BLUE COUP D’ETAT

Stared at the ocean from a ledge surrounded by trees, the sun hidden behind the clouds reflected an oval on the horizon, bright white. I stared at the burning water until it turned red and then black rippling and throbbing on my retina following my glance even when I looked away, altering the colors of the grass, the trees, the cross country runners racing through the park.

The old lady in Venice stepped out of the shadows and to no one in particular exclaimed, “I’m a Gemini not a juper.”

A cutey pie with one pig tail
and a short red sun dress covered
in little white flowers
wipes oreo filling
off her lips
on the frilled edges
and smiles shining
metal braces
and dark skin

Los Angeles is lost. I’m a blind taxi driver and a psychologist. Everyone has their hand out and I’m giving carefully, breathing in the smog, feeling light headed, sleeping on floors dirty with feet sweat or on futons that a hundred people have shared behind the Mann Chinese at the Nirvana apartments where flies congregate on cloudy days and watch you from the walls, patient for your departure or there are the smoke musty hotels on Hollywood Blvd with creaking floors and cum stained sheets, dead swimming pools floating birdshit and soggy crumbling leaves. But I’m distracted so I shouldn’t be complaining, distracted by other people’s problems, should thank god for other people’s needs and problems, for hardship and confusion, for obsessions that make mine seem small and petty that reveal mine for what they are - dreams, a one sided dialogue, unfulfilled madness, a whirlpool of figment and fantasy, a waste of time. But love comes from within and is so blinding that it is hard to believe when others don’t feel the emanations, don’t feel the way I feel, don’t feel the sincerity. you gotta have this within yourself to feel. Two souls feeling it and reflecting off each other like mirrors in the sunshine.

Norma Rodrigez
In the L.A. parole office
she sat near the back
Mexican red hair
curly and disheveled
tired impassive
resigned to wait
knowing times change
with time

Dead stars
shine in one direction
lightening a face
turned away
Two stars go crazy
breaking the laws of physics
dancing around each other
a new orbit
a new universe

Waiting aint hard
Trapped butterflies
don’t complain
just bounce around
Doin what they
always do
until they die
Let ‘em out and they die
outside
meaningless goop
in other people’s ears
dead caterpillars
’cause they need a warm dark stomach
to grow

i was going to make a movie about going to texas and i sort of got lost looking at pictures of japan that reminded me of the same cycle - it happened in both places. a little bit sad, confused, beautiful.

music - texas never whispers by pavement

tnwV3

When time stops it’s you that really stops and when it’s fast it’s you that’s fast and when it doesn’t exist it’s you that doesn’t exist. It’s all verbal. It’s all nonsense.

Sometimes I think my body would be a lot better off without my head.

Love the hesitation, the moment when translating thoughts, thinking about words instead of just saying them.

The effect that this shift has on me is akin to a nervous satisfaction, a glimmer of falsehood attached to all situations. Something like the sense of ducking under a wave and holding your breath patiently until you can’t stand it anymore and you struggle through any amount of force for a breath. Things are just piling up around me and I don’t care but I look on in horror somewhere deep within myself, the body a prison and time flying by.

Suffocate my love, hazy thoughts forgotten, dreams damp and distant, anything; bury the lack.

When you take things to a certain level they find ways to finish themselves.

Just when you think the world is just about as shitty as it can be you meet a woman and fall over yourself, smiling your head off.

The cold air is quiet and still, ice shavings, the first of winter, imperceptible except in moments, one at a time burn themselves on my breath.
I am a dragon, I am a bear.
Do they get sad too?
Curled in a cave hiding from man?

Objects, that’s it, that’s the problem - Objects, inanimate objects, seeing it all like pieces on a board that you can move around just like that but someday you realize that the only piece on the board that you can really control is your piece, just yours despite all illusion and egotism. Or maybe you don’t realize and you’re full of false expectations.

I slip into a reality where the words happen, the thoughts take shape but I never move just sit there, mouth slightly agape, doing nothing, caught up on an interior dialogue that tries to fit the world into something understandable, hopefully something desirable, usually only truly so in the solitude of my imagination.

