April 23, 2013
philnoto: Don the Salesman [so can’t afford to go across the country (again).  instead back to the desert, you know?  because everything’s shiny and cheap there, but mostly the people.fuck it]

philnoto:

Don the Salesman

[so can’t afford to go across the country (again).  instead back to the desert, you know?  because everything’s shiny and cheap there, but mostly the people.

fuck it]

6:36pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyjP8cj2
(Notes: 6,320)
  
Filed under: personal blog reblog mad men phil noto countdown to an early grave 
March 31, 2013
and on the third day, jesus grindr-ed.

and on the third day, jesus grindr-ed.

3:18pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyhb7RLp
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: blog grindr happy easter 
March 28, 2013
last christmas i received a kindle e-reader. is that what it is? i’ve watched movies on it, played games, these sort of things. when i opened it, i looked at my overflowing book shelves and wondered how i’d file it. i didn’t think i’d use it to actually read. like an ipad, this’d be a nice gift, but what fuck, you know? a day later i looked through its online offerings and nothing immediately grabbed me - nothing interesting i hadn’t already read. so i saw douglas coupland’s LIFE AFTER GOD for $7 and i clicked buy (is click even the right word for that when talking about a tablet device? stupid anachronisms). god: five years ago or so, i lent my paperback copy of LIFE AFTER GOD to a girl i really liked. because she’s much younger than me and i thought that she would get something good out of reading fiction about her generation. i thought nothing of it, then. i used to like lending and giving books to people. partly because there’s a weird sense of superiority in the giving books part. but the biggest reason is: i am giving you a story for us to talk about, to think about. catch is, of course, you have to read it. a book is not an inert thing, and the having a book is a third of the process. i never got that book back. i was going to type “we stopped talking and seeing each other” but that would’ve been untrue: i stopped talking to her, i stopped seeing her. we exchanged notes and emails randomly, but that situationship (high-five to golden!) was over. but later i discovered she no longer had my book and had given it to one of her girl friends. LIFE AFTER GOD is my first ebook and i read it in one night: a collection of stories about and around the first post-religion generation. it is terribly fascinating to me, and incredibly sad. the other day i bought a hardcover first edition at a dollar store at the mall near where i work. mostly, i think, to have a hard real thing to cement my foul memory of that girl from years ago. and so i can give you a story when we meet.

last christmas i received a kindle e-reader. is that what it is? i’ve watched movies on it, played games, these sort of things. when i opened it, i looked at my overflowing book shelves and wondered how i’d file it. i didn’t think i’d use it to actually read. like an ipad, this’d be a nice gift, but what fuck, you know?
a day later i looked through its online offerings and nothing immediately grabbed me - nothing interesting i hadn’t already read. so i saw douglas coupland’s LIFE AFTER GOD for $7 and i clicked buy (is click even the right word for that when talking about a tablet device? stupid anachronisms).

god: five years ago or so, i lent my paperback copy of LIFE AFTER GOD to a girl i really liked. because she’s much younger than me and i thought that she would get something good out of reading fiction about her generation. i thought nothing of it, then.

i used to like lending and giving books to people. partly because there’s a weird sense of superiority in the giving books part. but the biggest reason is: i am giving you a story for us to talk about, to think about. catch is, of course, you have to read it. a book is not an inert thing, and the having a book is a third of the process.

i never got that book back.

i was going to type “we stopped talking and seeing each other” but that would’ve been untrue: i stopped talking to her, i stopped seeing her. we exchanged notes and emails randomly, but that situationship (high-five to golden!) was over. but later i discovered she no longer had my book and had given it to one of her girl friends.

LIFE AFTER GOD is my first ebook and i read it in one night: a collection of stories about and around the first post-religion generation. it is terribly fascinating to me, and incredibly sad.

the other day i bought a hardcover first edition at a dollar store at the mall near where i work. mostly, i think, to have a hard real thing to cement my foul memory of that girl from years ago. and so i can give you a story when we meet.

