Yesterday I went on a four-mile jaunt through Portuguese Bend, the first time I’ve done one of these jaunts in a couple of months. I could feel my expansion while The Grandmother was going through her shit. Even though she’s not back to where she was before, I just needed to get out.

As I was going up the hill, I felt every ounce of the two-month expansion in every wheeze, every jolt of neural overload in my hip, every scream from every alveoli. In short, I needed that.

Someone chatted me up on a hookup thing over the weekend, and we had a nice back-and-forth. He saw a revealing picture of me, and thought it was hot. Of course he probably wanted my mouth and/or asshole around his cock, and he would say anything to achieve that end — yes, even deception. I was a bit preoccupied to read his profile, but when I finally got around to it there were those two words which had me seeing red:

NO. FATTIES.

I don’t lie on these hookup things, so my true stats are there for all to see. The only Photoshop I really do on pictures is just to adjust lighting. It’s not like shaving myself off digitally like Todd Haynes did with the Barbie dolls when he filmed Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

So despite his precondition of “no fatties”, he was willing to get my mouth and/or “nice fat ass” around his cock. I just dropped the conversation right there.

But this has stuck with me for the last several days. Why should we all fall prey to this fascistic body shaming bullshit that is meant to keep us subjugated and under control? I have half the mind to start posing my fat ass nekkid body for all to see. Maybe I’ll start a porn blog.

It’s happened again.

“I absolutely cannot predict any type of future in terms of sexual interaction or romance, but I have to tell you that every time I talk to you I feel so calm and relaxed. There’s something comforting about you.”

Never mind that I told him I like listening to Satanic music, that most people I know think I’m a cunt, that I don’t really conform to much of anything. That if I had more balls I would do porn, that sometimes I wish The Grandmother would pass so I can get on with my life. That most days I hate everyone in my family. That I do like watching sports and taunting the hell out of people. That sometimes I want to be slapped while being fucked so that I can slap and punch and choke right back.

But no. I’m comforting. A teddy bear. *sighs* Always a motherfucking bridesmaid…

To take solace I’m listening to a bunch of Coil and eventually I’ll have to edit the new podcast Brendan and I recorded earlier today.

(I am sitting on the toilet in this picture.)

I actually went out into the real world with real people. What’s sad is as I watched The Wolfpack documentary¹ the other day, I was starting to find myself identify with them. I’m really starting to feel like that agoraphobic old man horder who will die in a fire sparked by a decade old issue of Sports Illustrated, cat hair and friction.

So out with Abbey and Elliott we went first to the Watts Towers and then to the best burgers in Los Angeles: Hawkins Burgers. We blah blah blahed and all of that good fun stuff and even told Abbey, a NorCal transplant, the history of Watts and Compton and South Central LA and how everything is so much nicer now than it was in 1992.

I have to say that as underwhelming as the Towers are when you first encounter them, they do grow on you. I am always happy after I visit them.

I also think it is nice that some of the houses nearby also take its cue from the Towers.

All in all it was a nice way to spend a couple of hours with folks I very rarely get to see. It also broke the sort of monotony of trying to listen to the best of 2015 music and reading alternately Infinite Jest, The Brothers Karamazov and Gay Berlin.

That sounds real creepy, don’t it? A dream I had last night had me and a group of friends going to the movies to watch what I’m guessing was a David O. Russell movie. I had the same uneasy feeling in my gut that I get when I’m getting ready to see a David O. Russell movie for the first time. Is it going to be more like the genius that is Flirting with Disaster and I Heart Huckabees or more like the horror that is American Hustle or Silver Linings Playbook?

We start having a conversation about Star Wars where I proclaim that I don’t understand how anyone watching the original film now can even take it halfway seriously. It’s a completely referential piece of self-indulgent filmwork much akin to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We are talking about this quite loudly even as the previews start up. It is then an usher comes back and tells me that I have to leave the theater for causing a disturbance. I tell him that it’s ridiculous, the movie hadn’t even started yet and that I will keep quiet. I stay.

The movie is pretty awful. All I see is Bradley Cooper’s stupid grinning mug — it’s almost like the Richard James’s mug on the kids in Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy video but nowhere near as creepy. I fall asleep in fits during the movie. I also remember wondering why people insist in being quiet during movies. How boring is that?

Right before Thanksgiving, I had another dream where I was at a screening in some film club where I was also being shushed. I tend to talk during movies at home, but at a theater I’m always well behaved. So what does this all mean?

I find it sad that in response to the mass shooting in San Bernardino last week, people have responded by buying more guns and applying for more concealed weapons permits. I understand the fear. I understand the helplessness. But what exactly is a gun going to do? Does one imagine that when a shooter like that comes into their office, they’ll just whip out their gun and shoot him dead? By the time the gun is produced, you’re dead. Guns are just about as effective as a blankie in safety. The only difference is that a blankie won’t kill anyone (save for a very rare and extraordinary circumstance.)

I’m not even going to begin to dissect the fascist idiocy that a certain presidential candidate uttered, but man. Fear is a powerful thing.

