Tee-hee, dear diary:

Hey, just kidding! I wouldn’t do that . . . I don’t think! Anyway, yeah. Man, I’ve been having a hell of a time getting in the mood (to write) here recently. I prepared some green tea, a gala apple and a halved cinnamon raisin bagel slathered (read: dripping) with delicious, all-natural peanut butter as a sort of aphrodisiac — a lubricant, if I may — to writing this muddled garbage.

As the bagel popped up out of the toaster, I sort-of made a promise to myself that I would, at the very least, attempt to sound like a normal person, if only for tonight, and if only for the fact that breaking that promise (to myself) meant forfeiting the digestion of a cinnamon raisin bagel oozing with all-natural peanut butter (which I had to stir myself (because it’s only water, just enough salt and peanuts (all it should be, really))). Seriously: I said, Ryan, if you don’t type up something that a not-crazy person could call “halfway decent to read” and not a “bumblefuck catastrophe”, that bagel is going straight in the trash can.

And so here we are, friends and foes.

But, see: the midnight snack I’d prepared just wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t enough, I tell you. So, I sought out excellent music. I won’t say what it is, of course, because then it’ll turn out that everyone is driving around listening to this here excellent music, and I’ll feel like a total jerk, futzing around in a ball-pit for ninety-year-old men. I’m not a big futzer, guys.

I can’t have that, you see.

So, it’s working. This stuff is really good. ______ _____ is a really, really good “band”. I hesitate to take “band” out of quotation marks, because, you know. You know how it goes.

I feel like I’m alive inside of a Donkey Kong Country sequel. It’s terrific. This is great writing-at-midnight music.

[Note: Play this album, ____ _____, whenever writing anything at midnight [Okay, noted.]]

The reason I’ve been having a hard time writing is simply this thing here: roughly eight-percent of what is actually floating around the surface of my mind ends up on this website, this proof that I exist, and have existed, and will continue to exist so long as I type words and place it here. My keystrokes just aren’t fast enough for what I actually have to say, you see. And I type quite fast, I might add! Plato said — what? — that the realm of ideas is the best world, yeah? And that reality is a replication of internalized, infinite ideas, and that art is a replica of a replica?

See, this — this right here — is all a bunch of smoldering ash. This is dust compared to what goes on up here.

For instance: I’m writing up this enormous pile of rubble about going to another country, and being in that country, and being with bros in that country — but, it’s just not clicking. I’ll post it, anyway, so that you can scroll through it very fast with your mousewheel, and pretend you read it, and pretend you ever read anything. You may then shrug, suck in roughly ten seconds of stagnant air, and burp very loudly and hope your roommate doesn’t hear it. Maybe you live alone, I don’t know. I wish I lived alone, sometimes. A lot of the time, really. It’s all I’ve ever wanted in life: to live alone. What a thing that’d be. Anyway, jerk, I’m trying to say something here.

Yes: I know what happened in that country I went to, all right? I saw it, tasted it, slept soundly in it — hung out with some dude’s mom in it.

Hugged Dan Lama in it.

Several times, in fact (there is photographic evidence of this on the internet, if you’re curious (you’re probably not curious at all)).

(This doesn’t sound even remotely coherent, does it? Even less so, with me jumping out of my psychobabble to tell you that you must know that I know what you don’t.)

So, I mean, I know what happened, you don’t care what happened, and I’m the one writing it! For whom, damn it?! Me, I guess!

See, I’ve never kept a personal journal for more than a few months, because, really, who am I kidding? I’m writing for myself both on this here website-thing, and in all of those countless journals I’ve never seen to completion (see: my own death), but the difference is that, if you so felt like it, you could read what it is I’m writing. With the whole paper journal thing, I mean, you’d have to break into my house to read it! That’s a whole hell of a lot of effort just to be bored for two hours! Writing to yourself, for yourself in a journal you keep in your bedside table — talk about a disingenuous load of stinking garbage. I’m in the mood to be real, however horrifying and stupid and sad and unreadable though it may be sometimes (all of the time).

