Friday On Friday - "Coffee Mandatory"

Love is supposed to last a lifetime... until another comes along.

Just so you know, I never planned to fall in love.

It started out as nothing more than a relationship of convenience. Like sex for a green card, or the wash of a windshield for a couple of bucks at a stop light in Santa Monica. A fucking transaction. No emotion… no feelings. Just a need meeting another need. No romance, no flowers... just the glare of a naked bulb at sunrise, and the grunting of guilty pleasure heard on the other side of a thin kitchen wall.

After a while, like with any illegitimate relationship... and enough lying to yourself in the mirror... eventually you decide that maybe its okay to take next step... the public step. A coffee house. The thought was innocent enough in your head, “It’s just a cup of coffee. What could happen?”

Until you get there, and you wonder if this is how they feel in Amsterdam... ordering heroin... in a brothel.

At first, there’s that self-conscious thought that goes, "people don’t really do this in public... do they?” Followed by a second thought that you should just go finish your business in the restroom like the upstanding citizen your parents always thought you’d be. But you stay... you take your seat in the big room with all the other upstanding citizens... and you lose yourself to the overwhelming urge that brought you here in the first place. To take this private need to the next level. So you do. In front of God and everyone... if only God were watching.

I never planned to fall in love.

Years pass, and things go on like always. Public meetings, intimate rendezvous, long mornings after a bad night’s sleep. Every encounter making you sink deeper and deeper into what was such an innocent addiction. Days and nights became the same to you. Multiple jobs, endless hours... and only one thing remains the same. The need. The intense need, the unsatisfied need... the aching need.

Until another comes along.

As the glare of the naked bulb at sunrise still calls after you like a line out of a song by Mumford & Sons, the something new doesn’t call like a selfish bitch... it whispers softly in your ear, like the one that got away. It draws me to a softer place... a darker place, later and later in the night... after the glare of day, and all its distractions, goes away. And unlike the whorishly obvious coffee brothel, it is subtle and almost... caring. And the scars of years are replaced by tender strokes to a raw-rubbed ego. The only thing required in return was to think, and feel... and write. And whatever words came out were good... were accepted. I was accepted.

I never planned to fall in love. Not like this.

More years pass, and things change... drastically. The flutter and surge of my heart, gentle ego stroking, the sideways-smiles-turned-lustful... change. Flutters turn to questions. Surges to pain. The lying, sideways smiles, with their promise of fulfillment... turn to insistence. And whispers turn to ice at the harsh dawning of a new day, when I know it has become... the same.

I look up from the computer. I see the light of morning enter through the fog of early June. “When did this happen?” is all I can say, in a hushed voice, raw from not speaking. I turn my head the other way, toward the kitchen, to the glare of a naked bulb at sunrise...

...just so you know.

Copyright © 2011 Bill Friday

Friday On Friday - "Friday Turns 100"

Words to live by.

I keep a notebook.

No, not a Mac Book, a notebook. The kind you write in. The paper kind. And a pen. I’ve been told I’m an old soul… fossil old.

And since I don’t even own an iPhone...

(choking gasp of horror over morning coffee)

Let me explain… no, there is too much… let me sum up.

Okay, whenever I get a random thought in my head... something that, for the merest moment of time, I like the sound of as it floats between my ears, I write it down. In the same notebook I use for work. Sideways, in the left-hand margin... so I won’t forget where I put it. Sometimes, these random thoughts end up in a story. Most times, they end up forgotten… tossed in a drawer, or worse yet (the horror…) under the bed (another column for another time). And sometimes, like bullets from a 9 mil in a drive-by, they get used all at once. And if you think you know me… and you will think you do, the longer you read me… then you know that these are (some) of my words to live by.


“I have no desire to be friends with my past.”

While, for many, the past can be looked back on fondly... first bike, first kiss, first car... for me, my past is looked back on for some other firsts… first stolen bike, first punch in the face, first death of a loved one. And while I would not trade any of the lessons learned from it, my past and I are not now, nor will we ever be, on good terms with each other. Every now and then, we pass each other on the street… and nod. And that’s enough. Because with every passing nod, another page in the notebook is filled.


“Talent doesn’t pay the bills, working does.”

Obviously not an original thought, but since when did a teacher like the past ever claim to be 100 percent original all the time? Still, this one is for the times (many) when the thought of sitting on my bony ass waiting for something better to come along became more than just a thought... and it took some kind of tragedy to shake me enough to start something, or stop something, that shoved a wrench into the gears of my creative machine. Hell, I hate working three jobs. But it beats starving. Yeah, and I’ll sleep when I’m published.


“Sometimes drunks tell the best version of the truth.”

So, after you finish reading this, have a few cold ones, read it again, and leave a comment… preferably on my blog, to reduce the chance of having me ask the publishers to take it down. When you do comment, please let me know exactly how many shots, pops, or rips you’ve had, so that I can rate your truthfulness by the volume of your consumption.

