May 31st, 2005 Tuesday

There is a beautiful glass building in Golden Gate Park that is the home to orchids and rare tropical plants, including one that just bloomed Monday that stinks like carrion. I paid three bucks to take a peek and a sniff. Why not? Corpse flower, Titan Arum. It was fucking huge and looked like a prop from Little Shop of Horrors.
This is San Francisco. Not New Hampshire. Does anyone know the difference besides me?

I do naked aerobics with my shades up in San Francisco, and with the shades down in New Hampshire.

May 30th, 2005 Monday

Ocean Beach is the sand of San Francisco we know as the edge of the Pacific. It has a near constant cool breeze and fifty degree water. When you take a trip out to the beach, you bring a hat. You don’t wear shorts. Women aren’t sunning in bikinis.
As a man, this can be saddening. There is something very basic to our health as men to see that women are worth mating with physically. The local government understands this and has given The City massage parlors, strip clubs, peep shows and streetwalkers. But many decent men don’t feel those activities are healthy, so we also have parades. Yesterday was Carnival and I went and I saw a lot of ass. Really great ass in sparkly thongs being shook by some very beautiful hips. I saw some wonderful legs, some thin like the pinchers on an ear wigs tail, some very thick like they could hold a man down in the prone position. These women rode up high on floats, shaking their slender shoulders so their breasts, barely hidden, rippled, and my head spun slowly as I was entranced by the offer to watch. They also marched in formations on the ground, vaguely reminiscent of a military formation, here to ask me to lay down my weapons. I was ready for peace.

“Why are all the men watching the parade as it has gone by, instead of while it comes toward them?” my lady friend asked.

It was all that ass. But we both already knew that. The lovers of women, both straight men and the lesbians, the bi-sexuals and some who were just curious, turned their heads to watch wistfully as the glitter’s sparkle faded out of sight, the solid thighs shaking the cheek of the rump, first the left then the right, as they danced on down the street, spreading the good news that we were still sexual, still alive, still needing connection, just like the big plan demands.

Then the low rider club came by popping and dropping hydraulics, little boys on low rider bicycles with chrome spare wheels on the back fender, and I was ready to fight again, I was ready to be a man, and show the world I could be attractive as well.

May 26th, 2005 Thursday

It’s about time I started writing in a post-Bukowski manner. He’s dead, so it doesn’t do any good to write like him. Call him a one trick pony and move on. In what direction? Like a White Stripes song?

- What's tied around your wrist son? The shirt has buttons, so you don’t come undone.
You have a thirty dollar watch with brains to do the math. Tattooed words for a sleeve, not a nine to five path. Lost 29 times no going back. Cup the dice, shake in your shoes, make your big toe roll don’t ask it to choose. -

That’s not it.

- Never see the doctor, have to believe she can’t help. Leave your stuff in your locker, or put it on the shelf. Carve a stick like an Indian, pinch off some leaves and heat 'em in your mouth. You walk like you’ve had shoes on your whole life. Nothing's tied to a bird like a string on a kite. Never had muscles from riding bicycles. Eating truffles and icicles. I was just jumping, I ran and I swam. You stand to masturbate and spit in a can. -

How does Jack White do it? I’m adrift in a post-Bukowski world.

May 23rd, 2005 Monday

Now I know how George Bush feels.

High school kids, when taken as a group of say, 66, can be a little intimidating. They are young, and there is an energy that seems they are hardly containing. The boys seem to rattle in their shoes. The girls are squirming. I had this job last Friday, where I got paid to meet a busload of graduating seniors down on Fisherman’s Wharf, and lead them to the Hard Rock Café for dinner. Then I went down the Pier to a Bay cruise boat and put out table clothes and balloons. Black and Silver was the high school’s colors. I handed the DJ a box of glow sticks to throw out on the dance floor when things were poppin’. The student’s chaperone called me when dinner was over, and I went back to the Hard Rock to lead the group to the boat.

It was dark out by now, almost 9:30. Fisherman’s Wharf is a tourist hole, wide boulevards for walking, and holding hands, and street performers are set up every hundred yards. We were next to the Peruvian pan flutist. Some of the kids were dancing to a hip hop song others were singing. The pan flute was enrapturing a group of elderly white folks who were huddled up under a street light, close enough to hear, but not so close they would have to tip. The high school seniors and the senior citizens summed up Fisherman’s Wharf for me.
Baby strollers were being strolled by couples, young kids from the suburbs were hanging around the metal bars along the wharf’s edge, out of the light, spitting into the dark water.
I am thirty four years old, so I can read an adults face. These two adults chaperones were about my age, and seemed afraid.

