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dustedmagazine · 6 months

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Dust Volume Nine, Number 10

Older, but not a bit wiser, the Hives return

Fall comes with its smell of maple in the leaves, its intimations of mortality and, this year, its share of unsettling events—war in the middle east, AI in everything and the murder of our beloved Bandcamp by capitalist privateers. (We are not equating these things by any means.) Like always, we turn to music, the annihilating blare of metal, the agile interplay of improvisation, the well-shaped contours of pop, depending on our individual tastes. We hope you’ll find something to ease your own personal burden in all this as well. Contributors include Bryon Hayes, Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Tim Clarke, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers, Alex Johnson, Jennifer Kelly and Ray Garraty.

Due to technical issues we're posting this in two parts, so don't miss the second one.

Ad Hoc — Corpse (Shame File Music / Albert’s Basement)

Ad Hoc was a Melbourne-based improvising unit, an experimental outfit that should have higher prominence. It only took 40-plus years, but Shame File Music and Albert’s Basement are finally spearheading a reissue initiative. Last year saw the arrival of the trio’s sole release, the hypnotic Distance cassette. It disappeared the moment it became available. Corpse documents an unconventional live performance from the group. They prepared their instruments (guitars, an EMS Synthi AKS synth and tape loops) for performance prior to the arrival of the audience and then shut off their amps. When all were seated, the trio turned on the amplifiers and unfurled an aleatoric blast of sound. The resulting music is far removed from the ambient tone clusters of Distance. The first piece shimmers in a way that calls to mind Matthew Bower’s Sunroof project, while the latter piece bathes in guitar noise so thick that it may have influenced The Dead C’s The Operation of the Sonne EP. Ad Hoc have today’s noisemakers beat: Corpse presents itself with a freshness that belies its 1980 provenance.

Bryon Hayes

Axolotl — Abrasive (Souffle Continu)

The French trio Axolotl existed for a few years in the early 1980s, and it reflects the aesthetic concerns of its time. Guitarist Marc Dufourd’s playing betrays some acquaintance with the work of Derek Bailey and Henry Kaiser, and the fibrous tones and agile exchanges between reeds players Jacques Oger and Etienne Brunet recall Evan Parker. All three double on electronics, hand percussion and utterances. These accessories, in combination with the concentration of the album’s 12 tracks, give the music a truculent attitude and just-the-facts brevity that brings to mind punk and post-punk. This may be free improvisation, but it is improvised from a point of view, and it’s that informed attitude that makes the album worth visiting nearly 40 years after its original release.

Bill Meyer

Will Butler + Sister Squares — Self-Titled (Merge)

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Will Butler joins with Sister Squares — multi-instrumentalists Jenny (Butler’s wife) and Julie Shore, Sara Dobbs and drummer/producer Miles Francis — for their debut album. Bouncy, heartland rock garlanded with that 1980s Fairlight and Linn drum sound mixes with touches of art rock as Butler emotes wholehearted. The influence of the 20 years Butler spent with Arcade Fire is inescapable, but it feels like the quintet have also been listening to Billy MacKenzie (“Long Grass”) and Russell Mael (“Arrow of Time”) as well as Springsteen, Mellencamp and company. “Hee Loop” sounds like a mash of Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel. The themes and emotions can be big in that Arcade Fire way that’s equal parts exhilarating and exhausting, but the album works best when the band dial down the melodramatic flourishes as on “Car Crash” and “The Window,” where Butler is right in your ear, tired, disillusioned, real. This is a record I wanted to like both more and less. For every heartfelt moment and interesting musical choice, there’s a cringe-inducing gestural overreach that makes you wince. A bit like his former band but with enough promise to persevere with.

Andrew Forell

Claire Deak — Sotto Voce (Lost Tribe Sound)

Melbourne-based composer Claire Deak’s last release on Lost Tribe Sound was 2020’s The Old Capital, a fantastic collaboration with Tony Dupé. In my Dusted review I said, “There’s so much wonderful stuff going on across these seven songs that it’s a delight to revisit.” As its title suggests, Deak’s solo debut, Sotto Voce, very much sits at the opposite end of the musical spectrum. This is subtle, minimal music that softly arises out of silence and speaks an elusive language. The background to the album’s creation is Deak’s exploration of the work of two women composers from the early baroque era, Francesca Caccini (1587–c.1645) and Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677). The dominant musical elements are strings, harp and voice, with other instruments coloring the edges of these understated, starkly beautiful compositions. Across the album’s 42 minutes the music feels, at times, to be battling the entropy of erasure, struggling to be heard amid the cacophony of these overstimulated times. For that reason alone, it’s necessary to invest your attention and listen closely. The experience is eerie and transportive.

Tim Clarke

Mike Donovan — Meets the Mighty Flashlight (Drag City)

On a musical Venn diagram showing the intersecting circles of garage rock, lo-fi, and psych, Mike Donovan has set up his sandbox. With Sic Alps he veered more noisy and lo-fi; with Peacers he favored a straight-ahead garage-rock sound. On this new record with Mike Fellows, AKA The Mighty Flashlight, Donovan steers in the direction of shambolic psychedelic-pop in the vein of the Olivia Tremor Control. (To anyone who knows and loves OTC, this is obviously a very good thing.) The splashy drums and percussion tracks feel like a gestural afterthought rather than a rhythmic backbone the songs are built around, and Donovan and Fellows steer these songs into some choppy, unexpected waters. Opener “Planet Metley” is the clearest and most successful distillation of their aesthetic, offering up a staggering range of ideas in under four minutes, stopping and starting erratically, the bass roving all over the fretboard. At the other end of the spectrum, “Laurel Lotus Dub” is the kind of experiment that sounds like it was more fun to create that it is to listen back to. Between these two extremes there’s the junkshop boogie of “A Capital Pitch,” which features the hilarious line, “Hanging out on the ramparts with some dickheads in black,” the concise drum-machine and organ instrumental “Amalgam Wagon,” and the plaintive, country-flavored “Whistledown.” Wherever Donovan roams it’s usually worth following, and Meets the Mighty Flashlight is a winning collaboration that fizzes with fun.

Tim Clarke

Everything Falls Apart — Everything Falls Apart (Totalism)

“Somn” means sleep, or more poetically death. It’s the title of six of the seven tracks from Everything Falls Apart, the self-titled album from the duo of Belgian bassist Otto Lindholm (born Cyrille de Haes) and English producer Ross Tones. Those titles (numbered six to 11) and the coda “Wonderfully Desolate” tell you only part of the story of the music the pair produce. Their conversation focuses on the nuance of the Lindholm’s double bass which Tones swathes in electronic effects, stretching notes and motifs into near drones in timbres that rise from the murk like lugubrious sentinels. This is seriously heavy music but the dynamism of the duo’s understanding and interplay distinguishes Everything Falls Apart. Whilst many of the pieces focus on stasis and decay, “Somn 9” is a desert storm with clicking percussion, almost didgeridoo like growls from the bass and screeching electronic noise. On “Somn 11”, deep bowed notes support Lindholm’s move through the registers as if shaking from fitful dreams into the morning light. “Wonderfully Desolate” is comparatively unadorned, a string quartet playing against the end times, shimmers of light through the cracks.