Thinking about my last couple of posts here, and man, I need a hard penis rammed into my butthole soon.

The Grandmother had a busy weekend. On Friday, three of her children stopped by to visit. Yesterday her old pastor and his wife stopped by. So it’s been busy around here which is nice. Also, it hasn’t been as much of a fight to get her to eat which has put me a little at ease.

Because of her frequent urination, I am a little wary about her kidneys so I took her to her doctor. It turns out she has a bladder infection. Antibiotics and painkillers. Let’s see what good that does.

As for me. Well. I’m here somewhere. I don’t know. I really hate that I had to miss Yobo’s birthday shindig Saturday night. I hate that I’m going to miss Faith’s birthday celebration tomorrow night next Tuesday. I hate that I’m horny as fuck but can’t really do anything except touching myself.

The Grandmother’s decline has gotten steeper the last couple of weeks. For the last year her decline was steady. Of course there was the exclamation earlier in the summer where her sciatica blew up for a month or so. But even after that she kept going.

Things plummeted a couple of weeks ago. All of the sudden she was throwing up. She didn’t want to eat. She was having to urinate way more than usual — she would have to go back to the bathroom just minutes after getting out of there.

Fortunately after a couple of days she stopped throwing up, but she still refuses to eat. She still is having to urinate frequently, and that is getting worse. Her short-term memory is nearly gone, she can hardly understand anything when you talk to her — you have to yell and talk very slowly.

While Dallas Aunt was here, even though she was able to look after the Grandmother while I went out and tried to be human again, she got very mad when I wasn’t there. She’s clinging to me as if I’m her only hope to live on.

While over the summer I was in tears, now I’m just numb. I know she’s knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door so to speak, and I think I’m protecting myself emotionally for when that happens.

Dallas Aunt came and left for Thanksgiving. While I always welcome some time away from having to stress out about The Grandmother, I’m not sure why she had to come. She refused to go to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner (albeit it was actually held the day before Thanksgiving, but she was here in time to attend.) It seems the only thing she did the entire time was yell at people, yell at the Grandmother, yell at me.

But it was still nice to get away. I was so happy to go to LACMA on Monday. I’ve been meaning to go to New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933 for a while.

Madd and I had a late lunch, and we took our time since we knew that after 3 pm admission is free for LA County residents. We weren’t quite sure whether they closed at 7 or 8, but we figured we had time. So we got there at 4:30 and find out that they close at 5! Oops. We went through the exhibit in like 20 minutes which meant we didn’t really get to absorb it.

I’ll have to go back around Christmas time when Dallas Aunt comes back to visit. But I also got to take a picture of Urban Lights above like every other basic bitch here in LA. But at least I didn’t pose or get a shot of anyone posing. That’s just stupid.

I’m not a big margin-writer. I would like to be since I do tend to get really immersed into whatever I’m reading. Also I tend to have a really bad memory, and I think if I were more interactive with what I was reading I would be able to remember plots better. For instance, for 1Q84 which I just read last year, I totally forget the ending. I remember that I loved 2/3 of the book, that I loved the prose and how it flowed. I also remember how much I disliked the last 1/3 of the book and can’t remember exactly the mechanics of how Aomame got back into the “real” world.

The Millions posted an essay by Dustin Illingworth about writing in the margins of books.

Our culture is less than forbearing in matters of extra-textual scribbling, its very presence analogous to vandalism or, perhaps worse, the intellectual’s vague sedition; our training, therefore, begins early. For a child overly fond of the library, the rituals of card and stamp and due date quickly (and, for some, permanently) accord the book a kind of material sanctity: to write in one would be akin to relieving oneself in the narthex.

That could be why I don’t annotate much, that as a child I was told it was vandalism because I was reading from textbooks and library books. As I have been reading books from the library a lot recently, I’ve seen others scribble in books. Maybe I’ll have to start doing this and say fuck it. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who have read the books I have read are pretty prudish. I wonder what people will think of me.

Alternately, who hasn’t succumbed to the delicious voyeurism of a stranger’s scrawlings? In following along with the previous reader’s checks and brackets, their snarks and synopses, their tangents and revelations, we read a text doubly, illumined by the spectral presence of past engagement. Used bookstores are graveyards of casual epiphanies, awaiting the resurrective animism of fresh consciousness. And whether we are of like mind with the erstwhile owner or we find ourselves adversaries in interpretation, it is a literary haunting the seductive power of which depends on the worth of its abandoned concealments.

Maybe I will start doing this in library books, too!

Towards the end of Henry and June, Anaïs Nin shares a love letter from Henry Miller in August 1932. In it he writes:

When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest — that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can’t help it. I want you. I love you. You’re food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were.

Isn’t that sweet? He continues later on,

I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love your so much, so much!

If a guy every writes anything like this to me, I would just cry and be putty in his arms. I got really jealous reading this. I also get really jealous when I see friends receiving dirty pictures on their phones.

Oh romance. Où est le mien?