Happy Birthday, Angela Fantangela;11:09am

happy brithday, angela fantangela! martini sumer! pygmy owl! donator to the great, grand jar of tears, the sequel! soft water, deliberate! sexy squirrel! slow motion landslide! ninja eyes! baby dreamer, in the good way!

so you’re 21. again. how does it feel? how does this very day, the calm in between your shows, with a legit theatre company, (by the way,you say theatre like this: thee AYE tur.) on the brink of multiple directional
explosions. like a grenade made of opportunity. and you’re quite capable of following every piece of shrapnel towards the human skin that…jeez. why the grenade metaphor?

it’s like you’re holding twelve kites in your hand. (yeah. that’s better.) and all this time, all this time meaning your life up until this point, and your holding twelve different kites. shaped differently, colored differently, and each needing a different amount of wind ressistance to actually soar. and you’re holding all twelve. on a beach in madagascar of all places. i said madagascar just because i’ve never use the place in anything i’ve ever written and i feel, because of that fact, i’ll use it in a long ass metaphorical situation for you. dude, i should totally start another paragraph.

from birth, you’ve had all twelve. it was written into your DNA way before your grandma was born. when the angels knew no difference between heaven and earth in fact. yup. that long ago. all twelve kites, all different colors, all different tassels, all different speeds, as a baby born, all twelve strings were held tightly in those tiny little hands of yours.

and you knew it. you knew you had more than the rest of the pink and blues in the same baby ward, even across the country. maybe even the world. dare i say, the universe? this includes the marklar of ursus minor VIII. and you know them grindops!

but you never ever really did anything with them. i mean, you did sometimes. you would tug at a couple, watch them jump. fancy at it like it was an orange colored frog or a baby cricket, but you never really saw them for what they really were. perhaps, you just didn’t know how to work them. or maybe they were just occasional toys you would play with on thursday afternoons because the cartoons sucked at that time.

and 30 years would pass. and a million pieces of your heart would be scattered across north america. right next to thousands of crumpled contracts and hundreds of evaporating particles of promises. your feet, slowing down from a walk to a drag, and at times, completely stopping. there was hardly any space around for you to go. every where you went, was a reminder of the ugliness of the ground. where you’ve been was, for the most part, rocky, choppy, cracked, and littered with pieces of your past. such rugged terrain for feet like yours.

i got this friend, right? can’t say her name or even write down the “literary” version of her name because i wrote a book about her a while back and she read it and we didn’t talk for almost a year. so i got to write this part of your letter with the precision and carefulness of a cirque du soleil performer. with the delicate dexterity of an argentinian tango dancer. with the hands of a sniper surgeon hybrid superhero.

sidenote: you know, i might be risking losing the reader at this point by introducing another character, another story, that might be too much, too much story. even if it is applicable, which will be revealed towards the end of the letter, the reader might just roll their eyes and walk away. dude, they’d say to themselves. get to the point, already! but then i figure, even by doing this, writing this sidenote thing, introducing a new character and a new story, that at first may not seem to apply, ultimately, at the end of this whole letter, there will be a revelation of how all things are connected. dots and shit. and if anything, you’ll be able to relate. which is why i’m doing it. the only thing i actually worry about, is if i’m sidenoting too soon.

she’s staying here in glendale at a friends place for a while. things happened where she was living, a lot more north, and my advice was to get the fuck out of dodge. coz it’s crazier than tombstone up in that mug and it wouldn’t be beneficial to survival in all terms of the word to remain. so she’s here. i’m here. the friend in glendale is here. we’re all cool and the gang like that. we’re talking like it’s a slumber party, making jokes, making plans for the future, watching movies, drinking coffee, and going to work, because we work together. and it’s cool. it’s fun. it’s something new that’ll help me get closer to a bigger brain. unfortunately, things aren’t going to be easy from here on out. now i can’t fully explain what’s going on, for legal reasons, but i think you’ll know what i mean when i say, shit is bad.

last night, we were driving back to glendale, talking about work and shit. we were coming from oxnard, so that meant we had a lot of time to talk. coz oxnard and gelndale is like africa and the moon. she talked in detail. and for a long ass time. she wept. she looked out the window a lot at the disappearing distant lights. couldn’t tell the difference between the stars in the sky or the stars of the cities we passed. didn’t really mater to her. the difference between sky and ground. the glow from the radio made a silvery half mask of a tired, beaten, worn woman at the brink of quitting. giving up. a fighter from day one was about to lay down and call, i lose.

there was 15 more miles until we got to glendale. i had to time my monologue just right, so that when we exited the 134, i would light my cigarette, exhale, and finish it all up with a, “you know what i mean?” wink, and hit the side streets. ya know, it would look cool.
“we’re all subjects of entropy. deterioration. things are going to break down. they are going to die. some people reason, so why fight it? why not adopt this fundamentalist attitude? we all end up the same way regardless? so why waste energy trying to keep it from happening? ultimately, entropy wins. but, dude, you know what i think? don’t answer. because you don’t. i’ve never talked to you about shit like this. usually it’s about who’s fucking who and who’s fucking who over and how much money are we gonna make and what’s the plan, jackie chan, and can i borrow the car kind of stuff. but i’ll let you in on a couple of secrets that keep me alive from day to day. it works for me, so it might work for you. coz i think you’re an INTJ, too. you ready, freddie? the coffee’s kicking in, so let’s dew this!