7:49am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyhK4wWz
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog books life after god 
March 24, 2013
“…my life isn’t complicated at all…It stretched all the way to early retirement, a whip-round from the people in the office, a bright little neat flat somewhere, a neat little empty death.” - terry pratchett & neil gaiman, GOOD OMENS

“…my life isn’t complicated at all…It stretched all the way to early retirement, a whip-round from the people in the office, a bright little neat flat somewhere, a neat little empty death.”
- terry pratchett & neil gaiman, GOOD OMENS

8:10pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyh35yq0
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: quote terry pratchett neil gaiman good omens personal blog 
March 22, 2013
apparently, i am in excellent health. aside from the dying part.

apparently, i am in excellent health.

aside from the dying part.

(Source: Flickr / jchavezloeza)

9:01am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZygrZgvK
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog hiv 
March 13, 2013
you may not know it from looking at me, but I just wanna be left alone with my long dark journey into the abyss of existential obsolescence.

you may not know it from looking at me, but I just wanna be left alone with my long dark journey into the abyss of existential obsolescence.

7:32pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZygD4lZP
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog Twitter 
March 12, 2013
i’m at the airport right now and i think a man across the terminal took my picture as i put on my belt. we meet, you know, but that’s the easy part. meeting people is easy. dinner and drinks and all that bullshit is kind of nice usually. but people with so much honesty right off the bat, to paraphrase saint palahniuk, don’t give me a hard on. which is ironic. ever look around and think ‘what the hell am i doing here, doing these things?’ i’ve made meeting people a contact sport. instead of concussions and bruising (speed still matters), i do feel diminished somehow each time. not because fucking’s bad. i do not like putting on airs, telling stories about how you grew up, what you like in life, and so on. i choose to be a horrible person. anyway: we met and drank and fucked and ate and walked and all the stories came from him and people are a one-way street. someone tells you everything about himself when all you want is to enjoy the silence. it’s not irony: i over share all the time out into the interweb. the difference? no one reads in the internet.

i’m at the airport right now and i think a man across the terminal took my picture as i put on my belt.

we meet, you know, but that’s the easy part. meeting people is easy. dinner and drinks and all that bullshit is kind of nice usually. but people with so much honesty right off the bat, to paraphrase saint palahniuk, don’t give me a hard on. which is ironic.

ever look around and think ‘what the hell am i doing here, doing these things?’

i’ve made meeting people a contact sport. instead of concussions and bruising (speed still matters), i do feel diminished somehow each time. not because fucking’s bad. i do not like putting on airs, telling stories about how you grew up, what you like in life, and so on.

i choose to be a horrible person.

anyway: we met and drank and fucked and ate and walked and all the stories came from him and people are a one-way street. someone tells you everything about himself when all you want is to enjoy the silence.

it’s not irony: i over share all the time out into the interweb. the difference? no one reads in the internet.

9:24am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyg5qRi5
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog countdown to an early grave travel 
March 9, 2013
arrival. have only been here an hour. there is always a story isn’t there?

arrival.

have only been here an hour. there is always a story isn’t there?

7:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyfvuRK8
Filed under: personal blog countdown to an early grave 
March 7, 2013

i joke a lot about having an eating disorder.  i don’t have one.  when i started running last summer, i did try to eat better, but for me that simply means not fucking eating all the time (also, it meant being faux-vegetarian).  i don’t care if you have an eating disorder, to be honest.

but after years of that, i began to look at myself differently as i began losing weight because people remarked about it a lot.  and then, all the jokes about having body image issues crept up when i looked at myself in the mirror.  but really, fuck off with that shit too.

my doctor has told me in the past to cut it out on all the sugar i eat.  he had me get a liver ultrasound and, yeah, that made it a little more real.  i mean, who wants to get cirrhosis via oreos?

today, i put on my favorite suit after not having worn it in almost a year.  it doesn’t fit in the way i wanted because it’s too loose, too roomy.  weird: when i bought it was perfect.

i don’t have either an eating disorder or body image issues.  i joke about them a lot because it bothers me when people complain how lazy they are to eat better (at least differently, you know?), or when people complain how skinny they want to be, or when people whine about how fat they think they are.  gimme a break.  these aren’t people without the means to do these things (i’m talking about people i know, so don’t get all uppity about my generalizing), so it’s strange that such a lazy fuck up like me can do something as easy as no longer eating a box of donuts.  my body is different now too.  not the being a bit more in shape thing.  it’s also different in that it’s re-learned it can still do the things i want to do, that used to like to do.  don’t get me wrong: everything creaks and pops everyday, but, i mean, my body’s the only one i’m getting.

