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San Diego

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I walked home from the Coaster. Little Italy was full. Couples in ones and twos, threesomes, gangs of men all chests and swinging arms. I walked on the sun side of the street. Girlfriends were on the patios, bottles of white wine between them, the bottles beaded with water. There were families where dad and grandpa both had tall glasses of Heweweizen, slices of lemon floating in the beer. There were couples having shy conversations. First dates. Old lovers. Husbands and wives. All in the June late afternoon sun. And everyone gesticulating, nodding, smiling, talking, their voices like bottles of champagne popping and sloshing into the street, into the sun in the street, India Street, 5:15PM.

I meant to stop for a beer. I thought how a Duvel would look in a glass on a table in the sun, my laptop on the table. I thought how it would taste. That first big sip. How it would feel in my mouth, throat, belly. How a little bit would hit my head, and I'd crack the laptop, and the words would come.

I couldn't find a place though. Sogno DiVino was packed. Princess had too much energy. The place next door was dead. The cafes were fine, but I wanted a beer. You can't get a beer just anywhere. You have to order a meal most places. They look at you funny, they rush you. I walked on.

I ended up stopping at Tango, the wine shop. I meant to have a drink at the bar, but it was packed. It's one of those places that's packed when there's four people there. A shame. I bought a bottle of Paso red, and another because the lady was nice. The lady was almost a girl, and could have been a girl, but she was a lady instead. It was ok. I took my wine and walked up Laurel to Banker's Hill.

Everyone was out in Banker's Hill. A girl jogged past who I thought I knew, but I didn't say anything because she was into her jogging, and didn't see me, and I didn't want to scare her.

I thought about cutting over to Avenue 5, or Bassam, or Modus, but none of them were quite right. Then I thought about my porch. And a martini. The bite and the burn of a first sip of martini, out on my balcony, watching the sun set in the shadows against the wall.

I made the martini extra strong. 10 to 1. Montgomery. I thought about everything while I shook it up. It wasn't that bad, anyway. In fact it was pretty good. Sure, I'd thought of some pretty rotten things on the way home, but everything was ok now.

I took my martini to my porch. The first sip was pleasure. The second was joy. The third was extacy. I surrendered. I sat on the porch, drank my martini, waited for her to come home, and wrote this.

Summer

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

A little prose poetry for the summer solstice. Dance your pagan butt off.

On The Son

He's the muscled one, fecund and indomitable. Kept his promise to take dominion. We adore him without adoration, this one who's brought back the parts of us that cower. Turned our spirits, our work into gifts. He hauls us out in the mornings, we lay splayed under his body in the afternoons, we run wild with his shadow on full moon nights.

We whisper to be polite. For his own good. Yes, our man has grown! Such pride and aplomb! But always, the worm. We've noticed for a while how his growth has slowed. The hulk, hulking, but no longer expanding. And today is the day - this mid-June day of all days, so soon, just as his reign is ascending. It's the begin of his ending.

He doesn't have a clue. In his mind he's still waxing. After all, he is who-is. Raised on the glory of his boundless increase. Why should he have even an inkling of some old rule lingering just outside his light?

It's begun. The wane. He won't notice it, let alone acknowledge it, for a while now. His cock & surety will carry the coming days. He has no mirror, he has no model, She's told him no stories to warn him of cracks or wrinkles or cold September winds.

Above all, what he doesn't know - that we and especially She have seen this show before. It's her burden - To give birth to these sons, to nurse and nurture them, to notice on a May day how she's now the shorter one, to beam up at their June dominions, to catch them caught off guard by late August, to see them fade horrifically in October, to bury them in the finality of November.

How many iterations? And our Lady's still game. Her pregnancies keep coming. It's the repetition, this illiterate patience of the Goddess. An old stubbornness. A cycle that makes a man shake his head and wonder why she doesn't just give up. A man would've lasted three, maybe four go-rounds, shrugged his shoulders, cracked a beer and tossed the whole shebang into the sea.

And maybe that's why we prescribed this metaphor. As a method of making love to the perseverance of our women.

Why did we make words to make myths?

Maybe because caresses alone felt insufficient, in light of what we learned from these sons' inevitable wanes.

Progress Report

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

What's going on...

I've given up trying to blog A Story About San Diego and have put up a static info page. I'll still be talking about it here, of course, but maintaining two blogs proved untenable. A Story About San Diego, available October 2008.
Our first Creative Cusp workshop is in less than two weeks! There's still space left, if you're a San Diego writer I want to see you there.
Attended SDTweetup last night, lots of neat people, reminded me that I need to be more active in the geek community. Kinda lost my passion for it in the last few years - for the networking, not the geekery of course.

Travel

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Nice thing about flying Virgin from Seattle to San Diego is, you get to stop in San Francisco. Yeah, it adds about two hours to the flight. But unlike Southwest, you get to get off the plane and stretch your legs. There's usually just enough time to take a shit and drink a beer. In fact, that's what I'm coming to know SFO as - the place where I get off the plane, take a shit and drink a beer. And Virgin's in the International terminal, so it's nice - bright, spacious, and there's several good bars that serve decent snacks, and if it's night there's lots of asian cuties boarding flights for Shanghai and Bangkok and Manilla. Get off the plane, walk a little, do some squats for the calves and quads,use the boy's room, munch a greek salad, guzzle an Anchor Steam, tap a few words, get back on the plane and less than two hours later I'm in SD. Sometimes it's the same plane. Sometimes it's even the same seat. It's like rail travel in the old days, a hint of civilization for the jet age.

