Sobriety City

Is a lonely place where I never interact with anyone except in the work field where those around me only hint and joke about getting fucked up on the job. At the end of the day it is back to solitary confinement, not the kind to escape getting ass raped by the lifer convicts but to escape the legion of lunatics who want to buy drugs from me, then offer those drugs to me while staying up for days at a time talking about how their life is in a constant state of disarray, yeah, well, of course, you have an extreme set of habits and no deisre to get out from under them. Las Vegas does not help, at any hour I can find a barstool to call my own with no pressure to ever rise up from it during the hours of 12am to 9am and there have been more days than I have toes and fingers to count in this past year, can't entirely blame the World Cup and the time difference between Las Vegas and England, many of the nights freewill took over an overwhelming need to spend the entire night wasted on a variety of substances, some legal, others not, the goal had never been too clear, no females around, no real comraderie, just a strong current toward self annihilation, near heart attacks, and week long hangovers meshed together with insomnia. Those days have ended for the moment as I sit in this comfortable cell, just like country club living as long as the drugs, dependency, and idle moments don't make the sirens call. So far so good, work camp has me distract for the time being, but there are days off inbetween where sitting at a barstool feels like the right thing to do, then calling up a few friends from the super fun time brigade, only to start the cycle over once more, a cycle that feels like will never be broken, some applaude my endeavors concerning this kind of activity and this only exists because they are behind iron bars trapped in their personal middle class hell. It is all hell, if you let it effect you, but for now the effect has subsided, how long it lasts is up to me.

The Neighbor Downstairs

Loves to sit at the entrance of her condo with the door open smoking cigarettes while breathing in fresh oxygen from a collection of tanks inside her living room. My neighbor also spends time letting the pet dog roam the parking lot, waiting for the animal to crap in the street something that is viciously frowned uponby the housing association. A few months ago she told me the housing association was attempting to have her thrown out for some mysteriously unknown reason. The dog crap had to be one of the violations, the housing association has no tolerance for such activity and has erected a series of pet poop plastic bag patrol kiosks for dog walkers to clean up and discard their beloved pet excrement. On any given day there are at least twenty residents sidling up alongside their canine counterparts, either just off of work or heading to it in the immidiate future. How anyone can stand to let a dog linger in condominum for 8 to 10 hours five days a week is beyond me? But by the looks of all the doggie owners no one here seems to have a problem with it. My other neighbor who lives here part time might have been the whistle blower, not sure who he knows, but after short discussion some time ago in regards to the dilapidated state of the brick retaining wall in front our condonminum block as well as a brief dialouge about all the dog crap in front the place, no sooner was the wall repainted and the old lady under siege from the invisible hands of the local association, which is not the regional association who oversees the entire property of condos, apparently some of the condos are not under the jurisdicition of the local association, it is very confusion but as long as they get their checks respectively, I get to live in relative peace and quiet.

The Wild Roses

The wild roses have shown me human emotion recently and reestablishing connectivity has regenerated feelings, emotions, and empathy that use to be closed off in the past twenty years. This rebirth does not settle all too well with my former robotic like observational directive to feel passion, desire, and personal selfish joy. Television shows, music, and the general public took on different meaning as if formerly unavailable layers of interpetation had just become acessible. These ideas only made me more crazy, sympathy washed over my brain, was this nothing more than the acknowledgement of failure, of death, of giving up on living outside narrow minds of American and global society, my final swan song toward down the eventual road of self delusional goodness, as well as socially accepted cultural traits like practicing religion, belief in family, and the righteousness of the government system alongside my fellow human being? A part of me wants to give up, not break away from the mistakes of the past, but keep on making them, growing older, becoming more and more irrelavant, paralyized, fragmented, numb, and uncaring about anything more than the new culturally hip idea found from the webpages of where such concepts of 21st century cool are currently being cultivated.

I had to turn my back on these rediscovered feeling, mental states, and memories because they hold nothing for me now, not in this cold digital metropolis.

