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8 years in LA.

Awaiting sleep I know will barely come on the eve of my eight anniversary of living in Los Angeles, I have reached at the very least an understanding and at the most a revelation about the overwhelming nature of my emotions when back in this frosty state each holiday season.

The sentiments are both pretty and painful, and I can never tell when the right moment is to suckle on nostalgia’s honkers or cast spells against this homogeneous and often silently shaming culture. But despite the easy quips and passive aggressive or outright aggressive descriptors and anecdotes I palm into this place, the end of the day always illuminates how damn much I care about it here. I often act like it was nothing to leave at all and that I was never meant to be born or grow up in this place. Oftentimes that is the easy explanation for my departure. But just because I did really want to get out and couldn’t see a future where I never did, I’m reminded when I am in Iowa that it was hard to leave. It was hard and it did matter and I do care.

And so while at 30 it still seems to early to throw in the LA towel and consider those chapters of my life’s hypothetical memoir well defined and constructed, the truth is by 35 I’ll want to be closer to this place and my family and by 45 I could maybe even live here again. Even if it is so full of guns and hate. My family isn’t. And my kids won’t be. Until then I’ll continue to be the golden yet black sheep of the family, emo ass sheep hair dangling over my newly wrinkled face. <3

#reflections #moving #growing up

i thought I’d know if we should be together by now.

i thought I’d be more together as a person by now.

i thought i would’ve figured out how to live with my chronic stomach and anxiety problems by now.

i thought I’d know how to be more honest with myself and my friends and my family by now.

i thought I’d have been able to quit drinking by now.

i thought I’d be able to lie to myself less by now.

i thought I’d never date someone who made me feel this way by now.

i thought I’d be over comparing Iowa and LA by now.

i thought I’d stop feeling weird about aging by now.

i thought I’d let go of old jealousies by now.

i thought I’d know what i want to do with my life by now.

i thought I’d stop feeling so badly in this specific way all the time by now.

i thought i would’ve believed people more when they say they like me by now.

i thought I’d be better at loving others and myself by now.

i thought things would stop feeling hurt and lost by now.

whoops whoops whoops

I’m myself every time

#Poem #whoops #idk #fuck #happydamnnewyear

12.28.2022

No booze tonight. And no excuses. And no ghosts. It will not cure me of my nostalgia nor my past or current embarrassments, pains, and anxieties.

it will only quell my stomach and head to keep it simple with marijuana.

I do not owe anybody anything. I am free.

8 years since i graduated college. Less than that since i was free of you. The sentiments still hurt. Blooming and blowing across the frosty fields.

dried mango walk rap.

eating dries mangos on the walk from the Bowl

can’t call a car cause the prices bite our souls and i

think about you and how i should be feeling more

but paper’s only paper til’ the fire’s blasting chords.

and jocey’s striding quick cause she don’t wanna miss her life

the florals are her skirt are flipping cosmos in the night

and no one’s even straining cause there’s incandescent plight

rolling in and through us and busting all the kites

only flying skyward when the baby’s blue is brooding

only get real sad when i think of what she’s doing

only wanna move when it’s the neon that’s worth blooming

piece it all together so it breaks again in two.

#mango rap

Chelsea.

Crackles of polite parent clapping below flickering lights. Pads on pads, almost a slapping tone. Maybe closer to a thump. Coffee and hot powder chocolate levitating in styrofoam.

Chelsea and I stood in line post-school day pre-play practice snack. Wearing black. Not green and white, fight, fight. Rest of the line goers boppping around banalities, keeping one eye on the scoreboard. Chelsea and I talked about anything else. She said that band sucked now. She also saw Gage moon the lunchroom. Scrunched her face, so grossed out and so amused. Scruching up her still sore nose ring. Put a cigarette in her ear to prep for our walk back toward the school, khaki shorted dads eyeing her cleavage and khaki shorted moms frowning hard as fuck.

