Well: I’m almost done with my store. It is beautiful and cool. Maybe it sucks. I don’t know!

I have completely written out the next Gritt Calhoon tale, which is called:

GRITT CALHOON AND THE BIG-ASS HOLE IN THE GROUND

. . . Y’all ain’t ready for this’n. It is alive and hideous inside my brain, and that’s bad news for everybody. It is going to be the first new thing I publish through my little vanity publishing company. They might not let me write anything after this. Maybe . . . maybe I won’t let myself write anything after this!

Now I will briefly tell you what it is about: Gritt is traveling through space in his little one-seater vessel. He’s cruisin around, listenin to some hot tunes, havin himself a heck of a good ol time. For reasons that will be revealed later, he has to make a pit stop on a small asteroid to use a gas station restroom. He discovers that the asteroid is made out of a sort of marshmallow fluff material. Coupled with the low gravity, Gritt, the hardest dude in the galaxy, finds himself in a soft and bouncy world. And it is here he stumbles upon a massive sinkhole. It is truly huge. He jumps inside.

Yeah. What’s inside? Haint’ gonna tell you. All I can say is: hold onto your butts, cuz it’s about to get spooky in here.

Tomorrow (or rather, later this afternoon (it is nearly 6 a.m. don’t you know)), I am going to drive to IKEA (are you supposed to capitalize it?) and get me some soft-serve frozen yogurt. Last time I was there they had a vanilla-stawberry swirl. And before that, a vanilla-mint swirl. Between you and me, the mint was way better. But that’s just one man’s opinion, and really, what do I know.

I think I might buy a lamp, too. Like a $5 lamp. I want to put a lamp on the little apple crate next to my bed and read at night. As it stands I have to go other places to read. It’s driving me nuts. God dang it, I want to read in bed.

What else am I going to do in that rat’s maze of junk? Walk around by myself, maybe listening to music. I’m going to lay on the beds and chill so hard.

Later I am going to walk across the Hawthorne Bridge and hang out downtown. Downtown Portland, like nearly every downtown I can think of, kind of blows. I mean it’s OK. There are some good parks. There is a really good 24-hour diner there and sometimes I go there alone. If you go a little ways west, you’ll hit some nice moss-covered cemeteries. It really is beautiful once you get just a mile or so out of the city. I guess that’s the benefit of this city having rigid boundaries and also being inside this very green and lush state. Hell, there you go.

You know, I was thinking about legally changing my name. I will probably not do this. I figure you either get to change your legal name, or you get a gold tooth. How on earth could I get away with both? I don’t think I could. I am perfectly all right with living inside my own strange orbit, but that’s too much. Maybe I’ll do both eventually. I’ll feel it out. I’ll get that gold tooth and see how I feel about making any other potentially human-alienating changes to my life. What else am I going to do with myself? God only knows, man.

In Oakland, I had ‘The Fool’ on my door. I don’t know what happened to it. I think maybe I put it in a book for safekeeping, and then forgot which book I put it in, and now it’s lost. Oh well! I picked a new card. I guess, in some sense, I have graduated from The Fool into this guy:

Yeah, baby. I’m a dead dude with ten swords in my dead back lying prone beneath a dead black sky.

The label reads: “CLEARS TOTAL BLOCKAGES GUARANTEED!”

Blockages, huh. Lord knows I’ve got a few of those.

. . . I will report back with my findings in the morning~~~

aka see y’all at my funeral, suckers!!!!!

I don’t want to say too much about this, because I could go on forever, and a lot of this is like a systemic problem of every major American city, and I don’t want to offend anyone, and so on. . . .

But here are a few things that are driving me insane about this doughy, white-bread, cheesedick city I am in (which I consider myself to be a short-term visitor of, and not a resident). The city, by the way, begins with a “P” and is in the otherwise cool state of Oregon. I’ll let you figure it out!!

