All my words

It’s impossible to reach the people who manage my apartment complex. After about a month of texting calling emailing google review bitching screaming into the open air I got into contact with one of the leasing company managers. Please let me tour another place. I like the neighborhood but the loud terrible bitches across the hall and their dogs keep me up every night screaming at each other because they’re poor. I get no sun light in my apartment. Please let me see something else, I beg of you.   I finally meet with one of these people. Dark rainy Wednesday morning. Classic Seattle. She’s maybe younger than me. Overweight. Nose ring. Pink hair. What the fuck. You’re in charge here? Hundreds of tenants. They’re all waiting on a reply from this creature. It all makes sense now.   She takes me up to a 200 square foot closet with a view of several dumpsters. In three seconds: Oh I was hoping to look at the bigger ones. I saw there was one available now on the site. The one I ment...

i’ve written this a thousand times — i don’t understand how people can sit across from each other at a table and look into each others’ eyes and talk. i don’t understand how it doesn’t just become an insane face scanning self conscious nightmare. i don’t understand how it’s not too intimate.   if i’m eating with someone, we’re sitting diagonal or side by side. it’s not because i don’t like you, it’s because i’m a freak. i can’t have a human’s face be the default thing i see when i look up from my food. there’s this interview quality that’s so easy to recognize in first dates but that’s how i feel sitting across from anyone ever. everything is a first date for a sensitive guy like me.  

I’m like Dad you must know some people back on the East Coast. He’s like I know a lot of people. If I went back they’d have to schedule to see me. Like I was the Pope. But all my friends are dead, Tom. Acquaintances, sure, but all my friends are dead.   I couldn’t stop laughing. Not at him. At the truth of it. It was a joker laugh. I never considered that he had people he really loved: brothers, drinking buddies, classmates. Apparently all of them dead.

I realized lately my GF has a very lovely voice. She sounds like a girl. She sounds like she would completely change the vibe of an anonymous online FPS lobby, back in that golden era when those games would just match random people up together for a game of COD and let them speak freely in a voice call so you can hear some 12 year old kid say the word Faggot 40 times from anywhere on Earth.  The world that I was unfortunately not at all involved in, I only played Nintendo games, but which I’m sure was filled with many, many Funny Moments.  

I wore thick bangs over my forehead all my life. I wanted to decrease the amount of my face people could see. I wanted to hide. Wanted to not grow up. Last year I started pulling it back like this under my headphones and going out and not giving a fuck about people seeing my full face. Symbolic of some inner change. Sometimes I’ll see my face with the slicked hair tucked under the headphones in a video and think: hey, that guy’s pretty good looking. good for him. his hair’s back and he has a normal hairline, just like a normal adult human male.

I’ve been fighting off this cringe feeling that stand-up comedy is the best thing you can do with your life. Shane Gillis, specifically, has renewed my hope in the genre. There are comedians who are their acts, characters in their own stories, who write in the first person — Mulaney, Louis, Gillis.   Then there are pure joke-tellers. Who may as well not even be people, mere vehicles for Material. Normand, Hedburg, Carlin.   The joke-tellers are great but they’re not me. I am stuck in first-person. But going up on stage and saying something that you wrote in first person, about yourself, to a bunch of people who don’t give a fuck, frankly why should they, is just about the most painful hopeless thing you can do with your Friday night.   But everyone who knows you wants you to keep doing it. Everyone who knows you, most of all yourself, knows you could be really good at it if you approached it with half the vigor you do Super Smash Bros Ultimate.  So what are you wait...

7:30 am. turned a corner too confidently. way ahead of all the speed limit following sheeple normies. noise canceling headphones equipped. police guy on motorbike just sitting in the middle of road in a turning lane waiting for somebody to come around the corner too fast. sitting in the perfect spot to catch me before i see him and react. good job man. you pulled someone over in the proximity of no one else. you’re not protecting anyone. you’re a glorified tax collector. i accept that he’s going to pull me over and so instead of stopping on the side of the road and making a show of myself I pull into a near by parking lot. i’m so considerate. it just now occurs to me that i didn’t drink any coffee this morning. i just got up and did life.  anyways he’s pretty nice. “you were going 60 in a 35” i try my best to act surprised but there’s no point. i’m just going to take it. give him my insurance documents. losing writing time to this. remember high school track coach who always used t...

