. . . tis true!

(one time john cusack responded to my sister on twitter with something encouraging. i love how much he hates the government lol)

“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.

“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.

“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.

“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”

“Anything down there about your souls?”

“About what?”

“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though, I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.”

moby-dick
chapter xix, the prophet

Recently a bunch of stuff on my phone has been screaming at me about Big Numbers of Collected Data, what with the year ending and all. For the most part, I regard it passively. I’ll think, “Yeah, them numbers sound about right to me, but then what the f*ck do I know . . .” And then I go back to whacking a gigantic clown hammer over my head until I forget my own name.

Letterboxd informed me that I hit my completely abritrary and meaningless goal of watching 300 movies in 2024, which I wrote about in July after I’d crossed the halfway mark. At the time I was confident I would make it to 300. In fact, I ended up handily clearing it by 33 whole movies. Wow! See here:

(Here’s THE FULL REPORT if you’re into that sort of thing. Man, Letterboxd is so cool. It is definitely the best social media platform . . . it’s so peaceful. You just log stuff and see what your friends are watching. You can’t even DM people, which is beautiful.)

I really wish I’d been able to watch 32 more movies before midnight on January 1st, just to say I got to 365 . . . though let’s face it, there’s no point in getting greedy at this point. And there’s always 2025, The Final Year, of which we are already 12 days into, and see here, I have already watched 11 movies with one more on the way tonight . . .

So all I gotta do is keep going. All I have to do is . . .

NOT DIE YET

All year I’ve been excitedly telling people about the whole 300 movies thing, as if that’s an even remotely interesting detail about someone. They’ll say, “Oh . . . ? Oh, wow . . . that’s a lot of movies.” Bless them. I mean it. The correct response would be to burp and walk away.

The only person who kind of made me feel like maybe I’m a loser about it was my dad. I mentioned it to him in September, that I was on the road to 300 and would make it as long as I kept up my pace. He did not intend any harm, but for a flicker of a second he made me a face, perhaps to himself, that was essentially: “Um . . . OK man lol.” But my dad is old school. He’s just wondering how such an endeavor would benefit an unmarried and childless 36-year-old man who does not own property and will probably die alone. And he wonders at such a thing for my sake, not his. It’s just that it had not occurred to me until that very moment when he made that natural expression that intentionally spending 630 hours looking at my television in the dark isn’t exactly the pathway to curing cancer. It is not akin to telling someone you’re training for a marathon, or pursuing a PhD in agricultural engineering.

Still: As obnoxious as this may sound, I don’t consider watching movies to be an idle waste of time if they are A) enriching, or B) “bad” but interesting in some way. Some of my favorite movies are both. There are however plenty of movies I do consider to be a complete waste of time. McCune refers to them as “anti-time” or “anti-memory”. You get out of the theater and essentially have amnesia about what you just watched because of how devoid of any nutritional value it had. It takes something from you rather than gives you something, the latter of which being an essential criterion for any piece of art (or something resembling art) that is worth anything. SO SORRY, I can’t abide a movie that is the equivalent of baby food. Baby food is an easily digestible paste for a primitive life form that wears diapers. This is not the kind of mind substance you want to provide for your adult brain. It is MIND BLIGHT. I avoided these at all costs.

I’ll let ol Alan Moore take the wheel here for a second:

That kind of stuff is not, as Marty put it, “. . . the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

You want superhero movies over THIS? ↓

ANYWAY

AS I SCAN MY LETTERBOXD STATS FOR MOVIES I WATCHED IN 2024, I am unsurprised to find that most of the movies I watched were “Old” because, SORRY, that’s the good stuff. My friend Isabel the Russlanddeutsche who lives below me, sometimes she’ll hear me shuffling around in my apartment at two in the morning, and she’ll text me: “Are you awake? Can we get stoned and watch a movie?” And I’ll say: “Yeah duh. Come on up.” So she comes up and we make coffee and eat gummies, and inevitably she balks when I go to pick the movie. I find it so endearing that she thinks anything made before 1999 may as well be from the 1940s. She’ll say, bless her, “Ugh! An OLD movie!” And forget about a black and white movie! She’d rather eat a bullet. So unfortunately, with the exception of FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, which she did like, Isabel missed a big chunk of my nightly movie-watching. Ten minutes into watching VIY, which is the Soviet Union’s first horror movie, she declared, “I can’t watch this because I can’t handle Russian Orthodoxy. It reminds of my childhood in a bad way.” To which visiting Tombo and I were sympathetic.

