do his job and take Alex away, thinking him lazy and intrusive, and insisting he'd pay, no problem. Then, I said we could call a taxi, and then the fireman passive-aggressively insisted on taking him anyway, and off they went. I lingered for an hour or so more, finding myself in debaucherous scenarios with the guy I was trying to seduce in the pool. On the other couch in the same room that that was happening, I could see the big black naked girl getting banged by a Japanese guy. And later, I got even more debaucherous underwater with a guy who ended up being eighteen. Oops! Why do I always get nasty when my friends are in the hospital?

Eventually I half-drunkenly drove around Long Beach until a Google text message told me where the hospital was. When I came in, the man at the service desk told me I couldn't visit Alex because I wasn't family. I said, "Well, I'm his best friend and practically family, and I'm his ride home, too." He said, "Well, he didn't list anybody on the form." Then I said, "Well, why don't you talk to him then," and handed him my cell phone witth Alex already on it. I came to his bedside just in time for the head stapling. First there was an injection of something numbing, and then the stapler was pulled out, and click-click-click, click-click, and so on. The doctor let me hold my cell phone an inch away from his head as I photographed and as he stapled. Then, I conversed with the lady in the neighboring bed through the opaque curtain as we waited for Alex's release. It started out because she had gotten stapled when she was c-sectioned. Now she was here for heart issues. Her name was Elaine, 54 years-old and vaguely sad because her boyfriend wasn't going to visit her. She said he has one eye, that they both are living in a public park, they're both on crack, and that he's too busy to visit her because he's sleeping. She said she'd dump him if he didn't visit come morning. Then she told us three jokes. Question: "What do you call a black prostitute with braces?" Answer: a blackendecker pecker wrecker. And she gave me a shirt she found with a quote from Jesus on the back.

On the way home, I accidentally drove us through LA harbor, traversing a tall bridge amongst industrial wilderness in twilight. We passed downtown LA just before the sun showed itself, the buildings looking uncharacteristically glowy and polished in not-yet-smogged air.

the past two weeks.

2007-09-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Two Sundays ago it quaked again. It was 10.30; I was sound asleep, my room still in night, except for bright stripes from between window blinds cutting through. And then I heard loud squeaks: err-ee-err-ee-err-ee. I awoke from dreaming with the words: "the walls are jacking off each other." This half of the building is on stilts over the parking lot; I'm pretty sure a big quake will send me down the hill. It's probably also why I feel quakes so easily these days.

The following Tuesday I dreamt I was sitting with Oprah. I kept stretching a wig over her head that made it look like she had a crew cut. It looked good and real on her, and I said she should wear it all the time, but she didn’t like it. Sometimes I’d grab the end of it from the front of her head and stretch it over my knees, and Oprah would get upset and say she couldn’t see anything.

That same Tuesday I was dumped twice. Neither was unexpected. Yes, I was sad, the way you look when you have to flush your dead goldfish down the toilet. Tod once told me he loves no better a feeling than of saying goodbye and leaving, and I don't share that feeling in common. But I won't miss the smell of rotting meat coming from your dog's mouth, nor the way you rocked yourself back and forth to dismiss yourself from social realities, nor the awkward pauses between fits of would-be-laughter that I mistook for affection. I received both dumpings by text message on the way to Ron's house in West Hollywood. Ron is an older friend of mine who experienced and remembers gay life in 1970s New York like no other. Ron made me orange juice by juicing real oranges. Then we watched a video about time, and then Bill Clinton. And then Ron turned on his slot machines, and we gambled.

Thursday the sixth I signed up for classes. At CalArts you actually sign up: the professors sit behind long rows of tables and wait for you to queue and fill in the spaces, first come first serve. I slept gracefully through my alarm, but still managed to get into everything I wanted. The "experiments in autobiography" professor let me in even though the class was full, because she said otherwise the class would be all girls. Another needed grad students; as I wrote my name down I thought to myself, 'I won't be showing up.' Eric was standing with me in line for one, and he asked which professor I was waiting for. I said, "the lady in green. She looks smart, doesn't she." He looked over and said she looked like a sweet lady. Then I looked back and saw he was looking at some old little biddy, and I pointed over at the right lady. Then I joked, "at least you didn't think I was referring to that lady in green," and then pointed at a balding man in green sitting alone with the sign "Bunn" over his head, hopefully indicating his last name. In a cutesy voice, I said, "Aww, no one wants Bunn." Eric replies: "Well I want Bunn." And then a cooing noise followed. Later, after indecision and consulting my mentor Sara and reading through the entire course catalog with her, I wound up signing up for Bunn's class, "After Archive (from institutional map to subjective occupation)" and talking to him and I think I'm in love with yet another professor.

Friday I went to an art exhibit called "Golden Gals Gone Wild"—entirely artwork of Golden Girls characters naked and/or being sexual. We ran into this fellow by the name of Merlin, whom I made infamous amongst close friends as "the 19th-Century guy," partly in result of his grandfather outfits, his budding opera singing career and his reliquary of an apartment full of taxidermies, antiquated furnishings and miscellany. But for the most part, it was because of his weird accent in casual conversation, best exemplified in a message he left that I saved and still replay all the time, in which he says, "a quarter-past-seven on Mundee." Returning to the lascivious Golden Girls party, he said 'hi' to us and then removed himself from the event completely, perhaps acknowledging his own self-distaste for not wanting to have anything to do with me after learning I wouldn't want to get sadomasochistic with him. Later I photographed a gay man dressed up as a clown in front of a collage of Blanche Devereaux made with make-up kits, condoms and other red and purple oddments. And we went to Popeye's and saw a passed-out man get carried away to an ambulance, reluctant to get on the stretcher probably because of the huge bill he's gonna get.

Last Saturday Alex C and I went to Scoops again. This is becoming an unhealthy habit, but it's just so cheap and the flavors so unpredictable. The manager, Tai, invited Alex and me to go to a bar with him and one of the scoopers. We did, and reconvened with them in the dank deep recesses of Akbar. Tai's employee, the scooper, couldn't stop gabbing, mostly whiningly, especially after I mentioned communes. Communes are apparently always places for rich spoiled white kids to feel superior to everyone around them by denying the reality of our world. Afterwards, we went out for Korean food with them, too. Tai paid for everything—mojito, marinated beef, jello cubes of rice—which was weird to me since it probably added up to about how much I've ever spent at Scoops, the generosity also bringing me to wonder his motivations. He and the scooper laughed over kimchi about a co-worker's greeting/explanation to customers, "one scoop equals two balls."

Wednesday I had the new Britney Spears song stuck in my head all day from the moment I watched it several times to try to find any clue that she was fat. Yesterday I had the music from this video stuck in my head all day. I'm not allowing myself to listen to popular music for the month of September (Britney discounted, that was research), so now I'm much more susceptible to catchy music from other walks of life. I took a career test online, which suggested I be a parole officer.

I slept twelve hours today. I dreamt I was on a date with a guy who was stuck in a wheelchair. It was my duty to push him around everywhere we went. I had to prop him up and help him so that he could enjoy getting on toys with me at the toy store. We flew around in a plastic contraption. He looked and acted like one of the in-real-life dumpers, but was nicer and funnier, smiled a lot and liked me. Then we went to West Hollywood, and it was flooded like a tide pool at a beach. The water was really warm and replaced where the road was. I glided us through it like a manta ray. Then it switched to being with Alex C, and the warm water became snow. Alex was sitting atop a random jeep, while I had been making snowballs with little pictures I found on the ground in them, making pictures into objects. A man came out of a house along Santa Monica Boulevard, the owner of the jeep. He said he didn't mind that we were crawling all over his jeep, so then he went back into his house to get "McDonald's and some drinks" for us. Then I thought about an episode of the Golden Girls where Rose, Blance and Dorothy were wondering where Sophia was. They turned on their flat screen for a video conference call, and Sophia was communicatig with them on it from that same man's house. The others were furious because he was one of their exes. We were about to hang out and eat with that man, and I couldn't believe it.

chocolate-rain ice cream?

2007-08-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

Alex Castle and I just got back from Scoop's, a brilliant ice cream shop just up the street from me here in Los Angeles. They have flavors like strawberry-balsamic vinegar, peanut butter-chai, ube-dragon fruit, vegan avocado-banana, tiramisu-fig, horchata, chocolate-blood orange, foie gras, and even nicotine. Every time I go I try every new flavor, which is usually over half of them (high turn-over rate). My favorites are strawberry-madeira, vegan vanilla-chocolate chip, and mojito. A dry-erase board in a distant corner is there for customers to share ideas for future flavors, and Tai, the owner and ice cream maker, also a CalArts alum, told me he regularly takes up their suggestions. He disappointed me saying he doubted he would go for any of the suggestions I wrote. "Blood, sweat and tears?" he looked at me with disapproval. "Ehhhh." Nor did he go for highwater-bellbottoms, turtle's blood-banana, or my personal favorite: ice-water. He did seem interested in my suggestion of sarsaparilla. Every time I go there I spend my shoveling time giggling in front of that board. I've always dreamt of using food and flavors as an experimental medium, and he said that was exactly his goal while in the art program at CalArts. When he graduated he went straight to culinary school, and after that worked at a cafe where he found himself getting creative with the ice cream machine. I wish more eating establishments were as creative and as open to suggestion as his ice cream shop. Or as cheap: only two dollars for a scoop—which is actually two scoops—one dollar for each full refill. I asked if he'd be raising the price any time soon. The price of milk is skyrocketing, he said, and he's hoping to hold off on the price-raise until the new year.

Why is this "chocolate rain" video so popular? A question even asked to the maker of it on a recent late-night talk show. Over six and a half million views. In the past week, I'd be sound asleep, and then wake up and go out of my room in my underwear to close a window or pee, and Alex Castle would jump at me with arms flapping and singing the words "chocolate rain" just as startlingly as the very first moment I saw the video. Eric speculated the popularity might be because of the obvious fecal reference, but I don't think it's obvious. The comments below it never mention it. I guess the novelty now is that so many people have watched such an odd piece of work. But how did that happen in the first place? I've been so curious about YouTube manias, which motivated that video I made where I took Alanis' cover of "My Humps" and put it to 9/11 footage. All in all, I got over thirty-thousand views and honorable mention in several news articles and blogs, usually in sentences like "Alanis' video is so popular, it even got remade into a 9/11 tribute." It was calculated and made sense. This chocolate rain fellow, Tay Zonday, he's something of a spectacle, but not any more than most youtubey videos—except mine: pure genius—and yet there are over a thousand videos responding to his. I love what the internet is doing for creative/ interesting/ experimental/ crazy people; how else could one have discovered this lady? It's amazing how a green-screen bedroomful of knickknacks can function a lot like a map of one's subconsciousness, every mass-marketed product of decoration and betterment becoming a true spiritual relic.

