I finished ‘Steppenwolf’ last night

It was real good

Yup

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.

yeah

The other night before I went to work I wrote about my cat Dante’s gigantic vet bill. I asked y’all for help. I sent the link to my friends Jackson and Brandon and Tracey, all of whom have tons of Twitter followers, and asked them to spread the message around. And they did! (And EMi Spicer did too!!) (And my sister wrote up a nice li’l thing about it!)

I put on my jacket and walked to work. It was pouring outside. I felt like a big sack of horseshit. I wondered just what in the heck I was going to do to help Dante. I tried to be realistic about it—tried to remember that this was probably all on me!

Well: My friends saved me. Their message sure did get out. It circulated real fast. My phone vibrated in my back pocket pretty much nonstop while I was work. I kept getting Paypal emails. Within two hours, I had raised half of Dante’s vet bill. Within four hours, his bill was totally covered. I felt pretty overwhelmed by this! When I got home from work at 3 in the morning, I started crying. I couldn’t believe how nice everyone had been to me. I had received so many donations from so many people, most of them total strangers. People included little messages saying they hoped Dante felt better soon, or that they had had astronomical vet bills and understood what I was going through, or that they themselves had cats they loved more than life itself, and so on.

I went to sleep!

When I woke up in the morning, I had probably 25 more donations. I have now raised enough money to pay for Dante’s surgery and (hopefully) most of his post-surgery treatment. What the heck! You beautiful people!

Here is a list of all the people who donated—all 53 of them! I went through my Paypal / Square Cash history and tried to compile this list as best as I could. There were a lot of names to sort through! I hope I didn’t forget anyone!! If I used your full name, it’s because I know you and figured you wouldn’t mind if I did that. I also turned your name into a link if there was a thing to link to!

Beautiful generous friends of Dante and Ryan:

1. Jackson Broussard
2. Brandon Sheffield
3. Zak “Delicious” McCune
4. Tracey Lien
5. Laura Rokas
6. Anna Anthropy
7. Nick Splendorr
8. Elizabeth Simins
9. EMi Spicer
10. Megan Farokhmanesh
11. Mable Palombo
12. Skip Bronkie
13. Stevie Lorann
14. Hannah Knight
15. Vito Gesualdi
16. Darin Holden
17. Ella Higgins
18. Monty Yrigoye
19. Ellen Porczak
20. Mikaylah Walper
21. Eva Bronkie
22. Caitlin Tedrow
23. Mitch Corvus
24. Sidney Lien
25. Joey Hodges
26. Karen R.
27. Christina C.
28. Sean C.
29. Carly W.
30. Janan A.
31. Melissa F.-L.
32. Zach G.
33. Cassidy W.
34. Stephanie W.
35. Aivi T.
36. Hugh B.
37. Liz I.
38. Corey E.
39. Joanne L.
40. Jon S.
41. Alexander M.
42. Dawson D.
43. Nick D.
44. Donna W.
45. Alithia R.
46. Kayla F.
47. Em J.
48. Karen R.
49. Janan A.
50. Tessa L.
51. Samantha K.
52. Catherine W.
53. Shane M.

Lord! Thank you so much!!!

Dante’s surgery is on Friday. I’m going to drop him off in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon. They’re going to take tissue samples from various parts of his small intestines, and I think from some of his lymph nodes too. They say I will have the biopsy results in 7–14 days. It might be cancer or it might not be. I really hope it isn’t cancer. If it is, then they’ll start treating him immediately. If it turns out to be inflammation, then I think they put him on steroids for a little while.

Anyway: I’ll let you know how it goes. For now he is eating and drinking, has put back on the pound or so that he lost, and has not thrown up since last week. If you live in Portland and want to come visit him this weekend while he’s recovering, just text me or something!

Thanks again for helping out me and my friend Dante. I uhhhh still can’t believe it. Y’all are great. Thanx for being great~ ☆彡

Nine years ago when I was living in Baltimore, I saw an ad online about a litter of kittens a woman was trying to adopt out. I emailed the woman and she gave me her address. She lived on Lombard Street in downtown Baltimore. She told me she had gotten dozens and dozens of emails about the kittens, and if I wanted one I had to be quick. I left immediately and went to her house. There were four kittens in all. There was an orange one, a brown one, and two grey kittens. I told her I wanted the orange kitten and the smaller of the two grey kittens. She said: “Are you sure? He’s the runt. I’ve gotten emails about all of them except for him cuz he’s so small.” I told her, god dang, I want that runt. She brought him over to me and I put him on my shoulder. He was seven weeks old and fit in the palm of my hand. I named him Dante.

Dante and I have been good friends ever since that day. That dude is my little buddy. I tell people all the time, I say, “You could stab me or burn everything I own and I wouldn’t care so long as Dante was OK.” I care about Dante more than anything else in my whole dumb life. If I didn’t have Dante I don’t know what the heck I’d do.

About a week ago Dante started to get sick. He was throwing up multiple times a day and skulking around and hiding. I drove him to the vet near my house and they took his temperature, checked his ears and gums, and on and on. On the outside he was perfectly healthy. He didn’t even have a fever. They sent me home with meds which didn’t really do anything for him. Dante kept feeling sick.

