#fish publishing

Late. Vitaly Klitschko announced today he is giving Yanukovych and his regime twenty four hours to hold elections that will surely lead to his removal from the presidency, or Klitschko himself will lead a full scale attack on the riot police in Maiden. “Bleak” is how she has described life in Ukraine, and the protestors in Maidan have made it clear they are willing to die for a sense of promise. I read this on my phone while sitting in the barbers chair. It served the purpose of keeping me distracted so the barber didn't get the idea I wanted to chat. It was a warm, golden afternoon. I took the bus to Market Street. After my haircut I met Aaron at a nearby cafe. He told me he’s got no girl, no job, and no reason anymore to stay in San Francisco. Meanwhile, far off, my lover’s homeland is, what? Unraveling? Awakening? In revolutions all bets are off and in civil wars anything will happen.

January 25, 2014

Tonight Aaron came over and we played poker. I lost everything. Eventually betting it all on a pair of 9’s, hoping to steal the pot. No one fell for it. Chris won the hand with two pair. Inside, I started burning with rage. Not because I lost the money. Besides, he and Aaron kept trading me their paper money for quarters. I ended the night with six dollars in paper. A loss compared to the change I had, but it feels like more. No, I was in a rage because the bare surface on the reflective table stared back at me, gloating, a sign that I was no longer welcome there. So I left and had a cigarette. It didn't help. I was as angry when I came back to watch as when I left. Tanya offered to let me play on her team. Instead I sat alone and read the news on my phone. The situation in Ukraine is decided as far as I can see. Since the government texted the protestors (“Dear subscriber you are registered as a participant in mass disturbance”) the protestors have no choice but to succeed. Text messages mean names. Names mean addresses. Those who make it home alive if the protests fail will only live to be perhaps jailed or executed another day. They must feel that deeply.

February 19, 2014

This evening we had friends over to watch the olympics and eat pizza. Human’s have a drive to make things always and always better. We started watching the figure skating on a laptop, then I carried a larger desk top screen up from the bedroom so we could all watch together. Jake and I joked that skating would be better if the women were also contortionists and were required to end their routine by skating into a small box, that is itself on skates, and off the ice unassisted. We watched only hoping to see if the next competitor did better than the one before. Tanya is still watching upstairs while I’m in bed writing, even though she looked up the results before streaming a previously taped feed. What is the word for believing the future will be better than the past? There has to be one. Progress? People are dying in Ukraine for it. For believing the future could be better if it is given the chance to be. It is like gambling in a way. Stay at the table and play one more hand. Stop at the gas station to buy a scratcher. Bet on the next moment being better then the moment at hand, or the moment that passed.

February 24, 2014

Memory is experience tied to emotion injected with value, meaning, and understood as important for some reason. If I look back at my memories, describe them, then answer the question, “Why do I remember these moments over others?” I could answer based on what has happened since and before. In some ways memories are signifiers in themselves, and the sharing of a memory without explanation should spark connotations, signifiers, and more memories for the reader or listener. But I was reading Auden’s introduction to Goethe’s Italian Journey yesterday in Larkspur’s Piper Park, under a tree. What kind of tree, I don't know. Auden explains the importance Goethe placed in just that particular knowledge. A man can not write about the beauty of a tree without knowing dendrology, or know the beauty of clouds without understanding meteorology. One too can never know the beauty of a place and its people, or a lover, without knowing their history.

February 28, 2014

February is finished. Tomorrow will be the first day of the third month of the new year. But I guess every year only gets a few days to be called a new year. It is hard for something novel to stay special for long, when you know it will be replaced in a matter of time, only to be replaced again and again. Very early this morning I couldn't sleep. In the dark room I could see the glow of Tanya’s porcelain back and outside the sky was readying for sunrise with lavender paint. Now I’m recalling how that sliver of sky just above the roof of John O'Connell High School seen from the bedroom window this morning, and realizing I didn't fully appreciate how pretty it was. I read, sleepless in bed, about the appearance of armed, unmarked, unbadged, speechless and faceless soldiers at an airport in Crimea. I woke up Tanya at 6:30 with this news. She said the Russians are just waiting for orders to make their first move. I thought of an old Chinese man I saw walk out of a market on West Portal with a bundle of bananas. I said, the Russians are trying to take Crimea the same way, like a bundle of bananas, and wait and see if anybody notices. “I hope Ukraine doesn't become a bundle of bananas,” she said, and went back to sleep. It rained a bit in the morning. I slept through most of it. By late afternoon it became one of those special days like spring (the smell of which has been invading the city) when rain falls sideways in perfect sunshine and the air feels moist and tropical. Tonight Tanya said she would move anywhere with me if I invited her. But I plan on doing more than that.