Andrew Forell

False Fed — Let Them Eat Fake (Neurot Recordings)

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Is it accurate to call a band including members of legendary underground acts Amebix (Stig Miller), Nausea (Roy Mayorga) and Broken Bones (Jeff Janiak) a “supergroup”? It might help to note that Janiak has sung for Discharge since 2014, and Mayorga has done a couple stints as drummer for Ministry. All names to conjure with (though a few of us first encountered Mayorga as a teenager back in the 1980s Lehigh Valley hardcore scene, when he drummed for Youthquake; West Catty Playground Building forever, man). In any case, the players have pooled their talents to create this death-rocking, sorta goth, sorta post-punk record, and it’s a lot of grim, grimy fun. Most of the music is mid-tempo, grand and romantic in its gestures, but shot through with a crusty growl in the guitars and production tone. The best songs speed things up a bit; both “The Tyrant Dies” and “The Big Sleep” have compelling momentum, complementing the stakes of songs’ ideas. It's Armagideon Time, people. Here’s your soundtrack, from dudes that know.

Jonathan Shaw

Hauschka— Philanthropy (City Slang)

German composer Volker Bertelmann’s 15th album of prepared piano pieces under the name Hauschka is noticeably warmer than some of his previous works. Joined by Samuli Kosminen on percussion and electronics and cellist Laura Wiek, Hauschka continues his exploration of the rhythmic and timbral possibilities of his instrument. At times almost jaunty, there are echoes of Bertelmann’s previous experiments with melancholic atmospherics but the general tone here is welcoming and optimistic. Kosminen adds subtle effects which frame rather than obscure the piano. There’s a touch of Satie in Hauschka’s playful iconoclastic approach to the piano and his deceptively simple melodies, especially on “Loved Ones” where Wiek’s plangent cello lines sustain and decay over an allusive harmony that speaks both of innocence and experience. At the other end of the spectrum, the closing piece “Noise” builds abstract ambience from repeated piano notes, smears of cello and a quiet wash of effects as if the players are enveloped in a thick damp fog. A lovely album for both fans and newcomers.

Andrew Forell

The Hives — The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons (Disques Hives)

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There are usually going to be some questions when a band comes back with a new record after over a decade, maybe especially so with an act like Swedish garage/punk flamboyants the Hives; can they match the energy of their youth? Are they still willing and able to give us the old thrills? Or have they (and this is usually asked with a small, tasteful shudder of disgust) matured? It doesn’t take very long into first single/first track “Bogus Operandi” for the concerned listener to have reason for a sigh of relief. Anyone who used to (or still does?) blast “Main Offender” or “Hate to Say I Told You So” or “Walk Idiot Walk” should feel the galvanizing charge of a true, Frankensteinian resurrection once the riff hits. And across these not-quite-32 minutes (the brevity is also a promising sign) Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist and the boys kick up exactly the kind of racket you’d want from them, with tracks like “Trapdoor Solution” and “The Bomb” savoring the kind of gleefully dumb fun they’ve always provided (with a nice sideline in some of Almqvist’s deliberately, over-the-top awful narrators on “Two Kinds of Trouble” and “What Did I Ever Do to You?”). They even continue to throw out small, satisfying variations on the classic Hives sound like the brassy swagger of “Stick Up” and the surprisingly heartfelt thrash of “Smoke & Mirrors”. They may have killed off their “sixth member,” but the Hives are otherwise in rude health.

Ian Mathers

Islet — Soft Fascination (Fire)

The Welsh psych-electronic oddballs in Islet are on their fourth full-length now but show no signs of settling down. Soft Fascination is a bonkers mash up of dance pop, art song, hip hop, noise and folk. “Euphoria” floats a feather-light daze, a la Avey Tare, then punctures it the rat-at-tat of snare, the rifle shot rap repartee of Emma Daman Thomas. Gossamer textures of synth weave in and around the main action, snapping tight at intervals, like sails catching a hard wind. The whole thing is butterfly ephemeral with strong wires holding it up, a combination of daydream and architecture. “River Body,” if anything, tips even crazier, with its infectious sing-song, skip-rope vocals, its tootling toy keyboards, its blasts of noise and friction. And what can you make of “Sherry” which bucks and heaves and shouts out “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” like a lost Matias Aguayar cut? “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” indeed.

Jennifer Kelly

Jute Gyte — Unus Mundus Patet (Self-released)

Unus Mundus Patet is not the most dissonant or challenging record Adam Kalmbach has released during his 20-plus-year run under the Jute Gyte moniker. But neither is this black metal for the kvlt trve believers or for the hipster-adjacent sets, be they transcendental or ecstatic or blackgazy. The songs twist and turn in on themselves, always clear in their expressions of complex musical ideas, and also — somehow, someway — listenable and enjoyable. Avant-garde? Sure thing, and likely a much more authentic iteration of that phrase’s meaning than the music many other metal bands churn out under cover of high-minded beard stroking. See the by-turns undulating and fragmenting “Killing a Sword” or the trudging, vertiginous and then utterly thrilling “Philoctetes.” Jute Gyte doesn’t make music for the background, but if you can give these songs your full attention, you’ll be rewarded. Turn it up and open the portal into somewhere much weirder and more marvelous.

Jonathan Shaw

Danny Kamins / Chris Alford / Charles Pagano — The Secret Stop (Musical Eschatology)

Free improvisation may be a little sparser on the ground in the southern USA than it is in Chicago or New York, but The Secret Stop affirms the vigor of those who participate. Guitarist Chris Alford and drummer Charles Pagano play in New Orleans, and Danny Kamins is a saxophonist from Texas; this encounter took place in the Crescent City. As even players in places like the aforementioned northern cities or London will affirm, travel comes with this territory. Their interactions display a capacity to sustain balance when the energy is high and to back off when doing so will transform the music’s tension. Kamins intersperses long, coarse tones with emphatic pops, and Alford evidences a fluent stutter that suggests he’s spent a lot of time studying James “Blood” Ulmer’s sound grammar. Pagano’s cymbal sizzle and mutating not-quite-patterns provide both forward momentum and a framework within which the action occurs.

Bill Meyer

MIKE \ Wiki \ The Alchemist — Faith Is a Rock (ALC)

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The long awaited collaboration between The Alchemist and MIKE took a sudden turn when they took on board another New York rapper Wiki who steals the show here. Both Wiki and MIKE were outcasts recording music in the vein of Earl Sweatshirt, even though MIKE was always a better version of Earl with only possibly a tenth of his fame. Knowing no rest, The Alchemist (that is his fourth collab this year) takes both MCs way out of their comfort zone, refusing to pander to the needs. MIKE and Wiki have to deal with The Alchemist’s fast and thick layered production, and it works for all of them. “Mayors A Cop” is a standout here, and Faith Is a Rock is one strong contender for the tape of the year.

