Friday.

So me and my entourage roll up to the club in the stretch limo, and of course, by club I mean a local bar restaurant, by stretch limo I mean my fetal alcohol SUV, and by entourage I mean a dolly. It is ten o'clock, and I am charged with providing a three hour soundtrack of dance party music for whomever may wander in this friday night. I have been doing this every friday for close to seven years, and yet, this moment is the one which I still feel most terrified. I unload my giant coffin case, which I have come to call "the fully operational disco battle-station", and roll it into the bar on my entourage.  Invariably there are some dinner customer stragglers who are curious about this turn of events and often they enquire as to meaning of the big black box. 

"Gonna be playing some music?" They might say. "Whats in there, a keyboard? What kind of music do you play?" And because I generally turn to overly confident yet panicked absurdity as a defense against my profound insecurity I generally reply "No, no, not a keyboard. It is a harp made of calcified meat on which I play Welsh sea shanties!". Im not worried about the corkscrew nature of their eyebrows as I saunter forward with a purpose. They are not my target demographic anyway. It would probably be easier to explain Welsh sea shanties to them than it would electronic dance music.

I head to my corner and set up shop. Cables click, power-strips are engaged, and this beautiful series of machines come to life. I cue up the first couple of songs and Im ready. Now in the week prior, in preparation for this evening, I have probably listened to 300 new songs. I have selected a dozen or so that I think might work for this crowd, and integrated them into my library of already time tested and proven tracks. My iTunes at home is a mess, comprising of some 150,000 songs in this genre alone, but my battle-station is fairly distilled.

After a beer and a shot to calm my nerves, eleven o'clock comes and I am ready for the next three hours. Well, truthfully, there is one more step. I don a wide brimmed baseball hat. I found long ago that a baseball hat can replace the most powerful anti anxiety medications available. How? Well when one looks down at ones instruments, the brim blocks out everything else, and somehow, Im just back in my living room screwing around with machines that manipulate sound. No pressure, no one to please. Just fun.

But to be honest, the first hour is always fun. Its rare for anybody to dance for the first 45 min or so anyway. Everybody has to get their cocktail on because I mean, whose gonna dance if they are not at least slightly drunk amiright?  Thats just crazy talk. Hell, some of my regulars are probably just waking up from their disco nap. So I am free to play some stuff that I have found that I love. Some old chicago house music maybe, some soulful stuff… it varies, but truly, this first segment passes very easily. Too easily, in fact as before I know it, people are beginning to trickle out to the dance floor, and I know whats about to happen. 

The first questions will be easy, if not awkward. "Are you gonna play techno all night?" Inside my head I say "Well technically techno is a sub-genre of electronic dance music characterized by heavy four four rhythm at a much faster tempo, with acidic synth stabs and minimalist and heavily distorted vocal samples and I don't like it very much so, no." But outside my head, I simply say, "Yes". 

Then will come the first request, which will invariably be for one of the top three super mega pop hits. I have no problem with super mega pop hits, and I have them, although the versions I have are remixed fairly heavily. I have found that the pop lyric is the sugar that people need to allow themselves to experience electronica. Its my foot in the door and my stock in trade. In fact, likely the next two hours will be mostly a nonstop parade of remixed super mega pop hits. The funny thing is, I don't listen to super mega pop hits. When I have aural leisure time, Im more inclined to listen to NPR, or a radio documentary. I have very little knowledge of these little poptarts, and often have never even heard the original song. My gauge of a songs popularity is how many times it has been remixed by producers all over the world. It is very odd to be exposed to say, a Rhianna song on the radio, and to know that I have been playing it for months. Ahhhh. So thats what that really sounds like.

The poptarts come in waves over the months. It will be Britney Spears for a while, then maybe a few months of the Gaga woman, perhaps whatever song was sung on Glee the night before, but its always something. Lately it has been this Carly Rae Jepsen person and her song "Call Me Maybe", which I can only surmise applies Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal to the world of teen dating. I cant be sure… but I do know it brings down the house when it drops. And now here is an Amber, or a Tiffany or whatever, waving their apple chocolate cosmo-tini precariously over $5k worth of electronic equipment imploring me to "play it now, Im leaving in ten minutes, squeee". In my head, while using ninja like body language to maneuver her and her dangerous beverage out of my battle-station's airspace, I am saying "Ah yes. I will play it now, shoot off my largest firework first, then you will leave and the rest of us will all sit and enjoy our collective anti-climax for the next two hours. That would be awesome." But outside my head, I simply say, "Sure", which, while technically a lie, I prefer to consider merely just a chronologically adjusted truth.

As the sugar cubes of pop lyricism sprinkle into my set, the dance floor begins to fill, and I am becoming caught up in the energy myself. I am here to please, and I do get tremendous satisfaction from filling the floor, from giving the people what they want. I get off on dropping in a few novelties, like say a disco-fied "Killing me Softly" by Roberta Flack, but mostly Im winding up the hits. I peak from my beneath my brim of shame to find that people seem tho be having a really good time. Excellent! Although I know, that this second hour is fraught with an altogether different danger. Lets call him the Steve the EDM Nazi. He's is the guy who probably just returned from europe, where electronic music fills 50,000 person arenas. He knows everything about electronic music. Obsessively. He is here to test me, and his requests are gonna be obscure. I mean really really obscure. You got any Fuselby Grotto by Funkderstoring. In my head I am saying "Isn't that that 18 minute german minimalist tech house piece that samples world war one speeches? Yeah that sure would fit in right about now. Bastard." But outside my head come the words "Oh you know? I almost brought that but didn't have time to load it at the last minute, good request though".

