i would rather read an article titled “the top 10 types of elephant turds you’ll encounter” than one titled “the top 10 types of new yorkers you’ll encounter” (i just saw a similar article)

this place will be my tomb!!

jusy fyi it is snowing like hell outside and also i am evil now

Herman Melville wrote this to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

. . . the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, —that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning upon me, holding the door ajar.

One of the realest dudes who ever lived, no doubt about it.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

wow, yeah

i am the inertia king in my winter palace and the planet is dying right outside my window

full disclosure: i have not eaten meat in over ten years for a number of reasons that i am probably never going to write down

also i’m not going to wear a fucking t-shirt about it either, if you get my meaning

ok:

i think about this sentence sometimes, because it is so pure and beautiful in its ridiculousness

my friend was telling me about her friend, and how her friend had been seeing this guy

“she’s going to dump him because he can’t decide if he’s a vegetarian or not”

when i worked at the little coffee / donut shop in oakland, i would hear people sitting around talking about veganism all the time (the place was all vegan, though we never really even thought about it)

they would talk about how healthy they felt, or how they didn’t understand why other people weren’t vegan, or Where To Go in the bay area to get some “yummy vegan eats”

listen: hain’t nothing wrong with being a vegan. go ahead and do it, man

but if the only thing you have to talk about is how you don’t do something, whoa baby

get on that ASAP

that’s just my advice

(you could swap veganism out for anything by the way)

((p.s. one time my friend at the register was ringing a guy up, and she asked him how his meal was, and he replied: “de–awesome” which i guess is how you say “delicious” if you’re a moron))

(((p.p.s. another time someone was paying at the counter and i heard them describe their meal as “so many noms.” yeah, ok, let’s just go ahead and toss this generation of people who speak in baby-talk into the fucking ocean already)))

sittin here in the kitchen with my little baby cup of hot cocoa, gazing across this wintry abyss called a fuckin condominium parking lot

snowplows in the hospital parking lot moving things from one place to another

yeah

well the weather outside is frightful, and i’m gonna let you in on a little secret: it’s way worse inside my head

i’m stuck here, i feel like a garbage bag full of old pizza crusts someone threw into a swamp

let me know how you’re feeling

say hello: octonaut [at] gmail [dot] com

WE COULD FEEL ALONE
WHEN WE WERE TOGETHER,
ALONE AGAINST THE OTHERS.

. . . AND THE NIGHT
CAN BE A DREADFUL TIME
FOR LONELY PEOPLE
ONCE THEIR LONELINESS
HAS STARTED.