Uh, man. I’m really going to put up this essay, I promise. It’s not going to be interesting to anyone with eyes or ears or an organ between those ears, but if you’re sitting in your bedroom, and you can’t remember really even having friends in the last, hell, year, you should give it a once-over with those creepy, twitching eyes of yours.

Speaking of not having friends: I’ve been eating a lot of avocados lately. And I’m getting a very, very long (and retarded) essay published in a literary journal that I submitted it to on the final day they were accepting submissions (we call this “the deadline”) as a joke. They liked it, I guess — or, at the very least, they weren’t completely mortified with whatever it is I said in this particular essay that you may or may not have read before (probably not). I don’t mention avocados at all in this essay, and boy oh boy do I wish I had. I’d have been their star writer, had I throw in a few mentions of that sweet, sweet fruit-nut-thing.

Anyway, I write and work out and eat avocados because all of my friends have gone away, and none of them will return my phone calls. I’m seriously at that point, now. The “no one calls me back” phase of life. I hadn’t been anticipating this for, shoot, another twenty years or so! I don’t mean to slander anyone here, but that’s non-confrontational child-adults for you. How am I ever supposed to get anything done with all of this non-confrontational childish-adulthood drooling sludge all over the floor like all-natural peanut butter dripping off of a cinnamon raisin bagel!

I am “moving home” in a year’s time, and I have no idea why. (I plan to eat avocados and work out and write dumb things there, too.) The first thing I’m going to do is buy a bike, and a really, really nice pull-up bar. I figure it’s all I’ll ever need to be “happy”, having those two things. My brother once told me, in private, after having dangerously (stupidly) lit a cigarette on a gas stove (he doesn’t smoke), that he only ever works out so that he can “feel” bigger than our father. I have no idea what in the hell he was trying to communicate to me, as our father has never been an abusive or imposing figure, but I didn’t want to spoil it for him, so I let him talk to me about very strange concepts while sucking down nicotine like helium-candy. I guess I sort of got the message, in an indirect and unintentional way: he wants to be a big dude, because he doesn’t know just what in the hell else he’s supposed to do. And his ex-roommate-slash-gay-guy-friend told me once, candidly, that people who get a lot of piercings/tattoos only do it so that they feel like they’re in control. I guess that makes sense, too. I’m not that way — not at all — but I fully understand the desire, or addiction, I guess, that people get when they pump blood into their stringy, wiry muscles and make them big, fat, blood-hungry cannonballs. I mean, next to masturbation (which I very much dislike), it’s the only way I know of to naturally (see: without the use of something made in some dude’s bathtub) feel something inside, when all you’ve felt for a very long time is a lot of nothing. Or at least things that no one ever wants to feel for more than maybe thirteen seconds. See, I get that. I want that.

I want my body to produce candy-sticky-choke-me-sweet chemicals and gas my entire body in good (temporary) feelings. I would be delighted to feel that without having to resort to the ol’ rub down.

Maybe that’s the closest we can ever get to shaking God’s pinky finger with our entire bodies.

Or, at least, the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like I have friends, and that they exist somewhere, and that if I call them and want to see them, they’ll have the decency to call me back and confirm that yes, God damn you, I want to see you as well, Ryan, friend-oh-friend, benevolent ruler of the Kingdom of Forgotten Stuffed Animals!

Instead, the candy goop in my lungs and veins will fade away, and that incredible, delicious insurgence of sticky-red-stuff surging through my appendages will give way to old-age-fatigue, and I guess maybe I’ll take a nap in the evening of a summertime I can see coming upon me like dark fireworks.

Ah, yeah, maybe that’s what it will feel like!

That’s what it feels like now, anyway!

I have spun this record twice, and these words far too many times. Maybe it’s time to rest my head for a while. I apologize, friends and foes, for the measly eight-percent you’re viewing now. I promise you that the Real Thing is spectacular, horrifying and dizzying. I feel drowsy now, just thinking about it.

It’s how I always feel, though, I guess.

