today i met my dad’s new dog. he’s real small and only has three working legs but he’s super fast! this is us waiting in the car earlier today, when my dad had me drive him to this weird log cabin so he could buy a shotgun with cash.

i accidentally found a secret path through the forest

it rules

Well: It is spring now, which is just a prelude to summer. And so I have begun listening to SUMMER MUSIC, what with it being warm and breezy and all that. Here are two of The Good Ones, in my opinion . . . and I have been listening to both a lot recently!

NUMBER GIRL is one my favorite bands. They put out four excellent albums, and then Shutoku Mukai went on and formed ZAZEN BOYS, who also rule. Though yeah, SCHOOL GIRL BYE BYE is their first album, and I reckon it’s my favorite one. It’s just honest stuff is all . . . kinda sloppy and jangly in that good way. Also it is a steady ride the whole way though. If you’re driving a car and you put this on, you’re gonna have a real good time. I’ve played this album on every Oakland to LA drive I’ve ever done, which is a lot! Though yeah: roll down the windows and let it rip!!

REMEMBER SPORTS (formally just SPORTS (which is a better name (sad face))) is another honest and unpretentious band. Their songs are usually about hangin out and being in love or falling out of love, and so on. And even when they’re singing about something kinda heavy . . . it’s still bright and beautiful and feels summery in a high school sort of way. And as far as their first album SUNCHOKES goes, there isn’t a bad song on the whole album. There are certain albums that are real Time and Place for me, and this one right here reminds me of fleeing Portland and triumphantly returning to Oakland a few years ago. It was this time of year, and the weather was so pretty in Oakland as it always is, and I drove around listening to this album probably every day for months. I love it!!

•  •  •

AND ON THE TOPIC
OF SUMMER. . . .

Yesterday I visited a small city I like. I won’t say which one, because if I do it might vanish altogether. I have been going there every other week for a month I reckon, and every time I do it feels like gazing into an episode of the TWILIGHT ZONE . . . like it’s this dreamy thing I can only observe from afar behind glass. I can’t really interact with in any meaningful way, being an outsider and all. When I visit, I just see this laidback utopia like Austin used to be for me, and I envision myself subletting a small studio apartment and buying a bicycle and just hanging out there for the summer. I would read and write all day, and take long baths, and then get spooked up and ride my bicycle around all night. Maybe I’d even have a summer fling . . . who knows!

In my mind it is an idea built out of spiderwebs. It is so delicate I’m afraid to look at it dead on. I don’t actually know if that thing exists the way I think it does, and even if it did, how could I get my hands on it? I feel like anytime I ever get a hold of something, I ruin it, or else it is ruined for me. I don’t know. But the idea of rolling into this place and having a strange stretch of months and then slipping out sounds so nice to me. And maybe this is the only point in time when I could pull something like that off. It is a strange time, after all. I knew summers like that long ago. To have one like that again would make me feel a lot better about everything. Well . . . I’m still thinking about it. The barriers are low at any angle, and there is hardly any risk, so why not. . . .

Anyway . . . I’m going to read a few chapters from this Yukio Mishima novel I got, and then I’m going to eat a bunch of flower capsules and pray I end up in a nice quadrant of my brain. Otherwise it’s another trip down to Nightmareland. Hain’t like I got a choice. What can you do, really, except go to sleep and see where you end up??

☆彡

benvenuto disertori

imagine being a multi-billionaire and using absolutely none of your money to help eradicate human misery and abject poverty lol

i got the vaccine today and this is the bandaid the nurse put on me afterwards 🥺

I had A DOUBLE DREAM. I didn’t know it right away of course. In the deepest layer I had some sort of nightmare that I was able to wake myself from after somehow becoming lucid, maybe out of sheer terror. Even though I knew it was a dream, I still wanted out of it. I awoke inside a bathtub in a dark room that I didn’t recognize, so I figured I had only emerged out of one layer of the thing. The tub was empty but I was soaked and freezing. I closed my dream eyes and managed to will myself out of it altogether. When I opened my real eyes, I was covered in my own cold sweat.

If I am lucid and I need to evacuate myself from a nightmare, I can do so by making my actual body breathe heavily. Why this works I don’t know. This trick is particularly useful if I am experiencing sleep paralysis, which only happens once or twice a year. But it does work for nightmares too.