I fret I have hardly a word to say about myself on this here thing anymore. I'm too self-conscious and my internal conflicts too buried in my own green-screen these days to be divulged like in my July 8, 2004 or April 8, 2005 entries. I'm also horribly aware how nowadays more of my schoolmates and professors might be reading this, as well as friends and dates and relatives and enemies and et cetera. No one is left to gossip about. That's why this journal competes with several private journals and lists for attention. If only you could see what I'm writing there. About you probably. Unfortunately, those confidential ones are the best journal writings I have right now. Maybe I'll put up entries later when those people aren't around as much. Especially the dates. Oh you'll like it. It'll be so funny. It would be so much easier if I could date that doctor guy in the Match.com ad that comes up when you first sign into MySpace. He may deeply examine my health any time he wants. He's so boring looking, I can make him look like anyone with a little squinting or some rum.

los angeles and god.

2007-08-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

After New York, I was supposed to take an overnight bus up to Vermont, but my grandmother suddenly had a knee problem and was probably lying. I suggested I could stay with my aunt and uncle who live next door to her on the lumberyard. She even told me not to call them, probably because they would have given her away. Next on the itinerary would have been to head South, but all my plans required more notice than a sudden "I'll be there tomorrow." My own brother told me he could only see me for a meal maybe, and that I should book with him two months in advance next time. I called my father—at least he wanted me—and flew home to New Mexico for a week and did hardly anything. We did go to the Sandia Casino for dinner one night, and that was a totally new experience. A typical New Mexico demographic in front of slot machines with a live band performing country followed by "Hot in Herre." My father thought the cheap buffet food was gourmet.

The first week I was back, I went to the Museum of Creation just outside San Diego with my friend Jenny whom I hadn't seen since 1998. She's studying at Oxford to become a vicar. As dedicated to the Church of England as she is, she's no creationist or fundamentalist, so it was the perfect accompaniment into a museum intent on proving the only real Christians believe it all became in seven days. With lavish displays illustrating each of those seven days as well as the arguments against stem-cell research and DNA in general, this museum is a true spectacle and a delight. It's amazing what lengths they go to to illustrate scientific backing on creation. They argue that the chicken came before the egg, and that God made man in his image specifically with the purpose of having a form to take on later. They showed gods from Pagan religions, and as I stared into back-lit transparent photos of relics from some of the greatest civilizations past and present, a woman in palazzo pants pushing a stroller commented to the children following her, "that's what they thought God looked like. He's not a cat." And I think we all assume Adam and Eve killed animals for their clothes, don't we?, but on the contrary: "The first physical death was that of the animals whose skins God used to clothe Adam and Eve." By this point, Jenny was emotionally involved. But who can say they're wrong? Science is not about obtaining pure truth, and many "scientific studies" make completely valid points that disprove each other, so why not build an argument-installation-maze hypothesizing over geologic and biologic evidence that a book of fables had it right? Who's to say rainbows "didn't exist until the windows of heaven were opened"? Also, the museum is doing a DNA sample of any and all participants to prove that we all trace back to Adam and Eve. I really wanted to participate, but the right people weren't there, so now I have to call and get a kit sent to me.

Sorry for the flash-reflectant-filled photo, but I couldn't resist. On the sixth day of creation, the hand of God makes an appearance yet again, even in the display this time.

And, on the topic of religion, maybe you know about how 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores in Northern America into Kwik-E-Marts from "The Simpsons," in a "reverse product placement" campaign, one article calling it "making life imitate art." I was perhaps blessed with the opportunity to experience the life-art firsthand; at 2 AM we happened upon a Kwik-E in Venice. We stood in line at a security check, and then the cop let us in as soon as others emptied out. Out of the twenty-or-so customers in the store, 95% were male and under 25, as one might expect. They had life-size cardboard cut-outs of cartoon characters and were selling Squishies and donuts and sadly no Duff beer. I paid a dollar for one of the donuts, someone later commenting that it would probably triple in value in a few years. It's no wonder really that three of those Kwik-E Marts were placed in the LA area, the co-capital of simulation along with Las Vegas. I read in an article that the Kwik-E in Las Vegas is even run by an Indian, and when interviewed, he was not at all offended at the stereotype or that they chose his store.

When I was in New York I read an article in a locally-made book about public art called Creative Time in which Laurie Anderson said people in Los Angeles aren't happy for each other's success the way they are in New York. She also said people in Los Angeles can't separate "a hit" from good work, and if it doesn't sell, it's not good in the artist's mind. If I could even get Laurie's attention at my age and with the difference in "success" between us, I'd challenge her to define which people in LA, what she means by "happy" and to recount what unsatisfying personal experience she's judging a whole city by. I also read in an interview her saying she was happy with the world exactly the way it is. I don't suppose she's happy Los Angeles is full of selfish attention whores whom she compared with New Yorkers to elucidate a preference, meaning she's more happy with one part of the world than another. Maybe her traditional New York values have led her to this deep need and expectation of certain social behavior that she can't look beyond. No, I'm not going to stoop to her level and confine attitudes to a location, or define positive and negative attributes to characteristics based on such a tiny sample of a population. And if she has expectations, how can she be happy with the way things are, because—and I'm sure she'd agree—things never happen like you expect, and having an expectation is really the first step in a plan for changing things, not for being satisfied with them. Maybe if she followed her own "philosophies" on the world, she would have like LA.

In a Wal-Mart in Valencia, I meandered into the electronics section to peruse country hits compilations while waiting for the Vision Center to repair my glasses, which they inevitably didn't. Here I was, a small body peering up at a monumental wall of tv screens, all showing the same golf program, a few seconds of delay creating a blur echo across the wall. And then the program changed to a mini-documentary on Richard Serra's massive minimalist sculptures, talking about how the viewer of his work is framed in it, and so on. I turned the other direction, not even thinking about art or life imitating one another, or Los Angeles or suburbanization or my upbringing or the bureaucratic glitches in logic responsible for the circumstances, just enjoying this moment of entanglement between those arty theoreticals and the real life capitalist price-dropping imagery I was breathing in, knowing I'd never engage in the juxtaposition so nicely again.

A phone conversation:
Father: How's everything in Los Angeles?
Me: Dull.
Father: You should have stayed here. It's more exciting here.
Me: Why? What's happening?
Father: I'm making some pasta. I'm putting some horse radish in it.
Me: That's exciting?
Father: More exciting than tomatuh.

photos from new york. 6.7.7 - 6.22.7.

2007-07-26T00:15:00.000-07:00

The following seven photos are from Coney Island:

The artist of this work turned the New York subway map into an elegant public sculpture in SoHo; I read about it and then went to immediately after.

New Haven, CT.

See the rest of the photos from the trip.

road trip, part three: ms, al, ga, tn, va, wv, oh, md, pa, nj. 6.2.7 - 6.6.7.

2007-07-16T03:24:00.000-07:00

All I remember about Birmingham is how I made us sandwiches and it was 1 AM and raining a little bit. And that it was smaller and montane, and I was surprised how it already seemed like we had entered Appalachia. We got to a hotel in Gadsden over an hour later, and some big drunk motorcycle-type guy offered to carry Katie's luggage up the stairs. A complete coincidence that we ended up there, Gadsden is #1 on my list of names for a boy, if I ever have one. On dates I sometimes say, "well, I know I can't have one myself, but maybe if we try hard enough, it'll happen." That joke's a winner with the men actually.

Pigeon Forge, TN. Typical Dollywood family.

At Dollywood, our first stop was a buildingful of Dolly memorabilia. Rooms and hallways of endless Dolly faces and pink walls. I felt like I had died and become a doll(y). The place was wrought with interactive touchscreen videos about Ms. Parton's career, personal life, wardrobe, and even her hair―one screen had a camera so that I could try on her do's. Later, we went to Dolly's Closet, and Katie tried on Dolly outfits (see this and the rest of the roadtrip photos). Otherwise, not much separated it from any other amusement park experience, except the fact that on each ride we were in the company of many an Appalachian family.

Pigeon Forge, TN. On some mining ride. Kind of just very sad and beautiful actually.

Pigeon Forge, TN. A girl re-enters her own body in a Dollywood coffin.

Pigeon Forge, TN. You either want to sleep with Ms. Parton or become her; I wanted both.

Pigeon Forge, TN. Priscilla couldn't help but make eyes at the camera. No one gave her this kind of attention since Lester, her late husband and half-uncle.

The seemingly quintessential Dolly ride of the park, a humorous motion-chair simulated tour of the Smokys guided by Ms. Parton herself, was temporarily replaced with some Yogi Bear junk. It was actually so traumatic that we wrote a letter:

Dear Ms. Parton,

We are avid fans of yours, and have been since the early 1990s. Recently, along the journey of our cross-country road trip, we made a special stop in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, so that we could visit Dollywood and experience its magic.

While we enjoyed the rides, shows, and local color, we were sorely disappointed to miss out on your guided tour over the Smokys. We expected your amusing comedic talents, and instead were displeased to be met with the mocking countenances of Yogi Bear and the rest of his Hanna-Barbera cronies. We were informed only after sitting through this dismal farce that the ride had been changed for Kids’ Fest. Having only a limited time in the area, this was most upsetting.

The number one reason we came to Dollywood was to bask in your image’s glow, and we feel as though we have been unjustly denied that privilege. In reparation, we would be blessed by God, and you, Dolly, if you would so kindly send us a video version of your Smoky Mountain Tour so that we may enjoy it in our homes. It may not be as great as the moving-seat theater experience, but we can try to re-create the enchantment as much as possible.

We know that the change in program is through no fault of your own, and we remain devoted fans. Thank you, Dolly, for everything.

Sincerely,

Stephen van Dyck and Katie Jacobson

Pigeon Forge, TN. We each got a photo with Dolly.

