Back when my cousin and I ran this little publishing company in Oakland, we befriended a dude named Fielden Nelson. I had read a short thing he’d written on a popular website I don’t want to link to, and so I sent him an email and we started talking. Fielden was a cool guy. This was over 10 years ago now, and when he wrote this, he was about my age now. I don’t think he’d mind if I reposted it in its entirety:

You will move to L.A. from somewhere in the Midwest without previously obtained shelter or employment. You will be cautiously optimistic. You will have a solid short term plan. All of your childhood will be in your trunk.

You will have been moderately successful. You will stay with more successful friends. Because it is California, the land to where the more successful have already moved. You will stay with good friends. You will stay with friends of good friends. You will stay with colleagues of friends of good friends.

You will stay in extra rooms, assigned to non-extra functions. You will stay in living rooms, assigned to living functions. You will sleep on pull-out couches. You will consume limited space. You will overstay your welcome. You will walk in on intimacies. You will see nipples. You will hear what other people sound like. In the bathroom. In the bedroom. When they think they are alone or cushioned by walls.

You will sleep in hotels. You will sleep in motels. You will sleep in your car. You will sleep in a tent. You will have a graduate degree. You will turn 37.

You will look for jobs. You will send out résumés. You will do interviews for things like Bakery Counter Night Person, Part-time Intern for the Assistant Manager, and Personal Assistant to the Hostess/Host. You will not get jobs. You were bored working when you were a teenager.

You will walk other people’s dogs. You will watch other people’s homes. You will sit in other people’s chairs and use other people’s pillows. You will be surrounded by other people’s pictures, other people’s food, and their odd intimate tastes. In art. Lighting. Soap. You will be paid to do this. This will come to not feel strange.

You will walk. You will turn down random streets. You will consider collecting random things. You will consider building random things that will serve random purposes. You will consider pirates and their place in the modern world. You will lose any fear of lost.

Your cousin/friend of a friend/former classmate will get a major role. Write/direct/manage/create/invent a Hollywood Internet Silicone Valley thing. They will instant message all available social satellites: Never stop chasing your dreams. Hard work will pay off in the end. You have to fall before you phoenix. They will be 23.

You will focus too hard on the minute details of doing everyday things. You will grow to not trust spelling, grade school historical facts, the pronunciation of words, or the nerve responses returned from your fingertips.

You will at some point overhear these random phrases: fusion bicycle; going from consulting straight to banking is rare; traffic-driven website; my producer would kill me if he knew I was telling you this but. You will want to punch the people saying these things. As hard as possible. In the stomach. Until you realize they spend two hours every day with their personal stuntman/ex-marine/part-time porn star/niche martial-arts trainer who teaches them to flip off walls and obliterate boulders of low self-esteem. And to do ten reps after you’re dead. Step aside. The war is over.

Your relatives will die. Your mother will break down like you’ve never seen her break down before. Over the phone. You will not be able to attend funerals.

You will borrow money from people you’ve already borrowed money from. You will move into a broken apartment. It will cost more than your first car.

You will fall out of love. You will fall in love. You will fall out of love.

You will run out of money. You will be glad it’s always warm. You will stare at the sea. You will stare at the sun. You will stare at the birds breaking up blue. You will stare at the wind leant palms.

I remember feeling like I related to these sentiments at the time, but I was mistaken. Maybe in a quote-unquote spiritual sense it resonated with me, or at least I wished they did, though the reality is that I had not yet truly experienced many of the quiet sadnesses and feelings of disillusionment that he talks about.

What I’m saying now is that, YEAH, having just reread this many years later, I have absolutely bore witness to and lived these things firsthand. I’m always saying that in some ways, bad-interesting experiences are almost better than good experiences, and I got plenty of the former, for whatever that’s worth, probably not much . . .

Though yeah: this little essay is good. It is airtight and wastes no words. It’s also 100% true.

(Fielden? You still out there, brother . . . ?)