Obscured by Thought

It has been a month since I have last written anything and in this time there has only been work alongside of leisure generating a wayward station of stagnation, doubt, and the reconition of how finite my future is in this world. None these thing typcally bring joy, they only tend to bring a negative malaise that fits me like a second skin. In the days of long hangovers, little productivity, and a tightrope of wondering when my heart will give out; I can only lay in bed like some terminal patient following the arch of the sun across the horizon, on the sunny days at least and for the clouded days, twenty four hours sports channels and streaming movie sights bide my time, to destroy thought, contemplaton, analysis, and a journey down a path that only seems to run into more and more forks, circular turns, and dead ends. Grey hair on my head marks the sands of time, running thin, forming a vaccum that only increases in speed, a credit junkie, bound in chains, the latest prison sentence, ten years, everyday marked on a calender, think I am up to 70 days since the door was closed for the first time. No one person or being is keeping me under control and am free to leave at anytime, back to the streets, to the bars, to the women and binge like behavior of consuming.

This city has control over everyone in it, locked down till death to their part in keeping this monolith alive, this ragged corpse whose bones we scavenge to barely keep us fed, in constant competition for a prize that is never awarded unless you consider suicide some sort of positive affirmation. The only thing left is to go the workout yard during exercise hours, then either back to the cell or hopefully off to some state sponsored work, such as pleasing tourists, assisting the empty minded or developing new material for people like myself to watch in their cells during time off. The cell is all I know now, there use to be the world, a form of escape, a channel of hope to turn off my well engrained western cultural tendencies to buy t-shirts, drink excessively, and sponser leeches who have no intentions of ever returning my gracious generiosity, which is more than naive for my part, why think in a land of sharks, inhuman beasts, and weasel like sneaks that there would be anyone that contained strength, determination, and virtue to stand up again the metallic towers of the strips though possibly in defeat, to stand up nonetheless with shaking fists yelling " You will suck me into your dark cloud of 21st century slavery." My new goal is to not die here, die here before my time, from the excessive drugs to the inadequate sleep, seeing the sunrise, whether off to work or off to bed has been the fast track to insanity and the lunacy has been winning out lately, no more though, this is a death march through blood, bones, and the corpses of the captured, gates lay ahead and even as they appear to move farther away by the looks of my eyes, my heart knows soon enough I will scale those heights and leave everything about this city behind.

Star Bar

Another casuality of the modern tourist facade, this bar use to be home to the resident street creatures for its ultra affordable selection of alcohol and Philipino women. The place has become nothing more than a highlight for travel guides and upper middle class wanna bees who have no problem standing in line for an hour in order to get the opportunity to rub shoulders with the remaining crop of neighborhood crack addicts, pimps, and prostitutes who to me appear nothing more than out of work actors making a few bucks pretending to be living furniture in a setting that has since departed from these once rundown streets. This past weekend was a real eye opener, not the typical west coast techno hip hop mash up renovated shooting galleries that have grown to seismic epic proportions in a plague like growth around the San Diego downtown area, no that is just opportunistic endeavor of the mentality, "if I do not do it, someone else will" maybe the great tyrannists of history felt the same way, plow everyone under, it is nature acting out in due course. However, witnessing a waiting line in front of the Star Bar took me by surprize. This was a place I use to sneak into as an 18 year old after heading down to Tijuana early Saturday and Sunday morning to make my college and pro football bets. The San Diego trolley ran right down to the border and a few of the sports books happpen to be conveniently located near the border gates, within a half hour I was back on the trolley looking to catch the early games with a bloody mary in my hand. The bartenders and the cocktail waitresses always gave me some money for bets, so by 11am on a Sunday there was quiet a focused crew hip deep in drinking and wagering side bets eagerly taking any action on any game, regardless of winning or losing streak. Never had to pay for booze, being young allowed the older women at the bar to treat me like their little boy toy, one on each side of me during the game depending on how busy the bar happen to be at the time, as the female staff waited for commercials to help the small built up crowd of football fans waiting to be served.