What I'm Excited About

Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Stuff that has me enthused...

The Creative Cusp!

The Creative Cusp is Abbie Berry's baby. Abbie's a phenomenal woman, and a damn good writer too. I'm helping her with web design, marketing, and some of that make-it-happen magic that I sometimes conjure.

What's The Creative Cusp? I think - and this is the reason I chose to get involved with it - it's the best opportunity that's come along since I've been here for us as San Diego writers to find our niche, to grow in our own environment, and to have some realistic goals for what we can accomplish and what our role is in the community. There's two parts to it -

1) Weekend Writing Workshops. We've gotten together with local writers to put on fun but serious learning experiences. The workshops will take place once a month this summer - go here to see which weekends are available. Abbie's got a ton of people interested in these things, so if you're considering going, sign up now so we can save your place.

2) Publishing. San Diego is starving for words! Every quarter we'll be staving off the hunger for a bit with La Chingadera, a selection of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction writing about San Diego. If you love San Diego, we need your words. We'll also consider publishing longer pieces - collections, non-fiction pieces and novels.

Publishing includes promotion too, of course - we'd like you to publish with us, but ultimately we don't care if you're with Creative Cusp or Random House. If you're writing beautiful things about San Diego, we'll help you get your words out.

Jen's blogging (finally)

Right here! At last!

Actually, the truth is, she's been blogging for a while on her flickr. A few weeks back she even got a little taste of blogebrity. It reminds me of how much talent she has - she has the eye and the artistic skills of the household... as I say often, I'm only good at what I do because I make up for my lack of talents with my canine enthusiasm.

Mike Por

Mike's one of my best friends, so it's hard to write about him objectively, but I'm so proud of him that I'm going to try anyway. His current project involves housing and infrastructure projects in Cambodia, including plans to bring foundational services to the Cambodian people (trash pickup, reliably clean water, green power).

It's amazing what we take for granted. When I was in Cambodia this January, I learned firsthand what not having trash pickup means. It means severe air pollution. Why air pollution? Because without trash pickup, everyone burns their trash. A pickup service would mean cleaner air, meaning less respiratory problems, meaning a happier, healthier Cambodia. Who knows what art, what words might come out of the place if half the people weren't spending their lives hacking up a lung?

I chat with Mike a few times a month, and every time I hear from him there's a part of me that cringes, because when you dream as big as he's dreaming you're bound to get spanked a few times. Not this guy though! His dreams just keep getting bigger - in addition to his American investors he has Korean, Chinese and Cambodian investors lines up as well. Mike's a great guy with a big heart, and I know whatever he ends up with over there, it'll be good.

A Story About San Diego

I started this novel on December 26, 2005. Two and a half years later, the end is finally in sight. Thank you everyone who's read the early drafts and given me all that valuable feedback - I couldn't have done this without you.

More soon on the book, I promise...

Tacoma

Sat, 24 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I stopped at my sushi bar in Tacoma for some fish and a respite before a week at my mother's. It's Charlie's place. Charlie this slender happy-eyed Tokyo fishman with his knives, and his daughters up front taking care of the tables and giggling at his silly jokes. I go to Charlie's because of the fish, and also because there's usually some fellow lunatics at the bar. This time it's a fine pair, a seasoned hardarm with a busty blonde half his age perched on his elbow. The two of them halfway down a big bottle of sake. Right away they decide they want to put some of it in me too. Fine with me! Her fleshes just about pour out of her tank top as she hands me the little sake cup. Kampai! Yahs! Where you froms? Here try this... it's so good! Char-lie! As the fish goes down and the shots pile up, the 'Hais!' and 'Kampais!' get more guttural, more sincere. Charlie matches us shot for shot, same as every night. 'Fliday niiiight, ayte-fohty-fiiiive, tiiime to dlink!' His assistant just frowns and mixes his spicy salmons. He doesn't drink. He gave it up. Used to drink like a fish, until he wised up. He's that kind of guy, a wise guy, a guy who gives you the final score of the Mariners game-on-tape, just to make sure it's ruined for you, too. It'll be a shame when Charlie retires, I'll miss the place...

San Diego

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

...And past this construction site on Cortez Hill, trucks full of pipes and long strands of rebar, this union man all sardonic waiting for us way-to-cube-farms to drive by - lunchpail in a sooty hand that never gets clean and where's he stick that & who let's him stick it there & does he hug his daughter with it too? Head cocked forty-five degrees, eyes rolled, like 'I don't know what you think you fucking mean by all these white collar deli-ca-cies but I got your seventeen inch guns right here, so you just scoot on by man-childs', and in my rearview he crossed the street crooked-legged just like a cowboy...

San Diego

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Something big is coming. What exactly, I can't quite say yet. More will be revealed...

it was a marine air day
and I had the top down
the cool air, my bare chest,
driving with my pelvis -
kicking the car's clutch
working her stick through the gearbox
moving bodily, my arms extensions of belly
jamming home now with my other foot
on the gas, really getting on that thing,
jerking my little car through the alley
darting into the avenue traffic
winding around the little S bend
flinging down the hill
into the bright white day and the 5
- it's all on the way to LA.

Poetry

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

There's an underlying tension that becomes necessary when the poet reaches a certain age and realizes that things happen, utterly, and without violence or turbulence but rather mom's sublime decisiveness...

the thing is sad, maybe, but also hopeful, confident, full of plans which are made not oblivious to the rules but wholly conscious of them - nine innings, sixty minutes, a single beating heart.

