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.