today i went to PARADISE PARK CAFE down the STREET from me to visit my friend HANNAH and get some COFFEE

while i was waiting for my coffee, i went to the back to use the restroom. the little locking mechanism displayed a green band upon which was writ a single word:

VACANT

SAID I ALOUD TO THE DOOR: “yeah, you and me both, buddy!!!!!!!!!!!!”

(before posting this, i searched all 3,400 entries of this website to make sure i haven’t written about a similar incident before, which is a frightening and embarrassing possibility . . . what with the frequency in which i address inanimate objects who accidentally represent abstract concepts i have cartoonishly convinced myself i embody!!!!)

thanks for the coffee hannah

i don’t think you discounted me but it’s ok. you can’t go out into the world expecting anything to be given to you. but you can be sure you will have something taken from you—tangible or otherwise!

seeya at burger boogaloo next week punk!!!!!

FAR AS ANY GEOLOGIST HAS YET
GONE DOWN INTO THE WORLD,
IT IS FOUND TO CONSIST OF NOTHING
BUT SURFACE STRATIFIED ON SURFACE.
TO ITS AXIS, THE WORLD BEING NOTHING
BUT SUPERINDUCED SUPERFICIES.
BY VAST PAINS WE MINE INTO THE PYRAMID;
BY HORRIBLE GROPINGS WE COME TO
THE CENTRAL ROOM;
WITH JOY WE ESPY THE SARCOPHAGUS;
BUT WE LIFT THE LID—
AND NO BODY IS THERE!—
APPALLINGLY VACANT AS VAST
IS THE SOUL OF A MAN!

hey! have y’all seen any of the harry palmer films? they’re good! harry palmer is james bond if james bond made like $100 a week and lived in a crummy apartment and was indifferent to everything because he just wants to go home and go back to sleep.

anyway i would recommend any of them. yeah! i like them a lot. ok bye

yeah

An update on my new friend BRUTE! and the artwork I think he has just agreed to make for me:

Aidan,

Sorry for the delay. I think I actually got a little self-conscious with how dumb my idea sounded. I kept thinking, “Is this really something this guy would want to work on?” But maybe work is work!

OK, so: I basically just wanted to ape a few elements from the Rider-Waite Death tarot card but make it this whole other thing:

Helmet-less black-haired dude in black armor (which would be, uh, me) on a red-eyed white horse carrying a black flag with a white shooting star / meteor on it and “VIII” instead of “XIII”. The rest of the tarot card we can eschew in favor of an army of skeletons rallying beside and behind the white horse. A skeleton war, more or less . . . in the vein of the 16th century painting ‘The Triumph of Death’:

So obviously I’m not thinking it should be anywhere close to as insanely detailed this is. The painting probably took 20 years to paint. Just something loud and pulpy like you’re good at . . . more of a symbol of something bigger. We don’t need to see who the opposing side is: the opposing side is the world itself. Maybe just black and white and a lil’ (blood) red here and there. I don’t know what would be on the horizon. It could be nighttime with a starry sky above a dead skyline, if that’s not too much blackness drowning everything else out.

Ah, that’s what I got. What do you think??

Thanks dude.

Ryan☆

TWELVE HOURS LATER I received this (truncated) reply:

I think I can picture what you’re after, Ryan.

W-whew!! Sounds like this gonna be a real thing. I got T-shirts I’ve had for half my life with this guy’s illustrations on them. What a dude. And now we’re freaking working together!!

Maybe you can buy a T-shirt with this hideously stupid idea of mine on it soon?? Aidan will of course save me from my own stupidity, because let’s face it: whatever he comes up with will rule.

Why have I made myself the harbinger of doom? I don’t know. I guess I think it’s funny. It’s OK if I’m alone in thinking that. And let’s not forget that the Death card does not mean physical death . . . but rebirth! At the very least, symbolic meaning or not, I’m going to be surrounded by cheery skeletons.

