All my words

At Major Smash Pros Tournament BOBC5, the best player in Alberta, 18 years old, flew across the country to attend the tournament and experienced some of the most vicious widespread loud visceral hatred from a crowd I have ever seen.   Most would say he brought it upon himself. He isn’t particularly liked. He probably said something about Transgenders. He’s clearly autistic, like, in the pre-2020 way, the genetic way, and this manifests in many people having suffered negative, “rude” experiences with him. I’ve played him myself. I can see it.   But the way he brought this particularly loud, world-encompassing storm of vitriol upon himself was by complaining on twitter about the match he was seeded to play in the tournament.   "Thanks to biased pandering by the B.C crowd, they have reverted the seeds so I play Niko4 again." Yes it is funny. The phrase “biased pandering by the BC crowd” is meme-worthy. Twitter Comedians made an image using his quote that made me laugh. ...

W hen i see guys walking, holding their girl, it looks somewhat defensive. like they’re saying to the world: this is my girl, you can’t have her, don’t look, don’t touch, don’t even try. which i guess might be hot for her, but to me it looks somewhat weak. like he's coping with something.  a couple nights ago i was approaching a crosswalk near a young couple and when i walked up near them, the guy put his arm around his girlfriend. like obviously in response to my presence, unconsciously. it was a caveman moment. i had to smile. just like i have to smile right now remembering it. my own caveman moment.

it must look a little sad. to see me, here, in the prime of my life, alone with my laptop, practically straddling this poor table, eyes fixed intently on the sad little screen. no girl with me. no friends. just me and my sad little screen.  thinking about the way other people see me.  hoping i'm not hurting the business of this cafe.  starting to worry that the vibes i give off when i briefly glance at each pair of customers as they walk in makes them a little unsettled and ruins their whole boba experience and that the whole staff hates me, they loathe my presence and they all secretly wish i would just get up and leave. i think this feeling is a good sign that it’s time to go.

If I can see the opponent in my periphery, it completely removes me from the game. I’m now thinking about the other person, their life, their experience of fighting me. I’m noticing their posture and the way they smell and the profile of their face and this information pollutes that same corner of my brain that does not allow me to enjoy blowjobs. When I was a kid, I had my own bedroom. I was the only boy so I had my own room so I spent a lot of time alone. I was comfortable alone. I fell asleep alone. I learned alone. I grew up in mostly the company of only myself. And then I became adult and had to adapt my lonely brain to all these situations with other people in them.   I can’t fall asleep touching my Girl. She falls asleep in 3 minutes. She actually sleeps better when I’m holding her. Sounds cute, but actually isn’t because i always need to change positions and eventually detach her body if I want any chance at getting some rest myself. That part of my brain that monitors the ...

Someone just walked into the cafe and when asked “How are you today?” They responded “Bad” and immediately broke into a story about how some great quantity of things was stolen from them today, or something. I don’t know. It was kind of surreal. Everyone paused and looked over at her like she broke the simulation. Like you’re not allowed to say “no” to that question, like it’s against the laws of nature. I see the jaded cashier girl force a smile and it stabs me in the chest.  

was the last message she ever sent me. my behavior was becoming so scummy it bordered on parody. i would've been giving girls a fake number in the 90s. maybe not. maybe the apps themselves make you cruel. maybe something about the way you meet and communicate with people on those screens makes you this way. makes it easier to treat people like this. to see them as tally-marks. as practice. i hope to never cross paths with a girl like me.  my current girlfriend never had a "dating app phase," she tells me. she wonders about it aloud. she wants to know what I was up to those apps. she wants to know “how easy is it really” to have sex whenever you want, as a girl, on tinder. i speak of my experiences scarcely, like a veteran of war.  

Demonstrate Value: A lot of you will get on my case for this, but my advice? Take her to a smash tournament. To demonstrate your VALUE to this woman, you must show her that you are well respected in your community. And the best way to do this is to take her to Salty Runback #47 in some smelly card shop in a seedy area on a Thursday night. If you work out at all, you will be the best looking man there. If you win the tournament, you’re basically definitely in there. You just have to let it happen at that point, bro. Even if you fail, at least you showed her that you have friends and (hopefully) that people like you. She will be very impressed by this. Then you can take her out for boba and explain that you don’t really care whether you win or lose, you’re just in it for the fun of the game. Then you ask her if she has what it takes to take even a single stock off a real competitive player such as yourself. She will be intrigued by the challenge. This is the perfect opportunity to take h...