That night, in Virginia about twenty miles south of the West Virginia border, we slept in a hayfield. We stopped at a gas station just off I-77, and I asked a man with a horribly thick and inimitable accent where the nearest camping site was. He told us he didn't know, but that we could camp out back behind the station. I thought he meant directly behind it, but then he gave me instructions to take a dirt road around it and down a hill. That dirt road ended up being maybe a mile through the woods before we went around a bend and up to an open field. The field was several acres of open space completely covered in hay, at the far end was someone's house. The scene was well-lit by the stars and moon and no nearby city light, and I avoided using any other light in fear of insects and the residents of that house. Katie didn't get out of the car, I think out of distress from the situation, and I set up the tent myself and got her to join me in it. I called up Amarantha and requested lullabies; the next morning Katie wound up better slept than I was.

Cheshire, OH. Imagine living in this town.

Bird-In-Hand, PA. Amish children in a buggie, one admiring a bus.

Bird-In-Hand, PA. Katie and I decided to start our own Amish family. Afterwards, some random lady came up to Katie and said, "Some poor child is going to wear that mask after it was on your face."

Reading, PA.

See the rest of the photos of the trip.

i just posted on amazon.

2007-07-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

Title of Book:	Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters
ASIN:	0674250702
Condition:	Used - Good
Condition comments:	My pet hedgehog gnawed about three millimeters into the pages and back cover, but it's totally readable and more of a novelty than an interference. First class shipping. International or expedited shipping available.
Your price:	$8.99

road trip, part two: nm, tx, la. 5.27.7 - 6.2.7.

2007-06-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

Roswell, NM.

From Albuquerque we took US-285 through endless fields of purple flowers in a semi-arid semi-prairie landscape, past Roswell and got to a hotel in Pecos, TX, long after dusk. I asked the very large receptionist at the hotel how she liked living in Pecos and what there was to do there. She told us she hated it, and that the only fun things to do there are drink and go to the Wal-Mart Supercenter at 3 AM, especially to try on costumes. Katie and I later debated whether or not Wal-Mart would even have her size. The next morning we went to the Pecos Wal-Mart, the first of many on our trip.

Mentone, TX. At the gas station.

From the Pecos Wal-Mart we departed northward past "nodding donkey" oil derricks to Loving County, the least populous county of the U.S. In Mentone, the only town in the county, two main roads intersect, the only intersection in town, no grocery stores, banks, hospitals or cemeteries, just a gas station on one corner, the county courthouse on another. We scavenged around these properties by foot and eventually settled in front of the courthouse to eat sandwiches. Pretty soon, a large woman with one arm twice the size of the other comes out to show us a dead snake lying in the grass close to our standing picnic. We photograph it, and then the woman introduces herself as Beverly Hanson, Loving County clerk and district representative. Within the first ten minutes of conversation, she tells us about her ex-husband who beat her, and how she has suffered from chronic bronchitis, several heart attacks, a stroke, and how 25 of her lymph nodes were removed, which caused her right arm to swell to an enormous circumfrence.

Mentone, TX. Loving County clerk and district representative Beverly Hanson shows us around the courthouse.

Dallas, TX. At Brett's house, Evangelicals on tv told us to go get a drink.

We said adieu to Brett in Dallas, and proceeded onward on our adventure. In Waco, not far from the president's ranch in Crawford, we passed a Bush's Chicken restaurant (see it on my roadtrip photos page) whilst on the hunt for the site of that Branch Davidian building that burnt down in 1993. I went into a gas station and asked the guy ahead of me in line where "the cult place" was. He said, "God, I can't remember, I haven't been there in, well, at least six months." Katie went into a KFC to ask the same question, and the cashier had a tear tattoo under her eye and had never heard of the Branch Davidians. Driving away, we debated whether the tattoo meant she killed a man or had merely been to prison or was just being fashionable. We eventually found the site, and walked around the gravestone monuments for each of the deceased. There were even gravestones for unborn children, named "Little One Jones" and "Aborted Fetus Gent." (Also on my roadtrip photos page.)

Waco, TX. Mailbox for the Branch Davidians.

Stayed in Austin several days with Katie's friend Rose. She wears elaborate outfits and works as a stripper at The Yellow Rose. We met up with my old friend Richard, one of the first people I met in LA, and went to a theatre showing "Ladies of the 80s," a singalong/dancealong to music videos. The theatre had long thin tables in front of each row of seats so that one could eat. During "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," the more hyper half of the audience formed a conga line and went through each row. Then, the audience inflated and then popped 99 red balloons. Later, we explored Austin's hyperactive nightlife and live music scene, watching a band play "My Sherona," and then got bored at a gay club called Oilcan Harry's. Austin reminded me a lot of Albuquerque, in terms of size, demographic and liberalism.

Swamps between Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, LA.

Lake Charles, Louisiana, 1.30 AM, we drive by a bar still open on the way to a public campground, and I contemplate to myself what kinds of interesting fellas we could have met in that place. We drive over long bridges above wide rivers through thick fog, eventually finding the campground, its gate locked. We were so tired at this point, we went back in to Lake Charles to find a cheap hotel. At that late hour, the only other cars on the road were really fancy convertibles painted red or a sparkly gold driven by young black men. At one hotel with a giant billboard built on top of it, the receptionist explained they had no vacancies because they had the amenities of a five-star hotel. The next morning, at the Lake Charles Wal-Mart Supercenter, I asked a lady there how she liked living in Lake Charles. She said, "I guess I like it. I've never lived anywhere else." And then she told us she had never been out of Louisiana or Texas, and she had never even been to Baton Rouge or New Orleans, only two hours away.

New Orleans, LA. Hurricane-wrought store, above-ground tomb, residential architecture.

In New Orleans, I made eye contact with a fellow balancing a beer can on his head, and then he chased me down the street trying to get me to try it. For dinner, Katie and I split a meal of the quintessential New Orleans foods, Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie-ah (like the Carpenters' song!) and beignets. In a Walgreens, I asked a black lady standing with us in line what it is like living in New Orleans. She told us it's gotten really dangerous, and how she plans on leaving. She also told us she's a fortune teller and that we should visit her at her work and also see New Orleans' most famous church, but we didn't visit her.

New Orleans, LA.

New Orleans, LA. St. Louis Cathedral, near where the fortuneteller lady works.

See the rest of the photos of the trip.

new jersey and manhattan.

2007-06-13T02:06:00.000-07:00

I write to you now from a mauve house surrounded by deciduous trees, deer and bugs in suburban northern New Jersey. I lay on a teal couch like a fat cat sipping on a gin and lemon juice. Katie and her parents are terribly accomodating; tonight I am overfilled first with gin, then meat, then ice cream. And like clockwork I seem to sleep and receive my meals and gin at the same timeslots. I pee at 2 AM sharp. Katie's mother and I are watching three-fourths of Phat Girls together, interspersed with Larry Birkhead on Larry King during the commercial break. Two weeks on the road [I'll tell you about the rest of the roadtrip later when I have time] and I've stayed here a week now.

And twice, for foil, I've taken the train into Manhattan, the regimen suddenly collapsing to the impulses of a feral animal, and I feigned exploration with some alternative tours. The first was by Gary, an early 40s lifelong Manhattan resident―responded to a Craigslist ad I posted―I met him because we share an interest in goats. He told me he was hit by a taxi once and got a concussion on the curb. Now he has no sense of smell or taste, and he added: he used to be able to sniff a fox out of the woods, and now he can barely enjoy Jell-o ®. He showed me around Hell's Kitchen, an area that's being demolished and rebuilt like craaazzzy, including a new extension of Hudson Street for walking only, and sites of future skyscrapers to extend the skyline crowd. There were also aspects of the far past―the building where honkytonk pianos were first sold, for instance―and recent times―buildings through which the Lincoln Tunnel still exhausts, and Manhattan's largest camera store, run by a large family of Hasidic Jews.

My second tour was by a younger lad, Paul, to whom I had been leaving answering messages throughout the road trip to here imitating accents I heard at each place as I went through it. For instance, I heard a lady in Dollywood say, "Why should we have to stand in the shade? We Black." And then I would do a very poor job at imitating the accent of any one of these lines, and it will be interesting to hear them all in a row. He told me he was bringing me to two works of art. We went by the chaotic sockets of the World Trade Center buildings to a park made of large tastefully arranged chunks of brownish slate rock. Paul was simply ecstatic; I was photographing a hippopotamus statue in a playground emitting two sprays of water at an elephant with only one nozzle. Then we arrived at another park, which he kept referring to as one of his favorite works of conceptual art. And I told him I didn't see that, but thought it was nicely landscaped.

Luis, my only friend who lives in the city permanently, gave a third tour, consisting mainly of going to a gay bar where he last worked at over a year and a half ago, Xes, and watching the Tonys, which for me was like being exiled to a foreign country. I did enjoy being around gay strangers whilst watching bad television. Does LA have places for that? Then we stopped at Chelsea Papaya, where I keep buying a smoothie that tastes just like medicine I once received in Prince George, British Columbia, when I was seven and sick.

road trip, part one: ca, az, nm. 5.22.7 - 5.26.7.

2007-05-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

Katie, Brett and I began our road trip Tuesday from CalArts where I left my car off. For our first stop, we detoured to Riverside to meet a woman named Cherry I had been in contact with through Ebay, because I wanted to pick up in person the melodica she was selling to avoid shipping charges. Walking into the McDonald's, I noticed and waved at a small Asian woman, and soon after that, the four of us were gathered around a little table below a framed Hamburglar illustration looking at Cherry's melodicas.

In Blythe, California, we drove down a small highway that led past a high school and a middle school and into nothingness. We drove slowly past a crop trying to figure out what it was, and a policeman stopped next to us to ask if something was wrong. "Do you know what kind of crop this is?" We answered a question with a question. "Alfalfa," he said.

Entering Arizona.

Quartzsite, AZ.

Stopped next in Quartzsite with the ambition of eating at a roadside restaurant/bar. We saw one quaint little restaurant with a parking lot so empty and the lights inside dim enough that we'd never have thought it was open if there hadn't been an "open" sign. A young shy girl with glasses took our orders while an older woman with hickish 80sish haircut watched from afar. The food tasted like it had been microwaved. As we ate, the girl and woman sat silently with each other at a distant booth. Upon finishing, Brett started to pull out money to leave as tip, and the girl-waitress's eyes couldn't help but light up. Brett was going to put it in the "tip for chef" jar, and then I said, "no, leave it on the table." And then the girl's mouth couldn't help but widen into a huge unattractive smile. I think we made that girl's month.

