SINCE THEN ︎
WORK IN PROGRESS ~~~~~
Alright alright, the fluctuations of the creative process and my own bizarre compulsive need to archive my life.
I did the Japan Zine, I finally finished the last post on here (Chapter End, from the corporate days), and now I’m working on THE BIG BRAND. So, currently, I’ve had enough with the painstaking organization and clean coherent-ish linear storytelling. TIME FOR FUN! Or something like that...
btw tonight, starting this post, it’s monday october 21, 2024... there’s no fukn dates on this site
AND continuing it, it’s thursday january 23, 2025... back in key west under the influence of NOTHING BUT JOY !! fear&loathing_in_the_tropics
And now it is late phase February. PHASES CONTINUE! It seems this may just be life, strange as that is to admit.
a brief period of seeming normalcy
AND THEN we hit a phase of turmoil. It is now the end of Summer 2025, though it is not Fall yet, and I am thinking about wrapping this up.
Perhaps I’ll think of some cohesive narrative to include below to tie it all together. And then perhaps I’ll just stick to the theme this post began with and let it be a joyously chaotic splurge, having had enough need for rhyme and reason in all the other facets of my life...
Whatever.
I did the Japan Zine, I finally finished the last post on here (Chapter End, from the corporate days), and now I’m working on THE BIG BRAND. So, currently, I’ve had enough with the painstaking organization and clean coherent-ish linear storytelling. TIME FOR FUN! Or something like that...
btw tonight, starting this post, it’s monday october 21, 2024... there’s no fukn dates on this site
AND continuing it, it’s thursday january 23, 2025... back in key west under the influence of NOTHING BUT JOY !! fear&loathing_in_the_tropics
And now it is late phase February. PHASES CONTINUE! It seems this may just be life, strange as that is to admit.
a brief period of seeming normalcy
AND THEN we hit a phase of turmoil. It is now the end of Summer 2025, though it is not Fall yet, and I am thinking about wrapping this up.
Perhaps I’ll think of some cohesive narrative to include below to tie it all together. And then perhaps I’ll just stick to the theme this post began with and let it be a joyously chaotic splurge, having had enough need for rhyme and reason in all the other facets of my life...
Whatever.
5/20/24, Monday
Gray days. The sun retreats for four, five, seven days. There is rain but really no impressive storm, no clash of thunder or flash of lightning or howl of wind. Just a steady drizzle with spurts of heavier drops. And then there are the times of bright sky, you know, where you step outside and still feel the need for sunglasses despite the total hiding of the sun behind the blanket of clouds. Just a blanket of gray for days on end. Inevitably, the mood recedes from the high water mark. This can happen in varying degrees - sometimes it’s outright depressing after becoming a fat oozing slug trapped inside a dark dank cave for so many days, staying in prime slug condition with the small spurts outside for some little chore or errand when the rainwater can be absorbed through the gray slimy skin, just enough to keep the slug systems running. And sometimes it’s only a slight check on the spirits, reasons often unknowable, but perhaps there’s enough of the bright gray sky for a walk in the park, or perhaps you’re overdue for some extended time with the television and the couch and you don’t have to transform completely into a slime, or perhaps you’re just lucky and for the usual fluke cosmic reasons your mood doesn’t morph to match the amorphous gray blanket across the sky and you can continue on only slightly subconsciously stunted.
Gray days. The sun retreats for four, five, seven days. There is rain but really no impressive storm, no clash of thunder or flash of lightning or howl of wind. Just a steady drizzle with spurts of heavier drops. And then there are the times of bright sky, you know, where you step outside and still feel the need for sunglasses despite the total hiding of the sun behind the blanket of clouds. Just a blanket of gray for days on end. Inevitably, the mood recedes from the high water mark. This can happen in varying degrees - sometimes it’s outright depressing after becoming a fat oozing slug trapped inside a dark dank cave for so many days, staying in prime slug condition with the small spurts outside for some little chore or errand when the rainwater can be absorbed through the gray slimy skin, just enough to keep the slug systems running. And sometimes it’s only a slight check on the spirits, reasons often unknowable, but perhaps there’s enough of the bright gray sky for a walk in the park, or perhaps you’re overdue for some extended time with the television and the couch and you don’t have to transform completely into a slime, or perhaps you’re just lucky and for the usual fluke cosmic reasons your mood doesn’t morph to match the amorphous gray blanket across the sky and you can continue on only slightly subconsciously stunted.
Yeah, however slightly or severely the effects are felt for that particular stint, they are present. That’s just part of the gray days. There are moments of awareness throughout, but often, the gray blanket simply becomes the standard state of being, as if the maximum possible level of feeling has been reduced and so the lack of the upper ranges isn’t even noticed - those levels simply do not exist. And it goes on like that, mundanely so, until one big morning all of the sudden and all at once the gray blanket has dissipated, has been ripped back and off and the big bright blue is everywhere, and the sun shines down warm and truly bright, not that half-brightness of the reflective gray ceiling, but a shining shimmering thing that touches the skin sweetly, and the high sky and maybe clean distant wind reset the scale, and the upper levels are suddenly there and possible again, and almost instantly the dull gray days are a strange notion of the past, and the life of a wet lethargic slug seems like an impossibility, an absurdity, something comical even though it was something just lived and not so amusing while it happened… The gray days are there and they become the norm and then they are gone suddenly and completely, and it is not until then that the realization of just how abnormal that normal was can dawn. Life can become small, when the truth is it is always vast. Emerging from the dark cave, from under the heavy rock, a slug smiling in the sunlight under the big blue sky - it’s something sweet.
