at the precipice

when circumstance dictates your happiness

and your soul is only a sham

an amputated cesspit of loneliness

sadness far-reaching and grand

and daily you struggle with hopefulness

and daily destroyed are your plans

and you find yourself at the precipice

where future and nothingness meet

then hard is the task of restarting

your life on its daily repeat

and courage must come from the notion

"it is I who determine defeat"

Exodus from LA - Day 1

Time: 3:55 pm
Grand Junction, Colorado. They exited into intense, Death Valley heat. Reginald set out for a quick walk, something to get the blood flowing again after fifteen hours of sitting. By accident he followed a few rainbow hippies wearing greasy baseball hats. When they ducked into a bar he kept right on walking. He had given up the sauce recently, due to realizations gained during an intense bout of hallucinations (a result of food poisoning from eating street tacos in Tijuana, Mexico). His soul hovers above him in space, a lozenge of cool bright neon… the components of his life like milky comets spinning slowly down and away from it. The How and the Why and the Wherefore of each event is suddenly, overwhelmingly, clear. His fifteen year affair with booze is linked to every major source of woe and failure, a thick spine running the length of many ribs.
He’d added “no more booze-houndin’” to his List of Rules.
So far, avoiding the sauce had been remarkably easy.
Grand Junctionians lounged in the shade along a newly constructed pedestrian shopping corridor. They stared at him as he passed. In LA he had relished the flamboyant anonymity, confident that people would not trouble themselves with his presence. But that is no longer the case, old friend, he thought as he walked among them. So let them stare. Take it as a compliment – no sane person would ever wear sunglasses like these.
The bus was not ready when he returned. Charlene had changed clothes. Her gaggle had dwindled to two diehards. Reginald munched generic Runts candy (a perfect early dessert) and waited with the other passengers. The candies are cheap and if you know how to wiggle the dispenser just right, like Steele does, you can get more of them than intended. Separate little groups of travelers all watched the news together: recycled political videobites; and updates on the latest national disaster…
Captain Fearmongery, may I introduce, Her Majesty – Lady Despair.
The combination ticket counter/snack bar was closing down with a kind of hopeful reluctance. The bus departed twenty minutes late.
They eased back onto the road, dipping and climbing deeper into the Rockies. Reginald had been tempted to talk to a few of the cooler-looking hippies in Grand Junction but was afraid he would burst into tears at any moment. The earplugs had remained in place. They were working quite well as single-serving friend repellant.
A rumble passed through his gut. He drank the last of his water and concentrated on the hunger, felt it, followed it along the peripheral nervous pathways all the way up to his brain and forced it to go away, to stop bothering him.
Hunger is weakness, and the Poor can’t afford to be weak.
A few hours later, in Glenwood Springs, he bought a bag of chips and a candy bar. Denver was still a good way off. He yearned to be there already, to be away from Charlene and the rainbows sneaking off to smoke weed, away from people who needed nicotine so badly, away from simple conversations and lighthearted banter. Something deep inside him knew that Denver was the fulcrum, that place where things would change, where he wouldn’t have to be so damn sad all the time.
Thunderclouds were passing low overhead, creeping westward. He hadn’t seen rain in months – summers in the Los Angeles Basin can be quite dry. Static discharge flashed and rumbled through the deep surrounding valleys. The air had that unique post-rain coolness to it. He stood by a bunch of trees to one side of the gas station’s gravel parking-lot. It occurred to him that he could be hit by the lightning and should seek cover.
The internal war was brief – his depressive mind won. I’ll just stand out here in the open by these tall trees for a while with lightning flashing overhead, he thought. Just then, the setting sun burst through an unseen gap. It set the fringes of the dark flashing thunderheads aglow in a riot of orange and gold.
His heart leapt and he was cheered. He realized that it mattered not if he got hit; nor if he got back on the bus; nor if he ever saw LA again.
The beginnings of an actual smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
If I do get hit by lightning, he thought; at least I’ll have seen that.

