Hell, I’d make out with someone if they wanted to make out. I wouldn’t protest one bit. When I was walking around the other night I thought about how nice it can be sometimes. So yeah: I wouldn’t put up a fight. I would just say, “Yeah OK. Let’s do this god darn thing.”

Uhhhhhhhh if you wanna make out just go ahead and email me. I am 72% serious!

When I returned to California, I had several packages and letters waiting for me in my room.

Amy Ribar in Los Angeles sent me a San Diego bottle opener in a shiny blue envelope. She told me to stay out of San Diego because it’s “full of Christians.” On the back she told me to go out there and keep kissing people.

Kate Giffin in Halifax sent me 6,000 Chinese Yuan and told me she was glad I was her friend. The envelope was covered in Winnie the Pooh stickers. She told me to listen to ‘Jesus Is Waiting’ by Al Green immediately and I did so.

She sent me a postcard too. It is a picture of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. On the reverse side she wrote out the lyrics to ‘4 + 20’. Her handwriting is so similar to my old girlfriend’s handwriting that I almost threw up.

Jack Fields, the puppeteer in Winter Park, sent me a tank top he designed. On it is a horrifying drawing he did of Colton Burpo, the kid who claimed he went to heaven. It’s amazing. There was a little post-it note inside with a waving cat. It says “Hagn in there bro”.

Laura, who shares a wall with me, gave me a drawing she had made for me. It’s a shooting star.

Man, yeah. I know a whole bunch of good people.

meeeggggaaannn

My friend Megan was recently featured on the main page of a Very Popular Website. Or rather, the photographer who took the picture was. But it was the very first picture! And it’s also the best picture.

I told Megan, “Man, why didn’t you tell me you were a babe?”

October 8th is my favorite day of the year. I don’t know why. I guess I like the number eight and October is my favorite month. It looks nice written out: 8 October. “Eight Octo” sounds cool. It’s the same thing twice said differently.

At midnight on October 8th, which was five hours ago, I wrote a letter to a woman I haven’t seen in ten years. I drove to her parents’ house in Nokesville and left that letter in her parents’ mailbox. On the envelope I specified that it was OK for her mother or father to read the letter aloud to her over the phone (assuming she no longer lives there—which, as a twenty-eight-year-old woman, I imagine is the case).

It started to rain a little. I got back in the car and put on Jessica Pratt’s album. I drove for miles beneath black trees to the street where I grew up. I put the car in reverse and backed down a gravel road near my childhood home. I parked in the exact spot where I lost my virginity. I got out and went into the nearby field.

The blood moon was in the sky. It was huge and weird. The sky was so clear. There was a fleet of ghostly clouds passing over. As I walked down the gravel road toward the low grass, the clouds floated below the moon. The ground was light and then dark and light again. It went on like this till I got to the center of the field where I knew a tree had once been. The tree was still there. In my head I called it “the suicide tree” because Madeleine and I had once sat beneath it talking about all the times we’d ever thought about suicide.

It was nice, back then, to talk about something like that, and to hear that someone else had felt the same way, and to feel comforted that you were both still alive.

I stood by the suicide tree and scanned the field. The air was cool. It was windy but it felt good on my face. I didn’t feel cold at all. There were little animals running through the tall grass. I could hear insects in the trees. I thought, if what awaited me after death was an eternity in a windy, moonlit field on October 8th in Virginia, then I would be OK dying right then and there—because what came next was what came before, only it would last forever.

And of course there would be no such thing as time. I would walk down those old roads and through those rain-soaked fields alone, thinking nothing. I would be there with the moon and the grass and the trees and the little animals and the insects and that would be my own little painless universe.

suicide

I think Paul McCartney’s songs sound like something you’d play for your grandmother’s dog, but this is pretty cool by itself:

I was alone
I took a ride
I didn’t know what I would find there
Another road where maybe
I could see another kind of mind there
Ooh!
And I suddenly see you
Ooh!
Did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life?

(P.S. Just so we’re clear: I like Paul McCartney. OK? That dude is cool. I listen to ‘Band on the Run’ basically every morning.)

cannontyme

Hello my babies!! I am sitting atop a cannon overlooking the city of Baltimore. Time to blow this shit away!!!!!

Man, I’ve been getting home around 4 or 5 a.m. every night, and when I pull into my mother’s neighborhood I pass so many people on their way to work. What a miserable fucking existence.

I’m about to drive to Baltimore with a bottle of cough syrup and a pack of smokes just to walk around by the harbor and have a single beer at the Club Charles in my old neighborhood

Yeah!

Remember in ‘Beetlejuice’ how he (Beetlejuice) lives inside that scale model of the town? God, that’s what I feel like the world is. All I need to do is get a shovel and dig for a little while and I’m sure I’ll hit the cardboard crust.

Though, like McCune says, the scary part is we’ll never see something as obvious as that. As far as I can tell, déjà vu and my waking hallucinations aside, the whole thing is seamless. It’s solid all the way through. These reptilian overlords of ours really thought it out when they created this celestial playpen for us.

Jesus. The entire known galaxy is probably in some kid’s shoebox somewhere.

This— all of this— is a fucking circus for extraterrestrials and I can’t decide if my awareness is better or worse than being completely ignorant of it