Ode on Dull Day

Jan 22 Wed.
There are two pigeons perched on naked branch that sticks from the top of the trees against the gray sky out the kitchen window. I still feel that empty inability to create. It's like I'm blind; I look out and see things I've seen so many times they are now unnoticeable. So, seeing these pigeons today is a minor miracle. Water has temporarily stained the whitewash wall of the house in the yard behind ours. Next door there's a chaise lounge laying bereft among the fallen leaves on top of the garage. A vent pipe runs up the side of one house. How easily you can climb up it to the balcony there. I can see one of the the big houses on Venice from here. Do those palms line Crenshaw?  Are they royal palms? What other kinds are there? I know nothing about palms for all their ubiquitousness here in LA. One war-torn fellow holds up defiantly; despite the preponderance of droopy old fronds around its throat, a crown of green springs from its head.
We have a coffee table of glass on concrete pillars here in earthquake country; Shirelle loves it. I think I've mentioned that before. We use a clothing hamper for a kitchen garbage can. I think I've mentioned that before. A fishbowl of coupons sits atop the refrigerator. On the freezer door clings a magnet from the Bill Burroughs retrospective at LACMA last summer suspending a picture of me fishing Lake Mead. Curious George smiles in a cloud escaping a jar of ether. Out of the front windows is the house across the street called the Boo Radley house because no one is ever seen going in or out the front door and the yard is overgrown with weeds. It looks outside like the day has been closed for lunch, temporarily shut down, put on pause, on hold. I opened the window. A fresh cool you can smell blows in. I need to accept an audience. I need to rely more on others instead of always droning on to myself about what I already know. I need to direct myself to others, be forward, have an address. Here comes a prancing dog sniffing the rainsoaked cement and moving along on his free-thinking way. Everything is wet except for patches of tree trunk bone dry as July. The clouds part, reveal a canyon of further cloud. A mockingbird with bold white stripes on his sleeves raises his wings in heroic vanity, ready to dive from his perch like some caped crusader. Here's the dog again. Now he's working this side of the street. A car pulled up to the Boo Radley house! A man got out and walked toward the front gate. He took the mail from the mailbox there and drove down the driveway behind the house.

Satanic Buttfuckers

Tues. Jan 21
I'm sorry, but the whole Goddamn bunch of fuckin' retards running the world today can go straight to hell, starting with the idiots that administer the school where I work. Then the clueless fuckers out clogging up the roads with their fuckin idiocy can join them, followed by whatever buttfuck has screwed up my checking balance and Rosa Fukumoto can kiss my haphazard ass, followed by Roy Shit-head Seger and clueless Pam Cicada and candyass Hudi Iguana. And whoever ordered this angle piss spitting down from the sky can vaporize with the rest of them, along with whatever little fucking virus community is trying to move in on my lungs. Tomorrow I've got another one of those dumbass meetings in Torrance to go to. I have got to go to court Thursday night. Friday is a meeting in Long Beach. How did life get to be filled with so much bullshit? It's a desecration of nature, life today is. I'm a fuckin' madman. I must have a chemical imbalance. What the fuck else? I'm on hold to the piece-of-shit BCLAD office to try to enroll in the piece-of-shit Methodology courses. Kiss my fucking ass.
I read about the death of Saul this morning. I read a couple more Neruda poems last night after Peach and I went to Santa Monica to see his stepsister record her album. We went to Johnny Rocket's on the Promenade. It smelled like puke. I couldn't get on AOL last night to do my e-mail. I read Lamont's take on character, but I don't remember any of it. I'm trying to get online agian, and I'm getting shut down. I'll try to e-mail Demona. I'm going to have a garden burger. I may as well finish my wine and pot. Shirelle got home at the same time I did. AOL can kiss my ass and burn in hell with the rest of the satanic buttfuckers running around today. Shirelle made meatballs. Will I tread? Kathleen left a message about liking "Miracle Mile". I feel Jim's over-riding emotion today: Fuck all this.