So now it is the last 45 minutes, my very favorite part. Everyone is plastered, and plastered people generally are easy to please musically. And since I denied Amber and Tiffany earlier, I have a full clip of hollow point floor destroyers to drop in succession. This is gonna be great! But wait! What horror could this be coming my way? Oh no, dear lord no. There adorned in sashes and novelty penis antennae is the kryptonite of any fulfilling dj experience - the bridal shower party. And not just any bridal shower party, its the bridal shower party at 1:15 am,  after a full day of disproportionate self entitlement and copious amounts of sugary liquor consumed through penis shaped straws. I know the deal. They are the center of a blurry universe and I am merely one of many asteroids orbiting in perceived servitude. They don't make requests, they make demands. "Play some rap!" "I didn't bring any". "I have some on my phone, can you plug my phone into your machine?" Sigh. "No sorry, I cant." But its Regina's bridal shower, and she really wants to hear Birthday cake by Rhianna!" In my head I am saying "You know what, I don't know regina, and unless you all are part some sort of Japanese Phallic Cult, I know that this is a bridal shower, and while I could theoretically plug your phone into my battle-station, I would rather eat my own young than accommodate your bleary demands just because Chad finally broke down and proposed after what has been no doubt been years of passive aggressive hectoring." But I got a party to rock, and the bridezillas wont remember any of this anyway, so outside my head I utter a firm "NO.", which is often accompanied by a dismissive hand gesture. I should feel guilty for this, but I don't. In fact, it gives me pleasure. Great savory unexplainable pleasure.

Last call has come, and after some explaining that I personally cannot rewrite Virginia's liquor laws in order to accommodate your unexplained and urgent need to hear the song that you will be no doubt listening to in your car in ten minutes, I wind down the tempo and volume and the evening winds to a close. The relative silence and sudden presence of non flashing simple incandescent light leaves my plastered party goers looking rather not unlike stunned zombies. As the bartenders herd the wobbly minions out into the night, I step outside for a sweaty cigarette. I cant believe I pulled it off again. I feel good. I return inside, and after the exchange of some anecdotes and some currency, I pack up the fully operational disco battle station, and roll my entourage out to the street, where my limo is waiting.

Ho Ho Home.

(first draft)

I was born and raised in San Francisco, in a home purchased new by my grandmother in the twenties. It was a neighborhood affair, what with my friends' parents being schoolmates of my father and the whole bit. I knew everyone on that block and it was a safe fun place to grow up. Street wiffle ball, skateboards and bike ramps - the general rule was go play outside till the streetlights come on. When one grows up in such an environment, it is hard to imagine calling any other place in the world home. Even after being shipped off to Santa Barbara for five years of college and two bonus years of screwing around being a gypsy artist cliché, I still called 43rd avenue home. So when my last year of screwing around found me the proud father of a newborn son, he myself and his mother packed it up and moved back to the old neighborhood to seek our fortune. Another son followed shortly thereafter, and we were now precisely .3 children away from being nuclear.

Now your milage may vary, but something about becoming part of a nuclear unit triggered in us a desire to create our own homestead, but housing prices in the city fairly clearly dictated that any homesteading would require some pioneering first. We searched from San Diego, to Costa Rica, to Oregon looking for a place where we could afford to set up shop, but the great real-estate bubble was getting its first aeration, and nowhere presented itself as doable. Some close friends of ours had moved to outside Crozet the year before, and after visiting them we decidedly liked the area. We had been paying $2700 a month for a 2 bedroom house in the avenues, with a lawn you could mow with pinking shears, so when they called saying that the 1865 3 bedroom farmhouse on 5 acres adjacent to their property was up for rent - and up for rent for $600, we threw caution to the wind and greased up the covered wagon.

It was New Year's eve 1999, and our nuclear unit plus three cats and a couple of friends loaded up a box truck and the mini van, drove down to the pacific ocean, watched the sunset and said goodbye to the city by the bay.  We arrived in mid January after an epic voyage. Immediately upon arriving to our very very cold house, and very slowly realizing that in order for it to get warm, we would have to feed this large black metal stove pieces of wood we did not have on hand, the "oh my, what have we done" vibe started to dawn on our very chilly urban un-countrified heads. After finding a wood man, whom I was positively convinced was speaking some sort of foreign language, this feeling grew, although at least we were warming. After traveling to the local IGA supermarket for provisions only to find that the person running the register already knew my name, family status, current address and place of origin - this having been in town for less that 36 hours - my illusions of calling Crozet my new home were fading fast. After a week of traveling around reading mailboxes and deciding that everyone was named either Shifflett, Morris or Pugh, the final nail came when I saw something completely alien to my urban self - I saw a woman pay for groceries with a check. While this may be punishable by verbal flogging in the hustley bustley city, apparently this was perfectly acceptable here in my new home. 