Sometimes I tell my parents about my life and I mention that I do a lot of writing. They’re like oh that’s great. They’ve asked what I write about and I give them a generic nothing answer. It’s sad. I haven’t settled on a systematic way to share my writing besides screen-shotting fun snippets and posting them on a private twitter account. They don’t know what Twitter is. And most of the things I’ve posted there would horrify them anyways. They never ask to see what I’ve written, but I’m sure they’d be interested.  

I now have 30 minutes to be outside of that little office. I could’ve sworn I heard “an hour for lunch” when I was interviewing. I want to say that it doesn’t matter, but it does. 30 minutes isn’t enough time to do anything but rush to some place and type something shitty and then rush right back.   Molly celebrates 6 years today. I wish I could feel happy for her. She looks like the receptionist slug from Monsters Inc. She’s a good worker. She didn’t think she’d be here for so long, but here she sits. for 8 hours a day. Every single day. Helping to make Derek wealthy.   Derek isn’t so easily solved. I want to liken him to Mr. Krabs, but I know there must be more. But maybe not. Maybe everything is a habit. And if all you ever think about and all you ever do is work, then that’s all you are. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe he doesn’t have to go climbing on the weekends or have a side hobby or a real connection with his wife or kids. If he even has kids. I don’t know.   Julie...

CEO-Boss Man Derek, Middle Aged (late 40s) Chinese man with a real clear interest in Making Money and seemingly nothing else pulls me into his office for a 1 on 1 meeting, 1 week into the start of my employment at his company to ask me about my “Passions, Goals, Interests.” For the first time ever in my adult life, I am able to confidently articulate the plain honest truth about myself to my employer.   Me:   “I like writing. See this notebook? [ I flip through it like it’s animated] It’s completely full. Every day. All the time. Writing. I want to do all the writing I can here and get as good as I can. But I know there’s more to marketing than writing, there’s more to this business than marketing. Which takes me to my next goal: I want to own my own business. I ran a pretty substantial event with income and expenses and staff a few months ago and at one point I realized I was just running my own business. And it felt more exciting, more real than any ‘job’ i’ve ever had or a...

i was told i appear confident. this is my greatest trick. in fact i am an encyclopedia of insecurities.   intelligence, money, car, apartment, height, job, family, face, race, clothes, friends, sex, taste, hobbies, my ability to win games of super smash bros ultimate for the nintendo switch, it all haunts me on a daily basis. if anybody knew me like i know myself, they could blow me down like a house of cards

Wear huge warm grey girly overcoat. Look fashionable. Feel retarded when you walk by people wearing T shirt and Jeans. The snow can’t come soon enough.   Get to Redmond. Decide I want different Starbucks today. One I go to doesn’t have comfy chairs. Drive to other close different Starbucks. No parking. I attempt a tight parallel street park and scrape the rear left bumper of a shining grey Camry. Fuck. I get out and examine it. There’s a small green imprint where I cut in. Nobody saw me do it. Odds are they come back and don’t notice, I don’t inspect my car every time I get in, but with my green piece of shit parked directly behind him it won’t be hard to deduce what happened. If he has any kind of camera I’m fucked. They find my license and make me pay $40,000 or whatever it costs to leave a small imprint on somebody’s shiny new car. Sigh. I get in and shimmy my way out of that spot and drive away.   I still need coffee. I won’t give up. I drive around a bit until I see a pro...

My dad just drank himself to death and my mom just said “don’t be like ya fatha.” What am I supposed to do with that?   Now that I think about it, they actually did tell me how to be, quite often, but their direction was so obvious and cliche that it never really guided my behavior. Like they never had any divergent conviction of their own, they just aimed to produce a conventionally “successful” and “happy” and “good” person, according to their vague understanding of those words. And now here I am, alone in my apartment I share with myself, age 24, complaining about it all.  

The real reason I moved to Washington was to wear beautiful warm winter coats over slim fitting dress shirts. Tucked in. To slacks. Which attach at the heel to a pair of brown leather boots. The real reason I moved to Washington was to drive on the freeway at 7 AM wearing all this feeling like a real human being. Like a Hallmark Christmas movie. Every single day.  

my parents would ask if i wanted to smoke weed with them, once they learned I was doing it anyway. especially my dad. i always said no, didn’t question it. i know why now.   i would smoke weed to make myself more entertaining. more "fun." i would smoke weed to give myself enough dopamine to enjoy the lazy uninspired shit people regularly say. to be able to laugh at it. to feel that precious human “connection” everybody’s always talking about. it's hard to settle for reality when you've got screens. the algorithms are showing you the best of humanity all the time, the wittiest, wisest folks and their best ideas, curated perfectly to satisfy just and only YOU. how can real life humans compete with the perfect glowing entertainment rectangle?  i would smoke weed to make people like me and make me like people. i got high to tolerate my girlfriend. and so she would tolerate me. one time i was interacting with a girlfriend purely sober and she was like you seem a little off...

