Surfelport.com, I have no idea what any of this means…

Somewhere around July of 2009, I began losing the pamphlet war against the Donut Star, China Express and EZ Lube Huntington Beach. Having deployed a series of counter strategies, one of which included never removing them from the screen door, so as to give the appearance of a vacated place, another of which was coating the handle with vaseline (forgetting this counter strategy makes your late night return from the bars tricky), and another was to put a note on the door that I don’t like chinese (without specific pronoun like food or PEOPLE), it had become clear nothing was effective.

So when I pulled out of my complex and saw a short mexican man with a manpurse full of these pamphlets entering my complex, I swung back around to the other side of the complex, parked my car, and began to hunt him down. I located him just off the pool, near the mailboxes, hardly in the act of placing the pronounced discounted kung pao chicken pamphlets on any anonymous doors, but obviously a touch after he’d done a clean sweep of the 100s.

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I don’t get Google Plus at all. And I don’t think it will work at all. I think its rather endearing that Google somehow tricked an entire population into wanting an “invite” to a goddamn social media site. Honestly folks, did you think you weren’t going to get in? Its a fucking social media site, it needs people! Facebook looked like a total disaster for about two weeks.

“Hey got two google invites left. Let me know why YOU should get one.”

OMG OMG! I WANT ONE! Oh wait, no I don’t, because I just remembered, I am not a total idiot.

Firstly, I keep getting people adding me on Google Plus that I have never heard of in my life. I am assuming they are just going through their gmail address book and doing some sort of mass add. This makes sense, because if its one thing that will make the Google Plus experience that much better than the Facebook experience for me, it’s the ability to befriend a plumber I emailed 4 years ago about a shit clogged toilet. To be honest, I can’t even tell if the people that add me are automatically my new friends or if I need to do something about it? Like what the fuck is going on?
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December, year 2040. High Noon Saloon, Barstow, California.

“Another vodka?”

“Sure.”

A symbiosis of dreams and failures. An elaborate plan to escape burdens marred only by that of a concrete wall of hardened shit that cages it all in. A trolly overflowing with peddlers and refugees and battered lives. A lonely sanction that from one moment to the next may fool the senses into believing its all part of a plan. A God that graffittis “dirtbag” on your face and chest.  A miscarriage of justice that laughs in your defeated face. A placebo fighting the throes of a crippling terminal situation. An exit from the palace with a court filled of laughing jesters, a note in your hand from the queen telling you “we are better off friends.”

That’s what this desert bar is.

“I was watching this show on how people used to meet on this place called Facebook. Said they could trace like 30 percent of US kids ages 19 to 23 as having been spawned by that site. That’s just crazy.”

The host of your narrator’s disdain is a kid roughly 25 years beyond the fetal position. He’s got eyes like a gazelle in heat, at any moment he could discover something so amazing and so worthless at the same time that’s its simply fascinating.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did.”

“Well, this place….its just…it doesn’t seem like a place you’d be. Are you running from something? Is it a woman maybe?”

The bar goes silent as the rock station transitions from the classic John Mayor rendition of Your Body is a Wonderland to something now eclectically modern. The sound of a subtle exhale from a wrangled up kid in white jeans as he puffs some metallic pin-sized stick that glows of neon orange. The silence of three men frozen in tight yellow jump suits dilated eyes computer screens.

“I once killed a man.”

The music does not go softly with a cool breeze, it shuts down abruptly with a whiplash of silence. An older man, younger than me, but old all the same, turns gently towards me with his beaten eyes. Sure, I am old. I am grey’d-long-bearded-horse-voiced-survived by hardly a soul. That’s me and I am not proud of being all alone. But that’s all I can do is be me at this juncture in life’s in-compassionate joyride. The kid’s eyes evolve from gazelle in heat to gazelle giving birth.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” I tell him. The whirling mass of awkward and curiosity continues amongst the few stragglers and vodkas which remain on this cold desert December night.

“It just wasn’t what I was expectin’. I mean, like was it an accident? Or did you have to kill him for some reason? Are you an assassin?”

A deep purple box-like machine erects from the rooms center and a man in black balloon type pants and a tight vest and a stretching black hair over his shoulders approaches. He lifts out the mechanisms cylinder protrusion and holds a glass below it. It spews vodka. The deep purple strobes his chest as he pours, as he turns to speak, it silhouettes him.

“We were expecting you.”

He hands the drink to a waiting patron and scans the patron’s keychain with sensor for payment.

This is the story of the summons that is death’s stairwell. Its the story of humanity at its absolute lowest common denominator. Its the tale of The Death of Shirtless Ben.

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Las Vegas, Nevada. December 31, 2001. Stardust Casino and Hotel.

“You really fucked up. You fucked with the wrong people. You see that guy staring at you back there? That’s my boyfriend. He’s going to kick both of your pathetic asses all the way to the California state line. You are fucking thieves, and pussies. And now you are going to pay with your asses. We called the casino security also, don’t try to run, you fucks are staying put, believe me. This is a citizens arrest!”