My grandmother reminded me, just the other night, that my great-grandfather was a country lawyer, and a self-proclaimed failure. He was a dizzy man, too. He put a pistol in his mouth, couldn’t take the pathetic feeling of being dizzy all the time. His son — my grandfather — found him asleep forever, slumped over on his desk in his study. That little boy grew up to tell a young woman, just before World War II ended, that he was a sad, sad man, and he could never make her happy. She said, I don’t care about that, and then they had four children, and one of those children — the youngest, a girl — said something of the sort to a man who was neither abusive nor imposing. They ended up creating a little boy who became a man who felt dizzy, and who went on to tell every woman on earth, at the very same time, that he doesn’t think he can ever make you happy, and that he’s very sorry for that.

And now that little boy, who is now a man, rests his head, because God damn it, he’s dizzy, and God damn it, he deserves a little rest, every now and again.

Aw, hell, I don’t feel like writing anything right now.

Today is the worst day of the year, and maybe you were aware of this. I apologize if you were. As a human being who has stretched and pulled himself in various directions in the last four damp, tasteless years, I can tell you with boner-in-my-pocket confidence that I’m not in the mood to tell anyone anything they don’t want to hear for the rest of my God-exploding days.

It is my birthday. Twenty-something years ago, a man met a woman, turned to her with lust in his eyes, and created a baby boy for reasons that he’s still trying to figure out. Or maybe he just stopped wondering decades ago, I don’t know. That seems probable.

Every year he calls me up and reminds me that I’m a year closer to death. I think he feels comfortable knowing that we’re all on this train to hell. He feels content to know that we’re all dying in centimeters every second. Our birthdays are just a nice roundabout way to measure things cleanly.

Whenever he tells me this — that I’m dying — I tell him, Father, trust me, I hadn’t forgotten.

But, really: I don’t want to write anything. Can’t I have a day off, Lord? Can’t I not think about anything for a whole twenty-four hours?

Why can’t that be my birthday present?

Maybe I’ll give that to myself, this year: a day of nothing.

Well, shucks, that’s not much a birthday present, my mom would say.

She never says “shucks,” though.

Never do I. I just thought that was sort of funny.

I think that tomorrow I’m going to wake up and do one-legged push-ups while simultaneously practicing a language (I won’t say which). I tried that earlier tonight, but it was just something sort-of educational and not the information-shoved-up-my-ass scenario that I’m aiming for. See, if I can combine packing on hot, wet muscle with [a language that I want to learn], that’s, you know, a hell of a way to manage time. I figure, if I can’t point at the clock and tell it, “No! No, God damn it! Stop it!” I may as well pack in as much life-stuff as I can. I’m stuck in this shit-ass rainstorm-even-when-it-isn’t-raining sack-of-rat-corpses of a state, and I’m in a bad way both up and down, so all I can really do is self-improvement. There are worse fates, I guess.

I’m stuck here for the next twelve months.

After that, it’s self-improvement in favorable climates.

By that time, I’ll be mourning another birthday. How old will I even be then, I don’t know. I’ve stopped counting. It’s all I can do to sleep these days — to forget how old I really am.

In reality, I haven’t been around all that long. It feels like I’ve been shuffling through a thousand long winters, but I haven’t. My perspective is all rattled around and smoky, here in Reluctant Adulthood. I’ve been pacing and dropping dishes recently. Sometimes I look around and shake my head and forget what I’m even doing in whatever room I find myself in. This isn’t a play on words, here, I’m serious: I literally find myself places, now. Just what in the hell is going on, I wonder, and suddenly I’m in the middle of a shower, or washing dishes (which I sometimes drop (which breaks my heart)), or I’m driving a car on a highway and singing songs written by dead heroes of mine. I mean, I guess they’re my heroes. Younger Ryan thought that the way they plucked a guitar string and sang spider-web-thin into a microphone warranted “hero” status, and maybe I still believe that, I don’t know.

A dear friend — a hero of mine — replied to a very long email I wrote him with a very long response. He said something wonderful that resulted in dark fireworks sparking behind my eyes. He said, more or less, that little me and little him are the heroes of our consciousnesses. He said, when he loses his way, he turns to little him. What a novel thing to do. I realized, once I’d read this, that I do that, too, only I’d never quantified it like that, which is odd, since that’s all I do. See, I don’t just keep my bookshelves disgustingly organized, I do this with thoughts, too. All the time. All the fucking time, I tell you. I never get a break! (This is why I need tomorrow off — the day of my birth. I’d like to shut down and just eat meals and bathe without any tidying and re-tidying and re-tidying of the brain.)

