Watching your neighbor doing Sunday yard work you can almost see the self-righteous thought bubbles about the value of hard work floating above his head, played in his dad’s voice.

Like it or not, every thought or action is essentially a prayer.

Apparently it’s The Summer of Josh Brolin. If one is to fully engage in contemporary life, one needs to grapple with the notion of Josh Brolin-ness.

A great artist and an excruciating bore.

Some things should not be photographed or described, lest they be reduced to photographs or descriptions.

He had lately been spending as much time as possible in the company of animals. No animal had ever ridiculed him, nor regarded him with pity, scorn, or disappointment. Well, possibly disappointment. He could live with that.

An unfinished novel, left along a road, picked apart by crows.

He remembered the results of a study finding that over 50% of people you consider friends don’t reciprocate. Although in his case this was more or less irrelevant, he still found it depressing.

A feral hyena pack in a feeding frenzy, heads buried up to the neck in carcass of the New America.

He may have been a shit, but he objected to the word “total.”

A summer day in the late sixties. The rusted 409 is up on blocks next to the driveway. Dad is out back drinking and rage-mowing under a blackening sky. It feels like something bad is about to happen. Within a few months you’ll be hitching to LA. You think you’ll be able to outrun your sadness, but in this life you can’t outrun anything.

God always has a plan, and that plan is for random stuff to happen.