Focused Ramblings of a Sad Sad Little Monkey

I woke up for the fiftieth time this morning and finally realized why I had been woken up the other forty nine. My smoke detector had been chirping and beeping throughout the night, ripping me from sweet repose into a sort of half waking over and over again.
To add to this I’ve been in perpetual torment since last Friday when I went on a date with a wonderful gorgeous college girl in Westwood. I had brought up my mom being dead now seven years and went from thoroughly enjoying her presence and the evening to catatonic despair, fearing she would see that I have emotions and things I haven’t worked out yet and would not want to deal with it. As we left together and parted ways, I froze like Bambi facing a semi and DIDN’T go in for the kiss which I could tell she wanted. Her face fell and my heart broke and I just wanted to die right there on the spot. She hasn’t gotten back to me since sand I’m killing myself inside, cursing my foolishness and lamenting the loss of such a being perfectly shaped to my highest standards. Oh woe is me. I’m out of Aderall too and can’t picture leading a successful and productive life without it and the constant struggle I face with addiction and my desire to write but difficulty doing so and today’s been not great.
I’m lost and sad and curse myself every second for not being good enough or quick enough or just plain stable enough to begin a good relationship with this knockout chick. And then in all my grief I think back to the day I got busted for heavy armed robbery and my dad sat me down at the dinner table with my mom and sister and proceeded to categorically break me down. He broke me all right and I snapped and have since lost that burning driving confidence and love for self that I see shining in so many other people and had to build my psyche and self esteem back up but I think I messed up along the way. I didn’t ask for help and no one offered it really and now when my chips are down and I’m depressed I can’t help but thinking thoughts of death and just plain wanting to give up. But I can’t give up because it would break my sister’s heart and my brother needs and loves me too so I push on and try to write, try to find some meaning in my life or some sort of goal. But I keep crying and just started again and am wearing sunglasses not so people won’t know but so they’ll leave me alone. I’m a selfish bastard with tears on his cheeks sitting on Prospect and Vermont trying desperately not to fall in love with every gone girl I see and trying to write shit down and make some sense out of things. And all I want is a nice pretty girl who’ll LISTEN to me and accept me for who I am mostly and I saw her on Friday but my mind got in the way and totally fucked me over, and now that it seems I’ve lost her I just want to get shanked in some street fight over something trivial and die in an alley forgotten and unloved or steal a car and jerk the wheel into a goddam bridge embankment.
I’m still really mad at my dad for what he did and should tell him and explain the consequences of his selfish act and forgive him and maybe love him again and I have to hurry before his lungs give out and he dies too. But I may never forgive him for how he tormented Mom on her death bed, complaining over and over about her wanting to die in the States close to her family and how thing’s would’ve been much better had they stayed in Germany. But she’s dead now and I miss her so much and just want to make her proud but it’s too late for that and who the fuck cares anyway. People do care but I can’t seem to care for myself enough to get real help from a professional and try to get my head straight because every time something good seems to happen in my life a deep dark part of me licks out and sabotages it and I downspiral into self pity and - loathing. I don’t talk to people about this because I don’t want to burden them but I have to if I want to be sane and productive, and my whole life I’ve been trying to be accommodating and nice but that gets you nowhere and you just wind up sacrificing yourself for others’ sake and then they leave you or you leave them or they forget but I never forget and then they don’t appreciate you anymore and that just freaks me out too.
I sold a bunch of stock recently, mortgaging my future per se, but I used it to pay off a lot of debt and thought that would reduce the stress and help me focus a bit but it hasn’t really yet because I’m still stressing about a lot of other stuff and feel powerless to fix it. Things like my apartment in gang territory and all the roaches and stopped-up sink that plague me there, and the fact that I’m not pursuing some career at some bullshit corporation like society tells me to and which I could have been doing but now can’t even bear thinking about. - I had to come inside just now because some fag with a high nasal voice started talking right in front of me and checking me out and normally I don’t mind gays at all but I almost went over and shoved my pen in his eye. - So I’m a sad sad little monkey today and just fell in love but won’t talk to her because I’ll probably just start sputtering and cry and she’ll laugh at me or just ignore me and leave.
There are three main aspects to my personality: a) the wolf b) the jester c) the scholar. Not long ago I realized the scholar had gone bye bye for a bit and I’d been running on jester and wolf, who are good for smashing and maiming and insults and showboating and boasting, but a tripod can’t stand on two legs so I’ve been coaxing the scholar back but I think he’s scared, still reeling from the tumult and chaos of my life recently. I’m scared too but together we’ll march on, two steps forward a mile back, never giving ground but always losing it. The moments pass and I sit here and see everyone and watch no one and try to find room in my heart to love myself again. Oh woe is me.

JPR 4/30/‘08