The kids had energy, but no idea what to do with it. That is why they love adults. Adults give them orders, and the students scramble. It just feels like at any moment, they may realize an adult only has words, and words can be ignored. At any moment, they may realize they can think for themselves, and they might come up with a plan. I pictured the students swarming like a hive of honey bees, picking a new queen and hijacking the charter bus and heading for Mexico. We three adults would stand with our hands at our sides shaking our heads. There is no stopping it if it happens.

The two chaperones were trying to figure out a head count.
“Should we have them count off?”
“I don’t know the total.”
“Let’s get into our two groups then.”
It was celebration graduation, this class of ’05 had driven an hour and half down out of the farmland of the Valley and had just eaten at The Hard Rock Café. In San Francisco! It was their night, and they knew it. What was an embarrassing place to be for me, was a night to remember for them.
“Okay, everybody, hey guys! Hey, let’s quiet down. JAMES! I need everyone’s attention before we move. Are you – JAMES! Let’s get into our groups.”

And it worked. The crowd split, I saw one student wearing seventies reflective sunglasses come up behind and give his chaperone a push, and the chaperone ignored it, just kept his hand waving the students towards him.
The kids were like flies. Constantly buzzing around, seeming to run off, only to circle back, the little annoying buzz drifting in and out. They wanted to grab you, anyone, they had their hands on everyone and anything. All the students were there, so I started walking.

I was walking and looking back and seeing 66 students following behind me, because i was tall and they believed in me. They were unaware that I knew nothing. I didn’t understand a single thing about this world. I only did what I thought would help me. My mean heart and my addictions were invisible. I was a leader.

May 22nd, 2005 Sunday

I wrote a rap about Brisbane, a town of three thousand people hidden in a valley just south of San Francisco. It is like a lost tribe of people there. Many residents have built giant wooden stars with Christmas lights outlining them. Then they nail the star to the house. That is why Brisbane is the City of Stars.

(spoken behind the beat) Bay Area boy from Oakland all the way to San Jose…

I was a fetus in Milpitas,
Got fondled in La Honda
Now I stays with mom in Brisbane,
Smoking cocaine,
She let me do my damn thang
Ride to The City on the Caltrain
Las stop, hip hop
4th and Kang!

That’s life in Brisbane, City of Stars
Hard as cement with lots of rebars
So far from shit you have to drive cars
Livin’ in the Briz, City of Stars

S.F. isn’t the city of stars
But it gots titty bars
Girls with pretty claws
Big boobs and no drawers
(Strip club DJ voice) For your next Hustler Honey, let’s have a big round of applause!

That’s life in Brisbane, City of Stars
Hard as cement with lots of rebars
So far from shit you have to drive cars
Livin’ in the Brizzle, City of Stars

Get home-last train's 12 o’clock
Now it’s time for the X-box
And highlights of trash talk
Tivo’ed Cold Pizza and Talk Soup
3 a.m. and now I’m pooped
up for one more hour
lookin’ at porn and takin’ a shower
4 a.m and I fall out
I work 3rd shift at a warehouse

That’s life in Brisbane City of Stars
Hard as cement with lots of rebars
So far from shit you have to drive cars
Livin’ in the Brizay, City of Stars

May 21st, Saturday

“Why do you write this stuff? It’s good... I mean, you write well, but it’s very misogynistic. Not something I would read ordinarily.”

She was sitting at my computer, reading this:

Her pussy smelled like something had died in the bushes. I wasn’t so hot either. Evidence of my last three meals was beaded up in stiff drips down my shirt. The stain on my crotch was dark and wet looking. Semen or urine? I touched it. It wasn’t wet. Semen then. Or old lube.
Lisa was her name. She hadn’t had any exercise in years. But a woman is naturally flexible, and doesn’t need the physical stamina a man needs in bed. All that pumping, its like trying to move a heavy dresser all by yourself. Or really, it’s like using a handsaw to make a cut. You are going up and down, up and down, when all of a sudden the blade catches and buckles. Dead in the water. You line up and start slow again. Push Pull Push Pull.
It was probably four in the afternoon. I had her naked on her couch, I was fully clothed. I liked that. Just taking my dick out. It made me feel distant. Like a dignitary. Like I was visiting from out of town and had a lot to do and a short time to do it in. Sometimes I thought she was a wild creature and I was a scientist.

“What is that about being a scientist? You have no emotions, right? Why do you want to glorify that?” Audra asked me.

Audra was a smart women. Had her own career as an artist. Taught part time at a college. I told her why I did it.

“It isn’t misogynistic. I write to men. Like I talk to men. That is all. I don’t hate women. I’m just talking to men about what goes on in my mind when I’m with women.”

“Are you gay? Do you need men’s approval so badly? Why don’t you write like you talk to me? You can be so sweet.”

I wasn’t sure. I asked her to read something else.