Ray Garraty

Camila Nebbia — Una Ofrenda A La Ausencía (Relative Pitch)

The title translates as An Offering To Absence, which of course raises the question, what’s missing? Camila Nebbia is a multidisciplinary artist who grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but has seems to have spent a fair chunk of time moving around Europe in recent years, and is currently based in Berlin. She has a sizable discography, but this correspondent has not heard most of it, so let’s just focus on the album at hand. Its 16 tracks present three facets of her work — acoustic tenor saxophone, electronically adjusted saxophone and poetry — with the first method best represented. The unaccompanied saxophone performances reveal her mastery of both weight-bearing muscularity and adroit tap-dancing on the far side of the fences that confine conventional tonality. But when she layers long tones and feedback, Nebbia becomes a one-woman orchestra transmitting heavy Penderecki vibes. The one poem included, “Dejo que me lieve” (“I let it lie”), is recited in Spanish, and no translation is offered; perhaps home is what’s not there, so she needs to manifest it creatively?

Bill Meyer

[Continued in Part 2, because Tumblr decided we only get 10 audio links.]

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efabook · 2 years

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Los Angeles

The song "Idaho" from Slow Pulp blares over the speakers as I wait in line at Dogtown Coffee, an overdecorated, rundown beach shack of a coffee spot that hangs onto its cool in such an easy and insouciant fashion it leaves me pleasantly surprised; particularly considering what the vicious beast of gentrification did to neighborhoods I've inhabited in my past - the new life and easy vitality of Williamsburg, Brooklyn contrasted against the continuous cycle of Northern Liberties, Philadelphia, steadfast in pushing to breach the surface for a gulp of fresh air after escaping the bottom of the swamp, only to be perpetually swatted down; and here, the unaffordable westside, littered with housing crisis casualties - wherever I've run with outstretched arms the specter of gentrification stitches a dark shadow in my wake. But Dogtown Coffee is a place that thrives, it knows what it is: you are welcome here, but you are not cool enough.

Skater Girl works here. She's a member of GrlSwirl, "The World's Okayest Skaters". I saw her eat shit in the bowl earlier this morning, I guess before her shift. Tough roll on bare shoulders. She's young, she'll recover. She is a vision. She is very young. She loves to flirt with me. Let her have her fun. Play dumb. Keep the conversation squarely about her bruised shoulder and tell her to get some ice in a fatherly way. Because that is our age difference; father, daughter. I'd rather go older anyway. Well, Heidi Klum. It helps to set targets. Skater Girl slides an almond milk latte toward me. Triangle, pinwheel, heart, Pisces, arrow, 'I am enough' in cursive on her clavicle... I guarantee she took the "follow me" handholding photo and posted it a few times... I know she has a hat from The Wise Hatter or Nick Fouquet somewhere in her corner of a communal apartment... she definitely went to Burning Man with someone lecherous and objectionable simply because it was her only way to get there and it was a big box she needed to check. Fuck man, leave her alone. You're drinking alternative milk. Leave yourself alone, for that matter. You're dredging.

I don't know what it's called when we strive so hard to be different that we all end up being the same. Is that an affectation? She is an affectation. But if you look long and hard enough, we all are. I desperately want to be in a backyard with her under bistro lights, me thumbing a skin drum while someone in an overlarge hat plucks an acoustic guitar. There will be an Airstream trailer used as an ADU off to the side. It will be some sort of party for musicians and models. Sweet white sage and eucalyptus teasing the air through Topenga. We'll all be so unique we'll be ridiculously the same. And I am now an affection. You are an affectation. This whole paragraph an affectation.

Where I don't want to be is getting a creepy lifelike tattoo of some Dodger's personality then heading to the new bridge with a woman crammed precariously into Spandex with greasy, glued, black plastic daggers protruding from her eyes to possibly get hit by a car doing doughnuts while I try to spray paint a stylized Mickey Mouse onto a pillar. But these are choices, right? Who we happen to, or choose to, or want to be. Each experience perfect unto itself.

Slow Pulp. Idaho. This is your playlist Skater Girl. I am absolutely certain of it. And now, because of you, I am transported somewhere I do not want to be. I stand stupefied in line waiting for the completion of my order. I don't even have my cell phone in hand.

You whipped your hair around, splashed me with water and the wet mass slapped me in the face. You had just gotten out of a fountain. As you pirouetted to face me, I gave you a little shove on your shoulder. Smartass. Your eyes widened and flashed with anger, shifted and betrayed a fantastic idea; you threw your back against a looming concrete wall, leaving me off-balance, and dragged me in, softly, for our first kiss.

We were tourists. Not like the other tourists haunting Rockefeller Plaza so close to midnight. We had shared drinks. We let your sundress spill and ripple in the updraft of a passing MTA train deep below. We welcomed the cloying embrace of a humid July night. You stomped in the fountain. You did. They held their faces close to their phones, filtering their lives through a blue glow, metered out between the borders of their comfort, at times filming strangers like creeps, but really just a long, protracted and boring judgement, through a glowing rectangle.

To be so immeasurably lost like they. To want for so much while crawling backward into ever-tightening corners, self-inflicted, willful ignorance, peering out with rage and shame. The shadows. Wedged in dark holes like lobsters upon lobsters. Their voices a binary susurration of agreement or disagreement. Hot static. The ever-present crunch of the reef. Tips of antennae betraying their refuge.

You, softly, at first, the hint of artificial strawberries lipgloss and the heady bite of tequila, less grassy than whiskey, more like aloe. Then more firm, noticing the press and press again, the tip of your tongue, a tug on the back of my hair, you still hold my collar with the other, hot alcohol on your breath. My hands find your hips and twirl the band of your panties around my index finger through your dress. I feel my body on your body with only the safety of cotton and threat of public rebuke between us.

Everything has changed. Every crystalized facet of my aspect now shattered and whirling around in the container of me. I am a buzzing whirlwind, subsumed with fire, and blooming again from dead wood. You are positively steaming. Your hair a tangle of dark, wet rope, steaming. Your shoulders wet and steaming. The small of your back damp and steaming and radiating heat into the tips of my steaming fingers. I want to shout at you that I am forever changed. I know to hide from you that I am forever changed. Knowing what you become I don't want forever changed. When I do say to you I am forever changed you are gone forever. That is forever from now, though.

You slink down a few inches, apparently from your tippy-toes, and exhale. "Wisdom and knowledge should be the stability of thy times," you breath at me between kisses. You brush errant hair from my forehead with your tiny hand, and I feel you've suffered a stroke, or that you are drunk beyond cognition and I am crestfallen at the gulf between importance to me and addled comportment to you. But no, you're there, you are present in those eyes, those eyes looking over my shoulders, and up slightly. I turn to see. And you shove the back of my shoulder. "Gotcha back." And now I am staring at an art deco depiction of a God frozen in cement, delivering wisdom to humankind, pushing away clouds of ignorance. "Wisdom" a bas relief by Lee Lawrie, with a quote from Isiah 33:6 in the King James Bible. I had to look that bullshit up.

