I wake up to the searing sun accompanied by the morning birds singing their praises for another day. I've gotten to know those delicate chirps and obnoxious squawks so well. My relationship with my morning birds has been a tumultuous one. They're were times, as the sun greeted the horizon, and the air became crisp and cold. That I would feel as if that sun was for me and those birds were my choir. It was a gloriously lonely and beautiful feeling. Then they're were the drug-induced alcohol-blurred mornings in which I'd cringe hearing the birds mock me and the sounds of creaking metal, and horns. I'd put on my sunglasses, light a cigarette, and the morning dirge would begin. The procession of boring people rushing to do boring things. The only place I wanted to go was straight to hell. Where it's dark and filled with old blues musicians, poets, authors, and mass murders. My kind of people.
Rather than rushing to find self-identity through mass acceptance or running towards self-destruction. I find myself learning to find beauty within the struggle. For some, they can finger themselves and have the world cum all over their chest, opportunities slowly dripping off. They're content with knowing if they just roll over they'll be given another chance. Then there are the rest of us. The cum dumpster divers.
When I was a living out of my car in China Town. I'd spend my nights at Hard Times. A 24 hour jack shack. It had everything I needed: free coffee, a creepy 30 year old dude who had a thing for underage punk rock girls, and a crack whore that lived in the broom closet. I'd be wearing my bear foot slippers and playing bongos on silicone replicas of celebrity asses while she cleaned the booths and gave hand jobs, blow jobs, or whatever for the price of a summer blockbuster. She'd come out holding her bra asking me to put it back on for her. While I'd help her get into her sweat-stained nude colored bra she'd talk about how she was going to save all her money and get clean and then the state would give her her kids back. She didn't know where they were but she had two crumpled up photos that sat on her bed. Her bed being a plywood shelf with hair grease, a comb, and these two crumpled up abandoned kids. I knew she'd never get clean and hoped she wouldn't find her kids. I wasn't even sure how long we'd last dancing with self-destruction. Some people had prom. We had Hard Times.
