wish you were here

edit: i went out on 9 august to mccarren park. watched some pick-up softball game, watched girls looking very nice walk past, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes. weather was fucking beautiful.

there's something fishy about 9 august. i think at some point i screwed up the fabric of time or tapped into some unholy secret and now this date is cursed for me. 9 august last year, casey gets to drinkin' and ends up getting hit by a motorcycle on valencia and 21st. he gets thrown 40 feet into the gutter and police and doctors figure him pretty much for dead with severe head trauma, but he lives (miraculously), with a crushed testicle being his only major injury. doctors (also miraculously) somehow reassemble his crushed nut and supposedly it works perfectly, for all you ladies out there.

9 august 2004 was the last time i saw simon, my friend in the picture above. we drank a pitcher of beer in 30minutes at the hemlock, along with other assorted drinks—among them the sapphire and tonic he loved. we only hung out for an hour or so that night. a week later some girl from school called me to tell me he died and off i went to ohio to watch him get buried in some dumb sweater. well, when he was living he was the bees knees; a wild soul full of piss and holy water, and one of my best friends for the short time i knew him. we inadvertenly bought the same suit, which i still have. i wore it to his funeral.

stay indoors on 9 august. i'm going to sleep all day since i've been up all night putting up an amazing piece by benjamin strong for Fanzine on the parallels of the events led to nixon's final days and what should culminate to be president bush's. read it here; it's probably one of our best pieces yet. also, special thank yous to susan for taking me out on my birthday. we saw steve buscemi by the bathrooms of the IFC.

i took the pictures of simon with an olympus pen-ee half-frame—one of my favorite cameras of all time—during our drive back up to SF from thanksgiving in LA. traffic was absolute hell; a self-fulfilling prophecy to those who read the flashing signs for SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD as commandments and not advisories. we cruised along the I-5 at a cool 35 mph for nine hours and simon was shouting about assholes with stupid vanity plates for most of the time and i chainsmoked to deal with being crushed out on a girl back in LA and laughed my ass off. somewhere along the line i lost the roll of film and it got heat damaged, and now looks all arty. sayonara, simon.