Comfort Foods.

        I've never been one for emotional eating.  I much prefer to pacify my loneliness with vodka or a tightly rolled dubber and maybe a muscle relaxer now and then.  I once pacified myself with all three and convinced Jen I was going to puke to death while I draped myself over our bear claw bath tub.  Lately, a strong drink or five, simply is not doing the trick..  So now I've had no choice but to take up emotional eating, which as it turns out, is also not very healthy. 
        The coffee shop I work at, has the most indisputably delicious array of pastries ranging from an almond tea cake to a fucking cookie with candied almonds poured over a layer of thick dark chocolate.  Sometimes if there are no customers in the shop and my boss is doing inventory in the back, I stand in front of the pastry display and stare at the glistening sugar crystals in the icing of the carrot cake or the swirls of cream cheese in our spicy pumpkin bread.  At the end of the night someone throws them into a black trash can for the morning crew to throw away.  It's devastating to witness.
        Customers, if they see you dumping the pastries in the trash, will stop their conversations, look up from their lap tops and stop mid sip, and glare at you.  I think it's interesting to watch the people's faces though, they all look confused, shocked and sad.  I think it's been so ingrained into our minds and our DNA that discarding edible food is wrong, that people's minds short circuit when they see it happen.  I once worked with a man named Perry at an organic grocery store and every time he would return from the baler, after dumping hundreds of pounds of food, he would look mortified.  He would mope around for a short time after doing it, thinking, "what a waist." 
         The food industry is a disgusting place to work when you are hungry, because every food establishment I have ever worked for, throws away more food in a day than I could possibly eat in a year; and yet I'm pulling quarters out of my ass to buy a piece of shit cheeseburger off of a dollar menu.   In small spurts of retaliation, I have eaten out of my employers garbage more times than I can possibly even imagine counting.  If I have to throw away 26 rotisserie chickens because they've been sitting for two hours and legally they are no longer considered food, then I am going to do so while furiously eating 26 chicken skins by a trash compactor. 
        Usually, when no one is looking I will bury my face in the trash and dig out something delicious.  Last night I went on a baked goods bender.  I was shutting down the coffee urns and burned myself on the hot metal.  Suddenly I was fighting tears so hard my face became flushed from holding my breath.  My mom told me when I was a little boy that the only way to get rid of hick ups was to either eat a spoonful of peanut butter or hold your breath.  I found out quickly that they only way I could stop crying was to hold my breath. 
        So there I was, leaning against a coffee maker holding my breath for as long as I could bare.  I knew it wasn't the mild burn that I was holding back tears for, it was the fire raging in my head.  It was like the burn jolted out of the mussel memory, mundane tasks of closing a coffee shop and brought me back to me.  All of the uncertainty of California and of my decisions that have lead me here crept up and all it seemed I could to to keep from collapsing was to fill my lungs to their max capacity and freeze. 
         Luckily the trash can was over flowing with baked goods and I soon found myself violently shoving a fearful amount of carbs into my body.  I was breaking cookies in half and biting the center of them, the center being all I'm really after when I eat a cookie.  I was ripping open almond pastries, scraping out their marzipan centers into my mouth and discarding the buttery leftovers to the side like clam shells.  I heard the door open and customers footsteps walk to the counter.  I brushed the crumbs off of me, swallowed, dried my eyes and walked out to great them with an enthusiastic smile, a smile I have trained to look sincere in the face of customer service. 
        Holding my breath, I asked, "what can I get started for you today guys?"

Pure Garbage.

        I think it's fitting that Jen and I are spending Easter morning on top of a mountain overlooking the San Francisco bay.  Instead of going to church, we packed a back pack full of cigarettes, lighters, weed and our journals.  As I sit here looking at the water, I feel like I'm looking into a sandbox after a heavy rain and that I could scoop up the city with a cupped hand or snap the Golden Gate Bridge with a flick of a finger. I think this is closer to God than the pews of a crowded church that smells of a mixture of strongly applied perfumes and hair spray and the bombardment of pastel colored ties with Easter eggs on them. 
        I am almost more amazed at the amount of litter on this mountain than I am the view of tiny boats voyaging under the Bay Bridge or the lizards running and hiding from the hawk's watchful eye.  There are McDonald's bags, beer bottles, packs of cigarettes and for some reason dirty diapers wedged between these ancient rocks and between warm trees.  I am baffled by how little people respect beauty.  How some people will rush home to catch the last few minutes of Two and a Half Men or yell at their children for forgetting to use a coaster on the coffee table and then turn around and throw a diaper, a plastic diaper full of human shit into the mouth of mother nature; and still think of themselves with high esteem.  How some people can sit on a mountain top and be so underwhelmed by the majesty of nature and human capacity that exists within San Francisco, and throw off of it a bottle of Jim Beam.  
         Sitting on this trash covered mountain peak, I can't help but feel a connection between these stones and myself.  I too know the anguish of possessing paramount beauty, of being inspired and radiant; and then having someone dump a cauldron of garbage on top of you.  I know what it is like to have beer bottles dumped on me and left on to floor to roll a few feet and stop, forgotten.  I too have felt cigarettes tossed into my face by people who did not see my heart but instead saw an escape from their own swooning ball of darkness.  I have felt men discard their trash onto my chest and I have felt their foot steps as they walked away, shake my earth.  What I did not know until this moment, was what it was like to feel beautiful in spite of those bottles and cigarettes and trash that exists within the scars of my heart.
        Because in spite of it's debris, this mountain top is the most astounding thing I have ever seen.
        Thank you universe.

