does anyone else find that they are involuntarily rolling their eyes pretty much nonstop

i have this terrible feeling that once i leave this place it will finally disappear forever

Screen Shot 2016-02-08 at 00.54.26

AFTER ALL,
HE’S SIMPLY PASSING TIME
WITHOUT ACTUALLY LIVING HIS LIFE.

IN OTHER WORDS,
HE’S NOT REALLY EVEN ALIVE.

let’s do this baby!!!!!!!!!

jessicapratt

jessica pratt’s second album is really good by the way. i mean so is her first album . . . i fall asleep to it every single god darn night. i used to email her all the time, but i think i was annoying her so i stopped. we’re the same age! my friend danielle said she ran into her at a bar in LA, which i totally believe!!

anyway these are the lyrics that are illuminated in my mind like that evil script written on The One Ring after gandalf heats it up in the fireplace . . . but in this case it’s a good thing! as in, i’ll be sitting there with this album on, and working on other things, and i can’t help but always hear these lines:

“everybody tells me / he’s the kinda guy, you don’t know why he does
oh, stargazer, gaze for awhile / let me love you, baby”

“you’re on the outside, you’re looking in / to the escalators humming
they are pulling you from nothing / but your loneliness”

“i know you’re searching all the time / in the corners of your mind
but you can’t turn this planet round”

“if you just can’t find the words to tell / let me say that i know you well
deep inside your lonely room / our cards tell you but never get too far”

Man . . . I just had a real wild night. I walked to my old elementary school, about three miles from here, and hung around for a little bit. I thought about hopping the fence and sitting on the swings, which I’ve done before years back, but what with the police station a block away I figured that was pushing it. And because it was so cold, and I was wearing a black cap and all-black clothing, I probably looked like a thief or at least some shady type. If they ever check the security tapes I’m going to look like a huge creep. I’m going to look like a dude scoping out an elementary school!

Laura called me. She was upset. We talked for a long, long time . . . maybe hours! She said it was nice to hear my voice again, and I said it was nice to hear her voice too. God was it!

And listen: my elementary school was a private school, and the school itself was just a collection of old houses. Actually it ruled. But because it was so small we had our graduation ceremonies at a public school right down the street. While I was on the phone with Laura I ended up walking over there, and was standing in the parking lot looking around. Well, I happened to notice a dark figure skulking around near the front of the building. Once he saw me he hid behind a tree . . . and then lurched into view, and started walking towards me. He was hidden beneath a cloud of shadows! I ran across the street, still on the phone, and told Laura I needed to call the police, which if you’ve been paying attention, were just a few blocks away!

I crossed four lanes and a median and stood beneath a street light pretty far from the school, but still in plain sight. I saw the dark figure creeping around. It was spooky as hell, man. I don’t even know that I’ve seen a human move like that. It was almost supernatural, or something . . . there was nothing natural about it, that’s for god dang sure.

So I called the cops, and within two or three minutes a bunch of cop cars came swooping into the lot with their spotlights on as they scanned the building. Since I was also dressed like a dude who was up to no good, I got to walking. I don’t know if they ever captured the ghost-thing who was haunting the school and possibly wanted to kill me, though I reckon it was a sight to see if they did. Too bad!

Anyway I ended up at a 24-hour grocery store about a mile away. I bought a protein shake and a bunch of firewood. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, because that firewood weighed 15 or 20 pounds, which maybe doesn’t sound like much, but I had to walk 4 miles home with it in my hands. And more than the weight of the bundle was its odd shape, which was cumbersome and awful to get a grip on. I wanted to die pretty much the entire time I was walking home. I actually almost threw up a few times. I considered just hiding it somewhere so I could come back for it tomorrow afternoon, but I soldiered on, and an hour and a half later I threw the thing onto the front porch and screamed. My back and neck are going to feel terrible in the morning . . . and really they already feel terrible now.

This is what it looks like by the way:

wooddante

I’m going to have a big fire tomorrow evening. If I close the flue about halfway I should get six or seven hours out of these babies. I have a bunch of Kurosawa to get through tomorrow, so I will do it next to the fire. Lord almighty is it going to be nice. I’d invite you all to come over but I have already thrown a bunch of furniture in front of the door and boarded up all the windows so there’s no getting in or out. This may be my final correspondence to the world.

