September 04, 2009
Chan Marshall...
I am in love with. Been in love ever since I first heard her song. I was trying to explain this to the girl who was taking me to The Greek to see her tonight. Hadn't been to the Greek all summer - best venue I've ever known, just exquisite. Anyway, when she first waltzed out onto that stage and started that raspy soul sucking shit, I felt like I was falling into the floor. I wanted to meet her, tell her she wooed me, that she should be honored and that so few actually do. I felt like I was saying all of this out loud to my company - possibly foreshadowing lightly of what was to come between the two of us in real life. See, I had been seeing this girl long enough - or better...had enough of a connection and enough respect for her to know we had to talk. We were moving in separate directions and I could feel it. She was absolutely moving into the direction she should have been moving - towards me - and I was...well, standing still. I just wrote an e-mail saying something like, I've only gone on 4+ dates with 2 girls in the 5 years I've been in Los Angeles and loved both of them...before deleting it, as if it was supposed to be some form of consolation for my ending the night with words that led her into slamming my door and starting intentions of not behaving normally around me for the next 3 weeks. I was lucky to be with her. Absolutely and still...this is just how I behave.
September 18, 2009
Adventureland...
Great movie. And it's not because I spent the summer after my freshman year of college working at a Six Flags in Jackson, New Jersey. I lived in a company house with 8 other baseball players from all over the country. We'd have bonfires of garbage because nobody ever came to pick it up and rave dance parties with the European kids who came over to work for the summer. To get let in, I'd ask them to bring their free park passes, given to any employee after they accumulated a certain number of hours on the job. We'd get blacked out and fuck this house like you wouldn't believe. There was a Czech girl Ieva, beautiful blonde, who was always begging me to have sex with her...to save her from the arranged marriage that was waiting for her back home. I never did...told over over and over that I was in love with some faraway girl named Clark. One morning after a banner party, I stood outside the McDonalds by the park entrance, right off the highway and made 600 dollars selling the Euro kids' passes to suspicious Garden State natives.
October 29, 2009
Muse - Berlin O2 Arena - 10/29/09...
I ordered house made penne with prawns in a lobster cream sauce and a small margherita pizza and a Warsteiner. Half-way through the beer I started to feel my guts, shooting - like all that I was going to be was coming to life. It would have happened without the drugs, sure...I just don't know to what extent, and I don't know how exhaustion would have played its hand. The night was too big to leave things up to chance so I didn't. By the time the food came, I was rolling and starving and all I wanted to do was devour it so I did. Incredible. One of the better meals I have ever had - absolute comfort. I was reading the map and memorizing the subways and squares and parks like a machine and the waitresses were softening to me because I am who I am. I started to ask them how to say things in German, maybe telling them I loved them for teaching me, for bringing me along, for giving me such incredible hospitality while all the while thinking I'm on drugs I'm on drugs I'm on drugs. They sat down at my table and we talked because it was slow and because I am who I am and I promised them I would return. Of course I would return. Of course I would never forget them. Of course. The more oncoming of the two told me I could walk to the O2 and that made me very excited, crossing town in 20 minutes while relying entirely on myself and my feet and my toes, knees, heart, eyes...my brewing fucking insanity.
October 29, 2009
Sometime After 5 AM...
After going to bed at 1 and feeling like I had slept perfectly for days, I got up and went for a run. Today, I went west and went for 6 songs and then turned back, all Killers, set on shuffle. I shot steam with every exhale and in spite of things I've been through over the past few days, my legs felt strong, voracious. My breath was easy. I felt unstoppable and this is how it has to happen for the rest of my life. The TV doesn't work so I read books. I have no friends so I talk and wander and explore. I have no fear so I am fearless. There's an energy charging through me now, in this new city...in every new city from now until I no longer have the urge to do this. I am growing, exponentially when I chase these things and knew this when I booked the ticket a month ago, knew of its coming necessity - of all the reminder a trip like this provides. I need adventure to survive. I need growth to survive. It's easy to forget, to get comfortable and stable in the lives we live. To tuck away and be safe and just fucking hang on. There's a bloody red tattoo inked onto this right wrist of mine - reminding me to suffer, suffer in my pursuits - reminding me I don't need to be understood by anyone but myself.
October 30, 2009
John Durban Arrives...
Today he sent me a text and I told him not to because it's expensive when bouncing from the states and through whatever provider is swiping me out here. I told him to write me in an e-mail, not thinking about who I was dealing with...
H / i / B / u / r / n (slashes denote separate texts)
Are you serious? Stop
Yeah, okay / I didn't make it / are you there? / please don't ignore me / I'm fragile
Motherfucker!
I read / It looked good / Those boys can play / Sorry / Again
Alright cocksucker text me. Drinks on you.
Drinks always on me
You're coming?
don't know
Alright dude...
tone! that's a tone. why do you have a tone?
You should come.
You should talk
Halloween. I met a girl on the flight from NYC.
what's she do?
Fashion, runway.
Yeah?
Has 6 friends, same bill, edge beauty the cast type.
My type
They want to get righteous for Halloween.
Coincidence! so the fuck do I!!
You coming?
I always was. For you not them. Though I look a little false now.
Your MO. When?
7, already in the cab.
Alright.
Do you really think we need another chapter?
Yes. Maybe 2. One more push and they'll publish.