How can I look back now knowing that those eyes full of passion and promise and fire, those eyes you say are "just brown" and not the ossified amber with flecks of gold and peppercorn, or the patiently polished veneer of antique walnut, brown earth, wet from recent rains, flexing with your mood or the march of time, stare forward, flat and cold with disappointment?

I can't. So I don't. I delete the app for your business. I can't. So I don't. I unfriend you on Facebook. I can't. So I don't. I unfollow you on Instagram. Those pictures were no longer for me, or maybe they never were; maybe they are for an un-fillable hole of need to be wanted to be desired to be given attention. And now you are only a ghost to me. A ghost that I can summon at will. A ghost that haunts me with the ever-present notions 'now is the time she will come back to me, now is when I will hear from her.' The ghost is poured from a bottle of wine, the ghost is fed by loneliness, the ghost materializes when I sink into the briefest moment of retrospection. I endeavor to keep moving.

Skip ahead. It is noon. I am in Los Angeles. My apartment. On a little sliver of land south of Washington abutting against the big marina. There are two bottles of white wine sideways and I am holding a local pilsner. Do not be fooled, there is no such thing as a local pilsner. Californians can only make IPAs. And any other beer type is just some IPA that they really fucked up and tried to cover it up by calling it something else. Any time I try a California 'pilsner' I want to immediately drive to the brewery, kidnap the brewmaster, and make them sample both foreign and East Coast pilsners, hoping they learn the terribleness of their ways. Possibly followed by a snuff film torture killing.

The phone buzzes. It is you. I knew you were out here. I felt it every day you lived here. I stayed away. I was proud of myself. I did it. This one is probably Larry's fault. Maybe he machinated a "situation". To each other he and I are Loki, a perpetual downward spiral of tricks, we christen the cracks in our veneers, we dare each other to be daring - I guess he felt he owed me one... it's not the first time he got me laid... so I took the proffered ticket.

So, here we are, many years later I see you again. You said: "Life's short, have an affair!" I resisted you. Or maybe not, I just assumed you were talking about affairs plural and I wanted nothing to do with it. This was outside day-drinking at the new cafe in the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Fancy drinks. You took my french fries away. You had determined that I ate too many and that was that and I did not resist at all. In fact I felt a flash of warmth flow into my cock, you care for me; what does that say about me? That I don't have care, that I don't understand care, that I choose to register care from you as a slight sexual thrill? But that was that. You were stuck in my head.

So I sniffed around, and sniffed around, and after another wonderful moment of day-drinking, this time at the Mexican restaurant inside of the Westwood Century City Mall, I walked you to your car, which was not far at all, and when you turned to say goodbye I wrapped my arms around you and we kissed... we kissed after a long time of not kissing... we kissed and it was the sweetest kiss I had received in a long time. Nothing more that a slight trilling thrill up the spine. A simple little kiss that had the potential to change everything. And, if I am to be honest, one of the Top 5 overall in my life. I am reminded that is a fluid metric. My thinking previously, given my age, was that the Top 5 kisses of all time were somewhere in my rear view mirror, my proximity to, and attractiveness toward, what is to me the fairer of sexes on a graphical steady decline. Well, duly noted. Surprise registered.

That was a good spot. That Mexican spot. That convenient mall parking. The perfect place for an assignation. We were there next with your son. Looks and personality, he could be mine. There was a time when he might've been. We ended the first time because we ended. We ended because I had you out the window of my apartment, in flagrante delicto (doggie-style) on a weeknight over El Camino Real on 2nd street in Philadelphia, daring anyone to look, but not that daring given the entire side of the street across was a huge construction site, a soon-to-be meathead fantasyland replete with giant obnoxious Fan-O-Vision television broadcast directly outside the window of every apartment, and a poor, poor inappropriately named approximation of the Plaza Navona - the developer was an asshole, or just rich, which is the same exact thing. But as we screwed with you half-hanging out the window with wild abandon, my hands firmly gripping your waist for both traction and to prevent your untimely demise which would be the most tragic nut of my life, immediately replacing Becky on the counter of the women's room at the Lanoka Harbor Marina, I couldn't help but notice a slight smattering of a scab - one that I've been very familiar with over the years of recklessly piloting my 2-Speed Huffy around the alleys of Olney, Philadelphia as a child, and totally launching it off fellow 'kid constructed' ramps built from milk crates - this was rug burn. This was rug burn directly on top of your tramp stamp. This was rug burn from fucking quickly on a cheaply carpeted floor. And this was not rug burn from me.

We made it that close. I, out of my relationship with The Knifer. You? A beautiful, smart, young, overworked, visionary, female fitness entrepreneur, no time for anything more than the aloof fuck boy - and this was before the world provided everyone with a "Show Up & Fuck" button in each of their pockets... one needed 'street game' and a strong sense of conclusion when evaluating the potential pool of lithe sad boys twirling the dials of their iPods to some slow, dragged out tune, well before "Idaho" by Slow Pulp, and back to the possible song-of-inception, "The Sweater Song", by Weezer, perhaps? But that's how close we got. I to the point where I was ready to open my heart back up, to you specifically, in a post Knifer world. And you looking for a little bit more from me than a place to stop after you closed shop for a sure thing post happy hour romp. My heart shriveled when I felt the scab. A scab not as metaphor, not a figurative scab, an actual scab. I called you out on it. Your face blushed beet red. I tried to play it cool. That was the last time we saw each other. I with my never discussed, misplaced righteous indignation. You with your road to Jordan. The scent of orange creamsicle slowly dissipated. "I make my own scent." I had to ask. Of course you do. You made a beautiful child. I wish he was part mine.

You brought your son to join me at the Mexican spot. Somewhere beneath my office. In the outdoor mall world. Star-studded. Fragrance piped in. They have their own scent too. We sat in a booth this time. I made his day. You made mine. It was simple and sweet.

I guess by now I need to mention that I grabbed my coffee and left Dogtown. It would be weird for me to have stood there drooling this reverie like a sudden stroke victim in front of Skater Girl and the Stroller Crowd. Some douche-lord startup bro over my shoulder started filling my left ear with his self-adulatory nonsense as he squirted off to his girlfriend about heavy-handing in an attempt to close some letters of intent on a Friday at quarter close and how the responsiveness of these unfortunate recipients is dwindling. I don't think this happens in Paris; my current mental ideal. It probably does, through. At least while there I can barely understand it. It's definitely you, man. I pack up and leave. I think Miller, Bukowski, Twain, and, well, mostly everybody has this right: I'd rather be poor with rich experience than rich with poor experience. The tunnel vision it takes to be extremely successful leaves you with poor experience. Duly noting there will be plenty other douche-lords waiting for you when you 'make it'... or at least fuck your wife. But isn't that a near universal commonality?