HERE IT COMES BUDDY!!
^^^ this is in France. I tend to exist emphatically outside of France. I was in France for one day with my girlfriend. We disembarked from a Very Big Boat in Marseille, and I asked the man to drop us off in the northwest corner of of the Old Port. He was a Russian man and he explained the allure of France very well. He had been in France for many years and he was leaving France very soon. Or was that in Spain with the allure of Spain and leaving Spain very soon? My head was and remains foggy to this day.
We hiked up many hills and haphazardly ducked into a Dutch coffee shop. After that brief stay we wandered and wandered and wandered and I took photographs that I though might be meaningful at a later time, and pigeons splashed in the near-empty fountain and we climbed our way back down to the Old Port itself and walked out to the far point and swung our legs over the sea and thought about how nice it might have been to be someone else in another place.
We hiked up many hills and haphazardly ducked into a Dutch coffee shop. After that brief stay we wandered and wandered and wandered and I took photographs that I though might be meaningful at a later time, and pigeons splashed in the near-empty fountain and we climbed our way back down to the Old Port itself and walked out to the far point and swung our legs over the sea and thought about how nice it might have been to be someone else in another place.
SATURDAY MORNINGS as we once knew them don’t have to be dead! There are enough other days and times to be taken with existential dread and a vague sense of impending doom. Saturday mornings, regardless of other life obligations, can be made to be sweet and pleasant and far away from everything else, at least some times... at least often enough to not be so sweet that they must be treated as some kind of supreme rarity, because of course that spoils whatever chance there was of it being really... enjoyable.
So I started surfing again in September after spending enough time recovering from the harsh shock of 7.5 years in the corporate consulting world and about 6-7 months of being a big cunt.
It’s tough to overcome a condition like that, as being a big cunt is not unknown to be terminal, or at least permanent.
But eventually, you just have to force it through... hence my purchase of the PARTY PLATTER.
So I started surfing again in September after spending enough time recovering from the harsh shock of 7.5 years in the corporate consulting world and about 6-7 months of being a big cunt.
It’s tough to overcome a condition like that, as being a big cunt is not unknown to be terminal, or at least permanent.
But eventually, you just have to force it through... hence my purchase of the PARTY PLATTER.
CAMP PHOTOS
Here we have a series of photographs taken on my Fujifilm Instax, scanned in, blown up, and lightly edited for digital viewing pleasure. Early October in Frisco after roughly 10 years not going there. 12 photo slide show so this shit doesn’t become too long of a scroll. You can click through at your own pace, though it will auto advance.
︎︎︎︎︎
10/20/24, Sunday
SHEESH - I’ve been busy, I’ve been on the go, but it’s been overarchingly good. Surfing, camping, diving, maintaining some level of general momentum on my large scale pursuit. Of course, there are still the stumbles and the downs all along the way, but when I crack open an archive - a journal from a year or three ago say - it grants me perspective. Yes, questions still abound, but by comparison to where I was, great progress has been made, and the path is not so… repulsive. Perhaps still daunting, but not repulsive.
A little ︎︎︎︎ on a Sunday, duties all done, a strange canned drink to sip on, some combination of black tea and kava and kratom. Keep the blinds closed for the time being, set the lamps to blue and low, let Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground play, try to wind down, down, down slow, slow, slow…
I don’t want any big questions to stalk me at a time like this so I have to keep my tracks covered, even from myself, lest I unknowingly leave some clue they can detect but I can’t even notice is there, and then next thing I know they’re leaping out of the shadowy brush snarling and clawing and gnashing great white dagger teeth thirsting for BLOOD - no, let’s take it easy, bud. Not worth the risk at a time like this. Ignorance is indeed bliss. Shut it all down for the time being - save it for tomorrow. I am no longer bound to the standard 9-5 schedule, but tomorrow is in fact Monday, and at this juncture it suits me to play along with the trope. IT ALL BEGINS MONDAY.
SHEESH - I’ve been busy, I’ve been on the go, but it’s been overarchingly good. Surfing, camping, diving, maintaining some level of general momentum on my large scale pursuit. Of course, there are still the stumbles and the downs all along the way, but when I crack open an archive - a journal from a year or three ago say - it grants me perspective. Yes, questions still abound, but by comparison to where I was, great progress has been made, and the path is not so… repulsive. Perhaps still daunting, but not repulsive.
A little ︎︎︎︎ on a Sunday, duties all done, a strange canned drink to sip on, some combination of black tea and kava and kratom. Keep the blinds closed for the time being, set the lamps to blue and low, let Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground play, try to wind down, down, down slow, slow, slow…
I don’t want any big questions to stalk me at a time like this so I have to keep my tracks covered, even from myself, lest I unknowingly leave some clue they can detect but I can’t even notice is there, and then next thing I know they’re leaping out of the shadowy brush snarling and clawing and gnashing great white dagger teeth thirsting for BLOOD - no, let’s take it easy, bud. Not worth the risk at a time like this. Ignorance is indeed bliss. Shut it all down for the time being - save it for tomorrow. I am no longer bound to the standard 9-5 schedule, but tomorrow is in fact Monday, and at this juncture it suits me to play along with the trope. IT ALL BEGINS MONDAY.