(i want to make a joke, something along the lines of “my body re-learned everything…except the dying of AIDS part!” but i can’t get it to work in my head, and i must now go to sleep so i won’t try to work it out.)

i don’t know.  i am a jerk, though.  have you noticed?

i’m not sure why this just now needed to be jotted down right now. 

interesting work day today.

5:48pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyfluXyz
Filed under: personal blog 
March 4, 2013

i’m waiting for some great news from work.  always with the waiting with work, hey?  but that’s what happens when you work with a large enough company — bureaucracy.  at the same time, my confidence level in work is pretty damn high.  i really like my job.  it’s been the first time since i began working that i’m thinking of retirement and such things.  also, i’m getting older, so, there’s that, you know?

when these news come, i already have plans which is terrible because there’s something about hatching chickens with no eggs or some other terrible cliche.

i’m going to washington dc in the spring.

there was this short essay by warren ellis years ago about his love for traveling called COUNTDOWN TO AN EARLY GRAVE.  i don’t think of it as a zen process, but there are some things than never lose their magic to us, and like him, to me one of these things is flying.  i love traveling by car, but even more so in a plane.

i didn’t travel by plane until 1994/1995.

i always look out the window and marvel there is a piece of plastic and metal hurtling off in THE FUCKING SKY!  i think about the mechanics of it, how a man-made thing can do this.  if in the screen on the seat back in front of me shows me a map, i will follow us via that pixelated image.  i love it.  when the plane shutters and shakes - in 2005 coming back to las vegas from seattle, that plane dropped and swayed like a drunk girl - it does get my heart racing and i wonder what will happen next.  i’m typing this so obviously, so far, nothing’s happened to me while traveling.

flying is magic, isn’t it?  we all have had that dream and we all could potentially fly.  i love it.

why washington dc is because i’ve never been.  and before i die i want to go to places i’ve never been.  thought for a moment in going back to new york.  but, as much as i love it, fuck it - i need new places.  i remind myself of that quote from, i think, douglas coupland’s ALL FAMILIES ARE PSYCHOTIC: “I want experiences, no memories.”

also, i want to be a tourist.

i really should look for an apartment.

6:01am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyfUocnn
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog countdown to an early grave 
February 28, 2013

when i was out of town last month, i began texting with this young guy somewhere in the inland valley.  and i mean text because he’s younger than me and that’s as close as people nowadays want to get.  suits me just fine - i can’t with someone else, you know?  when there’s distance, literal or otherwise, i’m golden.

of course i think i’m so stupid; a pretty face is enough to get you going most times.  but, at the same time, while this isn’t one of those keep all options open sort of thing, it’s also nothing i’m taking ridiculously serious.  can’t have anything more that even smells like that.

i remember thinking before that waking up sundays with someone and reading comic books all day would be ideal.  over the last few years, really, i don’t really want to talk about anything i like with anyone else who likes it too,  my friends tell me their dating deals and i just don’t want to hear it: all this work they put into a thing and it becomes a complicated car wreck they cannot get out of.

(just there, i was going to find a way to use the term ‘extricate’ but i thought better of it because that word is too complex and gorgeous to be used when describing dating bullshit.)

in january i wrote a few things i liked.  this month, i posted personal bits.  trying somehow to get back on that proverbial horse, which i think is really some sort of fucked up unicorn because it’s just so damn hard to find sometimes.

last year i read one book.  so far, for 2013, i want to do a book a week (currently reading joe hill’s HEART-SHAPED BOX), and am staying on that plan.

so, i’m not out of town right now and dude tells me to look up this porno he did when he was, if i did the math right, eighteen.  of course i look it up, wouldn’t you?  turns out i’ll be out of town next month at the same time he’ll be out of town - we’ll be in las vegas at the same time.  and he tells me about this porn flick (it isn’t very good, actually) and i wonder what else will be on television while i’m there.

i was in seattle and while there i managed to catch a couple of late-night reruns of that show the big bang theory and have decided that it’s shit.  what books do you recommend for 2013?

6:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyfEGHTr
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: personal blog countdown to an early grave 
February 17, 2013

when someone who isn’t the same background as me - same sexuality, same ethnicity, same class as me, same gender as me - goes on and on about how much he supports me and my perceived struggle, it makes me their fetish object. i am not a “cause.” and, really, just shut the fuck up.