Anyway:

I haven’t seen a non-white person in over a month.
It’s true! I also haven’t seen anyone over the age of 35 (or under the age of 16) in about as long. I don’t see old people. I don’t see children. I don’t see anyone who isn’t a capital-W capital-P “White Person.” Everywhere I go, someone is dressed like Pinocchio (yes), or wearing a brand new denim jacket, or arguing about non-GMO foods, or proudly displaying a “VEGAN” tattoo while chain-smoking and holding a Rainier tallboy. As I have mentioned previously, most of these people are harmless. Generally they are obnoxious and annoying, and vain and superficial, and wrapped up in their own idea of coolness— which, hey, whatever. But some of them are all those things, and are also huge dicks. They are usually not from this city, though—they are from the Midwest.

Everyone is soft and unchallenged.
Unless you hate gourmet cupcakes and artisanal cheese and small-batch craft beer (uh oh, that’s me), you never really have to feel uncomfortable here. At worst, some meth head downtown will hallucinate that you are their dead uncle or something, and they’ll start screaming at you. But you just keep on walking. I’ve watched hundreds of people do this. Otherwise everyone here just drinks coffee and beer, and eats at overhyped food trucks and fad restaurants that the New York Times wrote a blurb about two years ago. If you were to eavesdrop on any conversation here (or, worse, be cursed with a hyper-sensitivity to the people around you to the point where you can’t not hear them (uh oh, that’s me)), you will hear people talking about their favorite brunch spots, or some dumb bar that has “a sick happy hour, dude.” People are always describing other times they’ve been drunk. Every single day of my life I hear a human being talk about a cocktail they had that was “so insane.” C’mon, man. Who are you kidding with that shit. It’s a fucking beverage.

Boutique-ification and the ubiquity of sterile, inhuman, slippery, frictionless environments.
This is affecting every city I can think of, but maybe this is the city where it was born. Everything is a boutique here. Everything is cute and safe and was designed by some asshole graphic designer who wears argyle socks and wood-framed glasses. My friend Natalie bought me lunch the other day (because “You seem bummed out, dude” ((thanx Natalie)), and Lord have mercy was this restaurant the worst place I’ve ever been. It was so try-hard. I mean, Natalie thought so too, so I’m not being mean. I got a “quinoa burger” on a “plant-based” bun, and I’ll tell you what, that patty did not want to be on that bun. It slipped around between the bread like a greased up hockey puck.

When I went to throw my trash away, this is what I had to deal with:

Oh my GOD shut up with this stuff. “Pint glass happy place” made me roll my eyes so hard I heard my eyeballs scrape against the inside of my skull. Everything is like this. Instead of using one or two time-tested, bullshit-and-jargon-free words, everything in this city has to use a fucking paragraph of worthless cuddly baby-talk just to tell you how to throw your garbage away. I’m surprised this sign didn’t also teach me how to tie my shoes or wipe my ass.

I feel like I am that patty, and the city is the bun. I am slipping around here because there is nothing to hang on to. I walk past these artisanal ice cream joints (which have a line around the block from sunup to sundown (seriously)), and these fancy bars and restaurants and so on, and inside I see totally frictionless environments that I can’t imagine any warm-blooded non-reptilian human feeling comfortable occupying. I would honestly rather hang out in a funeral home or a Chuck E. Cheese parking lot than drink a $12 beer in one of these places. There is just something off about them. It all looks so clean and modular—like they built the whole place seconds before you walked past the window. Now take a pub or a family-owned restaurant in Chicago, for instance, and it feels like a place where, for decades, humans have gotten comfortable, and have had conversations and experienced things, and so on. It feels, uh, like a real place. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to sit at a table that is one molded piece of plastic, or on weird, hip, backless chairs tucked beneath a “repurposed” chessboard.

