The Fucking Machine

Wed. Sept. 4

I didn't write here again yesterday immobilized by an immense fecklessness. I'm sitting at the bar in the French place called The Canteen here on Cahuenga. I ordered an $8 lamb sandwich that came laced with strands of rubbery fat from which I would chew off as much meat as possible and pull the rest out of my mouth with my fingers. The bread they gave me was stale, too. My credit card is near the limit, so I cut across the street to the ATM at my credit union, and when I inserted the card the fucking machine swallowed it and flipped me off. I punched a few buttons, but the machine maintained its digital bird. I looked at my watch. It was four minutes to five. The bank closes at five. I scooched in past the security guard. The woman at the reception area matter-of-factly informed me that the cards eaten by the ATM are usually destroyed. "Then I need to make a withdrawal," I said. She askd for my ID. I had to explain that local law enforcement representatives had relieved me of said ID. I felt a new line etching itself into my forehead among its older brothers. The woman asked for my social security number. I told her. She asked me my address, and I told her. She asked how much money I wanted, and I said forty bucks. She gave it to me. ~~~Now I'm waiting for alcohol school to start. I have about an hour. I'd like to drink a beer. If the instructor at the alcohol school suspects that I'm under the influence, I'll be suspended and sent back to court. There's a blue bottle between the Amstel and the Heineken up on the shelf behind the bar that I don't recognize. When I'm done here, I'll ask the pretty barmaid who just came in what it its.
What else? A guy in the park out the window across the street walking his dog scratched his nuts.
I started to read Richard III last night, The Tragedy of.
There's a girl in my alcohol class who afterward walks home. We have walked together as far as my car. Tonight I should walk her home. Dumb I didn't do it the first time.
Shirelle's network television debut is this Saturday morning. I planned on going to the UCLA Writing Program Open House at that hour. She is miffed. I like when you open a bottle of beer and the spirit come rushing out. Look at that.

Don't We All

Sun. Sept. 1

And this word "love", which the graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.

Chilling lines

I need a shave.

Mon. Sept. 2 Labor Day
We swept up all the stinking shit and garbage on the streets from the Jewish District up Fairfax, through queer territory on Melrose to La Brea and up to Sunset. The sidewalks were overflowing with garbage: fast food cups, mostly. A girl at Melrose Pizza said to come back when we were done. She said, "We'll hook you up." Wouldn't that have been nice?
Yesterday I told myself I wouldn't write in here til I worked on Jim Crack, so I didn't write in here. Did the Sunday paper thing, half watched the first NFL games of the season. Watched the Dodgers blow their game against the Phillies. Wasted day. Mike Hammer just clobbered some guy down the stairs on the 24 hour movie channel. Got myself a redneck sweeping the streets today. You get street garbage juice all over your hands, it runs down your calf from time to time. Today I had a pair of rubber gloves, but they ripped after a couple hours. I washed my hands in the bathroom at Pink's. The foreman didn't want us walking down Santa Monica. He said, "Men sell their bodies along here."
"Don't we all," I said.

Tomorrow is another school day.

el A

Vacilatin again Sat. Aug 31
Thing just popped into the VCR "Gilda" with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. We've just come from Cafe Largo across the street from Canter's on Fairfax wheree Ileni Mandel cutely crooned a few slow-burning girl songs and the bourbon was small and over-priced. Seedyo and I went to see the William S. Burroughs exhibit at LACMA, shotgun paintings and other multi-media bullshit. Again it seemed engineered toward some motive of ego. I found the un~~~~None of this is true or much of it is inaccurate. That wind-up cricket sound from watchmakers in Switzerland are those cricks his body makes in his eyeballs, too, sometimes scurrying out of the corner of his eye. Teeth ached, nitrogen bubbled off the rot inside, poisoning his blood. We also saw this movie "Trainspotters" about junkies in the UK. We took a taxi to Cafe Largo. Shirelle said the 'stang was fucked up and couldn't be driven, she just rumbled up in it, though, and is asking me to take her to In'N'Out. So I brushed my teeth and got some water and took a multivitamin.
I'm writing by the light of the computer in an otherwise dark room. I put my sunglasses on as protection against the radiation. That's making my teeth ache. Guys in tuxedos all knight. I watched some of Patton this morning, then I fell asleep on the couch. It made Shirelle mad. She took my laundry to the laundromat for me. The Dodgers won. I wondeer if Colorado beat Washington State. The Padres lost, too. I smoked two American Spirit cigarettes I found on a table on the wall. People smoke them because of the label. What do I know? He he he. I've been staying away from my car. I mean guitar.
What else? The newsstand on La Brea. A detour to Borders Books to look for a magazine called Mojo from Britain that had and article he wanted to read about the Beach Boys. That's kind of funny, isn't it? We stopped by Farmer's Market after the movie. I stepped out of the car to hear the seventh chime on the clocktower there. The food courts were shutting down. We walked through the maze to the sound of music, and lo and behold, there was a bar and some women and they were serving beers. I sat down to order one while Seedyo went off to find some grub. The barmaid said it was last call. I asked the guy on the stool next to me how long he'd been sitting there. He said he was born in Canada and lived in Venezuela for a time and was a dealer at the Playboy Club in London and then a stint in Vietnam before getting to el A and that barstool. He showed me a picture of his wife in her bunny costume. The barmaid wanted to shut down the curtain where we sat, so I found Seedyo at Dupar's. He had ordered a rueben. I got some onion rings.