Yes… and the times remain strange and turbulent. We’re coming up on the Presidential Election now, and it’s a big one. THE FATE OF THE NATION! Meanwhile, the State of the Nation remains a strange combination of happy idiocy and general malaise - the American Way. Superficially superb, comforts and conveniences abound, all wrapped into our daily lives and so taken for granted and not seen as the immense luxuries they would have been just a few generations ago. And underneath that outer level, just a SMIDGE down into the ether, we’re wretched and ragged and near collapse, or perhaps not collapse, but something more explosive or implosive - something more dramatic and full of deep personal failings. A fresh layer of pavement over a sinkhole of unknown depth and breadth. That new Ford F-150 King Ranch looks DAZZLING as it passes over, dad being an American MAN, mom smiling in the sun, kids laughing in the backseat, small hairline fractures running and splaying out across the clean black tar beneath, but not tearing wide and breaking through and opening the gateway into oblivion just yet - and that’s all that matters. That new sparkling truck and happy happy family will pass by unscathed, and it won’t be until the next truck and family, or the next, or the next passes over that the great black hole appears and swallows them up and then lets no one pass at all for a great and unknown quantity of time. Yes, it’s inevitable that it will happen, and probably soon, but it’s not happening right now at this moment so it doesn’t matter, and even though maybe it does matter, it’s so hard to care when everything is new and shiny and smiling, and so who cares, really, who really has the time or the energy to care… THE AMERICAN WAY.
Yeah, true, but what the fuck do I know about it? I’m a little high on the couch gearing up to watch some fine fine TELEVISION for the evening. I’ve got leftover pizza in the fridge, pizza that took two hours to be delivered from six minutes away, from a pizza company whose anonymous corporate system politely told me to go fuck myself when I complained. Good pizza! Although they were also out of ranch. But I’ll eat the pizza and I’ll watch the television and I’ll lay on the couch next to my mold-laden wall that my leasing company will not fix or compensate me for in any way, and I’ll think to myself, hey, hey, not bad man, not a bad little life you’ve got here. Superficially superb, but just a smiiiiiidge down underneath, into the ether, where the big questions prowl around… Eh, what do I know? I’m not looking. Ignorance is bliss and I’m a blissful American Man.
JOLLY DOOM
11/19/24, Tuesday
As a child I had a crippling anxiety, a strange kind of constant writhing torment that stayed with me for a period of time, partly a potent obsessive compulsive disorder causing me to be terrified of strange things like accidentally lying to anybody, but many parts other things - an early form of the darkness that would come back to afflict me as a teenager, then more as a purple billowing cloud of depression.
Now, it is different, and I am glad for that. It is not the all-pervasive and all-permeating writhing thing that it was then. But I do still have a form of it. Now, it is more of a long-pulsating dread that rides beneath my psyche. Sometimes, between pulses, it is dull and distant. But when that pulse shoots out hard it can still send shockwaves through my system. The inside of my mind does not look like the outside presentation that I show the world. No, it is a harder thing to wrangle. It is not as terrifying as it was when I was a child, but I do have to regularly remind myself that everything is ok - it is actually ok. The dread and the doom that I feel do not have to carry their full weight. The weight can be dispersed, or counteracted - negated in some way, at least partially. But I have to work at this, fairly constantly. As time goes by and I move farther along in life I have begun to come to terms with this, realizing that it is just a part of my mind. It has to be managed - or, as I said before, wrangled - but it does not have to be allowed to run amuck. I do not wish to let it consume me and so I will not.
As a child I had a crippling anxiety, a strange kind of constant writhing torment that stayed with me for a period of time, partly a potent obsessive compulsive disorder causing me to be terrified of strange things like accidentally lying to anybody, but many parts other things - an early form of the darkness that would come back to afflict me as a teenager, then more as a purple billowing cloud of depression.
Now, it is different, and I am glad for that. It is not the all-pervasive and all-permeating writhing thing that it was then. But I do still have a form of it. Now, it is more of a long-pulsating dread that rides beneath my psyche. Sometimes, between pulses, it is dull and distant. But when that pulse shoots out hard it can still send shockwaves through my system. The inside of my mind does not look like the outside presentation that I show the world. No, it is a harder thing to wrangle. It is not as terrifying as it was when I was a child, but I do have to regularly remind myself that everything is ok - it is actually ok. The dread and the doom that I feel do not have to carry their full weight. The weight can be dispersed, or counteracted - negated in some way, at least partially. But I have to work at this, fairly constantly. As time goes by and I move farther along in life I have begun to come to terms with this, realizing that it is just a part of my mind. It has to be managed - or, as I said before, wrangled - but it does not have to be allowed to run amuck. I do not wish to let it consume me and so I will not.
It is not that simple, of course, and yet in some ways it is. Sometimes when you look inside and you see boiling turmoil and fervent stirring you just have to choose to let everything be ok. You have to choose it.