Quartzsite, AZ.

Shortly after arriving in Phoenix, Claudia brought us to a small bar named Glam that had a light-up floor. We danced to Diana Ross and the Lovin' Spoonful. Some guy named Steve danced with us, and he and Claudia exchanged numbers by the end of our time there. The next day Claudia showed us Scottsdale. We went to an amazing ice cream shop straight out of the 1950s called the Sugar Bowl. I got the Super Float with vanilla/chocolate non-fat yogurt twist and mint soda, and when the waitress asked, "chocolate, caramel or marshmallow topping?" I said "all three." I was nervous that I had ordered something disgusting, but it was amazing, both in taste and in looks, a minty green and caramel brown swirl.

Superior, AZ. Not shown in this photograph: a mid-50s woman with short grey hair who was walking around inside the restaurant wearing only a shirt, and her legs were nice and smooth.

Globe, AZ.

At a grocery store in Globe, we met a cashier named Kim L. who was overweight, had a moustache, and had a band-aid on her nose from where she had cut herself trying to shave off the moustache. I asked her how she liked living in Globe. She said she hated it, and before she was done talking, a man standing in line behind us interrupted, saying "If you want a second opinion, I hate it here, too." He was wearing a purple shirt and buying a six-pack of Budweiser and a 40.

Albuquerque, NM. I've become a cowboy.

Been in Albuquerque the past four nights. My father keeps making us huge meals containing hotcakes, sunny-side-up eggs, bacon and orange juice. I almost forgot that I could eat this much, and when we went hiking afterwards, I felt like I could run uphill several miles. Coming back down from a rock-climbing romp on La Luz trail, I asked a woman how far she had hiked. She told us she had gone all the way to the top of the mountain and back; she had been hiking for eight hours and had gone a mostly-vertical sixteen miles.

On Central Ave, old Route 66, we saw these old ladies holding up "No war in Iran" signs and singing. We soon joined them. They call themselves the "Raging Grannies." The tall woman in pink is actually a man. She asked if I'd like lessons in falsetto singing, and then said, "it's easy! Laaa!"

Friday night I started feeling ill, and by the morning, I couldn't sleep because I was in so much pain. My father took my temperature, which was 102º, and then brought me straight away to the hospital. My father and I fought at a passive aggressive secretary about healthcare. She never actually responded to anything political I said, but glared at me for a half hour after I sat down. I have strep throat, and for this reason, I couldn't go to Santa Fe last night with Katie and Brett to visit Gabe. Instead, my friends Quinn and Valerie came over, and I slept through most of their visits. It'll be interesting to see how this trip continues, with me sick and on vicodin and with our plan to camp in Mentone, Texas tonight.

See the rest of the photos from the trip.

salton sea, etc.

2007-05-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

Went to the post-apocalyptic part of Southern California last Friday and Saturday. Tod, Amarantha and I, except Amarantha didn't answer her phone when we were in San Bernardino, so we shrugged and kept going. Stopped next in a 24-hour travel gas station around 3 AM in an otherwise desolate area south of Coachella, and Tod was almost pickpocketed by a band of grungy ranchy middle-aged Mexican men. This is not racist or meant to make you think rural Mexicans are pickpocketers, it's just a description of what happened. Arrived next at a campsite in the Salton Sea State Recreation Area. We put up tent there, and I fell asleep. Tod was still on a high and instead of sleeping wound up walking a good distance along the Salton Sea shore and finding what we would later refer to only as "the blood bath." According to Wikipedia, "Over 400 species have been documented at the Salton Sea." I can vouch for this, as I was awakened by at least 400 different kinds of bird songs about three hours after I shut my eyes. Later, during my designated sleeptime, I spent a good two hours combatting a small fly. At one point, was it noon by now?, I woke up and found the flies guts smeared all over my hands. Did I kill it in my sleep? And then suddenly, a giant fly's silhouette appeared on the outside wall of the tent. It must have been maybe an inch and a half long, and I felt blessed in comparison for the size of fly in whose guts I was adorn. And the heat was overwhelming by now, probably 96º as forecasters forewarned.

Tod arrived during my fly-gut revelation, saying he wouldn't let me feign sleep any longer. I cellphoned a fellow in my class named Aaron Winkle who has a certain kind of Kansas City charm that I could really get into, and I mean, get into with my tongue. Turns out he didn't go on the field trip, so he read me the number of this girl Courtney who might as well have been a 70s fashion model if she hadn't been born in 1985. She said they were already only a few miles from Salvation Mountain. We took down the tent faster than we set it up, which wasn't difficult, since I think it took less time for me to kill that fly than put up that tent. We flew through the campground exit fast enough that no one by foot could have stopped us to make us pay the $18 camping fee and lived. In Niland, I photographed an abandon gas station and a business whose main mode of advertisement was pink-princess-castle-esque signage. Found classmates walking down the main street, then followed them to Salvation Mountain.

In God's name.

Slab City community bulletin board.

Slab City is a town living out of the shells of old campers on an abandoned WWII military base. Leonard Knight, who made Salvation Mountain, first moved to Slab City twenty years ago with the goal of building a balloon saying "God is Love," but ended up with this mountain instead. It's made of adobe clay, straw and thousands of gallons of paint. He lives out of a 1939 firetruck with no water or heat. See the rest of my photos for a glimpse of Leonard and his truck. After Bombay Beach, an unsuccessful resort town on the Salton Sea now half underwater, I went back to our camping area in search of the aforementioned bloodbath. Trudged down the Salton beach, made of partially ground up fish bones instead of the usual sand, my feet are still recovering from the ensuing cuts.

Then Tod was exhausted and going into a withdrawal, and my class had gone to the annual High Desert Test Sites art show in Joshua Tree, so we bypassed it. (I heard it wasn't very good and continue to tell myself that as I wait for another year to pass.) A few hours later, Tod woke up and was ushered into an ugly suburban home in San Bernardino with eight cars in the driveway and a hideously obese man shirtless in its kitchen. Tod slept soundly on the couch as cousin Amarantha served me a dinner of banana/sweet potato mush—looked like the kind of unidentifiable substance a fifty year-old spinster whips up in an opaque red plastic dish for your potluck and no one eats it—and portabello mushrooms doused in peppers and orange juice. Tod and I had already stopped for a snack-turned-combo meal at Wendy's two hours prior, so it worked out well. Later, when Tod was awake enough to eat his leftovers from the Amarantha dinner, he exclaimed his love for the mush and mushrooms. "It reminds me of the meals my mother would make for special occasions." It irked me that Amarantha lived in a household of seven people, four of whom had no relation or friendship with any other, all of whom were either obese or over 50, all of whom were white and paying very low rent in an upscale-ish multiethnic white-minority neighborhood (a.k.a. the landlord thoroughly weeded out minorities in the tenant selection process). And Amarantha's bedroom might have been eight feet by six feet if I measured generously.

Please have a look at the rest of the photos.

the sea and the land.

2007-05-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

“The Sea and the Land. (1)”

(Epigraph: “The Sea” and “The Land” by Georgia O’Keeffe.)

“Teen pregnancy tragedy,” an Oprah Winfrey billboard reads. “Friday at 3 PM.” If ElimiDate and any number of Ichiban products no longer do the trick for you on a contemplative after-work weeknight, try letting the lack of stars overhead smother you to sleep, only to wake up sprawled out just below Oprah’s smiling face, probably the cause of at least three fenderbenders a week in each of thirty disparate roads winding down random crevices of greater Los Angeles. It’s tough being Oprah. To have to smile through everyone’s half-hour lunchbreak as seagull excrement drip-dries down the side of your face like white mascara tears down to the left dimple. And to get out of bed when the sun floods in like fatty tissue and then the slavework of filling up the Britta for some pretentious distillation. And to see what She sees at that same deathly hour: through a film of glue and gauze or the marine layer being ejaculated out by morning land breeze/smog: foothills of salty sea green, the grey and stink of his afterwards-cigarette, a large dark pink rectangle rising from unknown pits. You’re higher than the Hollywood sign when it’s time to punch out and get back on the 101. And one day you finally realize your growth has been stunted inside a large metal frame of my big smiling face, me: some 5’6” 130 # balding preppy dude in law school at USC asking you if you think you bring all the boys to the yard. I smear my hand around your belly and lean in for a kiss as though you were watching through a fish-eye lens. And you dare ask: what rough beast emerges on the horizon at this hour, crawling up my throat to be greeted with a bird poop smile?

“The Sea and the Land. (2)”

(Epigraph: “New Mexico Skies (August Skies)” by Victor Higgins.)

When you get far enough out, the waves are no longer audible or in motion. They haven't broken off yet to hit the coast. I’ve been hanging onto its edge in silence for what seemed like thirty seconds, enjoying the days and nights over the Santa Fe mountains moving like Koyaanisqatsi. You and I were only ex-boyfriends for a week, and that’s because I kicked Chris Livingston in the shin at Albuquerque Pride for telling everyone I blew him. And here we are at Santa Fe Pride, surrounded by middle-aged lesbians with perms sipping on Long Islands discussing coupons. I sat on the edge of the wall while you leaned against it. There was a weird touristy attraction to climb down this tube and stand on a precarious rubber boaty thing from the ship. It looked kind of like that contraption the Indians got scammed into installing on the side of the Grand Canyon. I kept worrying that it'd drift far away, so I insisted you join me going on it. The ocean was stormy, and we climbed through a rubber tube like in a playground, except it was large enough and we were old enough that we could stand. It took us years to climb through it, but when we did it broke off from the main vessel, no longer protecting us from water. And then it hit a point where it was static, and at a certain point, the water wasn't water anymore, but snow-glazed dirt-like-looking. That wall is still there, and the mountains, and Central Ave where we once got hot dogs and you wore glasses and we both looked sleep-deprived and on acid.

photographs lately.

2007-04-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

androgyne.

pizza.

spilt milk.

mighty flag.

kalu.

cold.

After this photo was taken, I pushed my father around the Getty courtyard at top speeds. Since the ground was slippery from the rain, as soon as I brought us to maximum speed, I'd lift my feet enough that I'd slide like a waterskier behind him. (My father is not actually wheelchairbound.)

crazies.

