Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction

My Old Neighbor

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I saw a cricket in my Palm Springs apartment the other day. At least I thought it was a cricket. It could’ve been something else like a cockroach. God, please don’t let it be a cockroach. Whatever it was, I smashed it with my fist and wrapped it in a napkin before I threw it away.

It reminded me of my apartment in Hollywood from four years ago. I moved out of there during COVID. It was a month after the George Floyd riots, and Hollywood was bleeding slowly. I had to get out of there.

I remember this one night, I had a neighbor who was an actor in Hollywood. Go figure. He used to stay up late at night and rehearse his lines all by himself. I could hear him through the wall.

But one night, he brought someone over, someone with a British accent, and they yelled at each other. My neighbor was yelling, not the British guy. The British guy was calm and collected. It was my neighbor who was panicking.

”You crazy f**k, how could you do this?”

”Oh, you’re being completely ridiculous.”

”You’re sick. She didn’t do anything to you.”

”Now calm down. You don’t want to cause a scene.”

”What do we do with her? We can’t just leave her like this.”

Now, I was lying in bed during the altercation. I thought about calling the police. But what would I say? I knew my neighbor. We would talk to each other when we met in the hallway. He was a nice guy, but not that night. He was screaming from the top of his lungs at this British character. Or maybe there was no British character. Maybe my neighbor was rehearsing a scene, and he was going back and forth between the British character and himself. I was hoping for that.

”We have to do something before the cops come. We can’t just leave here like this, you sick f**k.”

”I said quit being ridiculous. We have it well under control.”

It felt like the yelling went on all night. I let it pass and fell asleep at some point after drinking enough beer.

The next time I saw my neighbor, it was a few days later, and he was singing a different tune. He smiled at me in the hallway. Not only was he smiling, he was glowing in a manic sort of way.

”What’s up?” I said.

”Hello, Ben. Guess who I found the other night.”

Uh, I was thinking a woman’s body, but I played dumb.

”I don’t know. Who?”

”Jesus. I found Jesus.”

”Oh, okay.”

”And he told me to pass the message along to you.”

”What message?” I asked.

”The word of God. God loves you.”

In the few years that I’d known him, he’d never once brought up God or Jesus. He was a party animal actor, a womanizer. Now, he’d flipped into a born again Christian overnight it seemed, ever since that fight with the British guy.

He gave me a copy of the Old Testament. It was smaller than my passport. His smile never left his lips.

”I want you to read this and come to my church.”

He was starting to scare me, so I began to close the door on him.

”Thanks,” I said. “I’ll read this and tell you what I think.”

I kept the Old Testament in my bathroom where I kept a lot of books: on top of my toilet.

One morning, I read it, and I’d never read the material before. I was sitting on the toilet with it, and my mind began to drift. Needless to say, the Old Testament was boring me. There were too many names to follow, too much exposition. It wasn’t getting to the point, so I stopped reading it and left it on my toilet.

Another morning, the Testament slipped off my stack of books and fell into the water. I panicked because my neighbor might’ve wanted the book back after I’d read it—-which would never happen. I quickly fished it out and tried to dry it as best as I could, but the pages were already soggy. When they dried out, the pages were stiff, and they weren’t flat anymore.

My neighbor came knocking. I guessed he wanted the book back, but I wasn’t going to tell him what had happened. It might’ve devastated him, angered him, whatever…

”Did you read it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

”And what did you think?”

”A lot of names to follow. I really like the part about Noah.”

”I want to invite you to a reading.”

I really didn’t have time for a reading, but how could I disappoint him?

He never found out about the toilet incident, and I never went to one of his readings. But I respected his quest to find Jesus and tried to keep what happened between him and the British guy private.

Out of deep curiosity, though, I asked him about it.

”You got into a fight one night with what sounded like a British guy. Who was it?”

”Oh. It was nothing big.”

I guessed it was sort of none of my business.

I still have the Old Testament somewhere and tried reading it again, but again, my mind drifted, and I couldn’t concentrate.

My neighbor moved away soon after that to Glendale. He gave up his acting pursuit to go on a mission to talk others into finding Jesus, and I believed he said he was going into real estate, too. We hugged before he left.

”Keep Jesus in your heart,” he said.

Those were his last words.

We’re still on Facebook. Every month or so, he’ll post something about Jesus and the importance of Donald Trump. I always read those posts. They’re short and to the point, unlike the Old Testament.

Non-fiction

Dreams Are For Goats

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I’ve met people who remember their dreams, but I’m not one of them. I wake up early and think, “Wow, that was a wild dream,” but ten minutes later, I forget what the dream was about.

