Christopher Nosnibor in conversation with Jim Lopez


In tandem with the release of the collection Clinical, Brutal... An Anthology of Writing with Guts Christopher Nosnibor will be interviewing some of the contributors to the book about their contributions, their writing methods and their outlooks more broadly.

The writings of Jim Lopez have long impressed me, crossing elements of high-brow intellect with low-life gutter existence. Above all, he has a knack of telling a story. There was a lot I wanted to ask him, and in this interview, he gave me some illuminating answers and a whole lot more.

CN: Although it’s perhaps a little difficult to pinpoint precisely why, I find there’s a decidedly ‘Beat’ writing feel to ‘Rubber Hose Real Estate.’ Are you in some ways influenced by the Beat writers, intentionally or otherwise? What other influences do you draw on when writing?

JL:  I suspect that words are not really meant to be written down, unless a person is able to make it worthy of time spent being read; after which, the author’s responsibility is to shove the text on to the next generation. 

I have not read many Beat authors.  I read Kerouac’s “Satori in Paris” and “Orpheus,” Burrough’s “Junkie” and “Naked Lunch,” Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind,” some of Ginsberg’s poems, Barry Miles’s “The Beat Hotel,” and Jean-François Duval’s “Bukowski and the Beats,” but I have never really been influenced by Beat texts.  My readings of the Beats were more of a scholastic exercise, except Burroughs’s.  I have not read much of him, but he lingers in my mind like a lonely man who jumps out a window while everyone in the neighborhood is fucking each other’s brains out: like shooting an apple off of a lovers head in Mexico.   Yeah, how could I not want to know that man; whereas with someone like Kerouac or Cassady all I have to do is jump in the truck and make my way across the United States, drinking in every bar or back woods alley of my choice and then wind up in seclusion.  I’ve done that 17 times already and all I have to say is, “There are no good times to be had on the road per say.”  It’s like a baseball game.   You sit around strategizing for three hours, which is mostly a vain endeavor (as the odds are stacked against you), but you do it anyways because that’s how the game works.  Then your last two batters knock a few through the hole, landing on first and second.  Then your clutch hitter comes in and drops one in no man’s zone and the third base coach waves two runners home.  If you’re really on top of your game, or luck smiles upon you, you fuckin’ knock one out of the park and everybody goes home talking about what a great game it was.  Most of the time you were eating a hot dog, getting drunk and feeling up a fan or two: the usual mundane stuff.  But what sticks with you is that homer or great infield snag.  Burroughs is one of those great plays made in life, as is Bukowski.

You have to gather up the courage and get out on the road.  Screw Kerouac.  He’ll understand if no one ever reads “On The Road” again, but only if they actually get out on the road themselves; otherwise, stay home and read it.  I never could stay still long enough, so I never read “On The Road.”  I meet these Grateful Dead Head beat lovin’ pukes and they tell me, “Yo, you never read On the Road, and you call yourself a writer.”

Fuck ‘em, the Beats were a bunch of rebellious queers waxing their wits and thank god they did.  The Beats made oppression and disdain for a controlled life more acceptable.  That’s what we’re fighting or writing for: to determine one’s own sense of validation: to be one’s own determining factor in the pursuit for value.  And that’s how I understand the Beats.  Without them we would be further behind in self actualization.  It’s Cynicism, Diogenes of Sinope’s maxim, “That in order to be free one must rely upon the least amount of material objects,” and “That the market place cannot determine one’s value.”  In other words Time is not just a backdrop for events, it’s also an energy based on rotation.  Yesterday’s Laws may no longer be Laws tomorrow.  The current Timeline merely measures the History of the Slave Market.  That is what I understood of the Beats.  And one must eventually decide that he or she will decide for her or his self. 

But I was much more influenced by the Romantics, Bukowski, the Surrealists, Dorothy Parker, William James and the social realism of Steinbeck, Erskin Caldwell and Nelson Algren, peppered with Walter Lippmann and ancient text.     
 
The Beat life influenced me more than the actual text of the Beat Generation.

CN: Your stories are fairly densely populated with drug addicts, prostitutes, swindlers, perpetrators of violence and various other unsavoury sorts. To what extent do these people populate our own world? I suppose I’m asking how clear is the separation between art and life, and to what extent do you agree with the oft-held opinion that a writer has to have experienced something to write it and do so credibly, and the adage ‘write what you know’?

