But my life, since then, had been: get as lit as possible, starting the moment I awoke each day, to either read or write an unnatural amount.

Now I was finna fkng die if I railed another coffee bruh! what it was looking like.

In the kitchen, the mama handed me a shot glass of blasted Tibetan deer-turd-pellet powder, diluted with water, and told me Shoot it.

I shot it.

Then she whipped up this wild like lowkey 100% celery juice (lil apple also) not even in the NutriBullet but in the Cuisinart which made wild pulp waste and was a bitch to clean, that she read on a blog (after printing out and magneting it onto the fridge) was Top Ten Anti-Inflammatory Foods.

Told me rail that shit too.

I railed that shit too.

Then the mama was tired from all that blendering and chauffeuring. She retired to her room to keep plugging away on the newest Murakami, Killing Commendatore (2017)—the untranslated version.

There was this alley that ran adjacent to Wilshire, from the mama’s to this park next to a Starbucks, a few blocks over.

One of those garbage-type alleys I feel are unique to LA.

Where the storefronts facing Wilshire dumped all their trash and like dishwashers would pop out onto to smoke.

But this had become my ‘around the block’ equivalent, quieter and less exposed than going actually around the block.

Was an extension of ‘inside,’ where I could smoke and stroll and feel OK in PJ-type attire.

Rocking flippy-floppies.

So long as I didn’t get too immersed in whatever I was reading/writing on my phone and watched where I was going, to steer clear of the trash-bile puddles and not step toes/toe-cuts exposed into them, like I didn’t more than once.

It took everything in me to not order a coffee.

I needed one bc I was tryna read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) since V kept recommending it and quoted it in (or as) a letter he wrote me once.

I’d been tryna read it for months now.

Unable to.

Not understanding.

Reading the epigraph and opening paragraphs over and over.

Had that first part down!

But once it started getting into all kindsa Marxist stuff I was like WAIT WHAT?

WHAT IS HAPPENING.

WHO WHERE WHEN.

Like Slow tf down dude how tf does that follow that bro what.

Felt I needed all the fuel I could get.

But didn’t cave.

Went with a Passion Fruit Relax Calm tea or whatever.

Sat against a tree in the park across the street, reading the same passage over and over, laughing aloud at myself for how badly my brain was working.

White woman pulled up in a minivan, rolled down the window, leaned over.

“Dinner?”

Her daughter held out a greasy fast-food bag.

“Go ahead, hon,” she urged. “Feed the man dinner!”

“Oh no,” I said, semaphoring a hard redirect. “On a diet.”