I gradually came to peace, and even deep appreciation, of my new planet over the next year and a half, but I didn't come here tonight to tell you abut that. I came here to talk about Christmas. I mean, thats really the litmus test isn't it? Where do you go for the holidays? Don't you go home for the holidays? I don't know, maybe its trite, but it seems a good a compass as any i think. I mean… anyway. Yes. Christmas.

So after about a year and a half came the nuclear explosion, when my wife decided that she was in love with a young woman that looked rather not unlike John Belushi. I know the heart wants what it wants, but here we had just left the gay capitol of the entire universe, a place where there are no doubt support groups for the pets of owners emerging from the closet, and now we were in rural Virginia, a place that hadn't quite completely worked out race relations, if the preponderance of colored lawn jockeys was any indication. The heart may want what it wants, but I definitely wished that that particular heart had had just a scoatch better timing. But what can you do?

We separated, and I decided to move to c-ville, closer to my employer, but a manageable distance for the hostage exchange-looking pick up and drop off of the offspring that would now occur weekly. After becoming rather dejected at the rather poor selections available I quite accidentally stumbled upon Rancho Notso Grande, my current residence in Belmont. The sign said "For Sale", not "For Rent", but I called the number anyway. After talking with the real estate lady and finding out the joint was only $90k, then running some numbers in my head, I arranged for a viewing. And after the viewing, it became abundantly clear why the asking price was so low. 

A woman named Margaret Goodson had lived there alone for nearly 50 years. One day, she had fallen and broken her hip in the kitchen. She was taken to the hospital where it was determined that she was both an alcoholic and senile. She went from the hospital to a home, and pretty much the house was left as is for the next 2 years, just as she had left it that day. I now know that in real estate deals, it is often noted that "appliances convey", meaning you get the fridge or washer or whatever. Well with this deal, everything conveyed. And, with the exception of clothes, family photos and jewelry i do mean *everything*. Plates, silverware, bedding, furniture, ceramic jesuses, two *gallons* of Canadian Mist Whiskey - all the flotsam and jetsam of an old woman's demented final years. And lest you miss the entirety of this vast conveyance, this house, being a duplex, even came with an aging alcoholic tenant upstairs. And just in case that was not quite enough, it even came with a kindly old feral dog that lived under an azalea bush in the yard. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and seeing that I had no furniture, plates or other daily accouterments, I did the deal. In the rain. Covered in flour. But that is another tale.

That was October, the holidays were right around the corner, and the holidays are, of course, what I really came here to tell you about. It didn't dawn on me until about December 23. I had bought the grossly over the top amount of presents that any competitive newly separated dad would hurl himself into chasms of debt to acquire, but other than that, my house was decidedly lacking in holiday cheer. I was cooking, or rather heating, whatever frozen thing any incompetent in the kitchen newly separated dad would normally prepare for the fruits of his loin when a crazy notion hit me. So me and the boys headed down to the only recently semi explored basement and sure enough, there they were. Like the three wiremen, there on a shelf sat three glorious boxes marked "Christmas", bearing untold gifts. We lugged them up to the house and began to unbox. One of the boxes contained an artificial tree, which we assembled with a fever of ironic glee. The next two contained all manner of bizarre 1950's decorations - little santa heads that fit over the door knobs, lights, fake wreathes, ornaments with Goodson Family portraits imprinted on them - everything and then some. It was just like the very common tradition of unboxing the family memories for the holidays and festooning the house with the accumulated holiday treasures that make a house a home. Except for the fact that in this case, it was someone else's family, that christmas was still one of the weirdest, yet most enjoyable christmases on record for the three cross boys. And while it took several years to erase imprint of the previous owner and fully place my stamp on Rancho Notso Grande, and though it may be hard for you to understand, in the Fellini movie that is my life, that is the moment when my house began to transform into my home.

I'ds of March

I'd rather not be writing this at all. I'd rather the words spontaneously slip from my lips in a sunny room into a single forgiving ear punctuated by the crunch of crisp linen. Naked, warm and free from fear. I'd rather let them slip away and spin with the swirling sunbeam particles and watch them effervesce and disappear forever. I'd breath and smile and watch them go, knowing that finally peace had arrived in the kingdom of my mind.

No, I'd rather not be writing this at all, certainly not all alone in the darkness of my eggplant chamber at 4 am. I'd rather not know that the room full of strange ears that would ultimately receive these words were a gum ball machine filled with suspicion, judgement, sympathy and excuses. I'd rather my words were more than a bag of quarters, and I'd rather each twist of the crank brought more than a colored sphere of some unknown, distant reaction - some cheap fleeting phantasmic confectionary that loses its flavor in a heartbeat.

I'd rather these words were worth more, but they're not. They are but the cheap I'ds of a mind at war with skeletons and angels, fools and heros, ghosts and flesh. And I, the battlefront on which these multitudes collide, well I'd rather be planting flowers in these trenches. I'd rather see honeysuckle growing on the barbed wire. I'd rather see the clouds lift and the sun break down on green serenity, where the motives are obvious, the subtext apparent, and the heart open fearlessly wide. 

