These little girls are fawning over me while I’ve got mothers on their knees in my trailer. These little girls don’t know how precious they are and that they are fawning over old used up bits that old hags beg and crawl for. They don’t understand the concept of settling in full, and they may probably end up doing as much of such, since they don’t, as many don’t, understand the vast vast numbers of beautiful delightful human soul mates for you to meet and fall in love with and learn and grow with and share. There really are so many fish in the sea. But luckily, these precious little nymph fingerlings are here for me.

My brother’s got a girlfriend and they’re in love. My brother has had a few girls before this southern juniper, but besides one second grade minx that caught his first grade eye, the rest were all pleasantries and jealousy and unhealthy.

This one though, this one is a wide eyed, kind, quick jab to the truth. She, unlike most, is not afraid to admit what she does not know. She, unlike most, realizes that by doing so she will advance and advance and plant roots where others can’t see grass or ground.  

My brother’s girlfriend has an iconic look and an iconic name, but she doesn’t flaunt it or wave it around in your face; because she, unlike most, understands she doesn’t need to waste time on such artificial nonsensical “niceties.” She’s shy, vulnerable, clandestinely competitive and tougher than nails hammered into a baseball bat. She’s wiser than most her age and older, and still she doesn’t even know how pure and rare she is.

I don’t know much about where she grew up besides it being tiny in comparison to where my brother and I grew up, and that it hosts some great sluggers, but I get the sense that she’s been accidentally smothered, unwittingly holding off on unfolding.

My brother is so god damn smitten by her that when he told me he’s “completely fucking in love with her” and my response was one of those girly squeals, quickly tightened with an apology, he gushed and assured me that it totally deserves an "aww.” My brother is so god damn completely in love with her that he asked to use a postcard from my collection and tried out at least fifteen different pens, assessing their colors and textures to find the perfect ink. My brother is so head over fucking heels for this little lass that when he finished the card, which took up the whole two pages and the backside, he held it up for me, just far enough away so I couldn’t get a glimpse at the content, and asked me if it was legible. I told him I couldn’t see it, but I’m sure she’d get through it. He sent it off with a kiss and my brother’s girlfriend read it over and over and alone and again with her mom and sister. How wax seals.

My brother’s girlfriend got the nice china and the vacation invite. She celebrated my quarter century sunrise birthday and has the same taste in booze as me. She’s a bright bulb and a wonderful companion and her eyes remind me of Salinger’s Esme. Her’s are green green, faded, like foggy early morning mysteries and my brother’s are blue blue speckled and quenching. I can see their eyes melting together like a terrific lagoon and I hope they sail away to one, not too far away, soon. 

My best friend's healthy as an ox mother, collapsed from a stroke yesterday morning while readying for a swim at their lake house. My best friend just called me from the hospital to tell me her mom wasn't going to make it and that it was good to hear a voice besides a family member's and that the doctors said its the worst stroke they've ever seen and asked if they'd like to keep her on the oxygen tank or donate her organs.

I joked, bemused, "they couldn't wait a day to ask?" She got off shortly after and I sat on my mom's comfy red rocking chair looking down at the world from our porch at our second home, waiting for a squirrel to come gather nuts for supper or spring.

I apologized to her for not having something smart or better to say, since the best I could come up with, was "try not to shut down; I know that's easier said than done, but I'm here, always, whenever you need me." She knows it's true and for that I'm grateful but I just want to teleport to the hospital, to her and to hug her and to have some magical spell to be able to cure her mom and fix it all so when I tell my best friend 'everything is going to be okay,' I can really mean it. But I can't. I can't save her mom, I can't make everything okay. All I can do is listen and be a shoulder and pretend to have something wise and learning to say once in a while. And even that seems useless and somehow egotistical. After all, that's her mom, lying there, connected to tubes and a tank. That's not just some sick woman, that's my best friend's mom, that without, my best friend, our memories, our intersecting lives wouldn't exist. This woman that's fallen in love and broken hearts and plates and her hymen and squeezed out a boy and three beautiful girls and nursed them to be wonderful, thoughtful, careful, caring, truly lovely individuals, body is, for some reason, betraying her, and failing, without even a hope for a proper goodbye. Everything they've been working on their whole lives together, from breathing and walking and crying and cooking and fucking and feeding cats and babies and parties and doing whatever else people do, is ending, it's over, the deal is breaking; making this woman, this life, this precious wonderful life, involuntarily motionless, breathless and will-less. And now all that separates her from this world and the next is no longer her will, but a socket. They say we're human, but in the end we end up hooked up to machines. And now, my best friend's mom is hooked up to something she'd never want to rely on. To something they really have no control over, especially if the power were to go out; just a stupid little fucking button & socket.

