1) I started teaching and it turns out teaching is not at all like the movies where you just get to show up drunk with a flask in your pocket and yell at your slacker students about “FUCKIN’ LIFE, MAN” and then give A+s to everybody because, although they’re an unruly bunch who joined gangs when they were 6, they finally decide to kick it in high gear and win the big essay/ breakdance contest that saves the fate of the school from demolition by the evil for-profit institution while a hard (but uplifting) Tupac soundtrack plays as the faculty gives me high-fives and apologizes for not trusting such a rogue, off-the-cuff professor. In fact, teaching writing pretty much consists of grading stacks upon stacks of essays and then cursing the heavens for not handing me a brain that understands mathematics or business and 2) I’ve been terminally bored by everything I see.

It’s true. Somewhere in between Ron Paul and Honey Boo Boo, I stopped giving a shit about the news.

Take, for instance, Chris Dorner — the ex-cop who went nuts, wrote a manifesto and shot a bunch of people.

Meh.

I know, I know. The world is in a sick, horrible place when even mass murder can’t rouse a human mind … but meh. 

The only interesting thing about Dorner was that he looked exactly like L.L. Cool J (in Cool J’s softer In the House period ), but as soon as I caught on to that fact, a million other assholes on the internet realized the exact same thing. 

Memes were made. And they were made again. And again. 

Whoa, that’s actually freakier than I thought. I think L.L. Cool J should be arrested just to be safe. I’m sure he’s done something wrong. If nothing else, his role in Deliver Us From Eva is probably cause for imprisonment.

The thing about the internet is that it’s waaaaaaaay too fast for lazy people. The second you think of something, this happens:

Hilarious!  And the shitty thing is I though of it two months after it was made.

But this is where memes get tricky: People are idiots.

Here’s an example. When people post these kinds of memes, which, for the most part, are funny and entertaining, what I think they’re trying to say is, “I relate to this statement and that makes me a fearless, somewhat edgy person, who has a good sense of humor”: 

But what I see when you post that is, “I am a delusional, unoriginal piece of shit who can’t, even for one millisecond, come up with a unique idea because I’m not just simply dull, I’m most likely functionally retarded.”

What is the point of all this? I don’t know, smart guy. Maybe the point of this aimless, rambling and worthless post is to gently point out that this contestant on American Idol:

Looks exactly like my fucking cat:

Watching Stefan Burnett (AKA Ride, the MC for Death Grips) on stage is like watching a poet, but not the Def Poetry kind of slam poet who yells incoherent rhymes about how much he loves weed. I’m talking about the real kind of poet — the intellectual poet who whispers incoherent non-rhymes about the idea of weed. I know, Ride is anything but whispering, but when he raps Burnett yells so goddamn loud that his voice actually starts to take on the characteristics of silence.

Deep, right?

Allow me to go deeper: Burnett reminds me of poet Franz Wright, son of James Wright (both Pulitzer Prize winners). Recently, Wright experienced something of a meltdown that was captured (like many other embarrassing life moments) on Facebook.

I don’t really remember the context of what went down, but this lady offered Wright some sort of teaching gig. However, Wright (a known enemy of academia), instead of politely declining, opted to  call this poor woman a cunt. As they often feel inclined to do, other poets weighed in:

“How dare he?!”they exclaimed.

“You can’t call someone a cunt!” they chastised.

But, really, you can call a woman a cunt. It’s super easy. Plus, it was probably the most interesting thing to happen to poetry since Bukowski punched his wife during that semi-boring documentary.

Anyway, after Wright’s outburst, for a second, poetry came alive (only to go back to sleep again when Wright quit Facebook).

                                       MC Wright?

The point is Ride, like Wright, is sort of a nihilist who doesn’t seem to give a fuck. He appears that way, at least. Nobody knows what the fuck Death Grips is going to do next, which is part of their appeal.

For one, the group was a trio, but now it seems to be a duo, consisting solely of Zach Hill on drums and Ride on vocals. The other guy, the one who I think made the beats and stood in the background like a pale, emaciated Flavor Flav, Flatlander (born Andy Morin), is missing. Gone. Or at least he hasn’t shown up at any of the recent Death Grips shows.

The show at Slim’s was no different. Just Hill and Burnett. Before Death Grips took to the stage, I saw Ride slinking up  the stairs with a little Macbook and setting it on a table and then slinking away again. I guessed he was going to man the play button and rap at the same time, which is both impressive and kind of not impressive at the same time.

Some guy opened up for Death Grips who called himself Cities Aviv, a black dude who kind of had a Death Grips-y style, but in all was kind of bland. His DJ played a laptop with some sampler thing and was twisting knobs like he was Jimi Fucking Hendrix. It was annoying. I hate when DJs pretend they’re doing some technical shit when they’re actually just adjusting the tone to some pre-recorded sound effect.

I spent most of the guy’s set looking at the crowd.

The weird thing about the crowd was that every genre of subculture was represented: There were Juggalos, punk rockers, hipsters, college schmoes and gangsters with braided hair; Coachella Man with a goatee was there, along with some Asian nerds. And after a while, some much needed hookery looking sluts showed up.  It was a pretty diverse crowd.

                “Death Grips is tight as fuck!”