The closest I’ve ever gotten to admitting that I turn to my old self for guidance is wondering, constantly, “Would little me approve of bigger me?” The answer was invariably, “Fuck no, man.”

This friend of mine has spun my rocking chair around. I think that I will wonder about things related to our conversation for another two or three days, and then I’ll reply with something that maybe he’ll think about.

And it’s what I’ll do for the rest of my time here in this God-hating commonwealth.

That and one-legged push-ups on the tips of my fingers. I want to leave this place a steam-huffing psychopath, muscles on top of muscles, mind twitching with electric heat and invisible chemicals.

It won’t be so hard.

Twelve months until the next worst day of the year. I can make it that far, I wager.

Aw, shucks, I’ll sure as hell try.

We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. Derek had gotten the call a few minutes ago and we knew he would be here soon. We huddled together. It wasn’t that cold, but we needed to huddle together. Socrates was coming, and maybe we were scared, or maybe we were excited. We huddled together. The roads were wet. The wind was slow and carried a faint odor of storm drains.

We checked our watches to see how long it had been. We all wore watches, back then. I think mine is lost now. Maybe I dropped it in a gutter somewhere. I don’t remember. Jake still wears his on some days, but it doesn’t run anymore. You can get your ear as close to it as you want and you won’t hear anything, unless you shake it. It can still rattle, at least. Like one of those toys for infants to help them fall asleep.

The light would turn red and the cars would stop at the intersection, and we would look into the windows for familiar faces. All we saw were framed pictures of men and women, and they looked like ghosts through the fog on the windows. They would sometimes look back, but we would all turn away and look at the ground or the sky or the restaurant windows across the street. Then the light would turn green and they would speed off, splashing brown water on our shoes. All we could do was shake the spare droplets off and remain standing.

“We’ve been here a while,” said Jake. “A long time.”

“We’re still here,” said Derek.

“We may be here a while,” I said.

Jake was staring off into the gloom of the street. Jake thought a lot. We all thought a lot. Jake just liked to remember, most of the time. And I can’t blame him. There wasn’t always a lot to look forward to. But I looked forward a lot of the time anyway. And I thought about Socrates. A shiver went down my spine when I mouthed his name into the darkness. I didn’t expect him to be a great man. I expected him to be a spyglass, though which we might see something beyond ourselves, or of ourselves.

Derek was tapping his foot and slapping his palms against his thighs. Maybe he had found a rhythm somewhere in the white noise of the city. I listened, but all I heard was the buzzing. He was making something up. I thought about explaining the temporal elements of rhythm to him, how music was only beautiful because it existed in the moment, because it would fade and die. But now was not the time. Derek wasn’t like me. He was here, constantly, even when he didn’t want to be. I was too but my thoughts were usually somewhere else, and so was Jake but he always seemed one step ahead of his memories, like they were holding him back, but he wanted them to. I know that now. We had chosen who we were, the blame and the pride was ours to have, to play with, to dance to. We stood on the street corner, and I began to silently hope something of myself would be left by the time Socrates arrived, so that I would still have somewhere to search for answers, and a vantage point to search from.

We had built ourselves up into machines we didn’t fully understand. Input and output, and by the scientific method we were still attempting to discover what was in between. But if every input changes the mechanism it slips through, how can we ever hope to guess an output? Each time we searched we added new gears and passageways. I stopped myself. My head was beginning to feel like a vacuum tube again. I let it rest and fill itself up with shadows and car headlights. I felt it brimming and foaming over again, already. Fuel for thought. I could only take in so much before I had switch on again and process it.

“How long ago did he call?” asked Jake.

“I don’t know,” said Derek.

I laughed. It was forced, and I hated the feeling of forcing a laugh. The feeble noise bounced off the buildings and spread itself thin, and then was gone.

“He’ll be here,” I said, trying to smile. “He’s coming, I can feel it.”

“We may have missed him,” said Jake. He stifled a cough, and watched water glisten in the cracks of the brick sidewalk.

“Have faith,” I said, having none myself. “If we missed him than he’ll come again.”