Monday Jan 2o
MLK holiday, no school. Mac called around 9:30 to golf. I said I would come out to the Valley. Maybe we could get nine in at Van Nuys before it started raining. I stepped out the door and it started raining. We didn't golf. The movie "The Land That Time Forgot" is on. I remembered that Grandpa Zurn had taken me to see it at the Alondra Six Theatres when I still lived in Cerritos, before 1977. German U-boats going under ice caps to a land of dinosaurs. Stuff like that. A refrigerated chicken truck has overturned on the freeway. I'm going to shower when I'm done here. Peach is coming out to see his sister record at a studio in Santa Monica tonight. He called to tell me. I might go. I feel a little sick, though. My mind is weak now. I was only able to put two sentences onto Jim last night. I didn't read any Bible yesterday. I want to go on Jeopardy! soon. I have to shop for cars this week. I've got some e-mail to compose. We shall overcome. I had some tea downstairs with Getoff just now. We opened the kitchen door to the backyard and sat on the stoop with the clouds travelling across the sapphire sky, the moon winking through the early twilight, turning the grass an impossibly vibrant green.
Mac took me over to Eddie's to see the hydroponic marijuana garden in the closet. You can smell the weed out on the sidewalk in front of the house. I said that to Eddie. He thought I was joking. A guy named Harry played video basketball the whole time and spoke not a word. I sang, "I'm just wild about Harry". That got everyone looking at me funny, even me.
Laurence Austen, the lovable old flaming queer with flaming red-dyed hair, was robbed and shot and killed at the Silent Film House that he operated in the Fairfax district, where I saw my first Buster Keaton films on a magic night on acid where there were ghosts all around and plastic flowers out of Oz. I ain't kidding about the ghosts. It's the only silent film house in the world. Who will run it now?
I should tread before that shower, but it has already been thirty-six hours since my last shower. Getoff's mom and dad are coming to take him to the Bel Air Hotel to celebrate his mother's birthday. He says the last time they ever came over to visit him anywhere was when we were living together in Newport Beach and his dad told him we were living in poverty. That was the same instance that my father told me I was living like a nigger.
I should quit smoking for a while. I bought The Joy Luck Club and a hardcover Accidental Tourist and French-English translation book and some music at the yard sale our next door neighbor was having.

I'm a Great Genius and Everybody Loves Me

Sunday Jan 19
Oh no I didn't write here yesterday. Yesterday was Friday. I got up and walked to the store and bought a paper and a bottle of chardonnay and came back and typed for a while. Shirelle and I drove up to Hollywood and Vine under a gorgeous LA sky with snow on the mountains beyond downtown. A bottle of chardonnay will make a sky gorgeous. I went into the little shop and handed $20 over the metal screen door and got a gram bag handed back over by a shadowy figure on the other side. I had a little puff before Julia came over and we went to Kathleen Ford's and charged each other's batteries. I'm a great genius and everybody loves me. I forgot to say I read on the couch for an hour before anybody else in the house woke up. When Julia dropped me back at the house my left eye was bleeding red from Kathleen's cat. A day later it's still a little puffy. I did treadmill for thirty minutes. Shirelle's 13-year-old brother came to spend the night. Vern and the Insanity Pepper came over. Carlin's housewarming party was great. All her grad student friends from the Claremont Psych department were there. I'm famous among them, I don't know why. I eat it up. They all go, "You're John Zurn!" I had a martini and a margarita and a beer and wine and weed and I feel fine this morning. I got a joy-buzz tear to the eye telling about the bears in Mammoth and just talking fishing in general. Getoff brought a guy from the studio named Jason who I liked. There were pretty girls. I talke to them all and they liked me and loved that I'm a teacher. Ricardo Flowers just arrived. I have to go talk financial planning with him. Mutual Funds. We played Pictionary last night.
Ricardo just left. I gave him a check for $1,000.oo to invest in Smith Barney money fund. Its sort of a lot of voodoo. Barry Jr. and I played chess last night. / "Shoot zem. Shoot zem both." Shirelle just returned from Golden Bird. I'm going to crank out ten shitty first draft pages of Jim Crack before Feb. 1. I have to transfer $1,000 from my savings to my checking.
The shame of playing to sex appeal--or is there? Ideas for liquor store: Adam pays. 2. They walk out with it. 3. They get someone else to buy it. 4. He won't sell. 5. Something else?

