Better

I'm prone to terrible moodiness. The good is GREAT! and the bad is BAD! Suppose that goes for most anyone. But as ever, the end of the year brings it all back, you know. And instead of getting rest, I'm thinking about it all, bad and good. Because why wouldn't I?

What you might not know is this is the first year in my adult life where I feel I'm ending up worse than I began, for several reasons, which you probably already know. I feel vulcanized in a way. Tenderized. Contrary to popular opinion, I think my problem is kind of give a fuck. So, good bye, 2010, you were terrible. You and your little cohorts; shouldn't be so surprising people kind of ruin everything. Good bye terrible friends, and horrible job, and money problems, and emotional immaturity, and physical ailments, and you little emergencies that fuck with me every god damned day. You're all done. Blips in history. Some of you deserve better, the rest of you can fuck off.

Here's to better.

2010: Read

I used to do a top comics bit as well, but I somehow stopped buying comics over a year ago. Still, here are the books I liked the most this year. It's very difficult for me to compile the books list because, for the most part, I love most everything I read. I read everything from popular books (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was kinds of awesome, UNDER THE DOME was no), nerd books (I really wanted to put NEUROMANCER here but I bumped it for NEVER LET ME GO), and plain old literary books (THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and POINT OMEGA were astounding!). So, here it is. Honest: I think after watching the film, NEVER LET ME GO earned a rather unfair advantage, and YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is here not just because of its content but also because of Ms. Breslin's spate of writing over at her various blog posts and her THE WAR PROJECT and THEY SHOOT PORNSTARS, DON'T THEY? Anyway:

COMING & CRYING, edited by Meaghan O'Donnell and Melissa Gira - When these ladies do a second edition of this book, I encourage you to purchase it. Keep an eye here.


SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR by Bryan Lee O'Malley - Can a comic book series be more perfect that SCOTT PILGRIM...? (well. actually, Y THE LAST MAN was pretty perfect too!) Not going to lie, by the time the book ended, I was teary! O'Malley does in a few pages what others at all comics companies can't do in thousands of decades-worth of pages: give us the most romantic, exciting, hilarious, heartbreaking, and relevant (to a certain generation) story. Steeped in musical and pop culture, SCOTT PILGRIM's characters meander through their lives in the same way you did in your early twenties, but in SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR, the titular hero learns a few things about himself, what he needs to do in order to not just rescue the woman he loves from her ex but also from herself. And along the way, basically, Scott Pilgrim discovers how flawed a man he is, he steps up his game, not only for his love, but for himself. By the end he isn't perfect, no. But him and his girl, have a chance to continue growing, together.

YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? by Susannah Breslin - I first discovered writer Susannah Breslin through a post Warren Ellis made years ago, when she ran her THE REVERSE COWGIRL blog, and I've been a fan since. This year I sound this small collection of her short fiction and it cemented why I became a fan of hers: her language. YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is the various ways in which men are, well, bad. Whether it is the mand who ushers a midget into porn superstardom, the man who really just hates everyone and everything (the title story), the man who wonders about eating a woman, or the man prone to fornophilia. Breslin's words cut right to it, no time for niceties, and it is evident not just in her journalism nor blog writing, it's more than clear here. And that's what draws me the most to her writing, to her bits of fiction in YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? she doesn't fuck around, plain and simple. Reminds me of my initial reads of Chuck Palahniuk. And, all through this, because of her stories, I don't get the idea that Breslin doesn't like men, quite the opposite: I think she loves them, but is not naive to the social failures most of us are. If you're a man, or know a man, read this book and it'll show you maybe ought to know less men.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro - Ishiguro writes about becoming an adult with pretty sharp ear for the things adults do not tell children. Everything is ambiguous or flat-out false. Adults leave out a lot of the terrible things we all have to live through, the honestly brutal bits. NEVER LET ME GO, for me, explores these ideas but expands upon them by giving us Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth to view the world through. A sci-fi story that does more than linger on what possible future may lie ahead of us. Thematically dense, Ishiguro reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel THE ROAD: where McCarthy dealt with a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, Ishiguro shows us archetypes of boys and girls, and eventually men and women, who're raised mainly via their pop-culture (which could seem prescient always), which, at first may seem a bit of a reach, but if you remember finding things out your father, your teachers, your first girlfriend, your mother said were true but really were not, these stories will speak to you. NEVER LET ME GO seems to go far deeper than McCarthy, however, by exploring what the meaning of the soul is, and how it may be proven or not, along with showing the sheer naivetee with which we tend to approach the honest world, even when it's staring us dead in the heart. I want to point out plot bits but feel I would be ruining how much the story builds upon itself. Mark Romanek's film was also great.

GENERATION A by Douglas Coupland.

2010: See

In a contradictory (to my last post) way, my movies' list nearly always consists of films from the past year. It's been a good long while since I've watched an older film that I missed or some such that had an impact on my little brain. Anyway...

Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN isn't so much about ballet as it is about the high standard we hold ourselves to. A little on the nose at times, but Aronofsky manages to get you to empathize with Nina (played by Natalie Portman), who is clearly very driven and a very technically talented dancer, even as her own sense of self and her mind fracture to the point of doing herself more harm than good. The outside forces in Nina's life (her mother, her director, her would-be adversary) seem to play a huge part of her oncoming deterioration, but I think each is enhanced more and more throughout the film by Nina's own insecurities. Still, it's not that we want Nina to see what she's doing to herself and to those around her: WE want her to be perfect, even after blood's been spilled. Aronofsky's mentioned this is a companion piece to his THE WRESTLER and it is, not just as stories, but cinematically and thematically as well. Where I think BLACK SWAN excels is in the imagery Aronofsky's DP, Matthew Libatique accomplishes as Nina, finally, gets to become the Black Swan. She's perfect, of course.

David Fincher directed a script by Aaron Sorkin is all I kept hearing in regard to THE SOCIAL NETWORK for most of the year. Never having seen anything written by Sorkin, I didn't know what that meant; it was just the Facebook Movie to me. But I went due to my being a nerd fan of Fincher's since ALIEN3. And, unexpectedly, it blew my entire set of expectations away! The art direction is solid, the acting is superb (I can see why Andrew Garfield was picked as the new Spider-Man, and Jesse Eisenberg immediately was forgiven for being the poor man's Michael Cera), Fincher's direction is spectacular as usual, if not a bit more personal than in his other features (a lot of lingering shots on the solitary (mostly) Mark Zuckerberg drive home the point each time without being obvious), and, yes, the script was so fucking good! There wasn't a line in the film that felt unnecessary nor wasted. It's not just the Facebook Movie, it is the movie for this generation, trying to be more with others, to be closer to each other, but only at a distance. THE SOCIAL NETWORK isn't about what it means to be Zuckerberg or a Facebook user, but about the lengths that we might go for a vestige of attention, of admiration, of, yes, love. The internet's provided that for people who're born for the 21st century, and Sorkin and Fincher adapted THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES very well, and to say more about the current change in the pop-culture that is most of our lives.

In my eyes, Christopher Nolan can do no wrong. INCEPTION is a perfect film: it questions our way of thinking, our way of seeing our dreams, but not just our literal dreams, but the dreams we speak of when we talk about "I used to dream..." or "I dream of..." Tom Cobb and his team are thieves in dreams, stealing ideas, but now, the harder task they've accepted is inserting an idea into a man's brain: this is inception. At the core of this heist film is the constant idea that is what we dream real or not, how solid is it in our reality, do we really understand what any of it means, or is all of this completely unnecessary since in our dreams we have everything? I want to spoil the movie for you but won't. But what I will say that Nolan as writer and director is a fucking genius: he's done with practical and digital effects things that no one else has done in a long while (THE MATRIX comes to mind in technical, not story, terms), and the way in which his characters, in particular Cobb's go-to man, Arthur, played by the stellar Joseph Gordon-Levitt, seem more normal and true than they should be considering their profession. INCEPTION is the kind of movie every director should want to make: perfect.

