"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."

Yeah, the sands, soft and shifting.
I watched it at the beach today.
I think that most people were watching the waves break and roll back into the Pacific. I watched the sand, though. It glittered a little, like that, and broke when no one was looking.
When I looked closely I could see each grain and thought of how I am like them; small, surrounded but alone, formed by that which surrounds me.
Wreck Beach had not lost its fame on me.
I walked alone beside the wall of rocks on the South end of the beach.
Every 5 feet I would stop and puke-up last night's whiskey, only to wash away the taste with more whiskey. I stopped puking after about 50 feet from the crowd; it must have looked like I was inspecting the rocks, as I stooped and bent and held the form, retching. Take that, Savaroopa Yoga.
I bought $40 of chocolate mushrooms off of a guy named "Fred". Fred was naked and anxious about the drugs. I heard that the police were around that week end, having just found a body 30 feet from the shore a day ago. There was no word as to whether it was homicide, or not.
I thought again of the sands beneath me and wished he didn't have to be my friend; "...just sell me the drugs and fuck off, o.k.?"
He was cool and bailed, but his detractors were out in form, "He sells shit, man" one said. "Did you get high? Huh? Huh?", another pestered me for an hour.
"If you need some dope, man, I'm your guy", he said, "that fucker's a con."
Yeah, when hippies turn on each other then I am sure to know that it's all money.
Money makes us all pigs, rolling in our own shit.
I rolled and then fucked off; $40 worth of even the worst mushrooms was still a trip to never-never land.
I drove home like that, thinking it was a Star Wars battle, stoned and unsure.
I didn't crash and even parked smooth; I slid it in and it fit like I had used a some alien protractor.
Smooth like that. Cool like that. A man, like that.
I can't wait to see you again.
If I am drugged-up or drunk-out, never mind.
I will always love you no matter how tough the battle in here is.
Steve, Dwayne, Darren and Fish.

My Marx Brothers.
Bonk.
Boing.
Bash.
Ka-boom.

I love you.

-Sid
xoxoxoxooxo

"Room service? Send up a larger room."

We used to be crazy, insane, remember?
I would never play the piano;
But you would always hit me, bonk.
Boing. Blam.
Thud.

We were brothers then and I wish that we would be still, like that.
Nuts. Insane and detached.
I am going to the beach tomorrow, Wreck Beach.
I'll buy and eat whichever drugs I can, it's summer, you know.
Naked, too.

Where are you, brothers?

I acted like Harpo and played the harp, silent.
You hit me but I flinched not.
Except for the dirty, loud look I gave you you.
Goofing, I still looked at you hard.

But really I cried, and I can't play the harp.
I wept for the days long gone and the trouble we made.

Remember being insane? Loving all those girls?
We had it, then, brothers, life by the balls.

I miss it and I miss you, my mortgaged friends.

If you ever need escape, well, here I am.
Ready.

-Love Sid
xoxo

“I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.”

"Dear Jody.
How are you doing? I've been ill with some godawful flu/plague/black
death thing for nearly two months and it's sucked. Doctor's still
don't know what's wrong with me.

Still on the job hunt and have a few more prospects than a couple
weeks back with is something positive.....
Nothing has gone really right for me since I got back from Japan.
Getting sick more frequently, old "before Japan" friends seem utterly
dull doing the career/marriage/mortgage dance and never have time to
catch up which is bullshit and I've realized other friends haven't
changed at all, still wasting their days popping pills and leeching
off of gullible older men and to top this all off I can't get a proper
job. I try to be bad when I can.

How's your carpentry going? In Australia you'd be known as a
"Chippie". I check your blog often, good stuff.
I miss our phone calls and booze marathons. No one else ever quite got it.
Miss you.
xoxo
Stephanie K."


"Hey!
I have yet to get sick since coming back. Perhaps it is because I have
not stopped drinking?
Please get better. Now I am worried about you.

Some kind of purgatory, abyss?
Yeah, I feel like the things I loved have passed me by; the things I
hated are still there, waiting for me.
Not good.
Myhap we have been too hasty in our dismissals of reverse culture-shock?
I think so. Suddenly, the dull sameness of my day-to-day in Japan
seems better than the frantic unknown that I am experiencing here.
So, I, too, think that if I could go back to Japan, it would be
different this time, better somehow.

But, dear Steph, it's a lie. We hated that place and everything it did
to us and people we love.

I remember meeting Chris (BearsCubs) on his 3rd day in Japan, at the
Sapporo meeting for Hokkaido JETs.
He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, easy going and relaxed. Now, he
is vitrolic and filled with hate towards Japan. He leaves in 2 months.
I expect to be in touch with him in a year, too, as he realizes that
the home he knew is gone, and his fond memories were built-up and not
real.

Sigh. It is painful to be torn in two like this, isn't it?

Although I hated many things about Japan, it had begun to grow on me
in the sense that it was easy to just go through the motions and
collect my pay.
Here, in Canada, when I try to tell people of that, my victory over
that country, my ability to adapt, my proving of social-Darwinism, my
will to survive..., well, nobody cares. They don't give a shit about
the nights where I drank myself to sleep and cried and missed them
like I had never missed anything before in my life.