And as soon as the makeshift curtain lifted, the entire sold out room (800 capacity) collectively lost their shit. I mean they really lost their goddamn minds. The whole show (the sound effects, at least) was pre-programmed. Burnett basically pressed play and then the hour-long set began. I think it was when “Lil Boy” came on when some little Asian chick spazzed out and punched me in the tit. A confused Spanish-looking dude in a flannel kept kicking everyone in the shins. Some guy in horribly rendered corpse paint (he looked more like a pedophile clown going to a KISS show) pulled out a bottle of his own whiskey, chugged it and was promptly dragged out of the club by security.

There was no room to breathe.

When “Takyon (Death Yon)” played, the room caved in on itself. The atmosphere was 50 percent weed smoke and 50 percent sweat.

Zach Hill drummed so hard that it look like his head was going to fly off. Ride rapped over his own track, which is usually a no-no in hip-hop. But Death Grips isn’t hip-hop. They’re hardcore with some dude screaming crazy shit into your face. The double vocals seemed to work in the band’s favor, adding an extra layer of electronic scariness to Ride’s already frightening persona. Hill banged the fuck out of the drums while Ride waved his hands up and down, yelling through his tracks.

Poetry. He was yelling poetry, I think.

In the chaos of it all, I focused on Ride. His cadence–that long, drawn out growl; the pained look on his face when he released guttural grunts; the sincerity of his scream–was that of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.

“GIMME A PUSHCART PRIZE OR I’M GONNA TAKE THAT SHIT, MUTHAFUCKA!”

I haven’t seen a crowd go that insane since, well, ever. Even when Slayer was in their early years and their audience was half Nazi skinheads, there was an order to their madness. This Death Grips show was all about the audience letting out every chaotic emotion they had stored up in their bodies, from unbelievable joy to earth crushing hate. It was almost as if the band was the background music to an entire room of people having some sort of religiously cathartic meltdown.

It was great.

Here’s another thing about Death Grips: For a long while, people have been trying to define a Sacramento vibe. Are we swag fag rappers? Are we gangster as fuck? Are we hipster assholes? Are we Nazis? Are we lost in the Golden Era of hip-hop? Are we metalheads? Are we hardcore kids?

Turns out, the answer is YES. We’re all of that. Plus, we’re apparently a bunch of mentally unstable psychopaths who flaunt the language of violence to say even the most basic things. Hate is our talent. Basketball certainly isn’t.

Anyway, the next time Death Grips is in your town, see them, if only to finally realize how rad poetry can be.

I bought this shirt as a souvenir, but I probably won’t wear it because it’s a picture of a short, hairy Caucasian penis.

Don’t worry, Guy Fieri is not trying to poke you–this is just how he invites you to a fuckin’ Tesla concert, brah!

You might think that it sucks living here, but you’re an asshole. By the way, when I worked at newspapers, the editor would always say, “Josh, you can’t call the reader an asshole. That’s not what we’re trying to accomplish here.” But this, dear reader, is a blog. And you are a huge, gaping asshole.

Not only that, you’re a sorely mistaken asshole, because we have one great thing here in Sacramento:

Gangster rap.

Most of our city is too busy pretending to be wine critics and media moguls to care about our only viable natural resource, which is, of course, street gangs.

We have tons of them: Nortenos, Bloods, skinheads and one of my favorites–Crips.

Brotha Lynch Hung is a Crip. And so is Smigg Dirtee. (I just hyper-linked to my own website, you asshole!)

One thing I noticed about a lot of Sacramento gangster rap videos is that many of them are filmed in Florin Meadows apartment complex.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to go to Florin Meadows to do hard feet-to-the-pavement reporting because 1) this is a blog and 2) because I don’t want to be stabbed to death by a 12-year-old.

However, I do find great comfort in looking up Florin Meadows on the internet from the safety of my own home.

I actually found a lot of reviews on the complex. The first of which, clued me in to the fact that I’d found something magical.

This review is pretty negative, but it’s nice to know that amidst “hella cats,” crazyass kids and roaches “that don’t even go away,” the Zambrano sisters and their brother Scarface are in the midst of Florin Meadows, keeping shit pleasant:

Ok i used to live in these apartments a long time ago and they were not that bad but now that i go and visit its hella ghetto!!kids be running around the parking lot and there parents dont even care. The kids also pee on the playground. there roaches inside the apartments and they dont even go away. Theres hella cats in those apartments that have rabies. The people that live there are hella nousy they dont mind there own buisness. The gang people also knowned as the G vgs are always throwing parties and killing people in those apartments. The gates never work cars always get jacked etc i dont recomend these apartments to families with kids bcuz of the bad influece. oh and theres always asian old ladies digging in the garbage. The only cool ppl from the apartments are these two girls i meet Maribel and Selena Zambrano sisters of brian zambrano aka scarface.

Throwing parties and killing people! But that’s what life is all about.

Yeah, it’s not looking too good at Florin Meadows. Here, in this next review, we go deeper into the core of the complex’s problems: Gangs. Here’s an interesting fact: garden crips are much like garden snakes in that they both  call each other ‘Cuz’ and will shoot you with a semi-automatic weapon if you wear a red bandana in their neighborhood:

theses apartments are so dam ghetto…ice cream men get robbed, lots of garden crips and xiv ——– in this area…police called to this apartments all the time…rock throwing at the lightrails,trains…gang related tagging from 29st crips to the xiv vgs…not recommended to family with children…lots of gang influence

Here’s another perplexed would-be tenant:

If youre even thinking about coming to Florin Meadows you must be KraZy because these are one of the most Dangerous places in Sacramento It Has lots of kids running around at night with security scared to walk around so they got security that comes in car but they never do anything and in the back theres a dark alley and no one knows what might happen there and there a hole in the gate of u haul and theres many condoms so you know what that means SEX Many people Fu#k behind those gates they fu#k so much that they have a bed

So, I don’t know. Sacramento is not the coolest city in the world. We don’t have a shitload of gay people to make the streets sparkle with glamor. We don’t have a big sports team that people are proud of. In fact, I don’t even think the Sacramento Kings go to practice anymore. Many of the players just stand in front of Home Depot to pick up some extra cash. Some of them probably live in Florin Meadows.

