Exercise Ball, Blue w/Nubs, Deflated.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/zip/1713923304.html

as I make the right turn onto bryant street a quick glance to my left is all I need to know I am clear. fuck the stop sign fuck the half glow of the streetlights fuck the couple arm in arm who a step or two ahead of themselves would have met my right handlebar my right elbow and my bloody mouth spitting at them. hey. the guy shouts. nice night. I yell back. with only one gear building speed is the hardest part but once I get there my legs are like pistons pumping in rhythm somebody measure my rpms please. this late at night the bars are closing and I have to be careful at these red lights because any drivers out here have at least one drink in them timing is everything if I can count down my distance by the numbers next to the flashing orange hand four three two one I want to look like a white blur keeping within six inches of sideview mirrors of parked cars. I pass another bike the girl has long curly hair and a basket on her handlebars I make an Indian call as I fly past her and swerve around a Prius who undoubtedly had the right of way. the air is crisp I have been doing these laps for an hour and I cruise right past my building again. this time I dont even look up bryant street or try to slow down I think if a car is coming its coming and there is no way my brakes would catch in time and anyway Ive tasted the pavement before and I know to pull my tongue inside my teeth so I dont bite it off. the toe of my sneaker grazes the asphalt as I lean to make the sharp right but nothing else touches me but the wind. I exhale and drive my legs so hard down on the pedals that soon I am standing leaning forward my chest is out over the handlebars three two one wont make this one I jam on the brakes and a homeless guy pushing a cart waits next to me for the cross traffic to pass. where are you going. he says and I realize how much I am sweating. same place you are. I say. in circles. I push off and when I look back he is smiling. five four three fuck it.

Beans, Beans, they make you poop.
Now scoop it up fucker.
Don't do that again.

(Sign pinned on Peter's bedroom door throughout childhood)

Lessons of the Day: 4/19

1. Don't get Super-glue on your skin.

2. Don't touch insulation then itch your nose.

3. There's more to being a vegetarian than eating peanut butter.

His head lifts from a pillow green. Dew wells and dances two in beads across the hemisphere of his forehead - one departs the other for the bridge of his nose, the other swept up into the cracks of a passing finger.

All the rehearsal and still the novelty of it all! All the talk and he still feels it. His stomach lifts. Anticipation.

I'm here.

He raises to his knees, hands pressed to the clay beneath him. He's to his feet, though his eyes remain looking downwards - he's staring at the outlined furrow he's left on the earth from the night. It is as if she'd swallowed him into her skin, into a single pore - where he was a follicle, perhaps? Some cause for mutuality? An attempt at negotiation?

His eyes turn. The swelling feeling restores itself. He feels an eyebrow (just one) raise in question of the seeming contradictory nature of what he stands before him - this natural engineering been engineered!

It's a tree----that's all. But it's more, really. Her leaves rest on the ground (some having been his bed.) She is asleep. She is unaware.

Though, she has forgotten her own existence, it is apparent that some have not. Still they come to her - they adorn her out of their need for individualism (or perhaps just boredom.) She is trimmed in bulbs by the hundred - floursecently fogged. No electricity here - they inspire by modestly catching passing strands of sunlight that penetrate casually from the canopy above. Even the smallest beam catches the white skin of the glass bulb enough to make its surface glow entirely - they seem to delight in fulfilling this role. Others strands pass through uncaring, and heedless to their participation in this event.

The bulbs flicker - they are persistent. It's as if they wish to announce their own presence in this disregarded wood.

It's just as they said.

The bulbs hang on beaded chain, some showing age in coats of rust - others seem to gleam with youthful boasting. Time is present - that's clear now.

He walks to the tree, smelling the aroma of her damp, decaying leaves below him. One might imagine their scent rising skyward on tendrils of their own mode - much like those stems that supported them in life.