I started to whistle. I couldn’t remember the song, only the melody. I had woken up with the melody playing in my head and it hadn’t gone away. I waited for it to cycle back to the beginning in my head before I began whistling to it. I couldn’t well interrupt it, or start it out of time with my waking. Surely my mind hadn’t missed a beat since I had acquired the melody in a distant dream world. Surely the tempo was still true to when I had slipped out of bed and back into the world of the dying.

It was a world full of life, because everyone was dying. Even Jake was dying, even Derek, even me. We had all accepted that a long time ago. As to if a concept can be accepted before it is fully realized, I have never been in a position to offer more than speculation. But Socrates, he would know. Or at least, he would know how to strain the knowledge from us, how to trap the pulp and let the pure water escape. We would all know who we had become, when Socrates arrived. Derek would know why he tapped his shoes against the bricks, and Jake would know why he gazed with such longing upon all that was behind, and I would know why I kept my eyes trained on a light I could never reach.

As we stood on the street corner, all of us could feel the tides of despair and hope, of doubt and belief, moving in and out. They submerged us for just long enough to leave us gasping for air as we escaped, and allowed us only the amount of oxygen needed to keep us alive under the next wave. This was living, and we had to keep breathing, and keep holding our breath, and remember when to do one and when not to do the other, and as long as we could do that we could live. But living was not only a matter of survival. It was a matter of fully recognizing the will to exist. We had all done it in different ways, that may be true. But we had all done it. And every moment was that test, and that question, and that answer.

The test now was to wait, and so we huddled together and we waited, together. Time and cars and water slipped by. Every element was crossing over others, crossing over itself, on the three dimensional plane. But as always, like the pain of losing a dream to the fog of awakening, like an aching somewhere between the roof of the mouth and the floor of the skull, we felt the impossible: a fourth dimension, in which everything was moving in the same direction. The waiting was painful. But the waiting was the process which united three disheveled individuals. We were across from one another, or close, or far away, or thinking of things close or of things far away, or struggling with the inside against the outside, or falling, or rising. But no matter the placement of our bodies or minds or souls all three of all three were moving, through the medium which defies all attempts at expression, in one singular direction.

We were lonely in every place, but never in any time.

And without time, we would be stopped, we would have stopped, and we would stand still, not only stopped forever but stopping forever, caught in the action of a lack of action, imprisoned by a solid state of doing. Not being, but doing. One cannot be without motion. And though we stood still that night, listening to the world collapse around that one little street corner, we were waiting, and as long as we were waiting the hope was alive, and as long as we hoped we moved, together, forward and outward and inward, always together in the singular purpose of the now, which was to become that which was not the now.

The ghosts of friction would assault us forever, from the past, from the future, from the present. But still the now will continuously become that which is not the now, and the world will flow, and the past will be made beautiful by its rust, the present beautiful by its intangibility, and the future beautiful by its promise.

We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. And then one by one we turned around: Jake, then Derek, then me. He had been sitting behind us, looking on through the window of a coffee shop, sipping on hemlock, smiling to himself. We smiled back, and the image of his tired old face blurred as our eyes focused instead on our reflections in the glass, and we laughed like children.

I sleep like a stone next to her. In the morning she will mutter into my static-filled ears her dreams of California, and the sky, and caged animals. But for now I am a stone. I sink deeper into the murk of the lake, twitching to the music of ghostly currents as I slip further down. Bubbles rise past me, spinning my smooth shape with their effortless friction. They are messages from the black sludge below. It is calling to me. It wants to smother me again, and there is no reason to resist. I let myself fall. I think back to when I was loosed from the grip of a child, when my medium was the air. I skipped like an ancient discus across the water’s surface. One, two, three. The tempo increased, each jump closer to the next, until I was only a vibration in the liquid. Then I sank. And now I am sinking still. My memories are fading. I forget the rocky beach from which I was chosen, I forget my time as a source of wind and laughter, I forget how the sun felt on my round form, I forget the pleasure of spirit that I found in spasmodic dance atop the water, I forget how the droplets leapt around me. I forget, I forget, and I am still sinking. I am afraid of how comforting the darkness has become. I wonder if it was better to have flown once, or if it would have been better to sink since the beginning of time. But the choice was not mine, it seems. The child chose me for my smoothness, my roundness, my flatness. I was made smooth and round and flat by the tides. The tides were driven up and down by the moon’s cycle. The moon twisted in the sky by its own fearless momentum. Curses erupt from my design, aimed both outside and in, and the mud consumes me, and the need to be whole vanishes like a strand of steam, and time is a pinpoint, and I am a stone.