But last night was different. I dreamt that my father was being carted away on a stretcher to a Ralph’s grocery store. The medics were zombies. A zombie surgeon waited inside to perform open heart surgery. My father was unconscious with his shirt open, with those suction cups attached to his chest with the EKG monitor by his side.

I begged the medics not to take him in there, but zombies wouldn’t listen.

I’ll never know what happened to my father once he was inside the Ralph’s. Sometimes dreams have sequels. Maybe I’ll go to bed tonight and have the same dream. Only this time, it’ll continue where the first dream left off.

I don’t believe I have control over my dreams. I seem to be passive in them. Some people practice lucid dreaming. There are certain rituals before bedtime to activate lucidity. One of them is to keep a dream journal. That’s all fine and dandy if one can remember what the hell they’d dreamt about. I cannot. I’m better off not dreaming at all, which is fine by me. Far too many times have I awakened from a bad dream and thought, “Holy hell, that felt real.” I can’t afford bad dreams. Life is a bad dream already. Who needs a double dose?

The only difference is life isn’t bizarre enough to where surrealism plays a factor. Except Trump was president. That was surreal in its own fashion.

A friend of mine said he once had a dream where his keys were made out of salami.

Some people claim to be dream interpreters. My old psychiatrist said he could analyze them, any of them. I dreamt that I threw up in a car in front of an Auto Zone. I was in the passenger seat, and a jerk whom I used to work with was manning the steering wheel drunk.

My psychiatrist asked me what the color of the vomit was to make sense out of the dream.

I made up the color because I didn’t remember. ”It was yellow,” I said.

”It means you fear you’ll lose control.”

I thought I could’ve figured that out on my own. But I said, “Wonderful insight, doctor.”

Anyway, my dreams have never enhanced my life. They’re just disturbances in my sleep. I wouldn’t mind if I never dreamt again.

Non-fiction

Random Thoughts About Serial Killers.

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I sometimes wonder how a killer comes to be. Is it a person who was raised not so well? I guess there comes a time when people just go nuts and kill a bunch of other people at a park or a museum. People are fascinated by these killers. Television shows present them as nefariously godlike creatures who are somehow special over all of us.

There was a show in which a famous host devoted time to interview a man who was indicted for a bunch of murders. Apologetic was the killer and polite as well, and even more polite than you or me. It came as a surprise. I didn’t think he had it in him, but apologies aside, he still committed murder in the worst degree, in which he lured a bunch of women to his car. The seventies were when the murders took place. And now the killer sits in prison for the remainder of his life. What thoughts ran through his head before he chose to kill them? At least he showed his honesty, displaying no remorse. It made me angry. I don’t watch those shows too often.

Like I said, some people are obsessed. Perhaps they’re too concerned with how they feel. What if they worry that they might have intent to kill? And so they watch and watch the interviews to make quite sure that they’re not murderers.

I wonder if a killer sits at home and watches shows like these. Suppose Ted Bundy used to watch the interviews of incarcerated murderers out of interest, not idolatry. Or he idolized them after all. Who knows? It’s hard to think he would. I can’t imagine killers of his nature watching television anyway.

Non-fiction

Another One of Those Days

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Here I sit in the coffee shop, another feckless bore, typing on an iPad. That’s right. Ha ha. I’m typing with a keyboard for an iPad instead of touching the screen a bunch of times like most people with iPads do. That’s because I bought a keyboard from Best Buy. They makes those now. I find it easier to write with an iPad for some reason, similar to when I’m texting someone on an iPhone. The words come out more fluidly. I don’t feel the need to censor myself or get uptight about things. It’s just like I’m texting my neighbor. Meet me at the pond by eight. There, that’s it.

I dream big dreams as I’m typing, but I won’t tell anyone what those dreams are. It’s my dirty little secret, you see? If I tell everyone, the dream might not come true. And then what? More medication for me to take? 400 milligrams of Gabapentin, 300 milligrams of Trileptal, 1 milligram of Klonopin, 15 milligrams of Abilify, however many milligrams of Adderall. I may have forgotten some. In a perfect world, I’m taking none of that crap. But I need it to keep me going. I take amino acids to reduce the withdrawal symptoms because I’m getting off one of those drugs. My doctor says she’ll prescribe me something that will lift my interest in activities again. As of now, there aren’t many that bring me joy. I work my dead end job, take a walk, and go to sleep. Those are how my days transpire.