And remember, there are no wrong answers.


“Intimacy isn’t given… it’s earned.”

And people wonder why I don’t make many friends.

In a previous article, I covered the three kinds of “friendlies” every writer ought to know. This is the other side… the dark side… of that. For lack of a better term, they are, “the un-friendlies”. Part Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, part Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, “un-friendlies” are those Twitter followers or Facebook friends you wish you’d never clicked “okay” for. Sure you could block them, or just try to ignore them, but sooner or later they will always come back... with a bunny. As I enter into this phase of my writing life, I will try to remember to be polite to everyone, and always, always keep my head on a swivel… so it doesn’t end up somewhere else.

And finally...


“Handshakes are for people who can’t afford lawyers.”

This should be self-explanatory. It’s the California version of, “get it in writing”. California has always lead the way in defining how to put a price tag on friendship (community property, “palimony”), and on the number of lawyers per capita in the United States. I have one friend who is an attorney, and while I did not run number 5 by him before I submitted this column to the editor (something to do with “billable hours”… I really didn’t understand it all), I do know that he would have to agree with me on this one. Off the record.

Bonus thought...

I will conclude this first official effort by explaining that this article is my 100^th published article for Broowaha.com. In saying that, I want everyone who just made the effort to follow this one all the way to its conclusion to know that it is my wish that we all, as writers… as readers… get what we wish for ourselves in this creative venture comes true even wilder and better than we ever could have imagined. But be careful what you wish for, because...


“If wishes were Unicorns, they’d shit rainbows.”

Copyright © 2011 Bill Friday

The White Paint Chronicles (#0004)

Full-Moon-Midnight

Midnight is the moment of both merger and separation, where two planes of existence come together, then depart, with all the passion and abandonment of two strangers in the bathroom of a 737 during a one-hour flight from L.A. to Vegas... when transparency and desperation reveal themselves to the few who stop to see it in the dark.

Midnight.  The time when only bad shit happens to good people, and the motives of a man’s heart are most clearly revealed.  The mystical time between times that most honest, hard-working, daytime folk never see... and most shady, lowlife, night-dwellers are too involved in their shufflings to notice.  The time when the distance between worlds is at its least, and the visible and invisible almost touch. 

And quiet voices from one side to the other are heard the clearest.

-------------

My last drop of the night.  A drop just like any other, with just one little variation... time.

The time of night, and the time I would have to spend waiting in scratchy plastic chairs, worn smooth through the years by the fat bodies of truckers, squirming, for uncountable hours on end, waiting for their names to be called, and their cargo tendered.  My job is ninety-nine percent High Priority parcels... fast in – faster out.  But tonight, a cargo drop bound for Rio de Janeiro would force me to sit with the Low Priority crowd, in chairs... possibly all night.  One drop, and the only thing separating me from a row of cold ones was the interest level of the lone clerk behind the counter.  Now, after three hours and eleven minutes and thirty-seven games of Brick-Breaker on my Blackberry, I was second in line behind a cowboy trucker who had given in to the lulling hum of the forklifts in the warehouse, and closed his eyes for good beneath a yellowed, straw hat about an hour ago.

So close to the end of shift.  The end of...

A sound... jagged nails across a half-acre of angry blackboard.  The bitchy squeal of worn rubber, dug in hard on a smooth, paved floor, as if in protest against, against...

The cowboy jumped and landed on two feet, like a live man from his own grave.  Slowly, I turned toward the sound. 

Crumpled at one edge, tilted at an awkward, upward angle against a frame of supporting pine, lay a body clothed in cardboard, like ten cold reams of Banker’s Boxes, all in a row.




To be continued...

Copyright © 2011 Bill Friday

The White Paint Chronicles (#0003)

The Body

You ever see a dead body?  No, I don’t mean a corpse… I mean something that, as soon as you see it, the words, “dead body” pop into your head like the words, “flat tire” when you see a car on the side of the road or, “fucking tourist” when you see someone jay-walking at LAX. 

Dead body.

Say it just right, and you feel like you swallowed an ice cube whole.  Say it again, and the words burn cold and razor sharp, cutting your insides at that special place between the dry lump in your throat, and your fear-shrunken ball sack… because you’ve seen your future’s end, and read the last page of the unwritten story of your misspent life.

Is there really such a thing as “Indian Summer”?  In L.A. the closest thing to it is something called the “Santa Ana’s”.  Every fall, for a few days… okay, sometimes weeks… the cool breezes of the gray Pacific are swallowed up by a pissed-off furnace, blowing hot from the far north.  It’s a time when Chamber of Commerce weather is kidnapped and forcibly replaced by highs in the upper-90’s and gusts above 50 miles an hour.  During the days, dirt and smog blows against the grain from the mountains to the sea.  Palm trees are bent backwards, and the sky for a hundred miles is turned to 1960’s postcard brown… like it was when Dodger Stadium was new, and Marilyn Monroe was still breathing.  And the nights, tinted blue-black under a ghost-white moon streaked by blowing debris, glows with no life above the screaming of the wind.

