orson!!! you gorgeous bastard
Jeanne Moreau and my hero Orson Welles from ‘Chimes at Midnight’
love y’all
I posted pictures from this when world-famous French Canadian multimedia artist Laura Rokas was working on it, but I don’t think I ever posted the Completed Thing.
Anyway, here it is!! If you look closely, you can find my cat Dante, my cursed police car the Doomsmobile, and a shooting star that represents a certain dumb Starboy~
This winter I am going to the East Coast, which is where I’m from. I am going to visit Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York, Toronto (maybe . . . I think), Montreal and Halifax / Chester. I have friends in these places and I am going to hug them and flash my gold tooth at them and say: “Yeah baby!!”
Here is my Proposed Route:
Contrary to what that map says, I am not going to actually drive 1,858 miles over the course of 30 hours though! I am flying into D.C. and then busing / training my way up to Baltimore and New York and Toronto and Montreal. In Montreal I’m either going to fly or drive to Nova Scotia . . . I don’t know yet! My friend Kate, who I’m staying with in Halifax / Chester, told me that it’s a long-ass drive, and possibly excruciatingly boring, but I don’t care. I wanna drive alone through Canada in a rental car so bad I wanna scream. Though, if any of you out there in TV land want to tag along for any of this madness, you’re more than welcome to. Do it!!
I don’t have a family, not really, so I will spend Christmas in New York City I think. I may go to Boston after that . . . but who knows. After that it’s all Canada though. I ain’t been to NYC in six (!) years, and I haven’t been back to Canada in even longer. I’m excited as hell. Maybe once I get home I can finally die!
Just kidding sort of~
~*^_^*~
I think about this all the time: putting those boxes somewhere. I have probably a dozen boxes. They’re in my storage unit, which is the size of a broom closet. My storage unit is inside an enormous dusty square-shaped warehouse by the river. I visit my things every three or four days. I have never seen another person in the building. Inside I have two suitcases where I swap out clothes and retrieve my anti-seizure medication. Sometimes I take out my leather jacket and put it on. I stand there for a few minutes and flex my arms. When the leather bends it makes a nice sound. I take it off and put it away. Other times I take out my guitar and play a few chords or whatever. If you can miss inanimate objects, I miss a few of those things. I miss wearing them and holding them. They make me feel safe. I only have a few things like this. I sure do miss feeling safe.
There are a lot of people around me right now. I wonder if they have no money too. Some of them are dressed nicely and some of them are wearing expensive glasses. I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I had my paws on a little bit of money once, which is why I still own anything nice at all. Of course I can’t get to any of it because it’s locked away in that dungeon of a warehouse, and I’d have nowhere else to put it anyway, so all I have are the clothes on my back and a bag with a few novels and teabags in it. By all accounts I am a broke homeless loser. It could be worse. I don’t have a police record and I don’t think anyone is trying to kill me. That’s got to count for something.
from a post about moving to portland last year
(i still feel the same way about all that)
whew!! glad the portland part is over with
(also: i meant “antiepileptic” medication, because that’s what you take to control the godawful ailment which is called bipoar II, and which has eaten my whole brain. whoops~)
I can think of like a dozen times in my life when someone has commented on the fact that, for whatever the reason was at the time (maybe there was no reason), I was growing “increasingly despondent.”
Man, that’s a good word, isn’t it? “Despondent” is good.
Pretty good!
If y’all’s still out there in TV land, let me say this here on this godforsaken website: being human is a dark tide, baby. Despondency comes and goes, baby. Thanks for noticing though!
Years ago, when I was soft and pale and destined for an early grave, and so on, I moved to California and got a job at a cafe on College Avenue in Berkeley. It did not pay much and I only got two days a week and no one there liked me because I talked about death too much. I ended up meeting Sir Ian McKellen there one time, but other than that it was a shit job and nearly everyone I worked with was a either a stiff or a square.
There was one person there who did like me no matter how many dark things I muttered in the vicinity of my coworkers, and that person was a girl named Nani. I have no idea why Nani liked me. She was a sort of optimistic person who owned a ukulele and played sports and woke up early and was close to her family and stuff like that. Maybe she liked me because I was the opposite of her.
I liked Nani a lot. She wore Sambas too. She was cool.
Nani gave me her phone number and said we should hang out sometime, and I said: “Yeah all right!”
