i was just thinking that the hardest i’ve ever laughed in my life was last summer in a 1950s-themed motel in asotria, oregon, where mccune stood in front of our room at 4 am, both of us high out of our minds on these mushroom capsules we ate, him describing the plot to john mctiernan’s THE 13TH WARRIOR, and then reciting the entire viking prayer from the movie, which he apparently knows by heart:

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
And my sisters and my brothers
Lo, there do I see the line of my people
Back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them
In the halls of Valhalla
Where the brave may live forever.

we were cackling like hyenas . . . i couldn’t breathe lol

that movie rules by the way. we watched it when we got back. i love it when something is “dumb” and also extremely well made and cool, which it is!

mccune and i are doing another trip this summer . . . we have decided will do it every summer. i think in july we’re gonna go up to seattle and then all around the national parks in washington state. and you can bet your ass we’ll have a snuff box loaded with uppers and downers and laughers and screamers again!!

FINALLY: here is john mctiernan, director of PREDATOR and DIE HARD (and so on), talking about how you can secretly make Art using a movie studio’s money, and how artists have been doing similar such things for thousands of years. it is very good:

yeah dude!!!!

the pink supermoon . . . live from an undisclosed location!!!

shinsui itō

My friend SAHAR wrote to me yesterday, and she asked me if I wanted to do something “cool” soon. To which I responded: Um, yeah! She’s a dental hygienist, don’t you know, a little ways north of El Cerrito. Or anyway she’s studying to be one. I asked her if I could volunteer to come in and have her class clean my teeth, and she said yes. I mean, listen: that gold tooth has got to be professionally polished every now and then, lest it lose its luster. So why not. They’ll do it for free and everything, and maybe we’ll all learn something together.

Anyway: We have decided we’re going to go to Santa Cruz and get a cabin or something, and then eat a bag of mushrooms and walk around all night. Alayna has told me we should start at the UC campus and make our way into the botanical gardens, and then into the nearby state park. Doesn’t that sound nice? Eventually we head back and hang out in the cabin. And, by god, the place I’m looking at has a hot tub, which is just the sort of thing you want to do on the big comedown from that stuff. First time I ever tried mushrooms, we all got in the hot tub afterwards and stayed there until like four in the morning. At some point I watched my hand melt and become tree roots growing on the inside of the tub. It ruled. And now, exactly thirteen years later, I hope to end a TRIP in the same sort of way, having wanted to do so for a long long time.

Sahar is cool. She’s a solid person. That’s the sort of person you want with you on a night like that, and don’t I know it.

Here are some pictures I took last year when she and I went to Albany Bulb and Indian Rock one foggy night:

Oh hey, that’s Sahar in the first picture:

Aw!

I gotta go back there soon . . . lord knows I love Albany Bulb. When I first moved to Oakland, my cousin Jack and our neighbor Nathan and I would drive the DOOMSMOBILE over there round sunset, and we’d walk all the way to the end of the jetty, where there used to be a wooden bench, and we’d sit down and share a joint and drink coffee from my thermos. And I took Laura and Hali there when Laura first got to the Bay, and Hali took her shirt and bra off and ran around and I wrapped myself in a blanket I kept in my trunk and screamed at the top of my lungs at San Francisco (lol) while Laura took pictures. And, uh, I brought Anna there, back when the world was still beautiful. . . !!!

Well: Sahar, let’s god darn do it. If this world be a scourge upon the universe, THEN LET US BE RID OF IT FOR A WHILE. We have the keys to the Other World, after all, where our warped shared reality can fractal into something stranger. And maybe once again this can all feel like those nights on the jetty, if only briefly. Either way, I won’t be disappointed. After A YEAR OF DARKNESS, I suppose anything is better than this. Hey man . . . I’ll take it!!

ilya glazunov

coffee twins 🥺

(this happens all the time actually . . . laura and i are in sync with each’s coffee cycle which is cute)

happy bicycle day 😉

when i first moved to the bay area nearly a decade ago, i met a lot of different kinds of people and had a lot of strange experiences with them. it was a good time. one of those experiences i have never written about, but for some reason i recalled it just now on my drive from asheville back to tennessee.

many years ago now i met this woman in san francisco. i remember her face but not her name, which leads me to believe she never told me what it was, since i never ever forget someone’s face and name, no matter how briefly i knew them. she had me meet her at this abandoned pier somewhere near the dogpatch . . . i am certain this place doesn’t exist anymore. the pier was small and derelict and had not been used in a long time. it was locked behind a rusted barbed wire fence. she said, “are you down to climb over it?” it was dusk and there was no one else around. i said: “of course i am.” and so we clambered over, avoiding the barbed wire, and hopped down unscathed onto the concrete below. we walked out onto the rotted pier, which was full of treacherous holes leading to the icy san francisco bay, and got to the end where the wood was still relatively intact. it was cold as hell with all the wind. we sat crosslegged and she took out some wine and food from her bag and we drank and ate together.

she said: “i had to know whether or not you would agree to jump over the fence with me. if you had said no, i would have left.”

that did not sound draconian to me. i knew what she was getting at. it was a sort of personality litmus test. had i chickened out, she would have known i was a certain kind of person, meaning the wrong kind of person (as far as she was concerned). she wanted to hang out with someone who was down to go places you weren’t supposed to go, which of course are the best places to go. and there on the end of the pier we were just two dark shapes and we didn’t know each other at all, but had done this small thing together for the sake of doing anything at all. we wanted to talk to each other, to someone we had never met before, because really that’s the most fun you can ever have. in jumping over the fence to be alone and away from other people, we at least knew we had that in common.

we spoke for a long time . . . it was hours. we only left because of how cold it had become. and once we got back to the other side she tightened her backpack over her shoulders and stood there with arms akimbo. she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and told me good-night, and then walked off into the dark. it was the only time i ever saw her. for some reason it seemed like enough. i guess we both figured that what we had experienced together was all it ever needed to be. i still remember everything we talked about and i’m glad we met, but it’s ok that that was the extent of it. what i got out of it was a little story. i can’t really explain it any better than that.

maybe i just had one of those nights again . . . it had been a while! i don’t think i’ll ever get tired of it. or anyway i hope i don’t. it is such a special thing to gaze through a tiny window into another world that is not yours, and to meet friendly strangers with whom you instantly befriend but know for only a few hours. whenever i tell laura or tracey about these sort of nights, they say something like, “that’s such a ryan story.” well, that’s fine. it’s just too much fun is all. i can’t help it . . . i just dig that sort of thing, you know . . . driving through the night out of some strange town reeking of cheap coffee and a cigarette i bummed from someone at the bar to get back to wherever it is i came from, knowing i’ll probably be sleeping in the back of the car when i get there, all fried and worn down and rattled in that good way. i know it doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s just a thing i like to do. and of course i’ll remember all of it, and think about it sometimes, and it becomes a part of the tapestry of my life . . . or whatever (lol)~

anyway. . . .