I am a sucker for writer Alex Garland, and when I discovered his new screenplay was being directed by Mark Romanek, how could you go wrong? Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, NEVER LET ME GO, Romanek and Garland accomplished in giving me a parable for the future, what it means to grow up, what it means to raise children, and what it means when you discover, as an adult, that everything isn't as good as you're taught to believe. A story set in an alternate Earth that begs several questions about life, morality, love, death, and when it's time accept the world for what it is. Kathy (played by the spectacular Carey Mulligan) is carer, and has seen all the death for a better cause for most of her life. But in recalling how her life and her friends' lives from Hailsham to now have changed, Kathy and her friends show us what it means to be human when you're thought of (if thought of at all) as a product. Romanek broke me with Ishiguro's three main characters. I can identify with each of them, not as various stages of growing up, but as archetypes in the modern world: Ruth (Keira Knightley), a petty and jealous and torn and damaged person, who doesn't quite know what to do with herself so she becomes what she sees around her, what she thinks people will like, what she thinks people want; Tommy (Andrew Garfield), not so much the wide-eyed optimist, but he isn't very pragmatic, willing to believe what he's told, and learning the hardest possible way that the world will fuck you over; and Kathy, a stoic realist because she's seen the truth out in the world and recognizes that accepting it as it is isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I wager she finds herself a little lonely and a little cold. I know I did at the end.

I'll just say it: SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is perhaps the best comic book movie of all time. Screw off everyone else. Directed by Edgar Wright, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD is the adaptation of the comics series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, and gives us 23 year old Scott Pilgrim's trials and tribulations through young adulthood, his flailing band, his romances, and, finally, his growth as a man, as a person. You have not see any modern movie like this, perfectly capturing what is in a black and white comic book and putting it on screen the way it should. And this movie has everything: a bad ass soundtrack, great acting (including the titular character played by Michael Cera), kick ass action, tons of heart, lots of humor, and something you'll take home with you: how do you step up your game when it comes to love, when it comes to yourself?

2010: Listen

These are my favorite records and my favorite tracks of all last year. Not all of them were released this year, but as ever, each was new to me in 2010. As it turned out, if you listen to the songs below, it's a horrible sketch of 2010. I could sit here and say it's all coincidence and be truthful, but you wouldn't believe me. I don't care.

Top records:

THIS IS HAPPENING by LCD Soundsystem
THE BOXER by Kele Okereke - I've a crush on Kele Okereke, incidentally.
COSMOGRAMMA by Flying Lotus
TURNING DRAGON by Clark
WHEN PLANETS EXPLODE by Dorian Concept - Like Clark, Dorian Concept made noise the most beautifullest thing in the universe, a song at a time.

Top tracks (click to listen and improve your life!):

I CAN CHANGE by LCD Soundsystem
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED by Kele Okereke
NOSE ART by Flying Lotus.
DAILY ROUTINE by Blockhead
LOSER WINS by Atmosphere

(Incidentally, I don't think I gave the new Atmosphere a fair shake this year. I blame the boy for it. Whatevs.)

Two

Yesterday afternoon, my best friend and I were on the phone for a bit. We caught up on some menial work things, not-so-menial life things, and we talked about boys. One of the things that came up during conversation was how 2010 sucked. Well, I'm the one that started because it did. As I said in the previous post, wishing is for regrets, but there was something I arrived to yesterday: 2010 taught me nothing.

Maybe my little cursory glance back to the preceding year is mired in my own bitterness and hate. Who knows? I think anyone who knows me well will say I'm probably wrong. Good thing they're all sleeping. So, in our talking, I was telling Golden how there are two moments that stand out to me from 2010 that make me feel good in their own way.

The first, back in February, when we were in San Diego and he was sleeping and I walked out into an early and sleeping downtown to get coffee and juice for us. I walked out and it felt so great and glorious because I can't really recall: I was alone and there was a bit of chill and no one was about and the sun was out. And I remember very clearly walking toward a main street , making a left, and the glare from the sun coming off a building hitting me especially strong but not hurtful. I was isolated in the city. And for a few moments, before I had to head back to the hotel where he'd be waking, it was the best place I could possibly have been (a while back, I listened to Mogwai's NEW PATHS TO HELICON PT 1 and it reminded me of that).

The second was in March, when Golden was in town and we were off to meet her and Terry so see J-Live in downtown Long Beach. Ricardo and I pulled into the parking lot, I don't remember what we were talking about (probably some bullshit having to do with drinking or girls or both), but we laughed and laughed. And as mean as it sounds, I remember glancing over at a group of girls who were getting out of a car, a few of whom were dressed ridiculously for the type of show we were about to catch, and I made a ridiculous comment about how the whores are out in full force. But Ricardo didn't laugh because he saw that they were girls we knew. Oops.

Golden asked me if even the relationship taught me anything useful and I don't think it did. Neither did constant doctor issues, neither did family troubles, neither did money problems, neither did work issues. I don't recall a single good thing - even learning experience - that I can take away from 2010. At least I had that in 2009.

But this is all coming off rather depressing and emo.

It's not necessarily that 2010 was all bad, even I know this and readily admitted. But as the year comes to a close, I'm left with a feeling of "was that it?" I'm left thinking that there was no forward movement in life. There were not transformations, there was no transgression, no illumination. Maybe I'm to fucking stubborn to see it and recognize it, all of these things, but I'd gamble 2011 that I'm not wrong.

August

[written last month. i wanted it to keep going because i liked it (so far) and i told myself to finish it but what with the break up and the new job and all, i don't *feel* like it anymore. but still, there a loads of good bits in it, if i do say so myself.]


Soon as I walk in, I have to duck because here come NEW AVENGERS VOLUME 7 flying at me.

She says, "Sorry, but the fucking Avengers is getting terrible!"

I say, as I pick up the book from the porch, "Is that all you've been doing all day, reading comics?"

"Yup. Jealous?"

I am and say so.

"You're home early. What, you got fired too?" she says because she's been out of work for six months and has stopped looking for a new job since the unemployment started rolling in. "Come on, change. We're going out."

"I just got home."

"Change. I'm going to change my underwear."

In my room I peel off my not a uniform/dress code slacks and polo and take off my shoes and socks. I look at myself in the full-length mirror hanging on my closet door. I need a tan. Maybe a wax. I take off my underpants. Or a serious trim? Those tattoos I got years ago, yes, they're expnading in very unflattering ways as my mid-section does. Am I loosing my hair? I must be the palest Hispanic person ever. When I suck in my gut, you can still see the lovehandles. On the floor next to my closet door is a p-air of boxers I know aren't mine. I haven't moved them since he threw them there a couple days ago. I pick them up and hold them to my face and inhale and they still smell like him. I put them on.

Later, at the bar we seem to end up when we're bored, she's on her phone talking to her boyfriend. He's some sort of musician and is on tour somewhere in the south. I wonder if the south is still The South? What kind of gigs do rappers line up in Scumbucket, Mississippi? For Tuesday afternoon there's a quite a bit of people here. It's not really a bar. More like a converted shack with a cooler of beer, a jukebox full of 1990's music, and too many stools. The city university is on spring break and these must be the kids who have nowhere else to be. You know, like home or a vacation or life. She's finally of her phone.

"I'm pretty sure he was getting a blow job while we were on the phone," she says.

I ask, "How can you tell?"

"You've seen enough porn to know what getting a blow job sounds like," she says but not at all angry nor surprised nor hurt. "He's out on tour, having a grand old time, meeting new folk and I'm stuck at home doing nothing (no offense). I'm going to get him to get a blood test done when he gets back. I don't need to get the clap from hist our groupies."

"That's just nasty. Getting a third hand venereal disease."

"Oh, as opposed to getting it first hand?" she says and we laugh. She finishes her beer and I finish mine and she goes to get us more.

I don't normally wear boxers. I wear briefs. Plain black or white briefs. He wears boxers. I'm not sure what it is when he takes off his pants, it's not like I have a weird underwear fetish, but when I see his boxers every time, it sort of melts me. Right now, however, I really wish I wasn't wearing them: I feel like my dick and balls are all over the place. I feel like I'm wearing a diaper underneath my jeans. Is this what women feel like when they're on their period and wear maxi pads? I keep wriggling and pawing at myself, I must look like I'm some sort of pervert out in public to get my jollies. How is it that these boxers can wedge themselves so far up my leg and ass that it feels like it could be a bad thong I'm wearing?

I look over at the bar and see some young black guy with long thin dreadlocks and terrible Buddy Holly-wannabe glasses and a black tee-shirt with the word OTIS on the front smile and trying to talk to her. She smiles back but doesn't seem to be saying anything. A beer in each hand, she turns to walk back to our table and the guy, get taps her on the shoulder and says something in her ear and still smiling turns to the guy and tell him to leave her the fuck alone. She sits across from me and hands me a bottle and says, "I think we're the two oldest people here." She looks around as if she thinks she can will everyone here away.

