remember when sam says to frodo: “don’t go where i can’t follow”

i just said that to dante

all those little things i liked about my life are gone and have been gone for a long time

they can’t come back

and nothing has come along to take their place

shadows in the fog, man

who is in charge here

please don’t put us in this place and make us grow old and die

please don’t make us do this anymore

10:40 p.m. EST, buried in this tomb of a house by two feet of snow which falls harder and harder by the hour, i stand at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee and complete a quasi-journalistic essay about rock and roll and sleeping on a playground during a new england autumn

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

just going to go ahead and Post This Again

i have heard so many people say “ugh! hemingway! so overrated!”

and it’s like, man, shut up

hey mr. pop outside of your birth / continued existence i am most grateful for “there’s nothing in my dreams / just some ugly memories”

thanks dude

my greatest fear—outside of an endless corpse-shredding war with the chinese / an ambiguous enemy that results in the total destruction of this beautiful planet—is that i’m going to wake up and find that my entire country has been converted into a burning man-themed starbucks

oh. . . . oh god what if that is already happening

ok from now on my modus operandi is “gimme danger little stranger and i’ll feel your disease”

i would say it is “keep myself from being swallowed up in a subterranean hellhole of eternal sadness” but uh [extinguishes american spirit on heel of black combat boot] it’s a little too late for that, man

I was telling my father last night that the old world has slipped away from me and I am living in an inverted one that looks the same but has a sort of sinister veneer over it. To which he said: “Um. Uhh.”

It feels like my doppelgänger stepped out of his fucked up world and put me in his place. I know these streets and I know these houses, I know these forests, and on and on. But the god dang cruelty of time has got in me and I am looking at it all with tired world-ending eyes.

On my grandmother’s kitchen table where I write every day is a little calendar. It is flipped to February 20th, 2014, which is the day she fell and never came home again. There’s a lot of little stuff like this all over the place. I emptied out her refrigerator, everything inside of it having expired two years ago. Who else was going to do this? Who was going to come around and take care of these things? There are newspapers from January and February 2014 all over the living room. . . . This house is a museum of a great woman, and of my childhood too I reckon. The appliances all are from the 1980s, and look just as new as they did the day she bought them. All the chairs and tables are the same. I look at old photographs and see a very small smiling version of myself sitting on the cream-colored couch that I’ve been kind-of sleeping and sobbing on for over a month. But my grandmother is gone, and so all of this feels so creepy and hollow. That’s what this whole town feels like to me now. That’s what I feel like too.

I drive by my old schools, and my old house. I go to places where things used to happen to me. Things aren’t going to happen to me anymore here. It has all been played out. The other night I drove to this field where I went the night I got my first car. There were fireflies everywhere! Now it’s the dead of winter and the field is empty and I’ll probably never see fireflies there again. It is all very Twilight Zone-feeling.

Man. They want to tell me that I’m alone, or isolated. I’ve been alone and isolated for years. This place gets in me like a god dang ghost and makes it all worse.

why is it that no one in this country can spell “definitely”

my dad just told me i look like sinead o’connor