I'd hoped that by saying the words out loud their power to wage war would be greatly diminished. I'd hoped that I could make them hilarious, and small… words you would want to take home and feed and pet and watch their stumbling silliness. But no one will want these words, these words will pass through a sunday night crowd and I will take the solo flight back to my eggplant chamber, still stuck with them fighting it out in the grey sack in my head.

I'd rather not share these words with you, but here we are, at war, and Im bringing you all into battle.

I'd wished I'd had something to say when thrust into the deathbed room of my yellow skeletal father, all alone, all of nine, but all I had was mute terror. Id rather have been a better father myself now that the roles are reversed and the fruits of my loin are ready to fly away somewhere else out out and ion their own life. I'd rather have stayed an athlete instead being seduced by the chemicals and games that lit my mind up like a bonfire, but let my body waste away. I'd rather be invisible, yet I'd rather not be ignored. I'd rather you just came with me to my apartment instead of staying in that house that was about to burst into flames taking all your skin and talent and your life with it. I'd rather the naked women I've created out of pigment would leap alive from their canvas prison, touch my hair, tell me thank you and then whisp away into abstract fields. I'd rather not see patterns everywhere, especially where there are none. I'd rather not automatically think you hate me. I'd rather sleep longer than two hours at a time, with the seizure dreams and the falling dreams and the dreams of isolation and immobility. I'd rather not wear your judgement like a heavy blanket that keeps the light that shines from within me dark. I'd rather trust more, and sometimes I'd wished I'd trusted less. I'd probably have not taken that sixth hit of acid if I knew it would have taught me not the beauty, but the true horror of the ego. I'd rather have passed the acid test.  I'd rather not have given you that first hit of weed if I knew that you would be the one person that would spin that into a 100 dollar a day heroin habit that would destroy your life. I'd rather be a witch doctor again. I'd rather you see me for who I am so you could tell me who that is. I'd rather reinvent my life. I'd rather not feel its too late. I'd rather be a fearless egomaniac like the rest of you, rather than running from my own self. I'd rather have the courage to leave you alone. I'd rather make you laugh. Id rather make you squirm. I'd rather I'd been more careful with my heart, or barring that, I wish I could throw it open to the whole world. I'd rather believe in some sort of god. I'd rather there were some sort of meaning. I'd rather have at least some of the answers, even just a handful. I'd rather believe there were answers, reasons, an explanation. I'd rather the paramedics and cops hadn't busted down my door yesterday just because do one misplaced phrase, one cry for love that was perceived as a death wish. For the record, I'd rather not be dead, I'd rather be alive. I have shit to do.8

But mostly, I'd rather I meant more to you. Mostly, I'd rather be loved.

But here I am again, wasting my time, trying to make my id's stick. Fuck you, and your teflon spirits. Slippery selfish bastards.

I'd not have read this tonight had it not been the only war I've ever fought, the war with myself. I'd like to think that having such words on the outside could make some sort of difference as they slip through these dusty couches, bounce of the dusty books and penetrate your dusty ears. I'd be inclined, though, to think that this is just one more pile of meaningless letters strung together like beads forming a necklace that no one can wear. These words need crisp linen and sunlight and familiar smells and forgiveness. Only then can they lay down their arms, and sift back into the dark corners to rest. Only then can the life I'd rather be leading grow out of the scarred trenches, its green vines and virulent blooms totally obscuring the ravaged landscape that lay before.

All in all, I'd rather not be at war. To be at war with oneself is a a fools errand, a mobius strip of circular logic. It never ends, it never relents, there can be no winner. If you win you lose. I want crisp linen, I want forgiveness, I want sunlight. I want you to hear me without pity. I want to find that place in you that overlaps the place in me me where there is no war. Where we are one. 

All and all, I'd rather be forgiven my battle, as I know that your battle is just the same. My forgiveness is absolute. Your darkest deepest late nite conflict is the part of you is that which makes you human. It is beautiful to me.We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. And me? I'd rather be looking at the stars. I'd rather look at them with you.

From Masturbation to Defenestration - A Love Story

Ah the beautiful mysteries of sex. Of all the possible permutations of human interactions, none has been so little understood, and yet so utterly compelling. We are compelled to embark on a journey of understanding, yet the paths we take are dictated by a kaleidoscope of nature, nurture, circumstance and chance. For some the paths are short, narrow, flat and paved and yet for others they are long winding and forked at every damn blind turn. I must confess that I myself fall into the latter camp.

As evidence of this, I offer my very first step on the path to personal sexual self discovery, which, like many, was masturbation. I was about twelve, laying in my bed, absentmindedly scratching a primal itch when something magical happened – my penis erupted with a mystery substance, which I only noticed after the waves of seretonin and dopamine had cleared my shuddering brain. Amazing, this. And being twelve, and largely ignorant, I came to the only conclusion one could – that this phenomena could only happen at nine o’clock at night. I had stumbled upon the magic hour, and oh how I could not wait for bed time the following night! Of course, at nine the following night, it worked again and thus my theory was proven. And so I was born as a sexual being, taking my first steps in a bizarrely misguided yet harmless direction. And so it went.

