15 Nov 2006

I always said I was a juicy piece of man candy... Dicitionary.Com defines discomfort as 1. an absence of comfort or ease; uneasiness, hardship, or mild pain. 2. anything that is disturbing to or interferes with comfort. I define discomfort as 43 hives appearing around my neck on Sunday, 27 individual hives appearing on my right arm on monday followed by another 12 on my left arm and numerous blisters and red spots suddenly appearing all over my back and legs shortly there after. I state here for the record that I am not a fan of tradional western medicine - not that I'm an incense loving hoaxa tea drinking, yoga worshiping neophyte hippie far from it (except for the hoaxa tea thing) just that I don't really want pills and steroids and antibiotics raging unchecked through my liqour infused body. That changes at 3 in the morning when I am in extreme discomfort. That changes when hives appear on my eyelids, on my ears, my toes and my hand swells so that I can't close it. After that point shoot me the fuck up with whatever you have handy. Steriods, pile em on, wanna test a new radiation therapy - please It'd be my pleasure - pump me full of artificial pick me ups like a lab rat and watch me explode across the sky like a billion bottle rockets on the 4th of july. I checked myself into the ER. Nicole and Eric went with me, Nicole also seemed to be having the same problem but not as bad. For her it was confined to her legs and cheeks whereas I looked like I coated myself in red chile and then jump kicked a wasps nest. This was my first time visit as a patient in a hospital. I was also slightly buzzed and more then a little nervous. I went to a room and they took my temperature and blood pressure and then put me in a gown. Nicole and Eric where in the next little partioned off corner of the room. I opened the curtains to hear them laughing at my lack of modesty - quickly I crossed my legs. In my mind I was trying to figure out how I could achieve the following: A) How to get rid of the rash that was covering my body B) How to not pay for the visit C) How to get a prescription for either valium or medical marijuanna With luck and charm I achieved 2 out of 3 The Doc deteremined that I was suffering from an acute allergic reaction to bug bites suffered from one of the shady hotels I'd been staying in. I determined my name was Eric Fura and signed his name to all the forms (any reference to people either living or dead is purely coincidental) The doc gave me benadryll, steriods (not the pump you up kind - I asked) antibiotics and something for the inflamation. In a bold effort to achieve my third goal of narcotics I told the doctor I had extreme anxiety - told him I was scared of scratching myself to ribbons in my sleep - scared I would wake up without a face and if there was anything he could do... He paused for a second, I took the oppurtunity to reach into my pocket - slip him a twenty to see if it would help, instead I pulled out a $1 bill and a devilish smile. You can't win em all. I went back to my hotel with Eric and Nicole and took all my meds. They told me I couldn't drink because of my antiobiotics. This lasted for a day. My hives are faded, my skin is a solid mocha brown and my blood is pulsing with chemicals. Kind of like I never left Santa Fe.

24 Nov 2006

24 Nov 2006

Leftovers are for folks with a fridge... Whisky and Benadryll Thanksgiving might have been different this year in that we celebrated in an Irish pub, that we didn't have second helpings or leftovers today and turkey sandwiches tomorrow but at the same time it was the same. To me, this holiday has always been about spending time with family, sharing stories and memories. Listening, talking, laughing and eating. Usually on Thanksgivings when I've been in Santa Fe I'll wake up with a hangover and head to my parents house around 1pm. My mom will have been cooking all day and the house will smell of turkey and love. Everyone will be excited, starving and we'll pop open a few bottles of champagne - gossip as my parents run around the house with various foodstuffs. Kevin and I will help stir gravy or chop potatoes and then the turkey will come out of the oven and all of us will ooh and awe over in all of its basted glory. Then we'll go set up the table, not the normal one but the holiday table that's only used for special occasions. More champagne and then a few shots of good tequila and all of us have a buzz. There's rice pilaf on the table, canned cranberry (my guilty pleasure) my moms homemade cranberry sauce, lots of stuffing, the gravy boat and the bird. Dad carves the breast and the dog gets the neck. Then its glasses clinking, forks and knives scraping on plates, satisfied moans and lips smacking and gravy spilling on the tablecloth. We lean back stuffed and relaxed, plates are cleared coffee is poured and my proud mother brings out homemade pumpkin pie and homemade whipped cream. After the mandatory nap we'll do it again and again the next day. If my brother or I have orphan friends in town then they'll celebrate with us. Yesterday San Francisco helped me realize that while I wasn't at my parents table I was still with my family. I was with Eric and Nicole two people crazy enough to follow me on this adventure - as I sit here in this Internet cafe in North Beach writing I come to the conclusion that this is what I'm thankful for. Our day wasn't perfect but it was spent together. That's what the meaning of this holiday is. This is why it's one of my favorite holidays. Even as a Jew I can see that the true meaning of Christmas has been bastardized by dollar signs but thanksgiving still remains true to its intentions. You don't need to buy or give anything - you just need to be there. I might not have enjoyed my food last night but I sure as hell enjoyed my company. I can't complain about drinking pint after pint ofGuinness and Jameson on the rocks but I can't say I'm used to it - still it felt right. O'reillys Pub isn't the Brouse house and San Francisco isn't Santa Fe but when the turkey arrived on my plate and that smell reached my nose I closed my eyes and imaged it could be. The noises were all the same, the smells the feelings all of it. A million miles away and still I felt at home. We took a walk afterwards and I bought chocolate covered pretzels and garbage pail kids stickers and the fudge shop and JW Red from the liquor store next to the hotel. Up on our floor there was an orphan party for people who had no family, no where to go. The room next to Eric was spilling out in the hallway with hippies and crack heads and weirdos from Alabama and yet they were doing the same as us. Holding on to that American tradition of food and family. Even though they didn't have much they invited us to join them to share their wine and listen to their stories and we did at least partially. Last night as I took my benadryll and washed it down with the last of the scotch and slept in a strange bed I smiled because I'm not alone and I am loved - even if its in the mist of madness.