Now and then, I’ll have a day off. Like next week, I’ll see the dentist on Monday. Wednesday is Juneteenth, so my boss told me to go ahead and take Tuesday off as well. There’s no use in working on Tuesday and taking Wednesday off again. So I’ll work only two days—Thursday and Friday. And then I’ll take the whole week off after that.

It’s for my birthday when I’ll turn the ripe old age of forty-seven. I’ll drive to Goleta where my favorite coffee shop is and stay for the night, and then I’ll drive to see my parents in Avila Beach the day after. I’ve been to Avila only once or twice in my life. My parents swear by it because of how gorgeous the weather is. They just want to escape from the triple-digit heat here in the desert. I don’t blame them, but something tells me Avila Beach will be overrated. I’ll stay there for a few nights. The drive there is over four hours. That’s why I’ll stay in Goleta for two nights: on the way there and on the way back. That way, I can break the trip up into an hour-and-a-half drive and a three hour drive.

And then the Fourth of July is the week after. So you can say I have it pretty easy for the next few weeks. But it’s back to a full week on the week afterward. Oh, well. Nothing lasts forever. What else do I have to look forward to? Nothing, really.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop, and nothing interesting is happening. I see the same old men sitting at the long table in the middle: the guy who looks like an Italian hitman, the guy with the tattoos on his neck who rides a wheelchair. Who knows what they talk about? The nice old man in the corner who always smiles at his iPad as if he’s looking at some endearing pictures of his family. The same baristas I see almost every morning, hustling about behind the counter. And me, trying not to be nosy, but I can’t help myself.

Non-fiction

Dumb

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I always figured I was dumb, not the smartest boy in class. They gave me C grades out of pity. I didn’t understand what I read while other kids thrived at the same material. The faculty held me back in remedial classes.

I remember the basement in the hall back in high school. That was where those classes were. I didn’t belong there either. I didn’t belong anywhere. I was unique like that. There were no windows. The gum was on the walls. Graffiti stained them, too. Who the hell did I belong with then? Certainly not the gifted kids. They took the GATE classes. Gifted And Talented Education. I had friends who took those classes. It was hard to relate to them when their education was so much higher.

But my mother called the school and told the principal to pull me out of those remedial classes. It was for the better. The most humiliating class was the woodshop because we had to build little bookshelves for the teachers and give them to them. Or the other shop where we had to make coffee mugs. We didn’t learn anything except a trade. And I imagine a lot of those kids grew up to become students at trade schools. Good for them because they’d acquired a skill for a career while I went to a junior college and a state school for my higher learning.

It didn’t get me far. I did, however, take internships. But they didn’t pay me, and they never got me anywhere in the company. So I moved back home without luck finding a job. Maybe I was too dumb. I could never formulate a resume. I didn’t know what skills I had, if I had any. My self-esteem was too low.

My psychiatrist said I thought I was incompetent when I really wasn’t, but I didn’t trust him. I really did think I was incompetent, and I still do. I have a job, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I pretend to know. I’m pretty good at that.

But anyway, being dumb has its perks. I accept less responsibility because people pass me up when they need something, and I can just stand and watch other people work. And maybe I’ll leave early.

When I leave somewhere, like AA meetings, I don’t stick around to stack the chairs. It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s that I don’t know how to do it. How do you stack a chair? I tried it once, and I couldn’t fit it onto the chair beneath it. It kept falling off, so I said forget it.

So here I am, dumb as can be. And I’m not alone. Dumb people surround the world. They’re all about. If you don’t believe me, visit any social media site and read the comments. People don’t know how to spell bike for Christ’s sake. At least I’m not that dumb, but I’m not too far off.

Non-fiction

My Reading List

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I read a book last year about how to read, and I didn’t get the message. But it contained a list of books to read before I die, and the list is vast. It has been well over half a year since I read it, and I’m only in the Fs.

The author had posted the list in alphabetical order. Most of the novels are tough to read, especially Jane Austen’s, Brontë’s, Gustave Flaubert’s, to name a few. Reading them was like reading the label on a bug spray can. Not to take away from their artistic achievements, but goddamn they were dense. The paragraphs continued for a page, or at times, a page and a half, and the sentences were full of semicolons.

British authors in the nineteenth century loved to use the word paroxysm for some reason or countenance instead of looks or facial expression—words I would never use in everyday speech. But again, I respect their achievements, even when I’m thinking about what I’m supposed to buy at the grocery store later while I’m reading them.

