yeah man . . . the chillest song

i remember doing mushrooms alone in berkeley one night, and i walked many miles through the hills petting cats and picking flowers. there was no one else out, just me. i had a really great time. and just before sunrise i was on the comedown, and i got back in the doomsmobile parked near the clocktower on campus, and i drove on the empty freeway back home to oakland with this on and felt real good

i wrote this back in august 2018 and reading it again made me cry:

i don’t care about anything i own or much else in my life. if most or all of it went away i wouldn’t care, because all i care about is dante. i have put all of my love into dante, and have protected him and made him comfortable because taking care of him is the only thing that makes me happy anymore. all day long i think about how i can’t wait to get back to him, and how he’ll be waiting for me when i get there. and every day we go outside for a half hour and walk around the yard and sometimes he lies down in the grass and takes a nap while i read a book. and he’ll go to this tree by the gate and grab a leaf and bring it to me, and i’ll throw it into the air for him to catch, and then he’ll take it in his mouth and run inside with it where he has a little pile of leaves he’s been collecting. at least half the week i sleep on the couch to be near the chair where he sleeps, and when i wake up in the morning he’s curled up by my legs

when dante hears me crying, he comes to me wherever i am and lays down on my chest and goes to sleep

i still cry about dante every day. i have cried for him every day six months. and now no one is here to come to me when i cry about him being gone forever

it is always a little sadness to me when i realize in a friendship (whichever one it may be) that i’m the one who reaches out 100% of the time. the other person only ever responds to me but never initiates. it makes me think that i want to be their friend more than they want to be mine, which is fair . . . but it is still a little sadness nonetheless. how could it not be? and then i get this dark suspicion that rather than them considering me a friend, maybe they just regard me as some weird annoying guy who they merely tolerate. oops! reckon that’s just fear and paranoia talking. i’ll never know unless they say so. in the real world, in nearly all cases, it’s not that people don’t like you . . . it’s just that they don’t think of you. what can you do? anyway, i always endeavor to approach everything with good intentions, so outside of that, ultimately there’s nothing i can do otherwise. and so i say: well baby then aloha.

I have been watching everything Danny McBride has ever made on account of I love that dude, and after bearing witness to dozens of hours of TV shows and movies he wrote / produced / directed / starred in, I have decided with finality that the dude is a genius. Have you seen that new Halloween trilogy he wrote? I can’t believe people didn’t like them . . . they’re so good. Forgive my saying so, but he’s a Real Artist.

The other day McCune spoke thusly: “I have been saying this since Halloween (2017/18) that Danny McBride is going to make/direct an incredible film before he dies. An important one.”

I agree!

Anyway: I have finally arrived at Righteous Gemstones and I dig it so far. And three episodes in, I have already found myself:

Within thirty seconds of meeting Walton Goggins’ character, who is named Baby Billy Freeman, he rises up triumphantly from an outdoor clawfoot bathtub on the shoreline of a lake and speaks of improving his life and that of his redheaded wife’s while his penis is absolutely in the foreground. I love it. That dude rules too.

I am currently suffering from some unknown ailment that is not covid, which I tested negative for twice, nor is it mono, since I’ve already had it during a miserable winter in Portland some time ago, and so it is now lying dormant in my body forever, and I am thus immune. And near as I can tell, it is also not strep because I don’t see exudate in the back of my throat, which you can’t miss . . . it’s very disgusting. But I am having that hot and cold feeling, the one where you never really get warm and even shiver and break out in a cold sweat in a hot bath, and the only time I ever felt that way was on strep. That was also the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. This was fall 2018, and Dragon Quest XI had just come out, a luxurious and super chill 100+ hour game, and so I had a real good time hallucinating and playing that thing all the livelong day. What I got right now is three seasons of Righteous Gemstones, so I figure I’ll swill down some cherry-flavored Severe Nitetime cold and flu medicine and sedate myself into dark dreamless abyss sleep until noon or so . . . and then wake up and keep plowing through this thing. It’s a way better plan than staring at the wall!!!

Though yeah: Dude rules.

OK . . . goodnight~ ☆彡

brother kerwin once said to me: “once you realize it’ll never be ok, it’s ok”

. . . I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking up and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.

i remember finishing ‘a farewell to arms’ in new orleans one summer a long time ago, and i always remember this passage. i remember it because i know exactly what this feels like, and how it describes a good deal of my adult life, and how i miss that place and that feeling now