The White Fire

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning. 

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I know a few good things about fires. California's coast knows them even better, secrets no living thing can fathom, forming in the smoke you breathed in too when the particles found their homes in our bodies' rooms.

I know one good thing is Echoes by Pink Floyd, and Dillon's mass of two foot long curls lolling down in the seat before me when Ethan starts taking the turns too hard and I yell something like "fuck dude slow down." He does so, laughs and we just go along until the song ends and the spell is broken by the smell of burning grasslands.

Tonight we got fed up with sitting in Ethan's garage and aborted the plan of marathoning Seinfeld until our eyes and lungs were sore. I suggested we should go hunt down the White Fire, which was burning in the hills above Santa Barbara, as I had done earlier in the day, but the roads had been blocked in an attempt to keep the adolescents from flooding in with their cameras and indignation. 

We decided instead to drive north, chasing some metaphorical flame in place of the real ones, hoping to smoke out the livelihood that had retreated into abscesses of some great abandoned estate we bartered in exchange for our youth. 

We reached Pismo and drove down to the wharf then parked, momentarily, before spotting three cops and turning straight around back up the way we came. Unfortunately,  it was a one-way street and soon there were blue and red flashes in the rear window,"Ah, shit" all around. At first my heart pounded so that I could hear the blood sloshing through in thick glutinous pumps. Then reason kicked in and we composed ourselves to behave like the upstanding young folks we were (or hoped we were, or in some ways were not).


"Are you students?"
"I need to see your IDs."


He took a full 9 minutes to look over everything while we sat and laughed and chatted in the car, more than we'd spoken on the whole ride over.
The cop returned, gave us back our things and asked what the hell we were doing in Pismo anyway. 

I said, "Our town is so boring, the only thing we can do is escape it."

"So you chose to drive from one large boring beach town to a smaller even more dull beach town?" He said.

"Yeah I guess," nervous laughter all around.
"Alright you kids get on your way then. Goodnight."

Pulling away from the flashing lights everyone was re-learning how to breathe and Dillon took ages to put on some music so we sat with our adrenaline in silence.

That's enough adventure for the night. Dillon cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and Ethan got on the highway while I wrote this all the way back to Santa Barbara's burning hips.

The White Fire started at 2:30 p.m. today and reached 1,000 acres by nightfall, born to carelessness and the Santa Ana's, blowing in hot from the south. The wind was so strong that planes were grounded within the first hour while flames jumped across mountain ridges and 3,000 people packed away their summarized lives into cars.

I went to see it, earlier today, before all this nonsense happened. I've always had a fascination with fires. Once when I was young, my parents drove me down the bluffs in the backseat of my father's tar black sports car and my mom thought we should bring soda and snacks to the firefighters so we did and she laughed with them while I stood and watched the flames.

Fires remind me of you and you remind me that I don't think I like being reminded of you anymore. But I do like fires, their brevity, and destruction. The closest I've ever been able to describe the curtain of loneliness that swallows me still is in a burned orchard I once saw as a child.

I'm standing in it now, right in the middle, surrounded by bleached ephemeral figures. The ghosts of trees look beautiful in their frozen screams, rising like tombstones from the dirt.

It's a bit frightening, but not nearly so much as the abandoned suburbs near the nuclear plant in the valley at night. When we drive by it, Dillon says his dad thinks squatters live there, cookie cutter houses leaking sewage and poor life choices at the seams. I imagine them and their charade of normalcy and realize it's not so different from the inhabitants before. Anyone can hide their corpses behind a job or a house or a car but they all start reeking with the passage of time. 

Global Warming and a Bioaccumulation of Guilt

Today while absent-mindedly making flash cards for my impending failure of an Environmental Science final, I found myself staring blankly at the television, entering its fourth hour of blaring CNN, if only to perpetuate my knack for over-empathizing.

When the commercials finally hit, I realized I had accidentally jotted down "bioaccumulation of guilt," rather than the actual answer: "bioaccumulation of toxics in marine life." Now, the word "guilt," had not been mentioned nor written anywhere on the program during this time, so I couldn't exactly place why my pen-holding-hand had so chosen to put it there for me.

Despite a lack of reason for its existence on my index card, the concept of bioaccumulated guilt is somewhat fascinating.