Hello, hello!

Let’s get right into this, because it’s getting very hot under here.

I guess I should tell you that I’m under a plushy microfiber blanket that I bought years ago. I won’t tell you what it is I’m listening to, but you’ll just have to trust my (expert) judgment, and believe me when I tell you that it’s very, very, very good music.

Getting toasty in here, for sure! That and I’m sort of hunched over in an awkward position in the middle of my bed with all of the lights out. It’s nearly midnight.

I am listening to incredible music in the dark, under a blanket, at midnight.

(I’d type with the monitor completely dimmed, but I don’t feel like proofreading this later on.)

Hell, if I’m not actually crazy, I might just invite such stormy moods into my life simply by way of all the strange and not-normal-people-behavior-inducing activities I take part in on a ritualistic, nightly basis!

Ahem!

Today I spent my entire afternoon in my living room. I did this because the heat is finally on, however low it may be, and it was practically thin t-shirt and hoodie weather in there. What a nice climate for choking on massive intakes of protein and being a jerk on the internet, I say!

I wrote about three-thousand words of my dumb trip to the Orient (haaaahhh!) and slammed against the wall and didn’t feel like writing any more about that shit today. I’ll get to it tomorrow, I think. When it goes *LIVE*, you may scoff at it and pretend like it’s bullshit, I don’t mind.

I was awake in the afternoon because the return flight from Tokyo has rendered me gum-sticky crazy and I sort of tempered my sleep schedule from something no productive human being could ever sustain themselves by to a downright grandpa sleep schedule. I wake up at six in the morning, for God’s sake! I was tired at eight p.m. I’m tired now!

Fuck, man. America. This place blows. I have a job and a life and, uh — well, I don’t have friends — but, you know. I have things going on for me here, and I’d completely forgotten about all of that on the other side of the world. What a great dream that was, way over there. And then pop! I’m back here, and everything is smoky and people are tar-coughing psychopaths, and not in a good way, either!

I can’t do this. I tell you — the more time I have to jerk around and do nothing, the less I feel like doing anything. I need pressure and time limits or else I’ll never be able to churn out buttery prose for you, you no one, you!

Seriously: three-thousand words are sitting on my computer right now, colorful sentences and (short) paragraphs and all. I talk about bathing with a fifteen-year-old boy at some point, and how he told me he likes baseball and having sex with his girlfriend even though her mother is a fucking ball-busting demon! His words, not mine (sort of)!

Someone — anyone — needs to keep me away from a computer when my mind starts whirling around like this. My eyes are buzzing and humming, and lord knows if the half of me that keeps this boat afloat even realizes that I’m awake and up past my bedtime right now.

Keep me away from a keyboard, I’m not even kidding!

This is the witching hour that I browse a certain social networking website and spout off god-exploding psychobabble to people who don’t even know that I’m still alive! And then they are rudely reminded that I am the following morning, and they never reply to anything I say because that would mean inciting the cloudy mood of a schizophrenic fire hydrant that is me!

Fuuuuuuuuuccccccccccckkkkkkk! Never again will I take a twelve-hour international flight in the evening. I arrived an hour before I left Japan on the same day!! If that doesn’t render a human being a drooling ape who sees only black and white and yellow, I don’t know what does.

Honestly, it’s best if I stop moving my fingers right now. The gears in my brain are popping off left and right, and I’m afraid of what happens when every part of me rattles and turns to dust and explodes. I mean — I know what happens. I’m just not sure what that means tonight.

Going to sleep, now.

I love you, you no one, you.

Really!

There’s something that I’m sure I’d like about you.

Maybe!

The man who signs my checks called me maybe thirty minutes ago. He asked me to come in for “around three hours” and run hot plates to clap-clapping people. That sounded reasonable enough, I guess.