Later that night, I'm laying on top of my covers, naked, masturbating with my eyes closed and his boxers on my face and I'm inhaling as deeply as possible, thinking about the last time he was here. He's a little taller than me, and a little bit tougher looking than most guys I've ever been with. He was laying next to me here, just talking, laying on his stomach and I had my hand on his back, at the curve just above his ass, just feeling the finer hairs on my fingertips. I don't remember what I was saying but he was listening and asking questions, and with my hand working my dick furiously, it's not him naked or the sex we'd had that I'm thinking of, just him listening. Even when I jerk off, I jerk off in words.

In the morning I pick up the Avengers book and sit on the floor with my back to the couch and I start reading it. I'm sure I've read it before: months back they decided to reveal that for decades a bunch of superheroes were aliens in disguise, and they worked it out that they could bring tons of dead superheroes back because, well, they weren't themselves when they died, they were aliens. It's pure crap. Superheroes should stay dead when they die. I mean, what's the point of having tons of tension for months and huge hoopla around so and so dying if all comic book writers seem to be coming up with are stories to negate all the other ones? Continuity would be nice. She's right, Avengers suck.

First time I met her she's crying in her car in the parking lot of where I work, which is at an electronics store that's about to go under. On my lunch break, walking back to work from the sandwich shop at the other end of the lot, smoking a cigarette, and there's a black 2003 Civic with its hood a little crumpled and a primered quarter panel, there is a girl behind the wheel and she's crying. Oh, I do think that it's a little weird seeing someone crying in public without seeing a reason for it. But I often wonder whether or not these people, this girl, if they just got off a phone call that clearly went bad real quick. Did she just find out her husband was cheating on her with her sister? Did she just find out she's deathly ill? Did someone die and only now did she just find out? Did she fail all her classes? She lost her job, her kids? We all do such a great job out in the world, being little citizens who're mostly polite to each other, and mostly sane, and we go on thinking everyone else is as pleasant and happy as us. All it takes is a few tears to bring it all apart and start seeing each other as people.

I almost walk by and never again think about the girl crying in her car. But I hear music coming through the car's closed windows and she doesn't see me because she has her forehead on the wheel, sobbing away, I can see her shoulders shudder. I almost walk by but stop and knock on her window and she startles up and sees me and smiles and I smile and it's like her tears are gone.

Years later, it's morning and I've just now finishes re-reading the book she threw at the door and a couple more in the series (you know, to make sure it sucked all the way), and she sees me sitting there, nearly naked if not for his boxers. She comes out of her room, her afro all over on one side and her eyes are still a little puffy and she has her empty coffee mug in hand. She's wearing an old enormous tee-shirt that goes down mid thighs she cut up and now has no sleeves and a neckline that goes down to her stomach and her tits are half-exposed. She smiles and says, "Good morning," and goes to the kitchen and sets the coffee maker on.

Before, she lowers her window and asks me if she can help me with anything as she wipes away at her face.

"Are you okay?"

She says, "I'm fine. Sorry. Yeah, I was just sitting here..."

"Oh, I know. I'm sorry I shouldn't have bothered you, you know."

"No, it's okay. I must look like such a mess, huh? Crazy girl, crying in her car and you see me and probably think it's some terrible tragedy seeing a woman out in public like this."

I can't help it and say, "Well, pretty much, yeah."

"I'm fine. Thanks."

"Um...why are you crying?"

"It's so stupid."

"Tell me?"

"I was just driving over here to get some blank CDs and a new jump drive and this song comes on and I just couldn't help it."

"You're crying because a song came on your stereo."

"That's about it."

"A song."

"God, what a fucking spaz am I, right?"

"Which song?" I ask and her smile widens and hits play on her CD player and we listen to it in the parking lot of where I work.

She comes from the kitchen with fresh coffee for us both and sits on the couch next to me on the floor and asks me what I thought about the comics and we talk about that for a while. She thinks Luke Cage is being underused and now that he has a kid they're turning him into a cliche. I say what a cop out it is to reveal that there've been aliens in the Marvel Universe and that's the reason why so many things happened. We talk about the fucking Avengers for hours.

That first day, well, that night, she meets me outside when I get off work and asks me if I want to go to a house party somewhere in Inglewood. I say sure because why not and I get in her car and we're there in half an hour and we talk the whole way about the song and the album that made her cry earlier, and we talk about comic books, and she tells me about her boyfriend, and she asks me if I have one, and I tell her about working where I do, and she says she's been working at the same boutique since high school, and I ask about why her car looks the way it does, and she asks me how old I am, and I offer her a cigarette, and she says she doesn't know whose house we're going to, and I ask what her favorite movie is, and she asks me what I read besides comics, and we talk about what living in Lynwood (her) and living in Bellflower (me) is like, and we each say how much we'd much rather live somewhere that isn't Los Angeles, and she says she was just in Seattle for a on-tour visit to his boy friend, and I say I've not been out of town in years, and once we're off the freeway and up Hawthorne Boulevard and just off Washington Street, there's the house we're going to spend the night in, and there's people all over and they all look very sketchy in a high maintenance sort of way, and a group of girls watch as we park, all of them blonde and all of them appear to be suffering from a bad case of I'm-a-horrible-person-itis, and I say so, and she laughs, and I laugh, and she says, "Let's get the fuck out of here," and we do, and we end up talking all night in some Denny's in Culver City, and then, she drives me back just in time for my ten in the morning shift.

She's in the shower and I'm finally pulling on some jeans and a tee-shirt and we're going to the mall and try to see if we can re-live a moment of youth while exchanging those blouses she'd bought for her job even though her receipts are lost and she's worn two of them. She'll yell at the girl behind the counter, I know, until she gets her way, and when she does, we'll stop on the way home for some ice cream and probably go to the record store to look at all the music we want but can't afford, and she'll ask me what my favorite movie is.

I didn't say he should but after we had sex he saw my briefs on the floor and he put them on. He asked me whether they looked good on him and I think I sort of smiled and he didn't say anything but said he was going to wear them home.

Earlier, we were just walking through downtown Fullerton, peering into the closed shops and in the open tattoo parlors and in the overly-dramatic restaurants. Just a walk through a neighborhood neither one of us knew. Lots of college kids and Laz commented on this fact. Tough-looking Hispanic boys walking around in wife beaters holding hands with girls with way too much make up on; preppy south Orange County blond kids, looking more out of place than I think they think; no older folk, as if this town wasn't made for them. Laz says it's because of the university nearby, I say it's because this town is a hole. He laughs and his hand grazes mine and we cross the street when he sees a Batman symbol on a window and we must investigate.

A little later, we're sitting in traffic trying to get back to Bellflower. The radio is playing something I don't know and he's driving. I ask him what the music is and Laz says it's blah-blah-blah and he must see I've no idea what he's talking about and then he says if ever saw that generic comedy last summer that was number one for like month according to ticket sales, and I say I didn't. He looks at me like he's trying to figure out whether I'm making it up or not. I'm not, but that sort of stops that conversation. It takes us a half hour to move three miles. He's a frustrated, but when I told him just to take La Palma of Orangethorpe Avenue all the way down he said he'd rather do the freeway and here we are, again. He's gripping the steering wheel pretty hard.

Before Fullerton, he shows up right after I get out of the shower and I've a towel wrapped around me. At my door, he cocks his head to the right when he sees me and smiles and says hello and he's a little too adorable for his own good. He's wearing black jeans and a plaid short sleeve and a pair of sneakers that look as if they were dug out of the trash. Maybe his jeans are a little too tight for him but look at those shoulders and that chest. I mean, really, who can say not to that? He comes in and hugs me and kisses me and follows me to my room as I change. While in the bathroom shaving, I catch his reflection in the mirror as he sits on my bed and he's looking at my ass. He sees me looking at him and says how nice I look nearly-naked.

After the freeway, we're sitting at a terrible chain diner that isn't as nice as Denny's and we're having coffee and pancakes as the sun begins to set somewhere. The old lady who's our waitress keeps coming back every five minutes to check on us and always smiles and there's no one else here. Laz says there's this thing coming up at the Hollywood Bowl, something about a cast performance of some movie musical, do I want to go? I say sure and we're both being ridiculous programming our cell phones with the information. Under the table, he's tall enough that his knees are touching mine. He doesn't spoon sugar in his coffee but adds milk. He says next time he'll listen to me about driving back from Orange County; it took us three hours to get back even though it's normally a fifteen minute jaunt. He says he feels pretty gross and can he take a shower at my house and of course I say sure.

