22 July 2026

I am on a train barreling through Czechia on my way to Vienna . . . and I just came across this video I had completely forgotten about in which Nicole the Polish Girl (one of the most beautiful women on the planet, pictured) and her brother Aleks (also a hottie) lure me into clumsily saying things in Polish so I sound like a huge idiot. We are posing here inside a darkened elevator in Shibuya in Tokyo, where we had hid for two hours in order to seek warmth and get drunk on Suntory Strong Zeros.

Nicole, your glacial blue eyes are so supernaturally beautiful that you could command me to rob a bank at your behest and, lost in a trance inside your hypnotic gaze, I would be powerless to say no. And even then I’d probably do it anyway. The video also reminded me that you have a very good voice. It fills me with a feeling.

As for me . . . I look downright ghoulish as hell here. In fairness, I had lost some weight from sadness, had nearly died in a plane crash off the coast of Japan only hours before, and had been in a lonely place for some time. I was briefly rescued from my own despair by the two Polish angels with whom I shared the elevator. Love y’all . . .

I SHALL END THIS POST THUSLY:

. . . by quoting the end of the video itself, which is to say:

NA ZDROWIE

. . . which is Polish for, I am told, “to your health”— said when toasting, which we did a lot of that night. I did pronounce it correctly in the video and the two Poles in attendance, who had likely initially hoped I would not, did seem pleased by this.

21 July 2026

I’m working on a VIDEO PROJECT that I’ll write about soon . . . but in cracking open Final Cut Pro again, I’ve been digging through a bunch of old stuff I’ve made in the last 15 years. I have to say: I felt a warmth. Some of it was pretty good! And I wondered why I had stopped doing it at all. I reckon after making hundreds of those things, I may have gotten burned out . . . but I never ran out of ideas. In fact, I still write them down all the time.

And then the other day, Bex said the ancient phrase:

Said I: “Yeah dude . . .”

I mean, why not? You’ve got to do something. So for GOD’S SAKE I’m going to start doing it again . . . with Bex, in Italy.

At the top is a screenshot from a video where I’m fucking around in Target (wearing glasses without lenses) . . . a girl I was dating at the time filmed everything. It is effortlessly funny in a way that I hope is not gone from me. Tonight I rewatched all the raw footage for the first time since we filmed it eight years ago exactly, and we’re laughing our asses off the entire time. I’m doing everything I can to make her break and laugh, as though making her laugh was more important than the video itself (which it was). I don’t know, it looked like so much fun. Lord help me, I missed it . . .

You know, for all my many flaws, every girl I ever dated has told me later that doing The Little Stuff together was always fun for them. They always miss The Little Stuff. Even if we were just grocery shopping or running some errand, we always found a way to drag it out a little and make it more than it was. You know? I think it’s sweet that no matter how the thing played out, even if it ended badly, they remembered that we had fun just for the sake of the song, so to speak. I believe there’s a famous scene in a movie about this very thing . . .

20 July 2026

I want to say that at least one person calls me every single day for relationship / life advice. Sometimes it’s three or four and I ain’t even kidding. Hey man . . . I’m happy to help. It’s nice to serve some sort of function!!

Today my old friend called me and laid out a tale of woe. It took about three hours. Without getting into the DETAILS, the story involved, as it often does, a choice between two men.

One of these men is some bicycle seat-sniffin wannabe artist loser who is juggling multiple women and keeping her on the hook. The other is a sweet and thoughtful dude who has been quietly devoted to her for years.

She already knew what she had to do, but she needed to hear me say it, and so gladly I said it: stay as far away as you can from that DIRTBAG CREEP who only wears cowboy boots and pour all your love into the man who has consistently shown up for you. I said: five years from now, you won’t even remember the first guy’s dumbass name (nor, hopefully, his disgusting mustache), but you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been with the second one. She seemed to feel much better after that.

An hour later she sent me this . . .

:,-)