It was the story (at Leland and Park)

I sat under that oak in Peers Park
around eight on a late-April Tuesday
her ten-speed leaning against the trunk
a sack of pastries between my feet
the lawn glistening in the post-dawn
red-breasts chirping & yanking at worms,
the SF train blowing two miles north.

My mind was on her & her fleshes
in hardcore flashes from last night
and earlier grins signing the docs
and all of our plans for the place -
the den, the office, the hobby room
the downstairs which we'll rent and
the wall we'll knock down and which part
of the yard our garden will go -

when I happened to notice
an accident, a happenstance -
one green leaf from that old oak
falling
without chorus or circumstance
pattering on the gleaming lawn
for no good reason, and no good rhyme,
and in what month, and at what time?

San Francisco

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The bay area this weekend - oysters at the Ferry Plaza for breakfast, then the CalTrain to Palo Alto to see Jesse's new house. It's a wonderful time to be moving around in California. Late spring. March's green hills are giving way to summer's honey. Everything's awake, pulsing, buzzing - like a big bee garden, as John Muir said.

The novel this summer - it's going to happen. I work nearly every morning these days, even if it's only for an hour. Heck, some days I'd be happy with an hour. Yesterday it was a quick 15 minutes, chopping up a few stray paragraphs in Gelato Vero. Editing a novel like this is like attacking a big hunk of marble with an ice pick. You've gotta just focus on what's in front of you. If you start thinking about all that marble, you're done for. It'll daunt you in a hurry.

Hillcrest

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Because it's my last spring in San Diego I'm noticing things. For example, on Penn between first and third, the sidewalk is blooming. Right there in the crack, these nice pink cups are shooting up, wagging in our morning spring breezes. It's a vine, doing what vines do, creeping along the edge of the sidewalk and the road. It's also life, in her syrupy dominion, trickling into everything.

Happy Earth Day. Like George Carlin says (with that mad stage-performing glee of his, which is essential context for any of his quotes), 'The planet is fine. It's the people who are fucked!'

Convalescene

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Finally, keys and whitespace again. Finally, the rules and regulation of english grammar, funneling their way through my brainpain and into these ten fingers. Finally, the tradition of my race, its culture, its collected best practices which are in fact collected by no-one but are our vocal melange - the all inclusive English collection. It includes American History Part 4 The Legacy of the Monroe Doctrine and it includes Pynchon and it includes the wildest shithouse porn. Its rules can be prescriptive or proscriptive, but they're always laid out firmly, with grave predictions for the wayward, though with a courtroom wink and a banker's nod we understand them to be quite malleable.

Finally, caffeine again. Finally, the hiss and fuss of a machine being tuned. Finally, the blast of caff which brings with it the electric rush of ideas. I love anything that brings us up, and maybe it's caff that I love best. It's such a loving up, such a brute but also familial jolt - like rough sex with a long-term lover. There's is no other upper that will stick around when the deed is done, will lick your wounds, will straighten your shirt, tie your tie and then send you out into the world not only fit for battle, but better off than when you found her.

Sick

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

it's always the one you love

French pastry guy at the Hillcrest Farmer's Market - the one at the stand with the yummy olives and the feta - thought I'd try his ham & cheese croissants. Took them home and heated them up - Not enough heat to kill whatever meanie was in there. Jen got it a little - nausea all day sunday - I got nuked. Puking and fever and puking and puking on Sunday. Liquid diet Monday and Tuesday. Finally, today, a foray back to solid foods - crackers, rice, cookies. Flavorless calories. Still really weak. Haven't written since Saturday. Been going to work because I'm a glutton for punishment? Yup, must be it.

2008 Spring Trip To Tucson

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The weekend in Arizona :

Thursday night flight to Phoenix, rental car, drive to Tucson.

Up early friday morning for espresso. First-morning best-morning. Saguaro East, a photo mission. Lunch at El Guero Canelo. Benson AZ. Sunset shooting in Saguaro East. Dinner from El Minuto, carne seca and menudo washed down by a Santa Cruz Mountains pinot.

Saturday morning's drive to Saguaro West. Then lunch at El Mezon del Cobre. The drive to Mesa via Casa Grande National Monument. Tom, the wife, the kid.

Sunday morning a buzz around downtown Phoenix shuttered for Easter, then out.

San Francisco

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

He'd been to San Francisco. He wanted to talk about it. He talked about the hills, and the architecture, and the cold fog that comes in around four in the afternoon. Yes, I told him, it's quite cold. He was being cautious and only talking about things how they were. I nodded for him to go on. There was something about it, did I know? I did. He looked at his wife, and she was a little embarrassed, like Oh no, here he goes. There was something, he meant, almost, romantic about it? Kind of? Yes, there is. Mostly it was unnamable, wasn't it? Yes, I agreed. San Francisco is very romantic. His wife laughed. He was relieved. We talked about the other cities we'd been to in America. St. Louis. Phoenix. And Denver. They were just ordinary places with their plusses and minuses, and they were easy to talk about in those terms. Later when we talked about Europe, I told him to pay attention when he's in those German cities, because that thing he'd felt in San Francisco? It would be there. He beamed and said he would, and his face was red, and his eyes were a little damp, and when breakfast was over we shook hands. I never saw him or his wife again. But I hope they make it to Europe someday.

Tucson

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Tucson, finally, after a low-sleep night. This is Southwest City. Long red-light boulevards that lead nowhere. Hardarmed men who've dump their paychecks into their automobiles stalk the city like hyenas on the veldt. If I was a woman with tender flesh, I'd be terrified of the rapist eyes of predator men, and maybe nowhere more so than Tucson Aridzona.

