Bad times in Los Angeles town. My bootleg wireless bit the dust, sending me into the Mercury Retrograde hell of Internet Access Disaster. A story too boring to summarize with sarcasm. Like an old friend of the blog once sang, “I wanna make a movie, so let’s star in it together. Don’t make a move til I say action. Here comes the hardcore life.”

So? What’s been the haps, paps?

The usual: writing, reading Wuthering Heights for the third time, talking boy poets down from ledges. The Freak Kingdom, its discontents and la casa de Kobek. What we do and how we do it.

I had a birthday. I’m thirty! My old pal and romantic interest, elly jonez, Escaped the Mission– which I believe was the title of a film starring Kurt Russell’s hipster second cousin– and visited the Freak Kingdom. Between anxiety attacks brought on by ferocious Concerns and Worries, she managed this photograph of my head exploding in a burst of incandescent radiance:

The Author at Thirty. Griffith Observatory. Surveying the Kingdom from on High.