I went down to the beach. The surf report said 4-6 feet at Santa Monica Pier. That's unheard of. Or maybe not. I don't know. But in my recollection that's never happened. Wait, what was it about the report? Oh! It said 4-6 feet FAIR. And the word FAIR was written capitalized and bolded in bright green. Green means good. That means that there is big surfable surf at the Santa Monica Pier and it would be fun to surf it. That was the novelty. I had to go check it out. And bring an easy board for it too; a short, black foamie.

The surf report ended up being a lie. Closed out. Shore echo. Ankle breakers. Medial collateral ligament tearers. Scrapes from a sandy bottom. I paddled out just to go through the motions. Half of surfing for me is to show up and then get in. I found myself just showing up. Waking up. Gearing up. Going down. Then being very judgmental and turning around and going home. Almost to the point where I felt that I developed some weird, water-based social anxiety. But I thought more about it and am in the current state-of-mind of thinking that I have trouble assigning an emotion to a feeling and that I was misattributing the initial body shock of entering the water as an anxious change instead of the elation that I think it really should be. That something in my head was either not mapped appropriately, or that there was some hierarchical rollup in my mental taxonomies of thoughts and feelings that were being generally applied and not fully articulated or resolved; depending on how you view the mind, of course; is it webbing? Is it soup? It is cement? But it was saying "this feeling... this sudden change in your homeostasis... this is anxiety" when it was in fact crystal blue liquid elation.

Out of the water I towel off. I take the long plod off the beach. I wipe the strange, sticky Los Angeles sand from my feet as I ponder how many hundreds of years of beachgoers touched each individual grain of the thousands I brush off without regard. I slap on my pair of Rainbows, the left one containing a blob of compressed tar, part of our 'permanent collection' snuffs the curator, casting his wisdom before this assumed Luddite. And now comes the worst part: how do I make the most efficient plan to carry all this crap. After some false starts of picking things up and setting them down, I figure out the winning combination. Well, I figure out the winning combination after a shuffling start of ten feet of a sub-optimal configuration that required me to walk as a hunchback and drop then kick then chase my metal water bottle, earning it another dent. as a rollerblader swooshed out of its way. The winning combination is: board under my right arm - I am left-handed and reserving this for more dexterous operations. Leash slung over my shoulder and the front of the board. Normally I would wrap the leash around the fins, but this leash is aging and would result in me dragging the leash behind me resigned to the sloppiness after about a hundred yards. Old 2/3 step-in wetsuit slung over the front of the board. This gives additional heft and loss of board maneuverability while walking, most pressingly while crossing the beach path where clueless tourists who apparently take vacations by shoving their heads directly up their asses, which could result in another false start of my arm-laden walk, but I compensate for this by being extra vigilant and steering clear of this potential - cherchez le Rollerblader! - and all other hazards. Also, I do have a trick up my sleeve with this - my flip-flops only flip, they do not flop... only the right one goes through the motions, the left is adhered to my feet by tar - well, maybe I have this wrong; is the "flip-flop" one complete motion of one flip-flop, or the accompanying sound that both the left and the right one make while I am walking? I make a mental note to contact the president of the International Association of Flip-Floppers & Assorted Dudery, with whom I am a close personal friend after besting him during a jet-ski race in the East River near the United Nations one fine winters' day, to get the official position. In any case, feel free to write my agent and weigh-in on this controversy at the following address: [since you are going to rep me, please insert your address here... for convenience]. My point being, even someone who is not paying attention will succumb to the lack of proper pentameter of the flip-flopping. There is only Call, no Repeat! It seeps into the subconscious of your average cud-chewing midwesterner and they must perk alert! They must, if only to answer the call of self-preservation built into their evolutionary "flight or fight" gooeyness squirting with great haste from above their kidneys: with every Flip there MUST BE a Flop!*

****footnote: *again, we'll come to a unilateral decision about whether that's the quote or we work in something about paired flip-flops.. that there was only a singular flip-flop and not a pair. But this is a little more esoteric, albeit even if more correct.

In my left hand there be: my wallet, my cellphone... both cannot go into my wet board shorts at the moment... something will get fucked up. Also my keys and my coffee container and my sunglasses. The sunglasses were at stoned-mistake. A slight miscalculation as they should have gone on my face but stopping now to drop everything and put them on my face would be a large inefficiency.

Suddenly I remember I am overdue to move my car. I quickly change direction, am almost immediately hit by Arnold Schwarzenegger pedaling by with his adult son and a small entourage on road bikes down Ocean Ave, and then instead I am actually hit by two large twins dressed exactly the same who are jogging by, shirtless. Full on yard sale for me. No one stopped. And I am glad no one did. Saves me an interaction. I pick my stuff, shoving my wallet and phone into my wet shorts, drape the wetsuit that's a calico mottle of rubber cement patches, faded decals, and loose seams over my head, and I let the leash drag. Fuck everything.

My car has a ticket. Sixty seven fucking dollars. Fuck you, Santa Monica. What am I paying for? The privilege of your dirt and crime and unresponsive government? What the fuck is the purpose of "Head In Parking Only"? I've been asking you for months and zero response. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. I smell nothing but Hot Dog On A Stick. Fuck them too. It's so damn good though.

My car. We fucked in that car. Here we go again. It was a drunk fuck. We went to that Mexican spot. I was excited to show you this new little sports car I picked up very prophetically a couple weeks before the world shut down and I ended up paying monthly for a new car that I drove absolutely nowhere. We talked about how I misread your previous oeuvres: "my SUV is right upstairs.", "it's just a quick walk." Great, I thought at the time, she's trying to get rid of me, I'll take a hint. I made a notation not to miss anything this time and this time I got sauced up with tunnel vision and we hopped into the back of my little sports car and fucked right there at pedestrian rush hour in the mall parking lot. It was not fun. It was not comfortable. You're tiny and I fondly remembered my surprise at how light and muscular and lithe you were. But we were not tiny enough for the coupe. I had forgotten this. Our fucking was more born of an overreach of not missing out and less of passion.

