This world is a temporary parking place. Cardboard seas and canvas skies. Muslin trees. Melodies played in penny arcades. Honky tonk parades. I look into the neon for guidance and I realize. Nothing is real. Not even me.

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Hi, buddyhead.

I think of all the things I can say about 2008, that I can be thankful that this is the year that we met. We were once strangers and now, I can't imagine a day without you. I hope that I've become an OK dad. I never really wanted to be a dad, really, and I think this is the closest that I will ever come, but I hope you won't hold it against me someday. Somedays, I look into your big brown eyes and the world, just for a second, feels like an alright place to live. Thank you.

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God, I love a dive.

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My dad's room has no inspiration any more. I figure I should leave some behind. Sometimes I forget that my mission in life is to make art and become locked inside the ennui that is me and the willingness to stare at wall and wonder when I should just draw all over them.

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Her good looks could've sailed a ship, but her will alone could've sunk it.

Looking out along the hole that used to be where I poured the blood and sweat of my early 20s, where most of my neck and knee really are, I lost got lost in the revelry of nostalgia. That is, until someone tried to steal my car. Then, I just started screaming babble and left them hanging on as I drove away as fast as I could.

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Diamonds on my windshield, like the song goes. The air is so brittle my breath hangs in it like the last chance someone gives just before they throw in the towel. I watched two people embrace on the side street and it lasted too long and the tears froze in their eyes and I couldn't bear to watch it any more.

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My fingers are the kind of cold that feels like heat. They don't feel like typing or telling you anything any more. They hurt, they just want to be wrapped in gloves and thrust in the pockets of the sweatshirt I am wearing. But my fingers are all I have and they have their job and I push them and tell them to shut the fuck up, I don't care that they burn, because there is work to be done.

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No one is going to miss me when I'm gone. Because I have faded slowly, so slowly, that no one ever realized. And one day, you'll turn around and wonder what ever became of me, and I have become nothing. I have disappeared and even I won't be able to write my way back. I will segue into hazy drunken memories and half remembered tales and that is where I want to be, where I can't disappoint people any more or make mistakes. I want to be finite fiction, one book, not this seemingly endless parody that my life has become. I want to sleep for the rest of my life and when my coma starts, I want that plug pulled in minutes. I want to seep beneath the icy floes and feel my legs and arms stop working and to just be numb. To be everyone else. To not be cursed with this need to please and care and worry and give. I wish I was an asshole. I wish people hated me with all their hearts and no matter how hard the other half of me tries, the real me keeps making up for him.

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Destroy All Monsters

I watched them destroy Tokyo at 1 AM in your glasses. Youngstown broadcasted the footage. I cheered for Gamera. I cheered for Megalon. I wished I was a big monster and didn't have emotions any more, once I grew up. I would eat a city. I would fight aliens. I would not worry. Roar.

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