One author, however, stole my attention. Her name is Jane Bowles, and her novel is Two Serious Ladies. Her language was so direct, and it sounded as if she was telling me the story while I was going to bed. Now she was an effective writer. Nothing pretentious. No need to keep a dictionary nearby.

In Southern California, we have In-N-Out Burger. The menu is simple: hamburger, cheeseburger, double-double, fries, soda, milkshake. That’s it. (There’s a secret menu, too, but for the sake of this comparison, we won’t go there). Bowles’s prose is as direct as that menu. No crispy chicken sandwich, no onion rings, or bacon avocado burger, nothing like that. It’s needless to say, I recommend Two Serious Ladies to anyone who wants to read a novel that carries them along instead of stopping them and forcing them to look up the word countenance for the thirteenth time because they’ve forgotten the meaning seconds after looking it up.

Again, I respect Austen, Brontë, and Flaubert, not to mention Dickens—whom I tried to read for a chapter but just couldn’t stomach the language. Dostoevsky gets my respect, too. I read Crime and Punishment all the way through, but I won’t lie and say I knew exactly what was happening in the story because of my ADHD. I take Adderall, and even that won’t help with reading the goddamn book.

Raymond Carver was another author whom I could read effortlessly, although a lot of his stories bored me. He would write paragraphs about someone opening his refrigerator and drinking from a bottle of milk. It was plain and easy to understand, but what the hell?

Right now, I’m reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It’s easier to understand than the aforementioned classic British, French, and Russian authors, but it’s still a challenge because Franzen tried to fit as much description and exposition in each sentence as I got lost in translation. But it’s still an enjoyable novel. At least I think I know what’s going on.

My hope is that, in this vast list of books to read, I will find another writer like Jane Bowles. I got to. There’s no way I won’t.

Non-fiction

Just a Wednesday

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I wake up and bemoan at the fact that it’s just the middle of the week. It’s difficult to adjust after a short vacation, but now I work all five days. Next week will also be a full week, and then the next two weeks will be short weeks for my birthday. I just hope nothing disastrous happens today, tomorrow, or Friday to totally sabotage my weekend. And disaster usually does strike in some form from my job. I keep telling myself not to let whatever occurs bother me. It’s easy as a reminder.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop. They’ve installed a TV with a styrofoam sheet covering it for some reason. And there’s a green pen lying on the floor with a straw wrapper lying next to it. The old lady with her dog on the pink leash has walked in and found herself a table. The dog wags its tail quickly and snoops around for any crumbs. She wears a red top with honeycomb designs on it, white cotton pants, and pink running shoes. Her dog is hyperactive. Customers walk by and pet it.

There’s a newspaper on the table in the middle of the shop. I didn’t even think they had newspapers anymore, but someone apparently was reading it.

An email came yesterday from WordPress saying a new version is coming, and I would have to change my interface, or else my website won’t function properly. I don’t know what that means. The email instructed me on what to do, and I followed those instructions, just hoping for a positive outcome. The last thing I need is for this website to lose its functionality.

It’s almost seven in the morning. A long day is ahead of me. I have to field inbound calls for my job. Who knows what personality will be on the other end? I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I have to, so I have no choice.

Wednesdays, ugh. At least tomorrow is the street fair in Palm Springs. I wander through it after work and never buy anything. It’s usually trinkets and junk food: two things I can’t afford to have. But the street fair seems so far away.

It’s all based on perception. Time is different from perception. At one moment, time moves quickly, but at another moment, time moves slowly enough to where it freezes, and I stare at the clock, waiting for the next minute to pass.

Not much is happening at the beginning of June. Summer starts. Boredom sets in. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. Summer used to be something to look forward to when I was in school. Now, with work year-round, what else is there to look forward to but dinner?

I eat tacos every night. That’s all I know how to cook. I suppose I could cook a steak, but I need a grill for that, and my kitchen can’t fit one with all the other stuff in there.

Anyway, it’s just Wednesday, and I’m spent. Maybe I’ll rearrange my shoes in the closet.

Non-fiction

Writing on a Laptop.

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It still feels funny to me, writing on this laptop. I write in longhand every morning, and it’s tiring tiring tiring. But that was how they used to do it back before the typewriter. It’s hard to imagine people used to write letters to each other rather than send text messages or emails.

I don’t know why it feels weird. It must be that it’s artificial. I can produce with a hand and a pen in a different sort of way. My thoughts are copied quicker on this machine than they are with a pen and paper, but that doesn’t make it better. It makes it lazier.