Gambling paid the bills back then, but I really never had too many back then which afforded me the ability to work at my leisure inbetween surf sessions at the beach, after high school I still had an entire summer to waste before creeping back into the reality of education, college was a distant and uncharted territory at the time I never truly embraced, blanketed by a lack of understanding on how high the bar would be raised in comparison from the rather laid back nature and generally uninteresting quality of learning experienced in the previous four years. Television and peers showed me how partying, sex, and a general disdain for focusing on achievement could lead to a life of unlimited cool, social success, and carnal satisfaction, what the above two things did not bother to tell me was that by following the fast track to frat league activity would transform all motives, actions, and mindsets into feeding those three needs over the next twenty years consequentially stunning my growth as a human being, an artist, and contributor to something larger than getting wasted, one night stands, and a total commitment to compulsive consumerism debilitating any sort of possibility of making a stand in working toward my real dreams of writing, film, and music. Those things have really never been know as money makers, but more like hobbies for the masses who drowned under the illusion that they have this hidden talent waiting to blossom into a Hollywood success story with all the trimmings of self destructive behavior, multiple sex partners, and a never ending supply of narcotic substances falling from the sky in a Willie Wonka factory dream breaking like a tidal wave of onto the delicate unmolested sanctified conscious of empty results, reality breaking critism, and utter lack of commitment.


Watching such people around me initally scared off the desire to do anything creative, it felt like anything realated to the current circle of musicans, artists, and other street freaks at one point or another needed a massive contract of financial wealth to give it any sort of sense of validity, bands back in the late 80's in San Diego were being given lots of money with nothing more than demo tapes in their possession, showcase concerts and opening gigs with national touring bands only fueled the already Hades like flames engulfing the San Diego music scene, of course the hype eventually moved on elsewhere taking the entire scene and all its sycophants along with it which was no big loss to me, resulting in the closing down of almost every irrelevant nightclub in town. A few still remain today not much different than they were twenty years ago with the same old worn down crusties in their fourties and fifties, with rockabilly tattoos and attitudes looking to get in the ring one more time if only for nostalgic reasons to induce a fix that has no cure, no escape, no eventual withdrawl, reborn by all the heros of real music, regardless of style from Jelly Roll Morton to Wilco, classical to dubstep, and reggae to reggaeton, possession is complete and final.

Sushi Deli Too

The original Sushi Deli has been turned into a parking lot as a friend and I walked through old San Diego Downtown neighborhoods that have been over gentrified since living on these streets a few decades ago, even the homeless seem happier than back in the late 80's. There was many a day back then when my ex wife and yours truly would stumble out of the plasma clinic in mid daylight still hung over from the night before, broke, with our only option at the moment being our weekly trip down to the plasma donation center. Don't really remember whose idea it was to begin with, but nevertheless this ritual became part of a pattern of flight which circled the Salvation Army food depot, sperm donor medical office, and the local hipster bars where the two of us practiced freeloading off of the San Diego art crowd, intellectual high brows, and wealthy children who shuttled away into the night with their parents brand new luxury sedan, but before then all stood in awe of our ridiculous adventures throughout the city that turned into a ghost town once the 5pm friday bell struck, avenues became personal playgrounds, no one bothered us as we walked down for cigarettes and wine before the last of the local markets closed for the evening.

The trolley was about as sophisticated in the travel department as we got, in fact there was no car to speak of, I had to travel twenty miles inland to a job in the hellhole of a suburban poverty stricken, meth distributing, and whirlpool of misery outpost where most of my high school classmates made plans to either get knocked up, find a going nowhere job, or reside to cruising the main drag on the weekends trolling for underage girls whom they could tempt with wine coolers and mini truck dreams. The only food we had came from the whatever fit inside an apple box left out in the back of the grocery store I worked at back then. The idea of waiting for the bus with an enormous apple box did not feel out of the ordinary, no one ever questioned me in the hundreds of times I rode home with such a box, ocassionally a few steaks, frozen seafood and other expensive items found their way into my possession, so we ate pretty well.