Recently  I was driving and commanded Siri to play “All Eyes On Me” and it gave me the Tupac song instead of the Bo Burnham version. Hey Siri, you know everything about me. Which song do you think I, an early 20s white man from Seattle, am searching for right now?   Spotify’s recommendation algorithm should be sophisticated enough to take racial and other demographic biases into account when selecting your song. Like Hinge. Tupac:   I got a caravan of neighbors, every time we ride Hittin' motherfuckers up when we pass by Until I die, live the life of a boss player 'Cause even when I'm high, fuck with me and get crossed later And here’s the song I was looking for:   Are you feeling nervous?   Are you having fun?   It’s almost over, it’s just begun Don’t overthink this, look in my eye Don’t be scared, don’t be shy Come on in, the water’s fine

On February 14th I told my girlfriend I was writing a book. Or at least that I was about to. Now it’s September and I haven’t done that. Not in any cohesive way. There are fragments in my notes and in my head but I can’t fight the feeling that nobody wants to hear about a barely-fictionalized version of myself teaching barely-fictionalized versions of my friends how to manipulate barely-fictionalized girls. Because that’s mostly what the book would be.   Spy Guy is a Sensitive Young Man who runs an anonymous remote small business in which he uses google-glass-type technology to lead hopeless bachelors through IRL dates. The book is laced with super awesome hilarious commentary and barely-fictionalized anecdotes which explain how spy guy became so knowledgeable in this discipline.  He has very few friends. Either he’s keeping this work from his girlfriend or he doesn’t have one. I never decided.  H e "works" from home, spending more and more company time doing Spy Guy stuf...

Warning: Unsolicited Dating Advice From Early 20s Male if you’re male, and you’re single, and you’ve got no plans for the weekend, maybe go to a thrift store. any thrift store. preferably in a city. capitol hill. u district. whatever. the girls shopping there are probably are single, or else they’d be with their boyfriend on saturday, and they’re also probably bored/aimless, or they wouldn’t be at a thrift store, and they’re also probably open minded and not high maintenance and also not concerned with “looking poor,” or else they wouldn’t be at a thrift store. and they’re likely not satisfied with how they look (who is), so they need more clothes, which is why they’re at a thrift store. some of them are practically begging to accidentally bump in to you, if you’re cute. so obviously, be attractive first, but if you are, and you see no natural way to “meet girls,” take whatever puts you in a social mood and go to some thrift stores on a weekend and just browse.   but what do i say ...

my dad: you cant show up that late, who are you OJ?   me: i have Clear, so I get through faster my dad (mishearing): you have cleats? you wear cleats to the airport? thats how you get through so fast?  

This is my job application strategy: log on to Linkedin.com (you’d think there would be a better website for this by now but there’s not) and search “Marketing” and “Writing” Jobs based in Seattle posted in the last 24 hours. Easy Apply preferred. Apply to every decent company whose application looks like it will take me less than 5 minutes. Once I’ve cleared those, expand the search to 1 week. There are thousands. If I’ve cleared those, I stop and do something else.   I did this almost every day for about a month. All of August. Many companies got back to me. I ignored most of them after looking a little more closely at the listing or the nature of their business, knowing I wouldn’t be able to fake enthusiasm there for all the money in the world.   None of the big tech companies (TikTok, Microsoft, Amazon) I applied to, with referrals, got back to me. Not a single follow-up. These companies, in my head, inoculate you into a kind of college-part-2 experience, plus infinite mo...

me: hey you see that dollar on the ground?   him: yeah. me: should i pick it up? him: its fair game.   me: i don’t know, if its over a 20 ill take it.   him: i’m just gonna go for it he picks it up. its a $100 bill us: holy shit i look around, some security guards saw us pick it up but no one else me: if we ask people if they dropped a hundred dollar bill, they’re just gonna say yes.   him: yeah. [he pockets it.] me, a couple pained minutes later: can i…. have it?   him: why?   me: i want it. i think i need it more than you [context: i’m unemployed].   him: you’re right. for being a good friend.   he hands it to me. me: thank you so much 20 minutes later I venmo him $50 (we’re separately on the way home) he likes my venmo payment.   The End.