"Is A Dream A Lie If It Don't Come True, Or Is It Something Worse?"

When I was probably 12 years old, I started to spend the money I earned doing little odd jobs on records. I had memories of growing up listening to the "Born In The USA" record in my Dad's truck a few years earlier. It was the one thing, besides Baseball, that we could always agree on and talk about.

That summer, over the course of two days, I brought home two used records by Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band: "The River" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town." I probably bought them, in a way, to try desperately to somehow be closer to my Dad, who was drifting further and further away. The kicker is: It brought me closer to Knowing Myself than anything else I'd ever come across. Both records were an absolute game changer for me. I sat there, headphones on, mesmerized by the vivid imagery of an America I longed for in my heart; a place where men found meaning through faith and work and wore their hearts on their sleeves.

Springsteen's music whispered "strap on your boots, keep fighting for what you believe in, the magic is gonna find you, you're gonna be alright." It made me realize that you could strip away the layers of the fashion show and be vulnerable and honest, that you could pour your own heart and story into the music and it would be better for it. It was like a sonic salvation or a rock n' roll baptism, peppered with acoustic heartache and the kind of raw sincerity that was so lacking in the pop music I heard on the radio. It sounds ridiculous, but those records were also a revelation because they helped me to begin to understand that it was possible to use music to navigate through the dark spaces of my own life until that sacred light emerged emerge and the healing waters soothed me. It was church for me.

There were many years after that, listening to punk rock or God Knows what else, that I was too cool to admit to liking the E Street Band. But no matter where I've been in my life, no matter what I was struggling with or evolving into becoming, I could always throw my headphones on and find my way back to Church to Feel The Real.

And the older I get, the more it means..

The Boogie Man.

Listen, the Boogie Man we've been collectively calling "2016" is more properly called "Addiction" and/or "Under-Treated Mental Illness." It's as Real as can be, and it's keeping a great many of us from not only reaching our fullest potential, but from actually growing old.

We can eulogize the genius of the creative people we've loved and lost to "2016", but let us not fail to absorb the bracing reality that undercuts their tragic passing.

What I want to say is This: If you need Help - If you need a friend or an ear or someone to help push you in the direction of getting some sort of treatment, to take you to a meeting, to connect you with people that can help: I'm here. And I hope you are there, too, for the people you love struggling with these demons in and around your life. Listen to them. Encourage them. Love them. Let them know you care about them so damn much. Love them until it hurts.

And perhaps we should consider honoring the people we've already lost, both in the world of the arts and in our own lives, by demanding better access to quality Mental Health Care from our elected leaders. Perhaps we should be more careful and judicious about criminalizing addiction and destroying the lives of young people who are struggling through an Unimaginable Hell.

Baby Steps. One day at a time. Unfortunately, one of the melancholic lessons we reluctantly absorb as we move through this life is that Wisdom and Grace come on slowly, while pain, anger and longing hit the heart and brain with electrical speed.

Maybe this is the time to be radically compassionate. The only chance we have of beating these things is by Loving Each Other.



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"We are not cured. What we have is a daily reprieve, contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition."

Gratitude: Part One..

Just a few little things for which I am grateful today:


Watching/Listening to my son start to form his own nuanced opinions about the world; from politics to art to science, etc.

Dimly lit diners where an older waitress calls me "honey" and brings me muddy coffee.

Hearing Vin Scully call a Dodger game and remembering listening to the same golden voice with my father and grandfather, echoing through the halls of the memory of childhood.

The magical surrealism and cinematic gorgeousness of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, etc.

Being able to crack the mic every night on one of the world's most legendary radio stations.

Eating vegetable pakoras at Natraj.

Long stretches of desolate highway under a big bowl of stars with the perfect soundtrack oozing through the speakers.

Kenneth Koch's "You Want A Social Life With Friends," which means just as much to me Now as The Clash or The Replacements did growing up.

The opportunity to contribute in funding music and film and art projects I love.

Remembering things so beautiful that you have to thank the Deity of your choice that they even happened and that you were lucky enough to be there.

Being able to make rad playlists on spotify for almost any occasion.

The light flooding through windows in the work of Edward Hopper.

The number of people who have truly loved me and cared about my well-being. I'm so incredibly blessed and have been given so much more than I deserve in life.

Little carnivals that show up in city parks.

Being able to write smutty three line poems and bound them together in a book.

Thinking of things Sun Ra has taught me that have not so much to do with music, planets or Egyptology, but just about how to live your life.

Boba all up in my tea.

The Augustine Fellowship and all they continue to teach me about self-love.

Wandering through the streets of Los Angeles, camera in hand, searching for little slices of life too beautiful not to attempt to capture.

Being old enough to see people change.

Being old enough to see people not change.