5:39pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyeOYkSr
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: blog really just shut the fuck up 
February 16, 2013

i never really wanted to be a writer or actor or something like that.  i have had huge interest in it, but if i could go back and talk with my teenage self, i’d tell me i’m being an idiot.  anyway…

i don’t know why new york’s always been inside me - wanting to be there, at the very least visiting.  and when i stepped out of jfk the first time i went (it was january, pre-blizzard, pre-birthday), and i felt the cold and rode the taxi into manhattan, it was far more interesting and beautiful than anything the church has shown me.

(the world is something else, but, you know, whatevs.)

in terms that i think only make sense to me, that city didn’t change my life.  probably because i’ve only spent two weeks there in thirty-six years.  but it has been that one thing from when i was young that i always wanted to see.  not the tourist traps or well-known bits or hopes of running into a famous person - these things are never in my head about any place.  but not knowing a thing about any place when i was fourteen to seventeen„ new york remained.

been talking of death, thinking of dying an awful lot recently (i’m at my healthiest in years, zero risk as far as i can see for immediate dying), but the one thing i’ve always wanted in life was walk through new york and i have.  and i want to again.

in that conversation i’d have with my teenage self i’d also tell me to stop being so fucking uptight, and to always wear a condom.

6:12am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyeGPwC5
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog new york countdown to an early grave 
February 14, 2013

over the past few years i’ve thought about what is going to happen when i die.  and i don’t mean when i die as in the normal way, no.  i think about what would happen if, for example, right now, when i walk to the corner store for a pack of smokes and a diet coke, if a car jumped the curb for whatever reason god decides and slammed into me and crushed me against the brick wall on my right.

what would happen if i was shot as i walked for my morning coffee during a break from work.

if suddenly i developed a fatal (duh!) embolism.  my brain just stopped.  my heart just stopped.

sure, i’ve also thought of me just dying in a not-so dramatic way of just disappearing into nothingness in a hospital bed.  this is the worst one.

i don’t want to die, but i think i can take it.

6:25pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZyeA51ea
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: persona blog death dying 
February 1, 2013

i returned from seattle yesterday.

one of the things that happened while there is i met a guy around my age and we fucked.  because i stayed downtown and a flirt becomes something else real quick when you’re dealing with gay guys after they’re off work.  fuck it: a generalization, but it’s pretty fucking true.  i didn’t even get his name, but we exchanged dna.

the last time i was at the w in seattle was 2005 and oddly there’s suddenly a theme regarding the place and me.  2005 was eight years ago and i was twenty-eight.

another thing that happened was a young guy (22) contacted me via the internet and began talking about hooking up and even though i wasn’t necessarily in the best condition to meet anyone for any reason at the time (drunk on cheap whiskey, high from my prescription meds (you know, the ones i need to live?)), but i gave him my number because why wouldn’t i?

first dude, he was cool and was in and out (so to speak) and on his way after and hour.  this is his jism over spray on the duvet.  he’s buttoning his pants and i notice the wedding band.  later he says i shouldn’t text or call him; email him instead.

this is the second guy’s handprint the morning after.  he was incredibly nice and cute and said he hoped to see me again before i left.  i could tell he didn’t want to leave.

i hope my next trip doesn’t leave me wondering about the why of fucking.

these two dudes and i are the same, aren’t we?  we all are, all guys.  it’s still a bit odd, even this late in the game, discovering each time how easily it meet someone to screw.  how pathetically the same all guys are: if the opportunity presents itself for some guilt-free (right?) risky sex, we take advantage of it without a moment’s hesitation.

i’m pretty certain september 2010 has colored everything i’ve done personally since then.  that was a cold cold day for me.  but i’m not stupid enough to believe it didn’t affect me, that the ex’s and my last real interaction didn’t stay with me.  fuck it.

i’m not trying to find a man, partner, whatever.  but the words i say to my girl friends when they’re down about the boys in their lives and want advice return to me immediately: yes, ever man is exactly the same.  this isn’t a game in the way that dating and hooking up are referred to as a game; no contest isn’t a competition.

nothing is boring, but what about when everyone’s the same?

10:32pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLraZydCPv53
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: personal blog countdown to an early grave the why of fucking 
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