Steph, no one but us cares, nor much less understands, the ways in
which our hearts are broken.
But, I understand that. And I love you for that.
Even though we have never met in person, when I think of the roughest,
most fun times I had, alone, I think of you and how quickly we loved
each other; loved in the way a soul loves a soul that is in-kind. We
'got' each other. Shit, even in day-to-day living, that is rare. We,
namely I, have been very lucky to connect.

In fact, I am not sure I could have made those final steps without
knowing that I could call you and you would be there for me.
I'll always love you for that. You did something even my best mates in
Canada couldn't do for me while I was in Japan: understand me and not
judge me.

Thank you.

I miss those days of talking and drinking on the phone until one of us slept or our phone battery died, too; very much. I wish for them, and fucking balls to
anyone who didn't get them. It was not for them to get. That was our
release and we loved it and we benefited from it, so fuck them.

I love you, Stephanie K.
I look forward to the days when we meet and drink and talk into the
night and then drink some more in the morning.

You are the best.
And I wish you the best there, in Oz.

-Love Jody
xoxoxoxoxo"

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."

I don't have a mortgage. I don't have car payments or even new clothes. I don't have any children and I don't have any pets. I spend my days working with my hands, bleeding, building, sweating and framing. I get whispers in my ears from friends about all those things, though. The "just married", "just babied", "just housed" and the newly old.
I love them but I can't buy into that plan.

Many of them I have seen puking their guts out on mushrooms and whiskey, while I crammed speed up their noses and love into their hearts; love as I know it, mind you. We would listen to Hoyt Axton and cry, talk about the things that gave us passion and zest and all the while we remained maddened by our flames. We lived, day-to-day, without fear of banks and incomes.
Like a thousand Siddharthas, sitting upon a thousand lotuses, living a thousand lives.
But some choose one, one path. But don't you know that it is only all paths that lead in?

I, too, am having slow death, like all of them, but I don't want to sit and wait for it in my new house or driving my new car; all on my new line of credit. I don't want to be that kind of man.
I want to live without those ties. This is not a judgement on them, but rather a proclamation for me. True; as true as I see you and you see me.

The lineage of this route, following the paths so well trod, before. The hole waiting for filling; our fates set. Why? Because our parents did/didn't do it?

My lovers, my friends, I hear a different drummer.

I want it all. I want to barter for hash in Morroco, fight Maori on the South Island, fuck whores in Thailand, teach English in Japan, frame houses in Vancouver and try new, terribly unstable things. The day I feel comfort and solace should be the day I have satori.

Until then, I will always be the awkward friend. The one who pulls his pants down at the worst/best moments. The one who makes you take MDMA eventhough you have to work in 5 hours, the one who dares you to max your visa on porno and whiskey, the one who loves you the most.

But please, understand that I will never come sober to jr.'s 2nd birthday party; I won't bring a gift, too. I won't care about your new bungalow with cable.

We are all dying, and while I respect your financial/biological success, I will never join you and will probably die long before you. I hope you are happy with your commitments, as I never am.

Like Kerouac said, though, "Live your life out? Nah, LOVE your life out!".

I love you, forgive me for quitting your club. It has just gotten too sane, too same.

-Love Sid
xoxoxoxoox

Baby. Those Flip girls, the youngest, are always named Joy, Baby, or some shit.
They are easy to tell that way.
Yes, I have rented whores.
I fucked them hard.

"And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. "

One of the holidays I took while living in Japan was to Bohol, Southern Philippines; pictured above. The stink was petrol and the drunk was hard.
I didn't do much of the tourist thing at all but instead on my first day bought a 40 ounce bottle of Jack and stumbled beyond the gates of the tourist-sanctuary, into the streets. I met some girls and we went to a street dance and I drank it all in and away. The Philippines is an insane country to begin with, but mixing that insanity with the drunk that I was, was, well, fucking insane.
I don't remember much but I know that I met some guys who resented me being with local girls.
It was Christmas Eve and they pulled a gun on me, the girls I was with tried to calm them down and I never flinched because I was too drunk to understand what was going on.
The gun-boys didn't want to rob me, they just wanted to kill me.
As the girls surrounded them I jumped in a jeepney that was speeding past. The jeepney swung wide and picked the girls up fast. We laughed nervously and then smoked cigarettes.
I rented a shitty room at a shitty hotel but it was cheap and I was fucking wasted.
I fucked them a bit and made them suck my flaccid cock.
I spent Christmas-eve insane, with cock in hand and whore.
They were good to me and I drank that Jack.
Fuck you.

"I drew a map of Canada, Oh Canada. With your face scetched on it twice."

I loved you so fucking hard, that whole time in Japan. I missed you. I cried when I heard your CJSR show.
I slipped it onto my iPod and played it in my Toyota as I drove to work in Northern Japan. I tried to keep you alive and I dreamed about the time we flew to Texas and stayed with Rich and he forced that bad Mexican dope on us, that was great.
I forget how that made me a man.
I wore a cowboy hat while watching Willie Nelson and Jimmy Dale Gilmore break my fucking heart a million times in that heat.
In Austin, on Slaughter.
Thank you for that, it's the best and kept me solid the whole time.

The Perfect Crime

First three parts of a 4.5-part series.

pt 1



pt 2



pt 3