Tampon Applicators and Kleenex Balls

          I'm not good at being alone.  I'm good at many things, but being alone is not one of them.  I can walk into a bar, a party or wedge myself between two strangers smoking a cigarette the permitted 20 feet away from city doorways and I can become old friends with strangers.  I can book a train and cross the continent without fear and I can lye in a man's bed and kiss him like I have loved him countless nights before, never wondering why the scent of his skin does not smell new.  I can do these things because it exists within me to be unabashed and careless and belligerently honest.  I can't however, sit alone in a coffee shop or a bar or in the stillness of my living room and feel anything other than a staggering desire to be in the company of someone other than the cruel man that lingers in my mind. 
              I have been in California for almost two months now, a time in which I have slipped deep into my own thoughts and come face to face with my own voice in a way that I have been avoiding my entire life.  It started when I began, at the age of 9 to realize I would rather kiss boys than kiss girls, a fact I was almost instinctualy ashamed of.  For the better part of my adolescence I found it was easier to call myself a fagot and tell myself I was sick, that it was just a faze, and that I wouldn't be that way forever; than it was to confront myself.  I remember hating myself so much that I would stand in front of my mirror and become nauseated looking at the person behind it.  How could such an ugly person be in that mirror? 
          I think in the same way that it was easier to seek comfort in self loathing than it was to seek bravery in who I really was, I am telling myself recently that I am not an artist and I am not a writer because being both of those things is hard and requires a person to, without fear, reveal their mind even when it is ugly and even when it hurts and causes a reader to cry as I have cried.  Sometimes I will sit down to write on my lap top and watch my cursor blink and erase for the duration of time it takes for my battery to die, I have done this often and in those times I am lucky to write a sentence or two.  Instead of writing the truth, I think about how the truth is not worth sharing.  So what is the truth?
          The truth, is that I hate being alone.  The truth is that I've never felt not alone, I have just been fortunate enough to, for brief periods of time, surround myself with people and romance long enough to feel just a little less alone.   The truth is that I've been grappling for love in bar bathrooms, gang bangs and sex shops since I was 17.  The truth is, people can smell me from a mile away and the smell of desperation is pungent and discarding.  I have done things in my life that haunt me, that tug at my skull daily and beg to be forgiven, and the truth is, I'm finally brave enough to let them tug and to let them be forgiven and to quite the man in my mind who does not love me.
            I think one of the reasons I hate being alone is how overwhelming my brain is.  It thinks of so many things at once and it is exhausting.  Other people slow my brain down in the same way half a bottle of vodka or a medical grade joint slows it.   I remember sitting in a desk chair at work a few years ago, using my feet to push my body backwards and balancing the weight of myself on two legs of the chair.  I pushed a little to far and began to fall.  I remember the second my feet left the floor and my body lost control, it was as if time stopped.  During the second or two I was falling, I remember thinking paragraphs worth of articulated thoughts, "Is my head going to hit the desk behind me?  No, I'll be fine, there is room, I will just have to keep my neck tight so my head wont slam to hard against the floor.  Fuck this is going to hurt so bad, where is my cell phone?  In my pocket?  No, it's in my hand.  Don't drop your phone, you can't afford another one..."  My mind raced and once I had fallen and I had stood up, I was amazed at how many thoughts my my mind just had. 
          I feel like I am always falling, about to hit something, and my brain is always trying to keep up with and exceed the momentum of my body.   I think that is a curse most artistic minds are plagued with, and is why almost every famous artist or writers fall victim to drug abuse.  My drug is and has been love.  I say this again, not to beat a dead horse but because it is the truth; my mind is only calm in the arms of a lover.  It is calmed by the slow gusts of air from a lovers mouth as he sleeps behind me.  Letting go of that calm has been hard for me, and I have finally collapsed into myself in the absence of it.  I have finally confronted myself and the truths of my decisions. 

     But I figure if I can get on a 3 day train ride across the America's, I can gather the strength to look in the mirror and think, "how can something so beautiful be in that mirror."

Rugrats

     I woke up this morning with rug burns on my knees and elbows.  The skin around my lips smelled like sex and was rubbed raw by facial hair, and my neck was swollen in little circles of broken blood vessels.   The sun was not up yet, but I couldn't go back to sleep.  My head was throbbing and I needed water.  I searched for my pants and underwear for a few minutes, growing frustrated I thought to myself, "where in the hell could he have thrown them?"  My underwear was behind my pillows and my pants behind my door.

     I was chugging my fourth glass of water on my way back to my room when I noticed something in the entrance of the living room.  I stood still, clutching my water and looking at the evidence of my bad decision carved into the white carpet.  The street light's soft yellow glow leaked into the room, and in that light I could see where my fingers had dug into the carpet and pulled with them acrylic fibers, leaving in their wake shadows of our bodies rolling and clenching and clawing.  My brother and I used to make snow angels in our mother's carpet when we were young.  We used to write our names in it too.
       Last night I made sex angels.
     "To bad he's married," I said to the floor.
      With a defeated smile, I used my right foot to erase myself from the carpet and used another glass of   wine to erase myself.