#uncoffeed...

A dire realization kept pulsing up from the deepest recesses of my mind, id and superego conspiring against me. I wanted more, and I couldn’t tell myself more what because the math was bad. Traveling artist, traveling musician, multiple levels of baggage and an old-school Encyclopaedia Britannica-sized stack of things unknown. Jeffrey on paper looks good, but what’s under his bed?  Something primal had taken over. The daydream couldn’t be supported and yet I was unable to let go of it.  I couldn’t do this anymore. I had to break up with someone I literally wasn’t seeing.  I had to break up with this house. This is, in a way, one of the messiest breakups I’ve ever had because my mess isn’t real. It’s allegorical paint splashed over a bloody crime scene, such vivid and leaky whorls as will not leave their tinct. Maybe I’ve done what I do and pushed too far again, impulsive; maybe this was always the end. But I’m not comfortable here anymore. I’ve made it weir...

The next time I was in LA, I deviated from the usual thrift stores to one next to a pet shop, and then I went into the pet shop. I’d never consider bringing an animal back to Ian’s place but I thought it would be fun to look, like a wee urban zoo. And it was fun, quaint even, until I found the Blue Damn Oranda. In a different life, I tried to breed guppies for color. My mom was tolerant when I explained we needed two tanks to separate the males and females, but refused to let me have a third “hospital tank” for the babies to mature, uneaten, until they could be sexed. She bought bigger fish that ate guppies.  In a different different life, I was given a 55-gallon hexagonal fish tank which housed only a clown loach and a plecostomus. I bought colorful cichlids, and quickly learned that the Africans and South Americans cannot live together peacefully. So I bought another large tank, and then - yes - a hospital tank, which became home to seven Oranda goldfish, five blue a...