JL: I had reality shoved up my ass the moment my mother’s pussy started stretching around my head and was smeared across my face.

H.L. Menken wrote John Fante, “The writer must do more with little.”  The work gets done by sitting in front of a computer, typewriter or pen and paper.  And that’s the truth of the matter.  There’s no way around it.  I know some writers who spend most of their time getting drunk and seeking out experiences, but they rarely ever write anything.  It’s difficult to be in two places at once. 

But I really don’t care about any of that.  Discipline is absolutely necessary but I find it much more inspiring to be disciplined when I am inspired by some external factor or am struck with inspiration, whether external or internal.  Often times these influences are merely what I am surrounded by.  I’ve never had to go very far to find unsavory characters.  I was surrounded by them as a child.  I was a latch-key kid.  My parents were rarely home and I was beat regularly by my over-worked mother and by bigger kids or gang members trying to rip me off.  And this happened weekly.  As a child I was surrounded by drug addicts, thieves, violent bastards, rock-n-rollers, and homeless out of work people.  Many of my high school friends had intact families and lived in nice homes.  I lived in a shitty barrio and the apartment building I was raised in was directly across the street from the 10 Freeway.  I inhaled automobile exhaust twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, from the age of eight to the age of seventeen.  The 10 Freeway is eight lanes wide with a train line running down the middle of it.  It was constantly noisy, dirty and hot.  The traffic was so load and filthy every day, twice a day during rush hour traffic.

Sure there were normal, well behaved people as well, but they were waning.  Kids who grew up in northern San Gabriel, which was middle-to-upper class were getting fucked up on drugs just as much as kids from South San Gabriel, where I mostly grew up. 

My mother worked two/three jobs to raise me and my sister.  My mother was conceived in a mental institution in Massachusetts and orphaned in LA, where she grew up in foster homes and Juvenile Detention Centers.  My father left Cuba right after the Revolution and married my mother when she was under age.  Their marriage failed and my father was a typical skipper.  My mother packed us up and moved us to Maine, where she went in search of her mother, whom she’d never met.  That failed quite quickly so we moved into the Wayfarer, which was a boarding house above a diner and a bar in Rockland.  At one point my mother could not afford to keep me and my sister (and she would not go on welfare), so she left us with a Mormon family, who lived on a farm, for a month until she got a stable job and found a place to live.  Then her boyfriend beat her up and that was it, we were back in L.A. two years later.
 
My mother was pissed-off all the time, working two or three jobs, and she and I grew tired of each other: she was either throwing me out of the house or I was running away until I moved out all together at the age of seventeen.  I had turned into a snot of a drug fiend and alcoholic.  Then I found Jesus but found the Christian world to be hypocritical as well as politically controlled and ignorant: there’s a lot of money in organized religion.  I scrapped the religious life understanding that all I had done was barter one neurosis for another.  I did maintain the essence of my theological pursuits and went back to what I knew, travel, drink and hope for some sincere love.

The point that I am trying to make is that unsavory experiences were natural.  It was my life.  I didn’t know much of anything else.  Me and most of my friends grew into bull-shitters.  We sat round, playing music, getting high, drinking and making each other laugh by insulting one another and not taking it personally.  We spun stories out of our daily experiences.  I simply chose to write some of it down and twist it a bit.

Most of the characters in Rubber Hose Real Estate were real people that I knew.  Angie is the only real name given to any of the characters.  She killed herself when we were nineteen, twenty.  She had AIDS and when things became too painful she sold her bike and T.V., bought some heroin and ended it.

Lucy is pretty much as I described her in the story but her and Angie never knew each other personally.

Soto is made up of two guys, one of whom I knew personally and one of whom I knew peripherally.  He drank himself to death recently.

Tino is made of two guys, both who are living and still using, if you call their lives living.   But I know only one of the guys that his character is based on.  The other one is a friend of a friend
Chacho is dead.  He was a neighbor’s boyfriend and real fucking fiend of a person.  He wasn’t a transvestite but he looked like one, constantly black and blue with a swollen lip and ripping people off.