My sister took this picture of me outside of Quince Cafe in Berkeley, California in 2018. That’s my black and gold special edition 1981 Datsun 280zx, which I loved. It was in near-mint condition and barely had over 100k miles on it. I drove that thing real fast all over the Bay Area, mostly at night, with the interior lit up dimly by the orange gauges. And every other Friday I took it to the carwash and sprayed it down and waxed it.

Sometimes people would come up to me in parking lots and say, “I had one of those in high school,” or, “My boyfriend drove one of those in high school.” And so on. It was a sort of cheap Japanese sports car, so I guess even a high school kid in the early 80s could afford one. I mean the car is basically just designed to look cool and make out in, which are two of the primary objectives of any self-respecting 80s teenager.

AND I GOTTA SAY: it really was a good make-out car. I mean, it just was! I remember picking up this teacher and taking her to a drive-in movie theater in San Jose, and we got drunk and made out during a really bad movie. It was great. And sometime later, while ripping onto 580 around midnight with this oceanographer I’d met, I remember she put her head on my shoulder and held my hand, and I thought, “Yeah dude . . .”

(Another time, this kinda crazy girl hugged and kissed my car a block away from the Wolfhound as I stood several feet away wondering at all the decisions I had made in my life that had lead me to that moment.)

It was painful to get rid of the 280zx. I had considered mothballing it somewhere, maybe in a garage in Berkeley near the Bay, but I didn’t want to pay to store it, and anyway it just would have sat there collecting dust. At that point I hadn’t intended to return to California in a permanent sense. So I sold it to the only person who contacted me about it, an army vet in the North Bay, just days before I left for Berlin in 2019. He gave me $6,500 cash and drove it home with his son without ever test driving it, which seemed insane to me. I put the money in my savings account and lived off of it while in Germany. (Three months later, the pandemic would start, and I’d blow a good chunk of that money buying a last-minute ticket back to the States before the worldwide lockdown began.)

Though yeah: As sad as it was to watch the 280zx turn right off my street and disappear forever, I did feel a sort of relief on account of knowing a big black hole for money was gone from my life. Anytime something beneath the car rattled or sounded weird, I knew I was about to throw a big wad of cash into a black hole. I was in constant fear that the it would just blow up or stop running, or else get stolen, which was not at all a slim probability in the East Bay. Not to mention filling up that massive 19-gallon tank ran me about $70 each time, and I was on a miserable publishing salary.

The Datsun 280zx was a nice to have. IN TRUTH: it made me feel cool whenever I drove it. I would only ever buy one again if I had a big pile of money, and kept it as a Weekend Car in the same way a dad does. I don’t anticipate ever having a big pile of money. And so saying, I guess the eighteen months I spent with it and the thousands of miles I put on that thing will remain a distant memory growing more distant. Maybe one day I’ll be some played-out chump missing my long-gone Datsun like those boomers who approached me and gazed sentimentally at my car in grocery store parking lots. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then. But if not: I reckon there are worse fates.

jules works right around the corner from me now

dude rules

emel is here

The other night I had a vivid dream that I was driving the Doomsmobile through Oakland and LA at night, which is something I used to do a lot in the early days of my living in California. I’d cruise around the East Bay at 2 am when I couldn’t sleep, sometimes with my cousin or a girl I liked, though often alone. I did everything in that car: search and rescues when friends got in a bad way, sat inside the warm cab with a head full of acid and surrounded by the fog on Grizzly Peak with a Trader Joe’s cashier I met in Silver Lake, smoked five hundred cigarettes up and down the coast to get to LA and back again, ferried dozens of strangers across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge late at night to get them home for a little bit of money, served as a sort of tour bus for both McCune and this girl I was dating’s drum kits, and me always taking hard turns on those desolate streets in West Oakland at 50 miles and hour while blasting Boris, and on and on. . . .