April 7, 2014

I learned a couple good words tonight. The first one. Russian. Used in Ukraine. “Blat.” A noun for institutional and cultural favor payments. Honors, services, attributes, experiences need not be earned, they can be purchased. Sometimes to get a passport, In the old days a doctor could give “blat” to the bureaucrat in charge of pant rations for his or her patients. The second word is cogitable, a rare adjective meaning conceivable, or able to grasped by the mind. I told Chris that we should speak in more rare, or hardly used words. Like purposeful. Chris said I sound, “pretentious and fuck.”

May 19, 2014

Dream: I cut up from the street, running through fenceless backyards where light from a large unseen moon, or my own eyes, made everything visible. The aroma of pine and dirt, and the night air, muggy and breezeless on my skin. The ground black but littered with red pine needles that guided me home, but I felt no comfort. The pine canopies were collapsing on me as I ran as hard as I could down the straight line of backyards to my home’s fence. I could hear someone shouting at me from the street on the other side of the houses. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It permeated through the splintered fence lining our back yard, through the grass beneath the rusted trampoline, through the door knob I turned to let myself into my dark home, where the voice came through the walls.

I could feel the sharpened words dig into my skin like the presence of God, somehow like teeth biting my wrists and forearms, and a nasty churning began inside of me. I’m a man, I thought, living in a world where God gives nothing but anger and hatred for me and me alone.

Then it stopped. I walked slowly through the kitchen. The house creaked under my heels. In my bedroom, I pulled open the blinds and saw a man on his back on the roof outside the window. He looked at me. The moonlight bounced off a bottle of rum in his hand. There was a girl beside him in a spaghetti strapped tank top and bathing suit bottoms. She had a toads head. Her legs were long, dangling from the drain like hanging vines. She said, zilch. All she did was smoke a cigarette, peering off the roof, out over the roofs of the houses in front of her looking just like my own, up to the cloudless starless sky washed in gray from the moon’s white light mixing with the black of night. She pulled her knees to her chest and blew smoke from her toad lips, and it floated away.

July 18, 2014

I closed the book lightly. Tanya held her phone with both hands. I was going to miss her. Her subtle nightgown was the color of lavender. About a year ago to the day, she placed restful lavender stalks in the breast pocket of my denim jacket and told me that now I could always smell lavender. It was growing in a pot of soil just outside the door leading onto the balcony. We stood there in the wind. Soon after I’d see the same restful hue alight on her bedroom walls. We watched it manifest around us in bed as the sun seeped through the shadeless windows. The sun carried the lavender on it’s white capped edge and left it on the walls before receding back out into the world as daylight. When she placed that honey dyed scent in my pocket I fell a little in love. Now I stand in front of her, bashful for giving more time to hillbillies and books then to making her feel how much I’ll miss her, in our last moments together. So I did. We made love. I left for work happy. She for Ukraine.

July 20, 2014

In pictures of the wreckage the Ukrainian sky spills like tea and milk over the edges of a table, falling behind men with their faces covered with black masks, holding large machine guns. The land looks lush and deep green, almost purple at one layer, faded green at another, and at the next layer golden brown, and going on like that over the earth. Is this right? I only see it in pictures on news sites, while you are there, though far from this pictured landscape where all of those people became corpses in a mess of fire, smoke, and metal made into wreckage.

An article by the Kyiv Post says the rebels are moving the corpses to refrigerated train cars, to transport them someplace where international representatives can identify them and decide where they should be buried. The writer said, “but the mutilated and decaying bodies were most definitely inside, as evidenced by the pungent odor leaking from the unsealed wagon doors.”

July 21, 2014

In the main branch of the public library, drifting through the main fourier on the ground level, I had this brief moment where I felt like I was an alien species dropped from the moon. Like I was experiencing earth for the very first time. I can't say what brought it on, but it was a very clear thought, one that cut through all other potential thoughts, and bumped up hard against the front of my mind. The echoes of foot steps and clicking computer keys, the muffled voices. All these things filled the space up to the glass dome sky light, from which a heavy gray light dropped in as I looked up to see the somnolent movements of fog swirling overhead. It was blueless. Utterly without blue. A thick woolen layer of fog that didn't seem to be moving at all, until I looked again, and saw a few fibrous strands of fluffed moisture swirl too. There is no indication, or demarcation of worlds at the library. The outside comes in, and you sense it in your nostrils, a sour burning smell. Outside people walk around inside half dead on drugs and booze. Inside people saunter outside and avoid the wheelchairs and beggars. Smells from the street penetrate the library. Madness penetrates the library. It mingles so naturally with the children on summer vacation, with their nannies or tired mothers. All of these things mingle so well with the endless variety of world knowledge surrounding everyone at the library. The library maybe the most charitable place in the city, the most democratic place as well. Neighborhoods on the other side if this sliding glass door that whooshes open for me now, are being broken up by the street into subsets based on race, yes, but mostly money. And this fragmentation lives in aesthetics and taste. You know how you can tell if a restaurant is for you by the way the light glitters off the window into your eyes that look in from the street? By the style of light bulb? Well, the library is gray, without aesthetic. Meaning the library is for everyone. It is in its insistence to remain dull and gray that it is its most charitable.