The story was inspired by this Princeton Journal I found about Dueling.  I’ve always been fascinated with men who could look each other in the eye and challenge one another.  Things didn’t go down that way where I grew up.  The Vietnam War ended and a bunch of refugees landed in my neighborhood.  White and Mexican thugs used to go Nipper Knocking.  They just got in a car and beat the shit out of every Nip?Asian they saw: man, woman or child and sometimes they got so carried away that they just beat the shit out of anyone, Asian or not.  And this was a regular thing.  Most of my friends from other neighborhoods would not hang out in my neighborhood at night.  I got the shit kicked out of me one night just because of mistaken identity.  I knew the guys and they knew me, but one of them was so high that he didn’t recognize me.  The three other guys didn’t jump me, rather they stood by yelling, “David,” the guy jumping me, “that’s Jim, man, that’s Jim!”  But David, who was a big redneck who beat people all the time, and Sesar, a 250lb Mexican, were so high they thought I was Asian.  I kicked David’s ass but Sesar pounded my face so many times that my jaw still pops out of joint when I move it.  He apologized numerous times after that and I forgave him, because it was really David who was not listening to anyone and when I got the upper hand Sesar stepped in to back up David.  I hated David before that and I hated more after that.  I made a bomb and was about to throw it in his house when I started thinking about his mother and brother and girlfriend and his new baby, so I never threw it in the house.  I lit it and was standing in front of his house and was about to toss it but ended up snuffing it instead.  I never thought about killing anyone and have never thought about killing anyone since, with the exception of some corporate scumbag, but that’s not my role in life.  So I had to grow up quick on my feet.  I learned how to run and jump fences as well as, maybe even better, than any Black guy in Compton. 

I was thrown into a couple of SODA Homes in Compton, which were private homes with bars around them, where underage, non-violent offenders were housed until they went to see the judge.  I was always the only white guy in the house.  I was locked in with a couple of Cripps or Bloods my age.  They fantasized about fucking a white girl with a shaved pussy.  I fantasized about fucking a black girl with a big hairy pussy.  They couldn’t believe it: a long haired, fourteen-year-old white kid jonesing to fuck a black girl with a hairy pussy.  They loved me and I loved them.  We would pillage the oregano from the kitchen or one of us would have a joint stuffed in our sock and we’d get high or get a head ache, laughing all night.  They always got sent to LeRoys or some juvenile detention center.  The judge wouldn’t even see me.  My social worker use to say, “The judge doesn’t know what to do with you, you didn’t break any laws, or at least you weren’t caught breaking any laws.  Your mother just doesn’t want you.  Do you have some place to go?”  Sometimes my mother would come around and take me home, sometimes I was dropped off on a corner and made my way to friend’s house for dinner. 

Aside from underage drinking, drug using, and the ever-so-occasional shoplifting the worst thing that I did was drive to Hollywood without a license and get free ball rubs from prostitutes.  I started doing that at fourteen and stopped at fifteen.  I’d pull up to a black whore and she would stick her head and tits in the car.   I would fondle her tits and she would rub my balls until she realized I didn’t have any money.  Then she’d split and I’d find another whore to rub my balls.  I love whores.


I tried to get into Military School. Metaphorically I was standing on the 10 Freeways catwalk and at the same time I was the guy screaming jump, because people are much more inclined to jump if they have a someone cheering them on, but I flunked the Military School entry exam and became a neurotic.  Picking things up and putting them into an empty cottage cheese bucket.  I have a collection of nails and sometimes I’d like to drive them through unsuspecting passerby’s.  I can’t stay still and being financially impudent I have a tendency to move around. 
That was it.  All I did was fuck around when I was kid because there wasn’t a whole lot that was available to me.  I’ve always been charitable and I still am.  I have coffee with homeless mental cases quite regularly.  On occasion, I even let them in my place to shower and wash their clothes, and I make them something to eat and listen to their craziness and plagiarize it.
I did have the discipline to put myself through college and grad school, working as a janitor, swinging a hammer, bartended or picking up any job I could get, thinking that an education would improve my financial situation but it didn’t.  I was born poor and unwanted and I’m still poor and unwanted.  Life is struggle, so I write about hardship.  But I do try to bring some ethics into my writing.  Dante’s “Inferno” is one of the greatest pieces of literature.  It shows the inevitable consequences of the Enochian woes, that is, those who attain wealth at the expense of others and those who lack charity will go to hell.  And that’s true, at least that’s what I believe.

The News Paper has been an influence on my writing.  But I’ve grown tired of it, as it is a sound track to start everyone’s day. 

