If anyone reading this is in Olympia and it is not yet January fifth, could you pick up and hold onto my mail? Mostly I'm worried about the new issue of McSweeney's, which I imagine is swaddled in cardboard and sitting not in my mailbox, but in front of my door. That's the McSweeney's that comes with a DVD- you could even open it up if you wanted, as long as I knew you were doing it and you returned it. You would be breaking a federal law, and I wouldn't even care. Other federal laws you could break and I wouldn't even care include drug trafficking and sedition.

I saw King Kong. I enjoyed a lot of it, but pretty much anytime someone talks about something that could be cut from it, I agree- The subplot with the one kid on the boat, those handheld strobe shots, a few shots of Naomi Watts climbing a ladder, if the bits with the natives could be made not-racist, that'd be sweet. Jack Black actually being funny also would've been cool.

But there are parts where a giant ape is punching dinosaurs. Those are sweet.

Oh, and this is bullshit- Bank Of America has a different computer system for California, Washington, and Idaho than the rest of the country, so I can't use an ATM. When I talked to people at the bank today, they were really confused- I need to deposit money so this check I sent my landlord, post-dated for the first of January for that month's rent, can go through and not be overdrawing. I don't know if I'd be able to withdraw money. But yeah, that's something to know in case I ever visit Portland.

For Christmas I got some like fifty-five dollars worth of Barnes And Noble gift cards, maybe forty bucks cash, and a digital video camera.

I continue, I think, to alienate myself from my extended family. Or at least- I don't know, I like cash, but it's not really enough to let me live, and if anyone were to ask if I wanted something that wasn't cash I could say Thomas Pynchon's V or Home Movies DVDs or a laundry list of CDs without even really thinking about it. I don't know if when you read that list of stuff I got, you got the impression of how not fun it was to open presents. My eyes were mostly dead-eyed, because I knew about the DV camera in advance.

I go out to meals with my mom a lot, which gets annoying, just on a "holy fuck you eat out a lot" level. I start to think things like "If you ate out like only three or four times a week, and sent the money you saved to me, I would have an infinitely easier life." Maybe it's not actually that frequent, and it just feels like it to me because I never eat out anymore and I'm just like the Jewiest kid ever?

I have so little to actually complain about, I guess, in the grand scheme of things. I hope something fun (perhaps debaucherous, maybe just maniacal) happens on New Year's Eve. So frequently I am only entertaining myself and just annoying/alienating other people, and that would be a fine way to ring in the new year but I can't do it alone.

You know what would be fun? Having some kind of audio playback device on your person that just yelled shit that either you or someone else recorded at random intervals, as you were somewhere in public. By fun I maybe mean nightmarish. I would love to record one of these tapes for someone- the Brian Nicholson as Horrible Party Guest Disassociated From All Things Going On Around Him Cassette.

Maybe there'd be songs on it, too, but again: Only at random intervals. Songs like "The Classical" by The Fall, or "Gareth Brown Says" by McLusky maybe, but maybe just normal mixtape stuff like Animal Collective or Girl Talk. Imagine that braying from the inside pocket of your jacket. At the end of the tape there would maybe be a sad song, as you leave the party alone and unloved but until then it'd be all "Hey there fuck-face!"

Hey there fuck-face.