o stargazer! gaze for a while!!!!

I’m done!

So good!!

Even Salman Rushdie liked it. I read somewhere that he referred to it as “a masterpiece” (lol (it’s written on the cover (which you can clearly see (that’s the joke))))

First person to Paypal me $2.50 gets it! I’ll Media Mail it right to your house!! I will use the $2.50 to pay for shipping!!! Obviously!!!! (Sold!)

Maybe I will put other things in the padded envelope??? Only one way to find out~~~

Bye!!!

“I watched [Ryan’s gold tooth] glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”

Oh man!!! I love this stupid thing!!!!!!

“makes the world go round.”

“what’s that?”

“gold.”

“some people say love.”

“eh, they’re right too. it is love—love of gold.”

what is the modus operandi of someone who didn’t hit the genetic jackpot, or who doesn’t have rich parents? i wonder

i mean: that is basically most everyone who ever lived— since the first human stood upright on this planet-shaped prison and screamed at the sun!

are we destined to skulk and toil in the darkness while a handul of people, most of them undeserving of their lot in life, have all the fun?? and then die unceremoniously, and be cast into a shallow pit carved into the earth??

well: ok

as long as i know for sure that is my fate, and the fate of 99% of people who are alive right now, i reckon i can come to terms with it

maybe i already have!

‘the book of laughter and forgetting’ is a Very Good book

it contains little secret truths that i have known deep down for many years but had no name for until now

whoa

I live inside a sleeping bag on the floor which is wrapped in a thick down comforter. I guess I have stopped hanging out with anyone, and everyone has stopped hanging out with me. Mostly I have fires at night and read some books that I am piling up next to my bed to sell. With that money I will by cat food. In the afternoons Kerwin and I work in the living room and talk about how we have no money. Last week we went to Reed and tried to play pool with some college kids, but they were having some sort of fall social in the pool room. A guy with muttonchops asked if we were in high school. I haven’t spoken to my family in any meaningful way in maybe six months. I don’t care if anyone ever kisses me or sleeps in my [sleeping bag on the floor which is wrapped in a thick down comforter] or says a nice thing to me again. The most fun I ever have is when I’m aimlessly walking around a grocery store with no intention to buy anything. Every Wednesday I go to a mental health facility a few blocks from my house and talk to a psychiatrist for the purpose of getting paid to test an experimental antipsychotic medication that doesn’t work on me. He asks me the same questions every week—asks me how I’m doing, and if I’ve had trouble eating and sleeping and so on. He asked me last week, as he did the week before, and the week before that, and so on: “Do you ever feel critical of yourself? Experience any self-loathing?” To which I said: “All you can eat, Doc.” And he said: “Can you elaborate?” And I said: “I cringe at everything I ever say. I cringe while I hear every single sentence come out of my mouth. I walk around muttering to myself about how big of a dumb jerk I am.” For some reason this amused him, and was also maybe confusing to him, and he said: “What exactly do you mean?” And I said: “I have no idea what I’m ever talking about it and I know it, and maybe everyone else knows it too. I feel like a fraud. I don’t know why I ever talk.” And then we stopped talking about that and talked about something else. He lead me to an examination room and a woman came in and had me lie down and she took my blood pressure. Then I stood up and she took it again. She lead me to a cold room where another woman came in and took my blood. I like her a lot and I like talking to her. She’s always very friendly and genuine. (I wish I could ask her to my friend, but maybe that would be considered inappropriate given the context.) She put a butterfly needle in my arm and asked me how I was. I said: “Ahhhh, you know. I’m all right, I guess.” She leaned closer to me and said, in a sad little voice: “I just feel all right too . . . and maybe even worse than that.” And I said: “Yeah.” And then, because there was no better thing to say, I said it again: “Yeah.”

Kerwin Ella took this:

I took this:

Laura said to me the other day: “Come home!” I had in the past considered Oakland my home, but I hadn’t thought about it in that way in some time. I won’t say the Bay Area is where I belong or where I’m supposed to be, but I did fit in there, and I did have a real good time when I wasn’t having a bad time. When I was there in October, I saw about a dozen of my friends, and I thought, “Gosh! What am I doing!”

I took some pictures and never did anything with them. I am doing something with them right now:

The Bay Area kind of sucks. I also love the heck out of it. Lord! I just need to make some money, and find a way to keep on doing that, and then I can see my friends again.