Sipping coffee, we almost trip on some rocks. We’re skirting into the near darkness. Between the whitish stadium glow and orangey-pink sunset and yellow of the high school parking lot.

Sometimes she’d get a Snickers or some Sprees to go with. I’d get a hot dog. Hot dog and coffee. No mustard or ketchup. It tasted plain and warm and good and adult and a little bitter.

That brick building, that backdrop for endless scenes we had no lines for.

She was always dating some dude who was 22 or 23. She’d talk about how it was "fucked up.” They’d have work or something and couldn’t come to her plays or art shows. Always had time for sex.

I told her it was okay, she was just trying to love people. She’d ask me if I was still worried about being the needier one in my relationship. Of course I was.

Chelsea would pop a Spree in between puffs of her Marlboro’s or Parliaments and I would feel adult with my hot dog coffee. We weren’t often alone. The energy between us was never precisely friendly or sexual or romantic. Two cars on the freeway matching up for a second. So close and never grazing each other.

Her mom burned all her art once. I heard secondhand. She’d called me first but I’d been at a physical therapy appointment. I’d called her back about four times. My girlfriend said Chelsea had really wanted to talk to me, but had gone to her when I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t handle telling the story twice. She never did.

She rarely went to our play practice. And if she did she’d usually smoke alone. Or text alone. Cry alone. She didn’t want me around if she was crying.

But those pressure free walks by the pines, by the scrappy high school cars meant something specific. Some mini adulthood. Some extended bratty childhood. Some nutritionally vapid calories.

I miss her and the way she kept gum and tampons and cigarettes and a notebook and pens in the same tin animal cracker-themed lunchbox. A good lunch.

#chelsea #good lunch #short story

older

i remember being a kid and waiting for my parents to finish working out at the gym. all the kids were older and had better pokémon cards and i didn’t want to make any friends and they didn’t want to be my friend.

the people paid to watch us were not paid enough and the sand in the beach volleyball area was gross and wet and mostly dirt because the mid-west is not meant for sand.

and i felt older then, at eight, than i ever have.

older than i do now.

when we were college and when it was simple. discovering how to be little people. knowing full well we didn’t know much. kissing and fucking and pizza for brunch. up late in dorms and anxious in bunches. untold plans and invented bluntness.

sometimes i felt confident and sometimes i felt so empty.

sometimes i felt lovely and sometimes i felt like a VCR everyone forgot about but remembered they once used.

i could be so so so so cold on that campus and still it took years for me to admit i felt it.

when we left and it was just me. when that bar froze us and your tears choked me back into love again and again and again.

and years later you ask what was on the tip of my tongue.

just a big bite

just a lost heart

just a missing chunk that’s still evaporating.

slow spill of a coffee cup into shards and scrapes

on my heart’s knees.

#hearts knees #poem

It’s both nice and difficult to have you here. Your things on my floor. Your snacks in my trash. Bottles of contact solution. Clothes you brought. Clothes you bought.

You interact with me on a mostly unguarded level when we’re high or drunk. Naked sober (which neither of us have been very much on this trip) you’re still a little more shelled-in.

There’s been a few moments where it’s all too familiar and I forget. Pat your shoulder when you’re looking at which pipe to buy, which ice cream flavor you want.

When I picked you up at that hot dog place in Burbank after your phone died I was so relieved you were there. Not lost. Tangible.

You riding in the passenger seat feels natural.

I’ve had sex since you but not anything that’s ever made me forget how sex with you was. The curl of your legs and the olive skin.

But not many of my urges for you are physical. Even less are sexual. Most of it is an urge for comfort and belonging in the universe. Which you’ve mostly given me. And which you said I’ve given you since you rolled into town.

I still want to be near you.

I still am sad you’re gone tomorrow.

I’m sad that it matters to me and also glad it does.

I hope you’re not sad that I’m sad. I hope sad in sort of a similar way.

Walk To The One You Love.

