All my words

when i was a kid my parents often took me to this guy’s house in a rich part of rhode island. his name was Wes. all my experiences there were positive. he was a chef. or a painter. i don’t remember. he had a trampoline in the yard. i had a good time. a few years ago my parents told me that in 2010 he hung himself. yeah, that Wes. The happy one. and as my last memories of this guy fade away I worry that no one will ever remember him. This poor sensitive guy Killed Himself and I cant do anything about it. This guy who showed me the Pokemon Movie 2000 and let me play pinball on his windows computer was so lost and lonely and terribly deeply sad he hung himself. I’m sorry Wes.  

toward the end she had compared me to some piece of expensive new medical or diagnostic equipment that can discern more about you in one quick scan than you could ever know about yourself — but the equipment doesn’t care about you, you’re just a sequence of processes and codes. What the machine understands about you doesn’t actually mean anything to it. Even though it’s really good at what it does.   she said she’d never felt the gaze of someone so penetrating, discerning, and yet totally empty of care, like she was a puzzle or problem I was figuring out. She said it was thanks to me that she’d learned the difference between being penetrated and really known versus penetrated and just violated — needless to say, these thanks were sarcastic.  

i knew it would come to this. i knew that things wouldn’t just work out, they never do, i knew i would go back to scrolling linkedin for terrible jobs i don’t want so i can send out hundreds of lie-filled resumes and eventually maybe hear back from one shitty company and then trick them into giving me a job that i hate.   i could stand to be a copywriter. but that’s not a real job. that’s not a real thing that people like me are paid for. that’s the job the boss’ son gets. thats the job that somebody at the company recommends their wild and goofy and clever friend Zack for, and he begrudgingly obliges, because what he really wants to do is write movie scripts, but he needs cash, so he settles for this. and i get nothing.   i get data analysis. i get shit that will be automated in a few years from now because i don’t have enough dopamine to learn to do anything else. the only thing i’m good at is typing these depressing fucking journals. literary masturbation.  

All the of the enormous screens of this restaurant, and every other KBBQ spot in the world, are broadcasting loud yelling girl sounds, shrouded in bass, accompanied by visuals of baby-faced young adult women dancing in tight bright clothing: K Pop. There’s nothing sexual about this at all. The digitally-enhanced ambient moans of some of the most beautiful female specimen the Korean equivalent of the CIA could genetically engineer, emanating through the room all night long. Normal. A song is a mating call, nothing more. all of it. rap, church music, opera, all of it. The chief function is to manipulate the senses. Disarm. My close personal friend Doug Stanhope says he “dislikes music.” I get it.   There are many good reasons women are obsessed with singers, but the main one is this: we are animals and a song is a mating call. famous singers are famous mating callers. And you wonder why every other news story is about one of them cheating or getting divorced. ha. i kill me.  

Yeah. I will find her LinkedIn account and scroll down to her past jobs and learn where she’s from and where she went to high school and then find her Facebook or Twitter and suss out her political views and then google her name + her college to get a read on any extra-curricular groups she might’ve been involved in, so I  can weave the similarities between us into my own story when we “meet” over zoom, so she sees me as more of a friend, ultimately more a person she’d like to fast-track through the rest of the virtual recruitment/hiring process.   So I start with her Linkedin and circumstance says LOL no. Her main mission in life seems to be to hire as many LGBTQXYZIA+++ individuals as possible. I am none of those things. Most of her bullet points under work experience sum up to:   -Hired Non White Men -Learned about new ways to Hire Non White Men -Supported the global initiative to not hire White Men This is Unlucky for Me. 

Red Bull is a drug company that pays people to hand out their drug for free so that people will become addicted to their drug and buy more of them at the drug stores. They ran the numbers: it’s profitable. And there’s no law against it. So fuck it. Why not.  At Gaming Tournaments. At the park. At schools. Why not. 

theres no such thing as an “internet addiction,” mom. the internet is everything. it would be like saying you have a “life addiction.” it’s redundant. until it isn’t. until you’re losing your job, your girlfriend, your apartment, your car, everything you own, because you can’t control your use of the world wide web. until all your loved ones you keep “checking in” to “see how you’re doing” because they don’t trust you alone in that room with that damn screen.   and they’re right. because it’s true: you can’t control yourself. you can’t stop Checking.   actually, it’s just me. This is about me. I can’t stop checking. I can’t stop checking the likes and comments and bookmarks on my videos and on my writing and I can’t stop checking the time and the temperature and the group chats and my email and instagram and facebook messenger to see if i got any messages today… and all this fucking Checking makes it impossible to focus on any one thing for long enough to make something GOOD ...