26 Dec 2006

26 Dec 2006

christmas My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends .. It gives a lovely light! Edna St. Vincent Millay Its funny but the longer I'm out here the more I think of home and when I was home all I thought about was getting out here. Not that I want to leave - its just different. Christmas eve was celebrated with my family in the East bay. In Santa Fe it would have been spent wandering down canyon sining christmas carolls, kicking farolitos and sipping whiskey from Georges flask. My family. Snow is traded for fog and though the whiskey still comes out of a flask it only serves as a reminder and not a source of warmth. We are the wandering souls looking for warmth in adventure and imortality at the end of a bottle or a pressed pill, a generation of chemically imbalanced digitially edited personas who stumble, stager and leap through our twenties and onward to oblivion. Like bottle rockets we shoot through the night straight and true till we explode in a brilliant cacophany of sound leaving only smoke and memories as we fade away. Thats the only way I want to live - screaming through the night. Exciting and remembered. I want to kiss off the mundane and bury the day to day. Freedom is the last power we all have in common. Its not that I want to burn out - its that I want to live. I want stories and scars - I want to get my kicks from the world around me and not burn out but blow up. Trip the trivial and flirt with the incredible. The idealism of my teens has washed away leaving wrinkled pessism and broken promises. That doesn't mean I need to stop believing. It doesn't mean I can't try. It doesn't mean I won't succeed. In what - well I guess that will take a year to find out.

New Years 2007

31 Dec 2006

new year's eve day The tap, Close my eyes and flow. Allegory. The velvet rimmed memories of new years signal something scary. There's a wolf in the woods, picking off the sheep one by one by one. The villagers are in an uproar; limp wrested homosexuals are prancing around in argyle sweaters, designer jeans, teacup poodles and impossibly straight posture. Little Chinese people slanging chicken feet and weird black skinned birds. Naked without feathers, observed from behind knock off sunglasses. Cracked out bums with milk in their beards, crazy people yelling sensible things, Woman in pant suits, Filipino barbers, compelling trannies, coffee shops, x rated cigar bars, plastic bags floating in the marina, hipsters with mustaches, homeless people with Ipods, ambulances drunk dialing in the night, cosmopolitans here don't come with twists or a cherry, embarrassed, clumsy rock n roll type lifestyle, fernet, chartreuse and Jameson blackouts, t-shirt weather in December despite the violent mood swings of a dreary forecast, hills, cable cars and couriers, feeling old, glasses and stretching out the back, glossies of bright eyed naked Asian girls getting shuffled in with bank statements in Chinese, sourdough bread smell and Dungeness crab, lost tourist, lost evenings in a hotel room, lost souls, living on empty under the sun a bright smiling calamity. The beat of the city, the beatest Last but not least me and in the new year I'm one of them. I can't take it with me and I can't live forever. Living the dream even if it's on empty. Telling everyone I meet about my sweet little Santa Fe, Raves, cowboys and king George Listening to new music, experimenting with sweaters Driving myself sane. – Going for kicks, ending up with bruises, blah blah blah Bygones becoming be gones becoming… In short a love letter penned with stolen sips of whisky, ginger ale on my breath Tasting persphephone's pomegranate Juices running down the sides of my mouth And tracing my fathers' footsteps. Howling at the moon.

Non descpript thursdays in the mission...

16 Jan 2007

You know, its not that I ever want to sound grotesque or obscene. I just want to write my little stories, tell you about my little adventures and have a jolly old time. Not too much to ask for. Its not like I could've planned my night out in the mission. I don't make these things up, unless noted I don't even elaborate. I just report. Cold hard objective style.

