every time you reassure, you make a reass out of u and re

(for g.)

Tonight in one of my classes, my classmate, Daniel, told me he saw me on TV this weekend. Channel 4 News was doing a story on Banksy's "Barely Legal" show here in LA (I will write a little about the show later...maybe). Anyway, according to my classmate, on the news, I was looking at the live, wallpaper-painted elephant in the living room, and talking to my friend--but I don't remember seeing any news camera (luckily, the camera didn't catch me tagging the elephant with my Sharpie).

Later, on my way home after class on the Red Line, I found a half-eaten Perugina gourmet Italian chocolate bar. It was on the floor, but the wrapping covered it and it was in good shape. I pocketed it as the train pulled in to Union Station, and I ate it after my dinner of soba noodles and frijoles. It was really good. But if I die from some kind of poisoning, you'll know what happened.

A few months ago, I looked up my Ex on myspace. I have a number of exes (highschool ex, greencard ex, creepy ex...), but there is always that one who is your "Ex" Ex. You know the one. The one with a capital E, no qualifier, the one you usually mean when you say "My Ex..." Eight-Year Ex. First-Time Ex. First Great Love Ex. That Ex.

Anyway, it's really weird that I looked her up. It's been years, and there was never any real interest on my part to see what she was up to. But I was talking to my sister about Myspace, how stupid I thought it was, and she said she liked it because she was able to find and re-connect with a few old friends, and suggested I do the same. So, that's what gave me the idea to look up old friends.

Only, when I went to enter something in the "search" field, I realized that I couldn't really think of any old friends (that weren't still in my life) that I actually wanted to find, let alone re-connect with. I half-heartedly put a few names in, some old emails. Nothing. Then I put in my Ex's name. Nothing. Then I put in her old email, and there she was.

In a wedding photo.

With a brand new baby and family.

Still looking California, but sounding a little Minnesota.

A flood of feelings, of course, but the first one was something like pure happiness. Sharp, surprised intake of breath—I even said her name out loud—and then just this flood of feeling so happy for her, seeing that she finally got what she'd always wanted, and deserved, and I felt so good for her.

Then the other feelings. Remembering my asshole twenties, my poor treatment of her and of our relationship, my stupid games, my egotism, my seesawing refusal to commit...and the whole time, my longing for some other kind of life, uncomfortable in my own (privileged, güero) skin, the first glimmerings of decolonization, trying with great difficulty to somehow graft this idea of kids, commitment, long-term life sharing, onto these other things that were pulling me somewhere else entirely—art, anarchy, aztlan. "I'm 34 years old," I said to myself, looking at her Myspace picture, "What the hell am I doing with my life? I live with three roommates, going to school, working as part-time as possible, racking up more debt, listening to punk music, wearing long stringy hair, a beard, ratty clothes (old t-shirt, cut-off Dickies, paperthin-soled Chucks), no back seat in my beat-up car (long story), no savings, no equity of any kind, riding my bike everywhere like a fucking chavalito, apparently still unable (unwilling?) to conduct a healthy, lasting, adult relationship..."

And so on.

Roll another cigarette; chain smoke on the fire escape; 1st Street bridge lit up, 3 a.m.; homeless guy poking through dumpster...

Of course, this deficit model ignored all the yeah buts—yeah but, compared to six years ago, when I was a completely colonized and alienated cubicle monkey with no consciousness, no social skills, no friends, no commitment to social justice and community, things look pretty damn good now. Yeah but, I meet and know some of the coolest, most interesting human beings in this city. Yeah but, I hear great music, see great art, experience moments daily that can only be described as little revolutions of everyday life. Yeah but, I've marched, I've organized, I've participated in transformative political and personal events in other people's lives. Yeah but, I've done some good work, and some not so good work, but I've done work—writing, creating art, performing, connecting with people, moving forward, falling back, moving forward again...

I didn't really take seriously the sense of my own failure. It was a momentary thing, one of those small hiccups that suddenly overwhelms you with doubt, fear, regret, one of those waves that are so hard to avoid when the spectacle society is constantly bombarding you with images and roles and the pressure to conform.

Not that I saw my Ex as having conformed—I just saw that she was happy and had got what she always wanted and what I couldn't give her, and I was happy for her, and I couldn't avoid asking myself if I am happy, if I'm getting what I want, if I'm even wanting the right things in the first place, or if I'm missing out on something important—every choice negates another possibility, another path, a whole other set of experiences.

Honestly, I still can't fully answer all these questions.

What I do know, from my internet statistics tracker, is that the U.S. government and military have been looking at my website lately (hi guys! leave me some comments!).

So, at least someone finds my life interesting...

