those balloons say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY Ryan!”

behind that white thing i’m chewing on is a 16 oz. tecate tall boy

(this picture was taken 10 minutes ago)

i uh . . . i got a lot of calls / texts / emails. about 30 altogether! so thank you my beautiful children

all right you jerks let’s freakin do this thing

by which i mean: we are gathered here today to celebrate paul newman’s birthday (he’s dead) and to watch akira kurosawa’s masterpiece SEVEN SAMURAI

yeah baby!

i will be periodically stopping the film (it is three and a half hours long) to 1) write posts on this website . . . of which i think i have about ten or eleven written in my head, and 2) grab a fresh BREWKI from the FRIDGE cuz it ain’t your 28th birthday unless you’re glugging down absolute toxic waste by yourself in your grandmother’s condominium which is located on the smoldering crater rim of eternity across the street from the hospital where, 28 years ago, your mother was sedated and you were taken out of her body via caesarean section and were born sick and had to stay in the hospital for two weeks and they put a little paper cup on your head so that your little baby hands wouldn’t touch the little baby needle which was pumping little baby antibiotics into your little baby body!!!!

yup: this completely sucks ass. i’m trying to have a good time anyway but i may as well be alone on a space shuttle to fuckin mars at this point

blows party horn into the infinite vacuum of space

confetti shaped like human skulls falls out of black hole

yeah

my good buddy on one of the best days of my whole life

one time i made a video called “welp, i’m done; or, i’m sick of this god damn cafeteria food” and in it i run a garden hose from the tailpipe of my car into the driver’s side window and then i say “there’s no punchline” and lean the seat back and let the car fill with carbon monoxide (i mean, i obviously took the hose out of the tailpipe before i started the car)

anyway i just watched it for the first time in four years or something and i noticed in the background that a car slams on the brakes, does a U-turn, and then slowly drives by my house again

i guess they thought i was really Doing The Deed!

happy birthday paul newman.

i knew someone a long time ago and she was a very good friend of mine. i loved her a lot. i loved her so much that i have never loved anyone else the same way. i completely destroyed her and i don’t know why. she was so good to me. she was such a sweet and loyal person and she was my very good friend. she stayed beside me until she had to go away.

i don’t ever sleep, so i am awake during the lonely times when lonely people are very lonely. and i think of all the stupid god damn things i’ve done, and that is absolutely the thing that i would go back and change. and not even so that i could still know her, but so she wouldn’t have had to go through that and feel all those terrible things that i made her feel.

i am sure that she is gone forever but i miss her every day

my car passed over a lot of death tonight. i made sure the fallen animal, bless its heart, was between my tires so i wouldn’t desecrate its corpse. if i had enough time to maneuver (death comes up on you so quickly don’t you know), say on a long stretch of road, i did my best to avoid the corpse entirely. . . .

on old church road i saw a family of deer, most of them very small, hopping over a wall of plowed snow to get into the forest on the other side. i slowed down and stopped in the middle of the street. i hadn’t seen any other cars on the road except snowplows so i figured it was ok to do that. i watched them for a little while. i was listening to “golden hours.”

once they were safely hidden in the trees i took it slow and continued down that dark road to the place where i used to live. my old house was black and dead quiet. every time i have driven by it i have this magnetic urge to pull into the driveway and go inside and sit by the wood stove, and everyone will be there like before. but of course this is crazy so i keep driving. i kept driving tonight.

on the snowy turn nearby i was thinking about a day i had a long time ago. i have been alive for over ten thousand days but this was a good day and i remember it. there was a big snowstorm coming, similar to the one i just experienced a few days ago, and they were going to close down the schools early. it was probably 10 a.m. when they decided this.

my dad was a police officer back then. he was a sergeant. he was allowed to use his police car for pretty much anything he wanted.

i remember the day the snows came he was on duty but he came to my school to pick me up. if i had waited with everyone else for the buses to arrive i would have been trapped there for another two hours. he didn’t tell me he was coming. i was so happy to see him. no one else got to leave early. he was in uniform. we walked to the front office and he signed me out. we drove down the street to pick up my little sister from elementary school. he took us home. i was just old enough to look after my little sister so he left us at the house and said he’d check up on us throughout the day.

my little sister made hot chocolate and i brought my nintendo 64 into the living room. it was snowing very hard. it wasn’t even noon yet. we changed into warm clothes. we both sat crosslegged in the middle of the living room with blankets wrapped around us and drank hot chocolate. the wood stove was burning and our cats were running around the house. i remember looking out the window and watching the trees in our front yard fill with snow. it was so beautiful and nice. that’s about all that happened that day, but for some reason i have always remembered it and have remembered that nice feeling. even my sister has brought it up to me before. she mentioned it again to me a few weeks ago. she was much younger than me but she still felt the same way about it.

ten thousand days! and that’s one of the days i remember most.