But being in love, such as young lover will do, they cannot live being apart for very long which prompted me to cut my hours in half in order to spend more time in bed laying around wondering what the future had in store for the two of us.

Most of the money from the plasma center and various other endeavors gave me and the ex a bit of spending cash which we did not hesitate to apply to large meals at the Sushi Deli, drinking after donating plasma is a short cut to total anihilation, a couple drinks equalled a twelve pack after having my blood filter through a few times, the ex had to be carried home once and a while in the late afternoon, what a couple we were, falling asleep at 3:30 pm, best to get some rest if I had to work the next day or rest up for the even run at the bars down the street. Walking these San Diego downtown streets tonight brings back so many memories, every block, turn, and building is part of the story of the years the ex and myself lived here. As for the Sushi Deli Too, this place has become the new or possibly old hip hangout for twenty somethings, tourists, and the relics like myself who have had increasing trouble finding anymore of the old San Diego to roam around in, as it has been replaced with all the convenient, obvious, and unchallenging restuarants, shops, and nightclubs now dominating the regional landscape. Out of towners own this town during the summer and with good reason, the weather is much better than in most other places in the western hemisphere, which over the past decade has generated a revitalization of formerly burnt out hotels, abandoned banks, and vacant skyscrapers into a semi cosmopolitan hotbed of fun, so downtown San Diego is back, much safer to walk the streets today than decades ago, as the homeless continue to arrive by the train loads looking for their private square block to call home.

The Sushi Deli Too has a waiting list of about fourty people at the moment, a large crowd hanging outside while I head inside to get some drinks, where the alcohol of choice is sake and most of the cocktails revolve classic concoctions made with a sake twist, of course all the bartender had to do was tell me it was happy hour. Six large sake bottles and a quick tour of the cocktail menu at least twice later, I vaguely remember eating, much happier though, sort of snuck into the bar area cutting in line but tipping the bartender well has its advantages. Japanese cheers and the will to push things further led to more sake, while watching a couple of the off the menu sake based cocktails pass by, only inspired me to convince my friend to have a few more, more sushi, and the place is cheaper than anywhere else.

By this time, standing has become optional, yet their is still so much of the downtown to see, luckily it is Sunday, most of the crowds have left, no long pointless lines or dress codes or bouncers with private agendas, nothing but the streets, the panhandlers, and the nearby 7-11 which no doubt will be the last stop of the evening to acquiring binge drinking snacks and sandwhiches to send my heart into a partial stroke paralysis sometime when I sober up the next morning, until then all we need is a bar and a bit of luck.

Counterpoint: Tweeker Strut

Ebb and flow of life in a twenty four span, stayed up till 6am again, the Cola crew crashed landed back in Vegas, all too eager to expliot my weakness in keeping the party going. Latched onto some bottle service VIP hounds at one of the local strip night club, there is nothing like weaving a tail to some unsuspecting female who most of the time are all to eager to believe a fresh serving of adventures which constitute the basic fabric of the media industry, most likely all industry. The classic tale of showing the clients a good time, most of my clients like to party all night, recreationally abuse narcotics, participate in casual anonymous sex and top the escapades off with the ever eventful post festivities paranoid psychotic episode of arm failing, heart stopping, physical seizure in their hotel room a few nights later. This routine is fairly common in the city, the only vehicle more prevalent than the stretch limo in Las Vegas has to be the medivac ambulance, another sort of exclusive form of transportation and from depending who you ask can range in response from poor unfortunate soul to bitch ass amatuer fuckhead who ruins it for all the other people who can handle their drugs.

