Rate my life

http://majnouna.deviantart.com/journal/7-Reasons-Why-You-Should-Go-to-Art-School-214154871

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/dont-go-to-art-school-138c5efd45e9

http://www.ehow.com/how_2073363_become-buddhist-monk.html

http://www.ratemylife.net/

The universe - How?

¨And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?¨

Today is Bastille Day. My aunt and I went to the Eiffel Tower Plaza to watch the most impressive fireworks show I've seen next to the time I ate mushrooms on the Fourth of July on the beach at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. La Toure Eiffel suggests the the tower is a woman and tonight, even in her steel stillness, she danced in colors, lights, and fire to the sound of opera, symphony, and at least a million people. And then, if it couldn't be anymore beautiful, a shooting star lit up behind the explosions.

Last night I met a bartender whose family is from the town that my family is from in Guatemala. The village is tiny. I smelled terribly of tobacco and smoke but she liked me well enough to give me free drinks and refuse my tips. Tre belle.

What strange part of human engineering did the universe mistaken to have given us minds that miss other minds? Im surrounded by decrepid monsters of beautiful buildings that don't themselves have minds at all but instill both depth and intimidation on my drunken strolls about Paris. Perhaps that is where ghosts come in. Walls catch light of prefuse moments in time and trap them there to reoccur continually in odd forms. Do those haunted walls miss somebody?

I've been reading Mark Gonzales' book ¨Boken Poems¨. One of the first stories is about how he was grounded by his parents once and his homies called from a party to brag about how some chicks invited them to a party and the World dudes were there. The next day he goes out skating and runs into the same dudes who ask him to do a trick for them. His breaks his foot doing so and is told he wouldn't be able to skate anymore. Crock'a shit that was right?

I've had three people insist that I let them borrow it. I hope they enjoy the chapter called ¨Poetry is for Pussies¨ but for sure not until I am finished with the book. One of my friends didn't even know that he wrote at all.

Anyways, I took the book from Everyday. I was there a few weeks back when I noticed the book in the bathroom. I always knew the book was there by the colors but never by the image on the cover, not particularly striking me at all. I began to read it but stopped to watch Spacely get caught up by the boys who wrote him off a ticket for skating (fucking rat bastards) so I left the book and swore to return simply to keep reading. It only came to one more visit to the shop right before I left and I decided that I couldn't continue without its influence- so I took it with me to Paris. I know, I know, fucked BUT IT GETS OK becaaause...

All right, so I had the book in my bag when I met up with this most certainly pleasant skater and artist Corrine or as everyone calls her Coco. I told her about the book and even showed it to her. She took a picture of it and posted it. Leaving the subject we then continued to drink at this punk bar called UFO bar and counted the shots the bartender was taking. By the end of the night we calculated that she must have had at least 15 by the time we left, leaving our certain number at 10 to use the bathroom and watch the world cup match. We got smashed with her friends while things got very German out as people paraded the streets. We left the bar and walked by the canal where I met this group of babes I'm setting up a shoot with. We stayed at her friends apartment by the canal. In the morning we woke up all in party scum like good fashion- still drunk, fully clothed, me passed out in some weird side room with just my belt off? Fuck, so we stumbled out, went to my aunts where my tia bought us helluv pastries and made us a good coffee set in her studio. We talked about the book again and how I'd be sure to finish it as quickly as possible to let her borrow it. Coco flipped through it a minute, then again switching subjects, and in a couple hours shes was off to the train to go back to her house in the 11th.

Normal right?

After a failed attempt of visiting a cemetery outside of paris and an interesting pass through Paris' Chinatown district (so good) I arrive back at the studio to a message from Coco in a screen that was
all ready up...

COCO: Guess who I felt into in the metro  (she meant fell.. so cute..)

I imagined perhaps a mutual friend or someone we were with the night before.
I click her page and lo and fucking behold...

SHE POSTED A PICTURE OF MARK MOTHER FUCKING GONZALES AT A PARIS METRO STATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIKE......... REALLY?????

Fucking A... What seemingly impossible beauties this world is capable of. Endless floral possibilites.
When  I went to explain to my aunt the gravity of gravity and that of the moment, I pulled out the book and looked at the cover much more closely.
Pictured is a hot pair of lips and below it a frame of an Airfrance airplane. I flew airfrance straight to Paris from San Francisco.

I had never even noticed it before.

*******


I have always loved that sentence...





Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.
Endless floral possibilities.

