Sometimes a man, feeling like a hot tube of stupid pathetic meat, stands in a hollowed-out crater of his own self-loathing and says to the universe, “Yeah OK”

Every single god darn night of my life I sit down at my desk to work on one of the many dozens of projects I haven’t been able to finish in six months. And I’ll do a little bit of writing and stare at it and hate it and stand up and fall backwards onto my bed. And then I think, “Well, I really don’t want to be doing anything, period. In fact I’d rather be dead.”

At a bar in Berkeley last night I watched a bunch of grad students sing and flail their bodies around in a way that just made me feel god damn awful. I was sitting alone at the end of the bar holding some shitty beer and I remembered that in one week I will be twenty-six years old.

A lady leaned over and said, “You OK, man?”

And I said, “No. I’m too cynical for this place.”

“Me too. But we’ll always have our dark corner.” She turned away.

I sat there for a few more minutes watching white people pretend to have the time of their lives and decided then that, as a birthday present to myself, I’m going to fly to Nashville in early February and face total annihilation.

I remember one night in Austin I was listening to a song I really liked and a girl came over and I liked her too and when I tried to have her listen to the song she said she didn’t want to

What do you want

What do you god damn animals want from me

Let me lie here

Let me die here

Let me eat my god damn microwaveable popcorn

I was biking home around midnight from some place called The Beer Garden on Telegraph . . . people I barely know had invited me, and I went along because I thought maybe something strange would happen to me.

Nothing happened. I probably sounded like a bitter jerk who doesn’t like anything. I sat there at a picnic table wearing my stupid scarf and drinking a beer that was so bad it made me angry.

But at midnight . . . midnight, midnight . . . I turned onto my street feeling rotten as hell and I flew past a group of people and I swear I heard a guy shout at me: “When’d you lose your mind, man?”

And I thought, jesus, they’re really going to kill me one of these days.

Make it sooner than later, I thought.

Lose my mind? When?

“Ten god damn years ago!” I should have said. Instead I said nothing. I’m not even sure if he was real.

I want to say to the Grim Reaper, “What’s it like to be you?”

And I’ll bet that big bastard would bend over and get right in my face

He’d open his mouth wide and release the screams of a billion lost souls writhing in the terrible darkness of eternity

And then he’d stand up and wipe the bile off his chin and we’d go for a walk

Oakland, California is the Island of Misfit Toys

It is the canary in the coal mine for the apocalypse

It is the Freak Kingdom

And I’m just another freak

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more aware of my smallness. I look around and I’m surrounded by beasts.

After the moon splits in half over the flaming cities of earth, the big ones will eat the little ones. Or kill them for sport probably. One day, I think, some hulking, drooling ogre is going to rip my spine from my body and laugh like hell about it. And I guess I’ll just be small and dead.

Last night I saw that new Spike Jonze film, which I guess is called her (lowercase “H”) (★★ (out of four)), and I sure did like that first hour. And then I started shifting in my seat because I didn’t really want to be there in that theater anymore, and then the film took a nosedive and got sentimental and cheap and saccharine sweet and I thought, “Well, I definitely want to leave now” and I made some sounds with my mouth and didn’t look at the screen during a few scenes because I felt repulsed and betrayed that the movie I had enjoyed so much only an hour before had turned into a Hallmark greeting card.

Anyway: there were flickering moments of genius, and I liked those flickering moments. For instance at one point Theodore, the protagonist, is lying in bed in the middle of the night in his Los Angeles high-rise apartment, and he’s talking to his computer girlfriend, saying something like, “Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever going to feel, and that all the emotions I’ll experience for the rest of my life will just be lesser versions of those original ones.”

And when I heard this I nervously darted my eyes back and forth, thinking, oh god, they know—they know and now they’re going to kill me now. They’ve read my thoughts and they’ve watched my dreams.

That was my favorite scene in the movie, probably because it made me feel anything at all. And I quote unquote related to it. The end!!!!!