I creep up to the crossroads of life. I approach cautiously, peering around the corners, peeking about and assessing, finding a vantage point to perch upon and observe for a while. I must come to know the place, the conditions, the potential pathways. I must perform my calculus. On the outside, and sometimes even on the inside on the straightaways and the in-betweens, I move fast and hard, even with an apparent nonchalance. Good and easy and steady. But beneath that, on a stronger current, I must perform my calculus. Regardless of how long and drawn out it may be, it must be done.
I think it’s because of this that I sometimes feel like I am not making decisions in life, or perhaps that I’m simply being swept along by the current, allowing it to carry me rather than my own volition. This sentiment frustrates me greatly at times. But then, upon deeper analysis of the larger arc, the slow calculus becomes apparent. I am creeping up and observing and assessing - moving at my own pace. Sometimes this means I am slow to respond to external stimuli… to react to developments on the path. But then it also means that my longer path is intentional. It is not made by indecision or external current, really. It is the result of my own internal calculus, at my own pace. I may waver, but I do not cease to listen to my own internal rhythm.
There is a brand called Jolly Doom. I started it, and I have to remind myself at times that it is indeed my outward endeavor, and this website is indeed my INTERIOR AND CLOSE ASSOCIATES endeavor. When I say this out loud I am speaking quietly in a room by myself in a place that I haven’t really earned the right to be by myself- i.e. here and now, in the guest bedroom in my parents’ rented condo in Key West, at the relocated desk by the window by the permanently closed blinds facing out toward the condominium walkway and tonight the heavy moving clouds, constant but seemingly sporadic to all the people here that have learned to not expect clouds and to expect sun and moon. I do not know what the moon is doing - I leave that to my sister, though it seems to haunt me. No, I know that we have some kind of rare alignment of planets that is being talked about on the streets, but I know more acutely that we live on the same Earth under the same Sky and mysticism is far and gone away. Earlier tonight I watched a woman leave her bar chair - I thought she had had a bad conversation and was gradually making her way to the door. She pushed off of me two to three times as if I was a column supporting the wall, which is not unheard of, and then she stumbled outside and fell into the nearest single chair. Well, alright. Several people joked with the bartender that she had never settled up for her drink. I chortled along, and then…
I went back inside to the restroom in the back of the bar and I hear a loud crash and general understated tones and exclamations of dismay. I knew what it must mean. The woman had fallen out of chair onto the floor of the bar. I emerged from the bathroom and looked out in the direction that I had come from - THOU SHALL NOT PASS. One individual made eye contact with me with a look of combined pity and bewilderment, and so I headed for the side door and came back to the table out front via the outdoor passageway.
Before I had ordered the additional hurricanes, which are made with a very integral shot of 151, I had ushered a nice Indian couple past me to the open bar stools in front of me. The barstools were open because two women had recently fled them - one to another barstool farther down and away from the woman rambling next to her, and the other woman rambling and then suddenly silent and withdrawn and dreadful, head bobbing up and down and then down only and body leading herself on autopilot to pass out in the chair on the porch just outside the door. Here she slept for a good while, benevolently ignored, until she stumbled back inside into a barstool with multiple woman trailing her with her belongings shortly after. It was from there that she fell and struck her head on some kind of metal pole, proceeding to bleed across the floor profusely.
“Well,” I thought, “there’s worse things for business.”
And indeed there were. A characteristically understated Key West cop arrived first, followed by an ambulance and a fire truck. The nice Indian couple stood outside the door with their drinks and I asked them, myself only having seen the various limbs of the limp body, “Did she hit her head?”
“Yes!” the woman replied enthusiastically. “There is a lot of blood!”
I looked toward my parents knowingly and replied something along the lines of, “Well, there’s often a lot of blood with a head wound, but it’s often surficial.”
“Sure,” she replied, “but we had to get out of there for now.”
“Sure,” I said, and I watched the cop laugh with a passerby on the street.
The medics brought the woman out with her arms strapped across her body as if in prayer and her chin strapped down in that way that is only done for those with potential neck injuries. And yet when they blink their eyes and look around it seems very much like they likely don’t have a neck injury and they probably just fell over in a very bad way in a very public setting…
“There she goes,” the nice Indian woman said.
“I’m glad they got the backboard in there,” my mom said, referring to the woman’s spinal immobilization.
I watched the woman peering around the scene with vacant ghostly eyes and I shuddered. Had I not earned this right before - treatment as an invalid solely through choices of my own?
My dad looked on with a strange whimsical look in his eye and said something along the lines of, “Well, it seems like she’ll be alright at least.”
Yes, indeed. After that, before the police car and the ambulance and the fire truck left, small waves of individuals poured into the bar.
“Well, they must make them good here, he he ha!” one of the older wider bearded gentlemen said as he headed inside toward the bar with the now very nervous bartender.
My parents laughed, and so did I, because after all - he wasn’t wrong, was he?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“You’re still here?” he asked, with that falsely amused disagreeable expression on his face.
I did not know his name, and really I did not know anything about him, other than he was ornery and unamusing and really, quite obnoxious. I paused to look at his wide stupid face with its false grin and then I said, “Yeah, well, you’re still here, aren’t you?”