I panted and foamed at the mouth for months later just to be ensconced in a little hippy poolhouse with you, to play an old vinyl on a record player while splayed out on some fake fur rug set centered within a recessed room, eyes at ground level with some high desert native plants, rum drinks on ice, a purposeful departure from our shared love of tequila. The needle would find a record on the platter. The initial soft crackles and pops not static on the vinyl, but a side effect of the best recording techniques possible at the time, a live routing of all instruments onto a single one track tape, in this case through an Ampex 350 machine - it wasn't until Motown pioneered multitrack recording that the one track mono style went away - in a recording control room, somewhere in the depths of Capitol Tower. A pianissimo half-chord tinkles from a piano, accompanied by violins bowed sweetly, a quartet of smarmy horns make their intro then back off making the way for Keely Smith to breath the title of the song into our ears, "Sweet & Lovely" she would say, "Sweet & Lovely". SInatra had recorded two albums at Capitol Records in Hollywood that year, "Come Dance With Me!" and "No One Cares". Not that you'd care. You just want the playful ambiance. The song on the record repeated. You could give a shit that Phil Ramone said "People play better at Capitol Records". Or that Sinatra broke ties with Capitol because they refused his command to record with a 55-piece orchestra. You want the rum. Me to tickle your feet. Tickle that space where your thigh meets your ass. Tickle the fuzz on the nape of your neck. We know better than to try and cajole a smile from Keely Smith. You're quite a different story. You changed my mind. I want what you want now. Just somewhere where I could take the time to love your body and slowly reacquaint myself with all your wonderful loveliness instead sloppily pawing you as shoppers stomped by my darkly tinted windows clutching their paparadelle, parmasean, pomarola, pork chops, Puglia's, pannetone, pannacottas, pitzelles, pinots, and grappas.

That was the last time I saw you. Again. And again my heart shriveled, but given the atrophy from before, the inflexibility of scarred tissue, and given the many hardening years since, it was just a sour rot; a tiny little dish of hate and disappointment with a quick hot flash of "I can't believe I got fooled again". I decided you were too far gone. Your flame is out. The little spark inside you that made you you had died. I cannot be the one to attempt to rekindle it. Not while you are newly single and desperately trying all the many things you think you missed out on that have matured in the time since before you were free. But let me tell you about those things in shorthand: commodified loneliness, extended singledom, a dataset to be sold, your growing ill-regard for those that you date (because you are so lonely that you don't really know or like yourself), and a shelf-life not much longer than burrata. Rolled up to leave you wet and salty... like burrata. Only be able to cling to these things like one can cling to burrata... which is not very much.

Man, I really want a good burrata right now - like the fresh bocconcini from Caputo's on Court Street in Brooklyn. I used to bike over there from Williamsburg in the Spring specifically on the first days when I knew the bocconcini was going to be ready. But I had to leave NYC. It has a people problem. They're fucking everywhere. And you are never truly alone. Crowded in a bucket of salty brine, like burrata.

I have to actually move my car (I know) but not that far. It needs to be close by because I need to roll downtown to the Orpheum theater and attend the concert of someone who I later learned was a "Me Too'r" even had a big write up in the Rolling Stone about it. In hindsight I wish I knew so I could choose to not purchase the tickets, not for the "Me Too" stuff - that's not the pinnacle of lechery for me, there's so many unique facets to why someone is a shitbag, in gradient form, not an on/off switch, mainly because I'm not a child - but for the fact that when I entered the theater I immediately notice there was no drum kit. No drum kit. No drum set up at all. This is going to be an acoustic show - fuck my day and fuck my life. I didn't intend to go there to synch menstrual cycles.

I pass a husky black meter reader on the way back to the car. I know her! But I don't. She looks startled when she sees me and blurts out: "you were in my dream last night!" I won't skip this, but I need to ask questions prior of you, dear audience; I mention that this woman is black because to me it is a descriptor. But would it now be a racist omission if I do not then describe the race of every single other character? Do I default to 'assumed caucasian' because I am a white man? Or do I default to caucasian - or conversely only label someone who is black as black - because of an authorship cultural paradigm of doing this? In other words, are the choices I am making to describe only characters who are not caucasian born of racist power? Or could it be a statistical likelihood question? Like if in Jane Eyre throughout the entire book she never once described her Victorian peers and only choose to describe in great detail the many scenes across the four specific chapters where the samurais attacked, only describing the samurais in their vivid and different glory? Could it be that? A question of mundanity versus something new and delightful? Is it marketshare? Can I look at universal book sales data in my specific segment and make assumptions of convenience about my purchasing audience solely designed to keep said readers speeding along like a fast burrata?

Fuck it. She pauses. She has a round face. She wears a hat. Her hair is freshly braided. In her braids there are fine filigrees of a metallic material like copper thread. It is most-likely plastic, given the demands of her job and an assumed want of comfort while walking the sandy streets of the westside bearing the brunt of assholes with cars who can't read signs or tell time (like burrata). Her uniform is crisp and new and she don't give a fuck about it - ticket book and cell phone in one hand, a large plastic coffee milkshake in the other - she is possibly a summer add-on. Her dark skin betrays sunburn on her cheeks and forehead.

"Sorry." "Don't be." "I recognize you... somehow." And then it hit me... "Yeah. Me too. I swear you were in my dream last night." "You need to tell me!" "Okay, so you were in my dream last night. In the dream, I woke up. And I was on some sort of spaceship. We were going somewhere far." "And you weren't supposed to wake up!" "Yeah, and I wasn't supposed to wake up. And you did too. And you weren't supposed to wake up either. We were found by - I don't know if it was people or robots or aliens or whatnot - but we were found by some explanatory consciousness..." "... I had the same exact dream." She went on... "We were told that we signed up for this. And we were given a dream life for the duration of the trip. Dream life, dream sleep, dream daily grind, dream everything. They said that sometimes there is bleed across the characters. That sometimes the dreamers interact. They don't know or understand why. Probably some crossover in the system or something."

She makes a good point. We all are suspended, reliving memories on a spaceship. Venice Beach can be a tough place at high noon. I continue to clutch my armfuls of soggy items and move on. Nothing good can come of this. What are we supposed to do? Go figure out the mystery? Then what? Play board games on a cold spaceship blasting across the cosmos for the next hundred years? No thanks.

Car moved. Back at house. Quick shower. Nap time - not much happened here, I probably cranked one out. Wake up. Throw on clothes, black on black on black, Dark Horse Tattoo T-shirt, faded black jeans, organic leather Bed Stus.

At the Orpheum Theater now. This place is beautiful. But there is a lot wrong with it. Assigned seats. Actual seats. My lifetime of early concerts alternate between getting jostled around City Gardens and The Troc or stomping barefoot on ecstasy in a muddy field. Tiny seats. I'm not a big guy, but if it sucks for me and I'm completely average then it sucks for a full half of all other people. Vertically aligned seats (the biggest crime so far), given I have a seven foot monster with a state fair prized pumpkin for a head sitting directly in front of me. Oh, and, as stated before, no drum set on stage. Rob McCarthy and I suffer through about thirty minutes of what I am told ended up being an almost unbearable four hour set before I feel a funny hot fizz in my pocket. Strange to feel much of anything given the key bumps Rob's been shoving up my nose. I look down to see full on flames coming from my jeans.

This is not normal, I am told.