I was fourteen and her name was Cathy Page. She was a 16 year old half phillapina catholic school girl who lived in the neighborhood, and oh man… oh MAN did she get my motor running. In hind sight, red flags were everywhere, but the lust of a 14 year old boy can blind one such that it could make Ray Charles look like a sharpshooter. Her mother was a Philapina woman who had married an white Army guy, who had then promptly left her in single motherhood. This lead to a catholic post traumatic race and garment based over protection of her daughter that bordered on pathological. I, being a young punk rocker, always wore a bunch of surplus army stuff that I had modified to flaunt my budding ideology. This attire, and my courtship of her daughter developed in her a nervous tic, as if she were holding back some sort of PTSD infused venom that could explode at any minute. Still she was polite enough, though, and I returned the favor out of pure fear.

Being both from single mothers who worked 9-5, me and cathy always had a couple hours afterschool in which we were semi unattended. I say semi unattended because there dwelt at Cathy’s house an individual named “auntie”. Auntie was a severely mentally disabled woman who would wander the house in her muumuu making strange guttural noises and obsessing over the availability of breakfast cereal. It was fairly easy to lock auntie out of Cathy’s room, though the noises were somewhat distracting. We would be making out on Cathy’s bed when from behind the wall would come a ‘Muaaaaah! Cheerios! Cheerios!” Small obstacle though, cause I was making out with Cathy Page. Auntie could have set off a bomb and I wouldn’t have blinked.

It was Cathy’s idea to “go all the way”. I believed she had done so already, but I sure as hell hadn’t. I found the idea compelling, in an “oh jesus christ I am the luckiest kid alive” type manner. We planned to do it just as soon as I could get some condoms. Ah., but my friends, this was the time before the plague, before condoms were in bowls at restaurants and in classrooms and every damn place imaginable. No, no. One had to go to the drug store and ask the pharmacist! Oh yes. I lurked in many a Walgreens the next couple days, looking for a non judgmental looking male pharmacist who had at the moment not a customer in sight. My moment came, and I made the deal. It was on!

So it was time, and as we lay naked in her bed in the afternoon, I suddenly came… to the realization that I had no idea what I was doing. Like so many other times in my life though, I took a deep breath and took the plunge. I could go on to describe that first feeling that has come to define some of my best and worst decisions in life, but it is not germane, and I only have seven minutes, which as it turns out was longer than I lasted that dafternoon. Succinctly, I came. As it turns out Cathy, like so many of you mysterious humans of the female persuasion, had only one way that she could come. Seriously, what is it with you folk and your special secret techniques? Jesus. She would extricate my semi hard wet penis and gyrate upon it. I knowing nothing, assumed this was normal protocol for intercourse, (and carry that misconception all the way to college) and seeing a the sensation was not entirely unpleasant, I lay back and enjoyed Cathy’s moans and groans as they mingled with the far away cries requesting Captain Crunch. Life was weird, but good.

Well, good, that is until I heard a new sound, a scary sound – the sound of the big deadbolt on the front door clicking over. This could only mean one thing, Momma was home early. General panic ensued. I was trapped, and was forced to slip into Action Hero mode. I did the only sensible thing and leapt, stark naked out the back second story window into the back yard. It was a good five minutes before Cathy was able to sneak back to her room and throw me out my clothes… well most of them anyway. She had neglected to toss me my shoes and socks.

Without a way to contact her I found my self on the horns of a dilemma. I got dressed, snuck out the alley between the houses, across the street to the laundromat and called her house on the pay phone. It was my intention to call and ask if she could toss my shoes out the window, which she did. What I hadn’t considered though was that the door to the alley had locked behind me. Now my shoes were in the back yard, I was unshod in a cheesy laundromat, and cathy was inside trying to explain why she was taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon. Ah young love!

My friends, I had no choice but to steel my resolve, summon my most powerful jedi powers, and march straight up to her door shoeless. I knocked and was greeted by Momma. “Hello Mrs. Page, is Cathy home?” I said trying with all my might to create the most magnetic eye contact ever conceived, anything, anything to keep her from looking down. Fortunately for me, either the powers of fate, or perhaps my freshly died pink and black hair, allowed me to pull this off, and I was granted access without a hitch. I subtly retained my shoes and spent the rest of the afternoon being the polite innocent young suitor that any Momma would like.

I have since read many books on human sexuality, and to this day I have never found a chapter on “Naked and Airborne”. If you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Penultimate Decision

For a brief moment in my life I took a summer job as a bicycle messenger in San Francisco. In the days before pdf's and email, large business districts of major urban areas relied on folks like us to deliver important documents of all sorts. The job was basically like being a cab driver for papers. I had a radio, and a dispatcher, a bag and a bike. The thing that distinguishes being a messenger in San Francisco from other cities like say New York is, you guessed it, the hills. And when I say hills, I mean hills with a capital H. Other than that, I think messenger culture was probably fairly similar in most cities.

