John John’s First Birthday
Dave took a lot of pictures of us and none of them feature all of us looking into the camera. But then Google automatically montaged us into this image. Rather unsettling.
Bottling
Brewmaster Nami
Ground
By accident, Evergreen Village Square.
It’s the first real heatwave since we moved to California. I’m outside in the zero gravity chair at five in the morning in my underwear. The cock crows.
Rap miscellany
The code of the streets:
There’s a choad in the sheets.
Rainbow Tomato Plant
In the garden, knowledge and plants will grow. Mostly hands-off, this Rainbow tomato’s grown since Vanessa Shaushkin gave me the seedling earlier this summer. It’s six feet tall. Should I top it? Never grown one this big. It’s a good omen for John John.
Painting
Jim Drain at Greene Naftali
This performance happened at the opening of Jim Drain’s exhibition “I Would Grow On My Hand” at Greene Naftali in New York City in 2007. A crowd of people filled the gallery to watch these dancers. There was Jim in a thong, silver tights, and a wig. There was a woman in a men’s dress shirt. Another woman wore a horse’s tail. They hopped in circles. We looked on. I took this video. The artist Gordon Hull was there and he gave me a zine he had been working on, full of incantations and voudou spells and secret codes you deciphered in mirrors. Vice licensed the footage for an art TV show they were working on. For dinner afterwards, I went to Taza del Oro on Eighth Avenue.
Presidential Fitness Test
I was a fat kid, people gave me titty twisters on the school bus. I turned up the Eazy E and looked out the window as the straw colored hills of Morgan Hill rolled by. When I took the Presidential Fitness Test, the result was that I was not fit. It was no surprise.
My teacher, who taught me to code Logos on beige Apple ][e’s in the computer lab, which I loved and was good at, handed me a rope and asked me to climb it. It was attached to the ceiling. Of the gymnasium! Later they took us out to the monkey bars to climb poles. I got the wind knocked out of me and saw stars.
We played Dungeons and Dragons at recess. I was the Dungeon Master. We didn’t have books to follow, just one twenty-sided die. We took turns rolling it and then I made up what happened. Who died, who killed the Dragon, who saved the maiden, who got turned into a bird and then a donkey. We huddled in the shade of a small tree in the parched clay school yard. It was dusty. I sweat from my armpits.
My grandmother told me that she didn’t believe in Hell except for Ronald Reagan who was going for closing halfway houses and defunding disability programs while governor of California. Arnold Schwarzenegger had helped to design the test. They’re both going to Hell, I thought.
Dominio de Eguren Protocolo 2012
BBQ chicken and peppers with pickles, rice, and tomato salad. The wine is an inexpensive Spanish red. Dried fruit front, raisin, Cherry, then tannins, and a tart pucker. A little funk, tastes sophisticated. Wonderful with the grill as well as the tomato basil flavor. I would definitely buy it again and before the meal was up, I schemed about how to get hold of a case. Hope I’ll see it again.
The Wine Club, $6
First Batch
Life is good. Nami is making beer, our first batch on the East Side. Kent Goldings pellets, syrup. Wort chillin on the porch.