Good morning. I’ve decided every morning is now the same.
Nick sent me to a burger place after work. I get there and sit waiting. I check my phone: he's not coming. I don't mind. There's lots of plants and I like the tile.
I wanted to write but I got stuck on Dean Cameron’s website. Why don’t people do blogs anymore? I don’t care to see the nth party or yth success worthy of posting to The Feed. Or even Your Ideas That Are New And Must Be Heard. I want to read about insecurities, the mortgage that eats you away, the inadequacy you feel watching your contemporaries become perpetually iconic while you are reserved to a short portion of time in a niche genre. We all need to melt into a big pile and hope that we stick.
Football is American Propoganda.
I'm not allowed to smoke weed after that last comment.
I was thinking earlier about writing a story about my old boss, Alex. He was such a character.
HR Boy Scout.
TikTok thirst traps.
Delusional fascist bureaucracy.
He was so stuck. You could tell the way he degraded college students.
Imagine, if you will, for me, a life in your twenties in Chicago. You just moved there out of college. Kent State, Dean’s List, no other notables. You found a shitty apartment, in the bad part of town, and you live with a couple of friends. You're all artists. The real deal type. Like, the ones who are so self assured they are going to make it, that they usually do. Or, at least, that’s how you all felt at the time. You spend your weekends in the early mornings, drunk at a local 24 hour greasehole. The kind where you get anything on the menu and feel safe that tomorrow you will have no hangover. You hop Bars. You network. You tell yourselves you’re in it for the connections, when really you just want to get fucked. Your Sunday morning is conducted with South Park and sugary cereals and your friend, Bobby, is always shirtless. He says it helps the alcohol vapor get out quicker. You find a job through a new friend you met at a club. Or was it a venue? Or was it a bar? They just sort of showed up in circulation of all three in the hours of Friday night to Monday morning. You just make copies. A peripheral mailroom gig. But its enough to write home to tell your parents you’ve made it. You start going to more parties. Except now you want to be there. You meet a girl. Her name is Slone. Now she’s friends with your buddy’s sister who lives on the north side of the city, and she only ever comes around every other week, to some art gallery or maybe a rooftop.
Going to the track. But in a blazer. Donny says you pick your horse based on the color.
Sideway horses always run striaght. I won with Simple Song. I could be up a billion dollars.
Broke even. Ellie keeps bonking Douglas with a pillow. I scratched all the names I loved the most. I'll put them later.
The dogs are barking. Ellie plays piano. That wrench. That pesky obtuse thing. Get away and never come back until you know how to tango. This song is dissonant.
There's chicken wire in the walls. I brought my goat back with me.
Litigation
For All Mankind
Jimmy Blue Jeans
gowokegobroke
Crude Velocity
Whatastarr
Dreams of Myfather
Neon Bordeaux
I threw my bike on the ground earlier. I was mad.
Whoever is hovering over this, the most sacrum of streamlines, I will kill you if you tell anyone my secrets
My car is broken. I’m stuck in Eugene Oregon. Worse things have happened.
That thing is too easy right now. I started reading this book and it's making me cocky. Like I can find myself in a maze before seeing the map. I check my phone and it says nothing back to me. Might go to the river later.
The disconnect between profundity and it actually happening. It's also hard to be here as the ghost haunting mossy streets.
Spending more time in my brain. I keep thinking about how much time I used to spend in my brain. Or maybe it was just that time is different. I always hear that time changes as you get older. It blurs. But that’s not cool enough for me.
Maybe the problem is reading. I just have to read. I have a feeling this guy might be a pervert.
I yearn for the aesthetic life. This podcast insn’t helping. Everyone everyone everywhere has a podcast. Why why why why. I don’t have the stimulants to properly describe but perhaps I am being preyed on by big social media when I choose to be upset all day because I’m not a party god.
The lord bankrupted heaven for our bodies to be the price?
Who have the first fruits of the spirit the redemption of our bodies
So not only has sin affected the ground that we walk on but we ourselves we who have been
adopted feel sin in our own bodies
Because of sin
We are not exempt we are not delivered from our broken bodies when we become
Supervising a church group if you couldn’t tell. I have been practicing typing and this guy in front of me like absolutely hates it. My little tippy typing ain’t affecting ur connection with the lord my brother.
I keep having these moments where I feel like my only existence is right now, but not in the way I want it to. If anything, I am living in the past and future, squatting in the present’s apartment. And they never do their dishes.
And I hate that every christian group always says the same thing about feeling god in the room –– that I of little faith will be proven blasphemous in the emotional confrontation of Him. But like bro, of course I felt something, you just gave me the freedom to stop weighing the finitude of my existence. And like these values can be applied to any faith system, why the one that upholds violence and horrific enforcement of oppressive tradition?