He laughed, not a real laugh, but that small kind of thing that serves to fill a space that would otherwise be filled with some authentic form of surprise.
I watched this with contempt, and then watched his beady little eyes flit away, and I turned back to the bartender. “Another round, please.”
I stared up at the TV behind the bar, and the wall and the bottles behind the bar, and really at nothing in particular, allowing myself the luxury of becoming lost in thought. That was when this unamusing lone man at the bar had to do it. He had been flirting very terribly with the bartender, and very unsuccessfully, and he thought that I had probably been amused by this at his expense, and now, although he hadn’t connected those dots and likely never would, he was angry with me because of it.
“Say, you’re not from here, are you?”
I looked at him with naked contempt. “No.”
“Where you from?”
“Virginia.”
“Cold up there, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m from Alabama.”
“Alright.”
“Been here for sixteen years though.”
“Alright.”
“You know what brought me down here?”
I did not, and I refused to ever know. “You survive a plane crash?” I was ornery too now, but also whimsical.
“What’s that?”
“A plane crash. Were you stranded here after a plane crash?”
He looked at me quizzically, a mixture of simple irritation and legitimate confusion, and then said, “No. No, well, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I said, matter of factly, “You just seem like the kind of guy who would survive a plane crash when everyone else burned alive in the wreckage.”
He began to turn red and his face began to contort. “Hey! I’ll have you know buddy, I have a pilot’s license, alright? And as a matter of fact - ”
“Not anymore,” I cut him off. “I work for the FAA, and I can tell you right now, your license is revoked.”
His face turned redder and contorted further. “Now, what’s the meaning of this!?”
“Oh I’m sorry,” I responded, taking a sip of my drink that the bartender had just passed me, she looking immediately away afterwards. “You should have already gotten the notice in the mail. You didn’t receive it already?”
“Hey, you shut the fuck up now! You don’t be messing with me!”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, a serious man like you. And serious business like this. In fact, if I remember right, the FAA thinks you might have helped train the 9/11 hijackers - ring any bells?” He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, which would likely put him somewhere around the age of eleven in 2001. I took a heavy pull of my drink and felt the whisky burn my throat and make me shudder slightly.
His head turned into a bruised and battered tomato. “Slander!” he yelled to the nearly empty bar. “That’s slander! It’s not funny to slander a man like that!”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, the whisky now riding around happily in my belly, “I think the FAA administrator may have actually told me you worked with the big man himself.”
“What the hell you talking about!? Who’s that?”
“Osama Bin Laden.”
His distorted tomato head exploded. The few other bar patrons looked over in shocked horror, having not witnessed the build up that made this conclusion quite logical, and the bartender looked on with an odd mixture of general relief at the forefront, but with exasperation at the big mess just behind. I grabbed a stray napkin off the bar and wiped the worst of the rotten red exploded tomato off my face, then pulled out my phone, opened YouTube, and began to play the Veggie Tales theme song.
The opening tuba sound came on, and I hopped up on the bar, kicking off my shoes to reveal a hidden pair of tap shoes, clacking my feet along with the beat and singing the opening lyrics:
“If you like to talk to TOMATOES (this word I yelled),
if a squash can make you smile.
If you like to waltz with potatoes,
up and down the produce aisle…”
A pause, and then the few other bar patrons, no longer shocked or horrified, and the bartender, now only relieved, leapt onto the bar beside me, kicked off their shoes, revealing hidden pairs of tap shoes, and clacking along they screamed with me:
“HAVE WE GOT A SHOW FOR YOU!!!”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
I was feeling quite literary. It was good to be writing with some frequency, whether or not I was writing anything worthwhile. It made it so I did not fear it anymore. Instead, it was more like a normal chore, something that I may not want to do but that I would be able to make myself do because I knew it had to be done and because I had gotten used to making myself do it. In that, it was like all things, and that is better than being afraid of it.
Here I am - I’m living this charmed life, by all available accounts and exterior metrics, and yet I can’t even fully enjoy it because I’m so wrapped up in my foolish fatalism. The menace of my own mortality hangs as a specter over my head. It is an ominous shadow, and it is a cartoonish anvil perched precariously on the edge of a cliff up above as I bound down the straight and narrow desert road. Ignorance is in fact bliss but there is no such veil for this kind of malice.
One of the most foolish parts of my foolish fatalism was my tendency to allow myself to feel preemptive sorrow. Things that had not happened and that perhaps would not happen or at the very least would only happen much later and so nearly abstractly would materialize in my mind and sink down over me like a dense pre-dawn fog. Some part of my mind, often not the forefront but also not an insignificant part, would then be taken with this fog, despite the fact that the world of reality before me and around me would not have fog and may in fact actually be clear and have sun. I knew there was no nonsensical reconciliation of the two, but then apparently, there didn’t need to be, as I was perfectly capable of straddling the two realms, lurking along the invisible precipice like some kind of strangely fluid ghoul.
~~~ ︎︎︎~~~LONG TURMOIL BREAK, FOCI SHIFT, SEASONS CHANGE~~~ ︎︎︎~~~
Alright, let’s kick it off with a photo gallery of assorted moments n memories of fairly recent lore. These were perhaps not selected quite RANDOMLY, surely, but certainly on little more than a WHIM.