Anyway, Sacramento might be unfashionable. Uncool. Ugly, even.

However, what we lack in urban hipster sophistication, we make up for in shitloads of deadly gangs that will kill your entire family and rape your house pets if you so much as look at one of them funny.

Namaste.

The other day I drove past a hipster with a long beard. He couldn’t have been more than 23, but the combination of his overweight-ness, cutoff jeans, tuxedo print t-shirt and that longass beard gave him the appearance that he really didn’t give a fuck. Like he woke up in the morning,  took a big shit in his pajamas and then went to the kitchen to have sex with his grandfather. That’s stupid. I don’t know what that means, but I’m just trying to say he looked like he didn’t give a fuck at all.

I can relate to wanting the appearance of not giving a fuck; I’ve tried at different points throughout my life to look like I didn’t care about shit, but it’s always been derailed by the fact that I actually give many, many fucks. Too many fucks. It shows. For instance, whenever I try to grow a beard, I always stop somewhere in between the long five o’ clock shadow and the full beard, so I end up looking like George Clooney when he plays a dad.

This dude gives fucks and now he’s rich!

By the way, it’s funny how Wikipedia describes beards:

A beard is the collection of hair that grows on the chin, upper lip, cheeks and neck of human beings.

That doesn’t say anything about not giving a fuck. My cat has a beard, too. So fuck that. The Wikipedia entry mostly concludes that beards are considered wise, as people like philosopher Friedrich Engels and author Charles Dickens were bearded.

This writer has a beard, too:

If I was a cop I would pull Christian Kiefer over for marijuana possession and then get him to autograph my copy of The Infinite Tides.

I asked Christian Kiefer, the famous author of The Infinite Tides (and a wise man), about his beard:

Does your wife enjoy your beard. I mean, sexually? Not, like, does she have sex with your beard, but does she find it attractive?

I asked Kiefer this question because I was always too scared to have a beard in fear that girls would find me hideous and not want to have sex with me. But Kiefer has something like 18 or 19 children running around a farm somewhere, so he’s definitely had a lot of sexual intercourse.

He answered my question this way:

She seems to but then again she also complains about it the rest of the time.

So, really, not much help. From what I gather, though, women seem to like beards from afar, because they make the man appear wise and masculine, but when it comes down to the tactile sensation of a beard rubbing against skin, it’s disgusting.

But women are good at putting up with disgusting shit. After all, my wife dealt with this for quite some time without divorcing me:

This is more of a mustache, but it’s still ugly as fuck.

Most of the time, I just half-ass a beard because I’m too lazy to shave. And then I look like Brian Austin Green, the hip-hoppin whiteboy who played David Silver on Beverly Hills 90210:

“Me and my beard are gong to the Peach Pit, brah.”

There are also gay beards:

A very wise power-bottom

And white guy who takes really good care of his Acura beards:

“If putting my dick in an exhaust pipe is wrong, then I don’t ever want to be white. I mean, right.”

Fancy beards:

A little known fact: This kind of beard has the vagina repellant power of muffin top, World of Warcraft, syphilis and acne vulgaris all combined into one.

And animal beards:

“Ay, c’mon, Wikipedia, not just human beings have beards, ese,” said the stereotypical Mexican goat.

And dead terrorist beards:

This beard tells us: “I will tear down your imperialist shithole of a country by flying fucking airplanes into your buildings, but I still have HELLA porn on my computer.”

And the modern black man beard:

“This beard is urban, but not urban. You feel me?”

I don’t know. I think I’m just going to stick with my peach fuzz mustache and call it a day:

Might as well skip the beard to highlight my shinyass chin.

This is the only picture that pops up when you type "Meinphragm" into Google image.

It wasn’t the best review. It wasn’t the worst.

Here it is, if you want to read the whole thing yourself: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/soundadvice/blogs#BlogPost-4417584

However, my readers, I’ve noticed, aren’t actually big readers.

So, instead, I’ll give you a play by play:

I went to this show and one of the performers, Meinphragm, was awful. Beyond awful.

His raps were so bad that at first I thought he was having a grand mal seizure.

I thought he had swallowed the microphone and was going into a fit of oxygen deprivation.

I thought he had been possessed by wack Milli Vanilli  ghosts. I called a priest to exorcize him.

Anyway, he didn’t like my review. He said I was hating on him. Meinphragm started a Facebook battle. He said that, ON HIS KIDS,  he was going to beat my ass. He even challenged me to a real life duel!

So as a man of God, a man of peace and a man of unflinching integrity, I wrote Meignphragm a video letter.

The last thing I need is a scar on this flawless mug.

I was a totally rapeable child, if I do say so myself.