For some reason it always seems the one of many spoils the fun parade for the others who take measured precaution against falling victim to their own self inflected damaging nature. I have been around some of the most over indulgent substance abusers through my time and even in the overdosed out, loss of control, and inescapable impending doom; these people never ignored how desperate of a state their mulit combo drug ingested corpse happen to be in at the time. In fact experience had taught them plenty in how to deal with this go for broke, clean out the medicine cabinet, local dealers, and a few Fedex packages. I was shocked initially learn a lot of these people led the healthiest of lives outside the nature of a part time decadent lifestyle, vitamins, working out, and a well defined diet seemed like the yin to their yang referring back to the first sentence in this episode.

Plenty of humor to be unearth with a discovery such as the above, a directive, commandment, and maxim I ahere to with the upmost dedication. In a 24 city that has no real time construct, conducting any sort of unnatural performance at any hour of the day or night here remains totally acceptable activity with a premium on rape, pillage, and scorched earth visual contact high like a razor blade across the throat.

110 today, even the insects are quiet, left a Mexican restuarant right outside the imperial gates of the compound known as the Las Vegas Country Estates. A well fortified castle ground who employs the most dilligent meth induced delusional paranoid private security contractors. The local HOA supplies them with unlimited stimulants and assualt rifles, not even feral cats, rodents, and the burrowing gophers on the golf course are safe. The guest cavity check at the gate is one of my all time favorites, three finger special they call it in Asia, here in the US I am sure there is another name for it. Either way I can comfortably fool myself into sleeping knowing the streets of the LVCE are safe once more. Crack hoes, wandering insane homeless, and local perverts roam the outer gate dejected in their inability to storm the castle guards without loss of life, a few of the more patient resistance fighters take up refuge in the abandoned bank building parking lot sharing tales of previous battle as well as coming together in an effort to rejuvenate the fighting spirit alongside morale in order to mount another challenge to penetrating the borderland between desolate, barren, unwatered strip mall vegetation and the oversatuarated golf course wetland tropical resort, local haven for young, nublie, twenty something women that habitate the area like Jamiaca's Club Hedonism. Who was the LVCE to prevent the local heathens from attaining squatters rights on some prime real estate, nothing a bit of well used cardboard, a few shopping carts, and a couple gallon jugs of raw urine couldn't do to help increase the overall property value of each residence within the community and with reasoning like that who could not resist such a solid financial opportunity. Apparently, the local battalion at the LVCE had no problem taking a stance of fierce reproach with truncheons in hand against such an aggressive, obvious, conjob posing as housing rights for the general public. The LVCE wasted no time employing the services of military trained German Shepards who were left off leash in moments of boredom, and apparently there have been plenty of them, to run off the seasonal influx of urban outdoor enthusiatist who ply their trades of multiple personality disorder, cognitive regression, and the lead role of spontaneous pants pissor in front of the nearby restuarants down the corner, entertainment at every turn which leads me to the Tweeker Strut.

A woman on this extremely hot day where everything moves very slowly unless it is in an air conditioned recently purchased luxury sedan. The woman was dressed in a neon pink bra moving with a dominating directional speed reserved for 100 meter sprinters and Formula 1 drivers, following her toothless, bare threaded clothed, Oliver Twist movie extra boyfriend/pimp who brought home the dope to keep the vibe alive and when smoking meth everyday for more than a decade, the tweek cells switch on like a magentic tractor beam, body formed GPS, a powerful intuitive possesion, this woman spots her man who has bailed out on a bicycle in haste, all the woman can do now is give chase like some near starving predator seeking prey, she hallucinates her environment a steadity devolving B Movie from the 70's where she fights collapsing to the ground after giving a final chase in total agony to slowly rot while her carcass is torn to pieces by scavangers out of visible sight who slowly circle overhead waiting for the psychosis to take its victory lap and drop the body to the ground in a deadly burst of aneurysm from the brain, that is it, last words, jet planes off into the sky, neon pink bra, thong, burnt tan skin roasted like over cooked chicken, ready to fall from the bone, no personal miracle, deceased, final, permanent.