It was around 11 at night and I just closed the bar where I work. My co-worker Eric (not my roomie) and I were going to hit up some bars in the mission and get swerved. All seemed in order. He had a car and we stopped down in Hayes valley to pick up a friend of his. Somehow or another Eric didn't get the name of the bar right and we stopped at the wrong place. I know I'm in San Francisco, I know it's the heart of gay culture but I just don't think about these things. So I walk into the club, walk passed the 6'4 Irish bouncer who was dressed as Donna Reid and into...a tranny bar. The music stopped. The crowd inside grew silent.
Stared at us.
The people on stage doing some cabaret thing stopped.
Everyone stopped and stared, and stared and stared.
Being sober, I didn't quite know what to make of the situation.
Do I start belting out Madonna classics?
Do I vogue?
Do I order a blue cosmo and bitch about the new goldfrapp cd?
As one the crowd smiles at me, bats their eyelids.
Beehives, polka dot dresses and high high heels are all a titter in
antica - pation.
I back the fuck up out of the bar, careful to not let them see me sweat.
Like woman and sharks - the gays can smell fear.
Slowly, slowly, slow-ly we back into my coworkers car.
He's fumbling with the keys. Their following us outside like coked out zombies from some sick wax museum of ktichy '70s era housewives.
Safe in the car we lock the doors and blast metallica, we don't say anything - we don't make eye contact.
Up the block we find Eric's friend - I offer to buy a round of shots, but its only beer and wine so we leave. Pussies.
On the way to the mission I call my friend tattoo Lisa from Santa Fe. We meet her outside of a bar called the phone booth. She's sitting on the stairs drinking a mini bottle of Jameson.
Offers us a sip and we pull out our flasks filled to the brim with a wicked Irish lullaby.
Safely seated and on the road again we head off into the boozy night of San Francisco.
We hit a place called Bruno's - hot chick bartenders and dudes in loosened ties slumming it. The place is a mess of young lawyers, deflated egos and the pulsating madness of 20 something rage. Bodies slamming grinding against each other in the inferno like bumper cars. Screaming train wrecks of people hollering against the wails of the Dj's top twenty - the glare of the strobe lights pulsates rhythmically to my heart beat.
Somehow our party spills into the street, cars whizz by like piss on an electric fence. People are hollering, shouting and spilling out their guts to which ever pavement will listen. Our uniform is couture, our dress is rebellious rich youth - diesel jeans and chuck taylors - we are crimes against conformity. I'm pushed into Beauty Bar, pushed past people getting manicures by incredible hip two toned hair women with superbly decorated fingernails and into the sweaty mash on the dance floor. Beers in hand and fernet on my lips - lovers or strangers grinding next to me, shouting things in different languages happy to be alive, to be there and bare witness on a nondescript thursday in January.
Then its last call and the cold of the street again, my eyes watery and the world hazy. People are passing out, stumblers swinging on the sidewalk like chandeliers and even though its time for bed something screams out more more more. I need to get back to north beach. Need to get home to my baby, need to take a piss.
Scandalously I scamper in the night - uncork my champagne and let it fly on a doorway. A 100 proof stream trickles away from me. There's light and a door opens and for a second I imagine that I've died. I aim my stream towards the light. I've died, and God's a Pakistani and he's very mad at me. I'm pissing in the doorway of his store- his store that's still open. That's still serving people. That I'm pissing in. They're watching me and laughing, pointing holding their sides so their guts don't fall out.
Slowly I back up.
Slow-ly button my pants.
Slow-ly back towards the street.
Am I sensing a theme for the night?
Then its a taqueria and chaos, the late night car salesman desperate to seal a deal with chicks obliterated on one to many mai tai's. They're revved up with redbull, faces red and veins bulging in thier necks. The drunks look like they've been chocked half to death libido's in overdrive - ready to explode like the deathstar in a moments notice.
I back out of the bar and wipe the lust of my brow.
Back out in the street and its hugs and slaps on the back and "Logan where were you?"
There's bottles to finish and breathless sighs and smiles and whirlwind of does and don't and half remembered finishes.
Fernet, Chartuese and Jamesone singing through my blue label liver. Couldn't hop a cab cause I didn't have cash, couldn't take a bus cause I didn't have balls and couldn't bum a ride because my friends couldn't stand. Eaten alive by the dreams of another night, stung by a drinking bee and thirsty for more I stood savagely in the street like Daedelus over the sea.

Stinking drunk and missing friends,
but patient.

now you know I'm here.