“
i’ll do it in a story. bear with me. i talk in metaphors. it’s this writers workshop thing i’ve been doing. it’s all about telling stories. so i can’t really do it in a couple of sentences. i have to do it long ass monologues filled with metaphors and analogies that take a long time. but i got about 15 minutes, and i’m gonna use every single second of it. because it’s my turn to talk. anyway, that was stupid, wasn’t it? i should’ve just went into the story, huh? you’re probably at the point of tuning out, aren’t you? okay then. i’ll get on with it.

“there was this time me and armando were getting gas. it was a 76 or some shit. across the street was these apartment buildings. residentials and shit. not the big city type of street. a small street in the middle of north hollywood. outside of this one apartment complex there was this old man with a broom and a dust pan. it was sometime in the autumn so, even in LA, all the leaves were falling. dying once they had no strength to hold onto the branch they were born into. the brown crispness indicative. i was thinking, how sad. dead tree children. softly floating to the ground. waiting for time to dissolve them into air. near infinity. over and over again. never ending. always the same. done and gone. nothing remains. made me kind of sad. i pulled out a cigarette and started smoking tobacco.

“after i tok my first puff, i exhaled out the window. armando was pumping the gas and i was sitting shotgun. i looked over to that apartment complex once more. the old man with the broom and the dust pan was sweeping all the leaves into the dust pan. filled it to the brink and then went over to his garbage can and shoved it in. he went over to the other piles and did the same thing. over and over again. armando was getting a lot of gas, so i watched for a long time. and i started thinking. man, this guy, probably, does this everyday. everyday he comes out with hsi broom and dust pan, sweeps up al the dead leaves that died that day and puts them neatly in that garbage can of his. everyday. because he wants the sidewalk clean. and the next day he’ll do it again. and the next. and the next. everyday, the leaves will fall and everyday he’ll sweep them up. jeez, what’s the point, ya know? it’s always gonna happen. why waste your time, old man? why aren’t you playing pinnocle? or rummy? or going to pachanga and playing slots with all the other senior citizens? why are you wasting you’re time?

“and then i started thinking, because dude, he has to clean. or else it’ll get messy. it’ll get ugly. see, i end up debating with myself because i’m a capricorn-aquarius cusp, year of the tiger, left-handed, middle child, only boy, INTJ. and that is a lonely existence. but it allows me to debate with myself. i guess you can say, i’m a master debator. just kidding. but anyways.

“see, what i was thinking all that time while armando was filling his, apparently, two hundred gallon gas tank because he was taking a long ass time, was that, to the old man, it didn’t matter if he had to do it everyday. to him, it was more important to keep what he considered his, his sidewalk, his apartment, his little part of the big ass world, clean and tidy. to him, the effort he put into it was necessary to keep him happy before the inevitable came. because the alternative would be some fucking huge ass wall of cracked, brown, leaves in front of him. and that was worse than the daily effort he put into cleaning. to him, it was worth it. it was worth it, you know what i mean?

“finally, armando was done. he got back in the car, i finished my cigarette, and we were off to wherever we had work that day.

“so, Kan…er, i mean, Coo…,uh, i mean, friend, what i’m trying to say is this. everyday there’s gonna be something we have to clean. there are those that don’t think it’s necessary to address them issues. they’d rather not think about it, let it build up, because it’s a waste of time to clean it up. then there are others out there who think it’s a waste of time to do nothing about the daily issues that drop in front of us, laying there on the ground, collecting into piles that they can’t even move around. so those people decide to clean it up.
because they want to be able to walk around. maybe even run around. so for you, friend, what do you believe? what do you think? do you think it’s worth it? you know what i’m talking about? you know what i mean?”

and then i exit the freeway and take a puff of my cigarette.

that’s what happened last night, while you were performing for the first time in a long time, on stage, with professional actors, with a completely enthusiastic, drama free ensemble cast. a new kind of experience for you, angela. on the eve of your again 21st birthday. while i was talking to my friend, driving her back to glendale, i was thinking about you. because, my love, soft water wiggle deliberate, ocean eyes, curtain eyelids, playful lips and teeth, tiny dancing hands, through your life, things have fallen on the ground, all over, piling up, making it hard to maneuver, sometimes completely stopping. and i’ve seen it. i was witness to it. those twelve kites you held in your hands never got a chance to really fly. they’d get trapped on the ground because you weren’t moving, because you had no room to move.

but now, fantangela angela, because you’ve been “cleaning” (remember your hour and half phone number deleting? that was funny. thank you marijuana and realizations!) you got some room. and you’re looking at your hand and remembering those twelve strings you got in your hands. and you’re looking down the sidewalk and seeing there’s a lot more room than there was before. and you’re walking. briskly. maybe even, soon, like tomorrow, maybe you’ll pick up the pace and start running. coz you got room now. and maybe, just maybe, one day soon, maybe tomorrow, ah ha ha, i’ll be able to see what twelve kites look like when flying in the sky all at the same time. and more importantly, you’ll feel what it’s like.

happy birthday. i’ll see you tonight.