I think nobody cares if you’re sad. I think they know, maybe only unconsciously, that there’s nothing they can do to help, and that everyone can only save themselves. I think everyone, once they reach a certain age, is permanently sad. And as they grow older, life becomes more and more various episodes of pointless goal chasing in an attempt to forget that you’re sad. And sometimes in the process of achieving these goals, you succeed… in forgetting to be sad… about the pointlessness of it all.  

finding a good girl — the perfect girl, was probably the main occupation of the last several years of my life. i traveled places, met people, learned so much, but if I had to point to one prime objective which never really left my mind, the answer is clear.   i started to give up, right towards the end, like in that “99% of gamblers” meme, when I realized that I would need to be with a girl who shared one of my niche interests - fighting game tournaments or stand up comedy, or our relationship would feel too superficial and run into a wall. and since both these in-person communities are so deathly scarce in the order of attractive young women, I would basically have to force myself to love a new hobby or stay on the 2-week hook-up-ghosting cycle I rode for many self-conscious, emotionally toilsome months since I landed in Seattle last year. and then, right when I needed her most, there she was. she lived about 90 minutes away, that's not too far, and she was amazingly, conveniently...

All I would do is write. I would start over, from the very beginning, unashamed, major in Creative Writing, tell people that I wanted to be a Writer, Write every day, Every night.   Fuck Philosophy, Fuck Politics, Fuck Law School, Fuck Psychology, Fuck Computers, Fuck Everything that isn’t Writing Words on Paper.   I spent 4 years failing to decide what to “do with my life.” I had a different story for every person I knew. It was always incoherent but it didn’t matter because they were naturally focused on themselves. I didn’t start writing for fun until my final semester, deep into Quarantine, when I realized Oh, Shit, this is what I should’ve been doing the whole time.   And before you say: Well hey, it’s never too late, why don’t you do that right now? I would interrupt you and say that is exactly what I am doing right now. But it is, in fact, too late.   It’s too late to go back. I find myself fantasizing about showing up to college as a 24 year old man and owni...

i wish i was the type of guy to be like “you look better with no makeup baby” but i’m not, because that’s not true. girls look better with a little bit of makeup on.   i think it must be devastating for them, mentally. once you start, that’s your new standard. once you’ve become accustomed to presenting that version of you to the world, you can’t go back. you can’t downgrade. no one can.   personally, the only way i’ve ever been able to really healthily successfully painlessly downgrade my own physical appearance is by no longer feeling the need to get spray tans. I had a phase, when i had more money than girlfriends, when i would go to a local spray tanning place near my house because i was confident i looked much better tan than I do in my natural shade of ghostly pale. i still think that, kind of, but now i have a girlfriend who loves pale old me and i don’t feel the need to be tan all the time in other peoples’ presence. sometimes i see other pale people and think they’re ...

Hey person I haven’t seen or heard from or interacted with in a while, how are you.   Not actually how are you, I can't handle virtual conversation, I just want my face to pop up on your phone screen reminding you that I exist and that I think about you and I like you and I’m glad that I knew you whenever I did and we don’t talk any more not because I hate you but because the winds of change took me somewhere else where you happened to not be and THAT’S OKAY!  

i miss when i didn’t care. i miss when i didnt know what went with what and i just put on a pair of jeans and a wrinkled t shirt and some sneakers and walked out the door and didn’t think about it at all. didn’t think about the way people looked at me, didn’t compare myself to them, wasn’t so painfully aware of what expensive clothes look like and who wears them and why. i miss when i was 19 and told my friend "fashion is just a scam to trick poor people into giving their money away" and really meant it. really didn't see any further than that. 

I lost so much writing in September 2021.   I started doing this in January 2021, when COVID was starting to feel like a joke and I could feel the rest of my life slipping away. I started typing to myself in my room in Los Angeles every night for no reason at all.   One day, 6 months later, in one of my my most epic personal blunders, all of my writing was vaporized instantly. I use the Notes App to write everything. And for some reason, when I unchecked a box in System Preferences which said “Sync to all devices,” every single note saved on my laptop and nowhere else was suddenly and permanently gone. I paid no mind at first. Surely, it can’t be this easy to delete so many notes. Surely Apple has some kind of protection in place for someone like me who has made a home for themselves on the Notes app. Surely there is some kind of guard rail for dopes like me with no back up. There was no such guard rail.   I was distraught. I wrote a note about it. I pathetically messaged...