Grabbing the Shark

31 Jan 2007

Grabbing the shark by the fin... Monterrey bay If Rascal is my middle name then Danger is my first. It's not that I plan adventure - I find it's the adventure that seeks me out. Let me tell you about how I almost got kicked out of the Monterrey Bay aquarium. Let me tell you how I stared death in the face and blew it a kiss and gave it a wink. I woke up on Sunday at 8:30 am to meet with Tony and Betsy who were driving in from Alameda to take Nicole and I down to Monterrey. It was a sunny day in north beach and we decided to get some breakfast. Tony was taking his time so we followed up our food with bloody mary's at O'reilly's our favorite Irish pub. We were going to invite Eric to come with us but he's too poor. Wait, that sounds mean. We were going to invite Eric to come with us but he had to work...yeah - that's sounds good. So we get in the car and Tony informs us that he has a 30 pack of bud light in the back. Usually when people say they have booze I feel l they are specifically talking to me - and I try to oblige them. By the time we get to the gas station San Jose (30 miles away) he has 10 beers left and a bunch of cans. These are the black thunderclouds that hang ominously in the horizon foreshadowing some sinister event. By the time we get to Monterrey we've mostly run out of beer (we'll I've mostly run out of his beer) and we've moved onto black label sparks. When I bought them the lady at the store warned me that they had liquor and a cop would ticket us for drinking them in public. I re-assured her by telling her that we would only drink them on the car ride to the aquarium. Strangely she seemed OK with that. Then we drive and drive and pass sand dunes and the ocean. By the time we get to the aquarium the sparks are gone and my flask is empty. We debate getting margaritas and decide against it - for the good of both our fellow man and the fish. The aquarium is is a sea of silent despair. Stupid sea otters bang there heads on the glass of their holding tanks as I selfishly hold my hot-dog out in front of them. Above the entrance to the cafe where the beer is sold is a huge whale skeleton. That means I'm standing under a huge whale skeleton. I keep wondering what the other fish think when they see it. We thought Abu Gharib was bad. By this point our words are slurred and we're stumbling and pushing past the smaller slower children. We're a wreck of tourists as we stroll around incredibly fresh sushi. The first and near last exhibit we went to was a touching tank. I've been to touching tanks before but usually they involve ecstasy and house music. This was different. Little kids we're getting their pre-pubescent rocks off picking up star fish and petting sea anemone's. No menthol ciggarettes, no back rubs just sea cucumbers and paper towels. The way they had it set up is that there is a touch tank of the fish I just mentioned and then another tank that connects to it via slotted holes in another room. In this other tank there were sharks and sting rays and more sharks. Nothing big, length of my arm at the max. But still - sharks. So I surprised myself by not falling into the tank and reached down and tried to touch a sting ray. Nicole tried to take a picture. Then Tony tried the same - Betsy got the shot. I made a Steve Irwin joke and a little kid teared up. This wouldn't be the last time. Those thunderclouds from earlier - they were starting to rumble. So this shark comes cruising by me and I have this flash back of my grandfather on fishing trips holding up shit he pulled from the sea by the tail and smiled for photos. I make a grab for it. The picture at the top of this post was taken right when I grabbed the shark. It felt like wet leather and power and I grabbed it's tail and yanked. Two things happened. One, time slowed down. I saw a lady in a uniform start to slow motion yell at me, noooooooooo! as she pushed people out of her way to get to me. Two, I grabbed a fucking shark. The realization hit me when it turned on me and tried to bite me. I pulled my hand quickly out of the water and splashed some little kid who was in a stroller. He started to cry too. I turned around to run, someone tried to grab me and I ducked and that dude bumped someone else who dropped their camera into the tank. Things were happening quickly now. Betsy, Tony's girlfriend was bewildered but thankfully Tony had been through this before (see the pickwick hotel episode) he grabbed her and quickly walked out. The person who's camera was in the aquarium was yelling at the guy who tried to grab me for knocking it out of her hand as I was trying to get away. Then the shark who's highly agitated makes a pass at her, tries to bite her. People are in an uproar. Children are crying. Asian tourists are taking pictures. I back out slow and quick just as security starts getting there. I'd love to tell you how we spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the jelly fish, yellow fin tuna and other delectables and while we did those things I also spent time looking over my shoulder for bigger fish - you know...the kind with badges. We spent the remainder of the day eating mexican food, drinking pitchers of margaritas and talking in old tyme voices, see. We drove in inky blackness through Carmel and made it to a target in some sleepy sea-side town before getting gas and heading home. On the way we polished off three cigars, two bottles of wine and the majority of Nicole's sobriety. We finished the night almost as we started it, in the bars of North Beach. Safe and secure home again and bewildered how we got there.

An Ode to Jack (either Daniels or Keroac

We are on the road again
pre-emptive surgical shots
followed by laser chasers
glee fully running through
our spirtual deforestations
lost
in a karaoke bar
trapped in San Francisco
the only way out
is blowing kisses from the end
of another bottle
merry makers
fools...
rosey cheeked &
gin blossomed
our ugly beautiful way
is our golden escape