My favorite quote from ‘Moby Dick’ again for the ten thousandth time:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.

I’ve always felt that way, and I used to be angry about it. Now I’m just laughing my ass off and having a good old time. Yeah!!

The few things I understand, I really understand

Everything else sure is a big God damn ball of chaos

Lying in bed in the dark and Dante is curled up on my leg and Jessica Pratt is singing and there’s a big-ass moon hanging over Oakland, California

Hunter S. Thompson used to write out pages from ‘The Great Gatsby’ so he could hear what it sounded like on his typewriter. I do this too with books / movie scripts I like. You’re just sort of living in the vapor of something cool that already exists. I get to feel out the creation of a thing, or something. Like, when I watch a movie, I imagine the words on the page. I visualize the script!!! Today I took a scene from ‘Heist’:

I am always thinking about The Deliciousness, which is a weird little concept from ‘Moby-Dick.’ Leila was just in town and we were walking around Oakland and I paraphrased this, because yeah dude, it’s definitely the truth:

We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Man yeah just go ahead and apply that to everything and you’ll be OK I reckon!

For my birthday Laura made me a lavender shooting star cake

 

She also got me a lavender “bubble bar” which I crumbled up and put in the bath. The water turned purple! My skin was very soft afterwards.

Yay thanks Laura ☆ミ

I wrote a letter to Angel Olsen and gave it to my friend Megan Beard to pass on to her. Megan did just that at what she called a Gilmore Girls sleepover (hah!) in Asheville, North Carolina last month. Last night at Missouri Lounge we were havin A FEW BEERS for my 27th birthday and Megan gave me an UPDATE to say Angel Olsen thought it was a nice letter and put it in her room?????

Yeah!

I like her

She’s real cool

(Megan Beard is cool too)

Oakland, California

Last night while Leila and I gorged on a bag of mushrooms at UC Berkeley campus, two old dudes with beards and huge backpacks and beat up acoustic guitars walked by us, one of them saying, “Man, we gotta get the fuck outta Berkeley . . . just hop on a train and go, you know?”

Pictured: Star-Boy and Star-Cat