May 20th, 2005 Friday

Do you ever drink alcohol with friends? It is amazing what you end up talking about when you get drunk with people you know, and you are in someone’s home where no one can overhear what you are saying. Alcohol, (Stella and Capt. Morgan’s in my case tonight) is a truly wonderful concoction. My chicken mole burrito was gone and I was drinking Capt. Morgan’s straight by the time The Well Read Carpenter got talking about beating up animals. I realized I had never talked about that ever before. I’m in my mid thirties, and here was a whole new topic of conversation! The Carpenter was charged by a dog guarding her puppies. So he kicked it as hard as he could, catching the bitch just under the chin.

“It felt like kicking a Nerf ball, she flipped completely around in the air,” he told me.

I drank and laughed. Perhaps alcohol is not going to make us better people, but it helps us pinpoint where we went wrong.

Next time I’m back in New Hampshire, I’ll have to find out if Ken Hawkins really punched a horse in the nose, knocking it down.

May 19th, Thursday

A lot of people wonder what its like to be a writer. Especially one that makes no money. "What do you write?" they ask. Today you get to see into the private notebook of a real writer. Let's read:

He grew up so poor kids beat him up. Like it was a disease that needed to be stopped. His mom worked and saved up for a skateboard for him. She wanted him to fit in. The kids beat him with it after school. He was crying in the dirt. The biggest one jumped up and brought both his feet through the center of the new skateboard. The big one’s little friend threw it in the bushes. It flew through the air like a kid's drawing of bird wings. A “V”.

I was barefoot. Just out of the shower. I sat down at my desk and put my foot in a puddle of my own semen.

I went on a binge
With an orange.
We broke into a school
And stole a computer.

That's great! Maybe you would like to start writing after work as well, and then share it with your friends!

May 18th, Wednesday 2005

A woman told me, "I like when I reach across myself and feel my breasts come together."

I'm not a woman, but I bet it's true.

May 12th, 2005 Thursday

We're all writing blogs. It takes about twenty minutes a day. The same time abs of steel take if you buy a Soloflex. But I don't need a six pack, I've got bionic emotions. Emotional life is important to a relationship. Probably more so than a six pack of ripped abs. Unfortunately, my emotional life is half mechanical. Women think I have super-feelings. Because of the bionics. Then they find out I am still half human male. Still half wild. They have been ignoring what I say, because I stood close to them, because my hand was on their back, just above their ass, when they talked to me, just talking into my neck. They believed my hands, not my mouth. Well, my hand was saying, "You feel warm. You feel soft. I like this." My hand was not saying, "I want to be your boyfriend, and walk with you, with my hand here again tomorrow." And my words were, "I had a girlfriend, and don’t want another one anytime soon.” So they read into my hands, and never even heard what I had said. It's hard to be specific.

It would be nice if we could be very specific in our blogs. But we know people will read them. Not many, just our friends and family. The toughest critics. So we can't say anything too strong. We won't repeat the conversation about going ass to mouth. No, that is something among drunk friends, just kidding around. We won't talk about stealing from our jobs, or from our roommates. Or our grandmothers. People read this stuff. You have a life to live, so don't make trouble. Who writes a blog to make trouble? Maybe some political guy. Or some lady who wants to uncover corruption somewhere. But people aren't making Blogspot rich talking about dark secrets. About faulty human sexuality.
So what’s a blog for?
My blog is about proving that I stayed busy today. So is yours. Blogs are puritanical. They are proof that you and I mattered to human culture today, that America kept on top because there are people like us creating.

Today I was driving by the strip clubs, and I noticed two white guys getting out of a white Cadillac, and they looked fresh out of prison with black hoodies on and tattoos on their necks and behind their ears. I could see it from a distance because their heads were shaved. Their white power had an awful lot of soul. Probably from incarceration. Living with someone, even if you hate them, will rub off on you. That might explain the skin head driving a Cadillac and wearing Addidas. Living too long with the blacks.

See, there's the proof. I worked. I made an observation today. My mind was working. I can get drunk now. I turned in my work. I work harder than you. I blog.

Anyone can read a blog. How can I be honest? How can I have an opinion? My parents have a pc and are online. Hiding shit from them here is harder than when I lived in their house. I moved three thousand miles away, from one ocean to the other so I wouldn't make them uncomfortable.

Before computers, I could have struggled in the alternative press, never worrying anyone I knew would stumble across my writing. I could have self published ‘zines, scribbled limericks in restrooms, and my writing would have never returned to my progenitors. That wonderful couple who are still married after nearly forty years and two kids. Beth and Jim, the god fearing couple from Greenland. The ones I would never want to truly understand me.
They are a click away from reading what I write. So, I hesitate. There are things I want to say, that don’t seem worth it, if they may read it.
But I am the first writer that is forsaking ink. I am the first writer to turn his back on paper. I am digital. I feed words into a machine. A machine that comes into everyone’s home, lurks on a desktop, then gets a tooth into you. Just one, the toxin is powerful. You’ve found me, along with how many others?

