Tag Archives: creative writing

East Bay on My Brains

Just wanted to shout out about this reading tonight for East Bay on the Brain at The Layover in Oakland. I’ve checked out the line up (yup, I’ve googled you) and it’s going to be a good one!

I’ll be reading a normal piece for me, a non-fiction tale of debauchery about dating while attempting sobriety. It’s funny. And it’s a bar. You can drink if you drink, although I won’t be drinking, but don’t think I’m judging you if you do drink. I’m not that kind of person. You drinker you.

I’m excited to be reading at this event, because hey, I grew up in the East Bay, and that used to not be a cool thing to say, specifically when I lived in San Francisco (where the hell is the East Bay?). I’m third generation East Bay on my Dad’s side, actually funny I ended up in the city he grew up in. Kind of funny. I really miss Oakland, to tell you the truth, and wish I hadn’t moved out of Temescal before it got all expensive and über hip.

Otherwise, I’ve been down with the sickness, the ill disease going around for those who flew on a plane home from Waikiki, still feel like I got the shit kicked out of me by the Grim Reaper: “I’m not quite ready for you yet, Bean, but I’m gonna give you hell for having some fun in Hawaii.”

Like the following famous poem:

Compensation

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears

–Emily Dickinson

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to what I’ve been doing all week: updating my facebook and spying on friends with my iPhone will I lay in bed and feel bad.

Stole this from Ms. Juliet. So funny.

Existential Crisis

My head is spinning in some crazy orbit and I can’t hold it in my hands, it keeps getting away from me. There is no nightmare, only reality, as the sun shines through the window and I sit on my couch hitting my head with my hand over and over again not feeling a thing but twitching all the same. Maybe I should reincarnate my old myspace blog posts. Back then I had some semblance of torture and animosity.

I feel, sometimes, when I’m reading a memoir about a behavior-modification program or a drug addiction, I feel like, oh, right. There’s that memoir I wrote. All two hundred pages of it. I should do something with it. And so I did. And then I get physically ill. And that’s just the addiction part.

So I bring out the old arsenal. Guitar. Food. Tea. Do I feel better? Exponentially. At least these days I am not a faded being, I am something more oh what’s the word, opaque. Sometimes glinting in the light, like a black sheet, or sometimes white. Ah, I realize I am making no sense. I am sitting here shaking my head back and forth like Jim Morrison in the desert thinking of all the ghosts of my path who are still alive, wonder if they are watching me or if I’ve become a blip on the radar. If I could erase all the experiences that happened to me from 12-16 and from ages 19-21 would I? I just might. In something like electroshock therapy, and I would be whole with missing chunks, and I wouldn’t relate to these tattered beaten souls who bang down my door late at night and share drug stories with me. What the bloody hell am I doing in life. Just drifting. Surviving. Nothing MEANS anything to me. Not the sun. Not flowers. Just outward gestures, like the point of a pinky finger holding a fucking cocktail glass…

And then I fall into some coma. And I’m asleep for years. And I’m sitting at a table with corpses and swine. What happens. Dreams come to you, they appear real, you fall into a pink cloud and you’re suddenly alive, manic with the energy of REAL LIFE and then you fucking SINK down down down into a tunnel of what. Nobody can explain. All the memoirs covering my shelves can’t explain. All the atlases. All the friends in the world. Where are they now? And I can’t cry, never been much of a crier. Just one for playing the guitar loud and alone, holding my feelings until they can be released in the empty walls of my room.

Happiness not shared is….

Happiness not shared is…

Had to throw it all away. Had to throw it all away.

My eye has been twitching constantly. There’s been some inner and outer commotion lately. All the outer straws are lined up but I’ve been speeding a little too fast toward the end result, not knowing what the end result it. Truth is I’m afraid to write. I am another person inside this person inside this person like those russian dolls. Open one and you get another and another and another and there are so many pieces of me smashed across the continent, in peoples hands, eyes, faces and memories. Even erased and fragmented. What are we. Are we real or just fragments of imaginations. Pieces we tell ourselves and spin together to form some halo of lucidity, to smash out and declare I AM REAL. ME IS I IS WE AND I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE AS YOU ARE ME AND WE ARE ALL FUCKING IN THIS TOGETHER.

But in the end, we are born alone and we die alone and all the famous musicians, poets, artists and vagabonds scream the same tragic tale, waiting for redemption, waiting for the end when it will all fall together, CLICK, the proverbial joining of broken puzzle pieces, we have missing puzzle pieces out whole lives and we can never ever find the tip of the tower or the middle of the ocean, because someone up there or out there has the pieces in their hand, is holding it, is laughing at us as we fall on the floor grasping at straws.

But what do I have if not this? This attempt at life. This existence that I so take for granted. What I had what I did, so many pauses and starts, fits and gasps of struggling.

And from the time he was a boy he worked hard, always had a straight line for a mouth, shoveled dirt, built a house, married a wife, had seven children, three of which died of scarlet fever. They rode into the little down to buy sugar and flour and cloth from the little store and shared a moment with the owner, but nothing struck out except for the gash of land on which they had fashioned some sort of life for themselves. Did they have books on the walls? Did they quote Dostoevsky? Did they struggle with their proverbial existence, waking up as coachroaches for whatever it means? Did they dance for the crowd inside a circus fence?

Did they flash to the future where people would click on the television.

Your hands are blood-washed violet. It takes one gash to end the world. One person to change a life. Yet everything falls as insignificantly as cherry blossoms to the ground. Once beautiful, now dead. And the song has no interlude. And I feel dizzy with the feeling of it. Birth and death. Spring and Winter. Fall and Summer. And I spin through this crazy nondescript world wondering…

what the hell does it all mean?

The Bell

It was one of those mornings. The bell was ringing. I had to finish fighting some battle involving blue pills and fear mongers before the bell would stop chiming. Then I realized that the bell was not the end to my battles, but rather the beginning, and I was supposed to be awake. The bell was to be silenced because it was my alarm, and had been going off for a half an hour.