J’apprends le français, mais je ne sais pas pourquoi. Peut-être que je veux être agaçant? Quand même, français est très difficile.

Yes. That is annoying what I just wrote, but because I’m learning French I suppose I should put it to some use. I know it looks like something a high school freshman writes after his or her first semester in French, but I guess I am a little like that right now. Genders of things are difficult — it’s not like in Spanish where for the most part nouns that end in -a are feminine and nouns that end in -o are masculine. Also understanding French speech is difficult.

The other day there was a solicitor in front the of the entrance at Ralphs, and I decided I was just going to speak French to try and deflect them. What a brilliant way to put my newfound learning to use! Perdon.

“Je suis aussi de France,” the guy said to my horror. Fuck. The first time I use this lie, and I get caught. I’m sure there is some fucking moral to this, but I’m not here for morality.

“Je n’ai pas temps maintenant. Perdon,” I said back to him and just walked away. I realized I should have said les temps, but I was happy that I got it somewhat right.

My podcast boyfriend Brendan writes a daily newsletter entitled Mystery Date which I just linked to and you can see in my blog roll below (or to the right or left depending on the layout I choose if you are reading this in the future.) I am fascinated each evening when one of his missives hit my email inbox and promptly read it.

With the death of Google Reader and the seeming death of RSS feed readers, I wondered if there was a better way of distributing blog updates. It turns out that WordPress can turn a normal run-of-the-mill blog into a newsletter. So if you look at the very bottom of this webpage*, you will see a “Subscribe to Blog Via Email” section.

It’s pretty simple. When I post on this website, you will be sent an email with that exact same post. There might be some formatting differences between how the post is presented here versus how it appears in your inbox, but you can always click on the link to bring you back here.

Okay. This was a bit stupid. So here is a strange user-generated video for Coil’s “Backwards”.

* Again, this direction is dependent on the layout I have here. If you are reading this on a mobile device**, six months from now, six years from now, sixty years from now, this might not be the case. But I trust that you are smart creatures and can figure out for yourselves where to find this feature or if the feature is still available.

** I checked on my Android phone, and if viewing the mobile site you probably won’t see this “Subscribe to Blog Via Email” section. You’ll need to view the full site for now in order to see this. I guess this is something I should figure out very quickly.

I honestly don’t know if I could have appreciated Coil’s Backwards before now. This was supposed to be the Coil album that Trent Reznor released on his boutique label Nothing Records in the mid-90s. It always seemed strange to me that he seemed to look forward to its release in interviews but nothing ever came from it. It was merely the mysterious Coil project, and that was all it was ever going to be.

It has finally been released in an official way. Not via bootleg. Not by way of remixes as on The New Backwards. I guess this is the closest thing to a true release since both Jhonn and Sleazy are dead.

Now in my mid-to-late 30s, I really can appreciate the nuances of Coil’s music much more than I could imagine doing so as a teenager. I suppose there is a lot of impatience in adolescence that mellows out with age. Backwards really does fill in the gap in the Coil oeuvre, and impatience or not, it really is a shame that it took this long for it to see the light of day.

I don’t know what happened to me. At around 6 this morning, I don’t know if it was a night terror, and epileptic fit, a seizure, a stroke. But something happened that has left me fatigued, without appetite, dazed and breaking out in cold sweats.

On a normal night I don’t remember my dreams, so I don’t know if it was an out and out night terror that paralyzed me. But as I was trying to regain consciousness I couldn’t move at all. I could hear what sounded like a heartbeat from the inside of the heart, but I think that was probably my snoring to be quite honest since I was lying on my back.

Towards the end of the episode I realized I had to piss, but I couldn’t get conscious enough to physically get up. It took a minute or so, but I was finally able to stagger towards the bathroom. It wasn’t until I got to piss that I realized I already pissed. As in, I fucking pissed in my bed. Fuck. I’m all for piss play, but there is a time and a place for it. 6 am when I’m in a middle of some sort of episode I can’t describe is not the time to be celebrating piss.

Yes. I motherfucking wet my bed. Like a fucking five-year old. I think the last time I wet my bed was in a hotel room in San Diego while on some really good heroin.

Thankfully I needed to do laundry today anyhow, so I just added all of my bedding to the mix. But man, nothing I did gave me energy. Not coffee, not muesli with honey, nothing. But the laundry needed to be done, so it didn’t matter that I just wanted to put my head down and just sleep away the day. I hate adulthood sometimes.

Now that I had some lunch, I’m feeling better. Barely.

On Monday before the rains unleashed its sudden fury upon Downtown LA, there I was in my little Toyota Camry on Flower Street trying to escape back to my little hamlet of San Pedro. My grandmother had an appointment at her knee doctor, and we were ready to get the hell back home.

It’s around 3 pm when I’m just crossing under the 10 freeway in the no. 1 lane when the car in front of me brakes suddenly. I proceed to do the same thanking that my brakes are still good.

