yeah

my brother

my captain

my king

Well:

No More Games.
No More Bombs.
No More Walking.
No More Fun.
No More Swimming.

I FEEL CERTAIN I AM GOING MAD AGAIN.
I FEEL WE CAN’T GO THROUGH ANOTHER OF THOSE TERRIBLE TIMES.
YOU SEE I CAN’T EVEN WRITE THIS PROPERLY.
I CAN’T READ.
EVERYTHING HAS GONE FROM ME
BUT THE CERTAINTY OF YOUR GOODNESS.

. . . anyway:

I received my W-2 from that god damn place I worked at in Portland, and of course I got my Oakland W-2, so now I can do my taxes. The Feds, bless their hearts, owe me a chunk of change. Oregon ain’t givin me one penny but California is coughing up at least a little bit of that sweet lettuce. And I’m gonna need every bit of it, because I made an executive decision in my bed last night to buy an iMac and a Final Cut Pro license (uh, instead of pirating it . . . like I have been . . . for a decade). In my dreams I met my other—met my Double Walker, and he said to me darkly, he said: “Hey. Get a computer and a mic and a camera or whatever and let’s start making stuff again. I don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not good. You need to make good stuff again. Make good stuff for me, baby.”

I woke up and said to the dissipating Ryan-shaped dreamsmoke: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”

Now all I have to do is wait 10 to 14 business days for the money to show up in my account and, hey presto, I can purchase a thing that will enable me to pollute the world with my pathetic cult of personality. Cool.

Well, I just looked and I have over a dozen little scripts written. Problem is that if you’re doing everything alone, it basically quadruples the amount of time you’re going to be making a thing. I’m probably going to be making everything alone, because god knows everyone has a day job and is tired or has a boyfriend or a girlfriend. For god’s sake, man . . . knock it off with that stuff. I sleep five hours a night and can’t remember the last time my body didn’t feel like a harmonica fed through a wood chipper, but I still make stuff. How do you not make stuff? You gotta make stuff. Otherwise you’re just a target demographic . . . or worse: a vertical-blinker.

Tonight! I’m going to figure out all the configurations, or whatever, tonight. I’m going to get me a real beast of my computer, and fill it with pornography. Yes, I think that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to do that at all. I’m going to keep it empty of most things, just like my head, and I’m going to shut my bedroom door and work. I am not married and as far as I know I have no children. I don’t even own a car. I guess this is what you’re supposed to do when you don’t have anything and aren’t anything either. Yup!

i got a freakin nintendo switch for my birthday

here’s my f*ckin FRIEND CODE ok, so go right the hell ahead and add me

we don’t have to play any games together . . . we can just feel less lonely together

☆ ~ ~ ~

my friend amy ribar asked me what 30 felt like, and all i could think of was this:

“Life,” Barris said, as if to himself, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.”

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.

“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, “I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like it, sir.”

“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.”

“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone, or I’ll clear the world of thee!”

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

(Stubb) “Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it’s a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don’t know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He’s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s that for, I should like to know? Who’s made appointments with him in the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that’s about the first thing babies do, and that’s a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ‘em. But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again.”

my heroes

. . . We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

dante and herman melville and me at midnight on my thirtieth birthday