When I found out a couple weeks ago that I will be having major surgery, it inspired me to make some home improvements within the next couple days. For starters, I had been sleeping on a memory foam mattress on the floor - I bought a bed frame, with storage space, and now the boxes that'd been in the corner of my room are out of sight. I also went to the bank to trade in a 20 dollar bill for quarters - the laundry room here doesn't have a change machine and I have often been out of quarters, perpetually chipping away at my laundry by hand washing it in the sink - low level depression housekeeping. The same day I got the quarters I did all my laundry, taking care of that subpar living condition that's often gnawed at my subconscious. I also stopped going to bed at 3:00 and waking up at 1:00, instead going to bed at midnight and waking up at 9:00. It's crazy how soon I changed, and I'm not completely sure why I'm doing it - the bed frame is going to help me when ...
"Halloween" (1978) I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use. However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life. Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story. Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation. He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hostility to b...