I don’t know where this fascination with pedophiles came from. I was never raped, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or not that I remember, anyway. Although, once, when I was 8, our neighbor—a 14-year-old girl with short hair and a reputation for violence—pinned me down in the backyard and unzipped my pants so she could suck me off on a moist patch of grass. I can’t remember her name, only that she was incredibly ugly. The kids on the street called her Alleyway because her face was dirty and freckled, and she always smelled of cat piss.

“I’m going to kiss it,” she said, chasing me around an Elm tree. Her braces flashed in the sunlight. I didn’t know what the “it” was.

I didn’t run as fast as I could have and when she caught me I only pretended to put up a fight while she fumbled around with my belt and zipper. I remember the feel of her mouth—warm and wet—and I decided the sensation of her quick, dry breath against my groin, her chalky tongue combined with the meaty smell of her head was somewhere in between horrifying and religious. But it certainly wasn’t rape in any of its devious forms. And, frankly, the story doesn’t explain much, except perhaps my own ecosystem of sickness and perversion, which is another freak show entirely.

Anyway, I’d taken to searching the sexual offender database almost every day for the past four years, so I’d gotten quite familiar with it. It’s set up so you can search by location or name and there’s a map marked with blue dots to indicate where the offenders live. When you click on one of the blue dots, you see the offender’s picture, a physical description (including tattoos), their address and their crimes, which range from public indecency to kidnapping and rape. I always begin the search in my Del Paso neighborhood, which occupies a poor, gang-infested corridor of North Sacramento. A ghetto, in the classic sense. My neighborhood is riddled with so many blue dots that in certain places they’re stacked on top of one another. If you didn’t know better, it would look like a rich terrain of royal blue castles, when really it’s a sinister Disneyland of sexual depravity.

James :(

Recently, to my surprise, I found my neighbor, James (a sad looking black man who reminds me of every grade school janitor I’d ever seen growing up in Boston—fat, bald, and unimpressed with everything). His saggy eyes and ashy brown skin were never sinister, just tired, so his crime—kidnapping and assault on a minor—seemed to betray him.

And as it turns out, Salome lives just down the street. He’s a Native American with a Johnny Depp goatee and a ponytail pulled back like a Samurai. In his picture he’s wearing a tight necklace made of Buddhist prayer beads. Salome was charged with rape in concert with violence and oral copulation on a minor.

In my four years of clicking through the blue-specked map, I’ve examined almost every one of the 90,000 registered sex offenders in California. Sometimes, by accident, I’ll click on one I’ve already seen and remember him like he was a long lost relative. In four years, I’d acquired 90,000 frightening uncles.

And aunts.

The Jodie Foster of child rapists

It’s not just men who are sexual offenders. There are also women, like Tamara, the 24-year-old spitting image of Jodie Foster. Tamara was a counselor at Bridges after school program when she fell in love with one of her students, a young girl named Josephine. According to Tamara’s court testimony, she fell in love with the little girl and the little girl fell in love with her back. It was mutual, she pleaded. Tamara forged emergency release documents and took her out of school, so they could express their love sexually in a hotel room. Four years later, Tamara’s internet presence hangs over her like a noose.

So here’s where the story gets kind of messy.

When I get home from work I decide that I need to call one of the pedophiles. I can’t explain why, but I can try to explain the feeling: I open the refrigerator, see a jug of filtered water and then feel something break in my brain, like the little pocket of air that pops in your knuckle when you push at it too hard. So I sit at my computer and pick one name at random from the database. The name is Charles, a disheveled man with unkempt hair. In his photo he’s wearing a suit and he reminds me of a poor man’s Rush Limbaugh. His crime is lewd and lascivious acts upon a child. When I type his name into Google there are many results: he’s a writer, a pizza maker, a veteran, a lawyer, a mechanic. I narrow the search by typing in his area code next to his name. And there it is, Charles’s phone number—right in front of me, like an old dollar bill folded neatly on the sidewalk.

Now that I think back, there was this one time when I was nine and I lived in Boston with my mom and step-dad. They wanted me to learn how to swim, so they enrolled me in lessons at the local high school. I was a shy kid and didn’t like being around other kids my age, mostly because they were cruel and impatient. But my parents insisted that spending another summer traveling the city’s subway system by myself was unhealthy. I didn’t know anybody in my class.

Our teacher, Mark, was probably 30. He had a big nose and tiny eyes, like a toucan. He spoke in the thick Boston accent that my mom always warned me about.

“Be careful with the way you talk,” she said. “People will treat you differently.”

But Mark was unashamed of his.

“Down, out, togethah!” he yelled when he taught the breast stroke.

After class, all the kids would run into the locker room. We shivered as we changed. Some of the kids snapped each other with towels. And Mark stood there, in the middle of the room with one foot up on a bench, taking it all in.

One time, when we finished changing, he approached and asked me if I wanted a ride home.

“No thanks,” I told him.

For the next two weeks, he asked me the same question, each time with more urgency, until I finally told my mom, who shook her head and laughed nervously.

My mother patted me on the shoulder. “Keep your little pants on,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“She wanted it”

When the phone rings, my hands begin to shake and suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing.

“Hello?” he answers. His mouth sounds like it’s stuffed with jelly doughnuts. Charles’ picture is still up on my computer screen and his large red face and shoulder length greasy hair remind me of a grocery store manager. “Charles?”

“Yeah, who is this?”
 For a second, I forget. My body is light. My brain turns into steam that’s billowing out through my ears into the porous ceiling. Words finally escape through the teacup of my mouth.

