When I lived in Baltimore I used to run a website called Octonaut. It wasn’t really about anything. I wrote little stories and reviewed stuff. No one ever read it. When I didn’t feel like writing on it anymore, I destroyed it.

But I kept everything I had written. I’d made copies of all of it, though I’m not sure why. I couldn’t stand reading any of that crap—which is why I killed the thing in the first place.

Well, listen: I just found all the essays I’d written way back then. I read through a good chunk of what I had. I still don’t like most of them, but some of them are all right.

What was comforting to discover (if anything about this can be said to be “comforting”) is that I’ve felt that same way about life on earth, and people, or whatever, since I was a kid. It means something always seemed off to me, even when I didn’t have the vocabulary to say why exactly or the experience to back it up.

That’s good! I’ve always been me! I’ve always felt uncomfortable!

I remember my father telling me once when I was younger, and again when I was older: “It’s good that you feel uncomfortable. You shouldn’t feel comfortable with what’s going on. It means you’re not part of it.”

Hooray! Too bad everything still sucks a whole bunch.

I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it always made me sad that “Yesterday” follows “I’ve Just Seen a Face”

When I lived in Baltimore, my friend Leila and I went to a gallery opening in the lobby of my apartment complex. Back then I lived in a government-subsidized artist compound (or whatever it was called) and the place actually had its own gallery space where the people who lived there could display their work. That sounded like a pretty cool idea until Leila and I showed up for the very first show.

There were things that had been drawn, and things that had been painted. There was a kiddie pool in the center of the room filled with feathers and broken fiberglass or something. By the window was a tipi resting on astroturf and if you went inside there was a TV displaying static. On the screen, written in lipstick, it said “FUCK THE GOVERNMENT.”

Leila said, “I fucking hate art.”

And you know what, so do I!

I mean, I like art. But I also fucking hate art.

In the last few weeks I lived in Austin, I spent a lot of time listening to Bradford Cox’s solo stuff while cooking in the kitchen. On two separate occasions, my roommate and girlfriend at the time asked me what I was listening to. And when I told them, they said, “I don’t like this.”

I said: “OK!” because I hadn’t asked in the first place, and because I didn’t know what else to say. I was just making food for myself and listening to some albums I had recently got. It’s not as though I’d sat them down and said, “Now, tell me what you think of this!!!”

Well: it’s been over a year since I left Austin and I’m sitting in my father’s kitchen with headphones on listening to ‘Parallax’ again. I’ll tell you what, I sure do like this stuff!

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A few months ago I was on the phone with my father, and I said to him: “Dad, I just want you to know that you’re the best dude on the planet.”

And he said, “Son, coming from you that means a lot.”

I know everyone says their dad is the best dude on the planet, but holy lord, look at this fucking guy.

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I took this photo in Washington, D.C. in October 2011. A few days later the National Institutes of Health told me they believed they had accidentally infected me with malaria. They made me stay overnight in a hospital suite. I had my own nurse. In the morning they let me go at 7 a.m. so I could catch a flight back to Austin to see Deer Tick perform there, and to see a girl I liked. I stayed there for two and a half years. I never went back to Baltimore.

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This is probably the most important sentence I’ve ever read in my life and I’m barely joking when I say that

Oh god please don’t make me have to touch another human being again

Oh god don’t do it!!! I don’t wanna!!!!

Man I’ll tell you what, I have absolutely no money, but I’ll bet I have a lot more fun than people who have millions more than me