It’s driving me insane that I haven’t had time to make anything recently!!! That is the only metric I use to judge my self-worth: my ability to make stuff. Lord . . . I’m way the hell down there, feeling rotten as hell for having not created anything in maybe a month or more.

And, my god, I’m losing my mind at night because I keep dreaming about Women I Let Down A Long Time Ago. My brain is a god dang haunted house, man. It’s spooked the hell up. The other night world-famous French Canadian artist Laura Rokas stayed over, and I woke up next to her gasping. I may have screamed too. Laura just kept on sleeping, and good on her, because maybe I made some terrifying noises attempting to get as much oxygen into my body as quickly as possible.

I got up and went into the kitchen and drank about a liter of water. It was very early. I thought about sitting down to write a thing, but I was exhausted and my back was sore and I was coughing a whole bunch.

. . . uh, anyway: I’m publishing two more bookz to my Teeny Tiny Li’l Baby Starsailor Store in the next month or so, so hey, that’s something. Or at any rate maybe it isn’t nothing. Have y’all bought ‘Gritt Calhoon and the Midnight Assault’ yet? I sold a copy dozen copies but, uh . . . I wouldn’t mind selling a few more. ;-o

I’m makin stuff! I’m gonna keep on making stuff. Just wanted y’all to know~

YahhhhOOO yeah baby!!!

Aw hell . . . I don’t mean to sound sentimental, but I did dream a dream the other night, and it was what you might call a sentimental dream. It wasn’t my idea. My brain produced the images and I was held hostage in my own dream world, was strapped inside my dream body like a ride at an amusement park! All I could do was look on and let my dream self move and talk, and so on. I had no control. It was hell.

Y’all ever seen ‘A Clockwork Orange’? Well:

Yeah, uh . . . anyway. . . .

As you do, I appeared suddenly in my dream. I was on a very long escalator in D.C. I was going down. There must have been thousands of stairs on this escalator. I reckoned it would take me a half hour to get from the top to the bottom. The escalators on either side were packed full. Maybe four or five people ahead of me was a girl with short red hair and a red sweater. She turned around and looked up at me. It was my ex-girlfriend from a long time ago—the one whom I loved very dearly, and who haunts my dreams from time to time!! She was back to haunt me. And there we were, two dream people, trapped on a molasses-slow escalator on our way to some subterranean concrete bunker, way the hell down there.

She made a face of recognition. I reckoned her face would swiftly sour but it didn’t. I reckoned next that she would come up to me and punch me in the face. Instead she smiled and ascended the escalator, asking the people there to let her pass, and she stood on the stair below me and hugged me. I had to bend down to reach her. She kept hugging me so I kept on hugging her too. Her sweater was fuzzy.

My dream self said, “I think about you all the time. I’ve missed you so much. Hell, man, it’s killing me.”

Dream ex-girlfriend said, “I’ve missed you too.”

I told her that I knew she wasn’t real and that this was just a dream, and she said it didn’t matter. I thought, yeah, I guess it doesn’t matter. What’s the difference, anyway? I got to hang out with my friend in my head. If that’s all I had, then I would take it . . . so I took it!

I jolted awake at 4 a.m. It was was still dark outside. My room was freezing but I was covered in sweat. I felt sad as hell just then. I felt rotten and fucked out. I got up and fed Dante and drank a bunch of water.

I went back to sleep!

I’m sure I’ll see her again soon. She was a great person. I miss her a lot~!!

Whew!!

Good lord, man. I’ve been zippin around the Bay every single god darn day since I moved back. I have been sleeping on couches and floors for weeks and weeks, and now finally I have my own floor to sleep on. Kerwin and I got a house in Berkeley, right on the Oakland border, about a half mile from my old house. This place is hot as hell. It’s got hardwood floors and new fixtures and appliances, and so on . . . and a li’l shaded backyard. My landlord, who is a heck of a guy, he said to me the other day: “You tell me what you want this backyard to be and I’ll make it be that thing.”

I have told him I want grass, and a place in the back with flat stones where I can put a table. He made me promise I’d water the grass. I promised him I would. I meant it!

Laura and I are going to plant California poppies all over the place, and a great many other things besides!! Isn’t that nice?? I’ll bet Dante is going to dig it hard.

Tonight, for God’s sake, I’m going to rent me a big-ass U-haul truck in Oakland and rip on down to San Leandro where my friend Tim’s empty ghosthouse sits emptily and ghostlike. I spent all last night tossing his unwanted possessions into huge black garbage bags, and putting nice useful things into huge brown boxes, and standing in cluttered rooms my friend used to occupy with my hands on my hips, arms akimbo, saying to myself and no one else: “Hmmmm. Man. Oh, baby.”

There sure is a whole lot of stuff in that place, some of which is mine, though not much of it. As I mentioned previously, in a fit of absolute mind-melting delirium, I have inherited Tim’s purple couch and his massive television. So I gotta load em up and take em north sometime this evening . . . I have no idea how I’m going to do this. Hmmmm. Man. Oh, baby.

Does anyone in the Bay Area want a bunch of black IKEA furniture? I guess y’all got forty-eight hours to let me know. And I guess ya gotta have a truck or an SUV, and be willing to take 580 south to San Leandro, way the hell down there. Oh, man . . . I’m definitely going to be chucking most of this stuff into oblivion, which is called the heart of planet earth. I’m sorry, earth. Please, y’all, come take this crap off my hands so I don’t have to choke our dear sweet planet with any more particle board furniture that is purportedly designed in Sweden.

Listen: Don’t despair. My own heart is still bitter as hell and soon, I promise here, I will go back to formulating sentences that speak for my bitter heart. I feel like hell. My body is a feeding trough filled to the brim with fifty-year-old corroded batteries and death-pale mannequin appendages. I need to sleep for a long time in my fortified compound in Berkeley. And then wake up again and hop onto that purple couch and watch gorgeous moving pictures on my stupidly huge television.

. . . my Great Fear, by the way, and I’m serious as a heart attack, is that I’m going to wake up in my house on Hawthorne in Portland, Oregon, and the last month of my life (or, God help me, the next six months, or six years of my life, or whatever) will have been an elaborate dream-hallucination perpetrated by some unseen cosmic joker. And I will be back in that absolute beef-jerky-dry oatmeal-flavored ice cream hell that was my life. Please! I pray that isn’t the case! And now I am going to stop talking about this before I unveil how truly deluded and paranoid I am about my own existence.

(lol)

By the way: I am getting a P.O. box in Emeryville this week. I’ll list the address as soon as I’ve got one to list. I hope y’all continue to send me mail~

OK: I am leaving work early to collapse on the rug in my bedroom. It is the only thing I’ve got in there right now. It is a nice clean life for right now. Maybe it’ll get real dirty again real soon.

I can only hope!!