quiet and sensitive and freaked out by the world, heartbroken and golden and hotter than most girls, lindsay wrote me emails that i ignored because no way would a shouldbe supermodel be writing me.

one day she said why do you ignore me? i said cuz no way are you the girl in the pictures.

she said i am. i said sir… please… im too busy for these shenanigans.

she said how do i prove it?

i said fly out here and remove all of your clothes.

she said how about i call you first.

i said how about you make a video first.

she said fine.

then she made the video.

then she called me.

then she flew out.

then i examined the situation

very carefully.

then i was revived from fainting.

then i did what i always do when i meet damn near angels from heaven or somewhere lower: i thanked the Lord and asked her to marry me or something lesser.

lindsay is a complicated girl with many difficult choices to make in the next few months. one of which includes taking my hand in matrimony, one of which includes sending me photos of the exotic variety, one of which includes meeting me in las vegas.

hopefully one of her decisions is to write on her blog more often because i love how she writes and i love her tales even though they rarely include me, even in passing.

aquarius on the capricorn cusp – i hope she finds much more than lust.

to: tp
date: october 22, 2007

subject: happy birthday tony

Tony,

I wrote you this post because it’s your birthday and because it’s been way too long since I last wrote one. Post it on your blog if you’d like, it’s for you.

xo

Carmen

p.s I included a picture of me on parliment hill in Ottawa (Canada’s capital city) trying to look cool.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A Very Happy Birthday To Mr. Tony Pierce

In the summer of 2005 I was working a very shitty job in Vanouver, BC. I would wake up each morning, make an inane commute on the public transit system I so despised, and arrive at the Italian deli for which I harbored an even more motivating contempt. I would tie on my red apron, a symbol of my incarceration, and spend my days explaining the difference between plain fettucini and herb fettucini to collagen-lipped trophy wives so dense beyond comprehension. My huge, sweaty Italian boss would crack sexual innuendo jokes that fueled my contemplations of how one might kill themself with an industrial grade meat slicer. I can remember the day when I was asked by my boss’s wife to clean out the microwave, the microwave reserved only for the bosses, and as I peered into its tomato-splattered interior I thought quietly about serial murder. It got to the point where I could guess exactly 100 grams of bocconcini cheese, or $2.50 worth of proscuitto, and yet these are not the kinds of things you would ever hope to excel in. Estimating the price and weight of gourmet Italian groceries will never make you a happy person.

I can’t really tell you what got me through the majority of those shifts. Sometimes I figured I had simply melted into the floor and taken my place among the dirt and dried, discarded pasta shapes. At other points I was sure that my soul had floated off to somewhere else, anywhere else. And yet, after each ten hour shift of forced sincerity I would somehow still be standing behind the meat counter, beside the pasta shelf, and in front of all those God-awful customers. I can remember one man telling me that he felt as though “my smile wasn’t genuine”. I wanted to give him a round of applause and a nice big gold star. “My sir, you’re fucking perceptive,” I thought.

I transport myself back to those memories, to that counter, and I can remember the day my heart stopped at work. I was serving a woman with a purse-dog some kind of cheese that was never going to be low-fat enough for her specifications when I saw a bald head. I jerked my glance up immediately and stopped what I was doing. I didn’t care that the customer was becoming impatient because I was almost certain that I had just seen the infamous Tony Pierce. I straightened up, studied the man from afar as my heart raced and my breathing completely ceased only to realize moments later that he was nobody. I bent my head back down in disappointment, put a block of feta in a container, and continued in my submission.

I wanted that stranger with a shaved head to be Tony Pierce because Tony Pierce would’ve gotten me out of that heinous deli. He would’ve walked up to my fat Italian boss and said “Do you know who I am?” He would’ve taken my hand and helped my over that counter and we would’ve walked out of there without looking back.

I later faked insanity to quit that job. I also later met Tony Pierce and he was exactly what I’d hoped for all those years ago, standing beside the smoked gouda tortellini staring off into freedom.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

to everyone who has sent me nice emails and comments and posts and nudes and facebook wall things and phone calls and to everyone who celebrated with me yesterday a day early and to especially whoever sent the Go Team to play at echo park last night and hollywood tonight thank you! i appreciate it so much!!

michele was my first california girlfriend. we were together for three years. best friends. i did a lot of things with her for the first time.

she called me a year and a half ago and asked me to remove her last name from the stories that ive written about her because she is a famous childrens book author and a mommy now, so i said ok.

without michele i would have not been interested in poetry or journalism or the cure or u2. she taught me to appreciate all of those things.

her family was and is wonderful, and incredibly loving and free. the parents let the kids do anything they want including letting fools like me spend the night on many occasions. i love them all very much and sometimes when im in malibu i will stop by and say hi – even if i have a different girlfriend to introduce to them.

michele lives in washington now, or oregon, or somewhere beautiful and natural. for a punk rocker she had many hippie qualities about her. she would weep at the sight of a whale or a dolphin, she would weep at the news story that would talk about global warming, she would weep at the newspaper articles about womens rights issues.

all of this was very eye-opening to me, who was from the suburbs of illinois and never thought twice about enviornmental affairs, or gender roles, or sylvia plath.

and fuck if i ever considered free verse valid.

michele allowed me to take lots of pictures of her, and for that i am indebted.

in many ways i owe her big time.

in many many many ways.

she was my buddy and my first real friend here in the golden state and if it wasnt for that begining guitar class in santa monica college my whole life, as dramatic as that sounds, would have been completely different, and its hard for me to think it would have been different in a better way.

i was eighteen when i met michele and im 111 now, and yet somehow today is only her 23rd birthday.

apparently she still has many more lessons to teach us.

jason + je_apostrophe + jason

shes 27. we met when we were one. actually we met at a courtyard on the other side of town. i always hung out over there for some reason, first because of ilka. one day this chick sue was walking around with a tall blonde. the rest is the begining of my life. me and mary talked on the phone for hours, sometimes every day. she lived on the edge of one town and i lived on the edge of another, but because we lived in the far west suburbs there werent a lot of roads so we thought we lived really far from each other because of how far it was to drive there.

then one day they built a road right through the farms and it turned out we lived exactly one mile away. on that day she found out that her dad was transferring to california. that night i decided i had to kiss her for the first time and see what i could do about making her my girlfriend.

i took her to the matthew broderick ally sheedy movie wargames.

the movie was so good i forgot to make a move, so i had to ask her out for the next weekend.

that one was steve martin’s the man with two brains. that one was good too but i stayed focused because she was probably going to have to move away in two or three weeks. her dad worked for a company id never heard of before. a group of undercover superheroes called the xbi.

catholicism had made me incredibly superstitious in my youth. so as i drove her home in my mothers car i said if a good song came on the radio id try to kiss her. this was a tricky situation because the radio in chicago at that time was really bad and youd be lucky if you heard a good song once a week. maybe.

tom petty’s breakdown came on, i pulled into her driveway and i kissed her.

my memory is so bad they made a movie about it, memento. but i remember all of that night. people who know how much i forget might be amazed by what i can remember.

i remember that mary was the best first girlfriend a boy could have had.

running into her that day in that courtyard should have clued me in that i would be the luckiest man ever.

her number was 528-1722.

raymi + umbrellaless + charly