Everything in Paris is goth or too expensive if you want it to be

People said it to me many times back home- ¨Parisians are ass holes and they're very rude. They won't give a shit about you.¨
Thank goodness.
 I am so ready and very excited for it. There is a passive aggressiveness that has evolved into something so thick in San Francisco that it was literally driving me insane, amongst various other factors of course . Not that I wasn't overly an ass hole this year, definitely drunk and owing many apologies I felt lazy towards eventually. Still I haven't figured out a way to properly apologize for being psychotic without seeming trite and as if I'm trying to dismiss full responsibility.
 At the very least, aside from being an embarrassment to myself, I left the city semi-content and with a printed, published magazine feature for amazing BelleSF, a pending magazine release for Lump Sum, and several hundred dollars.
C'est la vie or whatever the fuck.
Also, I found five euros at SFO during the TSA violations and I drank a lot of wine in first class.

So far in one day the city has been only good to me and I have all ready tried five different kinds of wine. Something to say of people who speak french is they all seem to have the most beautiful lips. The buildings here are old with intricate french framework. You can most certainly tell which buildings were founded recently but they at least take inspiration from a very classic look.
It's raining hard and I have a friendly girls date at some punk bar in the 11th at six'o'clock.
For some reason also, I have been very nervous. Not about the friend date, just about my position in general.

I start a lot of things I can't finish. Comics, paintings, silly business ideas, fights, proposed articles, all of it. Namely because I start new things everyday and I have the attention span of a three-year-old. That I've maintained a room at the 5shop for three years now, only once coming close to burning it down, is an absolute shock to me, as is any complete piece of writing or illustration. This year I had every intention to write out three articles and completing, sharing, and perhaps even publishing one. I started them all, the one about the police brutality case no one wanted to talk about that occured at City College of San Francisco in which several students were injured by SFPD, one about the discrimination case that may or may not have occured at a restaurant on 25th and Bryant that some people talked about, and one about how my mother is the strongest person I know having saved an immigrant from coyote bandits on a last minute emergency trip to LA and a very seedy hotel in Las Palmas- but never finished. The story I would like published is that of my mother's. I noted most of the détails mentally as she told me about what had happened the weekend before in LA while on a trip to northern california; when she rented a car and offered to give me a ride to a valley i won't disclose the name for. That happened in 2011. I'm waiting to interview her again so I can record it.  I named the article ¨The Trail of Skulls¨.

My great aunt Maria is wonderful. This is her story of coming to France.
It was 1975 and everyone was making the dash to the states from then and also now politicqlly tulmultous and civally dangerous Guatemala, mostly through illegal coyote routes through the mountains. Coyotes are people who are paid to bring immigrants to the states from central america. The practice is illicit and dangerous. Many people die along the trails or are kidnapped and held for ransom. My grandmother and my aunt's friends had either made it to the states or were well on their way but Maria was very afraid. She had heard of the terrible conditions like going through whole miles of dark tunnels filled with shit and cat sized rats and having to sleep in them. Women were often violated or sold off. Despite the increasing turmoil and political unrest in Guatemala, Maria struggled to come to grips with what the journey to the US would entail. She finalized her decision to seek other means after one of her girlfriends phoned her to let her know that she had made it, but not before being raped by four men, kidnapped, had everything stolen, being brought back to Mexico, and having to find the means to again pay for another coyote to help her in again. After that call my aunt picked up a newspaper and began to look through the classified. That evening she read a wanted ad for a cook for the Guatemalan ambassador in Paris. Although it was five in the evening and the paper was let out at six in the morning, she went to the office to try to see if no one had applied yet. When she arrived the applications list was three pages long. Although discourged for the day, she sat in the office looking through the paper for more ads. While reading a manager walked out and asked her to step Inside and fufill the application anyway. While applying my aunt told me she made a joke and made the manager bust up laughing. The joke isn't coming to me now but the manager was so pleased by it that she ripped up her applications list and told my aunt that she seemed very sweet and likable. She gave her the job on the spot. The only problem was that my aunt could not bring her 13 year old daughter with her. My aunt insisted on the position, put her daughter, my cousin, Ariselli in boarding school for the next four years and was flown to Paris the following month. Her daughter later joined her in Paris. My aunt worked closely with the ambassador for many years but later took a job cooking for a french princess after the ambassador moved to back to Guatemala. She stayed friends with the ambassador until her death and is still in touch with her family. Of the whole experience she says she is most glad that she had hope that day and ever since she has not had to ask help of anyone for anything.
She now happily maintains a studio four blocks from the Eiffel Tower, where I am living currently, and has a two year old terrier named Elliot.