“We don’t know each other. Sorry. I’m writing a story.”

“How did you get my number?” he asks. I imagine his thick jowls swinging as he speaks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was on Google.”

“Stop apologizing,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be on there, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well I just typed it in,” I say. “And it popped up.”

“What is this about?”
 “I have to be honest, I saw you on the offender website. I wanted to ask you some questions.”

At this point, I’m fairly certain he’ll hang up. I want him to hang up. I’m not sure what I’m expecting from the conversation, but I’m fairly positive this isn’t it. But Charles doesn’t hang up. Instead, he sits on the other end of the line, presumably thinking. I can hear him breathing long, disturbing breaths.

“What’s this about?” he asks again.

“It’s for school,” I say, lying.

“School?” he asks. “Are you going to record this?”

“No,” I say, another lie.

“So you’re not recording this right now?”

“No.”

We end up talking for an hour. He’s lonely. He tells me about his life now that he’s on “the list,” which consists mainly of watching television and reading passages from the Bible.

“Does it help you?” I ask.

“Does what help me?”

“The Bible.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I ask him what it feels like to be outcast.

“It’s bad,” he says. “People spit on me when I’m walking down the street. They wait at my house. They threaten me.”

Charles tells me about his childhood: His mother was an alcoholic; he was a strange kid who didn’t get along with other kids; he was a bad student, but he liked to read. When his father died he cried, even though he beat Charles and his mother until they both ended up in the hospital.

“Right now I’ve stopped living,” Charles says. “I’m only existing.

He tells me about how he can’t get a job and how he only makes enough money by doing random odds and ends to pay rent. Sometimes he doesn’t eat for days.

“Can you tell me about the girl?” I ask.

“What girl?”
 “The girl,” I say. “The one you assaulted.”

“She was 13. My wife’s daughter from another marriage,” he says, pausing. “You know, men have certain impulses. We can’t help things. The girls now wear all kinds of short clothes, tank tops.” Charles tells me how she’d come home at night and they were alone together. The aloneness is what broke him. It was unbearable, he said. She was suggestive. He insists that he didn’t rape her. It was consensual, he says.

“She wanted it?”

“The crime was absolutely wrong,” he says. “No ifs, no ands, no buts, no excuses—but there has to come a time when the pound of flesh has been exacted. With a registered sex offender, that pound of flesh doesn’t exist.” I can hear the frustration growing in Charles’ tone. He wants me to understand. He’s expecting a high-five.

“The daughter, the one you raped, does her mother still talk to you?”

“She wants nothing to do with me,” Charles says. “But I don’t blame her.” When I hang up with Charles, I look out the window. As the sun begins to set, I watch two men smoke cigarettes and talk outside the pornography shop across the street. One of them is so obese that his stomach hangs from his opened jacket, over his belt and it covers his groin. The smaller one gestures wildly with his hands and they laugh. The fat one holds his hand over his heart. The men flick their butts onto the street, get into a rusted pickup and drive off toward the freeway.

World’s Greatest Grandpa

I open my laptop to another offender—Roger—who lives just a few blocks from where I live, though I’ve never seen him in real life. He was born in 1948, but his wispy white hair and thin brittle skin are deceptive. He looks older—demented, even. His jaw bones form sharp angles and he wears the chin of an old boxer. When he was younger, he might have smoked a pipe and imitated Sinatra while his wife put down her magazine and rolled her eyes in the bedroom. He might have been handsome—an athlete who kept a girl in the library and one at the bowling alley, just in case. Or perhaps he was a family man, the kind of guy who’d steal a bouquet of flowers from the cemetery on mother’s day. He has a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his forearm and one of a lightning bolt on his neck. Under his list of crimes, it says 288, which is the California Penal Code that means he’s been caught having sex with a child. I close my eyes and imagine how he was once a child. It’s almost impossible to picture a child rapist as a young boy, so I keep trying. I think about how he carried books in his backpack, how his eyes were blue but now they’re darker, the color of wet concrete, like he’d been crying for the entirety of his 62 years.

“This is me,” he says, his sharp lips expose the rawness of his bloody gums. He’s choking back a ball of tears, trying to muster a truthful smile. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “Right?”

This is the actual place, which I found on the internet. If it was scratch and sniff you'd be smelling a shit odor right now.

George was a prick of a landlord, one of those old white people who was too into history, especially the Civil War. I’m not even sure which side he rooted for. He wore overalls and an engineer hat and he yelled every time we saw each other.

This is not actually George, but it is what happens when you type "old white man with beard" into Google.

“You’re a loser,” he said once. Actually, more than once. Maybe a hundred times. I was kind of a loser, though, so I didn’t really take it personally. I lived on the third floor of his old teal green Victorian that looked nice on the outside but inside it was infested with cockroaches. The building smelled dead and sour. The window that faced our neighbor’s house was the one I liked to sit in to smoke cigarettes. The neighbor was an old lady. Her hair was orange because she dyed it that way and she was always outside watering her plants. Under a certain light the sun would shine through her thin orange hair and onto her scalp and her head appeared to be on fire. This one time, I was in my window smoking a cigarette watching her tend to the garden. She took care of each stalk, each leaf each flower petal individually. It was impressive, the attention she gave to every plant. She was out there for hours, most of the day, with her fingers touching each part of every flower. One day she looked into the windowsill and saw me sitting there, smoking.

“Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to fall out of that window?” she yelled up to me.