Or, for another take - I'm having a cappucino on a cozy couch in the middle of Arizona. As far from the office, the novel or anything else that says 'Jon-Life' as I could be. The couch is in the corner and there's power and nobody else around. It's an enclave. A cat-spot. I could stay all day.

Last night I was thinking about the Sophia Story. I was so high when I wrote that last summer, and then I just let it go. How many pieces do I have like that? Fantails that have feathered away to the ethers because of the The Job, because of The Novel, because of Just Too Busy. To be honest - also because of too much wine.

What flavor will this trip have? Do I have room on this voyage for baseball? Can I get the definitive saguaro cactus shot? What about a decent Tucson shot? The downtown is so diminutive. I'm reminded of Sacramento, of Stockton, of Saskatoon...

Poetry Scrap

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I found a poem I wrote five years ago but never posted -

The world slips by
In semi-concious exhaustion
Think of the days of drunkenness
In Londons of middle centuries
When it was Thames water or beer
Wine whiskey whatever –
Dehydtration alone must have led to countless
Depravities
Let alone the warm drunken wash over
Scrupled London the Capital of the World.

Here's the same poem, this time a la mode of 2008. Wouldn't that be a neat exercise? To rewrite the same poem every five years, as a benchmark to measure the evolution of your style against?

Worlds were exhausted
half-humanly by boors;
Think of those stuporous days
in Londons of capital's youth
when it was Thames water or beer
or wine or whisky or gin –
Dehydration can begin countless
depravities
let alone the drunken flow through
scrupled London,
financiers stumbling over
the roots of our World.

Nowity

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Eloy, AZ

I'm at the Burger King, idling in the drive-thru, tapping away on my Mac Book. Could there be a scene more indicative of our times? Here I am with more computing power in my lap than they had in the world a hundred years ago. About to nonchalantly eat a meal that would would $70, $100 in today's money, if it was possible at all - some of the ingredients may not have been procurable back then out here in Aridzona, in the Spring. Idling away in this masterpiece of automotive design, wasting the legacy of the dinosaurs, doing my part to use up another $110 barrell of oil.

Everything we touch is made somewhere else. You know what? It's ok with me. All of it, in fact. Everyone's so consumed with the overarching pictures. I'm referring specifically to an article I was reading in Harpers about the future of economies. You know what? On a wide enough zoom, everything is wonderful. Only when you zoom in do you find chaos. And in that chaos is the most terrible of terrors, but also is the most beautiful of beauties. Me, I'm only in it for the fiction. Show me the beauty, baby.

Spring

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Thunder last night, a good spring storm to wake the dead or at least snoring me. Three times - 2AM, a 4AM and again at 6AM. The waking terror from the booming, mom's biggish reminder that she has dominion, dude.

When I woke up at 2 I must have been dreaming poetry, because I was determined I wanted to write my own Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction in order to answer Stevens' question : What should we believe in?, and knowing that I have a better, more modern answer.

At 4AM I woke with 'all things ought to aspire to excellence' in my head, the rejoinder to which was 'it's good to be wine, because for a wine to be excellent it has to be drunk, hah!'. Nothing like cracking yourself up in the middle of the night, is there?

The final act came at 6AM. The waking terror, the reminder of impermanence : I felt acutely the potentiality of never waking up. Felt the moment after everything vanishes. It was like a numbness, a TV gone off and all the characters are still there for a split-second, just long enough to realize that they're gone. And then poof! Gonzo.

When I woke for good at eight, the sun was shining like a meyer lemon, and Jen said 'Wow it's like there's no proof it was even storming!'.

The Sun Also Rises

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Every March I reread The Sun Also Rises. It's a perpetual birthday present to myself - That book contains enough treasures for a lifetime of reads. One of my favorite scenes is the description of the Place de la Contrescarpe. Jake and Bill have just had dinner, and Hem wants to show that they both Get It, so he describes the scene and then has Bill refuse a drink, just about the only time in the book that anyone does, because the scene taken straight is enough to intoxicate him.

This is my homage, courtesy of Bangkok :

Eventually we told the cabby to just let us off. We'd find it ourselves. The alley curved in each direction and we asked a cop which way. At the end of the alley was Yaowarat Road. The fluorescent lights from the shops lit up the sidewalks. Pop music came from an old stereo. Through the rows of scooters and all the people I saw the flames. They were blue and orange and we felt the heat. At the tables working people and students were slurping noodles. A lady was frying banana flowers in oil. There were iron pots of curry. The lady ladled some into a bowl for an old man who tottered on his rickety cane.

'Want to grab a bite?'

'No,' said Mike. 'I don't need it.'

Poetry

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

4 reasons for this poem -

1. I've been infatuated with The Waste Land since hearing it recited from memory by an Englishman at Shakespeare & Co on a summer evening in 1998.

However I disagree with most of the poem, including the opening where April is derided as the cruelest month for bringing to life these dreams which will eventually be shattered... I've done all that damn it! Lived out the melancholy of my life, as Henry puts it 10 years later in Tropic of Cancer. I'm through believing that life is futile because we owe a death at the end. We're like flowers, more beautiful because we bloom and wilt, like the Greeks knew way back when. Yeah, our future is as daisy-pushers. In the meantime, let's dance.

2. I woke up this morning thinking about how March and 'to march' were the same word, and why, and how generations of men have marched off to their slaughter in March, singing naive songs of bravery and companionship.

