Recently I have been getting daily emails from Dropbox telling me I have run out of space. I completely forgot I even had one. I LOGGED IN and discovered I haven’t touched it in almost five years. Well there sure is a bunch of trash in there. Most of it is just stuff from my phone, maybe 75% of which are pictures from back in 2013 when I was driving across the desert from Texas to California to get to Oakland. Whoa. I’d need to sift through it all to get to the good stuff . . . not because there’s so much good stuff to choose from, but because there are only three or four good pictures hidden within what I believe are thousands of bad and meaningless ones.

In SOARING THROUGH THE PAST, one thing is abundantly clear to me, which is that I used to be even more of a honkey turd than I am now. I’m much worse in other ways now, but I don’t know . . . who is this guy? is a thing I keep asking myself. What did he want? Or think would happen? It sickens me to ask those questions of myself, the living Ryan, who is me, and who is in some sense responsible for that dead Ryan, but maybe not.

Like, man, this is from atop some huge hill in the wastes of Arizona about a hundred miles from Phoenix:

Gross! I mean, to be fair, I was just recreating that picture of A YOUNG HUNTER S. THOMPSON, seen here:

. . . but still, I don’t know, what a fucking dork, man. Those stupid sunglasses. God. Maybe I’m the exact same person. That’s horrifying.

That trip was so good though. I had to pay like $100 extra to get a U-haul with three seats so that my friend Jason could come along . . . and we were crammed in there with a cooler and a bunch of SNACKS and we were just ripping through the darkness at 90 mph smoking spliffs (lol) and god knows what else!! And we knew that when we finally got to where we were going, we could stay there, and it would be in California, which was where we wanted to be, and on and on. Man, I was so excited. I think that’s the last time I was ever excited about something. Whoops!

OK, well, anyway: I’ll go through these. I don’t think anyone has ever seen them. I don’t think I ever even saw them. Like I said, I didn’t even know they existed anymore. Whoa. Well, hey.

Well, here you go: I’m hiring an intern. I’ve been talking about this for something like five years. When my cousin and I first moved to Oakland, we had dreams, now long since forgotten or abandoned, but one of the dreams I dreamed was to hire some college kid to hang out and make stuff with us. This internship I dreamed up was of course the ‘unpaid’ kind . . . and remains so as I write this godforsaken Craigslist ad, because lord knows I can barely afford to pay myself. But look! They will be compensated with unfailing loyalty, and my Filmstruck login info, and as much free tea and coffee and food as they want. If they need me to pick up their grandmother from the airport, or ghost write letters to their betrothed, or if they’re in jail and they can’t make bail hey: I got that money. We’ll be each other’s intern. We will have a strange symbiotic relationship wherein we freely pass the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza caps back and forth. It will be a beautiful thing, the two of us charging full blast into the wild world—into that great final windmill at the end of all things! See here:

. . . uh, anyway.

I have some pitiful “portfolio”-thing festering in the wastes of the internet, and it is there you might draw the conclusion that I am at least capable of doing more than blinking and breathing and consuming resources. I make stuff! I’m always making stuff, man. I just wanna find someone who wants to make stuff too. OK?? I know how to use Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign and Final Cut Pro, and on and on. I can code websites and make books! I have said to this future person, my future squire and friend, in the Craigslist post I am drafting, I have said: I’ll teach you how to do any of that stuff any night of the week, man. You, future friend, are signing up for a strange trip that is worth its weight in gold, I think! Can you imagine? We’ll just make videos and work on this website and a few others, and whatever the hell else. And I’ll make you dinner and crappy coffee. I’ll drive you all over town. Man, it’ll be cool.

Should I share the link here once I post the ad? Or should it be a secret? I wonder. I will make the decision to act or not act five seconds before I act or not act. What? Yeah.

I am sitting over here compiling a huge list of abstract amenities that only a cracked freak would slobber over. Well, whatever. That’s the sort of person I’m looking for. And as I am writing and compiling all of this nonsense, I keep thinking that this is the sort of thing I would have gone nuts about if I were 21 years old or something. I mean, I still would . . . but I’m older now, and time is up for me. Could I today wander the dark plains and forests of this world with a madman? With a doomsday prophet hellbent on discovering the secret nature of the universe before the whole world goes right down the drain towards oblivion? I don’t know. Maybe. It sounds exhausting, but who cares. I need a soldier, OK. I need a marine. Together we will wander directionless through the fog. It will be stupid but at least it won’t be boring. It will maybe be beautiful also.

Hmmmmmm. Yup.

happy birthday dante!!!!!! i would be dead without y-o-u-u-u-u-uuuuuu!!!