Wednesday, August 22, 2007

That Summer Feeling...



...is going to haunt you the rest of your days.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

San Francisco at Night



Down from Mt. Davidson

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Uncle Andy's Screenplay

Sketch for Uncle Andy’s Screenplay

Jonathan’s latest poem:



The Voice Mail I Painted on your Brain:

I saw the inside of your flower bed, your neuroblastoma,
Your first unformed words and ideas. It was ugly in there.
I came out with paint under my fingernails and a new idea
Of how smell can reshape your opinion
Of someone you once thought you knew.

Odors fade when you leave the blower on, and so –
The bluster of saints and demons, flying around
Suffering aerophagia – burping, burping – hoping to fly.

Can you tell me what I was painting in there?
Read it back to me on my machine.


The phone rings. Jonathan is in the second bedroom, the study, the office, the place he never hopes becomes the place he sleeps because he always wants to sleep in the big bed in the primary bedroom with Marie. He is working on his latest poem. He can’t help but let the machine take the call. He can’t help but let the machine taking the call creep its way into the poem he’s writing.

“Jan-uh-thaaaaan? Jan-uh-thaaaan? I know yr there cuz yr girlfrenn sejude be home all day. So since yr there, I wanna know, Buster. How’s my screenplay comin’ along? Give me a call. Itsyr Uncle Ayndy!”

Friday, August 17, 2007

Blue Heron on Methadone

Blue Heron on Methadone



What kind of Blue Heron gets hooked on methadone? That’s just the type of question Charlie the Blue Heron on Methadone put to himself constantly. He sat on a park bench in the dog park hoping for a few crumbs from a passing human or, at worst, to be mauled to death by some unfettered pit bull. The Blue Heron on Methadone, who will henceforth be referred to as Charlie, was working on a poem. It was a modernistic and linguistic jaunt through early 21st century imagery that both cut to the bone of our dying society and gently stroked a hope for the future. He couldn’t quite get the last line right, but it went something like this:

MAAAAAAAW!
Ma, why did you leave me?
My wings hurt. Do you remember Suzette?
She’s a pretty bird, that Suzette.
But I’m flying away to the cape today
Where the skeletons of my grandbirdmothers
Writhe in the agony of blue, blue life
Of a Blue heron on Methadone
With one foot on a Cell phone?
With…dirty angel foolish cones?
With…fuck, I need another pill.

Charlie lit up a cigarette. How, I do not know. But he did it. His thin feathers, the breast feathers, looked frayed and stringy. He seemed injured, but he wasn’t. He’d always looked like an injured bird. He’d always liked the attention it had gotten him so he exploited it. He never spread his wings unless some dumb fuck was chasing him.
Charlie hadn’t ever done needle drugs, he’d just found himself resting in a park near a methadone clinic. He had friends, mostly street teenagers, who scored for him. Most of them – Tony and Timo and Tim and Tim’s girlfriend Pamela and Pamela’s sister Bandana and Bandana’s boyfriend Eric and Eric’s brother Sean and Sean’s boyfriend Parker - would place the methadone in slices of stale bread and feed it to him from a park bench where they sat chilling out on their own doses. The dispensary was notorious throughout the city as the easiest place to cop. So Charlie lived there as the only Blue Heron in the world who had a methadone habit.
Charlie pulled hard on the cigarette and watched a corgi run up on a homeless dude with disgustingly gnarled hair. The dude was pissed about the corgi. The dog ran away before the dude could whack him, though he tried. Charlie laughed which sounded like a pretty amazing screech.
Charlie saw a cop staked out behind a tree with his hand down his pants. He freaked out a little bit but then he saw two women with a bunch of dogs enter the park. He waddled tentatively towards them, hoping he might have his misery ended once and for all. A Siberian husky regarded him with disdain. Charlie craned his neck forward hoping it would be some instigating manoeuvre. Charlie liked to throw in useless frenchy words whenever possible. He was a real plongeur that way.
Charlie read somewhere, because he was a bleu éron on methadone who was completely literate and fairly well read, that the point of writing anything was only to examine the way in which a world could be created outside of the author’s suffering and in that way everyone was the author of everything. This thought occurred to Charlie as the seven dogs looked on with shame while their masters were dressed-down by a chronic masturbator in a uniform. Charlie realized that nothing was doing with these dogs and their contribution in his quest for a quick death. What he really wanted was a hit and he decided he had better do something about it because just sitting there wasn’t getting him anywhere. He wasn’t closer to death and he wasn’t closer to flying again. He was depressed but he knew his depression was just a bandied-about word that filled in an even more excruciating place of complete emptiness. At least he didn’t have to talk to anyone, one of the few saving graces of being a bird.
Charlie decided he might try something different. He was ashamed of his wish to die at the hands of bourgeois dogs. It was unfair to them, yes, to attempt to entice them into avian murder (or ornicide as it had become popularly known to anyone who has read this far). He felt like he was robbing his grandbirdmothers and his grandbirdfathers of the majesty of his species – species so very near extinction (along with all of you fucking people).
And so, as simply as that, with little fanfare and not much challenge to his psyche or general well-being, Charlie never took another hit. After six months of sobriety, Charlie regained his elegant plumage for a final flight into sweet, sweet OH-blee-VEE-Ahhhhn. Which is to say, he is the bird in that fucked-up video circulating around the internet that flew, inadvertently, into the engine of Boeing 747 and was instantly incinerated into one trillion easy pieces.
But truthfully, there is no internet.

Dogs on Leash

I. Dogs on Leash

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Describe.

Its a flashy little feeling of confidence. Its an embarrasment of riches. Its a cheesy pile of stinky, fusty expensive cheese. It laughs a lot.