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hey there
i'm doing well. i had a kidney transplant in june. i'm just living with my mom in carver and looking for a part time job, waiting to go back to school for my last semester in january. kinda bored. really bored. just watched fargo on netflix. matt thought frances mcdormand was a babe. he was right. I would like to play more basketball but am intimidated by the kids who hang out by the hoops, the court. how the heck have you been? are you still living in marshfield? I’m just waiting for thanksgiving, really. tonight my mom said “I have a surprise for dinner,” and the surprise was that she bought lobster. this is terrible timing because I’ve been sentimental about some things lately, including the rights and feelings of lobsters, which may have been triggered by reading david foster wallace’s ‘consider the lobster’ essay. but tonight i was also sentimental about being nice to my mom because i really surprised myself by saying 'fuck you' to her today because she smoked in the house, so i obliged and ate some of the lobster, was sorry i couldn't be more enthusiastic for her like she'd expected because she never has the means to get anyone anything. the lobster meat in the claws was really underwhelming in quantity, very flimsy. my mom said she must have bought retarded lobsters. this seems really unfair, to blame the lobsters, so I gave my mom the tail meat and rinsed the butter dish and felt my eyes water at the sink. yeah, I don’t know what my problem is. man, it’s been a long time. you used to have a chalkboard wall behind your bed, and my number was on it. your dad had a huge moustache. in the ninth grade you told all our friends that my boobs were uneven; you made a song about it in the hallway at school and then B and i wrote a nasty poem about you and put it on my old website and you cried. mountains have been visiting me in my dreams lately, big misty ones. sample from notebook:

dreamt about driving up and through enormous mountains. my cats were lined up at the base.

second dream this week about huge mountains in strange unfamiliar places, absolutely breathtaking scenery. mist and sunlight through trees. L is there and I’m yelling to him to get in the basement, the shockwave is coming because he pressed the red button, and I heard the telltale explosion in a distant Swedish village at the base of the mountain. he won’t come to the basement and in the small rectangular basement window I see the trees submit to the shockwave, bowing suddenly and recovering slowly. a small shockwave, though, because L is okay and we find ourselves trying to reassemble/revive S’s mother, who is a pile of strangely arranged toothpicks in the fridge. the feeling is that she was a whole person/mother in the fridge, but when she froze to death she became the toothpick structure. i'm trying to tell L i admire his curiosity but i can't say it for some reason.

third dream. I’m excited to be going up this mountain. I’m going on vacation with A. other people are waiting to get to the other side, too. some kind of vacation exodus. I’m nervous because once we’re on the other side, there’s nothing there. no stores, no hospitals, just mountain. there’s one house I’m looking at, to the side of me. it’s a small house and there’s something colorful about it, something I remember liking intensely. the way to get up the mountain is in a steel cage held by three strings. you’re raised up in it. the mountain is like a sky scraper suddenly. suddenly I don’t want to do this, it doesn’t seem safe. A is saying he’s not scared at all and he trusts the steel cage held by three strings. we also have the option to climb up the side of the mountain with ropes. this dream feels like an easy candidate for dream dictionary interpretations.

-end notebook sample- today I took an informal inventory of my mom’s medication and ate the dark chocolate at her bedside. the water was shut off today, well work or something. I found some papers by the bed, a big stack of them, from bible study. fill in the blanks (italicized). weirdest shit:

"We were put on this earth to enjoy Jesus’ love, and to manage all his other creations."

I hope you’ve been doing well all these years. what have you been up to? take care.