I have been watching everything Danny McBride has ever made on account of I love that dude, and after bearing witness to dozens of hours of TV shows and movies he wrote / produced / directed / starred in, I have decided with finality that the dude is a genius. Have you seen that new Halloween trilogy he wrote? I can’t believe people didn’t like them . . . they’re so good. Forgive my saying so, but he’s a Real Artist.

The other day McCune spoke thusly: “I have been saying this since Halloween (2017/18) that Danny McBride is going to make/direct an incredible film before he dies. An important one.”

I agree!

Anyway: I have finally arrived at Righteous Gemstones and I dig it so far. And three episodes in, I have already found myself:

Within thirty seconds of meeting Walton Goggins’ character, who is named Baby Billy Freeman, he rises up triumphantly from an outdoor clawfoot bathtub on the shoreline of a lake and speaks of improving his life and that of his redheaded wife’s while his penis is absolutely in the foreground. I love it. That dude rules too.

I am currently suffering from some unknown ailment that is not covid, which I tested negative for twice, nor is it mono, since I’ve already had it during a miserable winter in Portland some time ago, and so it is now lying dormant in my body forever, and I am thus immune. And near as I can tell, it is also not strep because I don’t see exudate in the back of my throat, which you can’t miss . . . it’s very disgusting. But I am having that hot and cold feeling, the one where you never really get warm and even shiver and break out in a cold sweat in a hot bath, and the only time I ever felt that way was on strep. That was also the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. This was fall 2018, and Dragon Quest XI had just come out, a luxurious and super chill 100+ hour game, and so I had a real good time hallucinating and playing that thing all the livelong day. What I got right now is three seasons of Righteous Gemstones, so I figure I’ll swill down some cherry-flavored Severe Nitetime cold and flu medicine and sedate myself into dark dreamless abyss sleep until noon or so . . . and then wake up and keep plowing through this thing. It’s a way better plan than staring at the wall!!!

Though yeah: Dude rules.

OK . . . goodnight~ ☆彡

brother kerwin once said to me: “once you realize it’ll never be ok, it’s ok”

pretty much!

. . . I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking up and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.

i remember finishing ‘a farewell to arms’ in new orleans one summer a long time ago, and i always remember this passage. i remember it because i know exactly what this feels like, and how it describes a good deal of my adult life, and how i miss that place and that feeling now

pretty sure i’ve said this verbatim before

also escape from LA rules

tomorrow is my birthday. so i’m on a bus headed up to new york city to spend the weekend with my friends there. if you are reading this and also in new york, you’re invited to my birthday party. just email me!

ok!!!

I wrote this some time ago in a draft I never published:

I sometimes wish, as I do right now, that there were some way that my death could be helpful to someone, or preferably a lot of people. You know? I wish there were a way I could be totally annihilated to serve some higher purpose, or at least something bigger than myself. And I ain’t talking about war, though I don’t exactly know what the other thing would be either. Is this an insane and childish impulse to have? Probably it is. . . .

Truth be told, I’ve seen enough, and though I have many regrets, I have got them off my tail the best way I know how: I MADE AMENDS if it involved another person. They were owed it. And when I do perish, I have made sure that the people I have wronged will never have to wonder if I was remorseful and sorry for what I did to them, because I was and am.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that I paid my debts, and I’m Ready. To be clear, I don’t have a death wish. But if something killed me swiftly, and at minimum they could harvest my organs or whatever, as they clean me up from the front of the bus, I wouldn’t necessarily be sad about it (never mind that I wouldn’t be around to feel anything about it at all). I just hope that in death I can achieve something with it. It is not vanity. I would actually take a bullet in the chest if it meant someone else didn’t have to . . .

Why didn’t I publish it? Because as I rightly predicted back then, the whole thing is childish, and also I figured I didn’t want to worry anyone. Now I have absolutely nothing to lose, which in some ways makes me impervious to pretty much everything. In my mind I’m living on borrowed time. What else could the world possibly do to me? Kill me? I’m already dead. You can’t kill what’s already dead! Put another way: the worst that could happen is that I lose my life. And I got that for free!

In Savannah I told my friend something annoying, which she did find annoying (“Ryan, shut up”), which is that I think of myself as a non-entity and my only function is to help people as much as I can until I die. It’s true! I hate to say it, but I just don’t care about my own life anymore, or what happens to me. I told her that too, and she told me to shut up again. As I wrote in my embarrassing diatribe above, that does not mean I have a death wish. Though I do pause before coffin warehouses, and bring up the rear of every funeral I meet, I am not going to throw myself upon my sword, so to speak. I have things I need to accomplish first . . . or anyway that’s the lie I tell myself, or else I wouldn’t bother to get out of bed in the morning.

But when I do go to my reward, however long from now that is, and however stupid and misguided this sentiment is, I still hope my death helps someone. Isn’t that one of the major tenets of Christianity? I can get down with that. Certainly there are worse ideas to subscribe to.

Just make sure they bury whatever is left of me, even just my bones or the dust of those bones, at the foot of the volcano Mount Terror in Antarctica as stipulated in my will. I’m serious as a heart attack. Hah!

Anyway . . .