Adderall, Modafnil, Vyvanse, I’ve used them all at different points.   Modafinil is the safest. So it feels the least good. The least my interior jigsaw’s missing piece — the least making sustained focused effort possible and sometimes even pleasant. The Modafinil use started in college. I had sleep issues. More accurately, wake issues, since high school, but in HS I only needed half my brain anyway. In my senior year of high school I rigged my schedule so that I was a “Teacher’s Assistant” for 1st and 2nd periods (8AM and 9:30AM) — abusing the goodwill of teachers who liked me, knowing they wouldn’t care if I stopped coming.   I had more important things to take care of,   they assumed, I assumed they would assume, so they weren’t really surprised or upset when about halfway through the first quarter I stopped showing up for the morning classes.   I was, uh, doing College Stuff. I was being the Vice President of the Senior Class. Finishing an application for a Schol...

Maybe you fucked those girls only for others to see that you did, or that you could, and there was never really any passion or love in it at all.   Maybe they were just accessories to your endless presentation of You. That guy Chris will never forgive me. I keep doing bad things and then looking back on them and thinking: That’s gotta be the worst thing I’ve ever done. And then I do it some more. Keep hurting people — excessively, thoroughly, over and over again.   Not people close to me. People who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

“One time when I was on the school bus this kid was eating copious amounts of paper. Like entire sheets. I was concerned. I went up and told the bus driver.   She said “Tattletales get nowhere in life” and let him keep eating.”

One of the less enjoyable things about raving is coming back from the rave — rejoining sober society back on earth, and still in the habit of looking strangers in the eyes with childlike curiosity and love and feeling them unable to reciprocate.   You feel this little jaded rejection several times until you learn that it isn’t the optimal strategy for interacting with strangers and so you inevitably devolve back into another one of Them.  

I live in a studio apartment (a 300 Square Foot living room).  The foot of my bed is 5 feet from the door.   Last night I forgot to lock the door before sleep. GF sleeping next to me. So at about 3 AM, all at once, a drunk girl swings open the door to my apartment, takes a big confident step in, her friend yells: “NO!! WRONG DOOR!” and I automatically spring up awake into a seated upright position screaming “AAAAAH” as a kind of animal self defense, to scare off the intruders.   Blood flooded with adrenaline. I was instantly compelled to rise up to defend against whatever just opened my door.   And then my brain caught up to the situation, and the drunk girls said “Oh my god oh my god, sorrryyyy” and I just said “Fuck” and rubbed my face and locked the door and consoled gf and went back to sleep.  She experienced it as a dream. 

I smell the girl making the “Bubble waffles” today. They always make them here until 9pm and then they stop selling them.   I’m here at 9:02 PM wanting something sweet and breaded to put into my mouth and I smell such a thing behind the counter in the waffle iron and I’m like are the bubble waffles still available and she’s like No, we only sell them until 9pm.   Now it’s 9:03 PM and I’m looking at the waffles trying to imply hmm it seems like you’re going to sell them to me or they’re going to waste and she looks back at me, confused, like no one’s ever been so bold as to ask for waffles after 9pm before, like no one’s ever suggested maybe we could make a deal where you put those freshly cooked waffles sitting right there 10 inches from your body onto a plate and take my money and hand them to me so I can eat them, break the rules a little bit, and she looks back at me like i’m a retarded criminal, her face morphing from confused to pissed off, and restates: we only sell them...

That feeling when you see someone from a long time ago, from a previous part of your life, in a different part of the world, spontaneously, unplanned, it’s amazing. We went to school together in LA and now I’m randomly seeing you at a coffee shop 3 minutes from my apartment in Seattle. Wow! It’s reassuring — what a small world, maybe I really am a part of something bigger than myself, maybe this is all real after all, no simulation. All these thoughts compounded at once compel me to hug a guy who might as well have been a total stranger back when we “knew” each other, when we lived on the same floor for one semester of college.   This brief moment of joy is then eclipsed by the subsequent realization that we’re going to have to make small talk — I’m going to have to provide a neat summary of the past 3 years of my life until now and avoid mentioning my present joblessness in a way that doesn’t sound like conscious avoidance. Or I could just lie.   I just lie. The crushing sham...

theres no such thing as an “internet addiction,” mom. the internet is everything. it would be like saying you have a “life addiction.” it’s redundant. until it isn’t. until you’re losing your job, your girlfriend, your apartment, your car, everything you own, because you can’t control your use of the world wide web. until all your loved ones you keep “checking in” to “see how you’re doing” because they don’t trust you on your own in that room with that damn screen.   and they’re right. because it’s true: you can’t control yourself. you can’t stop Checking.   actually, it’s just me. This is about me. I can’t stop checking. I can’t stop checking the likes and comments and bookmarks on my videos and on my writing and I can’t stop checking the time and the temperature and the group chats and my email and instagram and facebook messenger to see if i got any messages today… and all this fucking Checking makes it impossible to focus on any one thing for long enough to make something...