I copy my stories from longhand. The problem is I can’t read my own friggin’ handwriting. It’s as sloppy as spaghetti. My alphabetical letters look like squashed insects. Squashed black insects because of the black ink. I choose not to write with blue ink every morning when I journal.

Some people are opposed to journaling. I don’t understand them. How do they jump right out to writing without warming up? That would be like skipping stretching.

Journaling is hard work. I usually write the same crap every day, but I know better not to show it to anyone. No one would want to read it anyway. They would think, “My god, what is this person doing?” Or “Lock this person up.” Yes, some morbid thoughts intrude in the morning. They’re distracted as the day continues by worries such as my job. I would rather keep those thoughts and bottle them up for later, but they dissipate like dreams. Then I’m stuck with dull thoughts, like what shall I do later?

I’m reading a book. I’m always reading a book, except my ADHD doesn’t allow me to focus. The books I read are long, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Damn, it’s long and dense. I have no idea what I’m reading.

But anyway, my laptop is a fountain of activity. I use everything for it, it seems, as it pertains to writing. But I can’t just dive into it without my stretches. I have to get loose, and this is one way of doing it. If only I could read my own handwriting, I could write a whole book that I copied by longhand.

But no. I have to do it the hard, unnatural way, and that’s by jamming these keys with these fingers and pressing ENTER every time I finish a thought. That’s right. I space it out like a weirdo and then go back and form these paragraphs to fit the prose together.

What’s the proper way to form a paragraph? Do I even know, or do I just make an attempt? I never diagram sentences. They never taught me how to do it. When I was in high school, they showed me how to outline, which was the worst thing they could’ve done. I’m terrible at outlining. A. Ab. Ab1 Ba1. How much more confusing can it get? I always skipped the process and dove right into the writing.

Of course, my mother would help. She showed me a short story I’d written in elementary school. It was obvious that she’d helped me. I didn’t have such a rich vocabulary when I was eight, but she swore I’d written it on my own. Yeah, right. But I guess I’ll take the credit.

Anyway, this laptop has saved a lot of time and effort. I just wish I was born in the age of the typewriter. It would’ve taught me much more discipline. I would’ve had to toss the page after a typo and start all over, not simply tap DELETE. Oh, well.

Non-fiction

What I Miss…

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What I missed about the bars were the unexpected faces I would see whenever I walked in. The women would sit on their stools with their large purses on the counter. The men would grip their glasses as if they were pulling the clutch of their automobiles. The bartender would polish the glasses and hold them up to the lights to see if they had wiped off every blemish.

“What’re you having?” they would ask me.

Those were the new bartenders. I always felt discouraged when facing the new ones because the old ones knew what I wanted. They wouldn’t have to ask. As soon as I entered the bar, the familiar bartender would begin to make my vodka soda, and I would sit on my usual stool after work. From then on, it was happy drinking until I blacked out. Yes, those were times that were simpler, I suppose.

What I miss are the karaoke bars. There was one on Sepulveda–it’s still around, but I forgot its name–where people sang every night. I would sit in the back patio near a fish tank, chain-smoking with my vodka, listening to other people’s conversations since I would sit there alone. Weird me would type their words in my notepad on my iPhone for later if I had any use for them. Shit, I might’ve. A blues band played in that bar every weekend. They were loud, but they never bothered me.

What I miss is the bar on Cahuenga and Wilcox, I think, which was owned by the same people who owned my favorite watering hole. It had a fireplace in the back smoking lounge, where I would stare at the flames and contemplate what to do with myself. This was me in my early thirties. I was high all the time when I went there, and then I would get drunk. The bartender was lovely. I forgot her name, too, but she was an older lady with purple hair who always loved to see me. She knew what I drank. I downed whiskey there for some reason, not vodka. It was self-medicating. Why lie? I was all alone with no friends, reminiscing about the times when I did have them around.

What I miss is the bar-hopping from one bar to the next in Hollywood. We would always start out west on Sunset at a western bar with a mechanical bull which drunk people would ride and fall off of. And then we would work our way eastbound, closer to where we lived, to bars that were less packed. I remember we would drink at Chateau Marmont, a place where some famous people had died because of an overdose.

What I miss are the afterparties at my friend’s apartment. He would always let me crash there on his couch. I didn’t need to take a taxi home. This was before Uber and Lyft. I would wake up on Saturday and Sunday with a gargantuan hangover. My car would be parked somewhere on his street, which was permit parking only, and I would stagger to it in the morning like it was the walk of shame without the sex with a strange woman. Sometimes I would get a ticket, or sometimes I was lucky. I always had to hurry before the parking enforcer would show up.

