There is a woman who works at the Trader Joe’s on Cesar Chavez near my house. She wears all black and kind of looks like Sofia Coppola. Anyway I love her. I told her that today when I was grocery shopping, but she probably couldn’t hear me because she was on the other side of the store.

This is the Japanese “F for Fake” poster. Isn’t it cool?!

Zdislav Beksinski!

Yeah all right!!

hey if anyone wants to send me some geo coordinates for a good place to lay down and have a huge fucking animal eat me i’d appreciate it

i wanna go home

what do i have to do so that i can go home

A pin with a pink triangle fell out of my pocket the other day. I was taking my keys out of my jacket and it fell onto the pavement below. I picked it up and inspected it and wondered where it had come from.

The pink triangle was originally a badge affixed to homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Later it was adopted it by the gay community and, hey presto, they turned a bad symbol into a good symbol.

Of course this is where I’m headed now: In ‘VALIS,’ a girl delivering pain medication to Philip K. Dick’s schizophrenic alter ego, Horselover Fat, is wearing a necklace containing a pink prism. Fat opens the door, sunlight hits the necklace, and a beam of pink light hits Fat in the forehead. Immediately his brain is filled with whole libraries’ worth of knowledge that he could not possibly have known before. He can read and write new languages, has limited telepathic powers, and so on. He believes the light is God, or at least some sort of alien entity (God is an alien entity, when you really think about it), who is communicating things to him. And perhaps not necessarily on purpose. He admits there is nothing extraordinary about him. He just saw something that maybe he wasn’t supposed to see.

When I picked the pin up, I held it in my hand and looked at it. I took it inside and tossed it onto my desk . . . tossed it onto the only thing that was on my desk, which was a copy of ‘VALIS’!!

Later, I took a picture. I left it on top of the book because it looked nice:

The rest of the book looks like this:

Pink light!! I’ve been reading a book about pink light and how it paved the way for enlightenment and total insanity.

What’s going on???

I guess I’m at a point in my life where, rather than considering the most straightforward, obvious explanation (reckon the kids call that “occam’s razor”)—which is that someone slipped it in my pocket while I was working at the coffee shop, or whatever—I am fully prepared to believe that an unseen cosmic deity is whispering hints about the true nature of existence into my poor broken brain.

Hey, OK! Bring it on, God.

Is a pink triangle pin the Portland equivalent of a beam of pink light? That’s great. I mean, hell, if that’s true, you’ve really got to step back and appreciate that for what it is.

I’m sorry. I’m going to have to use the F-word:

Every third person you meet here has a tattoo of a fucking tree. And not some cool-ass Tokien tree, or some cool-ass Winnie the Pooh-ass Hundred Acre Wood tree. No: It is the same tree every time, and it is the god dang vanilla ice cream of trees: the pine tree.

And they’ve all got them on their forearms!! It’s insane how many of these I’ve seen. Hundreds!!

ok bye!!!!

These photos were taken exactly 10 years apart. The first is 18-year-old me staring off-camera (???) at nothing while the sun rises in the background of my weird apartment in Baltimore. The second photo was taken 5 minutes ago by the 28-year-old version of me . . . though you can’t see the sun rising because I have my windows blacked out (lol). Also, uh, if you wanna get abstract about it: Baby, that sun ain’t never gonna rise for me again.

Other than that I tried to replicate the original the best I could!

OK! Here:

Man, isn’t that wild?! I used to be a soft little baby, huh. Though I guess we’re all soft little babies at some point or another. . . .

As you can see, Bitter Old Ryan is looking to his immediate left, cuz 10 years of Being Alive has taught him that that’s where you wanna be looking (I’m not going to spoil it for you if you don’t know why that is). Baby Ryan, on the other hand, is content with pointing his peepers diagonally. What a dope.

Anyway, the verdict is in: I’ve always been a dumb pale jerk!!!!

See you in another 10 years!!!! Good-night!!!

LISTEN: With the exception of a handful of people I know here, I could walk away (literally and figuratively (lol)) from everything that comprises my life here: my house, my job, the places I go, the things I do, et cetera . . . and I would feel absolutely nothing about it one way or the other!!!!

This fell out of my pocket yesterday. It is not mine! Who put it there?!