3. I'm an Aries and know something of the Zodiac's connotations, as well as those surrounding my later-neighbor the bull.

4. I love March. The return of the light, the awakening of the lamb. And in San Diego, asparagoose and strawberries, if you can believe it.

March First

c'est March
same word as
'walk steadily forward
in step with others
into bellies of Russias' -

and I know why
April is the cruelest month,
drowning in keratin sheaths
the suckling peace
of March's rams -

I just don't believe
- the cruelty not the reality -
for me, giggling
on my way to the stage
or in line with Jean
trampling the steppes,
some General's ideas of Spring.

San Diego

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Other winters were wet and when the rains came we'd sleep until eight or later. Those mornings usually began with nibbles at flanks or pinches at flesh. It would be cold in the apartment but we'd cuddle under the comforter for as long as we could stand it. Or until one of us got the Jones.... coffee. Good coffee. Usually it was me. I'd leap out of bed and in one momentous moment of momentum throw on my heavy overcoat and my rain pants and my wool hat and my waterproof socks. Like a bullet. You do it in one moment and there's no thinking involved. You still freeze but at least you don't have time to think about it.

Dressed for winter, I'd run down the stairs and into the wet. The cafe was three blocks from our place. Fortunately inclement weather in San Diego was usually pretty flighty. Oh it'd start off coming down in buckets and sheets. But then it would remember this was San Diego and politely stop.

San Diego wasn't built for deluges though, even short ones. On a rainy day our neighborhood would be a tidal zone. I'd splash from puddle to puddle, happy in that way you can only be when you're wearing dry clothes on a rainy day. What I love about rainy days - how the palette of the planet shifts to green and grey.

Back home I'd melt good chocolate into some milk, and then pour the coffee into the little cups and top them with the melted chocolate. We'd sit at our computers, cups of cafe au lait mochas steaming away, listening to the rain, expounding on the world as the coffee stretched our minds across the latticework of Web 2.0.

Sick

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Sick as a goat for the last 5 days. 1 day of sore throat, 1 day of intense fever, 3 days of severe nasal drip. No kinda fun, and I know I have a couple more days of snot and coughs before this thing passes me by

Hoping for decent health by the weekend...

Poetry

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Progress, Cambodia, early 2008

My first time in Siem Reap
they were digging the sewer line.

Women worked at it
with shovels and picks
poking and prodding
sublimating the dirt
choking their street in dusts.

We laughed at this progress
or what passed as,
making jokes about CalTrans –
“Siem Reap Trans!”

and wondered why they don’t get it
and when they will get it
and worried they won't get it
and worried they will
as we watched from the car -

windows up & the AC on
our driver honking
plowing scooters and bikes
like a water buffalo
driven through October rice.

Democracy

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Some friends have asked me about my presidential preferences. With the California primary 2 days away, this is as good a space as any to weigh in.

Everyone wants to talk issues. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that the issues don't mean squat. Every politician is indebted to whatever groups got him/her there. Their primary motivation when they take office therefore is to take care of said groups.

Clear the issues out of the way and you're left with the man, and what goes into the man, and what the man exudes when he takes a hard stand on a podium. It's been a long time since we had someone who spoke eloquently about America. Too long.

For me, only three of the candidates look like a president. Actually four do, but I refuse to consider Hillary on the grounds that there's been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House for 28 of the 31 years I've been on this earth, and as they say in Arkansas and Texas, enough is enough.

Mitt Romney looks like a president. But more of a guy you'd cast in a sarcastic movie about a blundering president than an actual leader. He's not my guy.

Johnny Mac looks like a president. I don't care for his allies, but the man exudes charisma and integrity. I'd be happy with him in office. I think he'd go a long ways towards restoring the dignity of the office - and he'd be a fine foil for the big government Democrats in congress.

Barack Obama looks like a president. And he's my choice. I can't stand his big government politics. But like I said, the issues don't matter to me anymore. Every politician is a crook of sorts, a schill for their own tribe of hucksters. This man looks and sounds like the President of The United States. I'm sold.

2008 New Years in SEA

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Something I did in Southeast Asia was, I reconciled my relationship with the sun.

I've never been solar powered. More like the pasty geek. Growing up on the coast of northern California, you don't get much sun. In the winter it rains and in the summer there's fog. You maybe have two months in September and October, what we used to call Indian Summer, to catch a tan.

I've spent my years here in San Diego consciously avoiding the sun. All that reading - tumors, the ravages, the wrinkles. I want to look young when I'm 50, damn it, not like a raisin! Lately it hasn't been that difficult. I'm an executive nine hours a day and a writer for three to four. Staying pasty is easy when you ride keyboard in twelve hour chunks.

Then this trip to SEA happened. To prepare my skin, I did a session at a tanning salon. I figured I'd go over with a base to keep me from burning in the 14 degree north latitude conditions.

That one tanning session did something to me though. I came out of it feeling alive, in a strange way. On an endorphin kick of a certain nature that I hadn't felt in years, one that conjured a forgotten childhood spent playing outside all day. It shocked me out of my protective attitude, reminding me yet again that my body is on loan, a loan that's going to come due someday anyway, and that it's my duty to use this body to its max, not to preserve it behind a sheet of glass.

So for the first time in my life I'm taking regular doses of sun. 10, 15, 20 minutes a day. No sunscreen or any of that junk. Just me and the sun. If it was socially acceptable I go out nude like the woman in DH Lawrence's story, Sun. Sadly, social convention frowns on the nude male, but fortunately I can still bare my chest and go for a walk on a local trail.