Financial districts have a very distinct caste system, and of all the castes, messenger is the absolute lowest. It didn't take long to realize this. Drivers on the road hated you for weaving in and out of traffic and generally causing a vehicular ruckus. Office building folks hated you because by and large most messengers look like they are extras from the movie road warrior. One fellow I met looked rather normal. He had a baseball hat with longish hair coming out of it. Thing was, his head was shaved shiny all around the top, right where the rim of the hat began. His thing was that every time he would make a delivery, as he was leaving, he would tip his hat to the receptionist and wish her a nice day, leaving always a rather stunned expression in his wake. He was also known to write obtuse messages on his dome from time to time. The sheer creativity expressed in the diversity of shenannigans lead me to believe that this might be a culture in which I could thrive. But it was a closed culture, and I needed I guide to show me the underside of these invisible people. That person turned out to be Mike Mowhawk. He was named such because well, his name was mike and he had a bright blue mowhawk. We hit it off immediately. And slowly over time, he revealed many secrets of the downtown pariah.

Since most of the messengers lived in squats and such, most of them had no bank accounts, so being paid by check presented a problem. Mike showed me the Korean liquor store that almost all the messengers went to cash their checks on payday. Payday was once a week, and so this little hole in the wall turned into quite the circus every seven days. Now there are many Korean and Vietnamese liquor stores in SF, who will bend all sorts of rules so I always wondered why this one was the chosen one for nearly all the vagrant messengers. Once I had put some time in, and folks figured I "was ok", I was allowed to find out why. A half block down from this particular store was a large sheet metal fence. The fence could be peeled back giving enough room for a person and a bike. Behind the fence was a large empty lot surrounded by tall windowless buildings on the three other sides. This was messenger party town, and every payday, flush with the cash for their vice of choice, the messengers would party down. I was young, but still I thought I had seen a few things in my time, but this... this was something else. I can remember just staring, soaking it all in, this hidden world that I had somehow found my way into. It left an impression.

Now just like that fellow with the baseball cap and the semi shaved head, I began to learn that most everyone had a "thing". For some, like Mike, it was his bright blue hair do. For others it was more complex games - like taking a huge hit of weed right before entering a building and elevator and trying to hold it in until no smoke came out. Most of the larger buildings had separate elevators for pond scum like us, so it wasnt that big a deal, but did hear tales of messengers pulling it off in the main lobby elevators as well. These stories were carried like trophies, with everyone trying to out crazy the others. Keying cars while in motion. Throwing AA batteries at cars that cut you off or curse you. Now I was young, and not up to any of these potentially litigous antics, but still... I wanted a "thing" of my own. A game I could play throughout the day, something that amused me.

It started accidentally. Every receptionist must sign for a received or picked up package. I would then have to make my own initials on the form. Once I had a woman sign, and then found myself without a pen. I asked to borrow hers, made my initials and then unthinkingly left with her pen. I didn't even realize it until I was out of the building. Thing was, it was a really nice pen - Parker medium ballpoint black, if memory serves. As I clicked the pen, it clicked in my head, for reasons that make no sense at all. I would try to see how many pens I could get a day. Absurd? Yes. But mostly harmless, and it gave me something to think about whilst dueling with the three mortal enemies of all bicyclists: rail car tracks, wet bald, and drivers that have no idea you are there. I had found my zen by collecting pens.

And I was good at it too, maybe 10-20 a day, all shapes, sizes and colors. I would sometimes pass Mike and he would shout "How many?" as a greeting. I would always reply "Six!", or wherever I was in my count, as a response. I kept them in a big box at home for reasons that were entirely unclear to me. I mean, this ink armada was way beyond what an average person could  use in a lifetime. Still, I got this odd sense of satisfaction out of that box of ill gotten writing implements. Was it the minor transgression? Was it a developing obsession? Is this how the concept of "hobbies" came to be a part of the human mental landscape? A minor amusement slowly creeps into the grey area bordering the realm of sanity? How many other aspects of my life have yet and since followed this slow winding path from pass-time to albatross?

As the box filled up, I began to worry. Its as if I could see the writing on the wall in a thousand different color inks. I could see myself sitting in that back lot with my head shaved into a reverse hare krishna, mumbling incoherencies and non-sequetors between gulps from my Mad Dog 20/20, celebrating yet another meager payday. But I had found some friends, outcast and odd though they may have been, and had carved out my own peculiar little identity as the guy you went to if you ever needed a pen. I was the pen kid, and god knows why, I kinda liked it.

I still had three weeks before I was to return to Santa Barbara for my second year of college, so I knew this mental mobius strip of mental hopscotch had a punctuation mark. This was a fact I never divulged to my fellow riders... I wanted to be the pen kid, not the college boy. But my box was nearly full, and when I considered starting a second - I wondered if I would even make it three weeks. I was addicted to the thrill of riding fast through the streets. I was enamored of the underdog access that being an accepted member of the pariah class afforded. And I liked stealing pens. My friends, I was at a crossroads.

