“Yeah, sometimes I miss you, don’t you? I do that thing where I’m in one of those moods, you know, and I wonder what you’re doing, and I think about what we would be doing if things were different. And I look at my phone and realize how easy I could just pick it up (sometimes I do) and just call and I wonder - you’re going to think it’s so dumb! - if my picture will come up, you know, the one you took of me in, what was it? 2003? Yeah, I wonder, your phone will ring and you’ll see my picture, you know, and you’ll think for a moment whether or not you should answer it. I mean, I would if I saw your name on the caller ID. But you do answer, and I can’t hang up because you’ve seen who’s calling, and all I’ll be able to say is hi and how are you and can we talk…that sort of bullshit. And you’ll be great, and you’ll ask me things that I’ll answer and we’ll laugh - that’s the best! We’ll laugh and we’ll leave off saying things like we ought to get together and we should maybe see a film and get coffee and things we criticize people for saying because they don’t mean it because we don’t mean it, and we’ll each go back to our lives, thinking and feeling good things, but imagining we’re each better off without the other, still glad one of us reached out, and go and forget all about it in a few days or so. Anyway, that’s what I think. And I saw you walking across the Boulevard the other day (my god, I should’ve said something to you that day!). I don’t know where you were going. You had your headset on and you were fiddling around with your ipod. But I didn’t say anything to you and you were just across the way, and now, here I am, telling you I’ve been thinking about you since then and I feel a little dumb. But I guess that’s part of it, isn’t it, feeling dumb and stupid for missing a person? Sort of comes with it, I guess. Did you ever have the same feeling? Jesus, listen to me, going on and on. I’m nervous, what can I do. It’s been a while and you have this way of making me feel like I’m a thirteen year old boy at a dance: awkward and strange.”
He says, “You know, if you untie me, this would be a lot easier.”
A threesome with one woman and another man really gets you everything you could ever want.
I am her mother’s age. But she isn’t her mother.
I thought it was an ingrown hair just next to my scrotum. I’d feel it, a little tender, just right there where sometimes I like to scratch just because if feels more than fine. It didn’t hurt at first so I figured it would eventually pop on its own. But as time went by, I’d forget all about it until I was in the shower, until I jerked off. And it was growing, but I didn’t pay it any mind soon after I noticed it … again.
Eventually, it was the diameter of a quarter and the bump felt hard. So I worried. Or began to worry. Whatever.
It didn’t hurt but I wondered if this was cancer. Should I take a needle soaked in alcohol and pop it? “Doctor visit?” I wondered once aloud while in line at the grocery store. I looked at it with a mirror, I’d lean in while sitting to see it, feeling around the edges of it - tender but no pain. It wasn’t red nor was it like a giant zit. Imagine a ping pong ball underneath your skin. Imagine those weirdos on the internet with implants.
And then I’d forget about it once more.
It became large enough for me to notice it when walking, and I decided, fuck it, time to see a doctor. Called my insurance to find a decent doctor, took the day off work, cancelled a date I’d made with someone whose name I couldn’t remember. I was readying myself for the worse, and the worse was cancer. I don’t know why, but that’s where my brain landed.
In the shower the day of my doctor’s visit, I was so nervous. I wanted to just take a knife and take care of it myself. The bump between my leg and nutsack still grew hair and still didn’t hurt and still didn’t just go away. I toweled off, and sat on the toilet naked, with a mirror to see how bad it must look. So strange, looking at myself this way, thinking that I don’t want a doctor to think this growth on me is strange looking. Fuck, right? So, I’m looking at myself in the mirror, at the cancer I think I have, and I can feel it more and pulsate with my heartbeat.
That’s when I dropped the mirror because I couldn’t take this feeling, and I couldn’t take the fact that as I’m looking at myself - lifting my nuts off to the side to get a better look - this bump that’s been growing painlessly on me opens up slowly but just natural enough, like an eyelid lifting open, and reveals a mouth with black teeth smiling at me.
The sheriff’s officer, he gives me a ride home from downtown because when he asks me where I live and tell him, he says he realizes it’s four in the morning on a Sunday and he’ll just take me home.
The entire fifteen minute ride, the police man, he talks to me about his wife and their sons, and how each of them must make their own choices. He tells me about his church and asks me if I’m Catholic. He asks me if he knows how lucky I am to be let out OR. I say yes to everything.
Nearly five in the morning, he pulls up along my street, in front of my building, and says I need to be more careful, unzips his fly, takes out his hard uncut dick, and says, “You never know what could happen to you,” and I say a little prayer.
[full disclosure. also, this.]
In my dream - the same dream I’ve had for years - there is a dog running next to me, as if we’re racing. I think we’re racing. I can’t tell how old I am in the dream but I feel young. Is that something you can feel? In the dream I feel like I’m ten years old but when I think about it afterward, I never see myself in this dream; I never look at my hands, never see myself reflected in the water. Nothing. But the dog and I are running. And it isn’t really a dog but the idea of a dog, something vague and a little off, but I’m confident this is a dog running along next to me. The kind of dog I always wanted when I was a kid but my parents couldn’t afford to get me. The kind of dog you see in commercials, playful and big enough you can roughhouse with. We’re running.
In the dream, it’s like one of those places where there is nothing but grassy fields and a small town off in the distance, but that isn’t where we’re running. We’re not running away from anywhere, either, or anyone. Sometimes I look up at the dream sky and it’s so blue it reminds me even while dreaming of the way my little brother would color with crayons, hard and with so much force the blue crayon would stick to the paper and leave a thick coat of wax and crayon bits all over.
