Me at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park the other day for Laura’s birthday picnic. She took this picture! I look like i’m about to rob a stagecoach. My bag was full of snacks.

lol my hamster bud in animal crossing has a birthday one day before laura’s and i went to his house yesterday and gave him a football as a birthday present

Happy birthday to my best friend Laura Rokas~

Laura, I’m sorry that you’ve spent so much time and money immigrating to a racist police state which is governed by sadistic autocratic plutocrats who are actively trying to destroy us!! And that your birthday falls during a quarantine lockdown due to a deadly pandemic lol

. . . but I’m glad you’re here 🥺

. . . and there ain’t nothin like a friend who can tell you you’re just pissin in the wind!!

i watched ALMOST FAMOUS last night. i had not seen it in many years. and look: i’m lester bangs! that’s me. i like that guy a lot . . . i bought his one and only book years ago, and i still got it. RIP lester bangs and philip seymour hoffman. those were cool dudes.

oh! i actually met ol billy crudup once, who is also in the movie. this was years ago when i first moved to california. he came into the cafe where i worked on college avenue in berkeley. he was in town for a play he and sir ian mckellen were in. i had met sir ian about an hour before. sir ian hugged me, which ruled. i just shook ol billy boy’s hand. i told him i had tickets to the show, and then i accidentally said “good luck” instead of “break a leg”. the play was extremely good. it’s one of the best things i ever did.

though yeah: i reckon i’m lester bangs. and if that’s true, i got about a year to live before i overdose on nyquil. there are worse fates.

. . . until then: if you get into a jam, you can call me. i stay up late!!

I have bipolar II disorder. It is a total nightmare. Also, it is difficult to explain what it feels like exactly. I reckon the way I always thought about it, in a simplistic sort way, is that I have a foot in two parallel realities. Probably everyone does to some extent, though what do I know? I ain’t other people. At any rate, it is nauseating to not know which reality to belong to when you are experiencing them simultaneously. In one of them you are alone. Which one does everyone else live inside of? Often it is difficult to know for sure.

It is a rough hand to be dealt, and often it steers me into making catastrophically bad decisions about uh “finances” and “”romances””, and so on . . . the negative impacts of which I don’t realize until later. And when I do, it always feels like waking up from a bad dream. I cannot connect myself to my previous actions, though I am still responsible for them of course. A lesson is learned, but the damage is irreversible.

Sometimes, when the trip gets real heavy, which occurs every few years like a dark tide rolling over my soul, I become paranoid that everyone I know hates me and I start to question my own memories and perception of reality. It is a bad beat, no doubt . . . and incurable too! Oh well.

Anyway: A SCANNER DARKLY is one of my favorite novels, and there many passages that come close to articulating this godforsaken ailment that several of my friends and I suffer from. Here is one of them:

Back at Room 203, the police psychology testing lab, Fred listened without interest as his test results were explained to him by both the psychologists.

“You show what we regard more as a competition phenomenon than impairment. Sit down.”

“Okay,” Fred said stoically, sitting down.

“Competition,” the other psychologist said, “between the left and right hemispheres of your brain. It’s not so much a single signal, defective or contaminated; it’s more like two signals that interfere with each other by carrying conflicting information.”

“Normally,” the other psychologist explained, “a person uses the left hemisphere. The self-system or ego, or consciousness, is located there. It is dominant, because it’s in the left hemisphere always that the speech center is located; more precisely, bilateralization involves a verbal ability on valency in the left, with spatial abilities in the right. The left can be compared to a digital computer; the right to an analogic. So bilateral function is not mere duplication; both percept systems monitor and process incoming data differently. But for you, neither hemisphere is dominant and they do not act in a compensatory fashion, each to the other. One tells you one thing, the other another.”

“It’s as if you have two fuel gauges on your car,” the other man said, “and one says your tank is full and the other registers empty. They can’t both be right. They conflict. But it’s–in your case–not one functioning and one malfunctioning; it’s . . . Here’s what I mean. Both gauges study exactly the same amount of fuel: the same fuel, the same tank. Actually they test the same thing. You as the driven have only an indirect relationship to the fuel tank, via the gauge on, in your case, gauges. In fact, the tank could fall off entirely and you wouldn’t know until some dashboard indicator told you or finally the engine stopped. There should never be two gauges reporting conflicting information, because as soon as that happens you have no knowledge of the condition being reported on at all. This is not the same as a gauge and a backup gauge, where the backup one cuts in when the regular one fouls up.”

Fred said, “So what does this mean?”

“I’m sure you know already,” the psychologist to the left said. “You’ve been experiencing it, without knowing why on what it is.”

“The two hemispheres of my brain are competing?” Fred said.

“Yes.”

MmmmmhmmMMMM!!

lord . . . this has got to be the chillest song ever written lol

i remember sitting in my old police car near uc berkeley campus at the end of a mushroom trip and listening to it on loop until the sun came up

it ruled

oh man! and me and the donut farm cook neil would have black sabbath fridays and play all their albums in order

my friend shaina hates it when i say stuff like this, but like, if you can’t hang out with black sabbath then what are you doing man

AND SO I RECALL THE PAST, TO WIT:

hah!!

tune in next week as i descend further into the realm of stonerism!!

WHILE DOWN BELOW THE TREES
BATHED IN COOL BREEZE
SILVER STARLIGHT BREAKS DOWN FROM NIGHT
AND SO WE PASS ON BY THE CRIMSON EYE
OF GREAT GOD MARS
AS WE TRAVEL THE UNIVERSE

yessssssssssss 🚬👌🌝

DEATH and THE HERMIT

and THE DEVIL (sorry monty)

AND ONCE AGAIN I FIND MYSELF in a strange way. To be more specific, I am in whatever realm of psychological deterioration where you get stoned at 4 am and listen to fuckin Stairway to Heaven backwards lol

ALSO: I woke up from a melatonin dream this morning and saw a sponsored Instagram ad for a song written by this girl I used to know in LA. It made me a little sad to see her face again. She has a good face! And she’s a good musician. Just, you know, it was surreal as hell . . . and it makes you wonder is all~

FINALLY: For those who came in late, the supposed cryptic message that those cheese-eatin evangelicals thought they heard in STAIRWAY way back in the 70s is as follows . . . and if you know what you’re looking for, you really can kinda hear it, which rules. Though like, c’mon.

TO WIT:

Here’s to my sweet Satan
The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan
He will give those with him 666
There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan

Yeah well . . . I sure did walk sad Satan’s little path in my dreams last night. And near as I can tell, I woke up in his little toolshed, and it is there I will stay forever!!

Yeah!!!