And I was literally at a crossroads, 5th and Market, I believe, when my path was decided. The radios are set up so everyone can hear everyone else. This allows for the en route transfer of documents from messenger to messenger, and we were constantly handing things off. I was on a corner, waiting to meet another messenger to pick up some archetecht blueprint something or others, so I was monitoring my radio. On it, Mike was confirming a pick up and heading out for a delivery. Mid-sentence there was a horrible crashing screaching sound, and then total silence. The dispatcher then asked Mike what the hell was that but got no response.  And again. No response. A little while later, I found that my friend Mike had been hit and crushed by a muni bus and killed. I had quite literally just heard someone, someone I knew, die on the air. It was the jolt that shook me from my obsession. It was payday, and I went and turned in my radio and id, collected my last check and never looked back. I never even went to the back lot payday party. My career, sanity lay elsewhere.

And to this day, if I find myself in possession of a pen that is unfamiliar, I often imagine Mike up there somewhere with a bright blue halo saying "Only one? Weak!"

Incandescent Monsters

Thru the day of plod and toil

and beasts that turn one's blood to boil

grey faces pass in one big blur

but rarely one will cause a stir

A rumble somewhere deep below

a reflection of their blinding glow

a slap across the boredom's face

a shine, a smile, a touch of grace.

Nothing gives me joy like the incandescent monsters.

And in the evening, twilight fades

and the sky turns all those mournful shades

the sun has died, the light has gone,

reflections pass, and sorrow spawns

that one that held the key to all

that led me to the tragic fall

dashes through my weary head

and leaves me with the words unsaid

Nothing like the sadness missing incandescent monsters.

And then to bed in hopes to sleep

where mirrors wall and conclusions leap

I drift off and start to dream

misty narrative with lens of cream

So of course at four I wake

cold, alone I start to shake

I must face the nameless dread

of mistakes I've made with my own head

Nothing like the late night fear of incandescent monsters

At last its time and up I rise

tired yes, but to my surprise

my body glows just like the sun

and I will face another one

A day, a week, a month, a year

is but a road no one can steer

yet where my path is dest to go

is something Im still inclined to know

Nothing like the hope inspired by incandescent monsters.

Memories of the Afterlife

On my ninth birthday, I got presents and cake, and my father got the flu. My father wasn't a lot of things. He wasn't very reliable, he wasn't a hard worker, nor a very good provider. He was however one thing - a very very funny charming man. A conversation with him always ended in laughter. He was also a prankster, April fools day being a national holiday for him. He was always up to something. Legend had it that in high school, an older gentleman across the street was pegged as to his schedule, and always parked in the same spot. So my father and his friends, having no wheels of their own, would simply "borrow" the car every night, and made sure to return it at the appropriate hour with the appropriate amount of gas in the tank. He never grew out of behavior like that, so to a nine year old, he was a god. Sounds stupid, but at that age, sneaking an entire pizza into a movie under his jacket was often more fun than the movie itself. I loved him very much - but I guess that goes without saying.

So after my party, the cake had been eaten. And after a week, the new toys had been played with and were gone in their newness, but my father's flu did not go away, rather, it had grown quite worse. Many trips to the doctor, and a few trips down misdirected medical avenues later, he finally had his firm diagnosis: cancer of the bile duct. He was hospitalized for exploratory surgery. Trips to the hospital were surreal for a child my age, and I don't remember much. I remember playing pool with relatives. I remember the shock of seeing him with all those tubes and machines. I remember the grave concern and gathering of family when it came to be the day of his surgery. I remember laying my head in my grandmother's lap for what seemed an eternity in the cold steel waiting room. I remember my mother attacking the poor doctor physically when he gave us all the bad news: the cancer had gone too far, and the prognosis was grim. There were things that they could try, but we shouldn't hold out much hope.

And so the medical staff tried those things, and so did my family. In my father's mother's case, this included lutheran priests, which my father did not cotton to all that well. In my mother's case this involved bringing in shamans and healers of various stripes to lay on hands and cleanse auras. My poor father did not cotton well to those either. He was born a cynic and would likely die one as well. I can remember him in a n argument with my mother regarding these healers saying "Hey, you bring these weirdos in and then leave with them… I have to *stay* here with the whole staff snickering behind my back!"

Ultimately, it was clear no amount of science, god or new age shenanigans was going to do the trick, and my father resigned himself to prepare to die. I remember the conversation he had with me, telling me no matter what happened that he would always love me. I guess I kind of understood what he was saying, but he still had that twinkle in his eye, so to my small self, some how it just wasn't real. Though i did not know it at the time, my father was adamant about dying at home, and an epic battle had been initiated to try to accomplish just that. Though I did not know it at the time, it seems that once one is in a hospital, it is very hard to leave unless one is either healthy or dead. I do not know the mechanics of it all, but somehow he arrange to have hospice care at home. And so, home he came, with a plethora of equipment and care nurses of various stripes.

The next couple months, as my father got sicker and sicker, was a parade of old friends and distant relatives. Seems there were always many extra people in the house, which was good in that it distracted me, but bad in that t distracted me. My father was visibly sick now. His skin and the whites of his eyes were a ghostly yellow color. He had lost a ton of weight. I still remember the shock of finding out he was wearing diapers. My rock, my world, my hero was being eaten alive before me and my reaction was at best described as having the dear on the headlights look. As he got even sicker still, people came around less. People could barely even face me, with a few exceptions.

