Do you ever look at a word - like SOUTH - and think it seems totally unfamiliar? And then you wonder, maybe knowing is a disease - a disease of complacency - where you think you'll never not know. But what if the words just stopped making sense?

We're moving into a new office at the Sunset Gower Studios on Monday. My commute to West LA is now going to be to Hollywood. In this economy of time, I now have an extra five to seven non-driving hours to play with per week. The possibilities are endless. And optimistic.

I am hungry. 

I'm actually pretty boring so I'll keep this short.

My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts.

When you're hurt, you feel that you'll never be unhurt again.

There is magic in a boring night at home.

Just watched this video, and then I watched it again, and again, and again.

Oh, life. Oh... Poland? I want a Philip Glass soundtrack like this to follow me around all the time. Though I realize that might get distracting, and it's really not needed for sitting in front of your computer or buying yogurt or driving in your car. Meeting friends for drinks? Could be maddening. Soundtrack like this would be a sort of fake kind of epic for the freedom we have in Los Angeles.

Sometimes I'll look out on those cars when I'm stopped at a light, the people behind the wheels, and I'll think, "I bet they've got wars buried under their skin. I bet they're fighting for something, even though they're sitting down."

Or maybe people are just driving and they're not striving for diddly-squat. Hell, if there's shit in Ikea chocolate cake, maybe there's nothing else to fight for.

I don't really think I know how to keep a blog anymore. I don't really think I ever knew. It just seems sort of strange nowadays if it doesn't have a theme or some catchy monkey topic that gets you noticed.

Writing your thoughts down and shooting them out to the world just seems indulgent. You need labels. Product. Something. Finish it. Finish it. You need to think before you publish.

But all I have are these thoughts. At least for the moment.

And this strange urge to drive up the coast. Bark at some sea lions. Feel the sand in my throat.

But I must say the highlight of this week was having my good friend Mariah tell me that she taught WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU? to her class. I just need to focus on what's really important.

What is the point of furniture? Why can't I keep the Christmas tree up until July? I hate L-shaped couches and crown trim and new shower curtains. I just want to live naked on a beach and eat ice cream out of coffee cups.

Convention bores me. It's my birthday on Monday. I'm not having a party because I can't decide on what to wear. Actually, that's a lie. A horrible, awful lie. I'm getting older and Matt's shopping for shoes online. "This is a great deal! You get 20% off on top of the 15% discount!" He shows me different colors of the same shoes. He's watching basketball. Last thursday I found an OSU sweatshirt in a discount store. I thought, what are the odds? But when I tried it on it was too big around the middle and made me look frumpy. For $28, it just seemed too much. I pictured wearing it when I went home. I pictured making him tea with just the sweatshirt and nothing else. I'm tired of Mondays. I want to praise the mutilated world but it's hard.

"This is a riot," a friend says. He pokes the fake branches. It won't even shed. There are pine-scented candles lined up at the base. I will not participate in the dismantling of Christmas. I will have Christmas trees until July. I will line the walls with them, staple the plastic bark to the ceiling. We will live in a labyrinth of plastic evergreen and dust will collect on the their limbs and I will do nothing to shake them down. 

Amen.

Well, a battalion of birds dive-bombed my car this morning. As I was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, they let loose 20ish simultaneous shits. It was a strategic operation that covered my car in tiny whitish, yellow bird crap. How do I know it was 20ish shits? I counted on my way to work. As I was driving, as I was stopped at red lights. I'm just glad the moonroof wasn't open. Can you imagine? It's 7AM and a battalion of birds come to make you the luckiest motherfucker alive?

Or at least that's what they tell me. That means today is a very lucky day. Those birds were sending a message. They were saying, here you are. This is your life. Live it up, stupid.

Or maybe it was just a reminder to keep my eyes on the road. To figure it out. A message from God? The undead? Tomorrow? 

You got me. 

Best Breakfast Ever

= Ronnie Rooster Toast + Matt + Old Time Christmas Music + Opening Presents + Steel Cut Oatmeal + Laughing Hysterically About Absolutely Nothing

Merry Christmas to all.

I don't know really - but I think I may have found my favorite book in the world and that is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that is because every page is like a dream and you can tell he really thought about what he was writing and he was tapping into some life source, making sense of it, and trying to figure out the way we are.

I read it while I was in Mexico, swaying in hammocks, and also while Matt was sick. See, what happened was this, on our second to last day there we ate at a taco joint that had plastic on the plates and we took the plastic off thinking that was what would make it clean, the plastic, but really, it was midway through the meal when we saw everyone else, all the locals, eating with the plastic on the plates. Well, damn me. So, we didn't think anything of it, but then we ordered this shrimp dish with an avocado sauce but when the server brought the plate to us we got a shrimp ceviche dish with a lime sauce instead, and the shrimp looked all shriveled, and although I thought maybe that's how shrimp ceviche is, the dish wasn't anything like the description. I tried to eat it anyway and it was okay, except I wasn't really feeling the shrimp, so we decided to take the shrimp back to the B&B to put in quesadillas, and all throughout the night this quinceañera was raging until early in the morning and although I slept through the whole thing, the next day Matt said he didn't feel good and that he had been up really late last night just vomiting and so we spent the rest of the day in hammocks, or I was in the hammock, and Matt was somewhere else -- in bed, on his side, his back, staring up at the ceiling, resting, feeling his forehead, retching in the bathroom again, on the floor, toilet bowl up, finger down his throat, trying to get it all out, get whatever was making him so damn sick, and I didn't think about that or anything really, I fell asleep in hammocks, waiting for him, but not waiting for him, and I thought, maybe I should go to salsa night, do something, but there was only 68.7% of me that wanted to leave, and the rest was quite fine just swaying, reading, writing, trying to figure out the complexities of life, or really nothing at all, just nothing.

After that day of waiting, those languid hours sleeping and reading and writing and thinking, I took a walk and brought my knapsack and a small container of Off! bug spray. There wasn't much to see, but I did ask the sun questions. I asked whether the sun would be interested in knowing more about the sky. He seemed inquisitive and shone his rays onto me, and it was then I knew that my time on this earth was undetermined. Slight.

Love is cleaning a toilet full of vomit that your boyfriend filled because he ate a dish of ceviche the waiter accidentally brought you at a mexican taco joint but both of you were too polite to ask for the correct dish and both too polite not to eat it. 

He ate more than you. So it goes. 

And you actually didn't clean the toilet, did you? And maybe it wasn't the shrimp at all, but the water or the pork or the countless cervezas the night before.