That’s Fauxmore
Gondolier from The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada.

TNB TV
Enjoy the magnificent Cory Daye fronting for Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band in a housecoat.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA

It’s hard not to feel like I’m in high school. I’m 27 and I’m living with my mom again. Except in high school I had a car and less acne.

But moving in with mom hardly seems like a choice at this point – it’s something I’ve been hurtling toward head-on through the universe for quite some time.

Let’s go back a year.

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TNB TV
Enjoy “Melancholia,” a “double-levelled interpretation of the first strophe” of Gerard de Nerval’s “El Desdichado.”

Other Times, Other Manners
Edith Wharton accessorizes with dogs.

The Misanthrope and the Cat
Mark Twain contemplates a kitten.

TNB TV
Logan 5 and Jessica 6 meet Box in the 1976 classic Logan’s Run.

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I once lived in a little white house near downtown Bakersfield in the Oleander area. A rental, it wasn’t a fancy house. Probably built in the 1950s, it was still comfortable, had three rooms, and was just down the street from quaint homes built in the 1920s. Yet like some forgotten pagoda on a no-name Osaka hill, its cobwebs held secret voices and its cracks harbored spirit warriors.

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Feldman the Great
“He has a giant skeletal structure for his breed.”
–Feldman’s Vet

TNB TV
Enjoy Lyle Lovett’s “Skinny Legs” performed by Izzy on the ukulele.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

There’s something about a bookstore, warm-gutted, umbilical–relevant. City Lights bookstore in San Francisco is the ne plus ultra of bookstores. The unkissed, the wretched, the imbecilic and insane–all of them, at one point, have struggled to hit that first step, lunge forth, looking for a depth charge to blast out the superstructures of their lives. I have. Have you? Oh, no. I’m not saying you’re a wretch. I’m not saying you’re anything. What I’m saying is that not unlike a church, or a Wal-Mart, or the feeling you take from winking at an ugly girl, you feel a sense of calm, however misbegotten or misguided.

One day I’ll tell you about how I feel about that. But last week, with an old, wonderful friend, a friend who knows that people are not kind, but like me, feels commandoish in dispelling the predjudices and the preconceptions of the drooling smash so intent on drowning out (and down) the boy with his back up–we went in to City Lights, went on a book orgy. I can tell you what I bought later, but buying Howl, again, at City Lights, got me thinking. Got me so much I’m going to call it “thanking.” But who is this lunatic spewing out vapid introductions? Let’s get to the story, eh?

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BALTIMORE, MD -

In my previous post, I revealed one of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me.  Here is another embarrassment (the list is endless, as the only thing I am sure of in my life is the fact that I will repeatedly humiliate myself!):

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SACRAMENTO, CA

It wasn’t until I was about 23 years old that I was able to face my family with the fact that I no longer believed in the Mormon religion. And even then I didn’t really face them. They found out in bits and pieces. The most obvious sign was the divorce, which I never told my parents about directly. They heard about it from my younger siblings. Through my siblings they also learned of my tattoo (oh my!) and my drinking (this hasn’t been verfied, but I’m pretty sure they’ve heard about it by now). And of course the whole living in sin with my boyfriend for the past two years probably tipped them off as well.

At first they would try to get me to come back around. They’d question me about my beliefs and ask when I had been to church last. When I avoided their questioning or outright changed the subject they’d get upset, angry even.

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AMHERST, MA-

Last night I took down a number of what I think of as “internet angry guy” posts on my blog that I’d put up over a few weeks, posts that are the equivalent of me being like my mom and shouting at the television–something that worries me about her only because she never had high blood pressure until, well, the last 7 years. I took these down because I realized in the most recent one I hadn’t really done what I wanted to on the topic of the anniversary of women’s suffrage, which happened on the same day as the Democratic National Convention kickoff and the beautiful speech Michelle Obama gave.

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PHILADELPHIA, PA-

I haven’t showered in three, maybe four, days. Not that I have anything against showering. It happens to be an activity I engage in regularly and one I encourage others to do as well (hear that, NYC taxi drivers? Yeah, YOU, the ones whose cabs smell like a combination of feet, spoiled cheese, and the dirty water left in the vase four days after the flowers have died).

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Before Adrian Monk, There Was Ian Stark
Neil Patrick Harris and Tony Shalhoub in the short lived Stark Raving Mad, perhaps the best TV portrait of a writer until Hank Moody.

TNB TV
Strong Bad explains how techno is made.

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

Update: Listen to GSpot Interview: Nick Belardes - Magic Realism, Bugs and 9/11

G R E A T  G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S  B U L L E T  The escape to California took weeks.

Renaldo had difficulty hiding that he was one of Poncho Villa’s soldiers and was constantly questioned as they traveled toward northern Mexico. Handsome, Renaldo had a broad nose and full lips. He wore a great sombrero high on his head and had a full mustache to match. His eyes were of a deep red-brown like cherry wood. He wasn’t tall, but looked it as he sat straight on his horse.

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PACIFIC GROVE, CA -

A month after he left, I realized I hadn’t gotten my period. I thought that this sucked. Not because of a perhaps potential child (which sucked in its own right in such a way that there was no possibility I’d have been prepared to wrap my head around it at the time), but because of the fact that I’d probably have to call him.

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NORTHFIELD, VT -

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? - Eleanor Roosevelt

I was barely 20 when the 9/11 attacks happened. It was a bright fall day in the peaceful town of Northfield, Vermont on a military college campus 300 or so miles north of the Big Apple, and I wasn’t even awake when the first plane hit.

I didn’t have class until 10…I had at least another hour before I had to be awake and I was using the opportunity to sleep in, especially because my thesis work would begin in another week or so and sleep would be a thing of the past.

My mom called me that morning and even through the fogginess of exhaustion I could tell that something was off in her voice, that something terrible had happened.

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