I got the shakes, Hubski.

Chronologically speaking this is when I always get the shakes. It's that point where I've been in LA too long and I start accidentally calling it "home" and I look at real estate because sweet jesus there has to be a better way to live. It's that point where my daughter has gotten used to me being gone, where my wife starts sending me shots of milk that will still be good when I make it back, when I start figuring out who else I want to see before I bug the fuck out. It's that part where I add up how much better I have it than anybody else and then recognize how much this sucks and then stare into the abyss of how much everyone else's life is filled with hardship and suffering that they don't fucking deserve, goddamn it.

Because I lead a charmed life. I truly do. I was looking at tax returns today (self-reported income! increase your credit limit on the card! No credit report pulled!) and I make now about what I made five years out of college. About what I made at my last real jobby-job. About what I made 12 years ago. But I make it in about 4 months. Those four months are killer, though. It's about 80dB in here from the air conditioning and I'm 8800 miles on a bicycle. Semi-drunk girl approached me a few weeks ago - "you ride that? On the bike path? Down by the river? Isn't it dangerous?" I've only been hit by a car three times, the guy with the pool cue swung and missed, and I don't think the kids with the taser were serious. I've ridden past a dead body and two shootings but the only crimes I've seen in progress were drug deals and taggings. Roommate spilled detergent all over the laundry room floor because there was a spider - you know spiders? He looked at me. I told him once you've had a rat claw his way into your shorts you don't care so much about spiders.

But that's a choice. I could get an apartment closer to work. Apparently it would only cost me $3k a month. I could buy a place - that'd only be between 500 and 800k. Pretend I could buy it outright. The property taxes and HOA fees would be more than my mortgage up north. People live like this.

Had a Lyft driver last week. Full pension Navy. Built Stealth Bombers for Northrup. Drives Lyft to pay off his daughter's student loans. Had a Lyft driver this week. Full pension Marines. Panama, Kosovo, Iraq twice. Guarded Rumsfeld's Folly. Apparently seeing pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills disappear into the Iraqi desert will fuck you up - dude lost 1 1/2 legs and what he was most focused on was the money.

No idea why he was driving. It didn't come up.

I think what's fucking me up is I figured out my imaginary friends are dicks. See, I play Destiny to get away because it's prettier than this shithole and I don't like golf. Shooting imaginary aliens takes some of the edge off. But it's time for new DLC so there's lots of scrambling for bullshit. So I'm trying for bullshit. And some of the bullshit requires you to kill other players in a very particular way over and over and over again and I don't suck at PVP? But I'm not great. And it's so.fucking.sweaty in there right now. If I were to pull off this feat, on top of the 20hrs of bullshit I've already done, I get magic armor. Except I don't. I have to repeat the whole affair to get magic armor. Except I don't. I have to repeat it again to get magic armor. If you do this three times - once for every character you can play - you get a magic space ship. You can't fly it, of course. It's a load screen. That's it. The only people who will ever see it are the people you go play PVP with. And in my pursuit of trying to get my first run of not-so-magic armor I've run across guys with the magic space ship dozens of times.

I'm playing against people who have done what I'm trying to do nine times over. Where do they find the time? I mean, obviously. It's summer and they're 14. But I guess goddamn. At least I built models. Of course it gets easier if you play a lot of PVP because then you get a magic gun that makes it easier to kill normies in PVP. And I've been dying a lot to that gun. And it kind of makes my chosen neighborhood - that place that I hang out that isn't here - a hostile shithole. Much like the place I actually live.

Is it worth 8 months off if four of them are like this? I mean, duh. Of course it is. But is it? I mean, I got a pension. But will I? There's one outfit insuring all the pensions. And if they have to do it you get 50 cents on the dollar. And there's 20 years for the 'boomers to suck this shit dry and if the rescue fund is dead then what and fuckin' hell if I were to bet on anything. And that's pensions. How 'bout social security? How 'bout the 80% of Americans that don't have enough saved? Guess what, kids, the oldsters that are supposed to retire so you can have their jobs? They're gonna fuckin' die in their cubicles. Hope you enjoy being a Loss Retention Analyst 1 for the next 30 years. Or until the computers can do it better. Lyft is hiring except in New York.

I saw Roofdog tonight. Roofdog lives across the street. He comes out onto the roof of the not-quite-garage and barks at you (the house is built perilously on a hill, like most half the fucking houses in this ghetto-ass neighborhood). Roofdog pleases me, more than Morning Rooster, more than Shitcat. I think it's because Roofdog is a totem for the third-world bullshit I'm living with my first-world problems, first class flights and ratburn, burnouts and Bentleys.

They rounded up all the homeless. Because of course they did. They won't tell you that, though. Didn't make the news. Anaheim cleared their homeless out and faced no blowback so LA did it on the DL. No hotels needed. Prolly a public vagrancy/public trespass bust, followed by some Greyhound therapy. And nobody's come at me with a pool cue since but it don't sit right.

Driving Lyft 50 hours a week to pay his daughter's student loans.

The rich fuckers talk of a "Great Reset" where we turn all the debt to zero and start all over again. That's where everything we owe we suddenly don't owe anymore. That's where everything we're owed we suddenly don't get anymore. What a selfish fucking concept. It's hard being me. Sometimes I can barely pull it off. But its so much harder being someone else. And there are so many someone elses and they're working so hard and they're getting nowhere and $3k a month for a 1200sqft 2br where it gets to 108 degrees in summer and my neighbor manages a grocery store and when September comes he doesn't get to leave. He doesn't get to go back where the trees are. He stays here with Roofdog and he's fuckin' winning. Greyhound therapy. Some of those guys had been there fifteen years.

Fifteen years.