On my way to UC Berkeley I always passed this elementary school. On the fence were these wooden paintings of panda bears doing various activities or whatever. One of them was a panda bear sadly pondering a red ball.

i have found pictures in this house of me as a 1-year-old baby crawling on the carpet that as a 28-year-old man i just writhed in agony on in the dark

i uhhh don’t really want to live in a world where people post pictures of auschwitz on instagram

y’all ever seen this’n? lord have mercy. this is the first 10 minutes of the movie, by the way. kurosawa never really wastes any time letting you know that you just dipped your soul-toe into a pool of the good stuff.

p.s. this is seriously one of the most frequent dreams i have. and maybe . . . uh . . . maybe that’s also one of the most frequent waking feelings i have too.

DID YOU KNOW: All mail sent to me by a real human is addressed to “Ryan Starsailor”? That’s so cool!!

I have no concrete evidence to support this thesis, but I think maybe Mardi Gras is to blame for Burning Man

I have decided, I think, as much as you can decide something like this—that I am going to stay the course re: reading huge books and watching long movies, and sitting crosslegged on the floor with my guitar in my lap, and going out at night alone with a terrible bottle of wine hidden inside my jacket, and writing stupid novellas that no decent tax-paying American would ever want anything to do with. Which is to say my quasi-ascetic idiot-monk lifestyle goes on, and I will rebuff anything that threatens it!!

I thought even a month ago that, hell, maybe I should call it quits and just date someone, or whatever it is you people do. But then: why? To be pierced with a poison arrow yet again?? I trust only a few people, for God’s sake, and I have seen no good reason to trust any more. And I’m certainly not going to let anyone get near this dumb lockbox containing a thing that, were the barb in it to be removed, would kill me!

Laura and I were saying today that so many people go around claiming to have Beliefs and Principles and Values, and hold themselves to a strict Moral Code. When really they’re just a trash bag filled with helium. They are met with a real test of character, and they immediately shrivel up and abandon all the noble things they prided themselves with having imprinted on their god dang souls. Their beliefs are conditional! Behind the thin human mask is a web of hideous spineless lies!!

The world, near as I can tell, is solid all the way through. But people are just vaporous fools who would vanish if you shined a light on them.

LISTEN: For the last MONTH of my LIFE, I have been the dethroned madman King Lear, and Dante has been my mocking Fool, and my RAINY HEATH has been my grandmother’s condominium. This is not much of a stretch, dude!

I have had several King Lear moments in my life. If I thought about it I could tell you when all of them occurred, and why they occurred, but I’m pretty sure no one in the history of humankind wants me to do that. Hell, even I don’t want to!

But I was watching ‘RAN’ in the bath today and thinking that the only thing keeping me alive sometimes is the thought that one day, if I live that long, I’ll actually be a crazy old man, and I might have a magnetic enough personality to attract some jester-like youngster into following me around and poking fun at my folly as we both claw through stinking earth during some awful fit of madness in the rainy gloam.

I haven’t read ‘King Lear’ in a few years, but it’s my favorite one. One of the best papers I ever wrote in college (which isn’t saying much since it was all shit) was about, uh, the concept of “nothingness” in Lear. There’s a lot of nothing in there! It is a word that appears often. I had a good time writing that thing.

But it is a confusing play, in terms of who is who, since characters keep switching identities and pretending to be other people, and there are letters going back and forth between the two evil sisters, and so on. I was reading the Wikipedia article to iron out some of the little baby details I was hazy on, and I saw this line:

“Lear appears, by now completely mad. He rants that the whole world is corrupt and runs off.”

Yeah that rules so hard. So does this, which is from that scene:

“When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools”

You said it, brother.