For those who came in late, the Doomsmobile was my P-71 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, which was a decommissioned Fremont police car my cousin and I bought in Daly City. To paraphrase the Blues Brothers: it had a big V8 cop motor, cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. If you slammed on the accelerator, the car would rocket away accompanied by the smell of burnt rubber. We spray-painted the doors black at the behest of an Emeryville police officer in order to keep it street legal, and it ended up acquiring a lot of weirdness both inside and out on account of its storied life, largely due to the fact that it was stolen four times, with each new thief adding or taking away some element of it.

When we first got the Doomsmobile, it looked like this:

That spring, my cousin and I had filled the trunk with strange and useless these we’d either bought or found in Oakland: a traffic cone, a wooden pizza paddle, redwood logs, hazmat suits, bear mace, and so on. We’d put some blankets and pillows back there since we often ended up sleeping in the thing, not wanting to pay for hotels in LA. We even mounted devil-shaped deer antlers in the back window.

The Doomsmobile had also acquired a massive dent on the roof on account of two girls rolling around making out on top of the car. Still, it was in good shape:

By the time my cousin and I drove it down to LA to cover the Electronic Entertainment Expo, it looked like this:

(What the hell am I wearing? I was totally fried on Adderall.)

The day I sold it, it looked like, in the words of my friend Tim, “a car Count Dracula would drive”:

The last time I ever saw it was late at night in downtown Oakland. Amazingly, I pulled up behind it headed in the direction of Lake Merritt. I knew it was the Doomsmobile because of the plates. The guy who had bought it had tinted the windows and completely redone the paint. It looked really good. I followed it for a few blocks out of curiosity, but it turned on Broadway, then another side street, and was gone. When I passed the side street seconds later it had completely vanished. It was very strange.

I always figured I’d die in that car somehow. Or anyway they’d find me dead inside of it, perhaps mysteriously. Laura prophesied that a fiery crack in the earth would open up, and it would be dragged back down to Hell, and maybe me along with it. At least for now, that has not came to pass. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if it came for me one day, being a cursed car that has put a curse on me, or else vice versa. I feel as though there is an unpaid debt I owe it, and eventually the bill will come due.

Anyway: Here in Berlin, I obviously don’t need a car on account of public transit being dirt cheap, and really you can get anywhere in the city, from one end to the other, and under an hour. That and I don’t want to contend with German drivers, who are insane. Still . . . I can’t help but admit that driving that stupid cartoon clown car all over the great state of California is probably the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything. I miss it very much, which is why I sometimes dream about it. I wonder if it misses me too.

If I ever ended up back in California, I know that it would be foolish to get another one. In addition to it being an extremely hated car, and for good reason, there is also like a 90% chance you’ll get your catalytic converter stolen on any street in Oakland.

Alas . . . !!!

I DON’T WANNA BE A GHOST

IN CALIFORNIA, NEAR THE COAST

THE SUN IT SHINES HERE

AND I AM DYING TONIIIIGHT

LISTEN

I know this is going to come off like some overly sentimental Dude Thing . . . and it is! But every day something insignificant will remind me of someone from a long time ago, and then I’ll feel a sort of sadness at it. And by “someone from a long time ago” I mean A Girl (of course) I Had Brief Closeness With, or maybe what could have been that, only it didn’t happen for one reason or another. The latter is the more painful of the two for me, because I always wonder, and of course now I’ll never know. In nearly every case, it is gone and it can never come back. I can only gaze at it from the other side of the tunnel. The people I see in the dimness there are little ghosts.

A long time ago now, I knew this girl in Oakland. She started working at the little donut shop where I worked and because I had been there longer than anyone else, I ended up having to train her. I lived a block away from work, so I had the opening shift Thursdays and Fridays, which meant I was alone from 7:15 am till 9 when the cook came in, and then she’d come in at 10 to help out before it got busy. This girl and I would fuck around the whole time, not doing much of anything, and we’d have “safety meetings” which was just code for going to the little yard behind the restaurant to share a joint. We’d say that to the people who came into the restaurant: “Ah man, be right back. We got a safety meeting out back.” I made a buck over minimum wage and had essentially no responsibilities in my life. It is easy to romanticize this sort of thing now.