I am a writer. I have to be naked. But I'm not just naked, I'm having sex and talking dirty. There is no bedroom door, this is the internet. Put some orgasm in your blog. For all of us.

May 9th, 2005, Monday

I live in the Outer Richmond District of San Francisco. It looks like a suburb out here, with the streets laid out in a grid, wide sidewalks, and what seems like an endless sea of clean homes with tidy shrubbery out front. There are a few streets, like Clement, Geary or parts of Balboa, that have businesses in store fronts, but there is not a package store on every corner. Shit no. My corner store is four corners away. I walk past apartments and single family homes, and rarely see children playing on the street. It’s quiet and empty save for a car parking, a door shutting, someone crossing the street into a home. Quiet again. A high school kid skipping class to smoke a cigarette behind my bushes is the only action on the street, until that bell rings and the cop cars come circling around for an hour. We all stay inside, out of the wind.

People assume I live in the Mission, because that is the hotbed of cultural activity in San Francisco. I don't. The Richmond has the highlight of Geary Street, where the average speed on the bus is seven miles an hour. It is like an eight mile long strip mall. Lighting stores, computer centers and pet food suppliers are stacked nuts to butts while parking is ephemeral…there’s one – ohh. Hydrant.

The racial profile is Asian and Russian. Japanese, Cantonese Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai. I haven’t yet learned where the Russians are from, other than Europe. We are all mixed up out here, and trying to keep to ourselves. We park our cars in almost the same spot every day. We don't worry about them being broken into. We cook dinner.

The Mission has an overall theme, like a dirty amusement park. You know you are in the Mission. The rides there cost twenty bucks in your truck with one of the ladies, and snacks are little brown balloons that cost the same. There is a sense of community down there, cohesion, highlighted by the gang activity. People know where they belong. They are attacked when they go where they don't.
Out here in the Richmond, the gangs are older and organized, and called mafia’s. They don’t put stickers on things, or write their names in spray paint.

Graffiti attracted me to this city, like lip gloss on a great pair of lips, it made me stop and stare. The decoration added to the attraction. I'll also say that a lot of it is some toy scribbling that shits up the place. FN is all over, like Lurk; in two months they've gone all city. Lurk has a strange stegasorous/horse that gets drawn sometimes, especially down at the beach. Folks go wild on that sea wall. Unfortunately, FN tagged a really cool old van that stays parked most of the time on Fulton. It seems to be there to promote O'Grady's Plumbing. I would say the van is from the late forties, painted in high gloss white with blue rims and a colorful bit of text painted on.

I get sad when I go to the Mission. It is sad excitement, for sure. I love the stickers, stolen from the post office, taken home by someone who spent hours with a sharpie practicing their signature before applying it on the sticker, then they sneak out and slap it on the Bay Guardian paper box for me. It’s all for me. That’s nice.

I love graffiti when it makes something that was ugly beautiful. I love it when it shows style and a respect for its environment. When a kid loses that focus and just writes on anything, its like an infant who hasn't learned to shit in a toilet. He ends up with a hot load in his pants. Its embarrassing for everyone.

I appreciate most of it. I appreciate the homeless and the rubber tramps setting up sidewalk sales of stolen shit. I appreciate the piss running in the street, the scat I don’t care to identify on the sidewalk. Most likely it’s human. All this madness is. I like to feel that part of me is here, the lunacy, the problems left to grow till they are malignantly cancerous and rattling, so death can find his mark in the dark. But I get sad. Who wants to really live like this? Does this guy in the doorway, up from Honduras, really want to sleep in the doorway to the video store? Why aren’t I doing something to stop it? Instead I go and enjoy the other's suffering. I talk with the guy asking for quarters, I feel like I understand what is happening.

I leave the Mission feeling inspired by the art and terrible that slum lords and tenement living, street walking and child prostitution have a safe harbor down here. While white kids who can’t hold a steady job make art. Because they have to.

They have to make graffiti. There is a new style hitting the streets, a feathered edge, like the paint is put on with a blow dryer. For years a tight line was the ideal, and it looks like people are getting over that, and learning how to control a fade. It is done with cans, held close to the surface but at a strong angle, so the leading edge is crisp and the outer edge is blown out. It will be interesting to see how it develops. I’ll be watching.

May 7th, 2005 Saturday

A diamond shines brighter than anything man makes, and I’m a man now. I will decay.

May 2nd, 2005 Monday

I think iconoclastic thoughts, like, "What if Uncle Sam nailed the Statue of Liberty, and that was how America was born?"

Sometimes I think heretical thoughts, like, "Did Jesus ever have a wet dream?"