It's where I'm headed right now - out to that dirt track, with the weeds and Sycamores and the gentle Californian hills, just me and that original God bathing me with his warmth. Hello Sun, welcome back to my life.

Time

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I told my friend today, I'm not sure what I'm more upset about : that time's going so fast, or that I'm still surprised by time going so fast.

i'm canning our accountant
first of the quarter
he no longer knows
where a half-hour goes
just throws them away
with his uncanny ledgering
for the cumulative effect
of a feature film missing
eight minutes for every twenty
you get the idea of the story
but you're left wondering
what substances you're missing -
or like flying LA to Bangkok
nonstop
assorted Alaskas and Japans
beyonds and belows
just notions of oceans.

2008 New Years in SEA

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Hello from the land of acute jet lag! It's partly sleepy here with a frequent gusts of malaise and a huge chance of general apathy. The five day forecast calls for more of the same, mercifully decreasing throughout the week, until next weekend when, hopefully, we'll have managed to avoid a head cold front and moved into our first calm patch of the year.

San Diego

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Apologies

No, I'm not dead (yet), I just lost the ability to continue posting from Southeast Asia. It was a combination of factors - lack of wifi in Cambodia, travelling with a companion, but mostly just the general fervor of travelling interestedly and joyously.

Over the next week or so I'll be posting selected journal entries and new poems that I wrote during the trip. For now, I'm back in SD, back at work at LifePro and on the novel. Cheers all, happy 2008,

j o

Bangkok

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Riding low on that boat down the Mae Nam Chao Praya after toasting Tao the driver, the orange glow, the water like glass rippled and blown, the neon green hyacinths, a brown man smoking his cig guzzling beer fishing, the whole world teetering, tottering, agog, aglow, flowing toward the Bight of Bangkok, the gulf of Thailand, the Indian ocean, there to mingle with Neptune’s soul in the vast bowels of mother soup.

We clinked glasses, the longtail driver and I. We looked at each other a long time and knew that we both knew. And then we turned away, and both glugged our Singhas quietly to the beauty of the thing.

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Alright, so you've poured 140,000 carefully chosen words into a first draft of something you're calling 'The Novel'. You've told all your friends and they're expecting to read something, soon. The only thing is, at this point The Novel is an unreadable mess. How will you toss the trash and sew together your moments of brilliance into something succinctly beautiful?

I had a math teacher whose solution to every difficult problem was 'break it down'. I can hear him now : I'd show him my flailings at some complex problem that I barely understood and he's get all excited. 'Jon, stop trying to eat the elephant in one bite! Break it down and eat him bite by bite. One inductive leap at a time.'. Funny, I don't recall much of Linear Algebra, but I've never forgotten that advise. It's applicable in so many situations. Like editing a novel -

The novel is an elusive work of art, isn't it? Consider this : A painter, no matter how large her piece, has the ability to view it in its entirety whenever she chooses. The architect can in an hour or two at the jobsite take in the entirety of her building in progress. The director, even if he's making a five hour documentary, can still bolt the doors, turn off the cell phone and watch his movie in a single elongated moment.

Not so the novelist. Working with 100,000+ words, there's just no way she can experience the entirety of her work in a single sitting. Even if she were to dedicate an entire day to reading her piece, she'd doubtlessly find herself at 4 o'clock in the afternoon in the middle of chapter 4, editing like a madwoman, splicing in some new twist. Reading 100,000 words takes days. There's just no way to view your entire work in any span of time that could reasonably be called 'a moment'.

If you can't see the whole thing at once, how do you edit a novel?

One of the finest skills a writer can have is the ability to deal with the needs of an individual tree while keeping an eye on the tree's role in the forest itself. Some trees are worth the effort of saving, while others must be culled to benefit the whole. It's a useful metaphor. Fortunately it's also a wonderful (and profitable) life skill, one that will always be in demand.

It works like this : break The Novel down into parts. Then break those parts into parts. Go further if you need to. Take notes on the parts. Not just about the parts but how those parts fit into the hierarchy of parts and into the novel as a whole.

That's certainly not groundbreaking advice. Nonetheless it's a mistake I've seen many beginners - including myself when I wrote my first novel-length work! - make. I used to fantasize about one day getting my arms around the whole enchilada and 'making it sing!'. (Confession : When I was working on my first novel I used a single word doc named Enchilada.doc). And that day of mastery was coming! Soon!

Only of course it never came... And I learned the hard way. You can't work on 'the novel'. You have to work on pieces of the novel. Not even on one chapter - most chapters are too big to handle in a single sitting. They simply encompass to much - too many sways, too many nuances, too many inductive leaps. I mean work on a section, on a paragraph, on a single key sentence. The smaller the unit that you're working on today, the better chance you have of either making it shine brilliantly or finding out that it just doesn't belong. It sounds silly and obvious, but it's true.

I've slowly developed a rule - each component part should have as much if not more written about it than it contains. For example, if I have a 3500 word section but I've only taken 1000 words of notes on it, something's wrong. I need to reexamine that piece, find out what I haven't looked at, what parts I haven't broken down. Inevitably that's where I find weaknesses - in my under-notated parts.

In part two of this piece, I'll talk about how I've divided A Story About San Diego for manageable editing.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0700

I've been reading Tropic of Cancer with Google close at hand, looking up references and street addresses. I had just finished listening to Ravel's drumbeat Bolero courtesy of iTunes when I came across a stuffed swan and some gal named Leda.