I went to her house maybe seven or eight times that summer. It was always in the middle of the night. She would text me around midnight and ask me to come over and I’d bike from West Oakland to her house on the Berkeley border and she’d let me in and put my bicycle in the living room for me and then we’d go hang out in her room.
I remember she had a couch in her room, and we’d sit there and drink cheap beer and listen to Townes Van Zandt and not do a whole lot else. It was real good. It was my favorite kind of Hanging Out With Someone and it seemed to be hers too.
She’d always tell me I could sleep over, and I always slept over. In the dark we’d hold each other or whatever and talk until one of us dozed off. I tell you, there weren’t nothing sexual at all about it, and I thought that was great. She’d spoon me, or I’d spoon her, and we’d fall asleep that way with the music still on real low. In the morning she’d wake me up and tell me she had to leave the house and I’d put my pants on and grab my bicycle and bike home.
I never wondered about it and we never spoke about it. When we did work together, we didn’t really pay any special attention to one another. I don’t believe anyone at work had any idea that we were friends. We would talk to each other, but we didn’t talk a whole lot on account of her being up front and on account of me toiling in the back with the bakers who hated my sense of humor.
The last time I ever spent the night at Nani’s house, she took me into the kitchen and gave me a brownie and I ate the whole thing in one bite. I remember her saying: “Whoa, dude. That’s kind of a lot.” And I said, “What do you mean?” Nani said, “Well I mean I hope you know that’s an edible!”
We went back to her room and I waited for the insanity to kick in but mercifully it never did fully unveil itself. My mind got a little slushed as the night went on, but it was OK because she was a little slushed as well. We went to sleep a while later listening to ‘For the Sake of the Song’ and I had my arm around her and she said, “This ain’t bad.”
Next morning I biked home in a complete clustered haze. I was reading the numbers on the street signs and I had forgetten where and when I was. I’d been living in Austin just two months before, so I followed the signs all the way to 34th Street to get to my house there, only to realize I was actually in Oakland, and that I didn’t live on 34th Street in Austin any longer. It took me two hours to bike a mile and a half, but eventually I found my house and went inside and collapsed in my bed.
A week later I quit my job. I’d gotten a better job in North Oakland. Nani and I stopped talking to each other for no good reason after that. I reckon it just wasn’t as convenient anymore. The summer had ended and I grew more depressed and Nani kept on doing whatever it was Nani did.
About a year later I was hanging out at my house in West Oakland with a Polish masseuse. She wanted the spare bedroom in my house, which I eventually gave to my best buddy Laura Rokas—the world-famous French Canadian multimedia artist who I would take a knife in the throat for. Neither I nor the Polish masseuse knew this at the time, so we sat in my living room smoking a joint she had found in her purse. We were laughing like hell about something. She told me she had three cats and asked if that was a deal-breaker. I told her I’d have to think about it even though I was pretty sure it was a deal-breaker.
My friend McCune called me and asked me if I wanted to go to the Oakland Museum of California downtown and look at some shit since it was First Friday and the entrance fee was only five bucks. I told him I did and said good-bye to the Polish masseuse and about ten minutes later he swung by with his girlfriend and picked me up. We drove the hell down there and found a parking spot right up front. I gave the lady at the front desk a five dollar bill and went inside.
I was accidentally stoned out of my head just then and wound up on a dimly-lit outdoor walkway on the second floor. I stood alone there with my arms on the railing and looked at all the people on the street. Two people came out of the museum and onto the empty walkway and I looked over and saw that it was Nani and some guy. She squinted and recognized me and walked over and said hello. She awkwardly introduced me to the guy she was with as her “boyfriend” and I shook his hand. I told them I had lost the people I had come with, and that I had decided it would be nice to be alone and in a dark place outside. I guess she felt weird about having to stand there and talk to me while she was with this dude. It wouldn’t have been weird if she hadn’t acted weird about it, but I didn’t blame her. They said good-bye and wandered off. I never saw Nani again after that.
I wrote this because I wanted to remember Nani. I don’t know what good it does to remember people who are probably gone forever. I imagine it doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. But I liked her and I liked listening to music with her in the dark. I liked that we could touch each other in that way and not have to have it mean anything more than whatever we wanted it to mean. Really it was just as simple as two people holding each other because it felt good and was harmless to us. She was a good friend to me and we had a nice thing for a while. It was a secret only because it didn’t matter if anyone else knew or not. It is gone now but it happened and for whatever it’s worth I remember it.
my friends