HOW FUKN WHIMSICAL
But what is it they say - a random sampling is the best sampling? ha, ha, ha !
Something like that, maybe, perhaps...
HOW FUKN WHIMSICAL
But what is it they say - a random sampling is the best sampling? ha, ha, ha !
Something like that, maybe, perhaps...
^^^pictured above, in no order and not including all:
TACO BELL FEAST after a day at the river, second time happening, the first having been for Jo’s 34th birthday, wow!
NO KINGS protest, big protest energy screengrabbed from an RVA reddit post
BIG TREE LIMB takes its revenge on a house, viewed from a back alley on a pleasant morning after one of this (2025) summer’s many wonderful violent storms
Jonah n meself outside the *altria* theater after having seen the great and controversial Louis CK... look, i get it, but the man is a true master of the craft, and this show featured jokes about putting a parent in an old folks home, something i am very familiar with via proxy
TEXT JOKES ABOUT THE BOMBING OF IRAN HA HA hahsdfkalsdfjdslfkjas... surely it was well-developed strategy that avoided a larger war and not posturing and happenstance!
don’t worry, that’s sour cream for the quesadilla but VANILLA ICING for the rice krispies treat. and don’t worry, that’s a RARE occurrence.
rex n robbie in pergatory. both would rise, but with varying degrees of consciousness. robbie and i would go on to tattooing in the morning light, robbie receiving his first ever, a version of THE SCIMITAR.
david gray and BIG FANCY play the BIG browns island!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Monday, March 17th, 2025
Well, here we are. I’m hungover, but I’ve taken ︎︎︎. I’m sad, but I’m ignoring it. If yesterday afternoon into the night was engaging active avoidance measures, this is the aftermath, the natural evolution, the inevitable subsequent phase - involuntary avoidance. Inability to assess and focus. Distant swirling feelings of panic if you allow yourself to think about that inability - why have I done this? Why can’t I just allow myself to process in a natural and healthy way? Wouldn’t that be better - more directly, more presently, isn’t that what I need?
Probably so. But here we are. I’ve talked my shit with my close confidants, my counselors, and I’ve even done what is for me a little extended outreach, drunken merriment meets passing epiphany in the night, phone calls and voicemails to what is actually still a small amount of close confidants, but to me now feels like over-enthusiastic over-telegraphing to the world at large. But there’s no social media post. There’s no announcement to the wider populace. When I feel I have already over-engaged by reaching out to close friends, at least I can take solace in that. I pride myself on mental and emotional fortitude but it turns out I still need to cry out in the night. It’s wonderful to be alone when being alone is a treat, but when it’s the standard state? Have I not lived that for years? Am I so afraid of returning to it now? Am I fraudulent in my sentiments? These are pressing questions, but I digress… what was I trying to say about the here and now? I suppose it’s that I should be sitting with all of this more closely; I should be more actively assessing all of this rather than just engaging these avoidance measures and letting the time pass by. I suppose I should be trying to have the clearest headspace possible and instead I have actively tried, and succeeded, to muddy the internal waters as much as possible - stir it up, drown it out, make it murky enough that there’s no risk of seeing the bottom… how can you bottom out if you don’t even know where the bottom is?
Great. Once again, darker and starker than I intended. Perhaps the core of this episode of fervent stirring is exactly what my girlfriend, ex-girlfriend (?), has identified as my primary issue - I don’t know what I want. She told me that I need to figure out what makes me happy, and I think she is right, but I also think and perhaps fear that the answer to that question is more convoluted than she expects. I have a rather deep-seated belief that it is hard to hold onto happiness, and that it may be necessary to rely on other things in life, things such as purpose and meaning. But perhaps that is just a haughty way of saying the same thing - you need to figure out what you want.
Well, what do you want?
As it turns out, it’s hard to say in any certain terms. There are myriad generalizations that come to mind, but when you get to the nitty gritty, the day to day, the ON THE GROUND experience - it’s rather hard to say. Perhaps it’s paralysis by abundance of choice. Perhaps it’s immaturity. Perhaps it’s a simple character fault. Perhaps it’s just the nature of being this type of person in the world - overly-analytical, fatalistic and hesitant, aloof until the wrong moment when the ship has passed. “OH, I’VE GOT IT NOW!” he shouts to an empty room, only then turning to see that the crowd has gone and he is, in fact, alone.
Sunday, March 30th, 2025
I went to see my girlfriend for other reasons, and it was good until the end, and then we talked and we cried and we did not reach an agreement. I then went to my parents’, and we had a fun evening where I did not think about it all, and the next day I lingered into a relaxing evening. On Sunday I left, stopping to look out at the bay, letting myself long for that horizon, and then I returned home. So, for the first time in some days, I was alone - alone with the current state of my relationship, with the condition of not being able to reach out to that person that I always reach out to, and with the great sadness of that and yet the inevitability of a coming crossroads in life. But it was Sunday evening, and it was warm, and I did not want to think about that just then. I knew it would be fruitless.