And at full-moon-midnight, near the end of another shift, a dead body spoke.






To be continued...

Copyright © 2011 Bill Friday

The White Paint Chronicles (#0002)

You never know where they’re going to come from.  They start as total strangers, then become people, who one day – whether you admit it or not – you cannot do without. 

They are… the “friendlies”.

This is a story about groupies.

That got your attention.  Don’t lie to yourself, you know it did.  Anyway, groupie stories are fun, and should just about write themselves… if you’re a writer without a soul.  Even more, if you’re a writer without a soul… who writes online.  Online, where disembodied voices whisper… saying things you want to hear… just as long as you say them back in just the right way.  Whispers that are never to be trusted, let alone believed… not when you crave honesty more desperately than your next orgasm.  Truth isn’t something you should have to pay for any more than you should have to pay for sex.  It should be expected, offered spontaneously and mutually and freely given, between those who supposedly share the deepest of bonds that could exist between consenting adults.  The mutual inadequacy… the fear... the greatest joy…

No, not sex you perv… writing.  This one’s about a different kind of groupie…  The “friendly”.

And this is the story of three.  

Those Who Know You Best

The one who knows you the best is, most likely, the one who reads you the least.  For them, it doesn’t matter how good… or how bad… a writer you are.  For them, it’s enough to know that you making it as a writer is a foregone conclusion… a given.  The thought that you won’t never crosses their mind, like a lot of things about your writing never do.  They know you, and because they know you, they already know what you know… that you’re a writer, whatever anybody says to the contrary.  Their lack of compliments, comments, critiques, random encouragements, or any other words outside the day-to-day reality that “this is who you are” and “this is what you do” is irrelevant.  You know it, they know you… therefore it must be true.  You wish they would, once in a while, take notice of what you do, but it’s been so long that you’ve decided it’s probably best just to let it go.  No point in ruining a friendship because you are so damn needy.

“Ain’t no thang,” you tell yourself.  One day, you’ll forget all this.  You won’t even remember the way you felt the first time you heard Marcus Mumford sing the words, “…you desired my attention, but denied my affections…”  And you’ll never remember how stupid you feel on those days you think this way… or how often.

Those Who Know You Least

“...You ARE and ALWAYS WILL BE a writer my friend. I see many people call themselves writers who barely write and don't even have a tenth of the talent that you have. You have mad skill. You have the disease!”

Portion of a comment at the end of the It’s Always Friday version of The White Paint Chronicles (#0001)

So says the friend I’ve never met. 

I don’t include the quote to make me feel better.  I include the quote to say that someone who knows me least, and only through a few words on a page… the “through a glass, darkly” kind of friend… can deliver this kind of unsolicited bump to a writer’s often bruised ego just when the desperate need of it is greatest.  Doubt, swallowed without hope, is the writer’s poison.  When swallowed together, they… the doubt and the hope… fill the writer’s soul with every emotion, every word, required to write again.

The existence of the post you’re reading (#0002) is proof of that.

Better still, that those words came from someone who would not know me if we stood next to each other in a ten-deep line at Starbucks, makes the impact of their words all the deeper.  And more lasting.

Those Who Know You Not At All

            “Blog like no one’s reading.”

                                                                        Agnes’ Pages

The other side of the coin.   The encouragement that comes from no one will know. 

I “met” Agnes by accident one day, surfing, on a site called Blog Catalog.  “Picking and clicking” I call it.  My blog is listed there, with uncountable thousands of other blogs.  I’ve picked up some pageviews by being active on the boards there, and every so often, I spend a little time “picking and clicking” blogs to read… mostly in the hope that others will pick and click mine.  A few months ago, I ran into Agnes’ Pages.  It was artistic and very finished looking… way more “polished and professional” than most of the BC blogs.  On the surface, it looked like a journal about a woman’s obsession with coffee and travel… which it is.  But after noticing just how many comments each entry was getting (and I mean dozens), I decided I had to find out what the traffic jam below each post was all about.  Turns out, the little blog that started out as random posts about ugly shoes and Starbucks Via drinks, had morphed into a personal journal about a young woman whose husband was dying of cancer.

I finished the entire blog, comments and all, in one night.

In among all the happy and the heartbreak, the hope and the hopelessness, one quiet line from one tiny little entry ran me over like a truck does rabbits on the highway,

“Blog like no one’s reading.”

Best words I ever read about writing… spoken by a “friendly” I’ll never know.  Life, like writing, should be that simple.

Copyright © 2011 Bill Friday