How did I miss this? It's a question I often ask myself when I come across a juicy topic that's previously escaped my examinations.

It doesn't matter though. Henry leads me back to ancient Greece and I explore this little lusty, bestial tale via Ovid, Michealangelo, that bastard Leonardo, Cezanne, Cy Twombley and the New York scene, and via Yeats whose poem finally, after so much beating around the bush by the painters, captures the essence of the thing!

And now I'm wandering around the city thinking about Leda and her encounter with Zeus. Encounter! Hah. What a mask for copulation ie : fucking. The whole thing smells like humanity looking for beauty in the animals and maybe a warning not to get too close, or what a woman will go through to have the perfect child, or a woman's sacrifice to bear the Godlike children. I don't know. How can you write about a poem? It's like sketching a hundred pictures about a painting. Fidriculous.

Leda fucking the swan who is Zeus and then having his child is a poem in itself. Yeats' piece, the painters takes, those are just methodologies of reviving one of our old old poems. A relic of dropping from the trees, separating from the animals, all of that. Genesis. All art seems be in love or at least in lust with that theme. Out with the new, in with the old!

It's insane to navigate a city with Leda and the swan on your brain. Hello, fine thanks. Cappuccino please. Yes, dry is fine. Oh I'm sorry, what do I owe you? And then other problems - catching the bus, avoiding traffic, things that have to get done. All of them pushed aside by Leda and the swan, but how far an you go into the cerebral before you're endangering yourself?

It's funny too, how no one can tell what I'm thinking about. How I'm imagining each woman I see enraptured with a big white bird. The absurdity of it - though look around. People are becoming aroused by less every day courtesy of the Net. Not only by watching but by doing. To become aroused merely by watching! It's a stupid thing, really. Real arousal involves every sense. Not just sight and feel but smell, taste, sound.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0700

The UT has a story about a hurricane slamming into Jamaica. The USA Today has the same story, but the headline is different. Hurricane headed towards Mexico. I look both ways then walk across University mid-block. At the corner several women are waiting for the light. Lately the world seems to throb with poems. I don't even bother writing them down there's so many. I just roll around and get filthy with them. Like a dog.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

I have this affection for baristas. It roots back to this theory of mine that there's something analogous to how a woman cranks out espresso drinks under stress and how she makes love to a boy. ('this one here, she must have been a barrista in a former life' I say, warding off ill looks with a quick squeeze.').

I was a great barista. For a long time I was a terrible barista who thought he was a good barista. Then Rudy got sick of watching me fuck it all up and took me under his wing. Rudy taught me all about milk, and steam, and how to treat every customer and especially every lady like your lover. How to open them up so they were comfy in telling you what they liked & didn't. How to accept criticism humbly. And most importantly how to put heart and soul into each cup.

Well hell. I was 19. I'd never put heart or soul into anything, let alone a friggin cup of coffee that I had to make one hundred and fifteen times a morning. Rudy showed me. Rudy who had a smile a mile wide. Rudy who barely spoke English. Rudy who sent half his barista's paycheck home to his wife and kids in Guatemala each week. Ojala que Rudy regreso de la Guatemala, y esta allí con su familia esta noche.

Rudy, I love you man. You're in the book.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Sat, 12 May 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Tom and I are building a great wall of 33. This is nothing new to me. When I was at SDSU we used to collect bottles and cans to turn'em in to the recycler. We'd get a monster collection going on the porch and then load up my roomie's truck with big clinking trash bags. Out in an industrial part of La Mesa there's a giant recycling center. Sometimes we'd get enough for a couple sixers of something good, or an 18er of PBR or the High Life. Personally, I wouldn't be bothered, but I have to admit that living with frugal people has its rewards. And so we're building a wall of empty Vietnamese beer bottles against the kitchen cabinets.
Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0700

An admission : Working on this thing is so much fun, I feel guilty. A bit ashamed. It's not supposed to be this much fun, is it? An artist is supposed to suffer, isn't he?

Bah. I suffered enough living through these days that I'm writing about. The suffering is in my past - as Henry says in Tropic of Cancer :

'...I've been over all that. I've lived out my melancholy youth. I don't give a fuck anymore what's behind me, or what's ahead of me. I'm healthy. Incureably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day.'

More Miller quotes here

- Check out this list of Miller's favorite books. Been meaning to read Petronius' Satyricon for years now. One of these days...

- Right now I'm in the midst of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. One of those books that's been bouncing around the apartment for years, tempting me to take it on. I like it - he's got a great sense of his characters, and some of his one liners are hysterical, and there's even a fine five page Shiterature episode - but I can't get over the sense that he gets away with a *lot* because of who he is. I mean, the first plot twist doesn't happen until about 160 pages into the book (Chip taking off to the Baltics), and the next one (Enid popping the Aslan) doesn't come until around page 330. The rest is filler, character info. Good filler, mind you, but nonetheless - if I submitted something to a publisher where the meat didn't begin until page 160, I'd get laughed out of the room. Heck, if you submitted something like that to me, I'd probably advise you to shove some of that action forward, you know? I'm just saying though - This story pretty much says it all.

Actually, starting with Kottke's reaction to it makes it even tastier. :)

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0700

The story of my first 30 years :

Because many things, like math and history and running, came easily to me, I made the mistake of assuming that everything would/should come to me easily - things like Happiness, confidence, empathy, socialization, leadership, physical movements, etc. Only in the last few years have I even begun to realize that everything I really want from life is hard, really hard, and it requires constant vigilance and an incredible amount of work. But it's possible, it's all possible...
Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0700

At the cafe this morning, working away. 7-8AM these days I'm at Bread and Cie, if you need me.

