seeya soon my friend

I don’t know what happened, but I think I ended up with a bizarre diet. I eat the exact same few foods every single day, in an effort to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation, and so on . . . to keep from throwing myself upon the sword.

For breakfast I eat two apples with a tablespoon of peanut butter, two mandarins, 25 oz. of green tea (the capacity of my thermos~), and a cup of black coffee.

For lunch I eat some sort of vegetarian chili. Once a week I go to this place on Shattuck and get a tofu banh mi. I only go once a week because, hey presto, I only eat bread once a week. Whoa!

At night, around 9 pm, I fill a big wooden bowl with this:

• basmati rice and / or quinoa
• black beans and / or pinto beans
• half a red bell pepper
• half an avocado
• diced red onion
• white button mushrooms
• spinach
• one hardboiled egg
• one scrambled egg
• fried tofu in avocado oil
• cilantro
• chipotle and verde salsa

It kind of looks like hippie dog food, and I’m sure the whole thing weighs about five pounds. I sit there and I eat the whole thing. I don’t think I’ve ever not eaten the whole thing.

SOME TIME LATER, around midnight, I do a bunch of pushups and pull-ups and kettle bell things. Then a make a smoothie:

• strawberries
• frozen strawberries
• blueberries
• frozen blueberries
• frozen blackberries
• frozen raspberries
• one banana
• spinach
• a wad of peanut butter
• chocolate whey protein powder
• two cups of coconut milk

. . . and I blend the whole thing together and chill real hard drinking the entire blender’s worth of COLD RED LIQUID, which is filled to the brim with that stuff, god love it.

Outside of whey protein, I don’t eat any dairy at all. I don’t eat bread outside of that one day I go to the cafe where they know my name and start making my sandwich as soon as I walk in the door. I don’t eat meat. I don’t eat anything with processed / added sugar. And I go to a bar, or wander around the Berkeley Hills drinking PIG WINE all by myself, well—I’m only allowed to do that if I have exercised at least three times that week, or at least plan to!!

And if I get HUNGRY along the way, I just eat a fuckin apple or an entire bag of broccoli or an entire thing of asparagus. Am I scaring you?? Do I sound like an insane loser? Yeah. Thing is, my diet is just about all I’m disciplined about, because the rest of my life is a nightmarish cartwheeling freak show. OK? I need the structure of cheap colorful vitamin-dense raw food to keep me straight at least a little bit, because

I HAVE BEEN EXPERIMENTING WITH CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES TO SEE DARKLY INTO THE OTHER WORLD

A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean, and I want to see the thing, what it is, and if I’m going to get there by swallowing clear liquids from an unknown source I bought from a guy in Golden Gate Park, and eat mind-expanding fungi, and so on, I gotta maintain this dumbass thing my ghost lives inside of. And I may as well consume colorful watery fruits and vegetables to get the job done, rather than prepackaged sawdust prepared in sterile warehouses by unfeeling robots. Did you know the first ingredient in a Slim Jim is “mechanically-separated chicken”? What the fuck is that? Why does the FDA require a distinction between regular old chicken and chicken which has had robot claws all over it? Anyway don’t eat stuff like that . . . but do name your band Mechanically-Separated Chicken.

Finally:

:,)

Well . . . bye!

you would not believe the amount of times someone who is also my friend has said to me: “i’m sorry i stopped talking to you for a while. the guy i was dating at the time was jealous that we were friends.”

we must imagine they were presented with some sad and pathetic ultimatum: “it’s either him or me”

man what. come on. who are these freakin jerkweed scumbag twerps, and why are you dating them?? tell them to get over themselves or kick em off the god damn train! they’re just projecting their insecurities and, let’s face it, they probably just suck anyway lol

Alayna and I were doing what we always do, which is to talk about our dreams, and how we live inside of one, and so on. And somehow we got to talking about being in a tower near the sea and dreaming our whole lives from inside this tower. I remember having a vision after my grandmother died of her waking up by the sea as a young woman, and the sky was orange and the sun was setting. And just as you wake up and recall the last little traces of your dream, so too did she have memories of her dream—the long dream that had been her entire life. In dying on Earth, she woke up on the shore of the other world and remembered the dream of being a person.

Last week, Laura and I were walking around Berkeley, and I kept talking about water. And she said something like, “You’re obsessed with water.” Which is true! I’m always thinking about water, either being in it or near it, or drinking it, or heating it, and so on.

In the first chapter of MOBY-DICK, Melville says that humans are naturally drawn to water:

Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

And so I see myself in the tower near the sea dreaming my whole life, dreaming of water, and on and on. Alayna and I decided that was not a bad place to be. In the other world, in the tower, we dream of our lives here. And when we dream here in this place, we are seeing glimpses of ourselves in the tower by the sea, though it is through a glass darkly.

MOBY-DICK:

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

MEANWHILE: At the exact same time, my friend Thomasina, a private investigator in Portland (which makes two PIs I know in Portland, somehow??), began talking about dreaming about the ocean. We had been talking about how squid and octopi are two of the best animals. And then she brought up her friend, a fellow Aquarian, which are of course the water-bearers of the cosmos:

Laura Rokas and I would call this a PLATE OF SHRIMP moment. To wit:

Every single day of my god dang life, Laura and I text each other our POS moments. Sometimes we’re listening to the exact same song at the exact same time, or something like that. This happens constantly. I’ll be thinking of a word or phrase and then it will appear in a book I’m reading or a movie I’m watching. I reckon if you’re open to such things, clairvoyancy / ESP and all that shit really do exist. I mean, why not? In viewing things as a lattice of coincidence as opposed to unconnected incidents, it is as though you are turning on your antenna. You are setting your motherfucker to “RECEIVE”. And then you really do start to see it all.

Whenever I do acid or mushrooms, I always look up at the stars. Like water I am also obsessed with stars. And every time Laura and I have been all spooked up together and walking around Berkeley at night, we both see these faint spiderwebbing lines connecting the stars . . . a huge ghostly grid of triangles that tie the whole night sky together. It’s real cool. I don’t know . . . maybe the whole thing, all of it, is like that: a spiderweb of faint lines tying it all together. I think it’s OK to go on thinking such things. After all:

YEAH

a bird fell from the sky and died in my front yard today

Whoa: One of my favorite bands, Remember Sports, formally just SPORTS (a superior name, but whatever~), is apparently remastering and putting out a deluxe version their first album SUNCHOKES. I love the hell out of that album. It’s real honest, you know . . . just some nerds in a garage singing about being a teenager and having cute li’l crushes on people and shit like that.

I saw them play at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco last January. It blew my mind because 1) no one had their phone out to record the show and 2) when some jerkweeds started moshing and pushing people around (this, uh, is not that kind of music), the band stopped playing and told them to knock it off. Afterwards some couple out back told me they liked my “greaser look” (lol) and then I drank a cheap beer and went home. It was cute.

Anyway yeah I’m gonna get this thing. Why not? The bombs are gonna start dropping any day now. May as well get my kicks while I still can!!!