Starbucks Girl: We’re out of regular bagels, do you want asiago or do you want Everything? Me: Give Me Everything.   I can’t be a regular at any cafe or eatery. I can’t go into a place where people know me. I’m self-conscious. Everyone is self-conscious, but Me extremely so. I suspect this makes me a very exhausting person to be around. If you haven’t yet noticed, all my writing sound like this: me me me me me me me me me me me me me me ME!!! it’s like the sound of a guy sleeping in an old cartoon. memememememe… memememememe…

I don’t know. It’s relative. It’s always relative. It depends who’s asking. I’ve got my own apartment and a few dollars to my name and a beautiful girl who loves me and lots of friends and a car and a few projects I’m working on and that all sounds good and dandy but it might not sound so cool if I prefaced it all by revealing that I am currently unemployed.   I’ve become pretty good at framing things in a way that doesn’t make me come off as a loser. That’s all that writing has done for me so far.  

He may seem harmless, but in reality he’s one of the most evil beings known to man. If you were stranded in the desert and dying of thirst, and he rode by in his Snickel-Mobile full of water, he would not pull over and give you a drink. He would just keep on driving, chug it all for himself and leave you to die. And then he would come back the next day and pour water all over your rotting steaming corpse. And your half dead body might feel a little better for a moment, but like a plant, you would only appreciate the water in a wordless, brainless, natural sort of way. What’s left of you would have a vague experience of being wet, a murky mirage, but it wouldn’t bring you back to life.  You're already dead. 

Many people don’t have a good group of friends who all meet together and look at each other and talk, smile, laugh, connect like this.   And when you don’t have that, when you have no tribe, no group, no love, you feel like an alien everywhere you go and you get anxious and so you try drinking and that seems to quell your anxiety so you drink all the time around people and that gets to be the only way you can stand to socialize and what alcoholics anonymous does is it forces you to be around people who are sober while you are sober so that you all might learn to love soberly together. And if you keep showing up, the animal part of your brain that really runs the show learns to love the tribe it now finds itself in without the supplement of alcohol or any other funny substances and so maybe you can function somewhat comfortably in the human social world.

I try to write fiction but I just can't do it. I can only write these aimless depressing journals. I can't step outside myself. So here's me: Thomas Johnston is a 24-year old man who lives alone in Seattle, Washington. He has several friends and many valuable things in his apartment and four unpaid parking tickets and alarmingly vague plans for the future. But this is the way he has always lived, with very vague plans for the future, never thinking more than 6 months in advance at any given time, and it’s mostly worked out for him so far, so he doesn’t have much motivation to spell out any serious long-term master plans.  But he’s starting to accept the cold reality that most people who make something significant of themself are planning their feats pretty far in advance. They don’t just try something and see how it will go, they decide exactly what it is they want and they make a definite plan to get it and then ruthlessly execute their plan.  This ruthless execution super...

One of the finer points of dating, besides every other aspect, is identifying the optimal seating location in a restaurant or bar. You should be making decisions like this, not asking her where she wants to sit, because probably, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t have a preference, she’s too self conscious and nervous about the fact that she’s on a date to make logical choices like this. But you are prepared and you’ve done this before, so you are. You scan the perimeter of the venue for a spot where you can view the action together. Not at the bar, with your faces to the staff and backs to the life of the place, but somewhere in the back-middle, able to watch the place and also be in it.   Sit by her side if possible. Tell her you’re weird and you like it like that. Sitting across from somebody face to face as you eat is nerve wracking. Even if you like each other’s faces, it’s too much. Sit side by side so you can touch her arm and point out funny things, narrate the show. You’ll hav...

“Keep the change” is so much more natural than any kind of tip screen percentage iPad quicktime event they put you through now. Just here’s more dollars than you asked for, in return for the thing, keep the change. Wink. Thanks. Bam. Interaction over. No digital interface. Everyone’s okay.   With cash, I will actually tip. I will not put thought into generating an exact dollar amount commensurate with the perceived quality of service you performed for me in the preceding 45 seconds. Lets just make a fair thoughtless deal for approximately what you said the thing was worth on the sign.   I like how, at Asian restaurants, the staff doesn’t come by to ask you how you’re doing or if everything is okay. they ask take the order, they bring you the food, they bring you the check. They leave you the fuck alone. They don’t walk through in the middle of a precarious discussion with your girlfriend about whether or not you should live together to ask if the food is “tasting okay? :)” ...