I picture her shriveling like a raisin in hospital robes and every time my best friend blinks her mom shrinks a little more. I wish there was no fucking button, no fucking decision, that she would just keep shriveling and shriveling every time my best friend blinks, until she disappears into thin air, and we can keep her alive by believing she decided to fly off. But I can't do that either. All I have are my stupid little words and a lumpy shoulder and all she'll have is her dad, half-brother, two sisters, and the memory of squeezing this button that means the difference between life and death. 

I'm riding the train home, watching a girl draft an apology note to a friend - something about a missing pair of sunglasses. The girl explains, that while she understands the earth shattering loss, that her friend has no idea about what's going on in her life and in so many polite words, to, please, ever so kindly, back the fuck up. 

Another woman, sitting the next section down and across from me, looks exactly like Michael Jackson, post transformation. I bet she cleans up nice and good, like the type of exotic whore you fall in love with.

The blonde girl fidgeting across from me feels pretty today and is nervously looking around to find out if anyone else agrees.  

The boy across from me seems too young to be so covered with all his tattoos, but he's dancing with a boombox and the angels around his neck.

We sit on pavements instead of benches, shaking scarred hands with Styrofoam cups seeking coins and courage, corrosion eroding from the gaps in our teeth where bone used to hang. Nobody listens to people when they’re one step closer to death.

We talk amethysts and triangles and combat and big open fields and dreams we think the government will help make come true, even though they’re half the reason we're sitting on the pavement in the first place. But, people don’t want to hear about UFOs and time served. People don’t care that we fought the war abroad and at home. People want well-mannered tooth bearing folks with no scabbed elbows or fingernail beds. People want normal so they have something to compare themselves to, something to work towards, a goal, something they can call progress, or attribute to a movement…even though they're mostly motion and emotionless.

We know they can see the smoke seething from our gums, and they know we can see them shun their heads and jokes away from our stinking disgrace. We know they call us crustys and druggies and scizos and losers and lazy fuck tards and shit bag, and they think about pissing on us when we're finally asleep in a doorway and they're stumbling home drunk to the 5th avenue McMansion their daddy bought them.  We know you're looking and wondering what went wrong and how we deal and why we lug our lives around instead of settling down. They pity our "poor" pooches and weep bedtime tears about how unlucky and unfed they must be, then rant on their precious Facebook page about the injustices in our society and animal cruelty. The next post is a caked up make up sorority squat encouraging/supporting injections and inflations. 

You see, we seek shelter when we need it, food when we're hungry, memories because we can never have enough, and afflictions to deal with yours. You see, you and me, we're not so different, you and me. Each step is closer to death, so why not make each step so full of life? Join us, down on the pavement, the world seems so big and round again. Don't you miss the weight of gravity?

Everyone is playing Pokemon and there is a black cat in the window watching the zombies with me. The woman in front of me is in stripes and wet hair and we all know where and what she's coming from at 11:16 pm this fine evening. It really is a very fine tempered evening. 

A couple is laughing next to me, the man sees me, but barely, and I don't care if anyone laughs at me again because I finally understand that I'm invisible. I can move like a ghost right through you all and point out all your secrets you thought were hidden.

There is an older woman waiting and a younger woman eating sushi, both sitting on a bench at the Jefferson Street L train station right now, at 11:18 pm, waiting for the same train as me. I pace back and forth at the end of the platform, waiting, just like them. I thought my train was coming but I'm drunk and have been confusing the subway construction lights for my train's headlights. According to the clock I have a few minutes before its arrival, but I feel the breeze in the back of my knees from the opposite track and now see mine too.

I'm still hungry and I feel bad because he thought I said lie down when I really did say something about fireworks. I guess the lie down could have been the same thing. Oh, well.

Stuffed animals are easy because they always love you and want to do whatever you want to do even if that’s playing tea without actual snacks or tea for the 17th god damn day in a row. Stuffed animals can teach you things, like about responsibility and compassion. They can teach you stories, especially if they’re from a story book…but real friends… living things, like animals and people… especially those you can have more than a one sided conversation with, an educating, inspiring, perhaps even somehow, transcending conversation, even just once in your whole life time, is better than all that cushy uncomplicated stuffed love. 