Art is the material form of something that is inside the artist.  If the artist is successful, the form is an authentic representation of what is inside of him or her.  That’s it.  There is no separation between art and life.  My life mostly sucks and so I write about things that suck and maybe my writing even sucks.  But all I am trying to do is give form to an expression or an inspiration that is in me.  It’s not complicated, but I can’t make it all up in a room sitting by myself.  I get the ball rolling.  When I get stuck I go out my front door and someone will inevitably say or do something that I could never have said or do, and I’ll take it and put it in an entirely different situation and continue building from there.  I need others and experiences, but I don’t purposely go out and look for it.  All I have to do is sit in front of my house and then Daryle the transvestite hair dresser will walk by.  He and I will flirt with each other or he’ll tell me some outrageous story or turn a cleaver phrase and I’ll take it and use it.  And he’s happy to oblige.  I’m happy to receive and hopefully the reader walks away feeling like he or she hasn’t wasted his or her time.  But I have not had very many readers.  Having any form of an audience is new to me.  

CN: Is there a particular philosophy behind your writing? Moreover, beyond the obvious and superficial function of literature to entertain, what do you consider to be the function of your work?

JL: Over all I am a victim to the American plight.  I want a hero to save my life, some fucked-up son-of-a-bitch of a bastard, who has mastered his manners and needs no one to validate his own existence except himself.  I’d like to write him in some way that has never been written, but I think Homer, Enoch, Jeremiah, Jesus, Buddha, Hermes Trismegistus, Socrates, Diogenes of Sinope, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Miquel de Unamuno, William James, Dorothy Parker, Marshal McLuhan, Bukowski, Nelson Algren, and a number of Latin American writers have covered the philosophical elements in literature.
Philosophy is the love of wisdom or the wisdom of love.  Honest copulations are important as are learning to choose your words and develop one’s own tone.

I read a lot of philosophy, theology, social engineering and history books.
I’m attempting to develop character, a homology, that is capable of facing death with courage.  That is central to everything that I do.  I am profoundly aware that I will die, and I want to face death calmly and courageously.  In order for me do so, I believe it is necessary for me to take risk and develop a charitable character.  When I was a kid I would watch movies where an airplane was going down and everyone was screaming in horror, or some guy has a gun in his face and he starts begging for his life, like Frank Lopez in Scareface, and I would think, “How shameful.”  I acutely remember feeling and thinking that it was shameful to beg and scream when death comes for you.  I never wanted to be one of those people.  And then, at ten years-of-age, a taxi was backing out of a driveway and ran over me.  I almost died.  The bumper slammed down on my entire body, the muffler burned me and then the god-damn tire grabbed hold of me and sat in my lap, skidding me out into the street.  My uncle saw it happen and shouted for the taxi to stop before the front end finished me off.  I remember screaming, “I’m going to die! I’m going to die!” as the paramedics were cutting off my clothes and my mother was leaning over me covering my genitals.  My friends were laughing and gave me shit for years.  They mocked my ten year-old genitals and made stupid jokes as I hobbled around, “That’s was one hell of a way to catch a cab.”  My uncle even joined in. But I almost died, and I could see the whole thing from above, like I’d been dosed with opiates or psychedelics.  It was such a profound experience that I had to repeat it when I was thirteen, as I got hit by a car two more times, only I was on my bike and I didn’t get run over.  I walked away clear headed and unaffected.  In fact, I got the people to give me money if I promised not tell my mother or call the police.

I think it’s fair to say that you can break down my writing thus far, philosophically:

Risk
Charity
Courage
Death
Immortality
Hope

CN: The anthology gathers a fairly disparate array of authors, all with quite different and highly individual styles under the umbrella of ‘clinical brutality.’ This was pretty much as I’d expected, and hoped – i.e. to show different interpretations of the theme. What does the concept of clinical brutality mean to you?

JL: Most things that are deemed clinical have an undercurrent of brutality.  The sophisticated indifference that is pushed upon us in the United States as a healthy, responsible, cultured life is really just a perverted, clinical form of brutality.  Madeleine Albright proved that when she said, on 60 Minutes, that a hundred thousand infants killed in Iraq because of U.S. sanctions is an acceptable number of dead kids.   That’s the mentality I experience in New York.  If you express an emotion over injustice your considered immature.  If I’m reading the paper over an espresso at the French Roast, and start screaming because some cop with a power trip shoots a Nigger in the back for stealing a toaster oven, New Yorkers, or new New Yorkers get up in arms because I didn’t use the proper nomenclature when referring to the poor black guy instead of manifesting an aggressive emotion over police injustice.  It’s fucking ridiculous.  Sophisticated indifference is the most brutal thing I’ve ever experienced, but I don’t have to worry about 10 tons of explosives and bits of metal resembling silver dollars falling out of the sky landing on my home and ripping and blowing children and elderly people to bits.  
Injustice is brutality.