“No,” I answered. “Are you afraid?”

“I don’t care what you do,” she said, and went back to her plants.

I flicked my cigarette down into the little walkway between our apartment building and her yard.

“Hey,” she said. She carried a hose that was spewing water. “Where are you flicking those?”

“Down there,” I said, pointing to the walkway.

“Don’t you have an ashtray?”

“No,” I said.

“If you need to smoke, get an ashtray.”

“My bad,” I said.

I noticed that when she stared at me her mouth looked like a cunt.

If you add 250 years to this girl, she would look exactly like my old neighbor

The next day, I got an ashtray. No, I didn’t. But I set a Budweiser can near the windowsill and ashed my cigarettes into that. When I smoked my cigarettes my neighbor didn’t look at me anymore because I had my little makeshift ashtray and that made her happy, I suppose. I still watched her tend to her garden and I realized that it was annoying how meticulous she was with her plants. She treated each one like it was an infant and I knew she didn’t even have kids. If she did have kids I bet she wouldn’t have harassed so much about about my cigarettes. She would have understood that kids are capable of much worse than littering.

XXX

The guy in the room directly across from me was named Josaih– a black guy who wore these really intricate braids. He wasn’t very interesting. He was a rapper, actually, a really good one. He could rap his ass off. He would go to rap clubs, take the microphone and battle other rappers, but in real life he was stupid as fuck. He didn’t understand social cues. Like, he would see a

This is not Josiah, but it IS a man with intricate braids. He, too, looks like he fucks a lot.

girl who he liked and even if she was with her boyfriend, he’s sit down and talk to her. And he’d get her number, too. That was a bad example of his stupidity because that just sounds like he was some sort of Casanova, which he was. He fucked quite a bit. Sometimes I’d walk into his apartment and he’d be fucking. He had no rhythm or style when he fucked, like a big black tugboat, putting through the sea. Anyway, he introduced me to his friend Mike, this goofy-looking white guy. He dressed preppy and looked like he worked at a country club. But he wasn’t preppy at all. In fact, Mike loved to do drugs. Hard drugs. Right when I met him he got really into speed. Me and my Filipino girlfriend went over to his apartment once and we did a big bag of speed together. We were so high that night we could barely stand. Mike kept pacing around the apartment, asking if he could fuck my girlfriend.

“I’m fucking horny,” he said. “It’s killing me.”

He was wearing this hideous salmon colored Polo shirt tucked into his chinos and he looked like a young investment banker, whacked out of his goddamn mind. He paced around the house for about an hour and then put on some porn and jacked off on the couch. But his dick wouldn’t get hard so his penis just flopped around in his hand for a few hours while me and my girlfriend talked.  When we left, it was about 6 a.m. and Mike was still on the couch, sweating, tugging at his red, raw cock.

Under that pink sweater, his heart is beating 4,000 times per second and beneath that crop job is a raging chino boner

XXX

I knew it wasn’t good when I heard George coming up the stairs.  For such a withered old man he had a lot of power in those footsteps. Especially when he was ascending stairs. Clonk, clonk, clonk. He banged on the door.

“Open up,” he yelled. “Get the fuck out here.”

I put on a pair of boxers and opened the door a crack. George slammed the door with his elbow into my big toe. I jumped up and down and he stepped into my room. George looked around with his hands on his hips and surveyed the room while I stood on one foot and massaged my hurt toe. His engineer hat was so fucking ridiculous that it took all my sensibility not to laugh out loud.

“Don’t you have any self respect,” George asked, in a way that told me it wasn’t a question.

“I guess I do,” I said, picking up a few Bud cans off my chair and placing them on the floor so I could sit down. My toe throbbed.

“Mrs. Boleto said you gave her a hard time,” George said. His hands were still on his hips.

“Mrs. Boleto?”

“Your neighbor, over there, in the house next door.” He pointed in the wrong direction, across the street where the bar was. “Don’t give me hell, too, you little shit.”

“I didn’t know that was her name,” I said. “Honest. She doesn’t look like a Mrs. Boleto.”

“Why are you giving her a hard time?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me,” George said. His face was red and I could see large purple veins in his red nose. “You flicked your cigarettes on the ground and told her, “I’m bad, I’m bad.””

“No,” I corrected him. I explained to George how I had said “My bad,” not, “I’m bad.” I told him how it was supposed to be an apology.

“Oh,” George said. His face softened and his hands came off his hips.

“I even made an ashtray,” I said, pointing to the can on the windowsill.

George didn’t look at the ashtray. He just stood there, shaking his head.

“What an old fucking bag,” he said. We stood there, in my dirty little room, for what seemed like five minutes, watching Mrs. Boleto down below, hunching over her little infant flowers.

XXX

George made me the building manager that night, which meant that I was in charge of sweeping up once a week, collecting rent and making sure the other tenants weren’t fighting or smoking drugs in their rooms.

“You’re the most responsible one I got,” George said. The other tenants were drug addicts, like I was, but they were happy being fuckups. My saving grace was that I was wholly uncomfortable with who I was. Or at least that’s what George told me.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re crawling in your own skin. You can’t even look me in the eye. All Kwan down there does is look me in the eye, the creepy little bastard.”

How many Asian guys would do this? None. How many Asian guys do this with some methamphetamine up their nose? All of them.

