All my words

I’ve been writing a lot of embarrassing stuff, and never reading it, never showing it to anyone, just writing it, and moving on.   I don’t know if any of it’s good. I don’t know if any of it means any thing. I wish it was all about the same thing, under the same title, born of the same goal, but it’s not. The only common thread is that it’s all about me. I wish that I could be the type of writer who explores things other than himself. I wish that I could really care about botany, or cuisine, or medicine, or anything really, other than myself.  

loving him is like being a devoted fan of a bad tv show. one you’re not yet sophisticated enough to resist. but when you’re older and soberly taking stock of the shows you spent your precious youth with, you won’t think of this one fondly, he thinks of himself. cynical, giving nothing — only able to take or destroy.  

Los Angeles, 2016. It was just so hot. Early August. 85 to 90. Dry heat. Every single day.   One of my first distinct memories is skipping out on the “Welcome Back Parade” to lay in sweaty heat with a girl named Gina, non-sexually, on my twin-sized dorm bed. We listened to “Closer” by the Chainsmokers, hating that terrible song together. It might have been the first time I ever physically cuddled with a female girl. It felt really good. Really really really good. That was all I wanted to do from then on.   I lost her trust in less than two months. One day she asked me where I was going and instead of telling her that I was going to a Smash Bros Tournament I said that I was doing something else. Partially because I was insecure about the fact that I went to Smash Bros Tournaments and also because I didn’t want her to think I was blowing her off for a childrens’ party game. But both of those things were true.  

On Fri/Sat nights at USC, student groups would list their address on some obscure app which got replaced every year and charge people $5-$10 entry to their dirty backyards, featuring a couple pop up tables and a loud speaker and several plastic bottles of vodka and sprite and cheap boxed Franzia and solo cups and everything was fair game from about 10 to 2.   the good parties were the ones where you weren’t alone. nobody really danced at these things. it was more a lets-get-really-drunk-and-talk-and-meet-people-and-maybe-if-you’re-hot-enough-and-i’m-drunk-enough-we-can-make out-athon.   as a freshman, i lived on a floor of open doors in a dorm full of academically elite heavy drinkers. Every Friday afternoon, the question loomed in the 40 Person Group Chat: whats the move tn. where are we going. whats the move. any moves. etc.   there was always a move. every night had its casualties. dead at the pregame. throwing up in the bathroom all night. kids were carried home just-...

I’m worried that I’ll turn into the stereotypical exhausted young adult worker who completely disappears from their life because they’re too strung out by their Job that they Hate.   They hate how they spend every day but it tires them so they spend every evening on Netflix, sleep through the weekend, neglect their health, no time to pursue their dreams, and their relationship falls apart and they don’t make art and their parents die in the background and they lose everything they used to love and they lose themselves and they suddenly blink and they’re 30 and they can’t believe they wasted the past 6 years at that stupid fucking company in that stupid little cubicle.   Has this ever happened to you?

i see people with thousands, billions of hearts beside their name, their posts directly above and below my own steaming piece of shit post with no hearts on it and think to myself: everyone hates me now. whats even the point. i shall never post again.

It always hurts me to be praised or appreciated. Especially over text. When I receive kind words from someone in any context, any medium where the point of the words are to flatter me, appreciate me, or anything like that, I just Can Not read it. It’s always too much. I can’t be like “aww, that’s so sweet! thanks!” and go about my day. I can’t even take people thinking positively of me. I can’t take it when my parents say they love me or when my girlfriend tries to express how she feels. I don’t want to hear it and I don’t know why.   Even when everything was going well, even in the best moments of my life, enjoying the spoils of years of passive effort, I would not be able to take ‘Congratulations’ comfortably.  

i know so many people with so much love to give and no one to give it to so much spare love out there and most of it goes to taylor swift or those korean boys hoarding it all through billions of glowing screens

It’s live theatre, except you get paid to watch, and the story they tell you is real, all true, and YOU are directly involved in the characters’ fate, AND they feed you grocery store sandwiches for free! It’s a great way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. Being unemployed is the best.  

in the future you’ll be able to create a promoted tweet by a generic girl account that says “guys with Camrys got the best dick fr 😭 ” and use advanced ad targeting to make it appear on your date’s timeline right before you meet. she’ll be with you in the camry and she won’t be able to stop thinking about it. she might even come out and say: “you know, i saw a tweet earlier that said guys with camrys got the best dick  😂 ” to which you respond: “wow thats crazy”

girls don’t enunciate their words any more. they all speak like kardashians. they’ve all got this california whine-drawl. any woman from the american past would make a killing doing “asmr” today. because every girl who was raised in the last 20 years just sounds fucking awful. like a mockery of the female voice. except my girlfriend. she sounds like a girl. she’s polite and measured and speaks slowly. rare in this day and age.