The book I’m listening to is so optimistic about America. So romantic. So proud. And I’m thinking why don’t people talk this any more. And it’s because this book was written when America was in its 20s. When it was the top dog. New on the scene. Full of potential. Getting pussy. Etc. Now America is in its 50s. Shit is breaking down. We’re the weird guy at the party with clout that nobody can track the real source of. We’re fat, we’re sick, we can’t   love like we used to. We’re divorced and our kids hate us. The end is near, we’re circling the drain.  

I’m listening to the post-suicide biography of my beloved David F. Wallace and realizing that pretty much everything good he ever wrote was ripped directly from his own life.   And that’s probably what all of good fiction is. Reality repurposed. Your life, condensed to the precious moments when you really felt something.  

I worked in customer service for exactly one summer. Behind the cash register, I was totally dysfunctional. My coworkers saw me and treated me like I was retarded. Functionally I was. I forgot everything. I lived in constant fear of interaction and responsibility.   I started to think that maybe I really was stupid. Whenever I was around other people in my youth, for example, in school, working on dreaded “group project,” I couldn’t retain anything anyone would tell me. I was not an effective member of any team. A non-contributor. People would look at me in the face and say things and they would bounce right off my forehead. More likely off the side of my head, because I wouldn’t look at them in the eyes. Not for a long time.   It didn’t make sense. I was at this job, the valedictorian of my high school, surrounded by mediocre students and drop outs who all thought me to be fucking retarded, with greater sureness the more time we spent together. It made me sad.   It final...

I hear friends discussing “Skin Care” and endorsing Cetaphil Gentle Good Marketing Chemical Put On Your Face Product, and I so desperately want to chime in on behalf of the Put Nothing On Your Face But Water And Let God Heal You If You Deserve It technique I’ve employed for the past several years since my acne faded but I abstain. Because nobody ever agrees with me. And I sound like a stuck up idiot simpleton who just got lucky with genetics. So instead I say nothing.   But that’s really what I do. Whenever i get pimples now in my adult life, I can trace their lineage. Face sucking. Sweating on a blanket. I ate an entire pint of ice cream. Or alcohol. Or both. It’s not terrible and frequent and horrifically ugly like it used to be when I was a late teen and it was ruining my life — It’s barely a factor now. Thankfully. And I’m going to keep using nothing but water on my face for the rest of my entire life.  

Writing makes you become your own person. Writing will expose the gaps in your understanding of the world. Writing will illuminate the cliches lodged into your mind which resurface in times of uncertainty and make you sound like everyone else. Writing makes you sound like yourself. Writing makes you pay closer attention to people and things. Because if not then what will you have to write about.  

When I was younger people thought I was stupid. I wasn’t stupid, I was just anxious, which makes you stupid. When you’re taking a test, in school, or listening to a lecture, it’s not about you. Nobody is taking time out of their day and focusing just on You. You might as well not even be there. You can dissociate. That is where I was “Smart.” Where I could dissociate.   Any situation that involved… Me … like my face, and my voice, and my active participation, cut my mental faculties down to about half. I could not detach. Everything was too personal. Any interaction with any person in any context was too personal. Too much. And then I went to college. And then I discovered drugs: Weed. Alcohol. Psychedelics. Sex. And then I started looking people in the eyes. Slowly, painfully, it became easier to Dissociate and Think in the presence of others. I deliberately, pathetically, forced my way back into being a socially functioning human being.  

you identify the girl who you are so afraid to lose, who you cannot live without, who makes you so nervous you could throw up, and then pretend, for days, weeks, months, that none of those things are true.   you pretend to be a guy with nothing to lose, no one he cannot live without, no reason to be nervous — he’s got options. and this gets increasingly difficult to fake as you cut off all your other ‘options’ because you are in reality so dead set on having this one girl.  

He started to walk outside just to feel like he had done something that day.   Looking at people, smiling, it was the deepest form of intimacy he could achieve.   He had given up on “Striking Up a Conversation” long ago. He couldn’t help but think to the end of them before they started, and so they always felt somehow pointless and inevitably fell flat.

In public life, some people have The Voice. Like the TV show, but IRL. The Voice that stands out when there are many voices in the room. The Voice that pierces through. The Voice that is so sure that what they are saying is worth your severely fractured attention and time. The Voice has no gender. It is has no race, It is everywhere. People think they’re charismatic but really they’re just loud. They are an impediment to pure, private, productive thought. You’re thinking your cherished thoughts and AHAHAHAHA there they are like a siren. AHAHAHAHAHA DUDE THAT’S HILARIOUS WHY DID THEY… I CAN’T BELIEVE IT HAHAHAHAH NO BECAUSE LIKE WOW.  Why did God give you The Voice and not me. I would use it to start a cult.