I have been writing a lot it is making me feel really good, like I am finally writing almost as well as my ability is, like I can tell immediately if a story is working or not, like I can edit my own pieces quickly and don’t have to wait a month or have someone else tell me what is wrong in order to figure out what is wrong. That’s another way MFAs fuck you up: they trick you into thinking something is always intrinsically wrong with your stories, and you can’t shape them up on your own.

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Every few years, the ocean pushes too much sand into the opening of the lagoon, and the lagoon waters can’t fall back with the tide, and then the lagoon becomes full and flat like a lake. There are bugs everywhere: gnats, mosquitoes, flies. I’ve killed one mosquito and two fly thingies since I got home an hour ago.  I stepped into two clouds of gnats today while making the three-minute walk between my mother and father’s houses. On Sunday, my mother and I took the dog to the beach, and there were thousands of flies in the sand. They collected over the kelp, sometimes in bunches that made it look as though the kelp wasn’t kelp at all, and instead a writhing and frantic black mess. I keep on feeling the bugs in my mouth, my eyes, my ears. I imagine them laying eggs in my ear canal. I think about all of them collecting in a mush in my stomach, because I swallowed them, drowning and then floating in the bile.

They took an excavator last night and dug the sand blocking the lagoon out. Now the water has receded, and the reeds look frothy and pale. The air smells like sea even more than normal, so much like ocean that it’s a little nauseating, and there are still stupid little bugs everywhere.

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[They have grown-up jobs, so let’s call them Kingsley & Kylie (which were the fake names we gave when we were teenagers and boys we didn’t like tried to talk to us at parties. My name was Kunta). Kinglsey is a little crazy, in that she doesn’t try to be crazy at all — she teaches elementary school and is the “nice” one. Kylie talks and dresses like a former sorority sister, because she is one. Currently, she’s a molecular biologist. A few months ago, a couple of our friends were contemplating having an intervention with  her. All three of us grew up together.]

Kingsley went to go visit Kylie in San Francisco. After drinking all night, the two girls woke at 7:30 on Sunday morning. They left the house with the intention of going to MackDonald’s to buy one hashbrown, each, but stopped by the liquor store and bought a jug of Carlos Rossi Chablis instead.

Kylie thought it was unwise to drink back at the apartment, because this would wake her roommate. They decided to go to the park. The park was full of the homeless and the non-whites and the non-white homeless.

They started chatting with the bums, and then rapping with them because Kingsley loves to rap. One bum was telling them he had just gotten out of prison. Kingsley and Kylie said this was okay, because he’d committed armed robbery and not rape or murder. The bums were drinking Steel Reserve, which was Kingsley & Kylie’s drink of choice, back when they were teenagers and we had just come up with these names. The girls then explained to the men why they shouldn’t hate gays.

A nice-looking lady sat across on the bench from them. She bought drugs from one of the men. Kylie wanted to know why she was dressed all fancy — the bum who sold her the drugs said this was because she had come from church. A woman walked by with one of the other bums, and Kingsley and Kylie called her over because they didn’t want her to feel left out. Her name was Blessings. Blessings and Kylie showed each other their tattoos. Kylie’s is on her thigh. She was wearing sweatpants with no underwear, so she put her hand over her crotch before she pulled the pants down.

They told Blessings that their favorite thing to do was watch drag shows. Blessings told them she would take them down the street to see the ladyboys. Blessings kept on pinching Kylie’s ass on the way; Kylie has a juicy ass. The were walking forever and ever, and finally they realized Blessings was not taking them to where she said she was taking them. Instead of going to see the ladyboys, they were going to see a meth den.

Kingsley and Kylie ran off to go hide in a Taco Bell. They thought they got away, but soon Blessings found them. She demanded Kylie’s phone number, saying in a very loud voice, “Kylie you’re my girrrrl.” Kylie wrote down her real phone number, but she wrote it very messy. Then the two girls fled in a cab, vowing to never do things with the motivation of experiencing “a slice of life” again.

This song makes me want to slowdance with myself.

saturday night, these songs came on my iphone in this order as I was driving home. It was two AM and the freeways were clear and all the lines in the road, all the lights along the 805, looked like they were going to the same place. i’d hung out with my friends, and the night air was cool and the sky was clear and it smelled like spring, and i felt grateful because some of these friends were people i’ve known since i was eight years old, and some were people i’ve only known for a few months, but i love them all deeply and feel understood by them and it overwhelms me, how much i love and how many people i love and how many people there are left to love. the world is an ugly and brutal place, but there is so much in it that is good and beautiful and whole. and i want to focus on the good. let us focus on the good. let us focus on the love.

right before i went home, i had sat in the dark and told someone the truth about my past, how i used to self-destruct and why, how it was because i felt so much and the emotions were overwhelming and i didn’t know what to do with them except try to extinguish them, and doing destructive things let me whittle them down. 

(this next part is going to sound cliche and trite and greeting cardy but i don’t give a fuck, and it also bothers me that i feel the need to apologize for this.)

and it struck me, as i was driving, with my music all loud, that we are all just afraid little babies in the wilderness. we all hurt and all of us are alone, all of us just want to be loved. and it is such a gift when we can hold hands understand each other and explain how we feel. all the lines on the freeway go to the same place. 

i don’t know what god looks like, or exactly what i believe in. these moments are small, but these are the moments when the god thing shines through. the little ones, the ones that we wouldn’t even think about down the line if we didn’t stop to hold them in our helpless little hands. these small moments are the transcendence we all seek, whether we acknowledge we are looking for transcendence or not. 

i hope i never stop purposely looking for transcendence, i hope i never stop allowing the little bits of light to shine through. i hope i will always burn, emotions overwhelming, feeling, me being a tiny nerve ending in the immense body that is life.

BAD IDEA

if i fucked you it

would impale my vagina

and come out my eyes

FOUR-FINGER DISCOUNT

every time i look

at your teeth i think about

bloody stump fingers

FREAK OF NATURE

your eyeballs look stressed

i can fit in your nostrils

violins from tail

HA HA

if i break my leg

i just go to the doctor.

you do it, you’re dead

CENTRAL PARK BLUES

I’m running down the

railway track. could u help me?

police on my back

EXOTIC PETS

down in tijuana

people paint you black and white

and call you zebra

DUMB BITCH

shoved nails in your foot

burnt my name onto your rump

now you know you’re loved

When I was sixteen and manic, I took an ax and chopped into my arm and the walls of my closet and the garage. Then Johnny Danger and Joel picked me up.  I took the ax with me because it made me feel safe. We went behind the bushes down the street to snort Ketamine off a CD and I hacked at the ground and started laughing. We went to the circle at the shopping center to find out about the party that night and everyone said I was crazy for carrying the ax around, and also because I was bleeding pretty bad (I went to the hospital later). Mullen was leaving to go hitchhiking, so he asked to borrow my ax for protection. He promised he’d give it back.

While he was hitchhiking, he got into a Jeep with a stranger. The stranger was drunk and they got into an accident and the Jeep rolled over twice. Mullen broke his jaw and had to have it wired shut, so for two weeks he could only eat liquids, things like hamburgers thrown into a blender with milk.

The ax got lost in the accident. Leslie and I were broke and wanted to get high so we connived up a plan: I told Mullen it was a valuable ax, an antique, and he had to buy us an eight ball to replace it. He bought us a gram. We were fine with that.