my spirit-brother tim rogers:

Let me tell you about my life. Life is long. If you’ve ever felt bored or impatient even for a moment at a bank or a post office, your life is long. The only way life can be too short is if you die in the middle of doing something you love doing. Many bad experiences in my life so far have been interesting. For some of them, I learned a lesson. The rest, however, taught me nothing. Not even a couple of those interesting bad experiences so far in my life have been experiences I could not do without.

laura rokas had a dream that i died in a car accident and came back without a soul, and she was the only person who knew this. in her dream she realized it was her duty to kill me to get me to peace because nobody else was going to. you can’t walk around without a soul, after all.

this morning i asked laura to kill me, on account of some wishful thinking that her dream was a premonition, or some such thing. she has refused! my little sister has also refused to kill me. what gives???

i’m on my hands here in the dark, man! i’m pleading with you, unseen silent joker: kill me!

is the universe a factory that creates experience-gathering machines? do we exist to be shot out into space to gather as many experiences and feelings as we can during an average human lifetime and then . . . return to the source? to be reshaped and shot out again? to gather even more experiences? to an end we are wholly, cruelly unaware of?

am i one of the experience-gathering machines that broke on the assembly line? did i just break down along the way? or was i broken intentionally in order to gather worse experiences than some of the other machines around me?

can i go back to the source already??

can you retire me from service, for god’s sake???

i don’t wanna come back here again, that’s for sure. . . .

kill me!

•   •   •

humans do all kinds of things during their lifetime, right?

discovering things, building things. . . .

things like houses, motorcycles, bridges, cities and rockets. . . .

all that knowledge and energy. . . . where do you suppose it comes from?

humans were like monkeys once, right?

and before that, like reptiles and fish.

and before that, plankton and amoebas.

even creatures like those have incredible energy inside them.

and even before that, maybe there was energy in the water and the air.

even in space dust too, i bet.

if that’s true, what memories are hidden in it?

if all the energy in the universe came from one point, will it go back there again?

and if does, will you be there waiting for me?

My sister’s boyfriend-guy said once that, after I’m dead (hopefully any day now), he’ll pour one out for me at the foot of my statue where all the unsleeping freaks and creeps hang out, which will be in some city of eternal night, real or imagined. And what would he pour? The $3.99 bottle of wine I get from Trader Joe’s, the one with the pig on the label, which I have referenced a billion times in a billion stories on this fine web destination. Maybe my statue would be holding a bottle of this cheap bad wine. Maybe, at my feet, would be a little cyclone of stray cats, who are my friends when I go a-walkin at night. Maybe my face would be warped into this hideous sad expression, which is the face I make when I’m alone and exhausted and desperate in the dark!

Thanks dude.

BUT LET’S FACE IT: Hain’t gonna be no statue, thank god! I’m not cool enough. Like three people on this entire planet think I’m cool, and all three of them are dead wrong. Plus I don’t think there are gonna be any statues anymore period unless they’re erected out of empty milk jugs or twisted ribar, or human bones, or whatever, what with the whole god damn world ending and all that.

Well, what the hell. Just go right ahead and pour one out for me anyway. I was born lonely and I’ll die lonely. I imagine I’ll be lonely in death, and god knows I could really use the company.

“time and space” is the “thoughts and prayers” of relationships

My spirit-brother Matt and I had a real Halloween experience. We went to his (our??) friend Sarah’s house and she let us carve pumpkins on her living room floor and dump baby powder all over our hair and so on. Then she did our makeup. It looked really good. Well, here’s the thing: we all drank a little of this stuff called GHB, which I had never heard of, but which I soon learned is the “”date rape drug””. What! I really had no idea what I was getting myself into it. I felt a little woozy, having drunk this stuff that is clear and odorless and tastes like the ocean, but I managed to stay upright and conscious and I at least remember most of what happened that night. But listen: I wouldn’t recommend it. It wasn’t very fun and I guess if you take too much you can go into a coma and die. Whoops!

Anyway we drove around all spooked up, looking like a couple of sad freaks, and blasting AVALON by Roxy Music every which way all over the Oakland metropolitan area, and some of Berkeley too. We ended up at Ruby Room, which was packed with a whole lot of other creeps just like us, and in the back we sat glumly smoking cigarettes and watching some costumeless cheese-dicks play pool. I did not drink, because I didn’t want to pass out and die. About an hour later we drove to the other side of Lake Merritt and bumped our pumpkin heads together and tossed them into the water. Cool!

Well: Thanks for reading!!!!