Later, after his shower, we have sex. We fuck. Something. I'm seriously wondering whether or not I should tell you the details. I mean, who doesn't love the sex details, right? Especially when the sex is good (because it was). But maybe I've already said too much already and I'm not even certain I like you yet. I'm pretty certain you don't know whether or not you even want to keep reading to find out whether or not you like me. I'm thinking if I tell you too much about Laz and I being naked together that's crossing a weird line. Like talking to your mom about something and the conversation turns into her telling you about when she was younger and was hopped up on something and having a threesome with your dad and her sister. You know, awkward. But then, I really want to tell you how Laz makes me feel and what I like about him being naked under me. I want to tell you all the noises he makes when I do this and this and this to him. I really want to tell you about the orgasms. And I really want to tell you how much I enjoy feeling him hard and wet and rigid through his clothes. But you'll see me differently. I mean, we don't know each other that well to start, but maybe I've decided you haven't earned me telling you that bit. And me telling you that I don't think you don't get to hear about it makes me think you think I'm a jackass. Such a odd dilemma between strangers. I'll say this: we have sex, we fuck. Something.

Now, he's in my underwear, looking at himself on my bathroom mirror, trying to catch how his ass looks in them, what his crotch looks like (he adjusts several times). He says it feels as if someone has his hands on his ass, holding it. He looks at me as he finally pulls on his jeans (they are, indeed, a little tight for him) and asks me what we're doing this weekend and I remind him I have to work and he says if he can come Saturday once I'm off and maybe we can watch a movie or something. Honest, I'm not sure if I even want to but I tell him, sure, why not, it'll be fun. He buttons his shirt and ties his shoelaces and I ask him why he doesn't spend the night and he says he has work in the morning and it's a long-ass drive from here back down to Venice and I say, oh, okay, and he leans over me and kisses me on the forehead and he leaves me there, naked on my bed and his boxers on my floor.

Much later, we're at the mall having ice cream and she says, "So he leaves wearing your panties?"

We're walking along somewhere in Lakewood. She wants to go to a comics shop near the college and because I've nothing better to do, I come along. The shops along the street are filled with college-age kids. Everywhere, kids. But they're not and I'm thinking about that time in the bar and I'm feeling us being the oldest people here. But they're not kids, these are adults, and suddenly my cardigan and plaid shirt make me feel like a tourist. Or a guy in his thirties trying to look like a guy in his twenties.

Another time, about a year ago, not long after I first me Laz, he has to ask me about my name. He says it's so strange that someone my age is named Horatio.

I say, "Supposedly, my mom was against it. She wanted to name after my dad's dad. Jesus-something or other. But because my dad is my dad and got his way, and because strangely enough way back when he was in college, he read Hamlet and decided his first boy would be named Horatio."

He says, "that's so ridiculous!" He laughs a little because it is pretty absurd. "But not as ridiculous as how I got my name."

I ask him and he tells me he was named after a comic book character from the early 1990's.

On the street, we stop by some Thai place and she says, "Notice there are tons more Thai restaurants everywhere now? Before it was like a treat, you know. Something you couldn't have every day. Now, you'd think Thai food was like McDonald's."

She's not wrong but what I don't point out is that she's reading the menu looking for her saitan with peanut sauce and pad thai to take home for dinner the same way folk always know they're going to get a big mac every time they're in a McDonald's.

Then, Laz says, "So, my mom was big into comic books and she saw this book at some second hand book store, a softcover collection of old British comics from Blast Magazine. She sees it and reads it at the book store - she says she couldn't afford it then. She reads it and say's it wasn't that good, that the art was pretty amateurish but the story was better than she thought it would be. But really, she liked the guy's name in it, the main character, and she said she decided when she was pregnant she would name a boy after the guy in the story. This guy, he's immortal, right? and the one thing he wants to do is die but he can't. The way my mother says it it's kind of romantic in a way, this guy, everyone and everything he's known keep dying while he keeps on living, so what's the point, you know? To me it just kind of sounds fucked up. And she likes the name so when I was born - she didn't have the problem of a husband - so she names me Laz. In the comic book, the guy's name is Lazarus Churchyard but his friends call him Laz, and she likes that better than Lazarus, you know, and so there you are: my name, Laz Churchyard Dominguez."

Of course, when he finishes his story, I laugh and he kisses me while calling me a horrible man.

There's no longer a comic book store where she thought there was one. It's a juice bar, filled with people (it's just after one in the afternoon) and I'm a little disappointed too. At the mall earlier, after our ice cream, I wondered after she mentioned the shop, if I could find a copy of that thirty-year old comic. Can I order it? But now, no, I can't find it here.

She says, "Well, we walked all this way, want a smoothie?"

Before the name conversation, months, I see Laz in Westwood, coming out of a movie theater as my sister and I are walking back to her car from dinner. I don't immediately think he's the most adorable thing on the planet the way I would in the future, but I hear his name from a girl whose arms are around his waist and she's smiling and he's smiling and this girl, she says, "Stop it, Laz!" and I knew then it was what I would name my kid if I ever had one. I didn't see him again for almost a year.

We sit after we get our smoothies. They're good. And neither one of us is saying anything, just enjoying the air conditioned air after the walk and the man who was standing behind us at the counter is getting loud enough that we can hear what he's saying to the very pretty brown girl behind the counter.

The girl behind the counter says, “But we don't sell those here, that's why.”

The customer says, “I just don't see why you can't just put this iced coffee in that blender behind you and turn it on for a few seconds?” He's holding a large clear plastic up from some generic coffee shop. Of course we're listening in.

“Uh, because we're not allowed to put milk in the blender is why.”

“God, just fucking do it. It's not like it's a big deal.”

“If it's isn't such a big deal why are you making a big deal about me not blending your milky coffee in our blender? There's a Starbucks two blocks up, go there.”

Ah, but if his glare could dismantle this little girl. He says, “Let me talk to the owner.”

“She's not here,” she says noticing the five-deep line this little asshole's helped create. “Now, I'm done talking to you and I'm going to help the young man behind you.”

He looks and five people behind him, none of them are on his side. He looks at the girl behind the counter of the juice bar and maybe he's about to curse at her but he doesn't and stomps out.

She sighs. The next customer, a pretty teenage-looking boy smiles at her. “What can I do for you?” He has beautiful fake green eyes.

Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?

We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.

"Do we really need that?" I say.

"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."

We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.

She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."

We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.

In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.

Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.

We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.

Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.

We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.

The walk takes only a few minutes. We drop off our bags at the car and walk to where I work so I can pick up my paycheck. It's still early afternoon and the sun is fresh and clean and there's a breeze. Maybe we're only a little quiet because stories, you know.

Where I work is a chain electronics store. Company's in it's final legs, everywhere you read in the financial pages, it says how much the economy is STILL in the shitter, almost always, you'll read something about the company I work for. It's projected it'll close by the end of next quarter.

She says as she lights a smoke, “I'll wait for you out here?”

I go inside.

After that first night out, I didn't see her until a week later. Across town, where I used to live, is where I normally get my comic books and that day, a week later, I walk in and, you know, browse. I sit in the corner, a stack from my pull box next to me, the girl at the register, I don't know her, but she was friendly enough. They keep firing everyone here and getting someone knew every few weeks. I'm flipping through the new Tara McPherson art book when she walks in. I see her but she doesn't see me just yet: Bree.

At the customer returns counter, I'm behind the counter, reading through a copy of the following week's schedule, just to make sure I'm off Sunday and I am. In the back office, as I'm waiting for my manager to give me my paycheck, one of my co-workers, Mike, he walks up and says something to me about the girl he saw me walking here with when he was outside smoking. He asks me who she is and what her deal is. I tell him to leave me alone. He laugh, calls me a fag, and says he'll see me later. My manager appears with my paycheck and he asks me who IS my friend smoking outside.

Bree sees me after I hear her ask whether or not they have the new Darth Vader one-shot.

“Hey!”

I say hello back and she sits next to me and starts flipping through the books next me.

“You know what I never liked about this new take on the Justice League?” she says, “it's how they tried for nearly a year to have the team without Batman.”

“Batman.”

“Yeah. I mean, come on, you can't have the JLA without him. It always turns out that they need him because someone comes along they supposedly can't beat, and who's the one who winds up making up the strategy for it? Batman.”

“I remember for that whole first year it was them versus really retarded supervillans like Mirror Master and – who was that guy? fucking Glorious Godfrey?”

“I know!”

“Well, when did they bring him back, like, number 14?”

“Man,” she says, “I though you knew what you were talking about! It was number 17. Remember? It was when the Joker returns.” She smiles. We become friends.

Walk back and she's sitting on the curb, typing with both hands into her phone, laughing about something she's writing. I sit next to her. I ask her for a smoke and she hands me her purse with one hand while the other keeps typing away. I get a smoke and she closes her phone and she says, “You wanna go get a beer?”

“How about some food?”

“Yeah, that too?”