I don’t know how it happened, but in the spring of that year, this girl started coming over to my house every day. We’d drive around in her car or get drunk in my room and watch movies. She helped me edit my novella and I helped her pick out clothes at the Buffalo Exchange on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. I got her into the Wolfhound one night when nobody was watching the door.

There was this day I think about a lot. We were drinking Andre champagne out of the bottle and the sun was setting so my room got pretty dark. We were sitting on my bed talking and I was backed all the way into the corner. She kept inching closer to me until she was six inches from my face. I said, “Wait, are you going to kiss me?” and she said, “I’m thinking about it.” And then I did something that I have thought about and regretted for years, which is that I got shy and said, “Ahh, I don’t know. . . .” I stood up to go get some water from the kitchen. When I came back, she and I lay down on my bed and kept talking. At that point we were both too shy to do anything about it. Around midnight she left. She lived way out in East Oakland by Mills College, so she’d brought her car. I texted her five minutes later and asked if she was still on my street and she said she was. I sort of implied she could stay the night if she wanted and she said she would. I then backpedaled and she drove home.

Why did I blow it? I have wondered at it. If I had to question the motives (or non-motives) of my younger self, I would hazard a guess that, because of the year prior to this, when I was a real junkyard dog in the house on Mead Avenue, in Ghost Town, I had gotten burnt out or else made to feel empty on account of all the accidental one night stands and temporary relationships I’d had. That first year and a half I lived in Oakland, my friends and I were wild as hell, and I was doing new things and going to new places round about every day. I was dead broke the whole time but even the bad days then were fun in some way. By the time I moved to North Oakland with Tracey and Laura in 2015, I was shredded and I just wanted to hide in my room and watch movies and read books for a year, which is exactly what I did. Somewhere in that new timeline is when I met this girl. Maybe it was that combination of having a sort of ascetic lifestyle and not wanting to get involved with someone if it might only last a little while. I don’t know! I still wish I’d kissed her that day, and had asked her to be my girlfriend, or whatever. Why not?

Had I done that, would we still be together? Well: almost certainly not. This was nearly eight years ago now. Bare minimum, I think we would’ve had a good time, and my being with her would have kept me from moving to Portland, which I did six or seven months later, and which is absolutely one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made . . . and maybe it would have kept me out of trouble in some other ways too, though who’s to say. But more than anything else, I just liked her a lot and wanted to be around her as much as possible.

I left California the following October and drove up to Oregon to have the most disastrous year of my life. I have only seen her three times since then, and one of the times I did end up at her apartment, and listen: we did hook up. OK?! But by then I supposed my life was over, and we didn’t even live in the same city anymore, and the whole thing felt more like a “Well, I guess let’s find out what that would have been like two years ago” than anything else. Next day I woke up on the couch holding her and we got up and I drove her to work. I went back home to Portland and that was that. The two other times I saw her happened years later and were pure coincidence, and it felt a little sad in some ways since those old lives where we’d known each other were long dead.

I last saw her at MacArthur BART in November 2019. She was awkward. She told me she was going to San Francisco to hang out in someone’s hot tub. I said good-bye and she went through the turnstile and was gone. I moved to Berlin a few weeks later. I haven’t spoken to her since.

And now, like all the little ghosts in my brain, I still dream about her sometimes whether I want to or not. I dreamed about her last night and then woke up missing her. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a feeling like that. It almost makes me feel physically ill to think about it. Maybe that’s just how I am about these things anymore, having lived long enough to have accrued so many dead-end stories like that. I know where the path ended because I can see it frozen in time down there. I’m not saying she was the one or anything like that . . . but I definitely wish we would have gotten together. If I’m being honest with myself, I’d ask her out right this very second if she were here, but of course that’s all gone now. What else can you do except go on wondering? I’m sure I don’t know.