Hope that they love you the same. If not the same than fairly close. Maybe spittable difference. Spit isn’t sexy except for sometimes. And in those times it is VERY fucking sexy.

Hope that the walk to the one you love is not so far that you get overly stressed about ever finding the one you love. Hoping that if the road is long then the road is interesting.

Hoping you’re even interesting and worth seeking.

Hoping you’re worth loving.

Not caring in the end because it’s your turn and the highway is frozen.

blonde and sweet 1.

she is unfiltered and lacking judgement with her cigarette on the edge of her

lips and her small tooth gap

still emanating white wine

in a sweet nightly grin

perhaps caused by

me.

it hurt my feelings really fucking bad when you said that the jobs Alex and I are doing we could have done without going to college

we know that

we didn’t promise you careers

we didn’t promise you anything

we didn’t know what we wanted

now we kind of do

so i’m sorry.

but i wouldn’t have gone to college if you wouldn’t have fucking made us

and maybe

if you wanted

career sons

you should have made us

major in something more serious.

Sometimes I wish I could be happy doing something non-artistic.

Sometimes I wish the thing I wanted to do wasn’t as popular. Or that this city wasn’t built around it.

But the only reason it was ever ubiquitous or tangible enough for me to pursue it is

because this stupid city exists.

Sometimes I wish

the way i’ll miss you.

the way i’ll miss him when he’s not living on my couch for the summer anymore or

the way i miss halloweens in iowa

so frigid and so saccharine and so rewarding when you

made it back in from the monsters

the way i miss

her sleeping in the sun,

those pockets of starry sheen

on the comforter

the way i miss being close for that

Thanksgiving road trip and how

the closeness then makes

now feel farther away

the way i’ll miss the way college could have been

if i had a better stomach

a better heart

a stronger spine

the way i could have been there

for myself and for my friends

the carpe i could have diem’d

the fucks i would have given

if only i’d known they

mattered

cared.

#sunday poems for no one

let me describe for you my relationship with alcohol.

hm.

tonight i felt off. i was waiting to go up and do some comedy at an open mic. i was with my friend ALICE who is cute and funny and great. and also my friend MAT who is sweet and almost funny and pleasant. and i was sitting there and thinking over and over and over “you do not need to buy a drink here. it is one of the few mics in los angeles that do not require a drink purchase.”

but then, you know. i had been there for over two hours. i was waiting. i had a drink.

and i felt normal.

and i had a good set.

i had a better set than i would have had sober.

i know it.

i love being drunk. i wanna be drunk forever - kevin french

fuck i am so sad

fuck i am so lonley

fuck everyone hates me

fuck no body wants me

i am just a very skinny stupid fucking asshole.

girls do not attract to me

guys think i am a fucking pussy or faggot or whatever

i just want to love somebody again

i am really good at loving people i promise

please.

someone love me.

someone fake it

i don’t care

someone at least

get off the couch and tell me i am not crazy for thinking

i suck so so so so so so so so so so sbad

mstry

He had the ability to present himself

as always having no plans

and always having endless concerts, girls, premieres

and being self-deprecating

and being amazing

and so that’s why

we went to the movies today.

i’m obsessed with whether or not you slept with each other.

whether anyone would like me.

why anyone would like him.

why she would.

hope she doesn’t

knowing i don’t even know her

well enough to

even care.

I hate W.

I hate W mostly because I know I shouldn’t hate him. He thinks he’s being nice and fun and friendly and interesting but really he’s a fucking dreadfully annoying human being.

It’s very possible I’m being an asshole. It’s completely and utterly likely that he is not an asshole, but is really a great guy.

I’m just not in the place for friends right now. Especially ones that are through WORK and who LOVE WORK and who LOVE ME.

Why am I more social than I want to be?

I think I am this weird sort of introvert that needs a lot of me time but thinks too much in his me time and ends up freaked out and mad so he hangs out with people because he DOES have fun with people and IS charismatic but then needs to go back to himself.

Or am I just not happy anywhere.

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFU U

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