Before I could say, “Nope!” I said, “O.K.”

I . . . agreed to go in and work today, if only for three hours.

This is literally a “call the doctor!” moment here, I’ll have you know. I need to contact a professional immediately and have him or her diagnose my current sickness.

Maybe the treatment options will include “voluntary hibernation.” I’d be all right with that.

I’m killing time by cooking rice and black beans and chick peas. I fried up green, red and yellow peppers with a quarter of an onion, and threw it into the protein-bubbling broth. It’s going to be a swell little meal, just for me.

It is, after all, bulk time.

Time to bulk.

Lord, I’m sorry. I’ll write something later. It will be about protein and my brother. The protein has nothing to do with my brother, although I’m well aware, as I’m sure you are, that he consumes a metric ton of it a day.

He’s training to be a helicopter pilot because they “kill the most people.”

“They’re the ones who come back all fucked up,” he tells me.

Man.

Ding. Rice is done.

I’m going to combine it with a can of black beans and chick peas and peppers three colors of the rainbow.

It’s protein time.

It’s bulk time.

Earlier this morning, I was pissing angrily into a Japanese-style squat toilet on a train going one-hundred-and-seventy-nine miles per hour. We’d just left Kyoto. We wanted to be in Tokyo.

As the stream spray-rocketed into the gray-plastic hole, I thought this: “I will put a pistol in my mouth with a degree in my hand. Whenever that happens, I don’t know.” I held my hand over a sensor to flush the toilet and whatever had been in me was sucked away instantly, terribly. It disappeared into the horrible black orbit of hell, conveniently located under the train.

Anyway, I’d like that degree now, thanks.

After that, I can see to the pistol bit. Maybe it’ll be a fun thing to do. I’ll devote a whole Sunday morning to it, actually, I think now.

Why in God’s name am I in an internet cafe in Tokyo? All the night trains to Akita were sold out, so here I am, sucking down milk tea (which I don’t even really like) while some fat slobs jerk off to manga at open booths that do not have doors! as they pour milk tea all over their adult-children bodies. It’s a hell of a Saturday here in Tokyo, Japan, let me tell you!

Man. If I’d gotten on that night train to Akita, hoo boy! That would have been something else. I was planning on flopping on to the station floor and screaming until my eyeballs popped open like eggs. I would have stood up and dusted off my jacket and caught the next train to one of the last-remaining samurai towns. Kakunodate, or whatever. I’d love to be walking around that place right now.

But, no!

I’m in an internet cafe hugging Nakano Broadway near the Sun Plaza. This is ridiculous.

I apologize, gentle reader — whomever you are, God bless you — for my absence. I’ve been too ball-blasting nuts to do anything with the English language in the last two weeks. What a swirling storm of nails and potted plants it’s been. Eggshells and acorns, over here.

Two nights ago I limped along in a snowy eleven-hundred-year-old city with a Frenchman in search of a convenience store. A day before that, I spent two nights in a city that my country blasted into oblivion sixty-something years ago. Before that, I was in warm little room in Virginia, thinking about the rooms I would be in days later.

And now, look at me, in a place with porn advertisements hanging over the urinals. The girls on those posters are showing off their basketballs to anyone who fancies a look. What a jerk you’d have to be to order any of that garbage. There are little hearts punctuating the page that say things that make you wish you were born dead. Jesus God, these ads.

I’ll say something nice and comfortable and sleepy soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe on Wednesday. Man, who knows! Who the hell knows, I don’t know!

Sleeping in this place, puh!

Cruising through a tunnel of trees in the deep dark, you think back to what brought you here, and wonder where this road is taking you. Some place grand, you used to say. Some place solemn and glorious. That some place has been shrinking farther into the background, becoming the punch-line of jokes that you can’t quite laugh at. Just the slightest turn of the wheel, or the faintest twitch of the pedals, and you’ll end up one of the tombstones. People will walk on the paths around you, and compliment you on your silence, envy your peace. They will lay in the grass and in the shade of the trees, singing songs they once heard, resting in a quiet valley full of bodies that can no longer breathe; strange children like yourself, holding hands, falling in love in a graveyard.