brownies

brownies selling cookies
in a strip mall

little girls with their moms all laughing
and chasing around

it doesn't matter if they sell
a single box

Journal # 05.25.15

Doing the dishes could be delicious, especially around four am. I am easily entertained by chocolate chip cookies on a sunny day with milky clouds and a friend. And fall I fall back into pain like another home in my heart, and feel i feel my way back into life from there. There are some people missing in Texas, flash flooding washed them away on memorial day... pray i pray they will all be okay. Summer is here and wait, i cannot, for the coin in the slot, and the hot delta breeze with a lime-lemon squeeze, and all the tourists give me cameras... say cheese! 

Journal # 03.01.15

Sunday. The girl scouts are out! With their buttons and badges and bake sale tables. Cute, cute, cute. I had to buy some cookies. I asked the girls which ones were the best? All except one was pushing 'the lemonades! the lemonades!' Well, lemonade isn't just a drink anymore. It's a godawful shortbread cookie with a high fructose lemon-flavored frosting. I guess little kids have different taste buds. I almost spit mine out, but I didn't want them to see. I had to jay walk to get to the other side of Broadway so I could get that crap out of my mouth. I almost got struck by a car. Not very girl-scoutlike behavior.

Sunday. Church comes in other forms. I like show up to gatherings of friends. We congregate. We sit in a circle and talk about what matters. We talk and listen to one another. Sometimes this is enough. Religion is not necessary in the presence of faith. Faith is a personal matter. I lost it for twenty years, but my faith has been restored. How lucky, to dwell in the sunlight of the spirit. Yes, I have my forays into the darkness. But not by choice anymore. Not by choice.

this time, last year

Companion to last year, this time


This time, last year, well.... i was pretty tore up. Looking forward to nothing. Twelve twelve twelve, and the end of the fucking world. I was living in a truck in Richmond, California. Not a nice place to live, really. Definitely not a nice place to live in a truck. It wasn't my idea. It wasn't my truck. Just shy of forty, and just shy of some incomprehensible impending doom I could feel, lurking around the corner. Literally.

This time last year, I was rescued. From an abusive relationship with a kid I met at a vending machine. He had sold the machine out of the cookies I was hoping to buy, with what was left of my bank account. Little did I know he would sell out on me, a few months later. Back to black. He went from telling me he would take a bullet for me,  the day we got mugged in De Fremery Park, to holding a fragment off a mirror he shattered, in my face. For real. All we ever had in common were those fucking cookies he sold out on me.

All I was left with was my impoverished beat down self, in the end. Staring at that metal coil behind glass, wondering how my spirit got consumed. I had all the time in the world to figure it out, this time, last year. Unemployed and unemployable. Mental Illness is a bitch. Causes you to get another degree in pharmacology, just to get baseline. When emotional flatline is your goal? you got problems, kid. Another degree in chemicals, had a reverse lake effect on my mental illness: took me a degree deeper into my chaos. Paranoid about people. And twelve twelve twelve. Unemployed and unemployable. Board and care, no longer cared.

I became bored. And careless with my self. That's what you get, when you take the road never traveled by. Who gets involved with an ex-dope fiend turned dope fiend, by choice? Mental Illness is a mother. Another landlord had had enough. I was about to kick me out of me! For real. Mental case. Up all night. Up all day. Writing? Yes, of course. But that was the last of my sanity, I guarantee. Never lose gratitude for cold cold reason. Always appreciate your frontal lobe. Do not sell it on the black market, like I did. This time, last year.