2007-04-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

Today I touched Orlan's face. She was visiting artist this week in the art department at my school, and spoke about her life's work so far. She's most well known for pioneering the use of plastic surgery as art, making herself look less like the popular Western-cultural ideal of feminine beauty. This explains it better. She stood in front of the audience wearing giraffe-print hose, her hair standing almost straight up half-black half-white divided down the middle of her head, her horns were glittery and she wore huge circular glasses that audaciously matched the hair, shiny white eyeliner and bulbous plum lips. She read about her work from a piece of paper in English in such a thick French accent that I am convinced she didn't understand a word of it. I could understand better when she would occasionally slip into French to speak to the translator. I think she was doing it on purpose. At one point she asked the audience, "how many males don't consider themselves feminists?" after which, one of the worst half-hours of discussion I've ever experienced ensued. One fellow insisted it wasn't fair to exclude men and how he thought the recent feminism show at MOCA should have been supplemented with a "masculinism" show. Masculinism in critical jargon means the favoring of gender inequality, as opposed to feminism which advocates gender equality. So finally someone explained to him that what he wanted was essentially male feminism. Anyhow, I'm telling you this for a reason. After the event ended, I went up to Orlan and said, "Je peux parler français un peu. Je suis un masculinist parce que je prefere la femme." I meant to say, I'm masculinist because I think all women are superior. But instead I accidentally confessed that I'm straight. She laughed anyway. And she let me touch her glitter-covered horns.

The other day, I went out with Tod and his family. At the Goodwill on Vine, much loved by me and Tod for its frequenting crazies, I saw an expensively dressed woman emphatically declare that she would buy used clothes there because she read in Time Magazine that it was one of fifty-one ways to help the environment. I had also read that article, and although I think it's fine and swell to do that, I found it ridiculously funny that she had to be told that by an article in order to do it, not to mention the fact that these clothes must not have had any appeal to her outside of that reason. Americans (, etc.) are so specialised to their jobs nowadays that they leave simple mathematics to a tax helper, fashion and style to mass designers, opinions to talk show hosts, cooking to Trader Joe's, and at the core of it all, thinking to thinkers. The best you can do to help the environment is to kill yourself, the sooner the better. After that, don't have kids, don't eat much, don't buy things, share things, inhabit less space.

The biggest tragedy of the Virginia Tech event is the media's portrayal of the murderer. The most that's written in news articles is how the fellow students perceive the killer, in headlines like "Students Angered by Manifesto." He wrote violent plays; he had no friends; his mental health had been examined. All this does to the public is reaffirm that these are the symptoms of a killer. It reifies the concept of "abnormal," and if people weren't so scared to deviate from it, maybe we could erase normalcy completely and consider a discussion of "weird" things for what they are. The media is so biased towards emotions and away from consideration. Seung-Hui Cho was more than just crazy if he went through the conscious labor of twenty-seven videos and many rolls of film in advance of his massacre. He had a point, albeit murky, and I wish people would at least hear it. "Jesus loved crucifying me," he says in a video. "He loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul all this time." At least NBC defended themselves for airing some of the tapes, "We believe it provides some answers to the critical question, 'Why did this man carry out these awful murders?'" He also wrote some nasty plays; I plan to put on one of them.

coucher caché.

2007-04-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

"my humps" 9/11 tribute—explanation and self-critique.

2007-04-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Seven questions to ask after watching my YouTube video and before reading this entry.
1. Why does a simple reality like the fact that "My Humps" can exist at the same time as 9/11 offend or excite people any more in this video than in reality? This is a piece of reality edited for all to see in a way that got a lot of angry viewers and a lot of delighted viewers. It seems like those reactions should go a lot farther than my comments box, but I assume it rarely does.
2. How random is this really? The masses are so bored. When we flip channels from MTV to CNN to EWTN to ESPN, it means we're bored. Of all things, how could those channels in succession seem monotonous? Don't blame me for the death of our morals. My video isn't even really mine. I didn't film anything, I didn't record anything, I simply slipped one thing onto another fairly incidently. Would it be at all unlikely for this footage to land on this song?
3. Why bother with an "art scene"? It's been proven up and down and all around: the masses are capable of engaging in an artistic dialogue. Why do I need a gallery when I have YouTube? This video has not been a part of the legacy of art as much as the legacy of YouTube.
4. Why do we have to perceive death as a bad thing?
5. Why does this video seem insensitive to some people when it claims to be a tribute to the victims of 9/11?
6. Why do people look for a hidden message or propaganda in this video?
7. How can you be any more mad at me than at your perception? How can you be any more mad at me than at your tv? A message to anyone who's participated in society in the past five years who has eyes: You were stupid to have thought any other way: lives are lives, media is media. In our regulated perception, the world trade towers are silicone breast implants.

As an artist, I'm sick of making compositions for concerts that only fifteen people attend. Let me tell you a story... Hal Fishman, an old-turtle-looking Los Angeles news anchor, has a commentary segment at the end of the evening news each evening that makes my skin crawl unusually quickly. I've been considering making a Hal Fishman reaction blog, just because he inspires so much reaction in me. For one of his commentaries, he said something to the equivalent of: "America isn't the first place we think of when we're looking for a country with culture. Europe is known for its many cities with their own symphonies and museums. Here in the US, we have hiphop and football and emo, and we don't seem to care much about culture. But there is culture here, too. Just the other day, I spent the afternoon listening to the exquisite sounds of the Santa Monica children's symphony. Chin Wong Sung is a twelve year-old violinist, and I think he's probably as talented as they get. When people ask me where to go to experience culture in Los Angeles, I'll know exactly what to tell them. Give your local orchestra a chance. Don't let the otherwise seeming lack of culture let you down." Eurocentric white trash ignorant piece of shit. I don't know about you, but I think symphony orchestras are a lot less interesting culturally than most of what I find here in LA. Someone should force Hal to go to one of the many Norteño concerts here in LA, characterised by amazing accordion and bajo sexto playing, and probably the most popular music within 500 miles. I don't see why ghostriding isn't considered culturally interesting. Hal's misled thoughts are just a minor example of how the masses still think that "high art" is centered around the symphony orchestra, the poem, the master painting and so on. I refuse to believe that the masses are incapable of openmindedness when it comes to a basic understanding of the possibilities of art or legacies or media of thought. For my latest project, I put a video on YouTube that's already gotten 10,000 views in a week. I think this piece has easily been more circulated than everything else I've ever made combined. I'm not claiming it's "high art"; you can decide that for yourself. But it's certainly thought-provoking and not in a museum. And if you think the art in museums is better than my video, that's a whole nother argument I'm willing to have with you.

A year ago, when I first saw YouTube, I thought, damn, this is going to be swell giving everyone a voice. And it's mostly been hogwash, Alanis' "Humps" included. Not to mention the biggest secret of all: it's all middle class and upwards from developed nations who speak English. But I'm thrilled above all things that I partook and found others who felt the way I feel and were deeply amused by this unlikely juxtaposition just as I have been. Even if 90% of the population doesn't feel it, at least I'm the voice for the 10% who do. If the majority doesn't understand something, that shouldn't be a deterrent. And that other 90%, I think they gained something from it, too: so far everyone's reacted strongly. That's the highest honor to an artist. I hope I'm serving as a role model for others to step up and speak to the masses. Everyone can be a terrorist. Terrorism is a marketing strategy.

Circulation and marketing aside, I'm motivated to provoke discussion. My video was the #57 most discussed video in YouTube's music section last week. Over a hundred comments, many of which were responses to one another. Every part of our everyday sequence of events is an opportunity to gain an experience or influence one's understanding. I don't believe in progress, but I might as well impact a progression, since I'm a being who exists and can impact things.

I love the Alanis song. It's not a parody to me as much as an interpretive cover. The song is non-fictional; it's real. It says to me, "I live in this big dump called America where all that matters are big booties and rolling around in money, and it really fucking sucks that I can't do anything about it." Our government, our military, the music industry, corporations, they're all the same. They're one big bag that we are suffocating inside, and most people don't even realise it. Why am I even telling you this? Anyone who's not overtaken by a media entertainment-induced coma will tell you that. There's hardly a democracy here when our president won't listen to the public, 70% of whom are strongly against what he's doing. Bush is the real terrorist. And the Black Eyed Peas, they are terrorists, too. Alanis is another terrorist. She's mournfully admitting to it by being the bimbo singing the song.

The Alanis video isn't genuine though—it's not even fake, it's just static—and I needed it to be matched with something genuine. It's basically a copy of the original Fergie version; how is Alanis even parodying her? A parody requires ridicule. How is she ridiculing the original by strutting her ass around exactly the way Fergie did? Alanis' video parody is nothing new, nothing different from what we've seen by Weird Al or Saturday Night Live or any other industry name. It's packaged to be digested easily. Not to toot my own horn, but for me my version is jarring, thought-provoking, illustrates the many facets of our cultural infrastructure all at once. Her song and 9/11 are not even in contradiction. If you listen to Alanis croon, her song is an intense, emotionally troubled, impactful-sounding remake. It sounds to me like a cry for help. The juxtaposition here is between America and America. We've got money-making booty-shaking consumerism, and we've also got conspiracy, scare tactics, holy wars, nationalism, maybe fascism and world domination. Neither of which we, the insignificant shopper, can do that much about. The whole world under one nation under "God." My version might not be funny to you; it's funny to me. It's a bit of a stretch to even see the relation for some. It's more complex, darker, indirect. It's a parody of a parody; (I hope) it's also hyperreal. After seeing it over and over, I start to wonder things like, "that man falling through the air, is he a hump? Am I 'spending all my money' on Cheney? Is 'the junk' Iraq? America? our souls?" Is this funny? It's just not right, right? It's morally shocking. It sends a strong message to you that might not make sense. Humor isn't really my goal as much as a strong communication. I'm glad to offend people; I think it's a good sign. Hopefully it communicated something powerful and opened up a discussion and all our minds just a little bit more.

