Well, I spoke to my lawyer about this, and he gave me the OK to talk about it here . . . so, yes, it’s official: my birthday is on Sunday, and I’ll be 32 years old. The world will eventually get its revenge on me, and kill me dead, but so far I have somehow, against all odds, managed to circumnavigate death. It was just dumb luck. I reckon that’s the secret though: to keep living, all you have to do is not die. There’s only so much you can do, of course, to stay alive. If something wants to kill you, it will. The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. (And so on.) On your end, with whatever trace of autonomy you have been afforded, all you can really do is eat and sleep and tell yourself a bunch of lies, hoping that’s enough to get you to the next sunrise. Sometimes you imbibe unhealthy substances to disconnect yourself from any higher thought for a while. Other times you just give in and jerk off. At the end of all this, in that ultimate moment, what was it, really? Whatever you got hiding in the shoebox beneath your bed, I guess. Forget about anything else . . . it will have never amounted to anything more than what it will finally be, once the music stops for good: tears in rain, et cetera. For those of you in the back, you should know that I have put in minimal effort. My self-preservation instinct is, frankly, a critically damaged machine . . . an angry, backfiring rat’s nest of tangled wiring and dying circuitry shrieking out circus clown music in the darkness of my mind.

Anyway! Happy birthday, Ryan.

I made a wishlist if you wanna get me something. I mean, go for it:

HERE IT IS

lol

I keep having these horrible nightmares that I live in Los Angeles. If I get kicked out of Germany, I’ll have no other choice than to go to LA and finally get my PI license. I don’t know what else I could possibly do. So a few things on this list are me future-proofing my life. I wouldn’t tie my shoes without a backup plan. Though yeah, I suspect these particular things on my list will be self-evident. Everything else is just for KICKS more or less. Hey man . . . there’s nothing wrong with getting your kicks. What the hell else are you gonna do??

Remember: If you don’t call or text or email me on my birthday, which is January 26th, I will haunt you after I die. Actually, I don’t like my birthday at all, and feel embarrassed by it, so in death I will leave you the hell alone. But you can talk to me on Sunday anyway if you want to! That would be nice. Get it while it’s hot, why don’t you.

okthanksbye