She drinks damned good wine, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWdhSccWd3A

Sleep by Haruki Murakami

"I am both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake."

http://www.mylostwords.blogspot.com/2009/01/haruki-murakami-sleep.html?m=1

Back in the food industry
And i cant smoke enough hash to forget it
And the slob techies i had to pick up after the past two days.
Im mad at their moms.
Also im not doing the blood numbing technique to my body anymore so i cant  pretend i dont hate things

And float around the venue spaces

In these weird cotton candy-
Bubble bath-
In god's-
Or the warm winds-
Arms wrapped a round-
The little hands that wear sunglasses-
And snap to old sound-
Trying to claw out of my throat-
All the god damned time-

-Visions.

Everything right now is
Except for me.

The ones of my ketchup grenade
Exploding all over these
Nano fanged
Whatever you call'em
Shitty faces.

Everything right now is
Except for me.

This hippie guy with mismatched  dirty patched
parachute pants that helps take care of diamond dave
Listens to him
Exalts him
Humors his still babbling mouth spirit
gave me a handmade pipe to smoke out of
It looks neat.
He made it.
its awful really.
but his intentions
are other wise
much like his soul
and that of those in
the same shock as me
everyday
that this city is seeping
something unlike ketchup

Everything right now is
Except for me.

It looks like it was made from a chair leg.
He gave me two really
But they are one clever idea he had
That has now given me a sore throat.

Eerything right now is
Except for me.

I threw books across the hallway last night screaming at my roommate about how i know he took the basketball hoop off our front door and that the kids from the projects down fruity parking lot need a place to play. I had just been laughing very loudly not one minute before i saw an opportunity for rage. He accepted my apology and they all blamed it on the moon. I haven't been like this in years.
I tell
My self.
I'm sorry.

Everything right now is
Except for me.

last fall and running into iphones with legs

Looking around

They all seem 

disconnected from them selves

They bump into me

and an old man walking

on the sidewalk
no apologies
needed
never
when you've got
things to like

on 24th

never looking up

talking

looking down

at rectangle versions
of themselves

of their friends

and family

and there is a wife lying
and like

many girls standing still

looking as though

they're not alone

behind that box

and many boys

and their new sneakers

i try to pretend

that they're all reading

about the ocean 

while they throw away

their body parts

and maybe

their shame

and butts
on the ground
grey by grey
sidewalk squares
they have no time to look at
but who thinks about the ocean

unless you're an ecologist

that's on 

some lame shit
nobody can get with

or maybe

i'm not the only one

who thought

they'd rather be walking

into crashing waves

this grey morning

to be rid of all

the beeping sounds.

instead

find gold

find brown

find

in thoughts

that are incomplete

and muted.
i want to mute the beeping.
find gold
find brown
find
in thoughts
that are incomplete and muted.
that are incomplete and muted.

how can you 

blame me?

diagnosis

This man had his dick out in his hand yelling towards the west side of market street, pissing freely, maybe not so freely and in dismay, but either way free enough, when I saw my now ex-lawyer passing by me look just as Mr. Magoo-ish as ever. I shook his hand and he told me he dropped my case because it's dragging on to long and, simply, a waste of his time, which I agreed to immediately. He said, "What's going on with you?" and I said, "Sometimes my shoes come untied too quickly, and it makes me taste the way milk does after a bowl of lucky charms." And he said, "Well I'm sorry, too, and you have got a warrant for your arrest." and I replied, "I'm sorry, what was that? I have a hornet for an artist?"

everything in this room is covered in spiders
and every thing is screaming at me
where have you been
and why didn't you tell us
you would be gone so long
and i did not realize
i was being so rude
and that pages have a song
that pages can sing
and that they have all
become me.

Money is being made
Sold some art
One person told me they would hang my whole series up in their house
Commercials are absurd
But that's how money is made
People are absurd
Have you ever had anyone promise air?

Some people

they call me a liar

because i don't take as many pictures

as the person in front

of the window shop

becoming a display herself

i wonder maybe

what picture means to them

the ones that call me a liar.

when strings leave my eyes

and puzzle pieces begin to fit

from blood

and stars from my mouth

begin to explode

and i get a little sweaty

and everything gets quiet

no body 

exists

that's when i take

pictures.