And that's...reassuring...

summer 2006

1 (for rerun & floricanto, a.k.a. las sheffield locas)
I'm almost out of ink. My words are transparent now, my fintgertips still smudged with invisibility, semi-anonymity, the nihilistic individualism of the atomized automatón, self-killer, self-destruct, addicted to death impulse, to the pornographic love of being in love, three-month fix, junkie with chocolates & roses & bread & roses & flor y canto—all of it, washing away,

past midnight, I recognize the iron bones of a dinosaur skeleton, marooned fins flapping pathetic at sand on dry land, poor extinct bastard, we climb in its belly & perform tricks, compare the lengths of our legs, our bodies big L's & our feet in the air, & later one of you will carry me on your shoulders, and I will let you, for once, not because you are strong enough, but because I am no longer as weak as I once was;

and it's almost gone, it's almost all the way gone but there are bits & pieces I still keep around cuz I like the echo that they make, remnants, memories of another jungle gym at night with another family, two gone, one still around, & bits of songs we hum & sing now, back then they were still new, now they are my memories, shadowechoes of memories for you—it's still a strange thing for me to remember a time when I was young & you were not yet born, maybe these are what I still cling to most, not the bits we have in common, but the ones you'll never quite know (hey 19...)

& you're laughing & saying to me, "Man, you GET me," and I shake my head and hand over a few more bits & pieces & I say, "Na, girl, here—you get ME," and we all look up at the el sereno night sky & laugh, & I wonder if one day they'll make jungle gyms that look like human skeletons long after this moment has passed, & if this is what it means to erase yourself from the scene, I wonder if seeing & being seen are really two different things.

I hang upside down & some change falls out of my pocket.

One of you, barefoot, finds the chancla I threw.

These words are fossils, this moment already as extinct now as thirty million years from now, no matter how much you think it still slides along your tongue. But I swear, it was really cool, magic, you know, that's all I want to say. I know that it's gone. I've been alive more than three decades & I know by now that only fools live in the past, nostalgia is another death sentence punctuated by the absence of the present, y punto. I know that it is wrong to glorify a memory, three people who no longer exist, shadows, afterimages. Nostalgia, reminiscence—these are all a waste. I know all of this.

I'm just saying.

I'm just saying that at some point that night maybe a little after midnight, we were lying there in that sea dinosaur's empty belly & I swear those iron skeleton flippers pushed & creaked at the spongy, sandy tarmack & then we were airborne way above the roof of el sereno, this thing really happened, & you were there, & you were there, & we were upside down, all this change was falling out of our pockets all crazy & shit, & that dinosaur's concept of time was all chuecked out & bizarre what with all the past in front & the future behind unknown and so ours was too, but we didn't mind because we were all three of us naked watching shooting stars & test missiles fly by because in those days it was a morbid sense of humor that got you by, & even though we already knew we were already extinct, gone, we just accepted it & got real gone, cuz we had each other for a little while, there was life here for a little while.




2
10 p.m. on a Monday night, walking through an empty Placita Olvera, cobblestones washed clean still wet, nobody around, just you & me, surveillance cam

—cockroach No. 1—

and it's the 24th of July and the 19th day of sick, humid heat in Los Angeles, and no end in sight, muggy, sticky—frog's feet sticking to the bottom of the pot—walking down Los Angeles Street now

—cockroach No. 2 (bigger, but faster)—

& I remember Kyoto at night, hot & sticky like this, something like regret & the opposite of regret settling in, which is to say, still a lack of innocence, but the guilt is mediated by mutual complicity, real, imagined, & otherwise.

Up ahead, the middle of the street is blocked off with dueling detour signs—right or left only, no middle way allowed here, 10,000 years of binary constructs, & the whole thing is lit up bright with night work lights, workers in hard hats, shovels, brooms, tripod mounted surveyors, hoses—here at the intersection of Los Angeles & Temple, they are re-shaping space, reconfiguring God in the middle of the night, for a New & Better Tomorrow—watch, you'll see, in the morning, when the remnants of this ritual have been swept away clean, the universe will have shifted a little around you, Buddha's legs recrossed

—cockroach No. 3—

But anyway, it's not until I get to Little Tokyo and sit on the Japanese American National Museum steps to write all this down that it finally hits me why I've been so fucking weird lately, so out of it (more than usual), pushing people away, not returning phone calls, cussing at those TV sets they put on all the buses now—not depressed, but not not depressed, either. Nearby me on the curved steps of JANM is a young couple, newly in love, intertwined, the whole deal. The heat, the warm breeze, the sounds of crickets, of a passing bus—all of this was designed for them, we all know this.

And while they chatter in quiet lover's speak, I start remembering Tokyo, the real one, not this little one, the first night I got there, how the weather was just like this, & then the next day we were at the American Embassy to pick up some document, and then a taxi to Tokyo City Hall, signing forms etcetera, and everybody (not quite) looking at us, all discreetly, American guy, Japanese girl (here, I couldn't even begin to explain Chicano, nor would it probably matter anyway), and I remember how right after the whole thing was officially done—fingerprints, family registry changed, my name on a piece of paper I couldn't read—we went outside to get some food and you stepped out into the street without looking and almost got hit by a car, & we joked about subconscious seppuku.

(haha. lol. 90% of humor etc.)

And so. I'm sitting here in Little Tokyo four years later writing about something I said I probably wouldn't ever be able to write about, and it hits me that it's almost to the day, July 22, when I lied to you & you lied to me, both of us just to get what we wanted, & I imagine calling you up & leaving a message, "hey," I'll say, "remember me? You know, these days, when I meet somebody new, the first thing I tell them is, 'Everything I say is a lie.' And you know what? It works, contrary to what you might think. At least, it's the truth, for once."