Deaf Mutes and Sex

Fri Jan 17
My golf game got cancelled tomorrow because Wesley got offered a shift at the mill and having been rained out of working so many other shifts lately, he has decided to work instead of golf tomorrow. Demona wants to do a think tank on pornography and the first amendment. I bet she wants to film some. Sometimes I look at people fucking on video and it's exciting and beautiful. Other times it's cheap and repulsive. I can't explain the disparity. Why would you want to have to work at sex? To have to fuck under someone else's direction? I don't care about it. I'm glad there's porno. I enjoy plenty of porno. I don't understand people who don't. I would not like to think of my sister or girlfriend involved in porno in any way. There's this exploitation factor that makes me uncomfortable. Not just the performers, but the viewers are exploited, too. Maybe more so. My mom just called. She can do porn; I don't care. Just kidding. She's giving me some kind of financial planning lecture. We had a dull day in Cudahy. Ordered the all-you-can-eat salad bar. I had a Lite beer with my lunch. I've got Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever on the stereo. What else? I'll put in "Slingblade". I'll do my fifiteen minutes. I have to resolve the stolen stereo thing with my Credit Union. The Guatemalan Insanity Pepper is talking about his deafmute girlfriend. "I'm telling you, Zurn, it's the greatest thing in the world." I suspect that since they can't express themselves verbally, they're more physical, and that translates to sexual action, plus they haven't spent their whole lives hearing superstitions about sexual impulses. And you don't have to listen to them talk about shit like other chicks. "You know what, Pepper," I say. "I believe you." I wonder if I'd like Shirelle better if she was a deafmute. Now the GIP is talking about jury duty. I've got nothing to write. I need better weed. I could eat again now. What else would be good? A little wine. Some new music. Acid. I need some acid. I need to treadmill. I write that in entry, don't I? I started reading Anee La mont's Bird by Bird. I'm still not done with Neruda. I'm on the section of poems he wrote on his first trips abroad. They're not as much about love as the others. I want a new drug. I put on Beethoven's 9th. This weed sucks. Two and a half hours is a lot of time to devote to watching a video. I'll watch it from my desk. I'll type all through the movie. I'll only write Jim Crack things. I won't put it on until Beethoven is done. I'll tread while I watch it. When Kayo and I walked out of Getoff's room we saw Carlin in her room lying on her back with her legs straight up in the air while she talked on the phone. It made us both laugh. I haven't read the paper yet today. I'll do that while I tread and listen to Beethoven. And play guitar. So much respect the choir in Beethoven's Ninth. What do they sing? Oh, sure, I'm a terrible penman. I'll have Shirelle read to me from the Thing's scripts.

Thurs. Jan. 16
Damn I'm tired. We didn't get out sorry butts home last night until after two. I only got four hours sleep. My eyes have been burning all day. Kayo got here at 7:30. We knocked on Getoff's door downstairs. He was waiting for his brother. We decided we'd all go out together. I asked if he had anything to drink. He poured a short Jim Beam with ice. He told stories about horny Christine. Eric drove us in the station wagon to the King of Clubs. Kayo paid for my Manhattan and asked me how to get into teaching. Then we went to the Havana Cafe. Kayo bought me an Oscar. We went to Dublin's. I ordered a Jameson's. A girl named Lynn hit on me with a bogus story about writing reviews for a small paper she wasn't at liberty to name. She said she was from Minnesota. I had guessed Wisconsin. She seemed put off by that guess. I said she seemed homier, more like a real person than all the made-up hair sprayed divas I usually met. That seemed to satisfy her. I needed a partner for my pool game. I asked a table of girls if any of them wanted to play. I got a chorus of "No"s and one "Yes." Nicole said yes. I started off hot, but we lost. I ordered a Harp. We crossed the street to Chateau Marmont and got a table. I ordered an eight dollar glass of red wine. I saw a couple of girls scopin' us out. I made some eyes at one and she waved at me. I called to her to come over. She said, "No. You come over here." I went over. She scolded my bad manners. She said it wasn't polite to call a girl over from across the bar. They had a tape recorder. They were recording me. I didn't have anything extraordinary to say. They left. I went back to the table. Getoff and Kayo talked some about my writing. I asked them if they'd heard the one about the monkeys writing the Bible before. They had. I ordered another glass of wine. We drove home.
Dick Flowers met with me after school to show me some different investment ideas in mutual funds. We're going to discuss it further on Sunday. Justine called. Kathleen showed my poem to Catherine Cruzan. I've got to sleep.