If I ever claimed to be aiming for a greater social purpose or propagandizing with this video, I never intended it. If the video claims greater social purpose or succeeds at propagandizing, then I'm proud of it. The video doesn't make an argument, just a question. It's pretty simply sad. The video seems sad, the music seems sad. It's pretty clearly sad-seeming. But it's not sad. It's as sad as a sexy woman's breasts. It's just what it is. For me, it's outside social mores and emotions and good and bad. Yes. I'm calloused. I'm a hypocrite. As an American, I provoke war, sex, death, spending, gains and losses. I feel cathartic every time I watch this video because somehow I'm liberated from the usual act of taking one aspect of "America" for granted while I partake in the other. I'm not claiming that Bush or the terrorists are better or worse than one another or me. Nor am I claiming any right or wrong about anyone, including myself. That's the ultimate objective here: no right or wrong. I adore how "flippant" it is. That's true freedom: being freed from worrying about people dying. They're just people.

As a closing statement, I have assembled a montage of accurate reactions from random YouTube viewers:
The terrorists have, in effect, fondled with all of our lady lumps. || You're supposed to hate the video. Who would like "realizing" their country is extremely materialistic whilst watching those images? || Why is everyone taking this video so seriously. I think it's cool it shows the fucked up shit that is going down in this world and yet we are so stupid we focus more on Fergie's humps. || The interstice? - isn't that the spot between the couch cushions, where your loose change goes? || If we are willing to accept the goal to move on, to control our own destiny, and not to be permanently victimized, then perhaps this video can be a therapeutic experience. || Is it art or a shameless ploy to get viewers? I don't know and to me it doesn't matter. It is thought-provoking, and I see no harm. || Your video is childish, exploitative, and evil. || This is fucking sick. Get a life, you fucking freak. || Is it recontextualization when a PHD candidate waits tables? || Tensions between sarcasm, framing, critique of social assumptions, re-contextualization and very literal tragedy. It is not a pro nor con statement. It is a semiotics marvel, a symbolic land and timescape of current trends in patriotism, pop culturing, media, and conspiracy. It bends parody, a Weirder Al. || Parody*Parody=Awesome. NeVuR 4gEtT!! || I feel sorry for the people who were lost, but it was the Yank's own doing. George Bush and the Illuminati. || You are a disgusting excuse for a human being. || This sucks! god bless America. || Just wanted to tell Torrential: You are a stupid fuck for posting this stupid shit.

"my humps" 9/11 tribute.

2007-04-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

I've been growing increasingly interested in YouTube lately, since it seems like one of the more truly democratic ways of having a chance to show something you've made. In reality though, it's mostly a bunch of bored/boring 14 year-olds filming themselves mouthing along to Kelly Clarkson songs. A parody by Alanis Morissette of "My Humps" was the most popular video on YouTube for the past few days. She makes a song with lines like "Whatcha gonna do with all that junk?" sound overwhelmingly melancholic. At the same time, in the video she's romping around looking like a hoe with men touching her boobs and spanking her butt. What a missed opportunity! Just like her song "Ironic" isn't actually ironic, this video didn't hit the spot like it could have. Her croon was meant for something more profound. So, I decided I'd be like the typical YouTuber and make my own video for her song. I chose 9/11 footage.

Footage from my Home Depot project has been added to their respective blog entries. If you'd like to view the whole project in its entirety, go here: http://torrential.us/homedepot.htm

guerrilla artist-in-residence, event #5: the critique.

2007-03-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

For the fifth and seemingly final event of this series, I presented my project for my Integrated Media critique class. Usually projects in this class tend to be object or installation-based, but I somehow managed to avoid worrying about just showing videoclips of me standing in short-shorts in a parking lot. I arrived with my laptop and the videocamera, and was even lacking some of the cords I needed. The professors and class loved that I wasn't prepared for the presentation; I'm apparently subverting the role of the artist just by being a bum about it, let alone not assuming any intellectual superiority by way of a rigorous slide lecture. I somehow felt so comfortable though upon beginning with my presentation that I was easily persuaded to read about the series of events via this very blog. At a progressive art school, blogs are an easy way to the critiquers' hearts, I am realising. I wound up showing and reading from the blog, then playing the video from each event, and they wouldn't even let me edit out the dull parts. I've decided this is how I'll have it in its final form: a webpage with the blog entries and unedited video clips interspersed.

Through most of the critique I didn't say much and also didn't understand much. Critical jargon leaves me staring off into an empty corner a lot, or sometimes accidentally right at someone. One professor said that my work fell into the realm of "social slapstick," somewhere between social theory and slapstick humor, that I'm not really either of them, but actually a synthesis between them. That the strength of the project existed somewhere in between the thoughtful ideas in this blog versus the naive slapstick of my Home Depot activities. At Home Depot I didn't necessarily carry out the kind of labors so rigorously as one might expect from a performance artist. I think the professor was implying that my work winds up being as much about me doing the project as the project itself. I'm noticing that that happens to/in my work a lot: I try to make a thoughtful project, and the result drifts in and out of a story about me doing the project. I was also praised for the way I performed as "artist" instead of (or, in addition to) assuming the role and being the artist. In the video I seemed as though there was an expectation as artist that I had to consciously fulfill, even though I was already doing the art just being there, being filmed and wearing the shirt. I was somewhere in between being natural and consciously pursuing a work of art.

Another professor explained that I work within in-betweens. The perceiving mind acknowledges the borders of things, so what about the space inside the borders? The word "liminality" was also used, but I haven't yet given it an official place in my lexicon. I drifted away from the original goals of each event into new situations with interesting trajectories. Here I am trying to comment on the probably-immigrant labor force by dressing up like a hooker, and my priorities get rearranged by the development of the situation, having to make on-the-spot decisions for my personal welfare. Gosh, am I really guapita? A lot of potential problems in making this kind of art were freed from their gravity in my piece, maybe, with an approach of anything-goes-ness. The discrepancy between the video and the blog writings, the oscillation between the two, and the philosophical disconnect created a kind of emotional in-between space. I sound high and mighty in my writing, well-conceived and analytical, and then in the video I don't know what I'm doing, like I lost control. Sara, my mentor, said I looked vulnerable the whole time, and she worried about my safety, and Anna (Oxygen), too. The audience often felt nervous and empathetic. Said I was putting myself in risky situations. For this reason, most concurred that the lengthy, unedited videos never got boring, because it built suspense for them. Reading directly from my blog, I ended up reading the parts where I referred to Sara as my favorite professor. And then the other professors were like, "Hey! I thought I was." But I liked those moments.

We get in to schools because the schools like our work. What if they didn’t? What if you are able and willing to learn new things to make work that doesn't fit with everyone else's? Should I know everything before I learn? Do you have to be friends with your friends? The artist-in-residence relationship usually functions this way. Home Depot is a kind of resource, like a school, and as artist-in-residence, I'm a kind of student. What about guerrilla students? Why not allow any respectful person to use any available resources to learn, whether or not their usage is conventional? Home Depot has so far agreed with this question. So long as I wasn't filming, they couldn't care less if I gathered eight people to percuss in their aisles or if I stood half-bare in their lot. No wonder it's well known as the best place in Hollywood to go cruising for gay sex. And even worse, for such a seemingly subversive project, I couldn't have received more praise from the professors and institution that I'm maybe critiquing. What if you've subverted roles and/or spaces, and no one notices? Breaking a social contract but no one notices because they're not looking for it. Maybe I haven't even really tested this yet, with the videocamera always weighing me down. During my critique, someone mentioned a spy supply store that could hook me up with the technology I need. Right now I barely have the resources to upload the video I captured already. I had to return that video camera I used; Wal-Mart gives you your full money back if you return anything within thirty days. Money and possessions are such a hassle; there's no in-between there.

Some people have expressed a problem in the way I referred to the freelance workers in front of Home Depot as "probably illegals." I'm aware that I made a racial jump: I saw Latinos looking for work and assumed that they're illegal. I'm just like you; I'm skeptical of me, too, for saying that. It's exactly what I thought, though, and as long as I'm not censoring or editing myself in my video or blog, I might as well say it the way I thought it. Yes, I'm racist. I'd rather be reckless and analyse the nuances of that than smoothen all the edges. The city of Los Angeles has almost 4 million people within its city limits, 3/8ths of whom are foreign-born. "Of 1,512,720 foreign born people, 100,252 were born in Europe, 376,767 were born in Asia, 64,730 were born in Africa, 94,104 were born in Caribbean/Oceania, 996,996 were born in Latin America, and 13,859 were born in Northern America. Of such foreign-born people, 569,771 entered between 1990 to March 2000. 509,841 are naturalized citizens and 1,002,879 are not citizens." I doubt very many of those non-citizens got work visas. Many of the Latinos I've met just being out and about here have told me they're illegal. Anyhow, why do you think these men at Home Depot are standing in a parking lot all day sweating in the hot sun waiting for work? If these men could just go in to any store and apply, I'm sure they would rather. I wish this government were in such a way that I or anyone else wouldn't just assume they were illegals. The issue to me is not even necessarily whether they're illegals but how they're being exploited by a big corporation like Home Depot. Standing with these workers as artist-in-residence is an attempt to comment on the role of laborer. Wearing the short-shorts and blush, etc, maybe I’m saying illegal immigrants are functioning financially as prostitutes in America. Again, my goal is to ask questions through gestures of performance more than to answer them. These are my natural reactions to Home Depot and its space.

Or maybe the whole act itself, putting myself with singled-out immigrant workers, was racist. My professors actually defended me on this one. Tom said my actions would have been racist, but then I responded to the security man saying I was "just looking for work." Because I really was.

Watching TV to take my mind off things. It's weird how they talk about Americanization of foreign countries as though it should happen or be expected to happen. "Is Afghanistan starting to get American like the rest of the world yet?" Conan O'Brien asks Anderson Cooper, who is obviously gay and won't tell us, so how can we trust him with important news? And this first question is completely valid, because it seems there's no way the Americanization won't happen at this point. It already has happened. This helplessness is exactly where I'm at. There's a monster we seem to think we can't stop. In a system so big as this one: capitalism, America, the universe, mortality, Bush, the state of the world in 2007, time itself, how can we—the insignificant, the individual, the indistinguishable—do anything? I often hear my professor Norman Klein expertly predicting the future of politics and culture. He says we're on the brink of a catastrophic political change, and there might not be a distinct war, but probably poverty and starvation and limited energy resources, much worse than it is now. The problems are only getting worse and worse until one day it's gonna burst. What if Bush is only a glimmer of what's yet to come? This might all sound extreme, but it's that burning reaction to thoughts like these that motivates me to go into Home Depot and act in all the ways I'm not supposed to, violating the social contracts one assumes I assume. Home Depot is an exaggerated microcosm for the world's infrastructure, both socially and politically. There is no "I" in "world." Feeling that way, we each become an outsider to the unity of everything. Imagine one iPod that everyone is forced to listen to. It's like I'm trying to tear myself out of my own body, but after all the squeezing and pulling and veins bursting out of my forehead and ripping through my intestines and bones and tearing chunks of flesh apart, no soul is freed. I am and we are going to fail anyway, so I might as well make it art?

