to whoever left all that firewood on my doorstep: thanks! i made a big fire with it. i hope you did not lace it with a toxic chemical.

me on christmas day 15 years ago:

me on christmas day yesterday:


I hate to use the word “curate,” I really do, but maybe it is the only word that fits here: I have seen so many people I know become totally warped by this obsessive desire to curate their lives for an online audience of mostly strangers. I reckon all of this began a long time ago. 

I was nine years old when I first started making websites and hangin out online, and back then (lol) it wasn’t so much about who you were. Actually one of the most appealing aspects of the internet, at least to me, was not having to be a person or play into a personality. And then of course everything changed, and now the internet is all about you, and me, and everyone else, and on and on—so many people it makes you want to throw up.

I have mentioned before that you see these kids in Portland (and anywhere else for that matter) standing around in a way that indicates to me that they are waiting to have their picture taken. They’re holding cigarettes and walking and standing and making facial expressions in this creepy sort of calculated way—posing for pictures, more or less, and hoping someone will notice them!! Oh, God! What a nightmare this world is.

The more sinister form of this invisible disease is that people pretend to be one person online while being a completely different person . . . in person! I have a feeling this sort of thing is mostly subconscious, but it still creeps me out hecka hard. Like 99% of the time when I greatly dislike someone’s quote unquote online presence, I actually really like them in person. What a weird feeling! And really, that’s the nicest thing I could say about someone: “I like you so much that it makes me real sad that you would pretend to be anybody else.”

Heck, man, why not just be the same thing all the time? Why obfuscate it to seem like a perfectly normal and functional person??

And don’t you know that hardly anybody is truly normal and/or functional—whatever that even means to begin with???

Stop being insincere!!! Stop posing for pictures!!!!!!

Who cares about those reptiles!! Just freakin live, baby!!

ugh!~!!!

I want to write more about this later, because other than money it may be my greatest enemy, but I will say this:

Remember in ‘Blade Runner’ when Deckard reveals to Rachael that he knows her memories and dreams?

Alone and drunk in his apartment, Deckard dreams of a unicorn running through a forest. Later, he finds an origami unicorn outside of his apartment door, which was left there by Gaff. Does Gaff know Deckard’s dreams?

Is Deckard a replicant too??

Anyway: As I said, I have a great enemy—a great fear!—which is that I’m not exactly sure where my memories and dreams come from, or why they’re there, or anything like that. I told Hali last winter that I had gotten to a point where my own past was foreign to me. My history may as well have been someone else’s, and that maybe nothing had ever happened to me at all. I had all these memories built up in my brain, but they’re not really mine. They were created and experienced by someone else who may or may not have been a younger version of me. That’s what it feels like anyway.

I’m not suggesting I’m an android! (I mean, maybe. . . .)

What I’m saying is that I am often horrified when recalling the past, because I can’t remember how any of it ended up in my brain. I remember (I think) a time when I felt connected to the things I had done and had been through and seen and so on. But now I’m not sure. In dreams, as Madonna points out, there is no end and no beginning. Remember? In a dream you are thrown into the middle of it. You can’t remember how or when or why you got there, and should you drift off into another dream, or just plain old wake up, there is no logical conclusion to the thing you just experienced. It blurs and becomes something else equally jarring and weird.

Uh-oh! Am I living inside of a dream?

I am willing to accept that I am dreaming, and I am willing to bet that all of you are dreaming too. Have you dreamed me up or have I dreamed you up?

Are we dreaming together—dreaming simultaneously and occupying this one realm???

. . . or are we the dream of the universe? Are we the universe’s dream?

Is God the universe? Is the universe God?

Are we God’s dream?

What happens when God wakes up???