I understand your title, Clinical Brutality, to be satirical.  All the writers might be rude, crude and brutish, but I suspect that every one of them loses their shit when they see or hear about injustice, about the rich ripping off the poor, or the mightier maiming and killing or dispersing the weak into a disoriented existence.  That’s real brutality and it’s usually done quite clinically, from behind a desk with a remote control nano-bomb that is designed to look like a butterfly.  We live in an obscene and beautiful world.  There are no caricatures, but this indifferent sophistication that is pushed on the common person is fucking vicious and is brutalizing the soul of humanity.   

CN: The Internet is littered with e-zines, most of which are pretty poor, it has to be said. You recently launched ‘Antique Children,’ which certainly stands apart from the majority, in terms of quality, and also in terms of feel. What prompted you to establish the site, and what is the ‘Antique Children’ ethos?

JL: Thank you for your kind words.  I’m glad that you like it, and I hope that it might me a worthy distraction.

Antique Children was an impulse.  I have so much photography lying around collecting dust, so I made the header art in two days and decided to find other people to create the aesthetic. 
Antique Children overwhelms me.  Sometimes I feel like I proposed marriage to a woman that I’m afraid to commit myself to because I don’t know what I’m in for, and I’m a little apprehensive of having to be responsible for the duration.  I could not do it without Ty Gorton, who has an excellent eye for art, and Hero MacKenzie, who is an outstanding writer and loves Spanish literature.  They are indispensable to the aesthetic and content as are the contributors.
 
More than anything I was interested in designing my own covers for the printed quarterly journal, whether it be my art or someone else’s.  I’ve always loved the feeling of being in a record or book store and seeing a cover that impressed me enough to pick it up and buy it.  If the album or literature was good then that affirmed my immediate sensibilities.  So what I am after is that first impression, the ineffable experience taking form into something coherent and beautiful. 

I can only hope that I can keep it going and that it can develop into a community of artists that feel a sense of purpose in life.  AQC is a sister publication to Paraphilia Magazine.  I understand Dave Kelso-Mitchell, Dire McCain, and myself to be three orphans who are trying to survive together.  After having read your introduction to the new anthology of Clinical Brutality I suspect that you’re another Oliver Twist, like the three of us, trying to arrest life for yourself and get on with it.

The ethos is still forming, but it is designed by orphans.

CN: You recently edited a special ‘Doppelganger’ issue for ‘Paraphilia Magazine’. How did that come about?

I found this old photograph that I took of a dead lizard floating in water and made a mock cover.  Then I sent it to Dire McCain and Dave Kelso-Mitchell.  They liked it and the three of us decided that it would be a worthy venture.  That’s it.  We saw the image, liked the idea and decided to do it.  There wasn’t a lot of thought or discussion.  Again, it was the effect that the image had on all three of us.  None of us knew how it would shape itself, but we knew it would.  Dire and Dave have been quite generous with writers and artists.  They let people contribute as they wish and the issues have shaped themselves with Dire and Dave at the helm.  They try not to control too much, just like doppelgangers.  They raise their heads when they see fit and do so with no warning.

CN: The way in which literature is transmitted and received has changed dramatically with the advent and evolution of the Internet. To take Lyotard’s assertion that the status of knowledge has altered in the postmodern age as accurate, would you consider the status of literature to have changed also? If so, in what ways?

JL: I think it has changed in the obvious way: the artifact of the paper book is less important because of the internet and I don’t like that.  I don’t like staring into a screen that is shining a light in my face and agitating my brain.  But the internet has its benefits.  You and I met on the internet, and I would never had met Dire and Dave and Craig Woods, who is one of the most creative contemporary writers I have ever read.  Meeting people on the internet and feeling a sense of closeness is something I would have never expected.  The internet is relatively new to me.  I just started poking around on it in 2003.  Prior to that I thought it was a waste of time and completely irrelevant to my life.

I still prefer the artifact of the paper book, and I suspect that I always will.  There is and always has been literature, publishers and agents who are too timid to take risk.  The internet offers writers the opportunity to search out those publishers and agents who are not afraid to take risk.  But I’m not very savvy when it comes to the subject of the internet.  I can barely type.

