Bottles and Cans

11 May

Homeless guy walking around with a giant industrial lawn and leaf garbage bag, gathering cans.  On a Wednesday morning.  Prime can gathering time; this is when people haul their garbage and recycling bins out.

How does he get this route at this time?  There are like 10 other homeless people who collect cans on my street, walking behind apartment buildings into people’s parking lots and rustling around the clinking clattering resonating trash cans– those things are like fucking tympanis– often at six or seven AM.  Up with the cock’s crow to go harvest cans, lest some other more enterprising homeless person get to them first.  Walking up steep hills with three layers of overcoats and snow pants on, with a black sweatshirt hood pulled up amplifying the sun.  Pushing a shopping cart with a bum wheel so you are constantly having to jerk it back to the left– pushing this up the second steepest hill in Los Angeles.  Getting to the point where you have the cart not just full to the brim but overflowing with a densely packed mountain of bottles and cans heaped up to the highest possible hump you can get without them falling out, and then on top of that four huge industrial lawn and leaf bags purloined from the city brush dumpster in the park, each full to bursting, packed drum tight like Cool Hand Luke’s belly after the fifty eggs, four of these lashed to the corners of this herky jerky shopping cart– restraining your now heavy and now even more awkward cart as you drag back down the second steepest hill in Los Angeles– dude. This is hard fucking work.  And a structured life: you’re up at six in the morning!  And you’re squabbling no doubt with fifteen other guys who want to do the same thing, OR, even more unbelievably, the other fifteen lesion-covered hairspray drinking schizophrenics have worked out a system, where one guy gets this block, this block and this block on Thursday, another gets them on Saturday, and so on.  I mean, this is how panhandling works– homeless people collectively have their shit together enough to assign one corner to one person on certain days; that’s why you never see two hobos battling to the death on the offramp over who gets to hold the VETERAN: HUNGRY sign.  They work it out, and in fact they give a cut to the cops, who enforce the territories in exchange for a piece. Probably they do the same for the bottle and can racket. Continue reading →

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Diary 2/27/11: Going to the Oscars

10 May

So: going to the Oscars.  Going alone.  It’s awesome that I’m going but it fucking sucks that I’m going alone.  At first, I was pissed that, you know, if I could have had a date, I would have been able to pull some incredibly high caliber of ass.  But then I would have had to keep the party going, get us into Vanity Fair, or Madonna’s house, or whateverthefuck. Now I can just come home. But still– this crazy spectacle, tons of famous people… I mean, I’m glad I get to see it, but it will suck to have no one to lean over next to and whisper to. Maybe I’ll sit next to Hailee Steinfeld’s mom or something.  Some woman from Kansas who doesn’t know anybody there either.
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National Novel Writing Month

9 May

It was National Novel Writing Month in November.  I sat down and tried to write a novel for about three minutes.  Here’s what I came up with:

BOOM!  A huge explosion. This is the first thing that happens in my National Novel Writing Month novel.  A gigantic explosion.  Massive wall of radioactive fire eating up the whole sky; trees instantly incinerated. Seagulls knocked out of air currents and turned to ash.  Rocks melted to glass.  Buildings crushed, like toys, in a toy crushing machine.  Crushed like toys during National Toy Crushing Month.  Cars, also like toys. Why is it always “like toys,” as though we crush our toys any more than we crush our normal-size possessions.  Toys are valuable.  Specifically to children, who are the people who own toys– nothing is more valuable than toys.  But anyway, these things are crushed like toys.  Like toys being crushed by a toy nuclear blast, except– this is not a toy.

Oceans evaporated.  The whole world now feels like a small unventilated bathroom after a long shower.  Sharks withering on the beach– once majestic, the king of the sea.  But who’s the king now?  No one. No one, you stupid fucking shark. Continue reading →

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Protected: Older Women Part 2

8 May

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Protected: Cancer and AIDS

8 May

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Diary: The Inner Life of the Exterminator Spraying Down My Storage Unit

7 May

Had to move my shit out of the storage unit this morning because there’s an exterminator spraying it down.

To be an exterminator, you must know about the creatures you exterminate.  You must study wasps, termites, carpenter ants, rats, etc.

You have to be an expert.  Because when you go to spread termite poison you have to know that the termite colony will have placed an egg chamber at a certain spot relative to a wall, a gestation chamber here, a feeding chamber there.  You have to know almost like E. O. Wilson knew the elegantly elaborate social gradations in termite society; the baroque architecture bored out of 2 x 4’s by these blind and delicate engineers.  How can you not see some poetry in it?  How, when you learn about ant societies; how like our own they are, but also how exotically alien– how can your soul not be somewhat captivated by these marvels of creation? Continue reading →

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Protected: Older Women Part 1

6 May

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The Difference

5 May

Between men’s and women’s sex fantasies is this:

If the cheerful 19 year old girl who delivers mail to my office came up to me one afternoon when no one else was around, and said “hey– you want to duck in the supply closet and fuck?”  It would be the best day of my life.

If you were sweeping out your stern patrician father’s horse barn in 1895, and a mysterious stranger came in out of a rainstorm, possibly masked, and despite your chaste protestations he brutally ravaged you as the steely eyes of the stallions looked on, it would be the worst day of your life.

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How to Quit Drinking and Smoking

5 May

Anyway.  I did not drink to excess last night.  And you know… I feel OK.  I feel better than usual. I also only smoked two cigarettes yesterday.  These are longtime goals of mine– do not drink to excess every god damn motherfucking night, and, as a corollary, do not, having drunk to excess, stand out on the porch and take a couple drags off a fresh cigarette and then put it out, then go back in the house and take a shot, look at shit on wikipedia, then, fifteen minutes later, go back out and relight and take another couple drags off the cigarette until the thing is gone, and you have then smoked four cigarettes that day. And drunk six tall brandies. And you wake up with a fog in your sinuses, you know… some hissing behind your forehead, sour phlegm in your mouth, and a cough that feels like it can’t quite reach the very bottom of your lungs where a couple oysterlike lumps of mucous are sitting in a soup of ashes and tar.

So today is not one of those days. And I feel somewhat better.  The thing is, merely feeling a notch or two physically better does not even begin to address the larger problems in your life.  The day to day, just– suck.  The removal of this small negative does not quite get you to zero.  And that’s all life is, a struggle to get to zero.

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The End of the World

4 May

I keep thinking about nuclear disaster.  Or some other apocalyptic thing.  Tsunami, mega-earthquake, plague– something.  As long as you made it through, as long as you were not burned by radiation or given giant infectious pustules– as long as you made it through, and weren’t somehow trapped caring for the millions of others who did have radiation burns and giant pustules– the end of the world world be fucking great.

And this is why there are so many movies about it, books about it– it’s not out of fear.  It’s out of wish fulfillment.  Just like Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins and etc . etc. etc.–aren’t orphans in their stories because of fear of losing your parents, but because kids wish their parents were dead.  That the bumbling, irritating schlumps constantly pestering you with questions that are like cigarette burns on the back of your neck– they wish these people had never existed for them, and that their real mommy were a princess who owned a huge magical castle that you could live in, and would have plenty of space to keep the two of you apart.

But anyway, if the world ended, it would be great.  Or at least, if civilization ended.  Loot the grocery store for a bunch of food and go up to the mountains and camp.  Shoot a deer once in a while.  Nice quiet nights by the fire.  Find a young woman of breeding age who needs you for protection and couldn’t leave you or she would die.  Take over some abandoned cabin and raise a modest amount of livestock and just rawdog her for the rest of your life. Continue reading →

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