The 21 People You Meet in Chatsworth

1.

I can only hide behind vague commentary on my boring existence out here for so long before I just start repeating myself over and over. I go back and look at something written seven years ago and it is the same thing I wrote three seconds ago. It’s like I never grew, but then I realize seeing mountains, bright blue oceans, long and winding roads, spending long days and nights with a beautiful girl, all of it does make for better stories than eating the same tired sandwich and drinking the same tired drinks every Tuesday night for seven years. I am no better than anyone because I make decisions different than them, but I never regret anything. I love all of them and always will. I feel like I do the best and worst things at the same time.

2.

Improvisation – I feel like if I never embraced the spirit of improvisation I would be stuck home, or just in these routines. The last two years, well, since January 15th, 2008. Routines have come and gone. They destroy my spirit and soul every fucking time. Once I find them and realize they are making me into a boring person, I need to destroy them immediately. Cigarettes. Home all day smoking cigarettes and reading books about dead horn players and fantasy novels and pissing dollar bills out of myself like I knew I’d be doing the same thing two years later three-thousand miles away with a tan and no nicotine in my blood. Now I just try and come up with a basic idea and move myself around it.

When we would improvise in this last band, it would feel so intense. I never wanted to be in another band playing “songs”. At some point in a “jam”, and no this isn’t because of marijuana, you could reach this moment where you didn’t need to pay attention anymore as the music kind of created itself. Doing this on stage in front of people was more rewarding than anything I have ever done, creativity-wise anyway.

Adapting this to real life situations is the same thing for me, especially driving a car. I don’t think I can really explain how this works though.

3.

So I put a text file on my desktop to remind me of things I have to do this week

I haven’t remembered to open it once though

I’ve tried to stop using marijuana 25 times now

pencils are making a comeback they say

I can’t breathe most of the time

I’ve only been to Nashville once

I want to get this shit together so I can rock and roll

dreams of rocking and rolling, and getting shit done
with a suit on, and a white fence

I’m getting some things done
with a nicotine jacket, and a head full of voices

too many voices coming in and out of the ear all day this week

I’ve hit an all time low

last week I started a fire

I must be a pyromaniac

I light fuses and trot away

I’m the opposite of the real pyromaniacs though

I don’t want anyone to know what I’ve created

I create way too many things a day

I burn them

I start them

I go inside my own head and drive myself back to Nashville

I love the way the heat felt on my head there

I loved the suffocating feeling I got

“do you know a good cup of coffee?”

I loved the phone calls to empty witch heads

I loved writing a million songs on paper

I forgot what a typewriter looked like

pencils are making a big come back they say

Nashville seemed to me like a smaller version of the earth

among the Greek statues I wasted more of my personal time

among the remote controls and porn magazine I wanted more personal time

I break a different law a day

I don’t break anything else

I burn

I create

I don’t break anything though

when they tell me that they can’t read me

I always tell them to either:

turn the page

try a different chapter

or let me write it out for them on a piece of paper

pencils are making a comeback they say

4.

Take the sword that you already have and enter a bingo hall/bean supper/buffet restaurant on a Friday night. Find every person named Irene you can. Equip all of the Irenes with swords. Destroy every single human being in sight and then make your way outside where the Irenes and you continue your massacre of everyone ever.

5.

The news hit the town that a new pancake house would be opening. Ted called his friend down the road, Michael. Michael’s wife answered the phone, Ted hung up. "That fat whore" he thought.

6.

Fill every pocket of a white denim jacket with fingernails and ripped up pages of a Danielle Steele novel. Live forever with this.

7.

If I remember correctly we would even put Polo on between our legs just in case we hooked up at the dance at the YMCA. One time, this piece of shit Greek kid punched me in the stomach in front of the girl I liked. His family was on welfare and he was adopted so I won at life anyway.

8.

Penny Marshall so fucked up on quaaludes that she actually has sex with you and your father at the same time

9.

