2025, Escondido

 

Sitting outside a drive-thru coffee bar in Escondido, listening to random piped-in music, grateful for all the random shit. As one does.

2013, Silver Lake

 

2017, Bookshop Santa Cruz

 

In another life

Adam and I stood by my car. "It's not feeling well," I said. "Something's wrong."

"It's okay," he said. "You'll take care of it."

"Yes," I said, "but I wish I had someone to help me."

My two rules for Baz

Don't be a dick.

Not to yourself.

Not to anyone else.

That should cover a lot of ground.

From my new project

They call her Cassie Lee. Of course, she doesn’t know that’s her name now. She only knows the way the place awakens the senses, causing them to cringe: acrid scent of cleanser, spiked barks of her fellow cellmates, shameful sting of her own waste, which she couldn’t help but let go. It was less about fear and more about lack of opportunity. She has no idea when she’s going to be outside next. 

They brought her in on a catchpole. There was no real need. She is beyond the days of fight; she has not yet reached the point of resignation but it is on the horizon. They may have done it because she is a pit mix; she’s not sure. She only knows that one minute the streets were beneath her paws and the next she was sliding on a cold kennel floor. 

Silence. She is craving it though she does not yet know it. Where she used to live she had long stretches – not necessarily of silence per se but of that brand of quiet that is made of a variety of noise: birdsong, footsteps, voices both distant and not-so. It is that melding, that togetherness of sound, that makes a life, defines a home. It underscores so much of what we know ourselves to be, both jointly and separately when it comes to what lives around us. The quality of the world, of ourselves within it.

All gone, Cassie Lee thinks in a moment of realization. To a dog, if something is not there, then it has never existed. But not to Cassie Lee, who perhaps is something more than just your average mutt. She understands the nature of passage, of what was and what may eventually come to be. She gets it, which is something you may say of an average dog as well. Dogs get it in ways that other creatures do not. That is what made them the mainstay of companionability with man and even with other species as well. This is what makes them better than human.

East Bay Jewish Writing Circle: Oct. 27!

I'll be facilitating. Join us!