I'm aware it's weird for you the blogviewer to read all this without having seen the video. Never fear, the video clips are on their way.

more dreams.

2007-03-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

March 15, 2007: I was at the Denver art museum with Amarantha, and we were going through an exhibit that I really liked. I went through some random notebooks that they had out for anyone to write on, because I wanted to write a note to myself of an artist's name whose installation I liked. I found papers with lots of weird symbols on them, almost like my father's stock market notes. During all this, or on the way to doing this, Amarantha walked by some kind of giant mystical puzzle on display and accidentally kicked the last piece in place. Everyone in the museum was really excited. I went around looking for her, to make sure she knew what she had done. She knew, and then she waited for me to take down my note.

I'm not sure if this was even the same dream as the last. I was in Home Depot, I think, and I watched a man install a temporary fan to air out an aisle. The fan was really filthy and gross. Then I was about to eat a large stack of slices of cheese. One of the workers at Home Depot invited me to eat dinner with them at Denny's or some place like it. Then I overheard another worker complaining that I was gay and that he wasn't comfortable with that. Anyway, I got in their car and joined them, and before the supervisors (one of whom was the one who invited me) could get in the car, they slammed the door, and we went high speed down an aisle. Home Depot in the dream was vast, the aisles were road-size, and there were hills and such. I was still eating my slices of cheese. The driver stopped paying attention to the road, but remarkably never crashed. It was as though the car was on a train track. And the entire scene of their escape was as if we were at the very end of a movie and they had finally freed themselves.

March 13, 2007: I was sleeping on the floor in Alex's parent's dining room, and around 3 AM, Mrs. Santillanes woke up and quietly came down to the kitchen. She was in the beginning phases of preparing something, I think, calmly cutting some cucumbers when she suddenly thrusted her whole body across the counter and shoved everything aside, making a loud scream as she did it. [In real life, she's a very calm, quiet and thoughtful lady, so this was like seeing her finally vent.] She went into the living room area, and I was worried she had reacted that way because I was there. I said, "should I sleep in a different room?" Then she explained to me that she's been getting this way lately because she eats fast food and it keeps her up at night.

March 8, 2007: I just dreamt that I was walking in front of a house in a neighborhood I'd like to live in. And someone was pointing out the insect life and said I'd especially relate to the scorpion. The scorpion was hunting amongst an array of insects right there with him. And then he casually walked away, then turned around quickly and just kinda chose the millipede. And then they were talking, and the scorpion complimented the millipede's website, and by then, the millipede was entering the poisonous vacuums of the scorpion (not like scorpions in reality). And the millipede responded, "I can't see the internet anymore, now that you've taken over my neural system." And as he said that, the music shifted from a twangy lull to a bunch of fast-bowed violins, like in Jaws. And it felt to me like suddenly my intestines were being entered from the belly button area. And that feeling woke me up. Later I had a dream that I had adopted a cat, but she ended up being like a daughter. And I had to put her to bed, etc. All the while, I was worried that I had suddenly taken on too much responsibility in my life.

February 28, 2007: I was in a building where "a lot of things happened"—apparently I had hung out with Jill ages ago in the building, and I was very nostalgic—and I went there while hanging out with some guy who then created an online going-away party out of some kind of temporary buddy list theme. People—not necessarily friends of mine—Imed me with random lower-case Greek letters as pet nicknames for me, like "my little (pi symbol)" and then a random song from my iTunes was somehow selected, but I didn't and don't like most of the songs on my iTunes, so it seemed uncomfortable for everyone including me. And during all this, we were in Barrack Obama's house, and it was a big night for Obama. It would be the night Obama would cheat on his wife, if that ever were to happen. And this guy and I were in the guest room, and I was sprawled out on the bed half-naked basically waiting for Obama. And then the guy I was hanging out with looked at me funny and told me he felt bad and looked embarrassed. Because the buddy list theme that he created apparently incorporated an element to the response system that implied that any and all of the responders wanted to sleep with me and pay money. Later, in the morning, when I came home—I apparently lived on the first floor of some motel-looking place—Obama's wife was singing a song in French to herself outside as she watered the plants. I went in, and Jason and Meredith were over [the friends with whom I went to the S&M dinner in real life], and also Brad, a guy from Virginia I got drinks with once. Brad and Jason looked cuddly, so I figured they were now dating. Alex was there, too, showing everyone Neko Case live performances from YouTube. Later I had a dream that my father had another child from a different woman, but my parents wouldn't let me babysit him.

February 27, 2007: I was visiting the Marksteiners after going to Las Cruces or somewhere. While in Las Cruces I saw lots of Native Americans, and I'm not sure why I was there. Maybe to do some kind of social research. No, I think I was waiting for a GAP store to open. Las Cruces ended up being Durango even though I went south. Then at the Marksteiners' house, I hung out with Liz. [Liz is a childhood friend of mine who died five years ago of cancer. Her parents were/are Catholic military Republican weightlifting champions.] Then their dog came into my room during a nap, and we cuddled. But the dog ended up being [Liz's brother] Tony, and he grabbed my hand and brought me to the bed and spooned me facing face down. Then his father came in while Tony was holding me from behind, and he asked Tony to show me something. Tony opened a closet full of perfumes and soaps, and the father went hunting through for a cinnamon black cherry flavored one. And then Tony found me another. There were more scented things there than what you would find in a store. Liz might have attempted suicide in the closet. And I felt like I was in love with Tony. Early in the dream was something about my grandmother. Oh, and Lorelei called while I was with Tony; she was upset because she bought something that broke.

guerrilla artist-in-residence event #4.

2007-03-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

You know how there are all these probably-illegal immigrant Latinos standing outside Home Depot all the time? I think this is only true in California, because I don't remember any loitering men in the HD parking lots in New Mexico. If you haven't bore witness to this phenomenon, they're looking to do your gruntwork, in case you need to reshingle your roof or something. They have an interesting role in the Home Depot infrastructure, standing out there because they can't get hired legally, yet Home Depot makes quite a profit out of their presence. I decided to join them and stand with them. Take on a different kind of worker role in Home Depot. Except I wore short shorts. I got them at Victoria's Secret. Green ones with silver cursive writing on the butt, and they keep nothing hidden. And my face was a little bit dolled up, but I looked like a very pretty gay boy version of myself if nothing more. And I wore my "Home Depot artist-in-residence" work shirt.

As we arrived, I was whining and moaning about have to actually go through with it. I told Tod to film from the car, and I would stand out on the curb with the men. As quick as I got out and started walking in the parking lot, the Illegals started whistling and hollering at me, seemingly reacting to every motion I made as I crossed the way. I lingered around a tree about fifty feet from the men, afraid to let anyone see me, but still posed like a prostitute to fulfill my performance. As time progressed, I got a little bit better at sticking my legs out. With all those men cheering at me, it was hard not to start feeling at least a little bit good about my body. Cars would drive by. Heads would turn to see my long bare legs and then look away. One of the men yelled out, "La chica es guapito"—the girl is a pretty boy. Home Depot employees would avoid eye contact as they pushed long trains of carts past me in my waiting. One woman stood as a spectator for at least twenty minutes, and might have been filming me, also. The wind was strong and cold and the least of my concerns. I should have gone over and talked to the Illegals, and Tod was telling me to, but I was so scared of them. I was afraid they'd touch my butt. One of them was laughing with another and gesturing like he was slapping an ass, while another had his cell phone out to take a picture of me. Then I started putting the carts away again, since, after all, I'm still the artist-in-residence. A lady in her car rolled down her window and told me to go inside and get warm. She also told me my legs were "sheet white." I told her that I was "just doing my job." "You work here?"

Tod, now hiding behind cars as he filmed, kept telling me I should just go to them. "The two of us can take em on," he said. I figured, if I didn't do it, the footage would be so boring. I made my way towards them, and then all at once, they charged toward me and gathered around me in a circle. They said they were looking for work. One asked if I was needing their help, then he looked downwards at my body. I didn't know how to respond to that. They asked what I was doing. "The same thing you're doing." Several of them walked away when they realized I wasn't about to hire them. "What kind of work are you looking for?" another asked, eyes also moving downwards before walking away. And as they dispersed, I repeatedly shouted to them, "I work for Home Depot!" and pointed at my shirt. One stayed behind and bummed a cigarette from Tod as he was still filming me. The guy asked if I was "un modelo" and called me "sexita." Tod told him he agreed. Then, some skinhead-looking men came out of nowhere and asked us what we were doing. I casually turned around and looked at one of them, then said, "looking for work." "No you're not!" he retorted. "Turn the camera off." So we did, and we left.

Part one:

Part two:

(Video added April 1, 2007.)

guerrilla artist-in-residence event #3.

2007-03-01T02:32:00.000-08:00

For my third event, I decided to make it a bring-your-own-product-to-work day. I brought in music: “Pornophony,” a sound installation made out of gay porn audio. It played from a tape recorder, which I hid in the nails and screws aisle in an open box of nails. The moaning of men emanated into the aisle just loudly enough that it seemed as though the nails themselves were doing the moaning. Home Depot is noisy, so you really had to get up close to hear it. It was kind of beautiful really. Surrealistically pretty to hear these moans of pleasure coming from rows of boxes of nails. Or so I was thinking as I stood there surrounded by boxes of tiny metal rods listening to voices of young men filmed faking sexual pleasure for big bucks. One man with a long white beard, probably part of the night crew, wandered by and suddenly looked startled, then walked around the corner snooping around for the source, but then lost interest. An hour later, the same man walked by again, and this time he really heard it. It must have been at the point in the composition where a lot of orgasms happened. I was leering from a distance, pretending to shop for brass screws. He moved boxes of nails around, looking beneath them anxiously as though he were putting together a jigsaw puzzle while being timed. The tape recorder almost fell out, and he didn’t even notice. I didn’t want him taking it, so I came up and grabbed it, and said, “Oh, I must have left this here,” then pulled it out of the box. The man looked startled: “Oh, sorry!” in a repentant tone as I scurried away. I wonder if Home Depot’s Republican-bred military-supporting values got in the way of his assuming anything queer. For some reason, no one suspects faggotry in a place for the men—if I could name any specific place in this city as the locus of manliness, it would probably be Home Depot. Maybe it was my Home Depot shirt that made him cower; maybe he didn’t want to piss off someone in a position of authority. Whatever the case, he immediately got the hell away from there.