I met a little old man last night in Doc Holidays from Malta who coulda been a pool shark if he wanted, but just played the game for fun, no glory, he's already had enough of that.  He has two daughters and pictures of them in his pocket, but he won't show them off. I'm sure the reactions he's heard throughout the years have joked about more than diamond rings. Still, he laughs with his whole face and his mouth really truly does stretch back as wide as his ears. His teeth are shiny with spit and he half sticks-half dangles his tongue out, especially when he’s smiling, which is all the time; apparently, just like me. 

         Every god damn fiber of my being wants a drink. I want that sweet, dear poison streaming, sinking through my veins and bones and to stay coated on my tongue so every time I swallow I can taste those sweet, dear bitter chemicals. At least I'd be in control of that death. I smoke more because it makes me feel French and exquisite and I've always loved it and I suppose it seems less toxic than being a boozer.  Now, I am caught between acceptable, nay, welcomed, hilarious daily inebriation and the part where I became a college grad and an adult in society and was supposed to inherit all of life's secrets when I accepted the hat and robe and diploma. But I didn't actually attend my graduation...

         I see a young me in a Millennium Falcon t-shirt sitting across from me on the uptown 6. Her head is dropped in her lap, eyes in her palms, hiding torn nail beds, bleeding and swollen from her gnawing, braces-less teenage teeth. When she looks up to scan for signs of life, I see the tired look in her only a few tortured teens know.

        Bellinis, mimosas, sangria, ooh! And all their fruity carbonated concoctions of the like! Ooh thank you yuppies for inventing drinks to welcome us boozers into sophisticated society as ageless and hilarious, again; and now with toast and eggs and the morning sun. See, so, sometimes yuppies are right... and well, yuppies are right even when they're wrong because when enough yuppies start yapping the same nonsense, the same nonsense comes true, becomes invented, whatever needs to happen does... because what yuppies want is good for business; because, what yuppies want, yuppies get; because their fat fat wallets and wide wide boredom always need more room for their gluttonous bellies and the leather that feeds them.

         This girl, this younger me, she leafs and hopes until defeat strikes and she drops her head again, lower and lower still, like she's already figured out the world and there's nothing more to watch today because she's seen it all before and, sadly, none of it is all too new. She gleams, prays even, for variations, for initiation, but really it's all the same and she's bored and tired, not so much from sleep deprivation, as from the bull that is the shit that rounds the world. Most are fortunate to ride the blindness of the truth that ignorance is bliss; but this girl, this sweet young young dear girl, can't help but see the spigot we rely on to revolve. 

         I cannot tear my eyes from her, because she seems even more heartbroken than I, and I hope she doesn't turn to booze and smoke to deal when gravity crumbles and we fall out of space because (half of) our darling country couldn't wrap their heads around anything beyond denying this sweet warming.

She’s a creature, just like me

The first creature like me I’ve ever seen.

I wake for no one but thee... ladida

I must kill her and eat her so she stays with me

            Inside me forever. Love me!

Drag her dummy through

Big and yonder til collapse and refute refuge. Run away bastard.

They’ll call me the run away bastard, 'cus I’ll have started it that way.

Tweedledee & Tweedledum so placed in shapes and forms and time!

The twins, Jekyll + Hyde

Sleep through your whole life

Slept through his whole life

Why start an outburst at a ward

I’ll sleep through your life

And high times can become realities, it happens all the time.

Israel is plagued with the talent of brainwashing any and all that come in contact with it. They brainwash their youth to protect and serve. They brainwash their blood abroad to come and make aliyah. They brainwash me to love and adore every aspect of them I've come to known. They've brainwashed my friends into thinking I'm brainwashed and only and entirely devoted to them and only them. They've brainwashed all that don't know into thinking they have the ability and willingness to brainwash any poor soul they can get their hands on. 

What brainwashing no one talks about is their inability to brainwash for peace. They don't talk about the babes and bombs erupting from rockets. They don't talk about the shelters and the folks lucky enough to have one in their own homes. They don't talk about the ongoing, pestering hate, or their gratefulness to have a plot of land they can finally call their own. They don't talk about a lot.

But, then all over, a lot of people don't talk and don't find out about things they don't know about because for a lot of people education exists solely between school walls and once that end of day bell rings and the graduation ceremony calls their names, they're done. They're gone, and whatever part of their brains that may have been turned on is gone now too. And they rant, and shit, and blame, and laugh at all who run to safety, who run to a holier, better life, a happier, beachier one and call them brainwashed. Meanwhile, they haven't a clue what true brotherhood really means. 

