I came home from work at four in the morning and intended to sit down and finish something I had started a few days ago—that dumb trash heap of a story involving my tooth, and getting old, and on and on, that I mentioned a few days ago. . . .

But Dante was acting insane, and so I hung out with him instead . . . Even now I can hear him screaming and running around in the living room. I have no clue what’s going on with this dude. He loses his mind as the sun is coming up, and I can tell by the color of the sky that it will be up any minute now. With the wooden blinds in my room I can make this place pitch-black, even on the sunniest summer day, which is how I keep it most of the time no matter what the weather looks like . . . and so I plan to watch an episode of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ before I close my eyes, since I am immune to anything the outside world has going on.

There is this job-thing going on invisibly somewhere. The machinery and dice-rolling involved in this process are known to other people—the people with all the power—and not to me, a person who has no power whatsoever. Which is to say my friend in Oakland recommended me for a job, and then I applied, and then I heard back from them with some brief questions, and I submitted those questions, and then they wrote back to me again saying “thank you!” and to expect an update in the next few days. What do they think of me? Do I seem OK? Who knows. All I can do is sit here and feel weird and wonder. And I wonder this: I wonder how many people received this email. It could be anywhere as many as ten, or maybe it’s just two of three. I really have no way of knowing, which is why I haven’t invested the slightest trace of hope into this thing. Though hell, let’s say there’s a fifty-fifty shot that I land this thing . . . Well, I’ll tell you what: with my very first paycheck I sure am going to take Dante to the vet to get his teeth cleaned and all his shots done. And I’m going to do what I said before, and buy him a year’s supply of food. And then I’m going to set up that sweet 100%-paid health and dental and vision insurance, and get a physical and a teeth cleaning and a vision check. You’d better believe it, baby. With the rest I will pay my rent, and maybe buy a kettle bell as well.

They wouldn’t keep emailing me if they didn’t like me, I don’t think. And whoa: If they did hire me, I’d get to walk across the Hawthorne Bridge every morning. It’s about a fifteen minute walk from my house to downtown Portland, and whoa—whoa baby—that would be an exciting thing to me, to walk across that bridge to earn some money, rather than to skulk around gloomily in a deserted city at midnight, wondering where it all went wrong. . . !

OK? Yeah. Anyway. I have some stuff written. I worked on this very website just today. It will be good and beautiful soon. I have a lot of ideas that I have been incubating the heck out of, and others I have already Made Into Real Things, and have hidden from the world until the time is right. The good part about living in a city as dry as fucking beef jerky as Portland is that you have very little incentive to go outside and be around identical-looking borderline-clone-like people with huge beards and plaid shirts, and so you just stay inside and work on stuff. Maybe none of this will pan out, but Lord knows I tried.