“Let's go,” I say and we walk to the car.


Near Seal Beach, we're in a surf taco shack off Pacific Coast Highway, having bad American burritos and lemonade. She's typing into her open cell phone and I am reading through Facebook on mine. One of the great errors we made that is now regular behavior is sitting across from someone at a table, elbows on either side of our plates, not talking, not looking at each other, not doing much of anything in the prescense of another person, but we'd much rather look into LCD screens and see what other people, most we don't even know, are doing.

She says, “You know, it's so dumb how we're more worried – no, not worried, but, I don't know, interested in what other people do than what we're doing right now.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Weird. How did that happen, I wonder?”

“I think it's always happened. I mean, it's probably why when you see a couple at a restaurant and they're not talking, that was their version of what we're doing now.”

Bree says, “Just imagine until it gets even more so. Man, what're we going to be doing, having lunch at a restaurant by ourselves and instead of a, say, napkin dispenser, there's going to be a computer at every table.”

“Like an office?”

“Like an office.”

“Notice neither one of us has put our phones down?” I say. And we both laugh and the waiter guy with a bad attitude shows up, asking us if we want anything else. Not need but want.


I met her current boyfriend a few times. I never really got a good sense of who he is but he's an okay guy. I mean, he's polite, kind of short, a bit attractive, and his music, if I was to guess from the few tracks I have listened to, is pretty bland. Weeks before the current tour, we're somewhere near the LACMA, off Beverly, a twenty-four hour hispter dinner joint. He's here, sitting next to Bree, I'm here, Laz on his way. The other three places are occupied by his friends, Evan, Marcus, and Melissa. I'm going to describe them:

Bree's boyfriend: aside from what I already said, he looks like a compressed version of Denzel Washington in the matter of looks: the potential of a handsome man. He's dressed in terrible loose-fitting jeans and a black tee-shirt with a blue and white skull logo on it. He doesn't have dreadlocks but a ratty mess that claim to have been dreadlocks at one point, now it looks like a demolished bird's nest. His white and blue sneakers are impeccable.

Evan is the most good looking of everyone here and incredibly nice. He's biracial, you can tell, and his hair is cropped very thinly, and is in a black polo and regular fitting jeans and black sneakers. He smiles and it reminds me of Blair Underwood when more people than just me knew who he was. He's incredibly polite and know what he's talking about. Very confident. Something clicks in my head when he and I are talking about the ridiculous proliferation of free online-only record releases. The bad thing about him is his shirt's collar is turned up. On purpose.

Marcus and Melissa are together. They're married. He's been living in California since he was thirteen but still has the trace of an English accent and has the whitest skin I've ever seen. So perfect too. He's white and has freckles and green eyes but brown hair. He's cute in an Eric Stolz kind of way, crossed with Julienne Moore. He meets us after he's done with work over at the Flynt Publications building and I fight my urge to ask him if he works on Hustler. Melissa is Evan's sister and very pretty. She doesn't wear a wedding band and has a short afro and is very curvy. Very sexy. She too meets us after her job at a law office in West Hollywood.

I tend to describe people by my ideas of what movie stars look like.

Near Seal Beach, the waiter leaves after we ask for more lemonade and the check. After he huffs and rolls his eyes as he walks away.

I say, “Did you see that asshole?”

“Who cares? Dude's just a dick.”

“I'm a dick too, but not at work.”

“Oh, I think you probably are. Dealing with jerks like us, asking for more service from the waiter.”

“Probably, you're right.”

“I don't really want to go home. It's so nice out. Do you have plans?”

I don't.

She says, “Want to go to Hollywood?”

“Sure. What's out there?”

“It's not here.”

Before, after the dinner, Laz walks me to my car and says how Bree's friends are pretty nice cool people and I say so too. We make vague plans to come back here some other time. He asks me if I want to meet him at his house and I say sure, he smiles. I ask him what he thought of Bree's boyfriend and he smiles and maybe is thinking whether or not he should tell me what he really thinks or a polite non-committal answer. I tell him to be honest.

Laz says, “I don't get why your girl is seeing that guy. He's not at all attractive, his music is terrible (yes, I had to listen to it before coming here, that's why I was late), and what's with his hair? She's much to pretty and nice for that guy.”

I point out both of them didn't talk much.

“I didn't want to talk to him. There's something off about that guy. Watch, you'll see I'm right.”

Bree and I get up to go and I pay the check with exact change. The waiter is walking in our direction, giving us a perfunctory smile and an emotionless thank you. I don't say anything to him, and we walk out, but I look back to see him pick up the money and check just to see his face get even more dour.


We're crossing Sunset when a gray SUV runs a red light and slams into a white Mercedez. All metal and rubber and scares the shit out of us.

Another time, before, but I can't remember when, Laz and I are walking down Fairfax after parking and it's the middle of the night and we're maybe hungry and whether he is or I am, Canter's is the only place that's open. No traffic. Very little. People just lingering about ever couple of blocks or so. In the distance I can hear a siren and I think it's a firetruck. We get to the diner and get seated and the waiter is a middle-aged Hispanic guy with a thick accent and we each order coffee. He's so sleepy.

On Sunset, the accident isn't as bad as it sounded. No one is hurt but the Mercedez seems like is irreplaceable. The driver is a young woman, pretty, maybe on her way to a reception because her dress is too dressy and she's completely calm. The woman driving the SUV looks like what you think a woman driving a SUV looks like: frumpy but trying to look like she's maybe fifteen, twenty years younger. She's hysterical and is sitting on the curb in front of the Pink Dot. We stand and watch, there are other people, some taking pictures with their phones and Bree says how great it is no one is hurt. There's already the honking from the intersection. I hear the siren of a police car coming.

We eat mostly in silence. A spattering of conversation about the movie and it's maybe three in the morning but I can't see the clock on the wall from where we're sitting. Long drive home. It will be the longest drive home in history, I think.

Once police and paramedics arrive we keep walking toward the old Tower Records used to be. That's the direction we're heading because I don't know why. We stop by Book Soup and keep on walking. There was a signing announcement at the front of the store. Some pornstar was going to be there to read from her autobiography at seven. Neither one of us bought anything. We're just filling time, so we walk. Bree says they reopened the old record store but it's some new company and wants to check it out. She says she read it was more like the old Virgin stores.

Afterward, we walk back the five blocks to his car. He lights up a cigarette, probably so he won't have to talk to me. And I try to hold his and when he takes mine in his, I might as well be gripping wet noodles. A homeless woman looks at us and says nothing. He smokes and I breathe I breathe it in as we walk. He sighs a lot.

There's no longer an old Tower Records building. There is a hole in the ground and two big heavy yellow metal machines on huge wheels and lots of rent-a-fence. I ask Bree what's supposed to be here but she doesn't know. She's not disappointed, and neither am I. Traffic slows more and more as the queue at the accident grows longer and longer.

He opens my door and closes it when I'm in and he flicks his cigarette away, exhaling very loudly, and when he sits behind the wheel, it's as if a cloud of cigarette smoke fills the car. He revs up and takes off and goes two blocks before he notices he forgot to switch on the headlights. He turns on his stereo and some DJ comes on talking about “obvious jazz influences” and “arrythmic time signatures” and “influenced by Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, and more recent artists like !!! and – believe it or not – Vampire Weekend”. He doesn't change the station but raises the volume. All the way up Melrose to the 101, all I hear is the radio and his breathing. He looks so sleepy but it's not just fatigue. He's angry. He runs the last red light before the on-ramp, and it feels like car's about go airborne.

We don't walk back the way we came but walk down San Vicente to Santa Monica and there, a group of protestors are chanting something and are carrying signs I don't bother to read. A throng of people, all wearing the same white and blue tee-shirt with a cross on the back, all of them probably gay, blocking the sidewalk. There are no police and I don't really want to know what's happened that brought them out here: reactionary protest. Bree says we should maybe head back. And we do.

Up the 91, nearly home, he reaches over to hold my hand. We don't say anything until this moment when he says he's sorry about the jewelry store earlier. I say it's okay and he says it isn't. I say we can talk about it tomorrow, we both just need to get home. He says fine, and I lean over to kiss him on the cheek as he pulls onto the off-ramp, and he turns his head a little. He doesn't even slow at the yield sign and a car sideswipes us onto the sidewalk. I scream. He says, “Motherfucker!” and the car comes to a stop just seconds later, and I see the car that hit us driving off into the distance. Laz turns to me and asks me if I'm okay, am I hurt, am I okay. And I say I am and I undo my seatbelt and I look at his face and there're tears in his eyes. He's breathing very heavily. I tell him I'm okay.

