I was travelling from tokyo to vancouver solo and had a 1 night pit stop in LA. When I got settled in to the hostel it was like 10pm and almost everything was closed so i went to get in-n-out. Afterwards I wandered over to the pier and end up talking to a bunch of old heads who'd just left the closing bar. Friendly dudes, I end up smoking weed w them and playing chess and listening to jazz with this one dude who does street chess hustling (he's wearing all white and plays on abbot kinney boulevard iykyk) until like 4am, at which point he tells me usually just finds a couch to sleep on. Being the totally naive and no self preservation having person I am, I realize I have the hostel room with 2 beds (I am exhausted from travelling and wanted a non-dorm night) and tell him that of course he can crash on the other bed. I tell myself if he wanted to assault me or take my money or any number of nasty things he would have done it already. Anyway, he doesn't murder me in my sleep and take all my belongings, and we both go about our lives. If/when I go back to LA I'm gonna try find him again.
Jul 5, 2024
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Last year, I made a new acquaintance at a house show & learned that she DJ'd on the side! She invited me to a party that she was DJ'ing a few weeks (?) later, so I drove to the address. Apparently it was a random warehouse space in downtown Orlando. There was a huge skateboard ramp in there and t-shirt printing supplies in the back, I think? Watching her play was really fun. At one point she even hooked up a Nintendo D.S. and made a beat on one of the games!!
The parking situation downtown is confusing, so I ended up parking my car in front of the church next door while their nighttime service was going on. The parking lot was full of other cars and there was no signage for towing, so I figured it was fine. There was also a fence around the parking lot, but I didn't notice the gate until I came out of the party and found my car sitting alone there, locked inside. I called the church and the nice guy on the other end said I could pick it up in the morning, so I Uber'd home. The next day, I came to pick up my car and had to wait about half an hour for the church man to get there.
As I was standing there, wearing an outfit that was hardly goth at all, this random guy on the street told me: "I just gotta say, I love your gothic style. I ain't gonna lie, baby, you're gorgeous. I'm sure you got a girlfriend though, right? Okay, well, remember me!" Somehow he clocked me as queer and hit on me at the same time. I decided to wait indoors after that. Eventually I did get my car back, but everything that happened in those 12 hours felt so random.
Mar 25, 2025
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A big shoutout to the very kind hearted and colorful man I met at the laundromat outside Joshua Tree. All the locals seemed to know him and had sat through his tangents many times. We shared my cigs as he told me about him and his brother trying to blow a tunnel in the mountains with dynamite in the 90s, which ended with military helicopters and only the beginnings of a tunnel. He told me that he was descended from the hired guards of Vlad the Impaler. “When you impale that many people, you need guards.” He said dementor-like hooded figures do strange rituals at night in the mountains there. “Harry Potter is real.” He said Biden was the antichrist and Trump could save us, though he acknowledged his faults and said he personally loved everyone. I believe him. I don’t think he was mentally well, but he had found a way to survive and be a well-liked member of his community. His eyes were brilliant and he was generous with his cheap whiskey. I think of him often and hope he is happy
Feb 23, 2025
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In 2014 I went with my buddy and my girlfriend of the time (now best friend) to see Danny Brown. I hadn’t slept the night before, and we were in a bit of a low key tweaker phase, fitting for seeing the self described Adderall Admiral, and I think between me and GF we honked up easily 300mg of adderall and drank a 12 pack and a pint, before the show. The show was so fucking lit. He passed blunts around the crowd the whole time, it ripped, my heart rate was like a Venetian Snares song, I wanted to swallow the crowd with the force of my body. Later me and girlfriend had a horrendous fight that kept going on in cycles all night in the hotel room that we shared between the three of us. We were too drunk to consistently remember what it was we were fighting about, and my homegirl in the other bed had to keep getting up and running interference, deftly explaining to each of us what we as well as the other person are doing wrong, probably less out of pure kindness and more out of at least a bit of rational calculation like “if I can socially engineer the fighting out of these two fuckheads I love but can’t stand right now, I can finally sleep.” The girlfriend and I probably broke up with each other ten times throughout the night. We slept gloriously eventually and the next day in New York was beautiful and it was truly as though nothing ever happened even though three times she tried to “take a bath” in a hotel shower that was not remotely a bathtub.
Five years later I’m in grad school dating a tiny smokeshow gothy hipster nerd stripper — I don’t know how I managed it ever, really, I was bald as fuck by then and a skinnyfat overstressed drunk — but it was fabulous, we didn’t have a whole lot in common background wise or anything but it was, for a while, a sublime dynamic. The show was Tommy Wright III, and like all ratchet-chic girls, she correctly loved the horror-tinged blown out grit of Memphis style rap. It was at the spot where I met the lady, a sort of quasi-speakeasy hole in the wall club in DC that doesn’t exist anymore, but where I’d ended up, alone in a new city on Halloween when I sidled up next to the alluring aforementioned, who chided me for not wearing a costume. “I live in a closet, I don’t have costume stuff, what are you?” “I’m a slut for Halloween,” she said, wry and earnest. I invited her to my closet of an $800/month room and she stayed for four straight days, smoking weed and reading manga while I put off the mountains of grown up homework I had. Anyway, like two weeks into dating this show comes up, and she wears basically the same little red silky Nothing shirt thing and I’m in a black beret and leather jacket and jump boots. They can’t tell that I’m not *actually* Cool, I assured myself. It had been months of total isolation and School, policy and philosophy, no culture no parties. Tommy’s set was short and a blast. After the show was the more memorable part. She wanted to talk to Tommy but at the same time, I was on a mission to the ATM several blocks away to purchase cocaine for us to inhale. I get back and they’re still talking, her and Tommy Wright, the legend, with the goofy perm hair still. Apparently he’d asked if she’d go with him to his truck and smoke a blunt and she told him no, she had a boyfriend — fuck, I could have hardly blamed her if she took him up on it. But then we hung out with Tommy, mellow and normal and tired seeming. Forgot to mention her friend was there too. Tommy politely declines doing coke with us. The three of us evacuate the baggy of terrible cocaine seemingly in one instant. Girlfriend’s friend wanted to fuck us both, she whispered to girlfriend. I declined.
Not sure this answers the prompt but it scratched an itch
3d ago
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Meeting people in large group settings definitely helps, i find theres a very natural pull feeling to people that are similar to me and its wayyy more noticeable when im not hanging out with people who ive known forever.
Turns out almost everything i thought was unique to me could be distilled into a list of 💫symptoms💫.
Ive alway seen myself as a drifter/chameleon type, i think my brain just resents ever being able to be defined or labelled or categorized.
That was disjointed but hope that helps, maybe that made sense to you and you are a little more understood now :))
Jul 18, 2024
