in my mind there is no reason for a human to ever use the word “sublime” unless you are talking about a lime that isn’t up to typical lime standards, in which case you should put a hyphen (-) between “sub” and “lime” thank you

and just flat out never use the word “exquisite” ok thanks

so i have pretty much lost any concept of what a normal well-adjusted person looks and talks like and so for all i know i am gollum now

so, uh, hypochondria didn’t always mean a sort of neurotic obsession with an invisible / nonexistent illness

it used to mean this (according to the oxford english dictionary): “a morbid state of mind, characterized by general depression, melancholy, or low spirits, for which there is no real cause.”

so when ishmael says he has to turn to the sea whenever his hypos “get such an upper hand of me,” he’s referring to a particular kind of depression / moodiness that i certainly identify with intimately! and if the emails i get are any indication, i reckon a lot of you do as well.

yahhhhOOOOO

They always say you should write for one person. Kurt Vonnegut said that if you open the window and try to make love to the world, you’ll get pneumonia. Hah!

I don’t have much to say to most people. But to be fair this planet is cram-packed with seven billion souls. How could you possibly say anything that would please even one percent of them? I don’t think it’s mean of me to not want to address any more than a few people.

I want to go on record right HERE and right NOW and say that I write everything with my friend Hali in mind. God dang always. When I try to come up with a joke, I try to come up with jokes that I think Hali would laugh at. I write stories that I think Hali would want to read. That’s the truth right there!

You know it does make it easier to write when you think of it that way. That anyone else gets enjoyment out of it, well hell, that’s a nice thing right there. But I only ever write because I like Hali a lot and I want to give her something to read.

OK second stalker story:

I had been living in Austin for a year. I met this woman somehow. She was really fun to be around. I liked being her friend. I liked her because she was always Down For Stuff. She was definitely kind of crazy, and she was a mess, but it was endearing and didn’t seem to be the dangerous kind of crazy mess. She was going to school in San Antonio but was from Austin, and so she would come home on the weekends. We would go out with my roommate and have us a good old time. Usually we’d find a couch in the back of Cheer Up Charlie’s and sit there with some Lone Star tall boys and talk about THIS and THAT.

Then I began to realize that she was a drunk. Like the kind of drunk where you have to wrestle their car keys away from them and make a bed for them on the couch and calm them down and plead with them to please just go the hell to sleep. She would just randomly show up at my house drunk off her ass. And I’m talking at 6 or 7 p.m. she was knocking on my door, falling over, asking me to go downtown with her. I’d look outside and her car would be parked halfway in my front yard with the headlights and the windshield wipers on—that sort of thing.

It started to get pretty weird. We would be driving in her car, and she’d be swerving all over the place, and drinking from a flask. And I’d say, “Holy hell! Pull over and let me drive!” and she’d slap me really hard in the face and tell me she was fine. We got pulled over in Westfield one time because she was drunk as hell and cutting over into the other lane and driving on the shoulder. It was incredible how she talked her way out of it. She completely came off as sober and the cop let us go. She called me a week later and told me she’d totaled her car, and that she already had a new one! (I think her parents were rich.)

She started doing this thing that made me uncomfortable, which was . . . she tracked down my friends and started hanging out with them without me. I knew these two girls and she’d met them once or twice and pretty soon she was at their apartment every day. They told me she was collecting information about me! “So tell me what you know about Ryan. . . .” Ruh-roh!

One day she randomly appeared at my house and told me she was dropping out of school and moving back to Austin. She said, “. . . but it’s not because of you or anything.” It had not and would not have ever crossed my mind that she was dropping out of school for me. This freaked me the heck out! I thought, well, why did she have to even say that?

She would come over and take my computer, and blast really awful music, and I would say, “All right, man. I can’t take any more of this shit. Also: I, uh, was working on something before you showed up and I really got to get on with it.” I would reach for my computer and she would slap me and punch me (hard!) and laugh in a sort of terrifying way.

We’d go to Cheer Up Charlie’s, and she’d try to hold my hand. And I’d say, “Dude! I have a girlfriend! C’mon!”

The last time I ever hung out with her, she was the drunkest I’d ever seen a human. I tried to get her to go to sleep on the couch so she wouldn’t drive home. She fought me! I begged and pleaded with her not to drive her car and to wait until morning. She calmed down and said she was going to sleep. I turned off the light and went into my room. Thirty seconds later I heard the front door open and slam shut. I went after her. She had one shoe on and was walking down the middle of the street. It was four in the morning. I offered to drive her back to her house in her own car, and I would just walk home or something, but she slapped me away and kept walking. The next morning her car was gone!

Uh, and here’s the strangest part: for months after this I would see her drive by my house. She didn’t live anywhere near me. She would drive back and forth on my street and then gun it and disappear. I saw her do this four or five times. My roommate saw her do it a few times too.

And you know what, if you take away all the weird stalker-y / drunk stuff, she was actually a really cool person. I liked her a lot! Just, man, too bad she was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

I hope she’s doing all right.

last february my buddy matt stites and i flew to portland and hung out for a week. then we took a train up to seattle and hung out there too. we ended up doing acid beneath the space needle and then walked to a clown-themed bar (terrible idea by the way). when we were in portland we told everyone we were private investigators from seattle. in seattle we told everyone we were private investigators from portland. everyone believed us! it was really cool.

anyway on that trip matt said something to me that i cherish. whether he meant it as a good thing or not i have no idea: “dude. you make more dad jokes than anyone i’ve ever met in my life.”

listen. i love y’all. i really do. it’s very painful but i do love y’all. but y’all gotta stop posting pictures of yourselves hugging and / or kissing burritos and pieces of pizza. i can’t look at any more of these. it makes me feel not-good things that i don’t even really want to talk about.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

i have read this a hundred times and man, let’s face it, ok. let’s stop FUCKING AROUND and kidding ourselves and so on and just admit that this is one of the greatest chain of sentences any human being has ever strung together. it is pure and beautiful. it accomplishes the truly rare feat of being a perfect peanut-butter-and-jelly combination of sad and funny all swirled together. here is a dude who, one paragraph into the book, is already your buddy. call me ishmael! walk with me as i tell you what it takes for me to not fucking kill myself!

this is so good i want to scream (and have in the past)

wooo! you ever have one of those days where you have to rip a huge rusty nail out of a 2×4 and shove it into the center of your palm to jolt your body into staying alive for 10 more minutes

remember that scene in ‘the empire strikes back’ where luke is training with yoda on dagobah and he senses evil inside this weird-ass tree and luke says “what’s in there?” and yoda says “only what you take with you”

and he goes inside and there’s like a hallucination / apparition of darth vader and luke battles him and he cuts his head off and the helmet explodes and he sees his own face in the vader mask

yeah

well if you want to know what my life has been like recently, it’s like being inside that evil tree and battling darth vader and seeing my face inside the mask, except instead of this taking place in five minutes it takes place in slow motion over the course of two months