We walk back and there is no longer and accident scene. As if it had never happened.

Bree says, “Wow, it's like they even swept up the broken glass and everything.”

“How do they do that that fast?”

“I don't know,” she says.

“So weird how minutes ago there was chaos and smoke and now there is nothing. No one driving through the intersection has an idea what happened.”

“Here to go."

We break up, my ex and I, and I'm visiting my older brother and his family in Seattle. Years ago, we're sitting outside his house, drinking beers, looking out into the neighborhood and looks like any other neighborhood anywhere else, and it's only a little boring. My older brother's been married for years and his wife is currently pregnant with their third child. He and I are drinking beers and talking about our father, where he is and how he's doing, and that's he's coming back into the country next summer. I ask my brother whether our dad asked about me and he says he didn't. Not as if I was expecting anything else, really.

I got into Seattle very last minute because I just didn't want to be home, obviously. There wasn't anything there for me after my ex say's he's moving in with some man he met somewhere in Long Beach whom he loves. He said he was sorry and he didn't mean for anything to happen where he'd hurt me and he didn't want me to hate him but it was a done deal and he was sorry. I listened, of course I did. I didn't say much when he was done. He stood there, at his door, he didn't even let me in. He was wearing the shorts I'd bought him the month before. Yes, I listened. And then I punched him in the face and took off the ring he'd given men not long after we started dating and throw it at his crumpled, crying, stupid face, and left. I haven't seen him since but that was only two weeks before arriving at Sea-Tac.

My older brother says, “Has he tried calling you? I mean have you talked to him?”

“He's tried, you know, but I've not answered and I don't really wanna talk to him.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Nah. He's a fucking liar, and he hurt me.”

“That's pretty petty.”

“Oh, I know,” I say. “I'm okay with that.” I laugh. “I'm having that sort of moment when I'm okay being a bad person.”

“You're too damn stubborn for your own good, you know that?”

“Am I? Probably.”

“This passive-aggressive bullshit of yours, I don't know how you do it, man. You're kind of smart and when your feelings are hurt you turn into this metal robot.”

“As opposed to a wooden robot?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.”

His cell phone rings and he talks to his wife for a few minutes. On the table before us, his pack of smokes and I take one and take a good long drag and I hate I'm thinking about how wonderful he was to me when he was there, present and fully, even when he'd be off at work and I was off at work and he'd send me inappropriate texts while he was in a meeting. He clicks off his phone.

He says, “So, I have a question.”

“Okay.”

“Don't get all offended and try to punch me in the face, okay (I mean, you know I'll kick your ass, right?)?”

I laugh, “What?”

“Okay: so who fucked who when you were together?”

“Are you really asking me this?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I'm just curious.”

“Why?”

“Why're you avoiding the question?”

“This is so idiotic.”

“Well...?”

Now, on the drive back from Hollywood, my older brother texts me he and his family will be in town, somewhere in Orange County so they'll be able to take the kids to Disneyland. Can we get together, dinner, maybe. He and his wife want to me Bree and Laz. I text him back sure, yes.

I say, “He's the bottom most of the time, if that's what you mean.”

“So he fucks you too?”

“Yes, but not often.”

“You like it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, with girls, you know they like it.”

“Oh? How do you know?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

He rolls over and it's morning, and I'm facing his back now, the sun coming in from his windows. Not another ex, not really, but we were sleeping together. We slept together. Whatever. He rolls over, his back to me, he has an intricately ridiculous tattoo covering his back, and when I first asked him about it, he sort of smiled and said it was one of the few things he regretted in life, getting this enormous tattoo that he's had unfinished for years. By the time I met him, he said when we first began speaking to each other, he was adamant about finishing it, but by the time I slept with with him last, two years later, he never mentioned it again.

We're still on the road, Bree at the wheel, punching things into her phone while she keeps an occasional eye on the road. It's getting to be later than we thought and the idea of driving to and back from Hollywood was probably the wrong one. Her ipod is playing on random through her car's speakers and there's that Catpower song I love and maybe it's not so random because the song before was Ryan Adams's cover of Wonderwall and I want to ask her if this is a playlist. She keeps typing into her phone, traffic or no.

He rolls over, it's morning. Over his shoulder, the sunlight refracts and I've various rays of color hitting me in the face, not unpleasantly, and I hear his breathing. I feel him move slightly, myoclonic twitches from whatever he's dreaming, and this isn't the last time we sleep together but after my break up nearly a year before, it feels as if whenever I sleep with someone it will be the last time I'll sleep with that person. He isn't like that and I don't know why for month's I will sleep with him. He will kiss me in a mechanical pornographic movie sort of way – a precursor to him letting me be fucked. When he said he didn't want anything serious but fucking, I jumped at the chance because fucking is better than still pining over someone who still emails you or calls you once a week. He hurt me and now I'm hurting him and I think about last year when my older brother called me petty out on his porch.

Bree says there's a party somewhere in South Gate, do we want to go. And because I don't know why I say, yes, we do want to be there.

I turn onto my back and hear him sleep. The sun doesn't move. At that point maybe I'm thinking that I don't really dislike him, not really. I definitely don't like him. Whether he's the good thing about a bad situation, I can't say. He's sleeping while I've been awake the entire night since he pulled off the final condom and said he needed to take a shit and did and came into bed reeking of come and amyl nitrate and sweat. My sweat. And I listen to him fall asleep and I'm thinking how much I want to return all of these phone calls and emails and it hurts so much to think that I won't do it because it would mean defeat and, naturally, I think this is the most childish thing about me and I'll probably be this way for the rest of my life. I'm twenty-three, sleeping next to him, the sun in my face.

We're the first ones to show up to the house in South Gate. This is how bored we are. We arrive and open beers and there's us two and Brittany, girl whose house we're in. Even her boyrfriend isn't here. She's playing something over the stereo that reminds me of old goth music from junior high school and I ask Brittany where she went to school after high school. Brittany isn't a friend the way that Bree is my friend. She's someone we know the way you get to know the girl behind the counter at the coffee shop: routine. She and Bree worked together for about a second in a second-hand store when we were in college and Bree says she just never deleted Brittany's number from her cell phone's memory. That's how I know her. At a party off campus, then, I'm told Brittany and I made out. I don't remember that. Brittany tried to hold my hand once at a hip-hop show a year after that. This music is terrible.

Naked, I get up and sit on the toilet, waiting for something to happen. I don't close the door. Through the hallway connecting the living room and the bedrooms (his apartment is huge and has three of them), I hear noise, rustling. He's getting up.

Brittany sees me eyeing her book shelves and says most of the comics are her boyfriend's, whatever this one's name is. She has had a lot of them in the time I've known she exists. It's what I hear. Gossip. If that's the case, I say, than your boyfriend has impeccable taste. I say this because he has an original printing of Box Office Poison and Blankets. She says she doesn't read them. She doesn't get them. Brittany, she says she used to read X-Men when she was a kid and there was an X-Men cartoon show. Bree on the brown leather couch, her legs underneath her, is talking to someone on the phone, and Brittany's stereo changes from terrible music to Chuck Ragan's first record.

After a shower, finally he emerges from his bathroom, and I'm putting my clothes back on. He says he wants to go out for breakfast and do I want to come and I say thanks, but no, I ought to get home. He stands in his bathroom doorway, naked but for the towel wrapped around his waist, steam pouring from behind him. He's muscular in the same what linebackers are muscular which is tangentially. I love his chest. He crosses his very impressive arms across the aforementioned equally impressive chest and looks at me and smirks. I look at him and I think I try to smile. It's not the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, I didn't then, and now, here, thinking about it, it should have been, not because he was a bad person, but I was running away and I think, even then, that was what would help me more than anything else, running away into brutally meaningless fucking (not sex), instead of answering something as small and wonderful as an email that asked how I was doing and said that I was missed and that I should call him back. I didn't. I never returned any of those calls or emails.

Brittany's party, two whole hours after Bree and I arrived, is actually entertaining and fun and I'm dancing with a girl with blonde dreadlocks who said she wanted to make out with me but settled for a dance.

In my car, after I leave his apartment, I turn up the music as loud as I can stand it and peel out and never take my foot off the accelerator once I'm on the freeway. It won't be the last time he and I will sleep together, I know this now, but I didn't then, and I'm thinking about what the sunlight looked like coming through his window, over his shoulder, and how inert it made me feel. Running away.

