The other night I had what I guess you would call a “sex dream”

Like all the other ones I’ve ever had, it was fucking terrifying

I’m there with this woman thinking “God why am I doing this” and every time I look at her face it’s different

And her face keeps morphing and morphing . . . even while I’m looking at her

I don’t know any of these women, I have never seen these faces before

Maybe they are an amalgamation of a whole bunch of people

And worse: sometimes the face isn’t a face at all—just a swirl of color as it settles on a solid form

In my dream I got up and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror

On my chest was a tattoo of some 1920s-looking guy with a handlebar mustache

Horrible tattoo

“Why oh why do I have this godforsaken tattoo”

The man is looking into a birdcage, and inside is a tiny woman playing a violin

Above his head a speech bubble: “Hell of a bird!”

warrior star

baby shoe

shoelace strangler

comin 2 get u

Are you more of a person than you’ve ever been

I am less of one

I am only ever a worse version of the thing that came before it

As dumb as this sounds, at least once in my life I want to come home and find someone in my bed (hopefully this person is someone I actually know / like)

laps around lake merritt

‘siberian breaks’ on loop

and then, spontaneously:

little farm & nature area

up, up, up into the mountain

fog everywhere

went there because everyone else was asleep

and lauren’s window was dark

(maybe she won’t talk to me again)

at the top there were three cars and no faces

and two people fucking in an old police car

i parked my old police car by a log and got out

silence!

the fog covered the lights below . . . no san francisco, no oakland, no berkeley

just waves of the stuff swirling in the dark

and black shadows too

on my way down i stopped to let a deer cross

it hopped up the side of a hill and i sat there in the middle of the road with my foot on the brake

and we watched each other for a while

another car came and the deer took off

when i got home dante caught a moth and i collected it in a mason jar and set it free

Here it is: The only thing you can ever hope for is more existence

The best sounds are the ones that say nothing at all: the wind, the ocean, the trees

The best things are the body things: sex, sleep, walking, jumping, breathing, taking a dump, et cetera

Put that thing down

You don’t need that thing

You have everything you need—you always have

There is nothing new under the sun

Have fun, don’t be a jerk

Open your god damn idiot eyes and see something for once

Months after that, I would receive a letter from NIH. The letter would say, among a lot of other things, that the vaccine had worked, and that somewhere out there, a sixty-eight-year-old molecular biologist named Dr. Joe Cohen was a very happy man, having spent twenty-four years making the damn thing work.

And I would be told I was the third person in the world to be immune to malaria as a result of the vaccine. And upon reading this I would feel nothing.

It took twenty-four years, I thought, to create a vaccine that could prevent a parasitic disease from killing over one million people a year. And now it was swimming in the veins of a twenty-three-year-old man in Texas who didn’t really want to be alive, anyway. I would go on to lose my temporary invulnerability to malaria, would lose my best pick-up line (“Hey babe, I’m, uh, immune to malaria”)—would again be wary of mosquitos.

Some kid in Africa would go on to let a white man inject a clear fluid into his bloodstream. And maybe he wouldn’t understand that it would save his life from the greedy bites of tiny insects. But now he would go on to grow up into an adult. And though he wouldn’t ever have to face malaria, he would feel something else instead. And if I could, I would tell him that the pain never goes away—it just disappears from time to time. But when it is gone, this whole thing is worth it, maybe.

And maybe he would blink. And maybe he would shrug. And maybe he wouldn’t give a fuck either way.

god, you people

you sons of bitches, all of you

i played “spook the squares” again tonight

where i drive around in the police car in berkeley, haunting those idiot streets

spooking all the squares there

and so on

hence the name

then i parked outside the auto zone on 27th street and smoked a cigarette and listened to music

the wind was blowing, it felt like fall

i hoped lauren would say hello or something, so i waited a while

she didn’t!

i went home

I think pure invention is way better than writing about all the stupid crap I do

Maybe I will stop writing about the stupid crap I do

Maybe I will just invent stupid crap for fake people to do