the traveling hat

Joaney was moving out. She littered the living room with boxes, scarves spilling out of one, pens and paper tumbling out of another, clothing stuffed into the old fashioned trunks she kept for the day she would deliver herself to some new place. As she took down her art and maps, the walls of her windowless room exposed themselves shamefully, grubby in their nakedness, the crooked, graying gypsum board having never been dignified with a paint job. Here was a building built for moving, built for moving out. The living room grew bigger as she shuttled away her boxes and bags to other lands, their names unknown. The windows looked on, remembering their warehouse days, and the alley waited apathetically for the moment it would have to say goodbye. The weather grew colder with autumn's approaching end, and the wind howled on through the cracks in the concrete.

She left on a Thursday, for distant realms in northern climes. There was a movement to follow, a city to sack, photos to be taken and journals to be filled. She gave me a hug and I admired her lightness, and pondered my weight.

She left me a hat, a peaked little straw thing with a curled brim around the back and a brown ribbon around the crown. It sat quietly on the windowsill in that first day of Joaney's absence, patient and kind. It was an optimistic sort of hat, brave and awake, always at the ready. The afternoon faded into an early darkness, with the resigned expression of a chaotic year on its way out the door. Winter marched in through the windows and I fell into a deep sleep under a high pile of blankets as the invading cold set up camp in the apartment. I awoke not two hours later, wide eyed with rest, and wandered into the living room, where all the wintery phantoms breathed softly in their slumber with the whir of the city below, billowing softly from the nests they had built in the bricks. The room glowed with a new Spartan independence in its uncluttered state, and there sat the hat, its peaked little face tilted towards the glass pane of the window, staring serenely at the skyline.

The cold quit me in that moment, staring at the silhouette of the hat. It greeted me silently, without turning my way: Good evening, dear. Without hesitation I took up the hat, the way men grab their lovers in the last hours of the night, and I marched to my bedroom, away from the distant laughter of the jostling revelers in the street below. The hat was here now, mine for just this moment. I fingered its springy straw construction, and admired the cheeky brown grosgrain that encircled its crown, investigating its imperfect undulations around the brim.

I tossed the hat onto my bed and I stripped naked in the cold, sliding the door shut to face a full length mirror, the yellow glow backlighting my silhouette, my body having grown soft and pale in the darkness of winter. Goosebumps rippled across my skin the way fallen leaves twirl on sidewalks on suburban roads, and I felt as quiet as the moon. I stood straight, my chin up and my wits gathered, as if my train had come to meet me on the platform. The hat joined me there, perched on my head like a wise advisor from some exotic tradition. The hat gave the signal. With one last push, we stretched up and out, expanding and writhing in the mirror’s frame, and marched right into it traveling.

the king's madness

i no longer have dreams of my father.

he was a king, alright. he was a wildly mad king, like a stray coyote barking down suburban streets at lunchtime, never quite satisfied with pack life. he was a king of one, and his kingdom waxed and waned with his madness. his reign was confined to the domestic realm in my little princess eyes, confined to the little asphalt paradises we lived in back then. in them, he was king of the kitchen, slicing and dicing with the swiftness of the teenage line cook he once was as a boy. and he was king of the amateur opera house, mastering his falsetto on the imaginary stage he conjured up daily while dancing briskly through the hallways of our houses. he was king of the shirtless barbecue, filling cheap paper plates with royal feasts prepared on saturday afternoons, the canyon waiting quietly below. he was king of the stately nap, his snores rumbling across the cathedral ceilings of the foyer like burros meandering across the desert—with a languid sense of purpose, by instinct. california was his dream, a place he thought he might conquer. californian summers never quite seemed to end then.

when summer gave way to fall and california gave way to massachusetts, he used to haunt my days, a crazy cursed look in his eye, pinned right to his pupils, like some indelible mark jabbed there by a force he had let take him over—some coup d’état that emerged from the inside. "et tu, geno?" it whispered in his ear. a faith had been lost. gone was the great leader of my childhood, replaced with a broken boy-king, unfit for ruling anything.

love is the answer to a question that i have forgotten

i wish i could remember the way i viewed love when i was a child. i wonder when i stopped being a child. i doubt we start our lives believing love should be a concept, a category, something to be bequeathed or witheld. it is simply everything.