I look in my rear view mirror as I tend to do and see a white SUV charging right at me unable to stop in time. Fortunately he is able to veer to the no. 2 lane to miss me. However Ms. Black Honda Civic wasn’t able to follow suit. I was expecting to hear a big boom followed by a sudden jolt and the sound of my dashboard completely ripping apart because of those goddamn stupid fucking airbags, but no. I hear a collision but it doesn’t sound like it comes from my car. Just a faraway-sounding thunk.

I look to my right and see Ms. Black Honda Civic’s left headlight dangling. Oh shit. Her car got a bit fucked up. I start to try and move off to the side of the road, and to my surprise I see Ms. Black Honda Civic just zoomed the hell away. I’m shocked that she doesn’t want to exchange information. I guess as much as I want to be Mr. Jaded Cool Cynic, I’m just a naïve schoolboy at heart.

So while Ms. BHC might have jetted, I pulled over to see how bad the damage is. My grandmother, bless her heart, was wondering if the car had broken down. She didn’t even feel the collision. As you can see above, all you can see is scrapes on my bumper. Not even a dent!

It reminded me of the last hit and run I was in. But rather than being angry, I couldn’t help but laugh. C’est la vie.

I was originally going to just watch the Cardinals-Cubs game just to make sure the Cardinals were going to make a postseason exit. They did, and it felt great to see the Cubs clinch only their fourth playoff series ever and their first ever at home.

I wasn’t going to watch the Dodgers-Mets game, but I did, and the Dodgers won 3-1. I wasn’t prepared to get emotionally invested in the Dodgers only to see them come up short. I’m invested now, and Game 5 on Thursday will be insane.

As I was driving back home from The Grandmother’s doctor’s appointment, there was an SUV with a decal in the rear window that read “Former Fetus.” I drove past him — yes it was a male — and realized that his mother should have believed in abortions. Isn’t it telling that the people who are fighting against women’s reproductive rights are the same people who should have been sucked away from the womb?

When I stepped out to get my car in the morning, the sudden heat blasted into my pores. It startled me for a second, but it felt different to the rest of the heat I felt over the summer. There was no humidity in the air, and the heat actually felt refreshing. This isn’t heat where even your sweat sweats as we’ve felt all through the summer. I can actually go around an walk in the heat and not be afraid of underboob sweat or pit stains that creep down to my ass.

It got up to 99.9F here in San Pedro, the third hottest day since 2010, but it could have been a lot worse.

Reading an entry of Anais Nin’s diary, I laughed out loud when I read this:

Nothing else about him interests me; his atmosphere of Middle West America homeliness, the cult of the ugly, the drinking, his dreams and talk, which I cannot even remember. Absolutely ordinary, youthful, too simple. – Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin 1939-1947, July 13, 1940, p.21

I couldn’t help but think back to this passage, especially the phrase “the cult of the ugly” while watching the Cubs and the Cardinals in their playoff game.

I took Dallas Aunt to the airport at 5 am, so now is a moment to breathe in a cleansing breath. She means well, but there is always a wave of negativity that surrounds her. She’s warring with my entire family except the Grandmother, me and Wheelchair Cousin so it’s sometimes a chore to try and mediate between her and the family. I always make sure the family knows when she is coming so they can opt to avoid her. While I do love the fact that when she’s here I can take that time off and be with friends and feel human yet again, she really is a lot of work.

I do love the trappings of city life sometimes, the feeling of liberation of not being tethered to a car and just going where our whims take us. Of course in Los Angeles it doesn’t really work this way all the time, but there are times it gets close.

Madd and I wanted to go to St. Vincent Court after watching an episode of Tom Explores Los Angeles that explored this strange oasis of fake weirdness in the middle of the Jewelry District of Downtown LA. Rather than deal with the hassles of traffic from her Mid-City apartment to the parking woes of DTLA, we opted to take the train there which was perfect.

Sure the day pass is now $7, but it’s still better than paying for parking at all the places we ended up at. There was St. Vincent Court, the Central Library, cookies and coffee at Bottega Louie, tea and mochi ice cream in Little Tokyo. With the exception of St. Vincent Court, everything else was on a whim. “Where should we go now?” “What are you in the mood for?” “Oooh this looks good!” It’s an exhilarating freedom to be so whimsical, and I truly felt in the middle of the heart of the city as the buildings and skyscrapers loomed overhead.

The buoyancy of the day sent a bit of regret up my spine of how I lived during my Hulu years as my 20s became my 30s. Combine the stresses for working for a startup tech company with trying to get better at writing with blogging for LAist, it left me quite isolated. Actually, I isolated myself. I know it’s trendy to say that you have no regrets when asked if you have any, but if I’m being honest this is one my of regrets. Of not exploring, not seeing things and crawling into myself.

One of stupid things I did was at the library. For some reason, I thought it would be a great idea to borrow one volume of Anais Nin’s diaries and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. I was already carrying around the Bessoa book I’ve been reading, so for the latter half of the day I was schlepping a load. I guess I got a better workout than I had anticipated?

As much as I enjoyed being out and about, seeing all the homeless people really tempered the joy. Friday night while at Faultline with Daniel, there was a homeless man lying on the sidewalk sans shoes. As we were leaving, he was still lying there but someone had laid down a dirty dog with a drink right next to him. I thought that was awfully nice of whoever did that.