First 24 hours back in California and I know already I’m a different person. Last time I lived here was 5 years ago—San Diego—and i was terrified of how my body had chosen to live itself. Never sleeping, booze in the worst and least social way, too many pills, desperate to avoid confronting myself, missing everyone and everything to death, crying speechlessly behind the darkest, cheapest sunglassses I could find. There was no respite, no relief, and no safe word. I yelled ‘“UNCLE! UNCLE!” but the slow stranglehold never released, and my uncle was in prison in Florida for something he was too ashamed to admit to me except in letters that he post scripted: stay in touch with your Aunt, she doesn’t believe me when I say I did these things for her. What scared me most about my situation was that it started off so great.
Ended up washed out on the shores of north Pacific Beach, mouthful of broken seashells and jeans, shirt and sneakers soaking wet and weaved with seaweed from a midnight mission I couldn’t remember. I’d run out of love. I’d written a book and run out of words. I couldn’t cope with criticism, the stories I thought I wrote FOR my friends turned out being perceived as betrayals, and I was some sort of traitor which was a total mind fuck, but a good early writing lesson.
Things were bleak because they were always ending. I ate a burrito and I thought, this is the last burrito I will ever eat. I took an airplane and said I will die on this plane. Same with saying goodnight to friends in town. Same with finding some girl out drinking: it was always the last sweet sex, the last sweet girl I’d talk to, then disappear on.
But 24 hours back in California and I know I’m a different person. The city is big but not at all intimidating, and you dont need a car to get everywhere like southern california. I think of a poem and I can write a poem. There’s no struggle in that sense, in getting lost in the chasm between what I feel and what I fake. I struggle in other ways now, and that’s fine.
I’m here and it’s a beginning, it feels like a beginning, even if it doesn’t last forever it will take me someplace else. I wrote mostly about New York City since I started this tumblr, and now I’ll be writing about San Francisco for a while. Any other artists in the Bay area on tumblr? Get at me. Page St and Octavia.
~rjb