Well, I sat on the back porch and I read, and I felt ok in the warmth and the sun, and so I decided to have a canned THC beverage that had been lingering in the back of my fridge. It was nice, and then it wasn’t. I could feel myself retreating into my head, my mind turning round on itself, the walls closing in, the pressure building and the beginnings of The Fear coming on. It would not do. So, although I knew I had been drinking too much as it were, I poured some of the nice rum into a glass of ice and mixed in a bit of water. I had to get out of my head, by any means necessary. It was a matter of mental health, and I knew that at that moment, it took precedence over any other health matters.
I poured another glass and the sun went down and in that strange head space it occurred to me to light a candle, and so I sat outside at the table on the back porch and I read in the warmth by candlelight. I did not want to be inside with the closed in walls or even the distracting screens. I was alone, and the questions were large and urgent, and my head was fervently stirring, and so I knew it would not be good for me in there. No, I needed to stay outside in the open air with the sky and the noises of the city and the birds and the wind in the great American elm tree behind my apartment. I could at least be grateful that it was warm, and so it was pleasant - the atmosphere, that is, and so that at least was better for dealing with the beginnings of The Fear. You have a better chance of dealing with the thing then.
I went to see my girlfriend for other reasons, and it was good until the end, and then we talked and we cried and we did not reach an agreement. I then went to my parents’, and we had a fun evening where I did not think about it all, and the next day I lingered into a relaxing evening. On Sunday I left, stopping to look out at the bay, letting myself long for that horizon, and then I returned home. So, for the first time in some days, I was alone - alone with the current state of my relationship, with the condition of not being able to reach out to that person that I always reach out to, and with the great sadness of that and yet the inevitability of a coming crossroads in life. But it was Sunday evening, and it was warm, and I did not want to think about that just then. I knew it would be fruitless.
Well, I sat on the back porch and I read, and I felt ok in the warmth and the sun, and so I decided to have a canned THC beverage that had been lingering in the back of my fridge. It was nice, and then it wasn’t. I could feel myself retreating into my head, my mind turning round on itself, the walls closing in, the pressure building and the beginnings of The Fear coming on. It would not do. So, although I knew I had been drinking too much as it were, I poured some of the nice rum into a glass of ice and mixed in a bit of water. I had to get out of my head, by any means necessary. It was a matter of mental health, and I knew that at that moment, it took precedence over any other health matters.
I poured another glass and the sun went down and in that strange head space it occurred to me to light a candle, and so I sat outside at the table on the back porch and I read in the warmth by candlelight. I did not want to be inside with the closed in walls or even the distracting screens. I was alone, and the questions were large and urgent, and my head was fervently stirring, and so I knew it would not be good for me in there. No, I needed to stay outside in the open air with the sky and the noises of the city and the birds and the wind in the great American elm tree behind my apartment. I could at least be grateful that it was warm, and so it was pleasant - the atmosphere, that is, and so that at least was better for dealing with the beginnings of The Fear. You have a better chance of dealing with the thing then.
So it got better, though of course it did not go away completely. But I could manage it then. Hope would flit in on the breeze, and then my mind would go off somewhere promising for a moment, and then it would go just a little ways too far and there would be a great heavy wave of sadness, and so I would pull myself back as best I could and look at what was directly in front of me, at the candlelight and the wind in the tree and then at my book, trying to read as if I were far away somewhere and as if I could shut down my mind. That, of course, was impossible, but sometimes you just have to go through the motions and allow them to do what they can on their own, let the validity of doing the thing speak for itself and not worry about the internal machinations and their indomitable will. This is better than not going through the motions, in letting yourself fester and letting the sadness and the fervent stirring pool around you like a thick oozing goo, and you will often even find that, if you can stick to it for a bit, you will even feel better.
Tomorrow will, of course, be a new day, and the late evening setting sun and lonely twilight will come again and again, but those things are not now, and those things can be dealt with when they come. That, at least, is what I tell myself now as I sit here by the candlelight and write and try to keep it all from flying away on the warm breeze… one foot in front of the other, mate. It will all be ok one day, true, but it may not be good for a while.
7/22/25, Tuesday
Sadness has been flitting about for a while now, a leaf in a fickle breeze, and now that the air is still it seems to have settled down. It has settled down right on top of me. It has settled over me, a thin sheet spreading out further and further, somehow billowing out in the still air, almost translucent but not quite - it spreads until it covers me and my surroundings completely, and it obscures the sky above. Wasn’t the sky blue? Wasn’t the sky high and true? Wasn’t there the image of hope somewhere up there far away? How quickly you forget under this cover.
My relationship has ended and I am alone. When you love a person and you share yourself with them it becomes a connection and an outlet that you rely on. That person is there, even when they aren’t physically there, even when it is just the thought of them being there - the comfort of knowing that there is someone at the other end of the line in this vast lonely world. So then when the relationship ends and they are not there - when you cannot reach out and have that connection and that comfort - it is heavy. It is a harsh thing, and it is jarring to be alone again. And when you sit in that and you feel the loss of that person, of that connection, it is intensely sad. There is the void and there is the loss, and both are hard things to deal with.
