Last summer I drove to Berkeley and ate a bag of mushrooms beneath the campus clocktower. I walked around in the dark for hours, climbing on walls and trees and befriending stray cats. I even called my little sister and had a long conversation as the sun came up. It was really cool.

One memory sticks out more than any other: I remember wandering over to the library in the center of campus where they have newspapers from all over the world hung up in these plastic display frames. And as I stood there reading them, I thought, “Man. I really have absolutely no idea what’s going on anywhere.”

Today I realized this has not changed at all!

I think Leila took this when she was here for my birthday

This was basically my whole day:

In all honesty I consider it an air-thin miracle that I wake up every morning and I’m still surrounded by four walls, or that when I turn on the faucet water pours out, or that when I flip a lightswitch the lights come on. And I don’t just mean that I pay my utilities— I mean it’s amazing to me that there is anything reliable at all in the universe. It is still a big miserable glued-and-duct-taped-together mass of chaos and dumb luck, but when a few things work it is a nice thing to me at least.

I’m probably only two or three months away from dressing like Tetsuo at the end of Akira for the rest of my life

For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.

. . . and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

This book was written 160 years ago and every time I read parts like this I want to scream because it’s about a billion times better than any of the cheap trash they expect us to relate to today

The other week I was walking through the deserted 1980s industrial landscape of Emeryville and as I neared an old woman walking her dog, she surveyed me with her cruel old eyes, yanked on the dog’s collar, and created a twenty-foot barrier between us.

Man! It was really weird. The thing is, the sun was still out. It’s not like it was the middle of the night or anything.

I wasn’t offended! I don’t think anything offends me anymore. She thought I was some sort of degenerate. God, yeah!

Just uhhh

Just going to go ahead and say this one last time (probably not) for anyone who might be reading this and who could also maybe give me a cool job:

I am absolutely 100% sick and tired of having no god damn money

. . . For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

This is a paragraph about a whale

Whoa