Let's make her famous / the city / maybe a pair of dames, too...
November 01, 2009
Amsterdam...
It's almost midnight. I have five hours to kill. At least. At least. Smoking doesn't work on me - even in Amsterdam. I'm not going to buy mushrooms and get on a 14 hour plane ride - probably wouldn't do it anyway. I'm not going to pick up some girl so I can share her bed for a few hours - it's not really my style. Sex echoes too much in me. There are candles in front of me - candles everywhere in this part of the world. I'm still trying to reel in everything that has happened over the last few days, can't believe it's a Sunday and I'm sitting with 3 drunks in a bar in Amsterdam, on my computer, about to be told to move along.
November 20, 2009
To place true value upon anything but that which is internal is at best a fickle fight, and at worst absolute self-destruction. I refuse to participate. Something will be done...
November 20, 2009
Ah, Berlin Through The Eyes of My JFK to Tegel Journeybeauty...
A couple weeks back, I think when I was flying home and then maybe even in recent stretches, this girl got me thinking about the psychology of attraction and why we work or why we don't...why we're inspired or why we're not. We sat next to each other on an airplane from New York to the much aforementioned German city and things happened. Most were real, some were probably invented, but things happened. We traded info and were going to paint town at some point and then it never really happened. I think she sent me an e-mail about Halloween and I sent one back and then didn't hear anything. I was out to dinner one night before I went out and I sent her a text to come meet me and didn't hear anything and something appeared in me. I say this without hubris and in full truth - I don't often get rejected. Usually it's me and apologies and some beautiful thing disclosing herself on the corner of a busy street and my uttering incapabilities and apologies over and over and over. Some of them shed a tear there or when they leave, or slam doors, or tell me to grow up and fuck myself in no particular order. I'm not making fun of any of this - I know how dire the straights of love are to navigate, and I think it's why I so, so rarely even think of fucking with that kind of force. But this girl was different - or maybe what was different about her was that it and she would have been my ideal in that moment - a foreign city and beautiful girl for 4 days and then lots of these: ???????? Maybe that's not universally appealing, and that's something I'm learning too - that everything universally appealing to me isn't necessarily universally appealing. Anyway, the point - it's obvious I'm still learning to move through it with grace...life and rejection. Looking back, I'm not sure where the attraction fell, in the girl or in her refusal of my advance. In her case, it felt like an 80/20 - because she was as curious in the first 6-8 hours as any girl I've met.
December 09, 2009
Time To Put This Down...
I posted a picture on November 20th with a title that said something exactly like Trouble Coming. There was a picture of a boat in blue water. I had Google searched something like Thailand Beaches and it seemed like the best one to fit what was in my head. I used it as a flag, something of a nod to myself to mark the moment I decided that this coming April, when my lease in LA expires, I'm buying a one way ticket to live in Thailand for a bit of time. It's not an I've had enough or an expat thing, quite the contrary. In my mind, the one life I want to live sounds exactly like this: see the world, place your voice in that world, give it life. I've always had this notion of selling a script or getting an advance on a book and using it to wipe away the 10,000 I owe in debt and then escape to the world and live somewhere where I don't have to worry about that shit and just create. Bleeding artist, I know, but if you know any truth to me, you know that's my heart. That's what I've got to stay true to. Something happened to me recently, some sort of epiphany I always knew was there. I'm a slave. The job I work runs me in circles just to support me and allow me time to write and create from Los Angeles. I love Los Angeles - there's nowhere like it...and I live a good life, I do. My complaints are so petty but still, this notion that's echoing, and it is, is saying something like what the fuck are you waiting for what the fuck are you waiting for what the fuck are you waiting for? Maybe I would feel more chained if I didn't have an escape, but the truth and my great fortune is that I have a golden ticket - a piece of paper that could remove my debt and get me where I want to go - a land where I can rent a shanty on a cliff on a beach for 5 dollars a day, where I can eat all I need for 2, where I could stretch one thousand dollars forever if I needed to. What the fuck am I waiting for? I'm not anymore. I'm gone.
This Monday, I met with a book manager that Team Burn set me up with. We had drinks in Culver City and he said something like I read everything...fucking everything from unpublished authors and this is the best thing I've read in a long time. Then he said these two magic words that went exactly like this, maybe ever. Then he told me we were going to sell it in the new year, to be ready to storm New York in February. Two days prior, the Bestselling NY Times Titan I got the book to sent me an e-mail apologizing for the wait, but that he was nearly done and that it was exactly, really...really good...very impressive. Then he told me to check back in two weeks. I didn't tell him I close strong, that if I had him early, I'll most certainly have him late. In both cases, I don't know what I felt. I've always had belief. Maybe at some point, I thought some form of validation would come but now I don't think it ever will. None of this matters. It can't matter so I'm glad it doesn't. Whether I sell this thing or whether it gets published matters but can't. If my work never sniffs a screen or a hardcover matters but can't. I was in a pure place on November 20th, alone, me and my pen and what we came up with, me and my pen, was something exactly like, we know exactly what this next book is going to be about...we know what we want to say...write it...do it...make it happen. It's in Thailand, life and my story after the work that remains in-between. I find myself often taking breaths and thinking about that and it fixes anything in the world that could possibly ail me. What else could be the path if there is one...
