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A Pasadena Childhood

There are a few distinct scenes I remember from my early childhood in the only house we ever shared, just the three of us. It was on Wagner Street, in Pasadena, California, only seven miles north of the two separate apartment buildings I split my later childhood and adolescence between, but I didn’t realize that for many years; I’d always assumed it must have become just the phantom of a house once we moved out, haunting a street that’d ceased to exist once we moved away. I remember hearing the Beatles “Hello, Hello,” and feeling sad because of how happy it made me. But I also remember overhearing the actors in this movie called “Sid and Nancy” yell, “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all you fucking, fucking brat!” – or something like that – and how gleefully startled, how strangely soothed I felt by those words. I recall entering the curtained guest bedroom and not being sure whether it was alright to be there. It was less than half full of short, open cardboard boxes stacked haphazar...
Recent posts

Swallow Me

  save me love me kill me swallow me first published Feb. 15, 2013

REGRETS I'VE HAD A FEW - short story by Robin Crane

In second grade I was very unpopular.  My only friends were 2 kids I only saw afterschool when we waited together on the schoolyard for our respective rides home, and one of them was a girl who was nice to everyone, so her friendship was less of a prize.  The other friend was a kid named Jason, so blonde and freckled he was like the personification of a Beach Boys song; there was also a melancholy that clung to him like the better Beach Boys songs that Brian Wilson wrote when he got more ambitious and crazy, and this was because Jason was poor, usually wearing the same red t-shirt every day.  Oh god, he had a crush on me.  How sweet to have a crush on me, when everyone else made fun of me all day, calling me a Gaylord because I was overly affectionate with girls I admired, and being such overly astute witnesses to all my little embarrassments, like the time I had to wear mom’s sagging underwear to school and everybody saw it when I sat down with my legs open.  J...

Three Poems From Awhile Ago

The Woman with the Saggy Breasts  That woman with the saggy breasts is me. But how on earth did that come to be? Mom sloped low with her burdened sigh, Now so do I, so do I. Originally published Oct. 12, 2018 Milk in the story of my life i would be a girl a pill-saddened milk-laden mouth-breathing girl in the story of my life i'd want to be a lamb a milk-giving soft-breathing daisy-laden lamb in the story of my life i am a blob a pill-breathing life-sleeping half-pretty slob. Originally published April 16, 2013 Anxious Poem Loudly I waited afraid of the kill, No doctor saved me and no doctor will. The cross eyes and fat thighs and wet sighs and red, Everything's thoroughly hollowly dead. All the cracked children's books and  the nights in my head, All are thoroughly, sleeplessly, recklessly dead. The Ovaltine covered with dust in a shed, It's all coated and bloated and breathlessly dead. Originally published February 20, 2013

Collage by Robin Crane

  I have been unable to come up with any poems or essay ideas the past few days, so this is a collage of some of my favorite videos, pictures, etc. Enjoy! these are literal screenshots, of my TV screen, of Colleen Dewhurst in the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls. I loved her fashion, makeup, hair and face so much I wanted to take pictures from every angle,  and I realized I was sort of passively stalking her the way the bad guy in the movie does! Rhapsody on a Windy Night, from Preludes by T.S. Eliot This was Mom's Emerald City display case that hung over the toilet in her favorite apartment. She knew how much I loved it and gave it to me one Christmas but it's when I lived in an orderly house and asked if she could keep it at her place for awhile and when she moved it got left behind. I took this video in the spring of a crazy lightning and thunderstorm I thought might  be the...

Don't Think Twice by Robin Crane

At some point in my teens, I became certain that ground travel across the United States, as well as staying in motels, were the moments to be most striven for, and once obtained, savored for every footloose second. I am aware that as a Californian, the concept of "car culture" - of road trips with stops at motels just off the highway, not so possible in parts of the country that don't live in a land of perpetual summer - is part of my home state's collective unconscious. But I haven't just driven. I have also racked up thousands of Amtrak and Greyhound miles, all across the country, countless times over. And as far as staying in motels, even when my heart was racing so much I was trembling, from sneaking out of my last house while my ex went upstairs for a second and was being crazier than usual, even then I still thought, "Well, at least I get to stay in a motel for the night."  When I was younger, college age, a part of the Olympia Washington artistic ...

Grocery Shopping, A Personal Essay

 Originally Published July 5, 2016 I was raised middle class but I always knew I would be poor. In the broadest possible terms, my mom was from a poor dad and a poor mom so she was 100% poor, while my dad was 50/50, so that has me at 3/4 poor, not in precise math I guess but definitely in fractions as done through an emotional filter. So, maybe that has something to do with it.  In any event, when I went grocery shopping with my middle class dad and stepmom, it was usually to the Gelsen's in Marina del Rey, and in case you've never been there, let me describe the experience. For starters, the store resides withing spitting distance of a marina full of docked yachts and the top-shelf only bars where carefree, asshole-ish yacht-owners drink and dine (maybe not in precise geography but definitely in the Marina del Rey of my mind). Being in Gelsen's and knowing that all goods on display could be bought by this half of my family was a palpable relief. At this Gelsen's, if yo...