sweetheart redux

Some of you are familiar with my old punk rock war story of me getting jumped by a bunch of skinheads and krusty punx after my first band's first gig.  I was 16, and as a teenager I was overflowing with creative energy and also a sense of everything still being new; even when something was awful, it was an intriguing new experience I wanted to examine with a feverish intensity.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote about the attack.  I did a zine regularly for years and at least 3 issues of it are practically exclusively prose and lyrics, and comics, and clip art, relating to my experience of being attacked. Other than that particular life-changing experience, though,  I tend not to record the big events in my life.  I didn't really write in any diary, fiction or essay format about living in my first roommate-free apartment, or my first heart surgery, my wedding, the birth of my son, my second heart surgery, the month or so I spent of rehab with family in Flor...

This is a Budweiser can in the rafters in my garage This Oly and the mayonnaise jar lids were in the garage in the house where I lived in 1999-2000 (this was also in that same garage)

Sometimes my body feels like a rattrap.  I can feel some small animal, hardly a morsel, sickly and slowing down inside my skeleton.  Every day for a year and a half straight I pondered the meaning of every inconvenience. Was a flat tire a sign that I shouldn’t leave the house?  I walked everywhere.  I was always seeing something I thought I should write down – a violent protest to end the war, a cop throwing his cigarette butt on the lush green grass of a public park.  Eventually, I tried to help homeless men and women and even children decipher a meaning to life. I approached it like a math problem: this one person has to suffer enough to cover a sadness deficit so some other guy and his girl can live in a decent apartment and both own cars. You shouldn’t describe the meaning of life to a sick person unless you are also sick.  My body is a rattrap but I feel okay, all i...

Framed beneath the smoggy, pink sunset, the gray frankness of lonesome smoggy streets lets Angelenos know that the city is a heartbreaker. Good and bad and mean and nice and happy and sad. Why does there have to be so many people? How can there ever be enough attention for each of us? Dear Native Angelenos, I have no siblings. Can we be brothers and sisters? Do you like me? Am I pretty? I like dangerous streets  and safe ones, too.   I like attention but I also like being ignored.

prelude What did you do in the dark and the cold? I smoked and I shivered with no hand to hold. Where did you go when your teeth got fucked up? I slept on the stairs and I never woke up. Who was the girl that you used to be? Nobody much,  Just little ol' me. *************************************** Dear readers, I have  been in a psychiatric hospital since last Thursday and just got out today.  I would say I just got sprung, but it was nice in there; the food was okay and sometimes good, the nurses were nice, Christian, pretty Armenian women who wore a lot of make up and who I would have written off as being dumb and mean when I was a teenager, just for being pretty and religious.  I had a nervous breakdown.  I haven't gotten over the summer's heart surgery and my new ticking heart yet.  I take too much stuff. I am moving to Florida on Friday, to stay with my dad and stepmom for a few months.   I just wanted to let you k...

sometimes I feel so old I feel like a woman  instead of a girl.

Ain’t We Got Fun In my darkest hour of need Still I reek a bit of greed Hands that shake and legs that lock A heart a lung a cunt a cock Who’s that sleeping ‘neath the sun? Why, it’s me! Ain’t we got fun?