I have taken Dante back to the vet three times since then. Once for another checkup, then to have blood work done, and finally I took him yesterday to have an ultrasound done.

Dante’s blood work was completely normal, but his ultrasound revealed that his intestinal lining has thickened, which is what’s making it difficult for him to process food. The vet said that this sort of thing generally only happens for one of two reasons: either the cat has developed intestinal bowel disease (IBD), which is very common, or the cat is in the early stages of intestinal lymphoma, which is also common.

Tons of cats have IBD. I think I read that half of cats over the age of 9 develop it sooner or later. My sister’s cat had it. It’s very treatable and is generally only an inconvenience that shows up every now and then.

Lymphoma is obviously a type of cancer. The prognosis for intestinal lymphoma in cats is good, but it’s much more expensive to treat, and it’s also cancer.

There is only one way to truly know which one a cat is suffering from, and that is to perform an intestinal biopsy, which is a minor surgery. Otherwise you’re blindly medicating a cat for an illness they may not even have. If they have lymphoma and you’re treating them for IBD, that’s bad news for everyone.

An intestinal biopsy is extremely expensive. It costs about $1,200. I’m going to have to come up with the money in the next few days so I can treat Dante and make sure he’s on the right medication.

This is what I’m looking at:

I feel ashamed about this next part, but here it is anyway:

My parents and a few of my friends have offered to pitch in and help Dante, and I’m going to spend every last dime I have on this surgery. But because I’ve already spent $700+ just in vet visits alone, I’m strapped as heck right now.

Man, I kinda need some help!

I send this message out into the darkness of space and time: Please! If you can hear me, and you’ve got a couple bucks layin around, and you wanna help out some poor old fool and his beautiful cat-friend Dante Starsailor, I would really appreciate it! I would be so happy! Heck, man. Even $5 would put me in a good spot.

I have a

Paypal

and I got that

Square Cash

Should you decide to help me out, please know that every single cent will go towards Dante’s medical bills. I’m already looking around my room thinking, you know, what can I sell to make some money. And I’m taking on as many freelance projects as I can. And I’m gonna do some outpatient clinical trials and get another job, and on and on. Listen! I gotta take care of this dude!

I’m also launching my store tomorrow, so if you wanna help me out by paying for some of the little books I’ve written, there’s that route too. In fact that feels cleaner to me, and makes me feel less ashamed. I’ll post a link when it launches~

For real! I appreciate your help! And for even reading this in the first place! I love Dante more than anything else in the whole world, and if I could trade places with him and feel all his pain for him, I would. But for now all I can do is stare at this astronomically high vet bill and think that, when you really get down to it, having a physical body is a godawful thing.

Poor little Dante. My friend! My runt! All I want is for his little body to feel better.

Thank you, everyone~ ☆彡

STAY CLOSE, LITTLE ONE
AND I WILL GIVE YOU GOLD.
WE’LL STAY UP LATE
AND LEARN TO HATE
THE BITTER, BITTER COLD.

Tonight for DUDES DONE WRONG we watched Charles Bronson get revenge on the world in the 1974 classic “DEATH WISH” . . . and, yeah baby!!!

Feast your eyes on this, you jerks:

Y’all shoulda be there! Unless of course you were there, in which case I say: “Didn’t that rule???”

I can’t sleep. I haven’t really slept in over ten years. I couldn’t sleep when I was a kid either but I could at least sleep better than I do now!

This is what I have to do to sedate myself:

Thirty minutes before I go to sleep I drink a cup of warm water mixed with a tablespoon of magnesium citrate powder. Then I pop a freakin melatonin tablet. I read until my eyelids feel like lead, and then I put on music without words, and I turn it way the heck down until it is barely audible. And then I put on a sleep mask and lie on my back beneath a thick comforter with my arms in an X shape.

I never just fall asleep. I can’t do it! I have to make a conscious effort to sleep, or else I’ll just lie there in the dark all night long. So on my back with my eyes blackened out and with my arms in an X shape I shut off my brain and focus on forcing my body to shut down too.

If I’m lucky, I’ll plunge down into that dark dark place inside my head, a billion miles away from the whole dang universe . . . and then it’s off to Nightmare World!!!

Most of my dreams are about me walking alone at night. Very rarely I’ll dream about the one and only Girl I Used To Love™, and we’ll just be sitting in bed talking or something. Isn’t that nice?? That’s maybe the only good dream I have ever. The rest are dark and lonely and surreal . . . just like my waking life~!!

I usually wake up gasping or involuntarily groaning. I’ll say to myself aloud in my perfectly dark bedroom: “This again, huh,” or “Oh, God. Why?!” (lol)

Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth or taking a piss or whatever, I’ll hallucinate what appears to be a spider on the wall—or I’ll see shadows at the corners of my vision!

Time to call a doctor!!!

Nothing pleased me. I was in the wrong place. To be sure, I had come with the best intentions, but this was no place for me to be merry in; and all this loud effervescence of pleasure, the laughter and the whole foolery of it on every side, seemed to me forced and stupid.

nice way of summing up planet earth if you ask me!!!!

got round about 60 days left in this joint