Twelve Years of Sobriety

30 Mar

Reminder that all my new shit is on Substack. 

**

Every day I walk my pug in the park. Throw her a tennis ball small enough for her little jaws. I look at birds. I meet people, middle aged women. We talk about our dogs. How old is yours blah blah blah. The dog loves them. She’s thrilled to see her friends. The women are thrilled to get the love they can’t get from their inferior dogs. My dog was bred over thousands of years to be a loving companion. Theirs were meant to hunt rats or pull sleds or what have you, and are only nice as a side gig.

Women and one guy walking his schnauzers every day. A kind man who shook my hand when I moved to the neighborhood. Takes care to make small talk. And I stopped seeing him. It was weeks. I didn’t notice till I saw him again. He was fucked up. His face was swollen and he was walking with a cane. How are you doing man I say. And he says not good bro I just got out of the hospital. And I say what happened and he says alcohol, I have a problem with alcohol.

I go four months and then I take one drink it’s and it’s months fucked up and I wake up in the hospital. This is the fourth time man. And he shows me his belly covered in bruises. He’s worried about his liver. And I say you know I turned twelve years sober yesterday.

Oh no shit

You ever been to AA? Continue reading →

Old Man

27 Feb

https://www.mediastorehouse.com/p/731/old-man-pug-c1740-18268951.jpg.webp

What do you want to do for your birthday, she asks. I want to lay on the couch with her and the dog. Watch a high mid Hollywood movie. Like Adrian Lyne or Paul Verhoeven. An entertaining movie, not art. I want to go to bed at 10 with the dog. Then I want to die so I don’t have to go to work anymore.

But the bag I’m chasing is stay at home dad money. Not working five years, so she can have her dreams too. Write while the baby sleeps. Get him in kindergarten. Then I’ll go back to work. But not yet, not yet.

**

Good morning.

I’m still 49 years old.

I made the most of 49. It was a good year when I wasn’t working.

I hate special occasions. I hate taking stock. It feels like cope. Well here we go, I started my 40’s broke, having emergency ass surgery, obsessed with a Korean woman who was using me for sex. Using me for my physique. Dating other guys. I worked for the same guy I do now. I drove the same car. That hasn’t changed. I had put out one ebook at 39. I remember that $115 royalty check, that was a great moment. But we’re talking about my 40’s. I released The Pussy which flopped completely as I expected. It sold 221 copies in 2016. Still that’s a thousand bucks which was nothing to sneeze at back then. I had a healthier attitude. I expected no one to buy it, 221 people bought it. 220 and one copy for myself. Continue reading →

Cormac McCarthy

29 Jan

Cormac McCarthy knew how to live. He went to a state school and dropped out. School is boring. He went to Alaska in the military. He only really started reading there. He went around on ships in his youth. He wrote books, and they didn’t sell, and he didn’t care. He got a wife and they lived in a shithouse he built himself and bathed in a lake and when someone would call offering money to lecture them he’d say no. And his wife said they’d eat beans. Years later when he’d had a little success an underage girl in a bikini came up to him at a motel pool. She said let’s hang out, he said yes. Years after that he impregnated a woman in his sixties who was thirty years younger. Not much is known about her except she came out of the kitchen to confront some other guy after she broke up with Cormac, with a Smith and Wesson in her pussy, due to an argument about space aliens. You can imagine how she fucked. McCarthy knew how to live.

People got mad when Vincenzo Barney’s article came out. The Wikipedia entry to this day takes pains to highlight “but she was still 17, on a shared trip to Mexico,” when they “progressed to a physical relationship.” Even in its uptightness it cedes that fucking her was progress. You and I know he nailed her day one in that motel. You’d do it too if you had the nuts. Which you don’t. I don’t either.