I have super powers. I know you and feel you and have felt you even before you were alive. I am off my medication and going home to get stoned. I’ll see poppies and turning drying racks. I’m craving Vonnegut and quiet. I’m no transfers and all train lines and a watchful eye. I’m history in the making. I’m all your shame and guilt and mine and the waves to wash it all away. I’m the perfect disguise and I’m screaming. I’m Pablo and fat booties and ray bans and iPhones and blows of cocaine. I’m dreads in a lost and found. I’m Eraser Head with your family. You’re not even you when I look at you. You’re a plaid shirt in a uniform self-prescribed.  You’re requirements without legal action. I’m your tapping foot and the all holy triple hat beat. I’m a kick in the face and new trainers. You’re in the way. You’re all in the god damn way. I’d scream if I thought it’d do anything and by anything I mean grace in silence and move to clear. I’m your little blind beast. You're blisters, I’m the god damn sun. I’m video games and slaughter houses and Sunday dinner but not Sunday mass. I’m everything you don’t even know you want to be. I’m an all white jumpsuit, fresh as can be and a parachute and the air inside holding you up, drifting you down like babes do to storks.  I’m a smirk you’ll never understand. I’m knowledge. A dictionary. I’m underground and underwater and gills. I’m fucking alive. I’m deep breaths and panic attacks. I’m train head lights. I’m hardcore sex on a platform waving goodbye. I’m a child’s eyes hiding behind your parents screaming bedroom door. I’m hungry. I’m a braid for tugging. I’m a lasso and the feast you rein in. [pull me (if you can).]  I’m a mother fucking picnic and the basket, blanket and dog.  I’m dead soldiers not on memorial day.  I’m the best night’s sleep and a comforter. You’re lies and falsified wants carving a picture of yourself, high, on an illustrious white horse. I’m here. I’ve got to go. Goodbye!

I can feel the bodies piling up. Mine’s in there too. The paved road warps and I weep because despite the endless conflict, all is unrested - I watch a girl from the bus window run home down a dirt road back to her goats and chores, I don’t know what she’s running from or towards and neither do I.  I see tree stumps and garbage littered out of cans and beneath ocean liners.  God damn the world is so fucking beautiful and epic and simple.  Why is it so hard to see that? Why has it always been so hard? I can’t get their faces, that window, that gun, his dirty scowling bald mouth out of my god damn head. At the wonders of the world, I’m so overcome with joy and the horrors of history: mine and theirs and yours. I know you. I know you’ve suffered; I know you still .  I don’t know when it will end, if ever. I know I’m still waiting. I see their young playful faces, happy and playing, not (seeming) afraid, even though their jungle gym is in a bomb shelter and joy has a limit of 15 seconds in case the sirens ring and the rockets red blaze, bursting at home, taking their days and friends and limbs.  Chances are far and few and good ones are hard to forget and bad ones shape who we become.  Meanwhile, I’m overwhelmed by the world; when did we invent buses and satellites and nail polish.  I feel like I’ve been asleep for centuries and now I’m here once again, now on the same, yet vastly changed land and my mission is to re-purify this place and make sure it survives.  Where is the balance? Swap the slums and the mansions. Bask your head and blow me. I’m ready for sleep. Different fascinates me; why does hatred deal in fear and what’s unknown then breed as addiction?

I’m still turning away from your window, eyes opening on a pouring pane and your shadowed humping beast of a body.  I’m still walking down the aisle and looking at your stupid clothes and the make up over the hole in the middle of your face I never kissed (while it was still breathing). I’m still picturing talons growing from my nail beds and scratching out your eye balls and tearing off your skin.  I’m still scared.

I wanna skin all my skin off because I don’t know where you touched me and I don’t want to be the remnants of you lingering on my body. You make me sick/I’m sick with myself.  I don’t want to have that conversation with everyone I fall in love with. That I’m damaged. That my parts were used shortly unbeknownst to me. I don’t want to look pathetic and weak and sad and scared. I don’t want to panic when someone comes near. Everyone has their own 15 seconds, and there’s a reason we all grip to stay there too.

“A country is not just what is does, but what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky

When I asked my friend, Adi, if she was scared about being in the IDF, and what that meant to her, she said simply and with innocent poise: “my people took care of me and now it’s time to take care of mine.”