ojalá pudiera recordar la manera en que veía el amor cuando era niña. me pregunto cuando terminó mi niñez. dudo que empezemos la vida creyendo que el amor debe ser un concepto, una categoría, algo que legar o retener. es simplemente todo.

a love letter to los angeles

los angeles, you don’t look so tall from down here.

i see you as a child might. a daughter of your shores, i am watching you. you, my father, my lover, my ward—you’re withering like a parent who is slowly, inevitably losing his godliness. you are struggling, trying to cling to the desert and the sea, hoping your mountains won’t move, hoping time will stop at your command or at least put your desperate face on the cover of a magazine before you’re lost to the sea. you can blame san andreas, but he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even after finding the messiah, the world had to let him go. and like him, you’ll only be a martyr if you stand for something, my dear.

you were always surprising me with flowers. from the dry hillsides the blooms burst, as if they could not keep from wanting all of the inexplicable unimaginable impure you. sometimes you brought me roses, grown with the water you’ve been stealing for so many years from someone else’s valley. i buried my face in their soft bobbling heads, always forgetting about the thorns. and after all the beautiful things you brought me, after so many nights spent intoxicated, gazing at your many faces from cool patios strewn with liquor bottles and coffee cups, you abandoned me at dark corners as i waited for the buses that nearly always came late or never came at all.

but as always, i am forgiving you. i remember your inconsistencies and carelessness, your cruel muttered afterthoughts, your chaotic explosions in the street. i remember the warmth of your polluted breezes, your windy peaks and still valleys, your sweet cologne that always appeared to be some intangible mixture of beer and weed and sage and gasoline, some inexhaustible toxic selection of putrid herbs crushed by the whirring wheels of the cars on the freeway. i remember your smiles that flashed quick as the fires that burn our hillsides in september, your hushed domestic contentment romantically shining from high balconies, and your quiet concrete hardness at four in the afternoon, walking below the underpass on 1st street as the scent of urine and booze filled my nostrils and that fourteen year old heroin addict stared right through me as if we were both already ghosts.

and sometimes i wonder if you even believe in death, or in gravity, or in the vastness of the universe. and religion, you say it’s irrelevant—but there you go, making gods out of mortals. and the truth is, i love your gods for their failures, for being so exquisitely human. i once met jesus on hollywood boulevard, but he did not try to save me. i once met a homeless man in boyle heights, and he did try to lead me to salvation. i didn’t go. it smelled like decay.

you have a way of making each fall from grace so artful—or at the very least, so descriptively gory—no wonder so many of the wild people of the world flock to california to fall apart in your arms. you want it all, all the mad ones, the bad ones, all the tired ones, the wired ones, and all the selfish, shallow caricatures of what it is to exist. you want everything from this world and from the next. you even brought the stars to the ground—i saw them in the blinking headlights of the hills on the hollywood freeway.

you taught me what it is to have to love and let go and see what comes back, the way the oceans bring sea glass to the shore. after so many years of tumbling, those violently broken bottles—for so often, love in los angeles comes in a bottle—the love smooths itself into a brilliant stone, solid, and tangible, but as inconsistent in its clarity as the dirty waters from which it came. this is a lesson i’ll have to learn again and again—because every time i leave you, i seem to forget it once more.

an explosive exchange

She wanted the sex to lurk around her like some snarling, captured animal. She wanted her heart to throb in her chest with a steady, burning beat, adrenaline teeming through every vein of her electric body.

She and the beast were two prisoners thrown into the pitted center of a gladiator’s ring. The beauty of the creature slouched menacingly around her, sizing her up, two naked warriors. She fought without a helmet, without a breastplate, without shoes or sword, like all her mothers that had come before her. She fought with only the searing touch only a woman has.

Fires did start. Explosions did occur. She came out on top.

She was freed.

john the postpastist

I’ve got a lot of ideas, but I don’t care to name them all. I once saw Posthumanism wandering helplessly around a public bathroom, strung out on information, a syringe in one hand and the internet in the other. He looked like a hideous clown, caged onstage at a wedding or an inauguration—a monster amongst the members of his own species.

And so here is the moral, the dessert of every story:
Ideas are like children. If you want them to grow, let them out.

a true story

At the coronation, they were drunk on petroleum. I didn't want it—I only wanted beauty and democracy and everyone to be as kind as they possibly could—but they pulled me up to the altar, anointed me with engine oil, placed a crown of hubcaps upon my head, and proclaimed me the Asphalt Queen.