Love from Starbucks, California.

Nail Polish to Decorate the Cake,
In Europe they say "holiday, I'm on holiday." In America we say "I'm going on vacation" or "I can't wait for spring break" or "I have 2 weeks off in the summer." In my world I like to say it in as many different ways possible. In Los Angeles the sun doesn't skip a beat. Just swirls and bounces the longer you stare at it like those saints in Fatima, Portugal. I feel that I am being followed by angels, tiny ones like a dozen pygmy monkeys bouncing around my head. I am more in love with my life here than anywhere else besides spain, france or the philippines. There are no impulses to blog when you can go outside in cut off shorts and stand in open toe heels under a genetically modified apple tree smiling into a sony digital to record the fantasy so many valley girls live. I am seriously thinking about that life again and how these poems can live in it--how the poem can not only survive being born from a laptop at the food court at the Northridge Mall in front of Surf City or Tommy's, but also burst out laughing in the general hoax of poetry and art as yet another thing to consume or lack like hardly being able to keep up with the piles and piles of reality tv shows gathering dust on my unactivated Tivo account or the tartar on my teeth, which, by the way I am so badly wanting to get them whitened. I've an appointment tomorrow with Britney Spear's old clairvoyant nested in some office in a high rise on Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills at 2pm and writing a review of it in the funnies section of NailheartsClip due by the next time you sneeze. While trying to get rid of trash bags of old clothes at the Goodwill I tell you there's no one place we belong to or can stand to live in for too long. I am not interested in studying a culture anymore than just living in one in the same way lifetimes begin and end into one seamless life sewn by an inherently imaginary time. But isn't it all just narrative? Isn't life one big narrative with no finite beginning or end along with all the academic subjects and relationships scattered within it? This Christmas was without gifts and wrapping paper and yet it was the most fun and debaucherous in years with cousins, uncles, and aunts taking up three rows at the Regal Theater in Downtown LA with a line up of 3D eyeglasses all poking out from their faces while laughing and crying to Avatar while passing around a popcorn bucket, a box of Reeses Pieces, a bag of dried Filipino chili pork skin called "chicharon", and a cherry Big Gulp. Afterwards we dump ourselves into some thai restaurant called Palms in east Hollywood eating green curry and thom ka gai soup with a dope Thai Elvis impersonator doing his thing on stage. My brother claps hysterically because he's so good. At the table my cousin tells me about those water cottages in Palawan island in the Philippines and I want badly to be there, to wake up in the middle of the ocean in a bamboo cottage on stilts with a boat moored below, the water clear blue like nothing you've seen and the shore hundreds of feet away you could care less if a typhoon came or didn't because your too busy already being in heaven. 2010? Are you kidding? Its gonna be a huge year-- the year of the Metal Tiger. Raaaaaaarrrr.

<3
Clipippines