Finally, he was what could be described as semi comatose. He would be out for long stretches, and then come back. I guess you could call it sleep, but it was something else, really. When he was lucid, my mother, younger sister and I would sit with him. And he would talk. And what he would talk about was this on going series of dreams, the narrative of which went something like this…

He had been flying in a plane with his "friend" (I will use the name) Jon Smith, someone that none of us recognized. Jon had been teasing him to learn to fly, but my father was reluctant to try. Then there were several flying lesson dreams about how awesome it was. Then there was a dream where my father had tried to fly his first time, and had, it seems, managed to crash and become stuck in a rock. He was ready to quit flying forever, but jon over the course of dreams, convinced him that not only was it wrong to quit, but that he should just get right back in the plane, and in fact try to fly solo for the first time. After a a few more dreams, my father relented and actually became excited about his "first solo flight". Even at nine I had a vague inkling of what this was all about. I remember the tears as he asked his wife and children to accompany him on this great new achievement. I remember the tears as my mother said no, that this was something he had to do himself, but that she loved him and was very proud of him. After that exchange, he slipped into a coma and never was lucid again.

His condition worsened, and everybody knew that the end was very close. One evening I was told that my father was "probably not going to make it through the night, and that if I had anything I wanted to say to him, now was the time - he couldn't talk back but he could hear me". I was then placed in the room with him alone and the doors were closed. This then is a moment that has shaped my life since. The dim yellow light. The shadows. My frail father, weighing maybe 80 pounds. The diaper clinging to his skeleton. The IV making its drip drip drip, ticking off the last minutes of his days like a timer. What the fuck was I supposed to say? This is not hollywood. I couldn't ask for a line. I stood there frozen, overwhelmed with grief and anxiety. And shame! I was supposed to be making the most of my last night with my father, and I was told that he could hear me, so I imagined him waiting for my final words, and being disappointed in my silence. In my final moments with him I was failing. But I couldn't help it. His twinkle was gone and replaced with the jaundiced haze of the almost dead. I actually remember feeling that this wasn't even my real father, although part of me knew it was. This moment, as I type this, I wish I could have done it different, but for the life of me, I cant figure out what I could have done. I was only nine. I didn't stand a chance. I left the room without saying a word and that is a burden that I have carried with me to this day. I left, went in to the room and went to bed.

That night I awoke with a start. I was half asleep but had this strange awareness, a presence if you will. I looked through the dark at the opened doorway to the hall and thats when I saw it. Now I am not a superstitious guy, I inherited my father cynicism and it runs through my very DNA. But I know what I saw and I know what I felt. I saw a disturbance in the air, like heat waves in the dark, pass through the hall across my doorway. It was vaguely man shaped and seemed to float. It crossed the doorway, paused briefly in the opening, and then left my field of view. When it paused, I felt something, like a familiar presence. It was a very strong feeling of love, of sadness. It is so hard to explain the experience. It was as if it was only barely there, and lasted only seconds. I lay back down and eventually got back to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, I was informed that my father had died in the night.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the wake, which was quite the affair. Having grown up in my father's mother's house, a neighborhood kid of many generations, simply everyone of every stripe appeared. It was my father's wishes that we have a blow out party and just really cut loose. And cut loose we did! My mother, who lived upstairs, was with all the beat hippy types, smoking weed and getting bleary and teary. The pile of seventies weed on the dining room table was like a small hill. Downstairs, in the inlaw apartment when my grandmother lived, the hi-balls were clinking and all the lode more conservative folks were getting tanked. And we, the children navigated the stairs, trying to avoid the hugs and slurred condolences. The downstairs people bitched about the drug use upstairs, and the upstairs bitched about the alcoholics downstairs, but really the bitching wasn't so intense, it was just something to talk about that wasn't sad.

At some point in the evening, my mother related the story about the flying lesson coma dreams to a man named Freddy Norman. Freddy was a giant bear of a man and had grown up in the neighborhood and gone to school with my father. And even though he capped of the evening by falling down the front stairs, the memory of that story must have stuck in his stoned drunken mind. It was about a week or two later when he burst into ow house shouting "You're never going to believe this!"

Apparently the name 'Jon Smith' had rung a bell for him, but he couldn't place it at the time, but eventually he did. Turns out that this fellow had played third base on my father's high school base ball team. He was curious, he said, why it was him, Jon Smith, that my father had named, as they hadn't really even been friends or acquaintances - just merely teammates. Freddy had done some research to try to find him, to tell him about these dreams and what he had found alarmed him. Seems Jon had gone on to be a commercial airline pilot and died in a plane crash the year before.

So. There's that. I'll just pause and let that sink in for a sec.

To this day I wonder. Was this some sort of paranormal experience laid bare by circumstance. I mean I did have some sort of experience the night my father died that was certainly not "normal". Or. Or was this one last practical joke my father had left us with. Did he somehow know about the fate of Jon Smith and concoct one last ruse to leave us all hanging with as his final calling card. Truth is, I will never know. At this point either seems as plausible as the other. Personally, I am burdened that now I will have to come up with something even more extraordinary for my own death, I mean, it seems that it s one of the few family traditions we Cross' have, eh? And man o' man, my father is, as he always was, one tough act to follow.