I'm a Dork

Wed. Jan 15 5:02 PM
It rained today. I'm bootin my computer while I write this. I'm going to check my email. Let's see if I can get onto AOL. It's trying the second number. I ate a honeynut crunch peanut butter and apricot preserves sandwich on sesame seed topped egg bread. Before that I threw a day-old tuna melt on bread from the same loaf and toasted it in the broiler for a few minutes. It is difficult to sign on to AOL now that they have "unlimited access". I got through on the third or fourth try. Kayo is supposed to be coming this way tonight. I think he is expecting to go to a bar. If he doesn't come, I'm going to watch "Slingblade" and read books and play my guitar. I want to eat all night. I need to treadmill. I have to get these financial papers in order to meet with Dick Flowers tomorrow. I stopped at Chief Auto on Highland and got the fuses I needed for the horn and turn signals. Maybe I'll call Skybar tonight. I forgot to xerox the article I needed. "A long December and there's reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last." Write Howrad. It would be better to go out tomorrow maybe. Oh, well. I can sleep an extra hour Friday morning. I need a briefcase or a new bag. I gave Shirelle my MasterCharge and a spending limit of $150 to Christmas shop. The bill has come. She spent $468. Who's the shit-head? The BCLAD application came. I'll have to wait to June to take the fucking test, and I may be on vacation in other lands by then, and the fucking money is not guaranteed. What else? Why am I such a fool? Why am I such a dumbass? Dionte was here with Shirelle. She had led him to the bud store. We smoked a bowl while I read the sports page and Shirelle prattled about matchmaking and background work. I belched twice just now. I have a zit in my forehead over the right side of left eyebrow. None of the Neruda poems have struck me so far. The translations are sort of aggravating. Marwin and some other clowns don't know Spanish or English or language that well. That Alan Bloom is likewise irritating. I'm going to have to get into a good work of fiction to make things write. I keep imagining the tastes of wine. I felt a drop of water splash on my hand, but there was no drop and no source. My uncle and cousins think I'm a dork.

Swinging Stan the Barber

Tuesday Jan. 14
Seedy brown weed. Shirelle bought a desk. I saw a story about Robert E. Howard and his relationship with a woman named Novalyn Price. I had forgotten that he killed himself. It was simple storytelling. Boring. Better to have woven together live action with graphic animation illustrating the action and fantasy of his interior life. Yeah. What else? I told Dick Flowers I would bring some paperwork to school so as to maybe invest in a mutual fund. Julia says the latest they can move back the writers' group to is 2:30. My presentation to the faculty today went great. What else? I ate a thirteen dollar burrito today. We held hands in a circle at Mixing today on the playground. Teddy Pendergrass is paralyzed. The Thing just came home. I was telling Shirelle about the thirteen dollar burrito. It happened in Beverly Hills on Wilshire. She's been working in a John Woo film with Nick Cage and John Travolta. She says she probably shouldn't have asked Travolta for his autograph. The Thing says he was at lunch listening to a debate about Ebonics on Real Talk Radio 97.1. One o one point nine is about to become ciento y uno punto nueve. Tomorrow Kayo is supposed to come at six pm. I wonder if I can reschedule it to Saturday night. What else? I'm fat. My scalp flakes and itches. I'm thirsty. I've reduced the list of Dodger games I'm goig to order tickets for to six. I have to check on the fuse situation after school tomorrow. I'm having a hard time. I got my haircut at the barber shop at Sunset and Poinsettia run by swingin' Stan. He's got nudie books in the waiting chair area bookshelf. There's never anyone waiting, though. You get the feeling, he's hoping you'll have a boner he can help you with when you sit in the barber chair. He gives a good haircut and shaves you with hot towels and a straight razor, makes you feel like Al Capone. A woman was talking to him when I walked in. She might've been a pro. Sometimes this is just my imagination, but I don't think it was this time, even though it was only a feeling. She said, "Okay, see you later, doctor," and walked out, winking at me. What else? The kids are learning about division and a little about Africa, and about the treaty signed after The War of No Battles. It's already a quarter to ten. I got email from dan. I got a Sears card in the mail. I need to make copies for Julia. What the frick else? Peachtree hasn't called back about golf. This is excruciating, this trying to write when you have nothing to say, and all you can see is how lame you are. I don't know what else I can possibly say. Acidic gas bubbles up from my guts. I'm waiting on my UCLA transcripts and an application to take the BCLAD test. I'll probably have to take some fucking classes for it. Just take the classes. Like church. Use it as a place to think and listen and meet some people.I guess I'll start on the fifteen minutes. This tape sucks.