my friend victoria from canada stayed with me last summer. we stayed awake talking until 5 a.m. every night for a week, and then i had to get up and go to work. it was worth it though, cuz hey why not.

after she left, i kept finding little messages she’d written me all over my room. some of them were quotes from books and others were just like mysterious and vague and may or may not have anything to do with me? or her? i don’t know. i was finding them for months and months in books on my shelf and in pockets and stuff like that. i have kept them all in a little envelope. there might be 30 of these god damn things in there. anyway i thought i had finally found them all, but then the other night i was digging around in my leather jacket and found the pages of this book, whatever it is, and i was real confused. i got all the way to the end and saw that she had signed her name. on the same day, having not heard from her in a month or two, she texted me out of the blue asking if she could send something to my house to send back to her to canada, which is something canadians have me do for them with increasing frequency.

but . . . whoa. man! that’s so cool. victoria is cool. i wonder if i’m still missing a few of them. girl, how deep in my room did you dig??

it feels strange to go so long without writing here. i won’t do that again. really i need to write here every single day, which i’m going to from now on.

laura and i dropped acid and walked around berkeley all night, and that is a thing i kept thinking about: that i have got to write more. otherwise, what’s the point? do i just sit around and wait until i’m dead???

well: AS IS MY WONT, in a sort of howard hughes sort of way, i have just locked myself in my house and have been watching tons of movies. honestly it rules a lot. i’ve been watching every scorsese movie in whatever order i feel like. ok?? i’m hiding from the whole wide world right now just for kicks. i’ll go back to the other thing when i get sick of this thing.

though yeah, it’s 5 a.m. and i’ve walked probably 15 miles all night and i’m sapped. i’m going to wake up in a few hours and make pumpkin cinnamon rolls with laura.

i’ll have more to say tomorrow. . . . ! i guess!

☆ミ

Well ACCORDING to the fuckin quote-unquote FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS OF BUDDHISM: Life is pain and suffering . . . and pain and suffering are the children of desire and ignorance. Yeah!!! And then you got nirvana and the path out, and all that other horseshit.

Listen: what I’m getting at is that I have spent the last five days gutting my entire house. I have held things in my hand and waited to see if I felt sentimental about them. And I’m here to tell you that 95% of the time I felt absolutely nothing, and so I put that thing, whatever it was, into one of three piles:

  • TO GIVE AWAY
  • TO THROW AWAY
  • TO BURN

Feeling nothing was a victory, because it meant that there was one less thing I had to hold on to both figuratively and literally. What a bargain! In discovering that a thing that I had kept in my house was useless, and then banishing it from my house, and being gladdened by its departure . . . well, it was then I knew that I had conquered an inanimate object, and was free of it. It is good to be unencumbered by useless things. And see I have to be straight up skeletal for the rest of my life what I’ve decided. It’s less painful that way.

I’m also selling shit. Hell, a few strangers from the internet even came by and bought some things, whatever those things happened to be, and gave me cold hard cash for it. I sold a god damn toolkit is what I’m saying . . . a toolkit I had no sentimental attachment to! There are a lot of things like that. I’m not going to make a pile, though . . . I’m gonna sell it all piecemeal as I come across it until there’s nothing left to sell. And really I should post some of it here on this very website, though I suppose I sold most of the things that were any good already. (If you’re in downtown Berkeley, go to the Half Price Books there and, uh, maybe you’ll end up with something I had carted around the country with me for the last 13 years.)

THAT BEING SAID: There are a few things left over that I’d rather someone here take than not. I gotta take pictures when the lighting is better. It’s 1 a.m. in the god dang morning over here in California, for god’s sake.

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!!! I don’t want none of it, man!! I want my life and my brain to be as empty as I was on the day I was born. OK??

This weekend Laura and I are getting cute snacks and then getting ripped out of our heads and walking around for seven or eight hours, because lord knows You’ve Gotta Do Something. Laura, I have a few things for you set aside . . . and they’re in the big empty room next to me where my roommate used to live.

Speaking of which: I’ve been living alone for weeks now, and for some reason I’ve been sleeping on the floor in the living room inside my military sleeping bag. Why? I don’t know. I guess I just like it is all.

Yeah.

I’m gonna go sleep on the floor. I’ve had the same album looping in the living room for something like eight hours now. At this point, why turn it off?? It just sounds like fuckin ghost music anyway!!!!