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nervously silent with a million thoughts racing about which safety measures to use first. I decided to save the party and I jumped into a coffin-shaped box. The fire got bigger and hissed violently around my ears. I wasn't afraid. I wanted that picture, that immortalized me that Summer and made me the Blue-Collar Hero!

    DRUNK ON YESTERDAY’S DREAMS
     
     
    I used to walk down to the little neighborhood park and swing on the swingset and look out towards the bay and the land on the other side. I had a light feeling in my stomach that fueled my hunger of ambition. There wasn’t a hint of discomfort, even if the weather was chilled. Oblivious of the weather touching my body like a ghost in a mansion, I contemplated a life extraordinary.
     
    It was a time that my friends were packing and leaving for college or the more adventurous, hitchhiking, backpacking, and flying to Europe. I wasn’t cool enough to know the ones that flew to Europe, but I assumed they made a show of whatever they did with a pompous and tacky air of false dignity.
     
    I swung higher towards the stars and when a jet flew over, blinking its little red and white lights like the lights from It’s A Small World at Disneyland, I followed the jet in my mind and landed in London, Paris and Tokyo. I didn’t know about Dubai yet, but it surely would have been at the top of the list. The air was like a sauna and there was perfume and money mingling from the international Jet Setters of mystery. Men wore suits ironed so flat and women dangled precious stones like dumbbells. In my mind, I was at any airport arriving or leaving and waving to the onlookers as if in a parade. My imagination swung with me on the swings as if I were stoned and skipping school, but it was my life and it was now beginning without my parents barking Yes, No, Yes! . . .which equaled: NO!
     
    The trials of life began too fast and I found myself living paycheck to paycheck, but I still had an air of rebellion that propelled me to walk out of jobs as easy as walking out of colleges. I wasn’t scared of consequences. Life was a big game show of neon shoots and ladders and I wasn’t going to assess the damage until I was at least forty.
     
    Pretty soon, the daring characters of my Romantic youth became beggars, bums and druggies. I was chasing a pipe dream while digging a shallow grave. I used all my free-passes and my tank was on empty. I was watching myself as if already dead, walking into AA where incessant smokers added to the brown hue of their lungs and the walls, where infamous mottos and cliches reminded the distraught how to “Live life on life’s terms.” Screw this. Let’s go back out there and chase James Dean’s exhaust and take a few huffs as well to get high. Let’s just remember to take Vitamin B before bedtime. Things will change.
     
    I remember tackling my Ego and my personality split into two and I was yelling at myself. I was sleeping somewhere I didn’t recognize. The walls were gray and telling from the sound of my voice bouncing back to me, the walls were feet thick. A Deputy Sheriff unlocked a huge metal door and handed me a yellow letter. The word that stood out was “restrained”. My Ego was holding on with excuses and denial. I looked down and my pants were Orange. The next day I was released into a windy world where crows flew overhead as I walked back to town. I found shelter out at the state park in an old Officer's cabin and rolled out a mummy bag I had just bought for five bucks. I lit a candle in the middle of the wood floor and hoped for a better life.
     

    INSIDE A PHOTO BOOTH
     
    It was Winter in Seattle and nothing was happening, except for a rock show I was too drunk to get into. I thought of my resources in the immediate vicinity and came up with a photo booth. How many couples posed in here, with their smug, protected, domestic bliss of courtship? I felt alone, with nothing but an imagination struggling to entertain it's inebriated, somber