good lord i know some good people
i am and probably always will be confused by what it takes for most people to want to stick around on this planet.
um: once, a person i won’t name, came to me in earnest and said that he perceived that i was in the beginning stages of accidentally forming a doomsday cult made up of people from my “harem.”
yup.
i would rather be dead than look at
- a wedding announcement website
- a designer’s website
- an illustrator’s website
- a photographer’s website
- a horizontally-scrolling website
- a website where a silly animation appears if you put a cursor over something
- a website where someone claims to love “travel” and “photography”
- a website where someone calls themselves a “world traveler”
- a website featuring a map of the world with dots in all the places someone has been
- a website with a picture of someone wearing a scarf indoors while smiling and holding a cup of coffee
- a website with a picture of someone under the age of 40 wearing a non-weather-related hat
- a website written by someone who lives in Brooklyn
- a website with a one-line “bio” written in large type using a popular sans-serif font that begins with “Hi.” or “Hello.” or “Howdy.” followed by “My name is [some idiot].” followed by “I make things.” or “I’m working to build a better future.”
- a website where someone’s bio includes a type of food / beverage they enjoy
- a website where someone’s bio includes the phrases “cat mom / dad” or “dog mom / dad”
- a website where someone claims to “love coffee”
- a website where someone claims to “love pizza”
- a website where someone claims to “love sushi”
- a website where someone uses the word “craft” in front of the word “beer”
- a website where someone “reviews” an alcoholic beverage
- a website where someone uses the non-word “lifehack”
- a website where someone discusses productivity techniques
- a website where someone writes about Silicon Valley in a positive way
- a website where someone claims technology will save us
- a website where a venture capitalist-funded for-profit company in San Francisco that produces a fucking iPhone app claims to be doing anything worthwhile for humanity
- any LinkedIn dot com profile
- any Medium dot com “article” / “personal essay” (put those in quotes (sick burn))
- any Twitter account where the person’s profile picture is a professionally photographed portrait of them shot against a white background smiling and wearing a V-neck sweater or a flannel shirt and gazing into nothing with absolutely dead-empty eyes
ever again
who does this to the house? i don’t remember doing these things. i wake up from some awful fucking dream where i am being pursued and i walk like molasses, or my punches are ineffective, or i’m trying to call someone using a huge useless phone, or my friend gets off the bus with a bloody face and runs away, and so on, and i look around the house and it’s totally trashed. i spend 30 minutes every afternoon returning it to normal. i mean nothing is destroyed, there are just clothes and towels everywhere, and dishes piled up in the sink, and pieces of notebook paper ripped out and tossed onto the floor. i don’t do these things when i am awake. i take very good care of everything. is this mr. hyde? the last time i did a card reading my future card was ‘death,’ which includes somnambulism. . . .
that is the land of lost content i see it shining plain the happy highways where i went and cannot come again
In Oakland I had a friend who was dating a Famous Hollywood Director. I used to have dinner at his house in the Berkeley Hills. He was a pretty cool dude. There was like a 25-year age difference between my friend and this dude but they got along real well.
Anyway my friend’s parents were in town, and she invited me to have dinner with them at A Very Expensive Restaurant in Berkeley. I don’t know why I agreed to go. I guess I thought it would at the very least be interesting. I was also really nervous about how much it would cost (each course was like literally $30) but they ended up covering the bill for me! Uh, it was a bizarre experience. Rich people are fucking weird, man.
Before I had left the house I got stoned for some reason, which was a horrible idea. I remember sitting there and hearing this family talking in a private dining room nearby. It was Grandpa The Patriarch’s 80th birthday or some shit. He gently took his granddaughter’s hand into his and said, “Sylvia, will you please sing for us? How we love to hear you sing.” And she said, “Oh, Grandpapa, of course I will.” This was horrifying. I’m not even making this up. And then she starting singing in this really loud operatic voice. I couldn’t believe it. I thought rich people only did stuff like that in movies.
My friend’s parents and her boyfriend asked me about books and movies. I suggested some strange stuff to them. I mean all I read / watch is strange stuff, so I wasn’t fucking with them or anything. They were genuinely intrigued by all this. It was very confusing to me. I told them my friend had hired me on Craigslist to be her friend and come to dinner with her and they believed me. I guess I seemed really uncomfortable being there—I was dressed as I normally am, and everyone else was wearing fancy clothes. Also my eyes were solid red, I’m sure of it. I was sweating a lot and I didn’t know which fork you use to eat salad.
My friend sent me this text afterwards. Apparently her boyfriend was perceptive enough to know that I absolutely despise myself.
I am going to start working on my fake apocalyptic newspaper again (I have decided).
You know what always surprised me about Oakland is how easily I slipped right into it. I remember after six months of living there I had so many friends and jobs were got easily because I just hung around with people. God, dude. I was there for almost three years and although a lot of the time I was broke and sad, I still did so god dang much. It was real varied, too! I hardly ever did the same thing twice.
The Bay Area kind of sucks because it feels like being trapped in a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but it is this big huge place where a lot of different kinds of people live. And though native Californians were so damn wishy-washy, a lot of perfectly nice strangers invited me into their homes and took me to parties and walked around with me late at night. When I was writing a long essay about the Bay, I realized how much I missed all those weird little experiences and all those nice people I knew for only one night. That was real cool.
I think people on the East Coast tend to be stiff and square and closed-off and career-driven. Over there people were just Down For Stuff. Yeah.