I was in Waynesboro, Virgina in 1998 and a woman with a dream catcher tattoo on her leg said to me "I can tell you anything you want to know about the mountains and how they watch us"

10.

I hate how you can’t control a car in your head during a dream or just thinking about it. It’s impossible. Anytime you think of driving close to a cliff you always end up driving off, sliding off it in ice, someone hitting you from behind. The terrifying last few seconds of your life as you fall hundreds of feet. How horrifying this is. I think about it constantly. I could never drive the Pacific Coast Highway south as I always thought I would doze off and take that terrifying plunge down to the ocean and no one would hear from me and my knowledge of Bud Powell and mid 80’s east coast hardcore again.

11.

We drank a 1990 bottle of Lafleur Gazin and listened to the first three Bad Company albums; by the end of the night I had your social security number, criminal record, phone records and enough information to put you away for good.

12.

"What time does Doug want us at the dart tournament? I have to take Hector to physical therapy and then to the bank"

13.

Smoking crack for the first time, and blowing the smoke into the muzzle of your friends Golden Retriever named "Freckles"

14.

A young man gets into a fight outside of a 7-11 and gets hit in the face with a bottle of Snapple diet raspberry iced tea.

15.

Ray Manzerak flavored popsicles.

16.

All fucked up on whiskey and Fresca, I soaked the rolled up copy of the February issue of Cat Fancy in gasoline and put it in the gas tank of my enemy’s minivan.

17.

Man, when we were at the Ozzy Osbourne concert. Brad Gillis on guitar (boo), all sorts of dudes with thin mustaches and no shirts on screaming and yelling about who knows what. I knew that night what I wanted to be in life: a loser with no direction. Flying High Again.

18.

On Friday and Saturday nights for a brief period of time a group of us would go out, calling ourselves “The Organized Vandals”. We considered ourselves “organized” because we each had our own responsibility; My nickname was “Drain Pipe” because I would rip the drain pipes off of houses, there was also “Flower Pot” who would smash any flower pot in sight, “Mailbox” who would steal the mailbox and any mail inside. There was also someone would cut the garden hose into a bunch of smaller pieces.

We would never have any specific target, generally a house that looked like the people were either not home or sleeping. Things would happen so fast that even if they were home they wouldn’t be able to catch us as we’d have their drain pipe folded like a pretzel in the street, piles of smashed clay and dirt everywhere before they even made it to the front door. One night we stole a number of statues from gardens and would put them on the front steps of other houses and ring the bell and run away. Even though we were causing quite a bit of damage to people’s houses, the real bad stuff would come later on when the group was smaller.

We decided trying to find parking garages that were unlocked would be our next step in fucking with people. One night, three of us found a small one car garage in the driveway of a house right near my house. Inside was a new luxury car, a Lincoln Town Car. White. Instead of doing what you’re supposed to do when you break into somewhere, steal things, we decided we would ruin things. I found a can of brown house paint and decided it needed to be dumped all over the hood and windshield of the car. Not to be outdone, another friend found a bag of peat moss and dumped it all over the newly painted car as well. It looked as if God had taken a shit on this car. A few weeks later we were walking by the house in the daytime and noticed a priest watering the lawn.

19.

The night we chop Lady Gaga in half (the long way)

20.

It was the summer before I turned a teenager, new-kid-in-town in another little Massachusetts suburb, Swampscott. I had no friends yet to speak of aside from a couple of kids who showed me around the school the first week I was there. They always seemed to give this job to these squeaky clean kids, and of course being an introverted, quiet kid I wasn’t asking my guides where the Eddie Haskells sat in the lunchroom. I’d meet them soon enough.

After dinner I would skateboard down to the train station after noticing some long haired kids hanging out there. My house was on a street that ran parallel with the train tracks so you could either walk down the train tracks or skateboard down to where the station was. The train station was a typical small building that was presumably closed for fifty years. Dusty windows offered a look into what was once a fully operational train station. It almost looked as if it was just abandoned at one point and now people were to figure out how to get on the train themselves.

21.

Richard Dreyfuss, but with five legs and no eyes