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Breathe In.. Breathe Out..

Let's all take a deep breath. No need to wrap ourselves in flags or symbols or tribes or ideology right now. Just Breathe. We're all here and in this together, us human beings, and most of us (myself included) have a lot more work to do to become our best selves. Keep Breathing. We'll get through this. Even the darkest times. We'll keep learning and loving and thriving. Breathe. Let go of fear and anger. Release the tension and anxiety. Feel the warmth coming from the furnace of your heart. Let it illuminate your body.

Breathe Deep and Exhale. Realize, with every breath: You are Here. You are Safe. You are Beautiful. You are Loved.

It's gonna be okay.

Scene I

Her entire body trembled as I tightly clenched her throat. Her hot breath shortened, full of fear and fuck, as I felt her heart pounding viciously in her esophagus. I thought of the ballbusting cop who might happen by and see some big, dumb, hulking creep choking a sweet young lady in the back of a beat-up SUV. I held my face right up close to hers and heard a primal, guttural moan escape from the center of her chest. She shook violently; writhing in her dark ritual, and pushed me off her, red-faced and gasping..

14 Years Later..

The Fallen will always be remembered, but the Living are the true monument to This Day..

Forget about bumper sticker sloganeering and frothing politicians, who will forever use horrific tragedies to dream up new wars for young men to slog through the mud to fight and die in. The real takeaway from the morning of the September 11th attacks is in the story of a people who mustered the courage not to flee in the face of unimaginable horrors, but rather run into burning buildings to save thousands of people they barely knew.

Many people would have you believe that we're a cowardly species, who would tuck our tail and run for the hills in a time of panic. This is, of course, Completely False. We all saw a glimpse that morning of what unites us, of who we are, and of the Love and Community that sustains us through even our darkest hours.

I realize we'll be bombarded with the constant imagery of those gruesome attacks today, and that some of the more twisted among us will seize the opportunity to bring us ISIS/ISIL or Muslim Extremism into the conversation; but I'd say to them, and to you, that today is not the time to talk about terrorism.

Instead, on the anniversary of that terrible September morning, we should perhaps consider honoring those lost by talking about and celebrating Heroism. Instead of talking about our stark (and exaggerated) differences in political, cultural, religious or social ideology, let's take time today to love and embrace those things that bind us together in a more perfect Union: such as the Heroic nature we saw on display that morning. It is our greatest strength, and as we saw that fateful morning, it can be shaken, but it will never, ever be defeated...

Let's Hear It For The Home Team..

There was this Promethean moment for me years ago – some kind of discovery or awakening..

At the time, my own insecurities and uncertainties had lived in the center of my chest, ghosting me through the years. I lived with the constant suspicion that I was somehow in the wrong place, the wrong town or the wrong neighborhood. It seemed to me that the very life in which I was existing amounted to nothing more than a bumbling series of miscues while I was somehow, inexplicably, waiting around for a place to be. I was living in some kind of strange purgatory, a stranger in my own life. I guess, more than anything else, I felt like the proverbial “player to be named later” in all those baseball trades you read about during the off-season or at the deadline, but later never seemed to come for me.

That afternoon, after messing up my life for the umpteenth time, feeling more uncertain than ever, reeling from the loss of a woman that was never going to love me again, I decided to try to walk off my self-induced, shame-spiraling stupor. I walked around Point Fermin with my one-year-old son Coltrane in my arms, holding him as we looked over the edge, watching the hulking freighters off the coast dotting the Pacific, hearing the warbling arf of the sea lions as the waves pounded on the rocks hundreds of feet beneath us. We sat there, the two of us, immersed in this moment, this indescribable beauty; watching as foamy pearls and diamonds kept forming and then dissolving on the tops of the rocks on the surface of the water.

As my little boy's eyes gazed across the expanse of the holy blue dream of a sky, his eyelids began to drop. After reopening them a few times, as if committing the scene of the sweetness of the vision laid out before him to memory, he finally lost the battle and fell asleep, the tops of his shiny brittle little eyelids meshing together.

I was 30 years old, awash in the scuppers of my messy head and messier heart.. and it was at that moment I felt the soft, fastening click in the center of my chest. The mass of warmth of his small sleeping body brought with it a deep, abiding calm. It was a weight in my arms that I’d always been missing. I’d finally been traded to my team.

Here and now, eight and a half years later, Coltrane is obviously no longer a baby. He’s a gargantuan nine year old boy, full of dreams and hopes and gross jokes and curiosity. The days of him falling asleep in my arms, at Point Fermin or anywhere else, are long gone. But every once in a while, I can still feel that small bundle I held to my chest that afternoon and recall that sacred moment: my arrival as the player to be named later, finally finding a home team - the ghost of my greatest and only Home Run.