Me and Dante are going to have the time of our lives sipping hot coffee and watching RAN (乱) in our pajamas next to a crackling birch wood fire!!! I earned this fire, OK, because I walked all that way with this bitch of a bundle slung over my poor tired back.

Yup. Good-night!

My lifestyle is completely different than anyone else’s in my family, and it makes them very nervous. I think they think I’m reckless, which is maybe not untrue. They also seem to think I will be dead any day now.

I just sort of crash-land into things and sometimes it works out. My grandmother was saying to me the other day, “So you’re going to Texas?” I told her I wasn’t. She looked horrified and asked me why not, and I told her it was very complicated. She asked me where I was going to live and I told her I didn’t know just yet, but I was leaving anyway, and I had to do a few things, and all the things I have to do take place in California and Oregon.

I really did try to be as vague as possible, because my grandmother is 89 years old and this stuff scares the hell out of her. I had to assure her I would be all right, which I always sort of half believe whenever I am forced to say such things for the comfort of other people.

I said: “I’ll figure it out. This is nothing. I’ve been through way worse things than this.”

Which is true!

My mother made a face, said, “You have?”

Good lord, mother, yes.

Before I left, my grandmother gave me a hug. “You have everything but money,” she said. That’s not true at all, but it was nice of her to think that anyway.

I cancelled my credit card today. The customer service representative, whose name was a mountainous northern state that I’ll let you figure out for yourself, didn’t sound human at all. In fact the only giveaway that he was human was that that he kept fumbling the company-mandated phone script, which I’m sure is taped to the side of his computer monitor. He also said “bear with me” a LOT. To which I always replied: “OK.”

Anyway he asked me why exactly I was closing my account, and I was blunt about it. I said, “I just don’t want the damn thing anymore.”

He said, “Is there anything I can do to convince you otherwise?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup.”

He read a few lines written by his reptilian overlords . . . something about “thank you for your business” and “we hope to have you back” or some crap like that. He reminded me to cut up my card and I told him I did that six months ago.

It reminded me of the time my former employer sent me a letter in the mail telling me I had to do something with my 401k. They didn’t care what I did with it, but they were clear that I had to something with it. I had just moved to California, and was broke as hell. My mattress, which was on the floor, was so thin that the weight of my body caused my spine to dip into the ground. I had back problems for months. So I called the company who was holding my money ransom and told them I wanted to cash out so I could buy a new mattress.

The dude on the other end of the phone, either a lizard child of the cold-blooded ones or just some hypnotized halfwit, warned me that it was unwise to remove the money from the black talons of his owners. He said I needed to think about my “Future.” It was a sum of no more than $600. I had only worked at the company for nine months. I told him I wanted what was rightfully mine, however paltry though it may be, and he sighed and agreed to send me a check.

He too asked me if there was anything he could do to change my mind, and I told him I wasn’t certain the financial institutions in place today would exist when I’m old and grey. I told him we’ll all probably be scavenging for potatoes and mushrooms and potable water in just a few short decades. He was in a hurry to get me off the phone after that!

I bought a mattress at the MUJI store in San Jose with that money. I rented a truck and drove down there to pick it up. The friendly employees helped me load it into the back and everything. Ten minutes later, after I had gotten onto the highway, I watched in horror through the rearview mirror as my new mattress went sailing 50 feet into the air and came rocketing down onto the highway, where it was immediately obliterated by dozens of cars running over it.

I looped back around and called the state police, who had to temporarily close the road so I could drag the sad remains onto the shoulder. The trooper was very mad at me. He said the only reason he didn’t write me a ticket was because he could I tell I was already having “a piece of shit day.”

I had to laugh. I laughed like hell, I really did. That’s what my whole life is like. As I like to say, it really is a cruel joke at my expense. But in the case of my 401k, and the ominous warning from a guy in a cubicle wearing a clip-on tie, and the death of my mattress, it is beautiful irony which must be respected and kept behind glass.