At the party, I see him. The man with the tattooed back, whose bed I was in for a long time. He sees me. We're both older but he sees me and smiles. I smile back. It isn't shock but what a tiny universe we live in. He comes in alone and I'm still dancing with the dreadlocked girl and he sees me and recognition: years have passed since last I saw him and I see nothing of me then when he appears. I don't feel the me from before now, here, dancing, a bit sweaty. He smiles at me and I wonder why I ever though he was a good escape. One of those things to regret for the rest of my life. I dance and dance and dance and dance.

Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?

We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.

"Do we really need that?" I say.

"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."

We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.

She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."

We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.

In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.

Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.

We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.

Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.

We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/softskinsells/blog#ixzz0zFTQ21TQ

Years ago, he invited me to his apartment for a beer. This is after we spent some time talking about the ridiculousness of the comics I was reading outside of a Starbucks after class. So long ago and still it's as if it's happening right now. Everything seems to always be happening at the same time in my head. Everything. Then. Now. Now, in his apartment that he shares with three other guys (only two bedrooms, one of them sleeps on the couch) and I look around and there's a futon in the main room facing a huge television set with all of the video game systems hooked up to it but no cable box. Shelves everywhere with records – vinyl – and CD's and DVD's and comic books seem to cover every available wall space. He sees me looking around and says none of it is his. Like he's embarrassed. Why did I come here?

We go to Target, after the mall, because we need some things for the house. The closest store is also a half block away from where I work and it's Thursday and I need to pick up my paycheck. We walk in and she grabs a shopping cart the size of my first car.

"Do we really need that?" I say.

"Maybe," she says, "let's see if we can fill it up."

We walk down the main aisle toward where the clothing departments are. There's a rack that looks like a broken and hobbled old skeleton with colorful swim suits and bikinis hanging off it. She stops and picks out a one-piece and holds it against me. She looks at me as if she's seriously considering getting me this and that I would seriously consider it wearing it at some point.

She says, "I like this color on you." She's serious. She drops it in our cart and we move on to where the lingerie is and she says, "I need a new bra."

We're both naked, our clothes lying on the floor, he's on top of me on the futon. He smiles down at me and his brown brown eyes don't say much other than he's about to fuck me. And I know this and I'm a little scared. But my excitement more than makes up for it. He's maybe five, eight years older than I am and I don't even know why I care about that right now, and he shifts his weight and I can feel his erect penis next to mine, wet and hot and I can maybe feel my heartbeat in it. It's all I can do to not come. He kisses me the way a car crash happens: perfunctory metal on metal scraping. There's more lust than anything else and I nearly laugh, his tongue in my mouth, when I remember my mother's sister saying I was cute now that I lost the last of the baby fat over the summer. He pulls my hair and my head tilts back and he nibbles on my neck.

In the lingerie department, she puts on bras over her shirt and whenever she does that I'm reminded she has big boobs. I always forget. None of the bras fit and all I'm thinking of is how if she wasn't here, I'd look like a perverted old man, holding these bras, lost, where I don't belong.

Afterward, in the futon, he gets up and walks to his kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for me and he asks me if I'm okay. I'm sweating and sore and exhilarated and he sits next to me and I make the mistake of asking him when I can come over again. Of course he laughs. He digs in his pants and brings out a pack of cigarettes and lights one and asks me if I want another and I'm more confused than anything else, suddenly. He's quiet for a long time and I watch him smoke, the sinew of his muscles on his skinny back look like snakes slithering underneath velvet. He gets up and pulls on his briefs, purple, maybe lavender, and not expensive and says I should get on home.

We're in the haircare aisle, and she's looking for another couple of hair picks and I'm looking for nothing. While she looks, I look over her shoulder. I see a lavender-handled hairbrush. It's pretty big and it's not the size of it that makes me reach out and grab it off the rack (there are several just like it behind it), but the color. It's unmistakable. Color memory, is that a thing that exists the way odor memory exists, transporting you to very specific time and place at the same time? I remember the very first time I saw this color. Every time I see it, I'm reminded.

Long after I walk and take bus home, after I shower and maybe there's some residual pain, I'm laying on my bed, under the covers thinking about him, whatever his name was or is, wherever he is now. Then, I'm thinking I will run into him next time and I'll want him to take me home again because I think I like him. What I know now that I didn't know then, of course. But in my bed and I'm sixteen, I touch my body everywhere he touched it, I'm trying to imagine what his touch would be feel the second time around.

We fill the cart with everything from towels to movies to baby clothes as we walk through the store. Everything is a story, a what if or a wouldn't it be nice. And it's fun making up the stories as we go because, well, why wouldn't we, right? So we leave the full cart somewhere near the greeting cards and she takes what she needs and I take what I need from it and go through the checkstand and she pays for everything and as the young girl running the register rings up the hairbrush she says to me if I forgot I shave my head and the cashier, she smiles, and I let's get out of here. And in the parking lot she asks me more about the stupid hairbrush neither of us will use and I tell my best friend a story I've not hold her before.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/softskinsells/blog#ixzz0zFTQ21TQ

More Of Us

Yesterday, Corey texts me about a boy who got in contact with him after seeing this picture in THE ADVOCATE (Corey's blurb is number seven in the series). This boy recently found out he was HIV positive and when he saw Corey with his doctor, something clicked in him to reach out and say what he needed to say, I suppose. Last night, we're talking about it, and I say to Corey how this kid must feel, you know, seeing someone as healthy-looking as him and reach out because of what is currently going through this kid's mind. Corey says that it's happened to him before, several times. At one point last night, I naturally recall what it was like when I first found out what it was like when I first found out I was HIV positive. Then, about three years ago, I'd known Corey for about a year and only online (we'd started communicating via myspace because I really liked his writing there). Below is the email I sent him then:

From: Javier
Date: Oct 5, 2007 11:46 AM

hi corey...

i find it a little weird i'm writing you this email; we've not met and know of the other online. this is the twenty-first century, i guess.

i know you read some of the things i post on here and you've emailed me about a few as i have about yours, randomly, so i hope this doesn't come off rude or in appropriate but i need some advice, and really, i hope you can offer me some because i'm a little lost.

two weeks ago i went to the doctor about something i thought was serious but turned out not to be. a week ago today, my doctor calls me and tells me my blood tests show i'm hiv positive. went through a lot emotionally and mentally over the last seven days, and my initial visit with my infectious disease doctor this week's calmed me down a lot. but i still find myself constantly thinking about it, driving myself crazy when there is no need. just returned from another blood test, and i'm sitting here, trying to read the paper and i can't.

maybe it's not really advice i want or need. but, i guess, what i really want to ask is how did you get over this initial shock? how do you reconcile the news with your everyday life? my friends are a great and all (and i've yet to talk to my family about this), but lots of times i just feel like i'm bothering them (i don't know if this is the right word) with all of this.

any advice is welcomed. as i mentioned earlier, hope this isn't inappropriate in any way, but i'm kind of feeling a little lost right now. hope you're doing well, writing lots, and enjoying this nice friday. thank you for your time reading this.

j.

Last night, Corey says the kid who reached out to him, I'll call him W. And I'm re-reading these emails from long ago and wondering if right now, somewhere in Oklahoma, there is a kid who's feeling just like I felt in October 2007. Of course there is. After I found out my diagnosis, I began keeping a blog for that here and I began posting pictures on flickr as well.
Also, last night, while about to call Corey on the phone, I got a direct message on twitter that said (sic, to be sure): "so i know this is completley random but I was going thru ur tweets, and pics on flickr and was wondering howd you tell ya mom about ya status". It came from a flickr and twitter and facebook 'friend' who I don't know (I'll call him D). We've exchanged comments on pictures I think, and a couple of tweets, but that's it. So, I answered and got back on the phone with Corey. But later that night, as he answered me back and I got a better idea of why this boy was reaching out to me (a latter direct message says, "...ya pics kinda let me know im not the only 1 in a relationship so its reassuring. yall like a hallmark card"), I began to think more as Corey and I had said earlier of the impetus we get to reach out to strangers in regard to something so life-altering.

Corey and I were talking last night and came up with that in this circumstance all we can do is be ourselves and be honest with these kids, which is what Corey was for me years ago. Corey even went further and said that there really wasn't anything that we could say that was the wrong thing and I agree with him. All things considered, after finding out you're HIV positive, what could another positive person say to you that he shouldn't? And I thought a little more on it when Corey said that me, now being the one someone reached out to, could be seen as becoming part of something bigger. And I think that was the feeling I got after I exchanged messages with D. As we talked, I pointed out to Corey that W and D both had not revealed their statuses to more than a couple of people (parents, and boyfriend & best friend, respectively) and us individually, and this, in turn, made me dig out the email I posted above because, well, the case was the same for me then. I wonder if Corey's was as well.