Thank you God for that.
This morning I went on a run with Mary from work and absolutely embarrassed myself. I am akin to a flailing rat and a baby jack sparrow while running. But I did 2.5 miles, with a 13 minute time. Just like middle school all over again. I threw up on the way home too.
I met god and he told me to quit cigarettes.
On the road again. September had me fill up her tires. We have 12 hours of conversation to make.
We’re chasing the sunset. Beating it.
I had something to say but the trees are too much. The change in pastel on the skyline. Feeling the weight of words.
An old trucker came up to me buying zyns. He tried to get my attention but I thought he was talking to the cashier. He followed me to the Arby’s and got it again.
He told me when he was young, in college, soon after the invention of the wheel. He went to a hospital one night. The bell rang from a room. No attendant in sight. He peaked his head in. A young man laid in the white. He smiled cheerily. He coughed off black. Black as the condiment dispensers. He came back weeks later, asking about the man. He had died, he told me. I smiled at the man. Told him I understood. That this was harm reduction. He told me God was with me, if I let him in. I thanked him. Provided a fist bump. Ran back to September. We turned back to the highway. I felt God in that man's headset.
Closing my eyes on the turns. I wince and September tells me it’s ok.
I’ll always have your turned lip.
At Level Up. $3 beers taste like water. Everybody knows, somehow. I feel eyes in my back. I shouldn’t have told Dylan. I told Joe and he says he doesn’t judge me but he does. I can tell. I’m overthinking, September would say. I should just be happy. She’s right. I remember seeing this half empty bar with contempt. Now I come with joy. $3 beers taste like water.
I wonder how long until I become one of those writers who makes their city their anchor: Oh, Los Angeles….the city full of angels…and just one devil.
I am chopped at stories. Almost positive the barista was mean to me because I look so chopped.
But anyway, throw all that away. I believe I have noticed something.
I drank a small bottle of kratom and it tasted what potion would be.
I’ve recently started posting on instagram again. Now in my day to day life I think im an
interesting person.
I’m taking more photos
And writing things down
I put on a ring today. Just thought it looked good.
I’m walking block to block watching the social classes of the UO flock. They travel to me akin to nature documentaries. The women all wear high boots or jeans. The men, a T-shirt. The younger packs are larger. But then again who am I to critique their patterns? I, alone, and far too high for the social expectation of a co-workers party, circled the block deciding between hers and another until it was too late to go to either.
The prime hours of Saturday night for finding a group amongst the street is 10:45 to 11:30. The first party or pregame has just about ended and the frats start opening their doors. So it’s not that the city has fallen asleep, but rather found it's place for the night.
On a Thursday, balcony parties can be seen at around 6 pm. The weather is nice and class is done for the week. And the sun is soon to set. What better way to celebrate?
The farther away you get from the population dense 5 block radius encircling campus, it dies down. There are bars out there, for the pleasure seeking Eugenian.
A cracked egg lays on the asphalt. How’d that get there?
I’m waiting for the first mention of zyns in mainstream scripted media.
The barkeep came straight up to a table, I suspect it was to get a closer look at the beautiful people up close. They, more than I, experience the plight of seeing people once and never again.
It rained while we were in the bar, the egg is no longer.
The leather man was wearing eyelashes. I would’ve paid to listen to their conversation.
Sitting at the bar at the Gaia Hotel in Anderson, California. The bartender works her magic on those little black plastic nubby things. I can’t help but feel I’m doing something wrong.
Like I was invading the space she existed in. As though the only socially acceptable option was to pull out my phone—which I’ve done now but for the purpose of concreting this thought—and disappear.
She’s wearing an encrusted tank top that says MILF and won’t stop calling me hun.
At the beach. Having to remember that I like the sun. I am at the beach. Donovan gave me his Dodgers hat since I forgot most everything. We all reapply sunscreen every few minutes. The rest of the group will get here sometime in the next hour, and we will want to leave. Caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the phone. I hate having those little prickly reminders jut out every 12 hours. I do not know how to be away from the pulse. It’s so infectious. . I was telling Donny something about this on the way back from Hermosa Beach.
“Mark Fisher had this thing he wrote about.”
Donny nodded his head, “Mark Fisher.”
“––What was that?”
“Nothing. Keep going.”
“It was about one of his students. How they were playing music into some wire headphones without evening listening. The kid said something about how he wanted to stay connected, and how the different webs of media make us feel like we always have to be involved––and even worse, that we like it.”
You ever see the drummer from Rush?”
“Yeah. My dad showed me the dudes drumkit when I was kid.
“So cool.”
“So cool.”
back of my knees ended up sunburnt.