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People get used to killing – conditioning conditions through orders, alcohol or asking Ukrainians. 

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Dear Mommy and Children,

            Want to learn how to take an ordinary man and turn him into a killer? To disobey orders, you become a coward, a traitor, weak, then no one wants to be associated with, friends with, or even just with them. Bravery, on the other hand, is not recognized in this situation.

            The horrors, they (try to) command us to, such as torturing, separating, lying, stealing, raping, slaughtering, starving, condemning, murdering (etc.) Jews are supposed to come as as natural as eating breakfast in the morning. Deception is the most important thing. I don’t think I’ll ever wipe the smell/stench of their burning bodies from my nose and lungs.  I can taste their lives gone in my throat. Their screams echo, ringing through my ears, tearing through my brain.  We read their letters and they write their loved ones telling them they’ll see them soon, and my heart breaks because I’m the one that will put a bullet in their brains, their children’s, to send their naked starving bodies into the showers that drown them with chemical gas eroding millions of them away because if I don’t, I’m a coward and then just as bad as the enemy, the poor, slimy, rat Jews. And then I loose you and my future and yours.  We pack them like cattle in boxes and deceive them with numbers for baggage and property, but once they pass go through these damn iron gates, they do not, but I know their doomed fate.  When will these people get to rest? Why am I meant to feel as a coward for not wanting to hate these PEOPLE?! They are people!! Not animals, as we act and treat them. That they are meant to be forgotten. Possessions, family, food, familiarities, basic human necessities, stripped away as meant to feel like the animals they are.  Still, they remain. Still, they write letters to loves ones. Still, they speak Yiddish and preach the words of their god in Hebrew.  Still, they laugh and love even through their tears and hunger. How strong they remain.  Just one of them is stronger, mightier, more, human and better than the entire Nazi following.  We take their names and exchange them for numbers. If they forget their “new” name, we are expected to shoot them dead immediately, as they now, even more so, don’t deserve to live.  Most of my “comrades” enjoy this task.  They take pride in eliminating another rat scum devil. AND STILL, through this, they survive, and with the hope of peace and reuniting with their family.

            I can see their morals slipping. Parents and children steal from each other, they cannot be rabbits, they must be wolves.  This may be the only place where luck exists, as it is a land/place/jungle/hell with no laws.  They eat snow for water.  We do not call, treat, or think of them as humans and now, even within family, on cannot recognize another.  Their knees look like knobs from a tree, but cannot hold up their bodies that are merely twigs.  We bulldoze them like garbage, trash into ditches and away, just to burn, to rot. We don’t even feed them to the dogs because they are all contaminated, mangy rats, plus the dogs can barely sniff them out as they are barely bones and skin. I look at the faces of my comrades and they have become hardened, oblivious, as they still laugh and joke and fuck their wives and kiss their children’s clean blonde Aryan heads.  I don’t know how they can go on. I see the shame Hitler intended for these poor star bearing folks, sinking into their souls, and they are starting to believe the lies and degradation and humility.  They couldn’t even swallow or digest food if they were to get some.  Their bodies wouldn’t have a clue as to what to do with it. One day their names will paint the walls so their kin and kin of kin may remember them despite Hitler and the Nazi’s/Hate’s efforts.

            The eighth day of the week is for imagination. Another love, compression of compassion comes from the horror. 

            Still they pray, still they hope, still they believe in god and good. They will rebuild. Their city will stand, layering and layering, reaching higher and higher into heavens on earth. Their building tops will glow and glisten in the sun. The same sun that didn’t come to save them when they were huddled into bunk beds and gutters and prostitution rings. Oh how lucky the pretty ones are. My group called me a faggot in so many words when I wouldn’t fuck the this pretty little jew they’d been passing around. I pretended I was so disgusted by them as a race, as a whole, that I wouldn’t even want to stick my dick in one in fear of contamination. They laughed and applauded my commitment to the cause. Hitler even heard about it and couldn’t have given me a bigger, warming hug and a nice slice of apple strudel for my dedication and true belief. It took all I had not to vomit, to lunge and pull his throat and lungs, connected to everything, down to his spleen and toenails out by the clenches of my fist from his neck. Instead I “grinned and bared it.” Just like the Jews. Except, they couldn’t even grin at most points; their bodies and minds and hearts had forgotten how.

