I got back to the Bay Area last night in order to fulfill my promise of house/cat-sitting at McCune Compound aka The Black Fortress up in bleak-ass Vallejo, California while the McCunes are chilling in Colorado Springs.

And so upon touchdown I fled the airport into the cold rainy darkness and took BART from Coliseum to 19th Street station . . . McCune said he’s scoop me up from Lake Merritt after he’d left Bar 355. As a childless and girlfriendless loser with nothing better to do with my life just then, I putzed around the lake and through my old neighborhood there, and ate a veggie curry wrap and drank a (free) cup of chai tee from Guru Curry House outside my old building, standing beneath the entryway to get out from the drizzle and mist. For two years I have been getting weekly calls from UPS and FedEx, the drivers trying to get buzzed into my old apartment, so I checked the call box outside and saw my last name still listed on apartment 3. I guess they never got around to removing it even though I asked them to a dozen times. When you are not paying a property management company anymore, they have even less of an incentive to fulfill your wishes than they would if you were actually paying them, which is saying something.

I took some pictures. See that lighted high-rise floating above the dark trees in the second picture? A bunch of rich people live there. I lived below it and to the right a little in a building where everyone was not rich. When I used to walk around the lake at night, which was pretty much every night, I would always look to that building and know that Dante was waiting for me in our cozy apartment, and I would quicken my pace to get back to him. Last night, knowing all that was gone now, our apartment and our life there, and him gone from the earth forever, I felt like drowning myself in the lake. I could think of no good reason not to until I remembered I had promised to take care of McCune’s cat.

Anyway:

I made my way to my old Trader Joe’s and stocked up on fruit. I did not recognize any of the employees and felt a little bit of a sadness . . . that small death of knowing you are no longer part of a place that was once yours. Outside I waited for McCune in the nearby parking garage where I had had a good-long phone call with Bethany a month ago. He showed up about forty-five minutes later smelling like a dude who had been at a bar. We rocketed onto the highway by Grand Lake Theater going 90 miles per hour, the road slicked with rain and the houses in the hills aglow in the darkness as we passed Emeryville and Berkeley and Albany and El Cerrito, booming across the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge and through the toll gate and not paying to get back to McCune Compound in Vallejo. Inside we were greeted by baby Tower:

Later, I received a series of truly transcendental text messages from my secret group chat:

McCune and I watched ESCAPE TO ATHENA (starring Roger Moore as a Nazi general), which blew my mind. Man! That’s such a good movie I want to scream. The house got cold as hell, so McCune went off to bed, and I ate a gummy and dropped off to nightmare world myself.

In the morning I found myself alone in the house. I got up and made coffee:

. . . and peed all over McCune and Joanna’s bed, as well as Tower’s crib. They had it coming.

. . . and hung out with Beezer the cat, whom I am the guardian of till Sunday:

It is a holiday week, or anyway it’s about to be one, so I down-shifted into Dad Mode and watched a bunch of Bond movies. Heaven help me, I still had Roger Moore on the brain. I put on MOONRAKER and saw my girlfriend, who is an austere French redhead who would probably be mean to me. Unfortunately it is implied she dies aboard the exploding space station at the end of the movie. Oh well. I’m mad at her for kissing another guy anyway. At least Jaws finds love.

Afterwards I put on OCTOPUSSY, which I had only seen once before. It is not very good, but like every Bond movie, even the especially bad ones, it’s worth watching anyway. Why not! Look at this:

Once the sun went down I drove to Target to get bagels. I made a mini playlist of songs about horses:

. . . and once home, I played the new remaster of DRAGON QUEST III. This is some shit I would say:

WELL!

My ass is tired as hell on account of all the nothing I did today . . . so good-night!!! ☆彡