☆彡

Lately I’ve been mucking around, digging up SKELETONS and summoning GHOSTS, and so on, and I’m thinking I ought not have. What I mean is that I’ve been emailing people from The Long Long Ago, and I wanna say half the time it’s a total dead end . . . but then every now and then someone does respond, and I’ll tell you what: a bunch of them are married. The married ones don’t really seem to wanna talk. There is definitely a finality to their emails. I guess they’re not curious anymore, or maybe they have what they need and don’t need anything from whatever came before . . . they only want what comes next, whatever that thing is, and what came before is irrelevant. Well hey, what’re ya gonna do.

I wonder about these people, I really do. I spend a good deal of my off-hours-thinking-about-stuff time wondering about them. What’s the juice, man? We used to have fun a long time ago. Who let it die? You know, at the beginning of ‘Dum Dum Boys’, where Iggy is rattling off names of friends and their ultimate fates . . . yeah. A lot of my friends, yeah, they’ve gone straight.

Listen: I understand. I really do understand how someone who has managed to exist long enough to see a full spectrum of sadnesses and failures would be absolutely shredded by their 30th birthday. And when that time comes, you either quit it all and find whatever comfort and relative safety you can get your hands on . . . or darkly forsake the future and continue to live in the strange limbo that made you! It is true for everyone whether they realize it or not that the preceding years were all an experiment to discover what you like and don’t like, and want and don’t want, and the results of this experiment are, to some, that they didn’t like or want any of it, and instead opt for the tried-but-true allure of long-term monogamous relationships and boxed wine and shared movie-streaming-service passwords. You hang around with other couples and play novelty card games, and use the word “bedtime”, and actually change the oil in your car every 3,000 to 5,000 miles. You wear soft earth tones and comfortable shoes, and buy nice towels, and add ancillary kitchen appliances to your Amazon wishlist. I don’t know. I’m generalizing of course, in a cartoonish way, though everything I’ve uttered here is something I’ve seen in people before. Conversely, I know a few creeps, bless their creepy hearts, who are right there beside me as we traverse the long dark dream together . . . having eschewed THE STATUS QUO, finding it to be boring and repulsive! I love the hell out of these people. I just wish I knew more of them is all. . . .

Just as the Ancient Mariner grabs hold of the Wedding Guest and, with the spiraling doom of insanity in his eyes, warns him of the great sin he committed in the deep dark cold at the bottom of the world—so too shall I say this to you, my little lambs! Let the long-gone ones live on as ghosts lurking through the shadowy rooms of your mind! Put the god damn shovel down and let them sleep! Do not dig them up again! It will drive you mad to see the mundane outcome of the world you used to know! Gaze not upon the dancing flame that speaks to you in the sad and lonely hours of the night! Like the fella said: Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me! There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness!

Cain’t help it though . . . I miss getting wild as hell with some of y’all. You grew up and away from me, and I’m still down here, virtually unchanged, getting real wild by myself. It sure ain’t the same though. Yeah.

I believe another fella said something like that way better than I ever could:

hey, where are you now when i need your noise?
now i’m looking for the dum dum boys
the walls close in and i need some noise

every payday, baby!!!!

$5!!!!

keepin this b*tch clean!!!!

now that i have a weird black car that my boss’s boss (i think??) referred to as “the car every guy i dated in high school drove”, the amount of times i’ve been compared to david wooderson from DAZED AND CONFUSED has increased tenfold

i’m not sure how i feel about this, but hey baby~

(p.s. i met wiley wiggins in san francisco one time. he’s the little guy on the far right in the first picture. we were both at this weird sponsored party-thing (ew), and i saw him standing alone on the second floor slumped over the railing watching everyone below. i thought, “yeah dude. yeah.” so i went upstairs and talked to him for a while. i don’t know that i initially knew he was wiley wiggins when i saw him up there but i knew it was him when he told me his name (lol). anyway: he was real cool. i asked him if it was ok if i hung out with him, or if he’d prefer to be alone, and he told me to stick around. “we can just be lonely together.” yeeeaaahhh!!!)

my cousins and me

i opted for black denim over a three-piece suit

i guess you call that a goth canadian tuxedo

jack and i are pretty drunk in the second picture

our colors are the same but inverted, which makes sense maybe to me alone

i escaped to the pacific ocean shortly after

anyway yeah