THERE IS NO TIME

TIME IS AN INVENTION

NEW TIME

NO TIME

PEOPLE

TRIP

FALL

THESE ARE PICTURES FROM ONE DAY ALONE IN TOKYO–Ueno Park, War Memorial, The Second Fastest Elevator in the World (I don’t know who is the fastest but this is the Second Fastest).

walking alone, rejected, a monday when everything is closed, there were seagulls at sunset that i didn’t include, maybe they will be their own thing or find their way in here later, a beautiful day in an exquistely painful way that i attempt to steer clear of nowadays.

music - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Kyrie, Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427

it is a long download (32mg)

alonetokyo

Broadway sky awash with pigeon wings coursing uptown blocks criss crossed diagonals
flowers spread on cold november wind
a feather petal plucked and spinning impossibly slow
oblivious dead grace
luke warm bronze rust shadows tired and treaded
hard halo sun blind windshields
chrome corroded bicycle bars and plastic baby carriages pushed by squinting young mothers
gangs of puffy northface jacket hombres stand in rows between chicken bones and bar-b-q smeared paper plates
ground into the sidewalk like painted eyes
shining lips
red nail sunrise ghetto fabulous firehydrant rivers and
spring squirrels with big balls swelling pregnant nights give long pink sunsets to the river
twisting light fantastical rhythms dropped and vanished ephemeral opera tenement dark summer morning
nearly drowned by racing cars bridge popping smog window fans and humid sensitive horns
sweaty sheets dream of a city submerged
teaming with life and fearfully rotten to the core

St. Patrick’s day, it is cold outside, four o’clock in the morning, the one train roars uptown. A woman sits next to two big green bags that look as though they weigh more than she does, her skin discolored and cracked at her calf and ankle; she rubs her ankles together nervously. She looks like a frightened dog that might bark very loud in fear. She wears green flip flops, a green sweater, black shirt, a sharp jaw that hangs from her head, black hair, black eyes. She gets up at 42nd, stands half asleep two stops to 59th where she trudges to the ABCD.

**Found this fragment in a journal today**

It’s a story about leaving home after living with the folks for three years after college.
It’s a story about saying goodbye to the West, goodbye to my car and the open road.
It’s a story about saying goodbye to youthful, idealized love.
It’s a story about people and their trips, struggling to make their dreams a reality.
Illusions, breaking down illusions, and America.
It’s about kung fu and discipline and fantastical nonsense and laughing at myself.
It’s my trip and sometimes I don’t see it, I feel it and am swept away by it
Times are transitory.
I lose things, find others but at all times there is movement even in stasis.

“The Way gave him a face and Heaven gave him a form. He doesn’t let likes and dislikes get in and do him harm.” Chuang Tzu

Lost in being all places are the same

Skyscrapers rise in the forest

Grass grows in metal girders

Suns rise and set simultaneously

Listen to the inner rythmn, all things are blessed

All places are the same and the “same” never loses the interest of the observer

The same sparkles as the now and the now demands presence and attention

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
photo courtesy of Fredric King

Some quiet afternoon we will look at one another and have the same wordless thought and it will rise to our skin and we will make love. And maybe that quiet afternoon will stretch itself out to encompass our lives or it might be that our lives fit within those few hours before dusk or perhaps I dream.

last year’s birthday party at the moses’
my cousin steve and his wife lucia have a couple of beautiful boys
music by Daniel Johnston, “walking the cow”

chrisianbday

Stop the thoughts, change the subject in my mind, watch the words, the repetition of negative views, the straight up shit talking. Pay attention! Train myself to think about things differently. It does pay off, I can bounce back from the negative quicker and sometimes completely deflect it or ultimately become like a ghost and let it pass right through me; the water which flows on despite resistance…

Elephants walk the streets
Sukhimvit 2005

elephantswalkstreets

sugarland
tx
first colony
little girl walking
orange crossing guard
stop-homeward way
grandfather holds her hand
going back
my old neighborhood
where I graduated highschool

just a brief introduction or interlude

sugarlandtx

Koh Samui. Late November. 2005.

kohsamui

Diabutsu of Kamakura is 15 meters tall while seated in meditation….. Music by Lotrane.

diabutsu

ink on paper

strange colors

punk rock or something from when i only had blue and orange markers

I actually drew this woman in a shawl first

drew this with a mouse on illustrator

had some old wax pencils and started rubbing and scratching

this guy looks like a bad guy in a wester