Man, this was a year ago exactly. That kinda makes me sad. For all of that June I had felt rotten as hell about a whole bunch of things . . . and then once I got to July I knew Bex and her band would be staying with me, and so I felt all right again. They rolled into town on July 20th, having come from a string of shows in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, and played a show at Stay Gold in Ghosttown a few blocks from my first house in Oakland. I let Bex and them crash at my place afterwards, and in the morning I made a last-minute decision to drive down with them to Los Angeles where they had a show in Glendale with Chalk Talk.

I wrote a long piece about those two days. I had a real good time and I thought I ought to write it out. I specifically remember standing in the lot behind the venue before they went on, smoking a cigarette Maddie had given me and thinking to myself: “This is a good thing that I am doing. I’m glad that I’m doing this.” It felt like the sort of thing I’d always done, and now I had the chance to do it again. I had just spent half a year of my life hanging out with people who I don’t know at all anymore, and who are ghosts to me now. But the people I met on that little trip a year ago, I talk to them pretty much every day of my life. I miss them when they’re not around.

Well: Chalk Talk are touring again in December, from Texas up to North Carolina, or something like that, so I’m gonna meet them at some point along the way . . . probably at their New Year’s Eve show, which I think is in Savannah or Asheville. I have other things I gotta do when I’m back in the US again . . . but I will let it be a mystery for now, because a lot of it is to a mystery to me as well. The point is that something is going to happen to me, and it’s important that I make something happen to me or else then I’m in big trouble. Ex nihilo nihil fit. See, you’ve got to place things like this for yourself in the future or else you’ll go insane . . . trust me!!!