Speaking of women, what I miss are the one-night stands in my late twenties/early thirties. Those will never come back again. We all went through them before we settled down. And we always had stories to tell to our closest friends–good or bad.

But what I miss the most are my earliest days of drinking: the first shot I ever took in that small town with the woman I was dating. Or the short time later, when my cousin drove me to Vegas, and we drank and drank and drank and hardly did any gambling. We’d come there to drink because I’d just turned twenty-one. Those days will never ever come back. Now I’m surrounded by death on the same street as I’m walking. People close to me will begin to die when I wake up sober each morning. It’s a sober life from here on out, a bittersweet beginning and ending. There hasn’t been a lot to miss. Except it feels better not to wake up hungover. I drink my coffee and still smoke cigarettes, but I’ve given up drugs and alcohol and the times I’ve had with them. There’s no hiding from the fact that I miss those younger days. But what will I do? Go back to where I was? No. It’s too late. If I go back, there would be no coming back. That’s what I worry about the most. I miss it too much.

Non-fiction

My Four-Year-Old Laptop

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My laptop has endured a lot of hell. I don’t treat it as well as I should. There are scratches and smudge prints all across the screen. When the sun glares on it when I sit outside, I can’t see much of it. I have to move somewhere in the shade.

But I’m typing this in a coffee shop where it’s colder than a refrigerator. It’s windy in the desert, so it’s freezing outside at seven in the morning.

I’ve survived many laptops. Most of them were Windows computers that lasted no more than three years. They would get viruses for no reason, so I would have to replace them with the next janky Windows computer.

Then my dad suggested I just buy Apple products from there on out. I haven’t had one die except for that one time when I used the wrong screen cleaner, and it destroyed the screen to where I couldn’t see it anymore.

That led me to this machine, which I bought during COVID. It has stood the test of time.

I get post-traumatic stress when it comes to my laptop. I protect it as if it’s sacred because of one time when I went to feed my girlfriend’s cat in East Hollywood. It took me three hours to clean up what the cat had done to her apartment.

When I came back out, I discovered my laptop (a Windows) missing from my backseat. All of my work was on that machine — I believe it was a Dell. I’d never saved any of it to an external hard drive. All those years of hard work were in the hands of a thief.

I began to cry on the street adjacent to Paramount Studios, where I was hoping someday I would get to send my unsolicited screenplay only to have it thrown in the trash.

After crying, I drove to the Hollywood police station a few blocks away to do the only thing and report my missing laptop. The policeman blew the steam off his coffee.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

“Go find it.”

“You got a slim-to-none chance, pal.”

I knew I did, but I was desperate and hysterical.

Needless to say, they never found the laptop. I don’t even think they looked. I filled out the police report anyway, but the time it took me to do so was a waste. The thief had probably already sold it by then.

What valuable lesson did I learn after that incident? Never leave my laptop unattended in the backseat of my car in East Hollywood — or anywhere, for that matter. Protect it as if it’s my child. I did neither. I trusted the world at the time, in my early thirties.

Now I’m hypervigilant. I’ll drive with the laptop in my backseat and constantly check to see if the bag is still there. If I don’t feel safe, I’ll move it to the front seat, as if a thief could’ve been hiding, took my laptop, and jumped out the window without me knowing. Or somehow, I’d absentmindedly left it at the coffee shop where I was driving back from.

And I’ll constantly stick my hands in the bag to make sure the laptop is there as if it had fallen out somewhere without my awareness.

It’s a brain disease, but that’s how much I value this laptop. I value many things in life, and more than half of them are objects: my laptop, my iPhone, my Xbox, my clothes, my Toyota, and my apartment. All of them are vulnerable to theft or damage.

I don’t know how much longer my laptop will last—maybe another year or so if I’m lucky—but it contains so much valuable stuff that I can’t stand to lose it or have it break down.

Anyway, like I said, it’s a cold morning in the desert. I have goosebumps on my arms. My fingertips are numb. I just devoured an egg and bacon sandwich on an English muffin, and I feel full afterward as I type away on this thing. I’m worried that the grease on my fingers will damage the keyboard. The keyboard is full of sand after typing in a sandstorm out here several weeks back. I’m afraid to clean it because I might use the wrong chemicals.

Then what?

It could break down.

At least my files are stored in a cloud somewhere, so I won’t have to worry about an external hard drive. Everything is stored in a cloud these days. Where are these clouds? Are clouds completely safe? I don’t believe they are. Nothing is safe.