Kwan, the Asian man who lived in the tiniest apartment on the first floor was the kind of guy who you see on the street and say, “Where does that guy go at night?” He was a speed freak. He’d wake up every morning, snort some speed he kept in a Karmex container and then set off with his huge boombox and stand in the middle of downtown blasting A-HA. And then, every night at about 9:30, he’d come back to his tiny apartment on 23rd & L. That’s where he went. On my 22nd birthday, we broke into his apartment, snorted all his speed and replaced it with crushed up Aspirin. On the second floor was Bernt—a Swedish guy who, for all practical purposes was normal. But there was something odd about him. He had a job that he’d get dressed up for every day, but he seemed off, like he might have a little boy fetish or something. When there’s a normal, productive member of society living in a halfway house, there has to be something he’s hiding. Something big. His name was pronounced “Bay-r-nt” but everyone called him “Burned” and he’d flip out and tell them to fuck off and eat shit and things like that.

So I was the manager of that kind of stuff. When George started coming by the building every now and then, it wasn’t to scold me, but to give me fatherly advice. “You know how you stay out of jail,” he said to me once.

“No.”

“Quit acting like an asshole.” And then he smacked the back of my head.

One day, he came over while I was sweeping the hallway downstairs. He watched me for a second before he grabbed the broom out of my hands.

“Didn’t anyone teach you how to properly sweep?”

“No,” I said. “It seems pretty easy.”

“It’s not easy,” he said. “Watch.”

I watched him sweep. Like he was angry at the ground. Like he was trying to sweep a hole into the goddamn earth.

XXX

When I finally moved out of that place, I cleaned my apartment so thoroughly that it looked better than when I moved in. I even painted. When I was finished both my hands were bright red and my palms were covered in blisters. When George came in for inspection he stood there with his hands on his hips and said, “This is beautiful. I didn’t know you had it in you.” And then he gave me my deposit back in cash, patted my back and almost said something. But he didn’t. He just grabbed my shoulder so hard that it left a bruise.

A few years later I was talking to an old friend and we got to the subject of 23rd & L.

“Did you hear about George?” she asked.

“Bramson?”

“Yeah.”

She told me that one of the foreign exchange students who lived in one of the spare rooms in his mansion came home after school one day and found George sitting in his favorite chair wearing only a pair of his tighty whitey underwear, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels. She wasn’t surprised because that’s how she often found him when she came home after 4 p.m., but usually when she came back he’d tell her to stand in front of him while he barked orders like “clean the sink better next time” or “come here and let me massage your neck.” But this time he just sat there so she went up to him and saw that his eyes were open but they weren’t looking at anything. He was just sitting there, dead, clutching his whiskey bottle.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“What do you mean what happened?” she said, confused. “He was dead.”

“But what about the student?”

“She went back to Japan, I guess.”

“Did she say how his face looked when he was dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was he smiling?”

“What are you talking about?”

I don’t know what I was talking about. George died in an old leather chair with his hands wrapped around a bottle of whiskey. And that was it. It seemed so simple, but I didn’t think it should have been.

If you sue me for stealing this picture I will fuck you up with a knife.

The awkward Safeway checker looked like an extra from Revenge of the Nerds. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Cherubic, maybe, is the word. His cheeks were red and fat.

“How’d he die?” he asked.
“How’d who die?”
He pointed to my Ol’ Dirty Bastard t-shirt, the one  with the date of his birth and death.
“Ah, yes,” I said.

I explained to him that ODB had to be at a recording studio on the opposite side of the country from where he was. So in order to board a plane, he swallowed his bag of crack cocaine, as not to be arrested for transporting narcotics across state lines. With the crack safely inside his stomach, ODB boarded the plane. Once his plane landed, he must have forgotten all about the crack he swallowed because he got to the studio, started recording a song, began to sweat profusely, clutched his chest and then he died rapidly of heart failure.

The checker looked perplexed.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
He stopped placing groceries in my bag, pushing my box of Fig Newtons into his chest. He appeared to be thinking.
“It’s a solid lesson,” I said. “If you think about it.”
“What is?” the checker asked.
“You know, not to swallow crack.”

He finished with my groceries and I left the store. Walking to my car, I thought about ODB and about how I had once smoked crack with a homeless man in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where I lived. My girlfriend had gone on a trip and I was drunk. And bored. So I walked outside, told a homeless man that if he got us some crack, that we could smoke it in my apartment. I gave him 40 bucks and watched as he disappeared around the corner. I waited for ten minutes and figured he was gone for good, but just as I was about to go to the liquor store, he came stomping up the hill with a shit-eating grin.

It’s really easy to find homeless pictures on Google

He opened up his dirty hand and there were two baggies, with two large rocks of cocaine. They carried a yellowish tint. They look like canine teeth.

“Do you have a pipe?” I asked.

The homeless man looked at me as if I’d asked him if he was ever a boy.

We walked into my apartment and sat down on my couch.

“It’s nice in here,” he said, staring very hard at my television set.

I watched him rip open the plastic and break off a piece of cocaine. His fingers turned the drug a dark brown.

“You have to have a piece of steel wool in there,” he said, holding the pipe up to the light.

“Like a filter?” I asked.

“A what?”

“Forget it.”

He stuffed a bunch of crack in the end of the pipe.

“Do you have a knife?” he asked.

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “If you think I’m going to give you a knife.”

“I’m not going to stab you with it,” he said. “I’m going to use it to stuff this shit in.”

“Can you use a spoon?”

“Sure.”