Hose Down

Fri. Aug 30
I'm in this urban style coffee shop on Cahuenga called Cybercafe. It has concrete floors and exposed air conditioning shafts and ducts. A fine, fine tart-looking English-accented barmaid hoses down the sidewalk to the back entrance in a white linen dress. I want to hose down her back entrance, I say to the locker room of my mind. Definite sauciness in her walk-a black girl was having an argument over the phone behind the counter and now an Italian-looking guy in a Hawaiian shirt uses similar intonations. The crossword puzzle was too hard for me today. I think I'll head home soon. The living room there is so predictable, though. Usually. Maybe I'll walk up to Rita Flora and have some iced tea and read and write and then walk up to the Odeon and see "Trainspotting" and then have some drinks at Louis XIV and then walk home and please god let me put another page onto Jim Crack.

Everyday-Type Nothing

Thurs. Aug. 29
Another one of these empty, everyday-type days of nothing. Nothing to remark upon, 'cept maybe the pall over the valley from the wildfires out at Castaic. I'm suffering from the strangest motivation to work on Crack, and a stranger impetus not to. How's that for poppycock? I'm drinking a Bud Light. There's a packed bowl waiting in the guitar fiend. Pedro Martinez is facing brother Ramon in a silbing rivalry pitching match-up between LA and Montreal. No score in the second. I need some stimulation! I'm going to play a game of chess against this computer that I can't ever beat. Ramon just walked in a run. I read a Gabriel Marquez story last night about a young couple who have a family and are poor and in Geneva to fleece an elderly exiled parent of enough money to send their children to college. The president by this time though was also poor and the children ended up taking car of him and used their little savings to pay the old man's hospital bills. Summed up simple I am twenty-eight years old. I would like to live at least another forty-seven years. That doesn't seem very long. Impossible math. Piazza homered. I'm listening to Paul Westerberg and the Dodger game and John Kennedy Jr.'s speech nominating Al Gore for Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I saw a Law and Order documentary on A&E about the rioting at the same convention in 1968. I was fascinated for a while., hatred for police states. I'm trippin' can't think. I'm going to put on this PoETRY in MoTIoN CDROM with Bukowski, Jim Carroll, Robert Creely, Snyder, Ginsburg, lot of these modern guys I've never really gotten into.

Alcohol School

One solitary defiant tree stood up out of the flood plain, the strenght and depth of her roots holding the ground around her together like a widowed mother might her family.

It's about loss of innocence, of course, and temptation, and the consequences of not being able to honor thy mother and father, which is to be abandoned to a world of indifferent good and evil.

Wed. Aug. 28
Looking east ou the 3rd story window of this builiding on Franklin and Highland where my fucking alcohol school is. You can see the observatory between a eucalyptus and an old 30's apartment building. Below is an old concrete tennis court, fallen into disrepair, weeds growing high from many cracks. When I used to only drive by this street it looked like a place where junkies shoot up, but the buildings have all been freshly painted, innocence seems to have been restored. I had to get here early to meet with Ray the instructor for a midterm interview. I want to tell him how fucked up all this shit is. I want to scrape him with my words. I want to puke on the MADD mothers and run my car through the living room of the judge and carry a handgun for the next piece of shit who lights up a red and blue light in my rearview mirror.

Writing this on the window sill; the breeze is cool; the pigeons do not give a fuck about a decoy owl; they shit on its head and preen.

The Nosehair

That hair growing right up out of his nose--not a nosehair growing out from inside the nostril, mind you, but a sturdy little spike which yearned heavenward like a stalagmite from the tip of his nose. Ann's eyes zeroed in on it every time, inevitably crossing them the closer he came. It seemed to rise out and block his face, as if he were standing behind the trunk of a redwood. It reminded her of a rhinoceros; the image went so well with his no-nonsense manner. The little quill helped to emphasize his points; when he spoke it stabbed upward with the flex of his nose as his lips formed each word. Would it hurt, she wondered, if he kissed her. What if that thing got into an eye? That was all she needed, laser surgery on her cornea, after everything else that had already gone wrong. She wanted to reach into purse for the tweezers she used to keep her eyebrows thin and yank that thing out before he hurt someone, but the had a feeling of its permanence, as if the mere steel of the tweezers were no match for it. She looked to the ground hoping to avoid any chance of this catching her staring at it, but there it was again, even longer on his shadow.

At a Picnic Table

Tues Aug 27
Two weeks ago I was feeling like a disturbed individual in need of shock therapy. Today I feel completely at ease with myself and ready to take on all comers. Nothing like 80 kids in the mountains to rejuvenate a withered soul.
I can't believe this is the final class for the summer semester here at ucla. I was looking forward to re-entrenching a part of me into the campus vibe, but it never quite happened. Maybe in the fall. I hear Asian girls giggling. It's 5:35 at a picnic table here at a nutrition commons. I asked the guy who took my five bucks at the parking garage if I get a carwash with that. He chuckled obligatorily. I thought of going into the village and having a beer with some surplus cash I embezzled from the district, but I thought better of it I think and am comfy here. If I have an oppurtunity, I'd like to read the first fifteen pages of Jim Crack to the class. I bought a HANSENS CrEaTiVE JuicES chromium high fruit juice blend enriched with chromium picolinate which is billed as protecting me from free radicals. I'm not sure it's working yet; a guy just bummed 85 cents for the bus off me.

Every other young woman that walks by makes my dick twitch. I'm a little hungry, But I'll wait and have those leftover tacos when I get hom tonight. I could go for a cig. I've started Strange Pilgrims, 12 short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So far, so-so. I was a little disappointed with his adjectives in the first paragraph of the first story. If it had been written in my class I would have dismissed it mentally, stifling a yawn. I haven't read the newspaper yet, either. Here's a pretty stewardess lady watching the squirrels as she walks. My pencil is getting dull.