CN: Do you consider your writing to belong to any particular genre, or that you ‘belong’ to a greater literary community? Is ‘community’ important to writers?

JL: I have always romanticized the idea of a tribe, especially Native American tribes, and I have sought out Shamans, though I have never found one, to give me some mystical insight, so community is very important to me. 
But I also like being alone and taking off when I want and not having to explain myself to anyone, thus Existential Literature has had a profound impact on my writing (I include the Surrealist and Latin American writers in that genre).  There is no pretense in the genre.  The Surrealists and Existentialists had just come out of World War I, where humanity was blowing itself to hell and doing it with rapid force.  There was no time to think, action was the most valuable currency.  There was so much violence that a person had no time for pretense.  Latin American Literature is the same.  Struggle and death is the central theme and how one deals with struggle and death is essential to developing one’s character.  Today just about everyone is pretentious, even myself at times, and I find those who go around with their moronic critique, calling writers who try to grapple with struggle and death as pretentious, to be the most pretentious turds I have ever met.  

But if there were one writer that has influenced me most in literature it’s Nelson Algren.  I’m an American and I speak English and I have not read anyone who has a command of the English language as Nelson Algren does/did in the 20th century.  Herman Melville was incredible but his time is far removed from me.  His social realism and his wit stands above anyone I have ever read.  He can make the reader laugh and think, and Algren is socially responsible in his writing.  He has an ethic that forces the reader to consider the plight of the underdog, the losers, scumbags, and unwanted while not romanticizing their destructive choices, yet he also forces the reader to consider his or her own responsibility in this whole bloody, unjust mess that humanity has created.  I’ve read everything he’s written, except “Chicago, City on the Make,” and I like everything he has written.

I’ve always been attracted to losers, underdogs, the unwanted, whores, artists, transvestites and self-destructive people, but I have also been lucky to have had some mentors who have embodied genuine benevolence (a sort of holy man) like Ray S. Anderson.  I went to seminary simply to study with him, and I never met someone like him.  I suspect I never will again.  He was a remarkable theologian and though I didn’t agree with all his ideas he was indeed the most benevolent man I ever met.  Nothing seemed to ruffle him except hypocrisy.  He had a Christ-like ability to make a person feel heard and understood and was able to give a response that was relevant.  He died last year on father’s day and his last book was on hope.    

Without hope a person will usually just lay down and die and that is what is so miserable and fucking vicious about the domination of Empires and corporate control: it strips the hope away from the unwanted losers.  Look around.  Empires and corporations are greedy pigs (they actually bottle and sell water. It’s fucking insane, pure evil): they control all the wealth and resources and then they have the nerve to peddle false hopes with a bread and circus act.
I understand the Existentialist to be looking for hope deep within oneself, to discover and develop one’s inherent sense of freedom and determine one’s own becoming.  The Surrealists do this by attempting to unlock the subconscious, if there is indeed one, and Latin American writers tend to do both and root in the world of violence, which they have been subjected to.  Algren does all of this and brings it home, right in my backyard, where the 10 Freeway spits out its poisonous gas fumes and decrepit hopelessness, as working people make their way to a 9-5, which I have tried to avoid.  Who wants to work some deadbeat job, scrounging for pieces of eighths?

I suppose you can label my genre, thus far, as Aggressive or Transgressive or simply “Filthy 10 Freeway” literature.  My body has literally been run over and polluted by desperate people driving back and forth to work, and that has made such an impact on me that it has left an immortal imprint on my smoggy face, and I refuse to accept a slave mentality: a little bit of money is not necessarily better than no money at all, especially if you don’t have children, which I don’t. 

I woke up to the sound of automobile traffic, my days were impacted by cars zooming and honking, my dreams were invaded with drunk drivers and rumbling locomotives carrying products day-in-and-day-out for ten years of my young life.  There was a cat walk across the street where I could stand above and watch the cars drive by as I pissed on them.  I’d shit on empty, smashed Rits Cracker boxes and toss it on cars as I stood along the shoulder of the 10 Freeway.  I assaulted those cars constantly but not as much as I they assaulted me.  But they were merely filled with simple people (who I never demonized or blamed) making their way back and forth to work.  Thank God I never hurt anyone, but I never wanted to be one of them either.

Hopefully, someday I’ll be able to wash the filth off my face, but it will forever be smeared in my mind.  And right now that’s what I have a tendency to write about: filthy subjects looking for hope.