I leap from my seat and ignoring the beer I am holding reach for the nearest wet thing I see in a panic, which is a container of tzatziki sauce that the boyfriend of the beautiful woman sitting next to me is holding as she dips her pita bread - also another big strike against this place: allowing full on meals during the fucking concert! At the Hollywood Bowl it's amazing. There's room. Here, it's an insult. Like being served a seafood boat in coach on Spirit Airlines. Anyway, I dump the sauce onto my pants and yank out the offending item, my saltwater corroded cellular telephone, sparking and oozing. This commotion takes places during a quiet moment of the already too quiet set and everyone stops and stares and the musician, already known for harassing the audience, harasses me for being on fire. Rob and I hit the alley and bum a smoke in the smoking section and tank our drinks then decide to bolt. No lasting damage, and a slight improvement to my jeans.

I'm glad Mr. Me Too decided to play an acoustic set. I'm glad my phone set my pants on fire. I'm glad it was unbearable to sit next to Rob during warbling, uncomfortable, introspective silence, listening to him snuffle his leaky, deviated, disco nostril, sneaking concert footage, posting to God-knows-who, and sticking his nasty classic car key in my face. I am glad because it led me to nirvana.

Nirvana requires of you some intestinal fortitude to achieve; and by achieve I mean getting into the front door. Between the Orpheum Theater and Heaven-on-Earth there exists Skid Row. And now I'm not here to cast aspersions on the unhoused, but that is akin to saying I bear no ill will toward drivers when the driver next to you is wantonly mowing down octogenarians doing doughnuts on the lawn of a local nursing home. What I mean to say is there is the misfortune of homelessness, and then the willful intent of throwing ones garbage around, intentionally purchasing and using the bad kind of street drugs, purposefully committing crimes, and menacing passersby - the former being something I can extend compassion toward, the latter something I want to see eradicated with extreme prejudice and without remorse. The tragedy is they live in micro-millimeter knife-edge proximity to each other that the efforts to reduce collateral damage are often so blurred that the effort itself outweighs the ends. Suffice to say, if you want to get to nirvana, you must pass through Skid Row, and passing through Skid Row puts you in a much higher risk category of getting stabbed, without any shared humanly compassion, by a total stranger.

But if you get to Nirvana unscathed or only mildly injured, you can descend the concrete steps using the ancient, ribbed wrought-iron railing as your guild, squeeze past the bouncer-slash-security guard position there most-likely to keep rapscallions at bay, though he is obviously engaged in a drug deal to acquire painkillers, and sidle on into a dimly lit but richly appointed bar - you've made it to Cole's French Dip.

I shove Rob down the stairs ahead of me. He's never been. Not a fan of dive bars. At least not a fan of dive bars un-ironically. I know he's seen the Pizza Show in Bushwick - most nouveau riche dickbag tech bros have - to be fair, it is a relatively good time particularly if you are in the company of those susceptible like a lonely tween boy to slight-of-hand magic who are easily fooled by the perfect surreptitious combination of stink bombs and melty ice cream. I, on the other hand, love dive bars, and will tell you all about Westy's, Ray's Happy Birthday Bar, Kung-Fu Necktie, Bob & Barbara's (especially drag show night), The El Bar, Johnny Brenda's, Les & Doreen's Happy Tap, The Fire, Tattooed Moms, Dirty Frank's, The Las Vegas Lounge, and the pinnacle and sadly defunct, Ministry of Information, and that's just Philly. Don't even get me started on Brooklyn. Or do. Just buy me a drink first. Preferably at a local dive. Hopefully at Lucky Dog.

LA doesn't do dive bars. At least not well. You need to truly find an old bar for it to come close and nothing in Los Angeles is really that old. Some have come close to dive bar status, not for being old, but for being divey... The Brig comes to mind, before the interior redecoration, not redesign mind you given it was just a paint job, but they were close - I felt at home there, comfortable, now I feel like I am walking into a Stereolab album cover. The Burgundy Room, Jumbo's Clown Room, HMS Bounty, and now Cole's, but not really, it's just about as old as you can get in Los Angeles. The Cole's interior is dark woods, dark reds, dark lights, and antique fixtures; a good solid bar where I imagine Philip Marlowe would toss back a few whisky sodas, striking a matches with his thumb, burning down Lucky Strikes, passing the time waiting for a dame on the lam to appear with an entreaty for help and a folder full of traveller's checks that will ultimately be refused ethically.

When I write "French Dip" what comes to mind? To me, what comes to mind is any quasi-religious family gathering at my Nana's house on my dad's side where there was always an ancient crockpot slowly stewing roast beef au jus with the temperament of a sloth realizing world peace. Mostly I guess Easter though. A little tub of horseradish my dad grew in his garden that anytime anyone gets within fifteen feet of the pot he suddenly materializes and dares folks to "try it." And he ain't fucking around about it either, it's hot, I mean hot hot. But like Northeast Philly white people hot. Which I learned later on while being married to a Trini that there is way hotter, short-circuit your brain and in rare cases your bowel control hot. We're not gonna talk too much about her - she was hot and spicy too. And terribly mixed up.

Maybe what comes to mind when I mention French Dip is a soggy wad of wrapped bread and meat tossed from the window of Tony Luke's on the way to a Flyers game.

Maybe it's a similarly wrapped tube of sogginess handed through a concession port at Wrigley Field.

Maybe it's kicked back along Pont Neuf, tall glass of ice cold Kronenberg perspiring on a wrought iron table, drops spotting then un-spotting your white and blue striped shirt as they evaporate in the Parisian summer heat, trying your best to stay in the shade of the world's largest sundial, le tour de Eiffel, attempting to keep the au jus running down your arm from staining your French Navy shirt, as you guide the paradigm of the French Dip, the beating heart of Frenchness square on the geographic epicenter, into your gaping maw... just like all the french do.

And you'd be WRONG. Dead wrong. The French Dip is an American concoction! Angeleno to be specific. Created right here in this very restaurant back in the early 1900's. Granted this is told via an oral history. And if I were held at knifepoint next to a dumpster behind Philippe's, I'd easily change my tune. But I'm at Cole's now. And I'm telling the story to Rob. So it originated here. He's not hungry. His foot is tapping a mile a minute. And his eyes are glazed from a key bump party of one that started around noon for him today. He won't eat one. I can definitely get him to drink an Old Fashioned though.

I am pleasantly reminded that the French Dip sandwich borrows it's name from a dress style popular around the same time too as two slightly-older-than-me women walk in sporting sundresses; though the "French Dip" fashion term was for a skirt worn slightly lower at the waist. I know that style too. My friend Carrie in college always wore she skirt that way.

My sandwich arrives. I had ordered the Prime Beef French Dip. No fries. No slaw. I want the main course. The title card. Not the featherweights. I got mine with Swiss. The au jus, of course, comes in a dish off to the side.

