^_^

(that’s a link (please don’t look at it on a phone (yet (it is kinda broken))))

I would give just about anything to wake up to Laura making coffee, and Tracey making soup, and then getting dressed to go work at Donut Farm . . . and coming home and watching a movie with Dante with the patio doors open in my room, and later that night suiting up and going to work the door at Wolfhound.

Yeah. I would pack a van and move back to my home in a heartbeat to do that. ;-(

Hey baby, if you ain’t takin a bath for the entire duration of an album you have playing in the bathroom, then you ain’t doin it right.

Bathing is, I think, the only real luxury in my life.

(lol)

So make it count, my babies. I live in that tub till I got something else to do outside of it.

Yup!

Listen: I spent most of my teenage years listening to German industrial music. I’m not sure exactly why it was so appealing to me at the time. I liked a lot of those bands but I liked KMFDM the most.

My brother gave me two CDs when I was 10: ‘Business as Usual’ by Men at Work (lol), and ‘Nihil’ by KMFDM. Man, I had such a good time with ‘Nihil.’ It sounded totally alien to me. Like, I couldn’t imagine how they were making those sounds. Or at any rate I had never heard anything like that.

I don’t think I actively tried to hide it from my parents, but I only listened to it at night after everyone had gone to sleep. I mean, it’s weird dark stuff. I didn’t have a CD player so I would put it in my Playstation and listen to it through my TV speakers. That sounds so romantic now, but keep in mind it looked like this:

I didn’t even have the actual jewel case, just the CD, so I only knew the songs as numbers. (My favorite numbers were 2 and 7. I thought those were great.) Though it’s a shame, because at the time I had no idea how sweet the actual cover art was:

In high school I actually ended up seeing KMFDM at the 9:30 Club in D.C. My brother took me! I also went with my friend Meg, who I thought I was in love with (lol). For weeks before the show I had been emailing their tour manager, a dude named Jeff. I’m not sure what I said to become an endearing figure to him, but he told me to find him before the show and he’d hook me up with all-access passes. I met up with Jeff and he gave me three passes (I still have it somewhere.) After the show we went up to the balcony and met the band. My brother got hammered with the drummer. Everyone was real cool and friendly. I have pictures of us posing with them somewhere. . . .

I saw them a few more times when I was in high school. I was alone at those shows. Afterwards I always hung out with the main dude Sasha K. I would say, “Do you remember me?” and he would say, “Of course I remember you, man.” Once, we were sitting in these chairs on the upper level, and this girl came over and asked him to sign her chest. Dude sighed and reluctantly did so. She hung around after that, trying to talk to him, and man this was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me at that point in my life. He said: “I’ll have to meet up with you later. I’m having a conversation with my friend Ryan.” He was talking about me!!!! He offered me a cigarette (I was 15!!!) and we sure did sit there and smoke that cigarette together.

Sasha and I used to email each other a lot. I was going to design the KMFDM website but their record company ended up hiring a dude to do it. I also gave him a pair of boots. I haven’t spoken to him in ten years. I think he moved back to Germany. Hell, I should get in touch with that dude. . . .

(I just remembered I have a picture of his wife Lucia kissing me on the cheek. At the time I guess that was the second-coolest thing that ever happened to me???)

I want to conclude this thing, whatever it is, by appreciating some of their best cover art. When I look at these now, I realize that my great love of white text on a black background and using negative space was probably solidified when I held these albums in my hand. They’re bold and pulpy, ain’t they? A guy name BRUTE makes them. We used to email each other back in the day toooooo. He’s a really cool dude and he does cool stuff.

I had T-shirts with a few of these designs on them. One or two of them got me in trouble at school. Hah!!

Anyway:

(‘SPLIT’ is definitely the coolest one, isn’t it?)

Listen: I have to get out of this city. It is killing me in a soft and ghostly way. This place sucks, man. I walk out my front door and I have zero curiosity about what lies beyond the places I go To Do Stuff (work, grocery store, et cetera). There is no going back to Austin. It is overrun and expensive and not at all the same as it was when I lived there. I have no home on the East Coast anymore, and no desire to be over there. The Bay is prohibitively expensive. And on and on.

I have received a few emails recently about jobs I applied for, all of them saying, more or less: “We like you, but unfortunately your application is not being considered for the next round.” I can never make it to that final round, man.

With the exception of one or two of my friends, the rest of my friends are all stuck in the same shit situation. Which is to say: having catastrophically bland and unfulfilling / low-paying jobs, perpetually being broke, mired in a deep depression bordering on total hopelessness, and a lack of enjoyment from the things we actually do like and find joy in!! ;-(

These are all smart and talented people. Why does it have to be like this? It can’t just be us that’s the problem. There are external forces at play that are much more powerful than our worthless efforts for a better life. Perhaps we live in an overcrowded world with too few good jobs to go around . . . not to mention we are living in the final days of the American Empire! Oh baby!! Oh baby baby.

I work full-time and I’m lucky to have ten bucks left over at the end of the month. Think about that! That’s not even an exaggeration. Even one of my paychecks isn’t enough to cover my rent. If one small unforeseen crisis were to emerge in my life, I would face total financial ruin. And have!

I didn’t move to this city because I thought it was cool (it’s not (at all))—I moved here to save money and to sometimes feel all right. Hell, that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, near as I can tell. All I can do is take care of my body and take care of my cat and hope to God one of these companies emails me back. Most of them don’t even do that. It’s not so much getting to the final round that’s difficult . . . it’s getting someone to acknowledge you at all. Hah!

Man! If I had time to do anything else other than survive and self-loathe then I guess I sure would enjoy updating this website.

I wish I had never known a lot of people, especially people I knew for long periods of time, and who I liked a whole lot. Their absence makes my brain feel as though it is punched out, like a timecard, full of black holes and empty spaces. Man, it blows. I don’t want to think about them at all, and not because I don’t like them anymore, but because I still like them and miss being around them. I am mostly alone now, and so I can’t help but fall into it sometimes.

I promise I am not being dramatic when I say I have less and less than I did in previous years. Were I to, uh, create a graph of some sort, I could trace all the things I have lost, and how nothing else has come to take their place. I mean big huge important things, too! And not only that, but my self-imposed exile or quarantine from whatever else is going outside my house has warped me, or has at least led me further away from being able to relate to most people.

Uh oh! Oh well!!

In my dream, a man stood with his arms folded, and I approached him and asked him his name. He said: “Murderer.” His name was Murderer! I felt a great fear wash over me when he said that!—so of course I punched him in the face and ran away as fast as I could. I fell into a hole, and through a dark tunnel, and then through the ceiling of my bedroom, and landed on my bed. My friend Kerwin was sitting in the far corner reading a book called “Programming Theory.” I put a movie on and we chilled real hard.

Ahhhh!! I made a cute li’l icon for the forum I’m making. Here it is:

It’s a cute li’l ghost hiding behind a cute li’l ghost house. It’s gonna be a good old time. Didn’t you know? I’m going to make Hali an administrator and have her temporarily ban people at random.

Well! I feel horribly depressed and hopeless so I’m going to sleep now!!!