well i just had my nightly quasi-panic attack so time to assume a supine position in the dark and pray to a cosmic entity who may or may not want to listen to me

bday

bros

laelbuds

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my 27th birthday with my buddies

i love my buddies

i miss my buddies very much

Well: based on the fact that I just threw away a box of green tea that had contained 50 teabags, it looks like I drank 50 cups of green tea in the last nine days.

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Last year I had the best birthday I’ve ever had. (And that ain’t no hyperbole all right!!) I usually don’t like my birthday. I’m sorry but I am one of those jerks. All the attention makes me nervous. I usually try to turn my birthday into something where my friends and I are just hanging out. You know? I don’t really want them to buy me dinner and pay for my beers and so on. I’d rather just be in the same room with them. Hell, I always want that.

Anyway: My roommate/buddy Tracey made me a chocolate cake, and my other roommate/buddy Laura made me a lavender shooting star cake. Tracey did buy me dinner but it was real good and I didn’t mind only because Tracey is a very sweet person and is incapable of doing wrong as far as I can tell. My friends Rachel and Megan came over and gave me a bottle of wine and . . . a radish, or something, I can’t remember. Then I went with a bunch of people to Missouri Lounge and Megan told us a story about accidentally going to an Insane Clown Posse birthday party. I went to a Finnish bathhouse (twice!) and my best friend told me she loved me. Man! It was so good. It was one of the best days of my whole god dang dumb life, now that I think about it.

I’m sure y’all saw this coming: This year I will be alone (with Dante) in my grandmother’s condo in Virginia across the street from the very hospital where I was born 28 years ago. I am sure it will be raining or snowing. (It has been raining or snowing pretty much every day.) Well, heck, I don’t know. I can’t do anything about that. Just wish I could have another shooting star cake, and another ‘I love you.’ I’m human! I can’t help but want these things.

;_; ☆ミ

Man, it’s so strange. With the exception of a few months I was miserable practically the entire time I was in California, mostly because I was trapped in the same place and couldn’t get around much. But now that I’m out of it, the uh, you know, the “dream of California” has reawakened in my god dang brain. I mean I guess that’s what took me there in the first place. I did like it. Maybe I shouldn’t have lived in such a rough city though.

The only reason I don’t want to go to Austin (or go anywhere for that matter) is because then I have to stop hiding out in limbo with my cat. I like it because no one bothers me.

When I worked at the donut shop in Oakland, we had to pack donuts to be shipped out to coffee shops / grocery stores all over the Bay Area. Usually new people were stuck with this position because it sucked. You had to pack 30 or so boxes and it was really monotonous and if you fucked up it meant you fucked up someone’s order. Eventually you “graduated” out of this position. By the time I left I hadn’t packed a single donut box in a year.

Anyway we delivered to Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. Usually donuts were packed in thick bakery boxes, but Rainbow was having a rat problem and the boxes kept getting eaten because of the crumbs that would collect in the boxes. They requested flimsy disposable boxes instead. I used to draw little pictures on them to make the Rainbow people laugh. I stopped doing this after one of the delivery drivers told me the woman in the bakery said I needed psychiatric help.

Here are a few of them:

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banana

My mother was going to Best Buy. I asked to tag along. This must have been 1996. I was 8 years old. I remember at the register there was like a big discount crate filled with game boxes. The boxes were all the same. They all contained a Super Nintendo game called ‘EarthBound.’ The sign said ‘EarthBound’ cost $5. I remember the boxes were four times the size of normal Super Nintendo boxes because they contained a player’s guide. That’s why I picked one up.

It had been released in Japan two years prior and was called ‘Mother 2’ over there. It was a huge sensation. It failed miserably in the United States. That’s why it was $5. I was holding it in my hands reading the back of the box and my mother said I could get it if I wanted to.

If you can’t tell, this game was designed and written by an actual famous Japanese writer and not “a guy who makes videogames.” His name is Shigesato Itoi. He is an incredible dude. He and Haruki Murakami put out a collection of stories in the 1980s called ‘Let’s Meet in a Dream.’ That’s great.

Man, this may sound dumb to many of you, but along with a lot of books and movies I absorbed when I was a kid, this is absolutely one of the most important things I was ever exposed to. I still replay it once a year. It takes about twelve hours.

Anyway, long post:

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‘Breath of Fire’ has a really bland english translation but sometimes it accidentally says some cool stuff.

My brother and i got it when i was in fourth grade . . . I would come home from school and we would play it together. This was around the time when my mother kept threatening to sell our house. Our house was amazing. It was on two acres of land and surrounded by woods. It really bummed me out to think that we would give that up. I guess my brother and I distracted ourselves from this by playing a poorly-translated Japanese role-playing game that sometimes accidentally said some cool stuff.

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