I figured this out a long time ago when I was briefly taking an antidepressant that caused sleep paralysis every single time I took it. I told my girlfriend at the time: “If you hear me breathing heavily, just wake me up.” I only took it for a few days, but I remember there was one night she had to wake me up six or seven times because I was twitching and rapidly moving my eyes beneath my eyelids. Talk about a nightmare!! It is a suffocating feeling, like being imprisoned inside your own body. Fortunately I have gotten to the point where I can do it by myself . . . but even still: my being able to (barely) control my breathing to wake myself up feels like trying to tunnel out of a collapsed mineshaft with a fuckin teaspoon!

Though yes: the double dream! It is rare. I don’t know what prompted it. Who knows anymore, really??

Last night I had one of my recurring nightmares, which is the one where I end up with a bunch of extremely bad tattoos and I spend the rest of the nightmare looking at them in the mirror and wondering how I let myself do that. Like in the dream I’ll be at a tattoo parlor, and the guy says, “So what kind of tattoo do you want?” and I’ll say, “Aw man, whatever you think looks good.” And then he gives me like some early 2000s tribal shit, or a Sailor Jerry tattoo, or sometimes both. It’s awful. Lord, last night I ended up with the Superman symbol on my forearm. I woke up nearly screaming.

The others I have written about before:

• not being able to fly when I need to escape someone who is pursuing me
• punching someone and the punch being completely ineffective
• trudging through a snowy forest at night with a skeleton that weighs 300 pounds
• my high school guidance counselor telling me I don’t have enough credits to graduate on the last day of senior year
• having sex with someone I’ve never seen before whose face keeps shifting subtly in the dark (this one suuuccckkkksssss)
• being with someone in a house, usually my dad or my grandmother or my sister or an old girlfriend, and then briefly leaving the room to explore, and then returning to the room to find that they have vanished, which is extremely sad
• being shot a bunch of times with a machine gun and feeling actual pain in my chest when I wake up
• falling from a great height and feeling actual pain in my legs when I wake up
• walking around or riding the JR train in Tokyo and then realizing I’m dreaming (I always realize I’m dreaming during these, and then I just try to enjoy it for what it is, even though I know it isn’t real (lol))
• being visited by someone I know who has died and having a conversation about what they’ve been up to in The Other World, and experiencing the great sadness of knowing they will go away again
• being chased and / or chasing my doppelganger in a small vacant 1950s town at night

and so on. Never had the teeth-falling-out nightmare and I feel like everyone has that one??

Well! I can count on having at least six or seven of these a month. I guess it all depends on how stressed out I am. When I am stressed out, it tends to manifest itself secretly inside of me, and I am only faintly aware of it. Maybe that’s unhealthy. Man, I don’t know.

I can’t ever really fall asleep naturally. I have to decide to go to sleep. And then I just wait for it to happen. Melatonin is like an SOS thing for me, and same with magnesium citrate. You have strange dreams on both, but way worse nightmares on melatonin. Magnesium citrate dreams are trippy and sometimes I like them, but they linger, and I’m in a half-dream state for like several hours after I wake up. It’s difficult to live like that. What mitigates nightmares for me are passion flower capsules. I met a girl at Ruby Room once who told me that. I told her I couldn’t sleep, and she said, “Oh, you’ve got to try passion flower.” I was incredulous at the time . . . but then I tried some and they really do work. I couldn’t believe it. Hardly anything ever works. Passion flower sleep is a deep dark dreamless sleep. It rules. It doesn’t hurt that the stuff is dirt cheap too. You can get 100 capsules for like ten bucks. That’s 50 nights of newborn baby sleep! I usually just open the capsules and dump the contents into chamomile tea. But tonight, just now, I swallowed two of them whole, so I reckon it’s time to lie down in the dark and see what happens.

OK, well . . . sweet dreams!! ☆彡

mccune and i discussing “”modern fiction””!!!

seriously have you tried to read any of that trash

yeah . . . me neither lol

um hello it looks like i’m getting my first pfizer shot on monday?? reckon i’ll be fully immunized by the end of april. that rules. yeah.