Gored my neck, don't spare me death.

EDIT: I just moved from Los Angeles to a little town in western PA, near Altoona, and I'm not re-writing this whole thing. I have absolutely no idea where I am, but I'll be here for a while... maybe longer. Why I am here is family stuff... my dad and half-brother live in the area. Dad is old as shit, high-mileage, approaching dementia, decided to have a kid at fifty, etc. You've heard the story. I hadn't seen the brother since he was a baby, and he's in high school now, so that's cool. I can mentor him on how to be a neurotic, peripatetic artist. Hopefully he has other role models. Wow, this is so personal! I should really save some of this conversation for coffee and pie.

Words and sentences. There should be some artistic merit (and there is, in SPADES), and it would be cool if someone published my shit when it's done because then I could buy new socks. Inhale, hold indefinitely. A graphic novel, maybe. I guess probably everyone says that kind of shit in this city. I won't mention it again.

My name's Levi. I was born in Annapolis, MD and grew up nearby on the Chesapeake Bay. My grandfather was a waterman. I attended some of the most prestigious community colleges on the east coast. Fine institutions, all of them. Coughed up and spat out by NYC. Film school in Orlando, lived there for ten years. I miss the weirdness of FL but this town's not short on the bizzarre.

Anyway, L.A. now. I don't have a car and I'm not buying one, either, so don't give me any shit. I just don't like driving, especially around here. I might get an old Harley or ride around on a Luck Dragon. I'm probably going to enroll in CalArts next spring, just to waste a few more years of my time and accrue an even more insurmountable debt. We'll see.

Alliteration. Sentence fragments. Spelling bees. Cooking and eating. Sticking up for friends only to alienate them with my solipsistic bullshit. Metaphors and similes. Balderdash, the best game ever created. Consuming tremendous quantities of beer in a single sitting. Cleaning the house to clean out my head. Surreptitious panic attacks on public transportation.

is that I don't have a necktat of a rodent. I have some in other places, but I almost don't even want to talk about it. I guess I kind of just did, though. I don't have a goiter.

When I was a kid I liked Ferdinand, Rikki Tikki Tavi and The Wind in the Willows. Now I'm more curmudgeonly and like Journey to the End of the Night, Moravagine and Tropic of Cancer. Typical dude stuff, I know. L'Etranger and L'Homme Revolte. Sartre's Nausea. The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. Crime and Punishment and all Dostoevsky. Lolita. The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. A Portrait of the Artist. I like Genet a lot, stylistically, but all the man on man buttsex gets a little intense. He wrote Our Lady of the Flowers on toilet paper while in jail. Twice. That's inspirational. Kathy Acker is great. I (not obligatorily because I was in L.A.) just read all of John Fante's work for the first time, which I loved.

Arrested Development and Mr. Show... really anything David Cross has been in that didn't involve computer-generated chipmunks. The first four seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, particularly "The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis." Damages. I don't watch all that much TV. I threw one out the window in Orlando once after I came home from a bar that opens at 7 a.m. It was a VCR combo, actually. I had just smoked some DMT. Don't worry, you can't find that shit now so your new flatscreen is safe.

I like Primer a lot. Godard, particularly Pierrot le Fou... definitely Nouvelle Vague-obsessed. Anything by Truffaut and most Louis Malle. Cassavetes. 8 1/2. Five Easy Pieces. Paris, Texas. Vertigo and most Hitchcock. I also like Point Break, Bloodsport and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and none of these ironically), so hopefully the snobbery levels out. And the Toxic Avenger (of course).

Some of my favorite albums are The Ugly Organ, Domestica and Burst and Bloom by Cursive, TIMTHY and Oxeneers by These Arms are Snakes, Cheap Shots/Youth Anthems by Kid Dynamite, Read Music/Speak Spanish by Desaparecidos, In Casino/Out, Vaya and Relationship of Command by At the Drive-In, Televise by Calla, Hidden World by Fucked Up, Teen Dream by Beach House, Dummy by Portishead, Embrace self-titled, Exploded Drawing and Today's Active Lifestyles by Polvo, Elliott Smith's first one, White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, The Cat and the Cobra and Inches by Les Savy Fav, Yank Crime by Drive Like Jehu, Crystal Castles II + III, Endtroducing by DJ Shadow, HaHa Sound by Broadcast, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Midnight Marauders and The Low-End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, Punk in Drublic by NOFX, Slip and Manic Compression by Quicksand, After the Gold Rush and Harvest by Neil Young, 13 Songs, Steady Diet of Nothing and Repeater by Fugazi, The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden, Live it Out by Metric, Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Everybody's Mouth's a Book by Henry Threadgill and most Dylan. Just a start.

Cheese. Grilled Muenster with onion + breath mints. Spaghetti and meatballs, meatballs stuffed with goat cheese. Pad Thai. Bulgogi. I hope I don't have mercury poisoning, but I'm not embarrassed about eating sardines. I will eat an entire tin of anchovies. I also eat all the weird Goya shit like octopus and squid in ink sauce. Bread is amazing. The best thing about I-4 through Orlando is smelling the Merita factory. It's seriously boner-inducing. I have yet to find an L.A. analogue for it. If you happen to smell like the Merita factory, please do contact me immediately. Never mind, that's weird. Take a shower.

Nutella, draught Guinness, Pepto Bismol, Kava Kava, Fluffernutter sandwiches, frozen bananas, the Baltimore Orioles, ibuprofen. They shouldn't give you all of this space for only six things.

Existentialism. Gastritis. Aborted fetuses. Pizza.

Straight illin.

Dead men tell no tales.

You don't have a pseudo-sexual relationship with your housepet (I love animals). You don't wear t-shirts from shitty 80's hair bands that you've probably never listened to (or should be embarrassed of if you continue to) because you think it's ironic. You've never referred to yourself as fierce. You've never shot smack into your genitals with a needle you borrowed from a guy named Vincent who hangs out in laundromats. If you don't think I sound like a douchebag, because I'm really pretty nice, just sort of cynical. Very cynical, but I would rather laugh than complain. Like the kind of person that requires extreme focus right now to avoid slathering you in platitudinous tripe about how I never thought I would make this staggering, bathetic descent into the world of OkCupid. Whatever, here I am so let's make memories.