I don’t know how it happened, but I have really good health insurance. Man, I don’t pay a cent for anything. Hell I ain’t even have any copays. It’s real cool, you know, to be able to see a doctor and a dentist again. It’d been a few years.

Since I got that little card in the mail, I have done the following:

  • got me a general practitioner
  • physical (I’m good!!)
  • STD test (I’m clean!!)
  • vaccinations for tetanus, HPV, the flu . . . maybe more??
  • had all my medications paid for
  • had my vision checked by an optometrist, who told me I might be going blind
  • had my vision ultra-checked by a team of technicians and opthamolcigsts, who told me I was absolutely in no way going blind

Next week I am going to:

  • get my teeth cleaned
  • get “fitted” for a gold tooth
  • see a dermatologist, because why the heck not

It feels like getting a tuneup and an oil change and new brakes and tires and so on. I’m just knocking all this stuff out at once. I mean, hell. It’s nice.

Tangentially related: These days my diet is fruit, cabbage, spinach, eggs, rice, quinoa, black and red beans, coconut milk (lol), and about a gallon of tea a day. About once a week I’ll drink a whole bottle of red wine by myself in a cemetery. I guess besides self-loathing that’s the closest thing I have to a vice.

Anyway this here body of mine is pretty OK for now!!!! Yeah!!!!!!

Oh: Before I lay me down to sleep, and pray the Lord my soul to keep, and so on, I wanted to show you a thing I’ve been working on, which is the KING METEOR store. Now listen, I know it would be much easier for me to just use something like Big Cartel, or Shopify, or whatever else the kids use, but I wanted to build my own thing because I like building my own things, and I like having control of my own things in the event that whichever service I’m using gets bought up, or shuts down, or whatever the hell else happens to websites in these dark and trying times.

am going to use Gumroad, which I believe doles out unique PDF codes, to sell digital copies of the books I have written and am currently writing. But the source of all this will be the store I’m building. It is nearly finished. Every digital thing in it will be choose-your-own price, since there’s no overhead for me, and because I regard a lot of it is too bizarre and esoteric to ever fascinate what you might call a normal person. Though, who knows. At any rate, I don’t expect to make a dime off of this. Anything more than zero will be an unexpected bounty for me. I just wanted something to do, and it keeps me inside and away from any trouble I might otherwise get myself into.

This is a tiny little baby taste of what it looks like so far:

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That’s right, punks: I’m doing audio versions. I have already recorded a few of them. It uhhh fries the hell out of my voice, so I can only do one a day. Also, my friend McCune is doing some doom-y / drone-y background noise-things for them. It’s going to be so hot. You have no idea, man.

And: My roommate volunteers at a printing press near our house. I’m going to make fifty or so copies of every book, and probably have a box of them in my garage for the next ten years. Anyway I reckon it’ll still be real cool to make them, and to hold them and flip through them, and so on.

I’m launching it soon. Maybe next week. Maybe not! I guess we’ll both find out soon enough.

Sweet dreams my darlings~~

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Man oh man! Talk about a hot beautiful soup of a movie: ‘The Lady From Shanghai’ is so good I wanna scream. I had never seen it before! I guess that makes me a dope.

Orson Welles was the coolest dude. He and Melville are my favorite dudes. I’m just going to keep on liking those dudes forever. What the hell else am I going to do?

Listen: If it’s all right with you, I’m going to post some screenshots I took, because: 1) well God knows I catalog this stuff, and 2) I sure do like them. They contain ultimate truths, either directly or indirectly. If you absolutely don’t want to be spoiled, then hey, don’t look at em!

Anyway:

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. . . well now here’s a movie I can hang out with!! And I did! I’ll hang out with it again soon . . . probably with other people, probably for Dudes Done Wrong. You see I’ve been trying to expose these here friends of mine to the old weird stuff, because they have told me they haven’t seen a whole lot of it. I myself am powering through as much of it as I can before the Reaper comes for me—which could be any day now—and for the most part it is not the least bit arduous. I have been picking things that have been baptized by time. I do the same thing with books. It ain’t a bad way to go about it, near as I can tell.

It is nearly seven in the morning, and though my body isn’t the least bit tired, I have taken some magnesium citrate (which I am told is absorbed better than plain old magnesium) in hopes of not being awake when the sun is directly over my house.

So long for now. I leave you with a thing you can think about sometimes if you want. I know I will!! Guy sure knew how to light a scene, huh??

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House to myself for ten days. Drove around in the rain. Went all the way up to PDX Airport, came right back down again. Thought about Orson Welles. Saw this image in my head:

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(This is from ‘F for Fake,’ where he says: “I didn’t go to jail—I went to Hollywood.”)

And then I got home and I thought that I would watch either ‘Chimes at Midnight’ or ‘The Stranger’ or ‘The Lady From Shanghai.’ And then I did some Wikipedia-level research, and discovered that this was the theatrical poster for ‘Chimes at Midnight’:

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Holy lord! That’s incredible!

