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2 feet tall and far from bulletproof.

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 wonder if people even think about me now, cause I am always thinking about people I have had zero contact with in years. Or people who probably were never as imprinted by me as I was by them....like Linda Ellis, the woman I worked with at Common Concerns. Or, people that are stuck to my psyche like dogshit on a converse sneaker like Kyle, who keeps fucking liking posts from Arlie/Atoms and Void/Juno on FB. Which I can assure everyone is because he has, once again been trading in my personal musical epiphanies as his actual history. I swear to god Mike, I will not be held responsible for what I may say or do if I actually run across that sorry piece of shit. Anyway, this was supposed to be about you, really. About you being gone for 5 years, and what a fucking 5 years its been. The world is falling to shit so quickly that I am streaming the new T Swift album and kind of digging it (though so many of these songs sound so similar it's bizarre. Like Wilco she's too damn prolific). WHAT IS GOING ON MAN? You missed the Covid, which is when I'm pretty sure when people all became insanely aware of how pointless life really is, but Americans, who are not culturally grounded enough to maintain any chill, immediately lost their minds - or did they. Jesus, I cannot write to save my life. Was reading a journal from '00 and even then I was still pretty funny and observant. Crazy how I seemed to have manifested Kyle, and yet now, in hindsight what I manifested was a complete collapse of my personal confidence. What am I doing? What will I do next?

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