One time I was working the door at Wolfhound Pub and a guy was outside smoking. He was a nice enough guy, he came there pretty much every night. None of the bartenders liked him because he never tipped. Anyway this guy would always quote Shakespeare and Nietzsche to me, and it’s like OK man sure whatever. It was so awful and embarrassing when I actually had to do my job though. People would walk up and show me their ID and this guy would be sloppily quoting passages from ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ and he never got them right. (Pro tip: if you’re going to quote something with some degree of authority, you should probably 1) remember what the actual quote is, and 2) understand the significance of the quote.)

Anyway so we were outside, and we’re talking (or rather he’s talking at me and I am trapped), and the subject is straights and squares, a common topic in Oakland, and he mentions that I am “not alternative enough” because I shave my face every day.

God that’s funny. This guy was like 28.

i guess laughter really is the best medicine . . . when your doctor won’t give you an oxycodone prescription!!!!

boom

blasted

I don’t know if y’all know this but I have a bunch of scars on my face. Like six of them! Some of them are pretty deep. Mostly I don’t know how I got them. Anyway they don’t bother me one bit, and also I am one step closer to fulfilling my childhood dream of becoming the gambler / rogue / ladies’ man Setzer from ‘Final Fantasy 6,’ who, yes, has a bunch of scars on his face because why the heck not:

Um he also looks like this:

God hell yeah! Look at those scars! I got me a few of those. Those scars, baby. Those scars.

Anyway: I have a sort of movie villain scar on my brow. It is thick and vertical. One night about a year ago I was drunk as hell watching ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and it was very dark and I got up to get some water and slammed my face into a doorframe. My skin split wide open. It was nuts. I’ve never had anything bleed that badly. It was gushing out and running down my face. I even documented the scene that was on when this occurred, which I guess also sums up how I felt:

And this is what it looked like the next morning when I was delivering donuts all over the Bay Area:

Yeah baby come and get it!!!!!!!

Well well!! It’s that time of the day (nearly 3:30 p.m. EST) where I have to scan the drunken text messages and emails I wrote in the middle of the night to gauge how bad the damage is. . . .

I am not a mean drunk! I am not even a mean sober. By “damage” I am referring to sentimental reminders that I sometimes give people when I’ve had a few too many beers I bought from the gas station. You know? I tell people I care about them and that they are welcome in my home at any time, but maybe that’s kind of annoying sometimes.

As I read these now I realize that in all the many ways these things can go, last night was pretty god dang OK. These were two-sided conversations. They were pure and beautiful. Yes yes~~

I am humbled and confused that this website has what seems like a sizable Belgian audience

How hey y’all doing over there

What’s up

et cetera

I have a lot of experience with this: you feel a certain way, and another person feels the exact same way, and then time passes and they let a new feeling take its place, and it’s as if they have amnesia . . . they can’t possibly imagine how you could still feel the same way when they’ve already moved on to that exciting new feeling.

Every morning when I wake up I have to clean the house because every night I get drunk and leave beer cans everywhere and books scattered on the floor and different costumes I use for movies hang over all the furniture. . . .

blow me

i know what i am going to write today and it feels good. i am going to write a multi-part essay about the strangers i knew in the bay area. many of them were very sweet to me, and we liked each other a whole lot. many of them just disappeared.