Again, his eyes return to the ground. He hopes for a chance to mark the tree. A true pilgrimage must manifest in a sacrifice? a rite? a symbol? His experience must orbit the others, a filament in this arboreal-mechanical symphony. He cannot explain this rustic need for collaboration. Assuming innocence, one hopes its a boyish longing for the natural. The bond of beaded chain on knobbed branch. That bond is all he cares for.

But, alas, there are no such supplies to fulfill his desire. No box there. This is no grotto in which to make addition upon discovery.

No - this is a tree in some forest - decored once, and, until recently, forgotten.

He walks on.

Rob: So Paul, you're like the first person we've ever had over to our new apartment.

Pete: Rob, I think we should paint those pipes green.
Rob: Yes. Like a bird of flight.


Paul: What the fuck, guys?

conversation outside bar

Man: "I'm glad we're hanging out again"
Woman: "We just have that harmony..."
M: "...like it's always there"

W: "You know, I stopped eating when we broke up"
M: "And the next day you were on the plane to LA"
W: "I was just tired of your games, John"
M: "But you'll always play them, babe..."
W: "I miss... your hair"
(Start making out)

Lessons From Last Night

-Never tell a Latina girl she needs to use more hips when she dances. She'll find another partner.

-Don't assume the guy in the Marilyn Monroe wig is not the lead singer of the band you're about to see.

-It's time to go home when the bouncer pulls out a big water hose and tells you he needs to clean the puddle of urine you're standing in.

-"I like your baby" is not always a good pick-up line.

The Locker Room

When I was six years old, my family joined the local "Racquet and Swim" club. For a monthly fee, we had full use of the basketball half-court, the unlevel tennis courts, the chilly swimming pool divided into lap lanes and the urine-scented hot tub. High luxury.

But the worst moment of each visit was right before we entered the locker rooms. I waved goodbye to my sisters, hugged my mom and grimaced as my father gently placed a hand on my shoulder. I knew too well the horrifying breed that waited for me--pantless and spread-eagle--inside.

Old men who belong to a neighborhood health club such as this one, have let their bodies depreciate long before their doctors decide it's time for them to join a gym. After the mandatory aerobics classes, group tennis lessons and cool-down stretches, these men wanted nothing more than a long hot shower. In their efforts to tone-up bodies that cheeseburgers and gravity have spent decades folding over and weighing down, the first pounds they shed seemed to contain all their notions of shyness and human decency. A 70-year old bare male bottom is more startling to a young boy's eyes than any woman's breasts will ever be.

But the cruelest part was my father's guiding hand. He led me straight into that house of horrors. The knobby joints, the wrinkles, the moles, the genitalia in varying stages of contact with cold water and the hair everywhere; the slapping sounds of old men lathering their sagging chests and powdering their buttocks, it was a strange world all it's own. And daddy--trusted reader of bedtime stories and buyer of hot pretzels--led me there. He dropped his trousers, stuffed mine in a locker without telling me the combination and told me, "No son, leave your towel outside the shower room."

My theory is this: it was all a biology lesson. My father was showing (not telling) me what happens when you grow up. Your penis gets bigger. It hangs down and looks weird covered in soap foam. Your toes grow hair and your toenails turn yellow. You also may lose some hair on your head and get a knot of black curls on your chest. My dad just didn't have the cojones (pardon the pun) to explain anything to me.

He could have said, "This is what a man's naked body looks like. That over there is what an old man looks like naked. Notice the muscle degeneration and that weird thing on his shoulder." I could have said, "I see, I see. And when will I sprout armpit hair, dear father?" These are important things for a young boy to know. They stimulate the developing mind. We could have had an intellectual discussion over a glass of chocolate milk.

Instead I was stood there under the hot spray of water, barefoot, bare-bottomed and stepping over lines of soap scum on the grey tiled floor, wondering:

Will I look like that one day?

Will mine hang crooked like that?

Why are those hairs so dark when his head is all white?

Yes.

Probably.

And Dad doesn't know.

Smurfette's Walk of Shame After a Most Awkward Threesome...