Woman at the post office: “You look like Ricky Nelson. He cute. He dead.”

Here is a weird unplaceable emotion I sometimes experience: you meet someone, and they are real cool—but then you meet their friends and they suck. Like they’re completely awful. It always makes me paranoid as hell when that happens (it happens pretty frequently, too).

Hello, functional alcoholism!

“I’m a mixologist.”

“Oh :-/”

Being in my hometown feels like being locked inside an abandoned amusement park

Being in the Bay Area feels like being locked inside Burning Man

where do i go

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror— and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I believed it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be— and behind them . . . there is nothing.

here you go

would sooner drink a liter of rat poison than step foot in san francisco ever again