I am going to start working on my fake apocalyptic newspaper again (I have decided).

You know what always surprised me about Oakland is how easily I slipped right into it. I remember after six months of living there I had so many friends and jobs were got easily because I just hung around with people. God, dude. I was there for almost three years and although a lot of the time I was broke and sad, I still did so god dang much. It was real varied, too! I hardly ever did the same thing twice.

The Bay Area kind of sucks because it feels like being trapped in a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but it is this big huge place where a lot of different kinds of people live. And though native Californians were so damn wishy-washy, a lot of perfectly nice strangers invited me into their homes and took me to parties and walked around with me late at night. When I was writing a long essay about the Bay, I realized how much I missed all those weird little experiences and all those nice people I knew for only one night. That was real cool.

I think people on the East Coast tend to be stiff and square and closed-off and career-driven. Over there people were just Down For Stuff. Yeah.

well: i guess now my heart is frozen shut so come and get me you idiots. 

i love you buddy

i think i’m going to start making newspaper articles from a dystopian future again

With few exceptions my grandmother’s house is totally preserved from the thirty years she lived here. I am the only person to have lived here since she left.

As sad as this sounds, whenever I remove something from its place, I neatly return it when I’m done. I put all the dishes back where they have always been. I put photo albums back in their boxes. I keep her pens in the same place.

I used her measuring tape the other day, which was wrapped in a rubber band, and when I was finished I wrapped the rubber band back around it and put it in the drawer where it belongs.

No one is ever going to come back for these things or even notice that I’m doing this. I don’t even notice what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I guess I just have this deep-rooted respect for this place and for how organized my grandmother always was with her things.

The girl with the red hair is my older sister Tara. She’s holding me. She was such a good sister. She told me that the reason I had freckles on my face was because they rubbed off of her whenever she hugged me. I think about that every time I see my freckles.

Tara totally destroyed herself and I don’t think I’ll ever see her again. She was a very sweet person. I miss her a lot.

Many years ago, twenty to be exact, a huge snowstorm hit the East Coast. It covered Northern Virginia, where I am from (and am currently stranded), with several feet of snow. I was eight years old. My parents were both law enforcement officers and so they worked during the day. Because all the schools were shut down they left with my grandmother (whose house I am currently stranded at). I remember the snowplows had created this massive hill just outside her house, right where the sidewalk ended. I managed to climb up it with my little eight-year-old legs. I stood atop this wintry hill and surveyed my kingdom. My grandmother came outside and took a picture.

When I graduated from school four months later, she presented me with a sort of display board containing all my little kid achievements / awards from that year. She had my awards shrunk so they all fit on the same page and were displayed in this poster-thing. My mother hung it on the wall. Anyway in the center is that picture of me standing on the mountain of snow from the blizzard of ’96. Below it she wrote: “TOP OF THE HEAP!”

In the last two days a similar storm hit Northern Virginia. As I said above, it is almost twenty years to the date. I was eight then, I am two days away from being twenty-eight now. The snow came down hard all day yesterday and all day today. Dante and I stayed inside and read books and drank hot beverages and brooded well into the night. As near as I can tell the snow never let up in all that time. At 11 p.m. tonight it finally tapered off.

I do not have any winter clothes, and the heaviest jacket I have is my old black denim jacket. I suited up anyway. I had to take the garbage out.

I was able to jump down ten stairs and land safely in snow so deep it came up to my waist. By the time I made it across the parking lot and onto where I believe the sidewalk used to be, I was completely out of breath. I was totally exhausted. I trudged on anyway—a stinking bag of garbage in my right hand compelled me to.

I looked around. There were no footprints anywhere. I was the only person who had faced the arctic wasteland since the snow let up. I looked at all the windows in my grandmother’s complex . . . all of them dark. I was probably the only person awake. Which is good because I am sure I looked totally insane hopping through the snow with this black bag swinging everywhere.

On the way back I noticed there was an enormous white hill in the same spot where it had been twenty years ago—back when I was Top Of The Heap. I climbed it. It took great effort. The snow had not yet hardened and so my feet went straight through to the bottom. The top was much thicker and I could stand on it. I looked around. My grandmother’s kitchen light was on. I had been inside minutes before drinking hot tea and reading ‘Moby-Dick.’ It was the only light on in the entire complex. My grandmother wasn’t inside anymore—just Dante.

It was dark and the wind was cold. The snow which had clung to my jeans was freezing up. There was snow in my shoes. My face was numb. Without my army-issue wool cap my newly shaven head would have been numb as well. I was standing in the exact same spot as I had been all those years ago. I looked around and saw a dead and frozen place. No one was there to take a picture so I took a picture myself. I set a timer and stood back. I looked at the picture afterwards. I saw the ghostly outline of sad, lonely little man who is very much not the top of the heap any longer.

i am just going to stay in this house until it eats me

also i will be 28 years old in two days

how about that, huh

my birthday is going to blow big time

i guess i am back to Hating My Birthday