My guilt comes in many different forms: a broken sibling, the bags below my mother's eyes, a slice of birthday cake, the mistakes I made with you, and all reflections. It sits in a cabinet below my ribs that I unlock only on nights I can't sleep and am feeling self-sacrificial.

When I do venture to find the key, I can hardly open the drawer; it's so full.
Faults escaping like air from a balloon, screaming as they stream out. I guess I'm a hoarder, a hoarder of guilt. I like to adopt it from others and give it a different name. I bathe it, feed it, put it to bed. But I'd be lying if I said I don't wake up sweating at three, its muzzle bearing teeth inches from my neck.

Last night the beast was a girl I once knew, who crashed her car and walked, leaving three friends dead in the wreckage. It could have been me. All those times I've looked away to change the music or drink some coffee or catch your eye in the rear-view mirror. It could have been you amongst the smoking steel. I don't think I cope that well; even fantastical vehicular manslaughter makes me want to kill myself.

The planet's guilt must be a heat, that ricochets off of everything and cooks us slowly like frogs in French pots. It must hang like a yellow, hazy cloud, suffocating us without a sound. Because the individual's guilt is not his own, rising from his clothes in fumes unseen, permeating lungs of children who don't know what guilt means. We all make it, we all kick it up, but nobody says a thing.

unrelated prose

In Santa Barbara, summer doesn't come on the first of June. Instead, it shatters across the seasons, tiny filaments glinting even in the darkest months, and casts a facade from their prisms.  People are hungry for it. In June, tourists spew out of taxies, cruise ships, trains and planes like a tidal wave of vomit. Couples hold each other and their shopping bags  pretending for the day that they too are part of this coy escape from the rest of the country. Surely someplace so akin to heaven is exempt from the corruption of consumerism and politics. People come here to forget. I've seen them, with their laughter. Families strolling down State Street dressed up, sun drunk, flushed cheeks pushed back by their smiles. I always thought it strange how all animals bare their teeth at each other for one reason or another.

Kepler-62e.

A planet with the potential to host life was discovered in the constellation Lyra, which I think is quaint and somewhat poetic, but the potentials won't know it, and when we tell them, they wont care and, most likely, laugh, however they do. Kepler-62e circles its star in 122.4 earth days. It can take much less than that to die from cancer and much more to realize someone stopped loving you long ago. In Greek Mythology, Orpheus, a musician poet prophet, was killed at the hands of those who could not hear his music. His head and lyre, still playing, floated down the to the Mediterranean shore where winds and waves brought them to the Lesbos islands before his lyre was carried to the skies by muses to spend eternity (or, the road to complete entropy) as a constellation. Sometimes I wish American politics was being strangled by mythology rather than monotheism. At least the Greeks didn't pretend any god made in the image of man was exempt from his flaws. 

"How To Be a Great Writer" by Charles Bukowski

you've got to fuck a great many women

beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.

and don't worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.

just drink more beer
more and more beer

and attend the racetrack at least once a

week

and win
if possible

learning to win is hard -
any slob can be a good loser.

and don't forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.

don't overexercise.

sleep until noon.

avoid paying credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.

remember that there isn't a piece of ass
in this world over $50
(in 1977).

and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong -

an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.

stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient -
time is everybody's cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treachery

all that dross.

stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.

get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your window

hit that thing
hit it hard

make it a heavyweight fight

make it the bull when he first charges in

and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.

If you think they didn't go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you're doing now

without women
without food
without hope

then you're not ready.

drink more beer.
there's time.
and if there's not
that's all right
too.

I had a lie but I don't remember

It's too bad I've lost my way with words

The poems escape me now in some horrible

Con I brought about then forgot;

an awful drought of thought

God must have cast upon me since I stopped believing

Or

Rejected his meaning in the grand scheme of things

Maybe I just loved you until my blood ran dry

Who knew a phone call could make my stomach fall through

Like I did, when I was clumsy as a kid 

and forgot the Speck's tree house had a trap door so I
tumbled to the whims of a ladder lying below,

Twisted little limbs bent between its rungs

Knocked down and dumb and then,

Bruises bloomed on the sides of my hips and all across my back.

For weeks I carried them 

As I carry you still.