When people come to visit me, they ask me what I do here, and I have no idea what to tell them.
I walk around at night. That’s about all I do when I leave my house. I don’t even go grocery shopping unless it’s nighttime, because that means there are less of those lizard-y schlubs walking around my neighborhood. I don’t go to any bars, I don’t go to any restaurants, I don’t go downtown. I honestly have no idea what you’re supposed to do here. Everyone seems to eat and drink and then go hang out in a basement with the same people they’ve been hanging out with since 9th grade. I swear I’m not being mean here—that’s actually what it’s like. The entire economy seems to be based on comforting people, and little else. You might be surprised to know that there’s a police department, and hospitals, and schools, and so on. This is actually a place where people live and work, but for the most part all of this is behind the scenes, and you don’t often encounter it. The city just kind of comes across like Disneyland for people who have pins for all their favorite bands on their jackets.

There are very few personality types here.
Almost every dude you meet here is exactly the same. I don’t know any of them for this reason. Though, hell, I guess you’d only need to know one of them to get the whole experience, because then you’d pretty much know everyone in the whole city. Also, everyone you talk to seems to have this arcane knowledge of every piece of media they’ve consumed. You mention a band you like, and someone will say something like: “The bassist had a side-project in the mid-70s, and he put out this incredible EP . . . I think there were only a few hundred copies pressed, and they were Japan exclusives, but if you can track down a copy, it’s some of the most insane stuff you’ve ever heard.” It’s almost like everyone reads the same Wikipedia articles, or something. Often conversations will terminate with: “His early work is so good . . . it’s like this French impressionist, film noir-feeling stuff . . . really surreal.” “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” “It’s good.” “Yeah, it is.”

It feels like living in a toothless boring limbo.
No one I know loves it here. It’s just “OK.” This city does not in any way elicit any strong emotions in anyone I know. They’ll shrug and say, Well, where else would I go? Man, that’s a weird way to feel about the place where you spend all your time! I myself find that I can’t really get a lock on anything here. It’s hard for me to feel anything at all. This place has no teeth. It has no balls. It has no grit, and nothing to chew on. It is a colorless, odorless dollop of protoplasm.

Couples dress alike and it’s terrifying to watch them make out.
This might actually be the worst one! Everywhere you go, you are bound to see a few couples wearing the exact same clothes. Often they have the same haircuts too! And the same glasses! And shoes! Holy lord!! And because it seems like everyone is always on a god darn date, you’ll see them making out all over the place: in parks, in restaurants, in bars, at bus stops. You can see how this would be absolutely horrifying if the people who are making out look exactly like each other! Do they really just want to fuck themselves?? Also, why does it seem like these couple are always wearing striped shirts and denim jackets. . . ? Why is that a thing???

My friend Stevie said to me the other day: “This place would be great if no one lived here.” I have felt this same thing many many times. Whenever I go out walking at night, not encountering a single other human (the city shuts down at 8 p.m.), I’ll always think, “This is great! What a beautiful place!!!” But then the sun comes up, and uh oh, it’s filled with cheese-eating marshmallow people again.

The river is nice. The weather is nice. There are seasons. It snows. There are flowers, mostly roses, all over the place. There is very little crime. The state of Oregon is progressive and really does take care of its people. You’re surrounded in every direction by beautiful forests. Looming in the distance is an inactive volcano that you can drive to in about an hour. The ocean is only an hour away too.

. . . it’s just too bad about everything else!!!!

Oh man, I found this too. That’s me and my friends Carrie and Rob (from Deer Tick!!) in some shitty bar in Nashville a few Christmases ago. I guess me and Carrie look like we could be vampiric brother and sister here??

Also: Carrie done gone and got herself a husband and a kid too. As someone who is typically indifferent to the existence of children, I gotta say, she made a good one. That baby looks so cool. I gotta go see that baby sometime.

Rob, where are you? I haven’t talked to you in a while, ya god dang rascal.

Whoa!! Look what I found the other day. That’s me and my buddy Erin in Austin . . . I think sometime in 2012, probably the summer. She took me to this terrible party. It was so bad that we went into the house and put on dumb hats.