For me, I have found that in the bad times I am at risk of becoming lost in my head. My mind takes me to beautiful places, depths that I yearn to explore, but in those depths there can be shadowy forms that move of their own accord. These shadows can lash out and cause pain, or worse, they can latch on and ride along, unnoticed for too long, insidiously leeching the life out of their victim the whole way, growing stronger as the individual becomes weaker, and if not stopped, they may weaken the individual to the point that they can drag him down into the abyss from which they came. Yes, I know this to be true because I have been dragged there before. I do not wish to return. And I fear being dragged into an abyss even darker and deeper than the one I have been to.
So what to do? One foot in front of the other I suppose. Because anything more is simply too daunting. In this sadness and loneliness, trying to look ahead can be a terror. What will you do with your life? Where will you go; what will you become; what will become of you!? No. It can be too much even in the good times, and these are emphatically not the good times. So you must try not to zoom out. You must not let yourself fly away. You must try to make yourself stay grounded and put one foot in front of the other and focus solely on that - take the next step, and then take the next step, and go forward in that way. Do not try to think about what’s further down the path - do not even try to think two steps ahead right now. No, right now there is only the next step, and forcing yourself to take it even though all you want to do is lay down and waste away.
Sadness has been flitting about for a while now, a leaf in a fickle breeze, and now that the air is still it seems to have settled down. It has settled down right on top of me. It has settled over me, a thin sheet spreading out further and further, somehow billowing out in the still air, almost translucent but not quite - it spreads until it covers me and my surroundings completely, and it obscures the sky above. Wasn’t the sky blue? Wasn’t the sky high and true? Wasn’t there the image of hope somewhere up there far away? How quickly you forget under this cover.
My relationship has ended and I am alone. When you love a person and you share yourself with them it becomes a connection and an outlet that you rely on. That person is there, even when they aren’t physically there, even when it is just the thought of them being there - the comfort of knowing that there is someone at the other end of the line in this vast lonely world. So then when the relationship ends and they are not there - when you cannot reach out and have that connection and that comfort - it is heavy. It is a harsh thing, and it is jarring to be alone again. And when you sit in that and you feel the loss of that person, of that connection, it is intensely sad. There is the void and there is the loss, and both are hard things to deal with.
For me, I have found that in the bad times I am at risk of becoming lost in my head. My mind takes me to beautiful places, depths that I yearn to explore, but in those depths there can be shadowy forms that move of their own accord. These shadows can lash out and cause pain, or worse, they can latch on and ride along, unnoticed for too long, insidiously leeching the life out of their victim the whole way, growing stronger as the individual becomes weaker, and if not stopped, they may weaken the individual to the point that they can drag him down into the abyss from which they came. Yes, I know this to be true because I have been dragged there before. I do not wish to return. And I fear being dragged into an abyss even darker and deeper than the one I have been to.
So what to do? One foot in front of the other I suppose. Because anything more is simply too daunting. In this sadness and loneliness, trying to look ahead can be a terror. What will you do with your life? Where will you go; what will you become; what will become of you!? No. It can be too much even in the good times, and these are emphatically not the good times. So you must try not to zoom out. You must not let yourself fly away. You must try to make yourself stay grounded and put one foot in front of the other and focus solely on that - take the next step, and then take the next step, and go forward in that way. Do not try to think about what’s further down the path - do not even try to think two steps ahead right now. No, right now there is only the next step, and forcing yourself to take it even though all you want to do is lay down and waste away.
Even now, after writing this nice piece, after giving such sage advice - I stop and I sit and I zoom out. What the hell am I doing? Are my dreams childish? Is the money going to last? Why am I spending so much money? Shouldn’t I be getting married and having children? What if I get left behind? I’m going to be in my mid-30’s before I know it! What if I never form another romantic connection? What if I squander it all and become a sad hollow shell of a man living alone in filth and squalor? What if everyone I love dies? What if I die? What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck am I doing? No, seriously, what the fuck am I doing?
Right. And that’s the way it goes. Fun! Just a little fun in the sun in this hot, hot, hot summer we’re having. Oh, the sorrow of it all compounds and jumps on my head. My head’s down on the ground, sinking, sinking, being contorted and even smashed but I can’t get out from under it. My limbs just flail around uselessly, spastically really, and my head looks like a smashed pumpkin now under this thing that just keeps jumping up and down, merciless, giddy. Bastard. And then just when it seems like it’s all over that last bit of consciousness zooms out of my smashed head and catches a bird’s eye view of this scene and sees it for what it really is - absurd. The whole thing’s absurd. Past the sorrow and the heaviness and the crushing immediacy of the pain, it is absurd. Truly. And so then that bit of consciousness zooms back down into my head and a smile spreads across my smashed face and then, even though the thing keeps jumping, I begin to laugh. Despite it all, I begin to laugh, because the whole thing is absurd and I know it now, this great secret, and as the laughter grows the thing becomes unnerved and it stops jumping and climbs off my head and even backs away. Then I’m able to stand up, holding my smashed head together with both hands, and laughing still I look at the thing and I say, “You’re a real bastard, you know? And you don’t even get it!” And I laugh and then the thing turns and flees because it knows it’s true. It doesn’t get it. Sorrow doesn’t know the absurdity of this life, and when you do, well, then you know the great secret. The bad things know they don’t know this secret, know they can’t know it, and so they fear it and flee from it. And then you can stand there, without them, and have yourself a good laugh about it all.