Although in the dream I’m not scared nor excited, and the phantom-dog-thing next to me is friendly enough, whenever I wake up from this dream, I feel this uneasiness. As if something’s out of place, as if something’s become disjointed somehow. As if the world is an elbow or knee and it’s been bent in the opposite direction, broken, and healed, only…wrong. But the feeling passes and I never lingered too much on it, then.
Now that I’m older, and I have the dream, everything is the same as ever, but I wake up feeling a little sad. Maybe it’s a weird psychological thing about never having a dog, or feeling like a wanted to grow up so bad when I was kid, or about always wanting to be on the move. I’m not sure. But I wake up now from this dream I’ve had for years, and I wonder what it means now, what it meant then, the dream. I linger around this feeling a lot more than when I was younger.
Maybe I’m just getting older and I want to wake up running.
Maybe that’s all there is.
At a diner, somewhere in the middle of the night, I think someone who isn’t me is out there having sex with someone else who isn’t me.
Yes, you’re sitting across a table from me. You’re talking. You’re saying something I want to really listen to, but I keep losing interest. Your hair, is it blonde or brown? Are your eyes really green? Who’re your inspirations, who were you imagining when you picked out that sun dress? What do you really want to say? Your tits are not too big, and that’s always nice. You’re talking about school. You’re talking about your finals projects. I don’t care. It makes me think only of how different we are. I don’t know why you’re here. I know why I’m here but it’s costing me more than money. I like the way you smile. It’s why I’m here. And the way you might look naked on your kitchen floor.
“It isn’t you, it isn’t me. It’s us that’s the problem.”
One day, he woke up, felt me up, got me hard, went down on me, swallowed my come, kissed me, made me coffee, got dressed, left, and I never saw him again. I never knew his name.
At the Depeche Mode concert in 2000, we hadn’t yet thought about what we’d name the kids. We hadn’t even discussed having kids. But she had swallowed my ejaculate and I’d let her fuck me with her strap-on: there would be a time for children. Yes, but it wasn’t at Staples Center in 2000 while I was face-deep in her while JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH played to a packed house. Eating a woman’s pussy, the last thing you think about is anything else.
When I found out Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father, I was five years old. It didn’t mean anything to me. It was a foreign movie I hadn’t even seen, nor had I seen the movie before then. So what?
Everywhere I went there was Star Wars everything and I thought everything was awesome-looking. We went to the mall and I recognized everything as Star Wars-themed. But really, toys don’t need marketing. I didn’t know this then, of course. I had action figures, dolls, whatever you want to call them, of characters from a movie serial I’d not seen. My parents never talked about it, but now I think they got my brothers and I these toys because every kid had them. Toys, I’d learn later, were marketed to parents. I had Ewoks and Stormtroopers but I didn’t know what they meant. They were new and came with weapons: this was all I needed.
When one of the neighborhood kids came over and we were playing he showed me the black toy with the red sword and he told me it was Darth Vader, the main bad guy. He didn’t have Luke Skywalker (neither did I), but he said the blond one in the movie - you know, the good guy - was this guy’s kid. Darth Vader looked like a black robot with a cape, which made him immediately cool. I mean, AROBOTWITHACAPEANDASWORD!! But when he told me about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker’s relationship, I didn’t care. Because why should I care? But I couldn’t express it yet.
Of course, many years later, when I watched these movies, finally, the impact was lost on me because I already knew this. Who cares? But every once in a while, I’d wonder whether or not something was taken from me before I knew it. Isn’t that a weird thought? You ever see those documentaries from 1977 and 1980 and everyone’s so shocked and so in suspense about it all? Weird. There hasn’t been anything like that in my lifetime and I wonder if that would’ve been me had I been old enough. Hope not.
Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Big fucking deal.
Have you ever seen these movies? Probably. Be objective: don’t they strike you as being made up as they’re being made? I mean, really? The incestuous subtext of it all. Now, you wanna shock the audience with a bullshit plot twist? What if the “another Skywalker” had been Han Solo? See? Also, we would’ve had a Luke-Han make out session on Hoth.
A woman, after I left her house, after talking and making out some, sent me a text message telling me she’d like to draw and-or paint me. I thought about it for a moment as I sped down the freeway into Los Angeles. This was when it wasn’t illegal to talk on your cell phone while driving. So, you know, not that long ago.
So, I think about it, what this woman means and it made me feel cheap. Is that the right word? Weird. Awkward. Dirty? I’m not certain, but I wasn’t filled with a lot of excitement about that. Then I started to think, this was a woman I’d been out with a couple of times. Nothing serious, nothing flighty…not yet. Why didn’t she say so to me before I left her house? Was I supposed to drive back right now? And then I thought how shitty the paintings she’d shown me at her house were and didn’t want to be drawn by someone who did things like that. I was conflicted for a moment.
I drove home. And I didn’t text her back.
Much later that night, I was on the phone with a friend and I told her this little story, and when I finished, my friend said, “You’re such an idiot.”
I asked, “Why?”
“When someone says that to you, they want to fuck you.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“How do you know that?”
“Didn’t you see Titanic?”
I asked her what her favorite movie was and she responded by asking me what genre. It was then I knew we shouldn’t have gotten married.
She lent me a book once, and I found a phone number written on a post-it inside, on page 172, and I called it and my ex answered.
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Fresh cut and beard trim (Taken with instagram)
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original wacom sketch from valentine’s 2012 drawing
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Ghetto Booty
Photo by Trevor Brown
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Four Eighties Rogues from memory.
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THRUST A FRIEND A photograph by NASA astronaut Don Pettitt offers a previously unseen view of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft as it...
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The Kiss of Death
“This astonishing sculpture forms part of Barcelona’s Poblenou Cemetery. ”The Kiss of Death” (El Petó de la Mort in Catalan and...
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Wolverine by Bill Sienkiewicz