After this he wrote Blood Meridian which I’m rereading now. The part where the army captain takes his squad into Mexico across the landscapes is the high water mark of the English language. Better than anything before it. Better than anything will be again. Continue reading →

Avatar 3

28 Dec

F**k that!”: James Cameron on Adding the Best Avatar 3 Scene He Wanted to Use in Sequel

Avatar 3 is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the imaginary battle you drew in your notebook in third grade. You showed your friends and they joined in. Pages and pages of epics about a giant unending war between armies of armored evil men with submarines that had crab claws against ripped warriors mounted on superbeasts smashed together out of a shark a lion and a firebreathing giraffe. You drew the visuals and you told each other the story. Every boy had this dream. A man kept that dream alive. He made other movies for 40 years. Because that’s what it took to get the money people and computers together to make the dream into this movie. Continue reading →

Being a Drunk

28 Nov

Being a drunk makes your life high adventure. Stumbling down the street trying to get home. Trying to get up the stairs. Waking up hung over willing your fingers to log on and pay a bill before the power gets shut off. Not knowing if you’ll make it. Waking up next to a human form not knowing- monster, murderer, beautiful nice lady, did I fuck her, did I use a condom, could I even get hard, did I get her pregnant. Will she accuse me of rape. Being a drunk gives your life stakes. Being drunk makes your life a TV show, the Twilight Zone, is she my sister, is she the cholo neighbor’s girlfriend, is she my landlord’s underage niece. Did I piss the bed.

Continue reading →

I Like Getting Older

25 Oct

I like getting older. I stand in the yard with my hose. Horses walk by. Birds singing. I still don’t know all of them. The dog waits for me in bed. The nights finally get cold. She stretches out against my back. Susannah takes me to parties, young people. Another country. A city where I used to live and like all old people I say it fell to shit. I don’t know how these young men do it. Tough out there- but I wrote down what it was like when I was young. It was tough then too. It was the worst it ever was, we had it so hard. How do young men do it- how did I do it. I stayed alive till it got better. Till the things that made me mad subsided by me doing nothing. By just staying alive. Not drinking, eating vegetables. Stretching before activity. Problems went away. I stood by the banks of the river. And they floated by.

Continue reading →

Don’t Be the Guy

26 Sep

Don’t be the guy. A lot of people out there saying someone’s gotta DO SOMETHING. About the left the right Zionists Hamas blacks whites troons Nazis etc. etc. etc. Don’t let it be you. You are gonna live a long life. A nice house. A nice dog. Not end up cold and alone in the woods on the run from big men putting knees on your neck. With everyone who said someone’s gotta do something saying you’re a piece of shit cuz you did something. Someone’s gotta do something. Never them. So not you. Live a long life.

Twilight of the Idols

25 Aug

I went for a run last night. Out in the park. Up the sand trail where people take their horses. To where the dog ate the toad one time and back. It was full dark of night by the time I got motivated, and it got cool enough.

On the way back I saw animals in the grass. I stopped and looked. A skunk was snuffling about with three coyotes lounging. It had been hot, it was a hundred degrees that day. The grass in the park is cool. Sprinklers come on at night. The coyotes lay placidly while the skunk snuffled for grubs, all a few feet from each other. A skunk hanging out with three coyotes.

Continue reading →

I’ll Miss This House

22 Jul

I love sleeping with the dog. Waking up with the dog. Every night I take a bath. She knows it’s close to bedtime. She waits on the bed. Susannah’s in New York this week. I gotta move to our new house. Moving is like a death. Your own death by a bad disease. The memories and feelings in the house welling up while you fight transactions bills work money logistics man up etc.etc. Lifting heavy boxes in the heat and crude workmen barking while you want to sit and cry sifting through letters from the dead.

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Father’s Day

15 Jun

Every Father’s Day I wake up unhappy. Stay unhappy all day. Don’t know why. And remember it’s Father’s Day and my father is dead. He had a pretty long great life. He left behind a loving family, I talk to my brothers just about every day.

We saw it coming. He got cancer. He was given six months to live and he lived 15 more years. He came out to stay with me. Got to see my place, meet my friends. I got to say goodbye to him before he died. I’m still sad he’s dead. I’m sitting here in a coffee shop and I half want to cry typing about him. But they’re playing EDM.

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