. . . but man have you seen that poster?

Her pupils are bats!

Though yes, I had a real good time watching 333 movies within 365 days. It was a comforting ritual that I mostly performed after midnight, and was the last thing I’d do before I went to sleep. As exhausted as I often was from living on The Road, riding every form of transportation you can think of to end up in a new city every two to three days in order to escape the pain of being alive, a movie was always waiting for me at the end of it. Mostly I went in blind— I didn’t even read the synopsis. Only a handful of times did I watch something I’d already seen, mostly with other people . . . so the newness of a movie unknown to me was exciting. And if I’d watched an especially good and dreamy movie, I would dream of the movie, and wake up thinking about it. All noble things are touched with that. And anyway, that’s a much better way to start the day than being haunted by disasters from The Past, AS IS MY WONT.

Speaking of The Past but in a good way: Whenever I’d watch something from the 60s or 70s or 80s, I would mention it to my dad, and he’d say something like: “Good movie. Paul Newman is great in that. I remember watching it in a theater in San Antonio on November 13th, 1967.” I love that. I inherited (the curse of) my excellent memory from my dad, so I remember weird little stuff like that as he does. And so saying, because I watch so many movies, I am able to sort of dog-ear periods of my life by recalling the movies I watched then. I can tell you that in late April and all of May last year, I watched pretty much every movie Clint Eastwood either starred in or directed, of which there are many, as I was counting down till his 94th birthday on May 31st (which is also Laura’s birthday). The guy is still making movies, by the way. There was also a block of Verhoeven midway through the month, as Tombo and I watched everything of his we had never seen, all of it excellent. For GOD’S SAKE, have you seen BENEDETTA?? If not, get on it . . .

FINALLY

Look at this other big number I woke up to the other day:

Wow! Where do these people come from? I wonder. As evidenced by THE ARCHIVES, I have been updating my website ceaselessly for thirteen years. I have never advertised it anywhere, it exists unto itself, and yet thousands of people still find it year after year. Sometimes someone will casually tell me, “I’ve been reading your website for 10 years,” and I’ll think, “Why . . . ?” and then out of politeness I’ll feel flattered. If you’ve been reading any of this space trash for any amount of time, even out of spite or morbid curiosity: Thanks! I will update it till the day I die. There is even a secret page hidden here that, in addition to containing my last will and testament, outlines a contingency plan for my website, should the world finally succeed in killing me.

I don’t care about posterity, and let’s face it: everything upon this earth is tears in rain . . . I’d just like for all this to stick around as long as possible as a sort of totem for The Future Ones to remind them that once upon a time, the internet was almost exclusively comprised of individual websites created by normal people from all over the world who weren’t selling anything, but who merely wrote and shared things they liked for the sake of the song, so to speak. Again I quote Ishmael: All noble things are touched with that. The Cold Ones have done everything in their power to pulverize that thing, the beautifully endless landscape of the internet, where all are equals, and mostly they have succeeded. And in defiant opposition to that I will maintain this solitary outpost at the edge of the world, and keep scrawling graffiti on this back alley floating in space, even if I am the last one, and even if my collective efforts have all the effectiveness of a fart in a windstorm. It’s like the fella said in ASHES AND DIAMONDS (starring the Polish James Deans), which was one of the first movies I watched in 2024:

YEAH DUDE

This website has been a constant part of my life for nearly all my adult life. No matter how heavy things got, and no matter how far down in the deep darkness I found myself, I have updated it weekly from dozens and dozens of cities on multiple continents far and wide. As of this writing, I have made 5,703 posts in all that time. That anyone takes time to read any of it blows my mind. Sometimes these same people, who are otherwise complete strangers, will send me emails and invite me to stay with them should I ever end up in their city, and many times I have done so, often to the places where they live with the express intention of meeting them. It is the least I can do. For no other reason than what I suppose is a gut instinct, they have trusted me in their homes and around their families and pets, and on and on. I have decade-old friendships with some of these people! Ain’t that nice? So I can’t ever stop cuz it’s just too much fun. Anything that is this much fun must be perpetuated into eternity. Because . . .

