21 July 2026

I’m working on a VIDEO PROJECT that I’ll write about soon . . . but in cracking open Final Cut Pro again, I’ve been digging through a bunch of old stuff I’ve made in the last 15 years. I have to say: I felt a warmth. Some of it was pretty good! And I wondered why I had stopped doing it at all. I reckon after making hundreds of those things, I may have gotten burned out . . . but I never ran out of ideas. In fact, I still write them down all the time.

And then the other day, Bex said the ancient phrase:

Said I: “Yeah dude . . .”

I mean, why not? You’ve got to do something. So for GOD’S SAKE I’m going to start doing it again . . . with Bex, in Italy.

At the top is a screenshot from a video where I’m fucking around in Target (wearing glasses without lenses) . . . a girl I was dating at the time filmed everything. It is effortlessly funny in a way that I hope is not gone from me. Tonight I rewatched all the raw footage for the first time since we filmed it eight years ago exactly, and we’re laughing our asses off the entire time. I’m doing everything I can to make her break and laugh, as though making her laugh was more important than the video itself (which it was). I don’t know, it looked like so much fun. Lord help me, I missed it . . .

You know, for all my many flaws, every girl I ever dated has told me later that doing The Little Stuff together was always fun for them. They always miss The Little Stuff. Even if we were just grocery shopping or running some errand, we always found a way to drag it out a little and make it more than it was. You know? I think it’s sweet that no matter how the thing played out, even if it ended badly, they remembered that we had fun just for the sake of the song, so to speak. I believe there’s a famous scene in a movie about this very thing . . .

20 July 2026

I want to say that at least one person calls me every single day for relationship / life advice. Sometimes it’s three or four and I ain’t even kidding. Hey man . . . I’m happy to help. It’s nice to serve some sort of function!!

Today my old friend called me and laid out a tale of woe. It took about three hours. Without getting into the DETAILS, the story involved, as it often does, a choice between two men.

One of these men is some bicycle seat-sniffin wannabe artist loser who is juggling multiple women and keeping her on the hook. The other is a sweet and thoughtful dude who has been quietly devoted to her for years.

She already knew what she had to do, but she needed to hear me say it, and so gladly I said it: stay as far away as you can from that DIRTBAG CREEP who only wears cowboy boots and pour all your love into the man who has consistently shown up for you. I said: five years from now, you won’t even remember the first guy’s dumbass name (nor, hopefully, his disgusting mustache), but you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been with the second one. She seemed to feel much better after that.

An hour later she sent me this . . .

:,-)

19 July 2026

My computer reminded me that these photos were taken ten years ago now . . .

I met a girl named Codi on top of Mount Tabor in Portland around three in the morning. She had texted me in the middle of the night and asked me if I was awake, and I said, “Of course I am.” So at her behest I got in the car and drove up there to meet her for the first time. She was very pretty. She’d brought a thermos of coffee to share. We sat in her car until sunrise drinking it together. I remember the entire backseat was filled with multicolored hula hoops. I can’t remember exactly how this happened, but at some point she brandished an expensive camera and asked me to pose for her outside the car. She gave me a huge feather to use and told me I was photogenic, at which I scoffed. Anyway, whether or not that is true: here is me at 28 years old with $12 to my name trying desperately to forget both of those things.

I saw Codi just one other time. She came over to my house and we sat on my bed and talked for a few hours. And then she vanished just like pretty much every other girl I met there during what was, until perhaps now, one of the worst years of my adult life. Why didn’t I ask her to hang out again? The simplest answer is that I was a fool . . .

My memory is so good that I can recall both of those nights with perfect clarity . . . I remember exactly what she looked like, though I have no pictures of her. It is a strange sensation. Of course, you wonder at such a person now. I doubt she is still in Portland. When we met, she had only just moved there, as had I. But nobody ever stays in Portland. You’re lucky if you make it a year (without throwing yourself off a cliff), which is exactly how long I lasted before I went back to Oakland, and I was white-knuckling it for most of my time there.

Though yeah: what a nice person, and a true saint for hanging out with my dumb ass. What I liked about Codi is that she was Down For Stuff. She was the kind of person who would, at her own peril, propose meeting up in a remote location in the middle of the night to hang out in a car and get to know a stranger who happened to be me. I could have been a complete psychopath. She could have killed me! But the risk of death was worth it for both of us because the potential reward was Having a Cool-Weird Night, which we very much did. We trusted in the goodness of one another. You could still do that then. This was in the Before Times, when life could still be beautiful . . . when we lived in a world of May mornings and midsummer eves. When even villainy was innocent. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! I remember that world. I miss it too.

Codi, you will absolutely never see this, but thanks for being cool. I hope you are happy and hula-hooping somewhere, wherever you are . . .