Halfway back to the towels, B’s friend whose house it was and another friend pulled up on four-wheelers. They weren’t as grating as you’d think bc the wind whipping so hard. You could barely hear em. Everything blended in with everything else. Holding our hats on our heads was how much it was whipping. But they were going so fast. They drove out to where we’d walked, then U-turned, but it only took like four minutes, there and back. They didn’t notice the crabs. Or I don’t know. It was fun in a different way probably. Right when B pulled back up to the towel spot, it sputtered and ran outta gas. She toggled the accelerator a couple times. No dice.

•

That night roomie bro and I rolled and sat on the back balcony and recorded a pod on Sam Pink’s Rontel (2013), which I’d given him for his birthday on the 1st and which he’d already crushed.

On why it hit so hard for him.

On the weird joy Sam Pink found in the absurdity/meaninglessness of everything.

How his style tapped into a sort of profound ego death: one went through the world responding to stimuli in a way that was, ultimately, out of your control; the passing phrases we perceived the world as—which he captured so uniquely with his line-broken style—even these were out of your control.

You weren’t even in control of your own thoughts/mind.

Your own thoughts had minds of their own, determined by / in response to the stimuli you fed em.

Phrases and responses and even commands flashed past as you moved through the world, in an absurd way.

Like early on, when the narrator is watching a baby eating a small bag of chips, dancing to music blasting on a speaker in the subway, and is commanded by his thoughts to imagine stealing them.

To, if the dancing baby drops the chips, grab the chips and scurry off with them.

Lol.

This was a disconcerting realization, initially. How little control we had over our own thoughts/memories. Thoughts/memories that, arguably, constituted our ‘selves.’

But was weirdly comforting, hilarious even, the more you thought about it.

Woulda posted the pod but the mouth sounds the molly had us making were a bit much.

III

Summer

1

MRA

St. James Day 2018

All fucked up, body-wise.

Skin resembling an elephant’s.

Ankles cankled.

No ankle bone, foot veins, nor ligaments to speak of.

Wrists, neither.

Golf ball–sized lump, side of my face.

From my infected right tooth I hadn’t been able to chew on for months, maybe.

Honestly didn’t even know.

Everything cut up.

Palms to neck to soles of feet.

Not healing.

Getting infected I thought but honestly couldn’t tell that either.

Lathered myself with Vaseline, caffeinated, and sat at my dining table.

To write.

Then read.

Then, unable to do either, troll my Twitter feed.