He gave me the pipe first. My hands were shaking.

“You need help?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You never smoked this shit before?”

“Nope.”

“This shit is bad”

“Yeah.”

He held the flame up to the pipe.

“Now suck,” he said.

When the smoke entered my lungs, my head went light. A burst of fluorescence exploded in my lungs and spread out through my chest, my groin, my legs, fingertips and exited through my eyes and ears. My brain felt like it was made of gentle electricity. My heart filled with love.

We sat there, smoking, talking about shit I can’t remember now. We smoked until the crack was gone. The only thing I remember is that he told me he’d steal me a bike later that night. For my hospitality.

I walked him out to the sidewalk.

“What kind of bike you like?” He asked.

“I don’t know.”

“A red one?” he asked.

“A red one,” I said, and I  watched him limp strangely back down Hyde Street.

In the Safeway lot, I slammed my door shut and started the car. But as I was pulling out, I saw the checker running across the lot toward me. I rolled down my window. A security lady stood right behind the checker.
“You need to come with me,” he said. Most of his fingers were curling into my car. I rolled up the window on his hands and he jumped back. He looked frightened and angry. And a little bit sad. I put my car into park.

“You need to come with me,” he yelled again. His voice wavered and his forehead was sweating.
I got out of the car and went with him. On the walk back to the store I asked him if my card was declined.
“Nope,” he said.
And then I remembered the employee in the fruit aisle who seemed to be following me to the banana section.
I wondered if they thought I was stealing. And if that whole conversation about Ol’ Dirty Bastard was an excuse to stall me so they could get the security wench.
There was a huge line at the checkstand. A couple college girls were standing there, looking at me like I’d just knocked over a bank. I pulled out my debit card.
“Are you gonna pay for our groceries, too?” one of the girls asked, flirting.
“Yes, but I’m not paying for that,” I said, pointing to her box of Tampons.
The security wench stood next to me scowling while the checker fumbled around with his cash register.
Finally, he printed out a receipt.
“There you go, Mr. Clark,” he said, smiling.

I looked at the receipt.

“But I’m not Mr. Clark,” I said.

“Are these your purchases?” he asked, pointing to the receipt. Fig Newtons, DayQuil, Raisin Bran, lettuce …
“Yeah,” I said.
“OK, I’m sorry, Mr. Clark.”
I wasn’t quite sure what happened. As I left the store and crossed back into the lot, a white truck with a McCain sticker on it’s bumper nearly ran me down. I jumped out of the way and watched it speed into the street. It was completely dark outside. A homeless man asked me for a quarter and I told him I didn’t have anything. I guess I was lying.

Here’s a weird phenomenon about seeing Bright Eyes live: There are bro dudes—like the kind of real beefy-ass bro dudes you’d see in a movie about fraternities –crying. But they’re not just crying. They’re angry crying. Rage weeping. Whatever. Take, for instance, when Conor Oberst started to strum the first bar of this song, “Poison Oak”:

Yes, it’s a pretty song, but when the first few notes floated from the speakers, the bro dude right behind me turned to nobody in particular and yelled, “I’m about to tear up. I don’t give a fuck!” I half-expected him to take a wild swing at the beautiful notes floating above his head like monarch butterflies that were turning him into such a raging pussy. Charming, right? Perhaps, but not at all unique.

Right after this song:

I looked up and there’s a bro dude—the kind of bro dude who’s fat, but still wears tight shirts because in the right lighting his man boobs kind of still look like pectoral muscles—charging right at me with his fists clenched, “I fucking got emotional!” he proclaimed.

I had no idea about this phenomenon and I was speechless.

Anyway, the show was good. Bright Eyes did a ton of songs from their new album, The People’s Key, which is a heaping pile of shit. I heard in an interview that Oberst wanted to shed the stripped down folk thing he became famous for. And the result is this new wave, poppy form of blandness with a few disco breakdowns in the middle. It’s not pretty.
This is one of the more tolerable songs from that album:

Sure, there were parts that were cringeworthy, like when Oberst lifted up his shirt to show the screaming bitches his nipple, or when he stopped the music to rant incoherently about politics, “Like, Obama, is like, uh, not, like, uh, like, living up to, like, his promises, like, Guantanamo, like you guys are from Silicon Valley, right? Like, use your money to fuck over the tea party,” or some shit like that. It’s a good message, but I think the best thing you can do for the progressive cause is to shut the fuck up and strum your tunes.

It seems like most of the show was spent waiting around for the band to play songs from I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. And when they did finally get around to those songs, Oberst sang the living shit out of them. There’s something about that wavering falsetto that lowers to a growling whisper that can reach into your chest, pull out your heart, hold it up to the moon and make you say, “HOLY FUCK, I’M FUCKING CRYING!”

I don’t remember where this post was going. I guess I’m just writing this so that I start posting again.

Some news: I have a book coming out. Here’s the cover:

I don’t know how my publisher got Jimmy Santiago Baca and Jose Montoya to say nice things about me, but I’m assuming he threatened them with physical violence. Which I’m all for.

Also, check out this video from HellaTV:

NOMENCLATURE featuring Josh Fernandez from HellaTV on Vimeo.

I don’t know why that didn’t embed the video, and that’s another reason I hate websites. They take ideas that are in my head, make them impossible to execute and then turn out half-assed and shitty looking.

My book will be available from R.L. Crow Publications on May 1. I’ll post the Amazon link when it’s up.