'Hey mom,' this kid at the table next to me says, 'guess what?'

'What?'

'In 2040 I'm gonna be 42. And guess what else? And guess what else mom?'

'What else?'

'There's gonna be flying cars when I'm 42.'

Mom didn't have a thing to say. I do though -

D'ON'T GET YER HOPES UP KID

and the world spins on, day at a time, same as ever -
Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Always in life with the dichotomies. Secular/spiritual. Mine/Not mine. Legal/illegal. On/Off, Night/Day, Dark/Light.

You'd swear we were a pack of primitives, dependent on our skills of identification to save our skins. That rustle in the woods, a tiger/deer. Predator/prey, right? Come on! We don't live like that anymore. Let's get over it...

I go out in the morning without combing my hair. Without even glancing in the mirror. I go out to flush my brain of these dichotomies, these introspections. Our city outside is lousy, literally lousy with interestingness. Myself is a trifle, a bore by comparison. A bore for sure, at least according to my girlfriend -

I've never understood it - why anyone would move to a city only to create the most banal, self-absorbed, introspective art? They call me self-centered - at least the women in my life do - but it's really more like self-interest. It's in my self-interest to ignore this inner space within my skin.

From what I've seen, only a handful of a handful of particularly devout students grasp the solution. The solution being to learn all you can about mathematics and algebras and calculus, then to forget how to add. No, better yet, to forget the whole notion of numbers. To be a master mathematician and yet to see a 7 not as 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 but as an inverted nose as Picasso did when he was a youth - now that's genius on a religious scale.

It is the genius of Plato that gave us this notion of universals, of some THINGS which can be counted 1, 2, 3, etc. Good dichotomy, this one - thing/unthing. Thing being a variable which can stand for anything. What he really was saying was x/-x. Then he goes -

for each object o in earth
if Plato.IsUniversal(o,x)
o.Type = x
end if
next o

- after which he proceeds to write the code for IsUniversal. You see? Plato was a coder, a poet, a brilliant dude. Genius would have been to know all of this and to smile anyway. To walk out of his front door there in Athens and smile at the birds doing their spring mating dance and not see them as birds or universals or attempt to analyze their mating rituals but to just look, listen and smile. Did he? Was Plato this sort of religious genius? I hope so. For his sake at least, for all that he's given the rest of us.

Why? Because if there's anything i've learned in 30 years of experience, it's that neither intellectualism nor money nor accomplishments can buy H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S.

Because what good is survival if you can't lose yourself to music, to love, to poetry, to a really good sunset, to a really good drug? To, as Baudelaire put it, 'Get drunk, get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose!'

It is midway between Imbolc & the Vernal Equinox and I am walking up University Ave into the latest blinding sunrise. Everyone is on their way to work. Everyone is listening to their iPod. Everyone is on the bum. Everyone has their head up the assholes of their own stanky paranoias. John Gault and Hanoi Jayne are walking hand in hand. An Iraqi opens his smoke shop, a Vietnamese opens his restaurant. Skater kids and Republican kids. Businessmen and a guy who pays a fat black woman to pee on his face. Entrepreneurs and sex slaves. A baby in a crib, a man with Alzheimer's in a pressed suit. Out of the east they're coming, a Nebraskan/Mongoloid horde dressed in bikinis and swim trunks. Joining the navy, enrolling at SDSU. Moving to OB, MB, PB. Here comes another SouthWest full of'em. The pilot is making his turn over Lemon Grove. Descending over South Park, over Balboa Park, over Banker's Hill, over the riverine 5, into Lindbergh - eek eek! Another perfect landing. Man's triumphant return from not-quite outer space.

I should have straightened my hair. I am scaring the kid next to me. Probably scarring him for life. Oh well. It'll be a good scar, one he'll wear proudly. One he can stare at and contemplate the dichotomy of scar/skin. Hah! I'm full of it this morning. Better go for a walk. Better open a bottle of wine. Hell, it's close to 8 in the morning. The day's going by like spring, in like a lamb like the new year, passing into the past, like a football game in the 4th quarter, like knowledge's links unhinging in an unused melon -

Rapidly.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0700

I love driving north out of downtown and riding into the Rose Canyon. You see the freeway, the SUV train, the bitch who just cut you off, the bastard in the Beamer. I see a nude legs akimbo, her right bent at the knee, a straight line grey line leading up and up the long slit of her skirt finally culminating in a fallopian happy trail straight to the gleaming white cross in the center of her belly, the gleaming pendant of Mormondom up around her neck where all the biotech drones queue up to take the offramp. A flight of F/A-18s from Miramar jetting out at 400 knots, the ultimate expression of phallic A’marica.

By this point in the drive I usually have a grand erection going. I’ve been a walker and a public transport kid for so long, I’ve been missing out on the subtlest but most desirable aspect of driving. The privacy. Here in my walled automobile I can rub my cock to my heart’s content and nobody’ll know much less shriek or call cops. It’s a fine advantage, easily worth the price of purchase and maintenance if not the gasoline.

Cross-posted to www.astoryaboutsandiego.com

jon oropeza

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0700

jon oropeza

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0700

When the office becomes privatespace

jon oropeza

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0700

The blue and grey of black and white.

jon oropeza

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0700

I have a second birthday in May, a more important one…

jon oropeza

Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 -0700

April in Hillcrest, the Jacs are pushing buds and there's some somethings going on…