You’re not really having a conversation if you’re preaching to the choir. Seems like a lot of “the art world” is so insular, as though only artists can understand each other’s work, and I believe every human being can perceive something from a work. Another interesting issue in a paid workforce environment is: what happens when there is unconditionally free help? During my sound installation, I organized the nails and screws in that aisle during my waiting, and put more carts away on my way out.

To reiterate my thesis, I’ve been dedicating my time to a research project in the Home Depot setting, exploring the role of artist-in-residence without an agreement, seeing if I’m liberated into a less biased role in reaction to the place. I’m not an ad for my residence, at least not necessarily a positive one. Laurie Anderson seemed to bring only positive attention to McDonald’s, America's heart attack resource. And as for NASA, the most she critiqued was the colors in the photographs of stars not being accurate. Unlike other artists-in-residence, I’m not campaigning for the recognition of employees’ hard work either. This is not about just some people. No one gets away victimized. Home Depot is one spot on a larger grid, and looking from that perspective on the grid, there is a lot to be asked.

As for the second event. Our little ensemble at Home Depot made beautiful music. I was very grateful that one friend showed up with a high-tech sound recorder. It's nearly impossible to film in there, especially in the evening. No customers joined in as hoped, but we got a lot of people's attention. There were seven of us, most of whom grouped and regrouped about five times, creating five or six different instrumental ensembles within an hour or two, and at least thirty instruments in total. To make noises, I remember using a spray bottle, a wooden bowl and wooden knob, two ceramic pots scraping around each other like one does with crystal wine glasses.

(Video added March 29, 2007.)

In my last entry, I asked the question, “Why not alleviate the constant consuming with a little bit of creation?” A friend pointed out that Home Depot is a place of creation. Yes, but always with exchanges of money involved. I think LA needs more attempts at using space for creation without money involved. I rarely see any congregating happening on the streets that doesn’t look gang-related or involve money. Instead of organizing a youth group sidewalk chalk playtime, and instead of organizing a senior bike-a-thon, I’m aiming to get anyone of any age, class or language to interact more even during their work and errands, and not in a way that money initiates. Home Depot is not the only place where I could have organized this ensemble, but Home Depot is still a private-owned business more than it is anything else, so I was commenting on that trait in specific with the ensemble.

innately surrealist.

2007-02-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

Went to the Magritte exhibit with my class today. I'm realising more and more how relevant the Surrealists are to me. My writing mentor told me my writing is very Surrealist. Surrealism is a superreality that includes both reality and dream. I try living in that superreality, harvesting my dreams like they're valuable to reality. I woke up from a bad dream this morning, for instance, where my fish Opprobrium was dead and bloated because she ate a cricket. And then it came out of her and she seemed better. When I woke up I anxiously jumped up and ran into the living to feed Kalu. And this is not the first time a dream has functioned as a wake-up call, so to speak, to get something done. All in all, my dreams might be a better indicator of my life in the past few months than my waking experiences. I mean, after all, they're a history of what I've been doing the other eight-to-ten hours of the day. In fact, think of these as a blog of my reality and it's very telling. The following are some delectable recent excerpts from my dream diary, kept in the exact format that I originally typed out upon waking. Note that I wasn't fully awake from the dreaming state yet when I wrote some of these. (Also read this, this, this, this and this from previous entries. There are more like these, but I don't have the time to search through three years of entries to find them.)

February 25, 2007:
Stephen: i just had a dream that alex castle's name was "alex bulldozer castle" and then i told him "maybe you should just go by "alex castle."
Katie: hahaha
Stephen: except "bulldozer" is a stand-in for any machinery. i can't remember if it was "powertool" or "carpet remover."
Katie: i like "carpet remover," personally.
Stephen: i think it might have been. i'm thinking it had something to do with carpets.

February 20, 2007: I was at a party with a lot of straight white friends, and we were playing a game where everyone had to balance hot dogs on their penises. One guy who was doing it had a really nice body, and a hot cock. And I thought it was Birch, but when I looked at his face, it wasn’t. And my friend Emily was there, and we talked for a while.

February 11, 2007: Phil from my MFA program was asking me for my family tree so that he could market his concerts to my family.

February 9, 2007: I had a dream that my father and I and a younger brother were living in the house in Albuquerque, and a bunch of old people came over, almost like a procession for my mother. And for some reason we all sat in the garage, and then my father told me we had some kind of mango tree just outside the garage, and then I went and looked at it, and it had huge mangos. Then I came back in and all the people had left, the last car was pulling out from the parking along San Bernardino across the road. My father was melting styrofoam and my little brother got covered in it, and then he got me covered in it. When it melted, it turned into brown water, and it smelt kind of like a papermill. It was disgusting, so we took a shower together, which turned erotic. I kept asking my father where the lower levels of the house were, because I missed them. (I often have dreams about these levels that don't exist.)

January ?, 2007: I don’t know whose house I was in, but my nephew Jamie was there, as were many children and parents, like a public pool. Jamie had just won some award at Yale, so he left it in the minivan, and my sister-in-law Amy kept mentioning it, too. The children around us were whiny and crying. Everyone looked at me as though I was dirty, and when a child pooped in the full bathtub, everyone assumed it was me. Amy was downstairs in the pool. The bathroom was as though we were in a master bedroom. I had just been walking a long ways down I-15. I was carrying all my blankets with me. Cars almost hit me on both sides, and I was also maybe 4-feet underwater. And there was something about the fault line.

January ?, 2007: Moving out of beach house. I go to las vegas on the way back to new mexico. on the side of the freeway just outside city, I see random people swinging on a body, and I join them. you can hear the man who died, his thoughts, still. there’s a whole group of people who want to commit suicide, and I end up meeting them all in new mexico. at natey’s, I keep losing teeth. all the suicidal people die in a collective suicide instead of learning to deal with it. I return to los angeles moving into a large mansion with satin walls. my teeth never get fixed.

December ?, 2006: I went on a date with someone where the fetish (like most) was to get scared, except, in this one, the guy had a fetish for haunting people. so, in the night, I would be scared and awoken, by him, escorted to his father’s house, and then, he told me, I would wake up thinking it was a very cold night even though it wasn’t.

December 6, 2006: My mother and I were going through my clothes, even though we both knew she hadn’t been around for a long while, to see what was worth keeping for memories. I would show like a sports vest that I never wore and say “this was from the era where I was trying to look masculine” and she’d tell me not to save it. (Since I never wore it.) And I asked her if she still remembered how at one point she was led to wear my clothes when I decided I didn’t want them, and she said she did remember. (I don’t think much of that really happened.) I also dreamt about being far out at sea in the ocean, and my parents (two people whose equivalents in reality were never stable) kept trying to make me go under from waves. Except this was a mere reenactment of how it supposedly was in my childhood. And maybe we were at the family reunion, because Aunt Irene and my cousins Richard and Evan were there, telling me what a proud life Ernie led, and then I swam into a harbor while hearing Ernie’s voice overhead narrate the brave story of his younger years and the war and how he swam into this harbor himself. The pace of the story decided how fast I could swim. The whole dream started with me following this girl up a hiking path at night in the warm rain, and then I think we made out or were supposed to. It might have been for a music video. The girl might have been my mother. Or me.

December 1, 2006: Ronnie and I were watching a really weird show where people had to pee in a hose at others, and it was in a game set up like teams, and sometimes men additionally had to cum. And this one black man had to cum at this young Indian girl in front of the camera, and as the cum made its way through the hose, Ronnie was like, “she’s not going to handle it!” And before that I had a dream that my mother came back, and my parents were nostalgic of the 70s together, and for some reason they couldn’t live together. And then I was living in a trailer with ten cats, and one was named “FDR” and I had to drive from Wichita to Calgary for school, and I think there were villains involved. I also remember a freeway that went across the Santa Monica mountains. For some reason, my father and I were living in Wichita, or just west of it. And cats kept escaping the trailer, because the walls were made of chickenwire.

November 30, 2006: I dreamt that Matthew with the dreadlocks in my MFA program was in a music video, but he had blond short hair for some reason. And something about my parents. My mother and father were together and seemed very happy. They each interacted with a random guy that I used to date (not real ones). I tried smelling my mother. Then I was suddenly on my way to a hospital in “northeast LA” (in the dream) which was an area I wasn’t used to going to, maybe near Lincoln Heights? I also recall a section of the dream where the tides were rising slowly, and everyone kept running up the beach, and I climbed on some party stuff, and the waves kept rising. I wasn’t afraid, but I knew people were going to die.

November 29, 2006: I said to someone that when I hear the word “place” I can either have a sense of place or think of the Japanese word “playss” (spelling showed up in the dream). We went to a place with a hot tub, and for some reason my body temperature was 81 while everyone else’s was 75 or less. A few people had been delivering money to other people through me, and I asked this one fellow why, and he said “because he owed it.” And someone played the Eurythmics song “Aqua” and then I was ranting about how much I loved it, and my father comes up and says, “This is Annie Lennox.” And he’s surprised. Quinn rented my old room and sublet a room in my new house. I think one was in Albuquerque, one in LA.

August 28, 2006: This morning I awoke to the shaking of an earthquake; extremely intense. And then something really hard landed on me, and I couldn't move. I couldn't even lift my head to see my body. I struggled with all my might. The floor above me had collapsed onto me, and I was dying. Then I awoke again, but this time, realised the earthquake was actually the feeling of being squeeze-hugged in my sleep. I insisted on making people look up earthquake reports anyway.

May 15, 2006: This afternoon, during my nap, I dreamt that I was stuck in a poorly designed railroad track-turned-walking trail and was informed by someone who was a combination of Jennifer Logan (my professor) and Janet Jackson that I would have to crawl out through guano. But I didn't.