July 22, 2014

Since Tanya left I've had to watch my money closely. The food in the refrigerator is rotting. I haven't gone to the grocery store. Only a few dollars remain in my bank account that I will have to stretch for the next week. Am I collapsing without her? With her, I know I’m me, and I’m alright. Without her I am incorporeal. I’m removed from myself and instead of living as I am, I watch me live, stare at my own shadow walking down the street. Without her all I have are books, which have been nice company, cigarettes, which have been an unwanted guest, and an incessant need to masturbate. But I’ve been picking my skin less.

I don't understand how the day moves without her, or if it moves at all, as night seems to fall without warning. I sat with Jake in the Pan Handle, chain smoking. The air was cool, and a light, yet cutting wind wound its way through the trees. But the hours leading to that moment felt like a dream I may have even forgotten.

Tanya, the effort I make to remedy the nights without you stand in stark contrast to the things I do during the day to pass things by. A man can go through hours of light dead if he wants, and be able to get away with it. There is no meaning to my job, no meaning to the mail I avoid opening, to the calls I avoid answering. No meaning to these cigarettes. But at night, my loneliness is full of meaning. Every motion I make deliberate and timed to get me back to the death day hours safely. My hands are soaked in coconut oil. I asked you once if you wanted to know what it would be like to be a man. You sat on me the same way this faceless woman is sitting in the video I watch. When I cum my hips lift off the bed, and semen splashes on my face, chest, all over my belly. It smells like wet grass and sweat. My tongue lurches from my mouth and licks my lips and I taste it, sour, warm. If I can’t have you now, I’ll be you tonight. You and in one body. I slowly massage the semen on my belly as you would if it were gleaming off of your smooth porcelain body. But my body is coarse ape hair, and the sound of semen moving through my body hair reminds me of walking through dead leaves in autumn.

In the bathroom I see myself in the mirror. Streaks of yellowish gray fluid shimmer on my jaw in harsh light. Have I heard your voice since you left? I would gladly die to hear you even swallow water.

July 23, 2014

Cinnamon layered the inside of the bowl like sand clinging to a white rock face. What was left of the granola and milk I’d eaten reminded me of moist rocks and the smell of mud. Brown milk rested in a little pool at the bottom. On a cobalt blue tea plate were the cold and gnawed strawberry tops, their leafy crowns dry and brittle. On the radio, Dutch voices mourned the arrival of the dead, raged at the way the corpses were treated, and argued over the importance of having the rest of the bodies returned home.

During breakfast I was able to download Viber. It took fumbling with the password, which I again forgot and had to reset after three missed tries, and then a world of aggravation trying to update my billing information. I entered everything exactly as I believe it to be and the machine said I was wrong.

But it turned out that I didn't even need to enter that, and happily skipped the screen by checking the word none, and tapping the word done. Viber downloaded. I finished my breakfast brimming with excitement to finally hear your voice and tell you so much of what I’ve been up to without you.

July 24, 2014

I finished a new book this morning, Victoria by Knut Hamsun, and Hamsun is only too cruel for what he did to those young lovers. And either from Hamsun’s cruelty or the hangover I feel from last night’s edibles, today the world feels dull and flat. I’m closed off. Drained of everything. Every thought I’ve had about writing you has been countered by a strong desire to lie on the couch all day and watch The Simpsons. What could I say? I just miss you, that’s all. I’ve filled pages in notebooks talking about it and each page could be rewritten to simply say, “I’d rather spend the next days with my hand in the garbage disposal then without you.”

Then my phone buzzes, and it is you. It is your body outlined by an oval shaped mirror. Your dark hair draped down your smooth back that flows like a waterfall into your perfectly round ass, all curves and softness. And are you cupping your breasts a little, keeping them hidden from me?

I’m coming alive.

It is not that you are a figment from a dream, something I imagined, but you are an entity from another realm, another life, something I never could have imagined, even if I were a great writer. No imaginative capability could have created you. Even in my deepest heart I couldn't have fathomed you for myself, and somehow, you’ve found me.

The message with your picture reads, “Something for lazy days.”

Then another that reads, “You’ll have to read Victoria to me when I come back.”

But I missed these messages when you sent them, and in the long wait you wrote, anxiously, “Hello?”

But I didnt mean to miss them, believe me. I write, “Oh my God, Hello!”

And about the book I say, “Yes, yes I will read it to you. I will sing it to you if that’s what you want me to do.”

This piece was written specifically for a writing contest I saw advertised in a magazine. A London based publisher called Fish wanted creative memoir for an anthology they were putting together. They were even giving out a little money. I used it as an opportunity to confront two challenges, the first being the utilization of raw material from journals, the second being writing about a lover. This piece did not win the writing contest, but was shortlisted, whatever that means.