Dear Mike

Man Mike, it has been a rough couple of weeks. Car went belly-up in typical fashion less than a month after a very traumatic brake & axle service. A hole in a hose led to overheating, and me pushing the limits and winding up with what is best-case scenario a blown head gasket, and worst-case a blown engine (still starts, but who knows how much longer that will last, and it definitely cannot be driven). Well, its three weeks later and I missed the FIFTH anniversary of you punching out of this...this...life? Yeah. It is hard not to think you are better off - I guess that is the thing that they say - death is only hard for the people left behind. Or whatever they say. I mean, at least there are probably a few of us who still think about you occasionally. Or, at least - i do think of you most days in some way (even if it's just when I notice it's 11:11 or popping an especially intense zit). Lately I've begun ondering in earnest if anyone will ever remember me. Hell, I won

 Hey Mike, Not that this will come as a shock to you (or, maybe it will, since you always seemed to think I was as adept as you at remembering all the ephemera of the punk rock life we led) but I seem to keep forgetting who the hell I am. Floundering in normalcy is not something I am amused by. Oddly, it was Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" that launched me into this spiral. Fucking SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE ALL THAT ACID WHILE WORKING AT TOWER RECORDS! Hilariously this is only funny to me, because I don't think anyone I still talk to even knows I worked at Tower Records, and probably I never told them how that fucking earwig of a song has been burned into my brain by multiple blotter doses an hour or so after count out, back in Spring of '91. Also, I have lost another nephew (Mason) to the Trump Turbine. It's killing young minds and making them all stupid, lazy, and racist. Super disappointing because this kid was always the one I pinned my hopes on to be his own man. I

 New Year's Eve, and not much has changed. I have been sick for well over two weeks now, convinced it's either my heart, my lungs, my brain or any combination of the above. The dog had a seizure yesterday, the first in a while (though of course I haven't ever tracked them, but they do seem to happen a couple times a year now, less often than they did in the mid 2010s) ((the "mid-2010s"?? Good god, how is this even still happening?)) but it made me want to mention, or document something about KC, and I suppose is true with other dogs who live their entire lives in an urban place that is constantly changing - but she is always remembering places we used to frequent. She will still stop at the doorway where the entrance to Charles and David's pet store was. The other day, on the way to the library, she stopped at the door of the last Bartell's we used to frequent. She often tries to pull to McCoy's a place we used to go a lot, but as I get older and less

 Hey Mike, Where to even start? With Israel and Hammas going at it yet again - slaughtering and terrorizing innocent people on both sides, again. Fucking religion is the single worst human trait, and no one, not even the most beatific Buddhist is going to change my mind. It's tragic, and now that we have all this immediate flooding of live broadcasts from people's phones on the ground - the carnage and destruction escalates not only my rage but my feelings of despair.  I guess it's fine that the final sweet release from this stupid, stupid world will be due to someone's misplaced desire to control others - rather than the epic continent-shearing earthquake or meteor hit. Fucking dinosaurs. Speaking of actual faultlines - had a nice earthquake on Sunday night - about a 4.5 (which I reflexively guessed correctly, and felt necessary to share with everyone; I even texted Karen). There was this delightful moment where the shaking was at what ended up being its peak and it hi

Hey Mike, I don't even know what that title even means, but I'm listening to DCFC and am having a hard time keeping my head up right now. Everyone's parents are dying, on top of all of our people dying because...I don't know, we had too much fun? Didn't take good care of ourselves? Didn't follow the rules?  I don't fucking know, and it's killing me. Everything feels like the fallout from not having made the right choices, and yet, I feel like I am only aware of it because I did live the life like it was a wave to surf - but apparently, I'm a shitty surfer? Dunno. I watched the Beatles doc that Ron Howard made and am even more fascinated by how fame manifested more than half a century ago, and how its so much the same, and so very different now. Also, this thing where I keep believing in stuff and it just always never holds up. It never is what I think it is, what I expect it to be. EVER. I mean, I spent my college years secretly hoping Joe Biden woul

A change is gonna come - I have not spent almost 60 years on this planet to sit in this closet and wait for my other retina to burn off the back of my eye and listen to GenZ humming mindlessly while constantly fucking doing the most un-teamwork-y shit all day long. I deserve to be spell-checking stupid AI-created content for websites that millenials scroll through mindlessly from the porch of my fucking teardrop trailer parked in a WalMart parking lot, or something. This is not how I go out, goddamn it.