I’m using ChatGPT to write cover letters. It feels like cheating. It is cheating. I realized, sadly, that I can use this thing to produce scripts for videos. I can feed this program my entries, the greatest hits, make it write 20 in my style, suitable for narration, with a hook, and a climax, and that little zhuzh that crawls in your head and makes you want to re-listen, that thing I don’t even have a word for but chatGPT knows exactly what I mean so it delivers me verbal gold, instantly, every single time.   It hurts. I was going through my old school papers upon a recent visit home and decided I was always a decent writer. Just nobody ever told me. Or I was too dense to hear it. Too skeptical of compliments, jaded by years of my loving supportive parents telling me how proud of me they were as I slowly grew to hate myself. As I grew taller and my spine bent forwards into a big question mark and I stopped having anything to say.  

The profile pic is my fake ID from when I was 17. I was still going as "5'11" back then. Some guy in my Freshman year dorm took all our info and for a very low price of $65 got us all decently legit-looking fake IDs to start college on the right foot. I chose Rhode Island. That’s where I was born.   Looking at this thing now I can’t believe it ever worked. People don’t believe I’m 21 now . I’m almost 25. Every person who saw this ID and sold me alcohol definitely just didn’t want to deal with the bullshit that day. They had a rough day. Their wife was being a bitch. Why would I rain on this kid’s parade. Let someone else do it.   Someone else eventually did do it. When you get a fake ID, you get two copies. So when your first one inevitably gets taken, you’ve got a backup. For some reason I carried both of them on me at all times. My first ID was taken in the summer of 2017 outside a club in Hawaii. The other copy was taken about 2 minutes later after I whipped it out to ...

I made my parents happy today, I made everyone very happy today, and I feel nothing. I never feel anything. I only feel something when someone rejects me. When someone leaves me. When someone puts their money where their mouth is and finally lets me go.   My parents know nothing of my life. That’s what it’s like to be an adult. For your parents to know NOTHING about you and still love you because you’re pretty much all they have left. All their businesses have died and their house was reclaimed by the bank and their relatives only love money so you’re really all they have left and you’re painfully aware of this and that’s what it’s like to be an adult.

I see people posting pictures with their girlfriends on digital hell scape Instagram and feel compelled not to press the heart button on their posts. I mentally simulate posting a picture with my own girlfriend to assess its “like” -ability. The thoughts I waste my life thinking. I decide that there’s no point in contributing to what amounts to another pointless exercise in herd mentality — ahem — “social media trend.”   And then, literally in the 11th hour, like at 11:06 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday August 1st, the night before we would fly to Hawaii where I will entertain her and my parents for 5 days, she reaches out over text to investigate.   She doesn’t exactly come out and say: I want you to post a picture of me on your social media account today, but that’s what her lighthearted self-deprecating text message implies. I know that if I pressed her about it, she would contend that no, I don’t actually care, I was just, like, joking, trust me, it’s fine.   But I know he...

We are an ad agency. we provide creative and strategic solutions for your toughest marketing problems. problems such as: how do we make more money? how do we make our margins just a little fatter, so the small group of people who enjoy the fruit of this labor can send their stupid kids to better schools or maybe buy a third house? these are crude stereotypes yes but they're also real. who exactly are these people? whose dream is it to be the founder of a mens underwear brand? what kind of psychopath enjoys business for the pure sake of it? how empty can you be? who is honestly endlessly passionate about the systematic transfer of wealth from some men to others? whose great adventure is that?   a blonde infant stares at me grinning. maybe there is more to life. maybe these people are just playing the game they have to play to get whatever it is they think they want. maybe they’ve got a good thing going and they can't let it go.   the worst part about working at an ad agency is ...

5 minutes till we land in Hawaii. All around me white people yell and cheer emphatically, literally bouncing in excitement, so totally pumped to be touching down in my own personal hell. The place that made me the way that I am. Paradise. Hitting a hard bout of turbulence and hearing the young mother in front of me go Whee ! with her kid and imagining, hoping actually, that a freak gust of wind sends the cabin into a barrel roll, displacing entire rows of loud happy families, tossing us around like a big meaty human salad. Bodies fly everywhere. Bones are broken. Skulls impacted. Whee!

i was at a restaurant with my gf in college and we saw a man in his 40s eating out alone. she said she liked that aesthetic: some guy eating at a restaurant alone. maybe he’s celebrating something. maybe he always does this. maybe it’s sad. who knows.   now i’m the guy who eats at restaurants alone. i don’t like spending time cooking. spending time at grocery stores. spending time on food in general.   some people like spending time alone with themselves. some people are not afraid of looking lonely or sad. some people need to leave their house to write anything true. some people are still getting used to having disposable income and complete control over their own lives. so they waltz into a busy chinese restaurant alone after work and say “table for 1?” and get a little disappointed when they can’t have a booth.