This journal is about strung-out dirty fucks, bookstores, and comics.
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I tend to be more of a people listener than a people watcher. I let others make up stories and histories for strangers they see across the street; the gentleman dressed in velour at the coffee shop or the woman pushing an empty stroller in a parking lot past midnight. I’ll bet that person’s name is Lola. See that woman sitting in the passenger seat of the minivan? Her name has to be Lola. Or Lorna. Something like that. Or, I’ll stake my life – my life, gun to my head – that the guy sitting on the park bench? His name is not Bartholomew. No chance. If that guy’s name is Bart, I die. Simple as that.

I’d rather finish conversations I half hear. In the span of half a block yesterday I heard/witnessed the following:

A girl, no older than 20, absolutely bawling on the steps leading up to the parking lot of McDonald’s on Haight and Stanyan. A complete wreck, tears streaming down her face, pleading earnestly with the skateboard-wielding scruffy-bearded guy sitting beside her.

Guy: “Answer me! Are you going to bite? Are you!?!”
Girl: “I – I (sob) don’t (sniff snort) know. I don’t know!”

They were positioned directly beneath the window advertisement that read “We Got Your Big Mac Right Here.” Seemed to belong in a belligerent vegetarian video for a forgotten Radiohead b-side.

Around the corner a fellow in a knit cap and camouflage pants was holding court in front of an entranced audience, gleefully relating a piece of an anecdote I came too late to fully appreciate. His friends were in near-hysterics, as I’m sure I would have been had I heard any more of his story. What I caught was funny enough.

Guy: “And then Johnny’s balls sucked right up into his asshole man!”

Funniest part? These guys know somebody named “Johnny.”

And just past Amoeba, two nouveau-street urchins were arguing. They were each on their own bicycles, facing different directions. The guy with the dirty face was irritated, and the guy with the even dirtier face was just plan pissed.

Dirty: “When? When?”
Dirtier: “When? Are you serious? You dropped my shit in the street right before we got to the tunnel, looked over your shoulder and shot me a smiley and took off!”
Dirty: “Fuck –“
Dirtier: “Fuck!”

They didn’t shoot any more smileys at each other but punctuated their respective f-bombs with some very defiant and pronounced pedaling away from each other. A forceful right foot and ass in the air can be just as emphatic as a doorslam when given the proper context. Try it yourself.

I have no legitimate segue for the next bit of my journal entry. Chastise away.



I love Green Apple Books. I’m not in there as much as I used to be, but I am still reminded, on every visit, how much I love the place. I loved getting lost in there as a kid, memorizing images from books of Japanese eroticism so I could re-create them in my science notebook and sell them to fellow seventh-graders for a quarter. I often wonder how many of mom’s paperbacks that I sold there, before they started asking for a signed letter of permission from an adult (a letter I, of course, had no chance of obtaining since all sales of used or gently-read novels had been executed without her knowledge) are still squirreled away on some rickety old shelf in the annex. I love being able to find, each and every time I go in there, exactly what I am looking for.

Yesterday my girlfriend found this.



Used, no less. And after coming up empty in three other shops, including two large chain stores both of which were ridiculously understaffed and criminally overstocked with Oprah’s crap. For the record, I don’t avoid internet hustles like Amazon or bn.com because of any attempt at middle-fingering corporate warehouse America, I simply have no patience and, when I want something, want it immediately. Fuck UPS.

I found this.



David B’s Epileptic is actually surprisingly available in bookstores everywhere (published by Pantheon; the same fine folks that brought Ware's Jimmy Corrigan to the world at large). The problem, however, is finding a copy that doesn’t have a tear in the dustjacket. The black cover is actually die-cut to display the image in yellow background underneath. I’m sorry for displaying my anality here, but if I’m dropping 25 bones on a comic, I don’t want the cover all cocked up.

I first discovered David B’s work at a bookstore in Italy almost four years ago. Europeans being much more open to comics as a veritable literary medium than Americans, this guy’s work was already popular even in its original French. The kind of attention given to James Patterson’s new Diary at a San Lorenzo Borders was instead heaped on folks like Hugo Pratt, Lewis Trondheim, and David B.



Here in the States we have Free Comic Day. If you remembered, you could have popped into your neighborhood Card and Comic b.o. burrow this past Saturday and grabbed a free edition of The New Teen Titans. Or something super spiffy like that. Hey. We’re trying. Everybody do me a favor and buy one funny book this week. Doesn’t have to be fucking Spiegelman or a Sandman trade. Give in to the flash and glitz. Make it a one-time guilty pleasure. And then, one day, when stereotypes have been re-written and expectations evolved, folks will freely walk around explaining why Ghost World is the best comic book movie ever made in one breath, and exulting the casting of Christian Bale as Batman in the next.

Oh what a world that would be.