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

Well! Thanks for reading!! And write to me sometime, why don’t you!!! Heaven help me, I love that shit!!!!

whenever we were interviewing someone at my old job back in san francisco, we would all take turns during the zoom call asking The Tentative Candidate two or three questions. we could ask whatever we wanted. i always endeavored to give them weird ones that had absolutely nothing to do with the job. and usually i went last so they got some dreamy ones to go out on. you don’t want to hit someone with some heavy stuff when you’re the final inquirer! you gotta go easy on them.

anyway: one time we interviewed this girl whom we ended up hiring. her name was julie and she and i worked together as writers for almost two years. i liked her a lot. the questions i wanted to ask her were all about dreams and premonitions and space and ghosts and phenomena beyond human comprehension. you know, fun stuff. sue me! but my boss politely asked me to scale it back a little (lol)

i kept this question:

“What is your favorite color, month, day of the week, geometric shape, and celestial body?”

i think that’s a good one!

my answers WERE and REMAIN:

• purple
• november
• thursday
• tesseract
• jupiter

to me they all feel spiritually like the same thing. you know?

(ask yourself: what are your answers?? perhaps they are more crucial than they seem . . . in fact, go ahead and tell me if you want!!)

a long time ago now, during a job interview for a writing gig in austin, i met with this guy who was essentially mid-30s me and vaguely i suspected that at the time. he wore all black and had the shades closed and used lamps with the overhead light off and showed up to work at 10:30 am on account of him being an insomniac. he did not ask me any questions pertaining to the position for which i was interviewing. instead he made me take two proto-buzzfeed quizzes online about which wings i would have and what country i would be. i got “bat wings” and “egypt” (???). anyway, he hired me based on my results, and because we both stayed up till 3 am and had black circles around our eyes. i love it!!!

wow i just realized that because 2024 was a leap year, my birthday this year skips saturday and goes straight to sunday . . . i got robbed. such is my tale.

i’ll probably be in new york on my birthday so i reckon we will just do something on saturday the 25th, which is virginia woolf’s birthday, don’t you know. (mozart is the 27th. i am birthday sandwiched between THE GREATS. and i share a birthday with paul newman and eddie van halen, which rules (rest in peace, brothers).))

also just fyi you only have sixteen (16) shopping days left to get me presents (plural…..)

Years ago I dated this girl in Oakland. She was the drummer in a band and I got her number at a house show she played in my neighborhood. I liked her a whole lot. It only really ended because she moved down to Los Angeles to kick a habit. At the time this seemed like the worst possible place to go for that sort of thing, though hey: she did it.

Recently I learned that she is now dating this Internet Famous guy who makes videos that get millions of hits . . . all due respect to him, but they’re pretty bad. Though yeah, I found out because a bunch of my friends sent me some of his videos she’s in, saying, “Didn’t you date this girl???” I won’t say who it is but you definitely can’t mistake her for anyone else . . . she’s the prettiest girl who ever talked to me on purpose.

Anyway: Good for her. She’s really cool! It just paralyzed me for a moment is all on account of I’d accidentally seen some of his videos before and it was surreal to see her suddenly appear in them like that. For millions of people no less, for whatever that’s worth.

I last saw her spring of 2019 when I visited her at work at a sort of horror store on Sunset Boulevard. I had a fresh haircut and was in the midst of falling in love with a g-g-girl. (That was a good Ryan Era, and maybe one of the best. I still mourn its end!!) I don’t think I visited LA again until 2021 cuz of the pandemic. By then her store had shut down for good . . . I know because I drove over there to see her and found a vacant storefront, so I guess that’s that. Otherwise I suppose I’d just have to run into her again somewhere in LA or the Bay, which is not at all out of the realm of possibility, though who can say. Only the Watchers and the Seers know for sure, and even then . . .

snow day at the winter palace
[location undisclosed]
10 january 2025

amissa update

(bonus text from shaina (when searching “amissa is” in my phone)):

aw lol . . . i love my friends

(also i love that my phone has created a whole album for baby tower!)

((when my phone generates slideshows showing pictures of dante and me together, i almost want to kill myself. but i lack the constitution for suicide, and also don’t have the heart to turn them off . . . ))