12.18.2025

I don't feel stranded here. I feel secure at the Safeway, where I go at least twice a day. I'm a regular there now. What's up guys, I say, and we do the pinky thing. At the cafes folks indulge my nonsense. Everything is so large out here, I say, so magnificent, like the Midwestern rube I am, the character who goes to California with a bag of beans, who's taken in by the scale of the ocean and the lights and the music and the disarming sexiness of the locals right before he learns the hard way that paradise is built on innocent blood, before he trades naivete for an unlit room with holes in the ceiling and learns the only way to get ahead is to murder someone he likes for people he doesn't. There's a word for this too, probably in Russian if nowhere else, and if I gave myself permission to look it up I'd use it for a title. As it is we leave him unfinished and unrefined.