As she stood over the table, arms defiantly and militarily crossed, a sense of vengeance in her eyes, I knew that most likely, dinner was totally ruined. There is nothing in this world worse than being arrested by a bat-shit crazy chick and having dinner ruined, its the worst of the worst. No one would argue this point.

“Where is Doyle?” Dave asked me, trying to keep his voice down as not to invoke any further emotional rise from our impending assailant. The entire situation seemed completely incorrigible, hinging solely on one common variable, Doyle. Without Doyle, the whole thing just falls apart in a bad way.

This is the introduction of Doyle: An accidental revolution. This is a tale of chaos, lawlessness and spontaneity. And it will be written in a style that reflects such, because within discord, we may find charm and enchantment, and maybe even, a bit of symmetry.

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Nicky Villar is the single mother of two children, a daughter of 9 years age, a son of 11 years age. She lives a modest, to sometimes, financially strained lifestyle, which is supported by a local bartending job at a brewery. The late night hours take a toll on this single mother, at times, causing her to feel as though there is no end in sight. Nicky’s ex-husband is a slouch, rarely paying child support and frequently communicating excuses and insults towards her.  Her dating life suffers and is at times, inconsequential, she’s had a string of relationships only to fall back into the singular search for love. Nicky does have some friends, at times, she has a night out with the girls whereas she sports a low cut top which reveals her larger-than-normal breast. She drinks apple martinis, she waves her hands in the air in an expression of freedom. She also loathes people that talk on their cell phones in line at the Price Chopper.

Nicky Villar, this ever-working, ever-mothering, ever-love-searching, mother of two, attended Olathe East High School. That’s the same High School I attended. After reading the aforementioned paragraph, you might never guess that Nicky and I have never even once met. Nicky is 37 years old, I am 34. Nicky remains a resident in Olathe, Kansas,  I have lived in Southern California now for over 10 years. Nicky and I have never spoke on the phone, or emailed one another. We certainly aren’t related.

So, at this point, you might be asking how I could possibly be so involved in Nicky’s life? It began on September 19th, when Nicky added me as a friend on Facebook. It ends this morning, from the comfort of my bed, within the rectangular soft-edged frame of my iPhone.

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At the end of August, my girlfriend of three years broke up with me.  The next morning, I woke up to a brand new world. A world that frightened me, a world no longer conquerable. My skin, as it often does when depression sets in, felt of crawling and irritation.

The world had changed. And I hadn’t changed with it.

My entire life has always revolved around the idea of romanticism. And romanticism now seems dead. We now have text messaging. We have Facebook. We have dating sites pawning us off for stints until we can be returned for something more fitting. We are human goods. The world changed abruptly from the chivalrous, into one largely connected-updated-status profile, trafficking one another for short term use.

No longer are the days of just walking up to a girl on the street and completely and totally sweeping her off her feet. Dead are the times we could realize dreams of loving someone at absolute first sight. Love at first sight, these days, exist in Fletcher Jones Mercedes. We are an imprisoned, unambitious society swept away in a world of material goods and computer driven matches. We have the technology to completely alleviate our compassionate responsibilities for one another. In Gone With The Wind, Scarlett realizes that her love for Ashley was that of yearning for the opulent social standards that disease each and every society. When she returns to Rhett, he leaves, hopelessly abandoned by the worlds he once knew to be close to heart. Romanticism is art. And art is passion. We’re a society far to self-involved to realize the dangers posed. Romanticism is rotting away, its decaying, its futile.

And that’s created attrition. Attrition, you know, just walking steadfastly away from it all, without looking backwards, into forever’s fog. Walking away, away from the world you thought you knew and cared for with everything you had. That kind of attrition. Leaving behind only other people’s regrets. Attrition.

Two weeks later, I began searching for destinations world-wide that offered aseptic beaches. There are few left. I began looking into the idea of just building a hut and living remotely and off the land. Never shaving. No iPhone. No Facebook. Just something to write with, some bananas and a breaking surf. My only daily routines would consist of building a hut. Surfing. Eating fruit. And writing. Writing a love story. Maybe even a social manifesto. I dreamed of just waiting for that day when the farthest of all reefs began to break with furious energies, when people from the inner-communities would gather on the beach to watch the majestic surf; magnificent surf so raw and so pure, it can’t be contained or denied by any social infections. And then paddling out. I would have to imagine that in this one desolate, chosen corner of the world, the language spoken between the peoples would be irrelevant, as they would just understand that it was one more sign that an entire world was dying off. I have to also imagine that once my body finds the trapping crevices harnessed by that lowly, unsuspecting reef, I wouldn’t be alone. Never, ever again, would I be alone.

This is the tale of a Modern Day Love Story. I hope you enjoy.

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Its raining. Its pure misery. Everything is slick and sort of feeling that of despondent. That’s fucking LA, on a Saturday in December. What can you do?