I looked her up the other day. Girl done got herself a husband and a kid now. She probably thinks I’m dead. Hell, I would too.

(Man, good thing I got rid of that mustache, huh.)

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one—in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that—as it that weren’t enough—but you, like Fat, ponder forever over those fluctuations in an effort to order them into coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes it s place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.

It was a mainstay of Kevin’s bag of verbal tricks that the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they would force payment.

I am reading ‘VALIS,’ and I’ll be god darned if it ain’t The Real Stuff.

As my friend McCune once said, seconds before he pressed play on ‘Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome’ (yeeeaaahhh!!!): “We live in a world where ‘War & Peace’ exists, and people read those Harry Potter books instead.”

I don’t know how it happened, but I have really good health insurance. Man, I don’t pay a cent for anything. Hell I ain’t even have any copays. It’s real cool, you know, to be able to see a doctor and a dentist again. It’d been a few years.

Since I got that little card in the mail, I have done the following:

• got me a general practitioner
• physical (I’m good!!)
• STD test (I’m clean!!)
• vaccinations for tetanus, HPV, the flu . . . maybe more??
• had all my medications paid for
• had my vision checked by an optometrist, who told me I might be going blind
• had my vision ultra-checked by a team of technicians and opthamolcigsts, who told me I was absolutely in no way going blind

Next week I am going to:

• get my teeth cleaned
• get “fitted” for a gold tooth
• see a dermatologist, because why the heck not

It feels like getting a tuneup and an oil change and new brakes and tires and so on. I’m just knocking all this stuff out at once. I mean, hell. It’s nice.

Tangentially related: These days my diet is fruit, cabbage, spinach, eggs, rice, quinoa, black and red beans, coconut milk (lol), and about a gallon of tea a day. About once a week I’ll drink a whole bottle of red wine by myself in a cemetery. I guess besides self-loathing that’s the closest thing I have to a vice.

Anyway this here body of mine is pretty OK for now!!!! Yeah!!!!!!

how much longer is the FBI going to let me get away with this

A video posted by ryan starsailor ☆ミ (@starpuncher) on Jul 9, 2016 at 9:10pm PDT

Well, I think this might be my masterpiece.

Oh: Before I lay me down to sleep, and pray the Lord my soul to keep, and so on, I wanted to show you a thing I’ve been working on, which is the KING METEOR store. Now listen, I know it would be much easier for me to just use something like Big Cartel, or Shopify, or whatever else the kids use, but I wanted to build my own thing because I like building my own things, and I like having control of my own things in the event that whichever service I’m using gets bought up, or shuts down, or whatever the hell else happens to websites in these dark and trying times.

I am going to use Gumroad, which I believe doles out unique PDF codes, to sell digital copies of the books I have written and am currently writing. But the source of all this will be the store I’m building. It is nearly finished. Every digital thing in it will be choose-your-own price, since there’s no overhead for me, and because I regard a lot of it is too bizarre and esoteric to ever fascinate what you might call a normal person. Though, who knows. At any rate, I don’t expect to make a dime off of this. Anything more than zero will be an unexpected bounty for me. I just wanted something to do, and it keeps me inside and away from any trouble I might otherwise get myself into.

This is a tiny little baby taste of what it looks like so far:

That’s right, punks: I’m doing audio versions. I have already recorded a few of them. It uhhh fries the hell out of my voice, so I can only do one a day. Also, my friend McCune is doing some doom-y / drone-y background noise-things for them. It’s going to be so hot. You have no idea, man.

And: My roommate volunteers at a printing press near our house. I’m going to make fifty or so copies of every book, and probably have a box of them in my garage for the next ten years. Anyway I reckon it’ll still be real cool to make them, and to hold them and flip through them, and so on.

I’m launching it soon. Maybe next week. Maybe not! I guess we’ll both find out soon enough.

Sweet dreams my darlings~~