‘The Lady From Shanghai’ it is, though!! I’ll tear into Falstaff a little later in the week, when I have been alone for much longer, and when watching a fat and bearded Orson Welles quote Shakespeare is the only thing that makes sense to do.

Listen: My buddies Kerwin and Jackson and I have started a studio. It is called, at least for now, ENEMY AIRSHIP!.

A few years ago I had my buddy James create a black war zeppelin for me. I always wanted to use it for something, but never got around to it!! Well, I made this yesterday, and it looks all right I guess:

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Anyway!! We are already hard at work on A Thing. Kerwin is programming, Jackson is doing art and music, and I’m writing the whole damn thing. Maybe later we’ll hire more people. Our goal right now is to create a working prototype . . . like an air-tight five-minute narrative to use as proof-of-concept. It’s gonna be real neat. I’ll post assets here as they are created! Or some of them anyway. . . .

Tonight I went to Southeast Grind and worked on my store. It looks so hot. I need to finish recording audio versions of my books, and then I’m going to open for business. I even have good ol’ Laura Rokas working on some art for a thing we’re making together. It will likely be the first physical thing we sell in the store. I think that’s neat. Hell, why not?

I also recently pitched some ideas to Paste magazine and they were into them?? The best pitch, the one I like the most, is about the loneliness you feel in abandoned places, versus the aloneness you feel in, say, your bedroom . . . which are two very different feelings! I’m being vague as heck but I’ve got it written in my head. Anyway I gotta work on that stuff soon. Hoo boy do I ever~

Finally: Y’all ever heard of ‘Mega Man Legends’? If you haven’t, take a li’l peek:

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Isn’t that cute as hell?! I love it!! Look how beautiful and chunky this game is. I’ve been having me a good old time with this thing after the sun goes down. I guess I’m going to keep on doing that until there’s nothing left to do.

It’s . . . five in the god darn morning, isn’t it? I can hear the garbage man outside. I haven’t gone to sleep before five a.m. in probably three months. It’s been a weird, weird time, man. I’m going to take some magnesium citrate and do what I can to force myself to sleep, or else I’m going to see that sunrise again, and then I’m really in trouble. . . .

(P.S. Slowly I have been working on an archive. When I rebuilt this entire site in February or March or whenever it was, I created a whole new WordPress directory, so the old content is hidden away somewhere. This website has existed in various incarnations since 2012. I can’t just very well kill off four years of stuff I’ve written here. But I am going to slice out stuff if it really sucks. That’s why it’s taking so long: a lot of it sucks. Also, I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that anyone is dying to see that old junk again. I personally need it back so I can orient myself in time . . . and hey, there are a few nice little essays in there. I’m gonna keep those. You’ll see!)

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Laura sent me this today. It’s a picture of her bedside table. That’s her and her sister Eli and they’re both holding her cat Boyboy (RIP). And that’s me! In 7th grade! I gave that to Laura before I left Oakland.

Laura said she misses Canada. I told Laura I would move to Canada with her anytime she asked me to. Man, I hope she asks me to.

The sun is almost up and I am looking at this picture and I miss my friend very much

Fourth of July: I woke up at 4 p.m. and immediately drove to a theater in NW Portland to see ‘The Neon Demon.’ I am not going to apologize for this movie, and I 100% understand someone not liking it.

. . . though hell, I sure did have a good time!!

Later, at home, I drank some coffee and wallowed in misery until my buddy Fiona invited me over to her house for a bonfire. I went. My buddies Stevie and Ella and Shannon were there. Man, talk about a god darn sausage fest otherwise. And, unsurprisingly, every dude there was indistinguishable from the other. It was basically like seven identical copies of one boring dude were hanging out together (this is a big problem in this city). Stevie and Ella and I hung back, away from the fire, and ate virtually all the food that was on the patio table. When everyone started talking about celebrities in that weird way where it sounds like they’re friends with them, I hit the eject button and left right away.

Came home, hid from the explosions outside, sat on my bed with my cat, drank a bunch of tea in the near-dark, thought about some shit~

I managed to go all day without seeing a single firework. It was fine. I have seen a lot of fireworks in my life. It’s OK if I don’t see them every year.

Did you know that in Oakland, the Fourth of July is a month-long event? For a whole month people blow stuff up. It’s total anarchy, man. It’s kind of scary actually. You’ll hear a huge explosion go off every fifteen seconds, almost like a carbomb or something. I don’t know where those guys get that stuff, but it’s intense as hell. You know what, I kind of missed it! Portland was so tame. It’s tame in every way, every day. It is aloof and indifferent and emotionless, really, when you get down to it.

Last year I stood on the rocks near the Emeryville Marina and watched fireworks over the entire Bay. It was real good. My friends were there. I miss those guys a lot. Man. Oh well.