They will find a way to survive, to resurrect, to remember. True beauty is only fully revealed once everything you’ve known is shattered and broken.  Barracks of stone and wood and pillars. Candles burn strong to remember to see the light, despite all that is and was lost. Still they, we survive. 

I’ll be home soon,

Love,

Papa

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“I happened to find a pencil and was writing out of a whim, out of nostalgia, in a dream.”     –Primo Levi

Today, I touch the cobblestones and bunk beds and trains and carts and rocks and can feel their ashes and blood and footsteps and whispers on my fingertips.  They are all still here. Haunting, reminding us, to move forward, to see past the matte prism and onto the glowing, beaming, building, layered, complicated world.

Boker Tov, y’all.

2 for ₪20 shekels. I guess you can put a price on history.

They touch our clothes and try our jewelry and toys and say thank you and toda and leave. They tease and bargain. I try to make them happy, I am happy when they smile, but the price is never quite good enough. Cheaper, cheaper, can you do less? No? They walk away and sing their sorrys and we'll be back, and I wait and wait until they find love at the right price and we strike a deal and I feed my children and they wear our garb and flash it around the world and brag about how good the deal they got from the cutest little man was.

^ click through ^

Lebanon is a string of lights in a hazy light and i can hear the gun shots and all i can think of is myself, my needs, alone time and sleep.

you are the refugee in this army of lies.

July 8, 2016

I am back from Israel now and, just as Avivoush promised, if having done the trip right, i am left with more questions and more, and more confused and the only thing I understand is that it’s complicated.

One day back in New York and I’m reminded why I’m ashamed to be an American. I see the lazy dragging un-blistered feet, stuffing another McDonalds "meal", dragging new things. Last night (when I got out of the shower,) right before family dinner, my brother threw the TV remote and he and my dad screamed at each other and then my brother marched into his room and slammed the door. We started dinner without him, he’s always the last to the table anyway. Of course families fight all over the world, in every room of every home; and I know the fights must be the same: you took too long in the bathroom, dinner was shit, you were late to the movies, you forgot the kids, you’re embarrassing, you don’t love me anymore. But somehow, for the first time after coming home to NYC after being out of the country, do I really truly see the bogus small-eties of everyone’s complaints. I knew it before, I knew it was dull, and it made me panic with rage at the stupidity of those around me because I feared i was that stupid too. I learned to laugh at them, appreciate the small moments: a little old lady pushing a grocery cart taller than she, storming though crowds and blocks, a curtain blowing out of a window and shadows swirling beyond it, a pizza man stretching dough, looking out at the same changing block for the past 40 years, an old couple, a first love kinda young couple, a street band, people moving, and the trash of memories/life left behind. Here, our things are so important, to let go of our things is this huge monumental moment that wins Pulitzer prizes and proud Facebook statuses. “Yay! I got rid of half my closet! I feel so good!” and the status gets the most likes on any post you ever post, etc. etc. In Israel, sharing is most important. The history, the culture, the age old fusion language, the Torah and the great writers since.

I'm high on the couch, writing, and I keep forgetting that my brother is taking a lsat practice test in my kitchen. His movements twitch in the corner of my eye and I jolt when I see him there working, prepping for his future.

Today I’m sitting on a street in Havana.  A pretty girl in a long yellow sundress walked by, her dress bottom spinning in the wind. Her browned ankles dancing over the cobblestones. A live band is playing a couple doors down, but you can hear it from blocks over. There are musicians on nearly every corner. But that’s anywhere you’re not from., you just have to remember to hear and find the music. There are humans everywhere, we are everywhere. This is our land.

Tomorrow I fly to Berlin in a friend’s jet fighter. Talk about a direct flight and no security lines. This is the life. He’s routed the route and says he’s done it a million times before. I’ll be his co-captain, but since he’s done the route alone before, a million times, as he says, I’m not really nervous. He said if I really wanted, I could even take a Klonopin or a tab to sit back and really enjoy the flight. We’ll see how I feel after breakfast tomorrow. Imagine that though, watching sunset after sunset, tripping out, as if the stuff doesn’t make you think about space and time already. We stocked up on chocolates for ourselves, friends and family.

I lost my pinky ring in the sand on the Coney island beach. It was sterling silver with a flat green stone across it. The band was very thick and I liked how tough it made me look. It completed the 5 silver rings on my left hand and I thought it made my hand glow a bit – I mean all of them together. Especially now that I’m tanned from the middle east sun.