Thistle sting

We drove to Los Angeles on Friday, and we did get jammed in traffic in thistly hills. We did see the soft rolls of California, cloaked in teddy bear skin. We did see the the truckloads of egg-shaped tomatoes and once we were showered with the parchments of garlic.

We went into a church on Wilshire and played the nice piano in the sunny room while the bride dressed in the bahtroom. We smelled every bum bladder. We had champurrado and mole for breakfast, and hot-pink horchata with freckles of walnut and cactus sugar and orange melon. We meditated at the Zen Center and watched all the clear-eyed people eat tomato flesh and herbs in the wooden room. Michael and Meredith were raised there, and sometimes the people would not speak for two weeks and walk in small circles for hours. Cats are not allowed in the meditation room because they are too curious. Michael and I meditated in that room for ten minutes at 1 pm, the blessed sunshine offering its supreme bath, and I was so pleased, you know I love the heat.

We met our own curious cat, a strange angel named Roy, while we drank Popov and Ocean Spray and Regia and Charles Shaw on the roof at Wilshire and Normandie. Roy's teeth were very straight and white and he was on cocaine. He drew a sap out of all of us, and relaxed the security guard, and managed to molest a couple of hours with such a sinister and funny spell. Bless all the facilitators, even the dragons.

I dreamed that I was in my childhood home with my sisters and I saw a big greasy tiger in our yard. It began to antagonize us and I raced to lock all of the doors. The tiger pushed at the doors and scratched me but could not break the glass. We called 911 but the operators did not care. I remember once reading the story of a man in NYC who somehow got a kitten tiger and raised it in his little apartment. The tiger began to get bigger and hungrier, and the man had to move out and he did not know what to do. He would throw hamburgers from the doorway to feed the cat. Society eventually found out about the tiger, but it took a lot longer than you might think. The neighbors thought the growls and purrs were a movie. When the tiger was rescued, they took black-and-white photos of him, dwarfing a white couch, with shit-smears painted on the walls around him.