Let's talk bread a second. Bread is important. Bad bread can come four ways: too thick, too thin, too goopy, too dry. Too thick and you take a bite and cause immediate damage to the gums directly behind your two front teeth... not quite the territory of pizza burn, which is only millimeters further back. Through if you are suffering from both at the same time you are in for some misery, most likely on the Monday after the Superbowl. A thick crust requires a heftier bite which then causes shards that wedge in behind your incisors up toward your brain to potentially and accidentally cause a self-inflicted lobotomy. Remembrances of terrible pizzas in ski towns at altitude and grinders from western Pennsylvania. Too thin and you're wearing it; wearing a billion tiny crumbs in your hoodie, your dress shirt, her bra, long hair, car seat, socks, shoes, floor mats, carpet, mats, table place, the fur of a turbinate, fluctuating, inconstant Maine Coon kitten, everywhere; the whole world suddenly fills with tiny, weightless bread-flecks that fill the air, asphyxiate the elderly, block out the sun, cause nuclear winter, disrupt satellite communications, prevent conception, pollination, photosynthesis, rending the whole of the earth sterile, hungry, blind, and in a very short war, leaving only a bready round orb behind, a universal Guinness contender for Largest Ball of Phyllo Dough. Too goopy and it's like burrata... a bad burrata. Too dry and it pulls the moisture from you, along with pleasure, leaving you an insensate, anesthetized wastrel suffering from sudden onset Sjögren's Syndrome.

Most bread rolls for sandwiches are variations of the french demi-baguette, with the pinnacle being a fresh baked hoagie roll from Amoroso. The crust thickness is perfect - it will not cause soft palette damage, it will not explode like a fluorescent light hefted like a javelin behind a dumpster by some juvenile Eckherd Drugs employees taking out the trash, it is a responsible vessel for your carefully simmered meats.

A Cole's Prime Rib French Dip will short-circuit your brain. Corporate fast food chain marketing departments have rendered meat descriptions meaningless. But the au jus from Cole's will seep into your sphenoid sinus, hijack the vagus nerve, subvert the blood-brain barrier, and fucking sauce you. Your eyes may cross as you suddenly stand rigid and emit the guttural call of half-a-whale (the other half being cut off due to brain seizures) and then bang your head on the table as you hit the floor, like the person whom I attended to after they had an epileptic fit in front of me that one time; maybe. You take a chance either way. The meat is good. Tender. A cut above anything you could hope to get from a chain. And is left to simmer and render and render and simmer waiting for you to claim yours.

"Cole's is cool. Do you know they sold over nineteen thousand gallons of beer to very day Prohibition was over in California?" Rob is dawdling in his old fashioned, checking out the tanned, fake tits on the two women that just walked in sporting said sundress, testing the tensile strength of their straps, happy that invasive surgery is an absolute surefire way to continue to receive male attention into old age, our Hollywood world hypnosis.

"What are you gonna talk about when you're done reading the menu to me?"

We're not vibing at all tonight. Sometimes we do. And it's usually one-on-one. In a crowd he's insufferable. Wants to be the center. Needs to. Is a clown about it. Big fucking red clown shoes of a man. He wants attention from the women. He's aching for it. But he's not that good-looking. I guess he's tall, so that counts. But he's gangly. Gone to age-related shit in certain spots. And he's not in his element. He does well when folks already know who he is. He does well when he's surrounded by those that admire his success, well honestly, his money. Not sure he's ever had street game. Or even any form of lasting success in love. In his defense, though, he is whipsmart. And he's a hard-worker. Too much of a hard-worker. But Hustle Culture is still alive enough that we won't hold that against him. He can reconcile that in old age... from a yacht in Capri.

My food comes. The girls walk through a door in the back.

"Hey, where they going?" "Man, I called that one." "What? Don't you want to get laid?" "What makes you think I'm not getting laid later?", I'm not, by the way. "You're not." "How do you know that?" "Because you're eating like you're not. You gonna lug around that bread and soggy meat in your tank? Slosh it around with each thrust?" "And what are you gonna do with that coked-out pickle dick?" "Doesn't affect me like that. One of the lucky few." Nonchalant fuck. I've had enough, "there's a speakeasy back there." "Well why aren't we there?" "That's next." Rob sticks his bony finger beneath the ice in his drink attempting to fish out the cherry. It just swirls around and around. There's a metaphor there. My brain doesn't work. I finish what I can and shove the plate aside.

“…the Old-Fashioned was perhaps the best of my whiskey-soaked life." Jonathan Gold, may he rest in peace.

We tumble out of The Varnish. That's the name of the speakeasy. The girls are on our arms. We promised them Jumbo's. But our LA geography failed us. It's too far. We wander over to the Nomad. We wanted to sit in the loft at the Giannini Bar and overlook the crowd. No room for us. We wind up in Bar Jackalope above Seven Grand. Meh.

I hurry to finish up and bolt. There is a look of surprise, distaste, and slight anger on Rob's face. I do that. I get up. I leave. To know me is to know that. I don't make plans to leave. I don't pre-signal leaving. There's no committee. I get up. I leave. Fuck you. There are many moments each evening where nothing better will happen no matter how much longer you stay. This was a night that slowly tilted in that direction. The floor a slippery mess. Slightly downhill. I could feel the gentle tug. A disquiet emanating from the inner ear. Lowing cattle in the hold. A bell rattling on the mast. Our ship was listing. So while I still had some traction, I got up, and I left.

Maybe I made plans to see the woman again. Maybe I didn't. Maybe we got together and fucked. Maybe is was just okay. Maybe she felt the same way. Maybe I saw her exit a pilates studio and immediately start jogging the other day. Committed, dedicated, obsessed? Maybe we shared a quick smile and wave. Maybe I said: "Hi Jennifer."

I headed home.

I opened my door.

There's been a heat wave. Not all of us have AC on the westside. Us Rent Control holdouts. I think my place was built sometime in the thirties. The structure is mostly held up by termites. The fuses are quarters. The wires coated in asbestos. A desiccated piece of hand-carved wooden gingerbread fell on my head the other day. It was a shell of its' former craftsman glory. Light as a movie prop. The landlord said: “It’s not structural.”

A wall of hot air greets me and I push my way in. It will wind up the hot, sticky drunk-on-the-couch kind of sleep that will ultimately require a greasy bacon, egg, and cheese on a hoagie roll to render me human the following day. It's eighty-seven degrees inside. I fire up some Dad Grass. "Idaho" by Slow Pulp is on repeat. You're back to haunt me. No more fucking in the car. Now a long, slow regret where I was not too drunk to drive when you invited me to lounge in the poolhouse behind your rental home. I take Sunset to Mandeville to Mulholland, wanting darkness, curves, and sweet eucalyptus air. I wind my way through Hollywood Hills. I arrive and you open the door in jeans shorts and a tie-dyed tank top. I wind my way through Hollywood Hills. You open the door. I wind my way through. I can't make the do-over work in my head. It's gone. And I am gone with it. I should have held onto you on your birthday when you smeared cake in my hair and all over my chest because I wasn't giving you enough attention. I should have realized you were important to me.

You told me once I was too aloof. I'm telling you now I was just broken. Temporarily. A casualty of another war. A war where I was abused. A war where no one trusted my reality. A war I had to fight alone. Decorated with scars you could not see.

Go to bed.

#Everything Falls Apart #EFA #Book #Novel #Seeking Publisher

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