One of the most striking things that we came up with in conversation last night was how it simply keeps on happening: Corey said how at a recent performance he attended, a performer said in his piece how exes revealing their new-found HIV positive statuses showed him how it felt as if it were still 1983 at the height od the AIDS/HIV epidemic, and Corey and I did not disagree with that sentiment. I made the observation to Corey how I think I'm a bright guy, you know, and pretty decent, but still I got infected. Likewise, I said, Corey did also. A little chuckle between us both, but it's pretty much true: never once in my life did I ever think I'd sit here, typing away about this, but I am because of the choices I made or didn't make along the way. For me, until 2007, having sex was something I did to pass the time while intoxicated or bored. It's never really been the most important thing in my life, but when I was in it, I never considered the risks of unprotected vaginal or anal or even oral sex. I was an adult making dubious choices and when I was thirty, well, I discovered this bug in my blood. And I remember being so shocked then, obviously, but objective hindsight tells me, "Fuck, Javier, what the hell did you think would happen?"

Honestly, I think had anyone I knew at the time said to me to protect myself and avoid multiple sex partners and all that I wouldn't have listened anyway. It's the arrogance of the human being. And, even now, I don't fault anyone for anything because I made the choice to have some man fuck me bareback when I knew all the consequences it entailed. And of course it's a little late for blame-gaming. Curiously, I still believe it's a matter of choice with us adults, who we have sex with and how, and the greater responsibility is for oneself and not count on others to look out for us. So paradoxical, this, since I want folk to be safe, but am not so forceful in that belief.

So: W and D are part of this whole of us HIV positive men of color. I'm not out to castigate and chastise but to listen and hopefully help. Because I remember exactly how each of these two boys are feeling right now. I remember how it felt to hit the send button in that email to a stranger of whom one of the things I knew was his HIV status. Because then, like W and D, all I wanted was someone to listen to me and tell me something. Anything. And like W and D and Corey and I, there will unfortunately always be more and more of us who need US.

Of course, we will always be here.

On!

Yesterday, Corey had his one-man show debut at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. He talked about himself and God and Love (I'm not sure if he meant to be heard as capitalized Love but probably), and the interconnectedness of everything, and sex, and sexuality, and even the television show DYNASTY. For those of us who know him, aside from the obvious affection, I think it was a bit more of insight into the man than I think we might have known. I know it was for me. And at the same time, personally, I find the way he thinks and feels and believes about the world a little fascinating, so seeing it performed in such a lyrical way and with such humor, and in such an occasionally brutal way, it has a bit more resonance. There was a part in his script where he went through a list of five (six?) men who've shown him different types of love and/or how to love, and I wasn't sure how it might play out, and he pulled it off (which, I think could be an entire show in itself with some development)! I'm very glad I was there to see it, all of it, from beginning to end.

For as long as I've known him personally, Corey's always talked about having his performance stand on its own without being integrated into anyone else's work, or as a part of a whole. And this was a great way for him to do this with, really, minimal risk. It was such an unreal trip for me, the entire process, along with a bit of artistic, if not professional jealousy.

A few weeks ago, while I lay on his bed, Corey ran through a few of his lines for me a couple of times. The first as rote memorization, and the second with such emotion and passion and flair, I was definitely interested to see the remaining of his script performed. I was very impressed then, and also yesterday when I saw the whole thing materialize. It's one of the things I've always been curious about Corey, seeing him do his thing, what he loves and is passionate about. And from the initial invitation he received to perform his work to the very last applause yesterday at the theater, it was all such a wonderful experience for me as a tourist in the indie theater community. It really is remarkable to see how creative folk work, you know. It's that idea of seeing how Corey went from idea to show, and that was very impressive for me to witness.

Not until his friend Kacy said so afterward did I think a post-show discussion would've been rather interesting, but I may be biased.

Aside from the practical aspects of the work, what did I see and hear and feel? I saw lots of courage and sadness and happiness. I felt a little uncomfortable and teary and joyful. It's very rare that anyone I know who's creative in any capacity affect me in various ways with their work, and even at the very beginning, when Corey was first talking to me about it and I wasn't sure how it would work, but Corey managed it. I'd like to think that I'm pretty objective. I also have said to him I don't think I'm the audience for his work (he's said otherwise). But it's the special skill of a performance to penetrate even those of us who're mostly rebar and stone. The deeper spiritual themes in his piece notwithstanding, I'm very happy to see all of this happen to Corey because he made it happen. At no point did he ever stop to think he wouldn't do it, or wasn't capable of doing it. Even at his hardest point, I don't think that ever crossed his mind. And that is one of the most astonishing things about Corey that I've seen so far.

Slanted & Enchanted

A lot of people have said to me over the years that things in life happen for a reason. Things must happen in a certain patterned way for life to revolve as it should. Most of these people are probably rather insane. I know of two who aren't, and the reason why I think they aren't insane is because there is an odd type of logic as we talk about certain things. One of them is my best friend and we had a long telephone conversation today. The other is my boyfriend, Corey.

Recently, I told Corey how everything I was reading or watching contained the name Didi. Watched Don Roos's excellent first film THE OPPOSITE OF SEX and in it Didi is the central terrible harridan of a lead character portrayed by Christina Ricci. As I was reading Don DeLillo's COSMOPOLIS, Erick Parker's art dealer lover is named Didi: an older woman who makes time for her young lover because he is more fascinating to her than attractive. Then, Corey lent me his copy of DRAWING BLOOD by Poppy Z Brite wherein Trevor Black's younger brother's nickname is Didi, but he dies at the beginning of the story so there isn't very much there about him anyway. In brief conversation over this with Corey, as he does when I talk to him about lots of things, he pointed out the very different outlets by very different creators about very different things all seemed to have found their way into my current state and obviously something clicked in me. I said, as I often do, it's just coincidence. Corey said to me that's several very specific coincidences. He may've laughed at that point.

Didi is Cynthia's nickname. Cynthia is a girl I think I know.

Late last winter, I realized that the girl from fall 2006 wasn't even around anymore. In various capacities. I'd lost the closest friend I'd made since moving back to California. Previously, of course as I found out, she stayed away from me for the very retarded reason that her boyfriend was feeling a bit insecure with me in the picture. And last winter, as she started seeing someone else, it got to be a very familiar scene. I'm leaving out the few tough talks she had with me and I with her about our rather strange dynamic. Keep in mind also that I'm leaving out a nearly ten year age difference. I've written before that it simply feels as if I was wrong in choosing this person as my friend. In a very unfair and selfish and irrational way, had I known what would happen, I wouldn't have pursued anything beyond a working relationship with her. So strange that folk that you're not romantically or familially (sic) linked to can hurt you.

Not everything has been bad. In fact, we've had lots of terribly great times. Great talks. Experiences. And even when I've been at my worst, I've managed to get a smile from her and vice versa. Ah, but we that could make things different, would be even?

So, all of these signs as Corey might say, right? I've not spoken to her in months. Over the last year, since a last trip out to Las Vegas, I've maybe seen her five different times? We live fifteen minutes apart. She goes to school five minutes away. It makes me wonder if she, like me, thinks that I'm not a very good friend. I wonder whether or not she thinks I'm not worth the effort as a person. Perhaps she's too much involved with whoever her current boyfriend is to not include me. Here I am going on and on, sort of putting the onus of our fractured relationship on her shoulders, I'm forgetting to burden my share of it. I do that. I wouldn't mind hearing it. But I won't.

In a similar way to how Corey and I were talking about her then, I had a brief conversation about her with Golden the other day. Maturity and age and friendship were themes, and in the middle of it I remembered something Corey said to me a few months back about when folk get married, each individual's friends fall into the background or disappear. I wonder whether it's that, you know, if it's what Corey said in a way. Do some people function this way? I know I do not and will not.

As recently as this week, Corey's had a conversation with an old friend with whom he had a really strong friendship which ended, not unsurprisingly, over a "misunderstanding." As he and I were texting about that late last night, it brought back to the forefront what I'd written weeks ago about my own old friend. Still, didn't finish those thoughts. But here I am writing all this histrionic melodramatic drivel instead, aren't I? This is why: Corey's having a one-man show in about a week and he sent out a Facebook even invite over it and I forwarded it to the people who I know who live in southern California, Cynthia being one of those on that very short list. This afternoon, Corey says she'd accepted the invite to go to his show. They've never met, and she and I have not had a friendly conversation in quite some time. Corey said to me it could be a sign that she wants to reconnect. Golden intimated the same thing. And as before I am skeptical.

But that's all I get.

Anyway, this rant is over. Or is it an observation?