so this is my third album  and when it’s done i’m not sure where i’ll be  i just applied for a job in oakland  so that i can get in that scene  and talk to hipster kids that dress like me  and hand them my cd  and say ‘your set was great,  do you wanna book a show with me on saturday at starline?’  that job’s in data science i’m pretty good at lying  on my resume these days  ‘i’ve got arcgis, c++ and cascade’  i’ll show up hungover and staring at the ceiling  thinking back to what the world looked like  from underneath psychedelic glass ceilings  i need a golden opportunity  i need a shot at redemption  don’t wanna end up twenty-seven  forearms bleeding colors in a graveyard  i’ve got a lot to say  so laptops closed and pay attention  tear your 90s literature apart  record your daily thoughts to bandcamp  i’m keeping prisoner of myself  from an alternate dimension  asking him just how long till he fucked it up  and he answers me ‘three years’  I probably drank too much  I probably spent too much time alone  I probably smoked too much  I probably spent too much time with her  and I can hear just what they’re saying  ‘oh he’s got it made and still complains’  well it’s true I do  but I can’t help what words I end up putting on the page  and yes I know I’m not depressed  like my depression heroes, car seat and mitski  if only I could suffer like they do  then writing songs would be so easy  and I would be legitimate  to everyone who writes a tweet  about how father john misty  is this generation’s paul mccartney  no one says that because it’s not true  no offense to josh tillman just want to clarify  in case he calls me out on facebook  so I’ll float down okkervil river  eating japanese breakfast  while less than tame impalas  are killing suns and moons  in an old abandoned beach house  well my pants are red enough to raise an eyebrow  but not rad enough to matter  and my shirts are old enough to taste like campfires  but not old enough to tatter  if I collect enough mastiffs and doberman pinschers  I might make it into heaven long enough to snap a picture  to the legions of millennials who think it’s cool to be agnostic  it’s pretty cool to have no feelings, no ambitions, make no promises  and I’m a time-delayed masochist from my undergrad decisions  having cruel internal dialogues with circa fall 2011  and I am beating eighteen-year-old me to fucking death  Oregon’s not far, but if I make the drive  it will bring me much closer  to making sense of who I’d like to spend  my weekends with when sober  and I can see how it’d be if I went to Corvallis  cut trees in the forest  and built a redwood vr to kick it with t.s. elliot  left her in senior year, found someone else  who read non-fiction, liked paul thomas anderson  and put up with ut kirin breakdown hell  would I not have found myself alone at a desk  spinning data in python to get a check and pay rent  would I not have found myself alone in my head  getting kicked by a drill sergeant to light fires that spread  well I should give up and be a fucking adult  but I'd be lying to myself  and that’s just not what I’m about right now  at least not right now  why does it make me hate myself  to try to remember myself  by keeping handwritten letters on top of my shelf  from people I wrote songs about in 2012  but when I was walking through Point Reyes  alone and painted in acrylic colors  well I thought myself in circles of sinusoid yellows  threading tapestries from nothing  ripping meaning out of everyone

there's a silence that only exists alone  in the third floor bathroom of the SF Moma  and there's something in the eyes in the mirror you never noticed  and you're trying to figure out if that acid is working  cause the German impressionists brought tears to your eyes  when the details were higher resolution than real life  when the straw and acrylic melted all of your woes away  regarding how this is your last weekend living in the Bay  so you spent it alone taking drugs bought in Golden Gate  trying to glean meaning from 2010 Ezra Koenig  but the lyrics that start Diplomat's Son just so perfectly  describe where your life is three weeks before twenty-three  now everyone says that they'll drive up to visit me  so long as I get them all hammered at the housewarming  and by then it'll seem stupid to be sad to be leaving  cause all we did was get drunk and get brunch in the morning  now none of my friends are thinking about getting married  which makes more sense than making agreements  with your fifty-year-old self where you say 'okay you get twenty-three  and I'll work the desk job, I'll fill out the 1040'  and I'll try to make sure her life is better than it would be  and I'll try to make sure she doesn't regret that French party  and I'll lose all the bros in exchange for posterity  in exchange for not ever sadly regretting  how wistful you were at nineteen and twenty  when you got a tattoo and had dreams of world traveling  in exchange for photos of the Andes and India  that sees you and her smiling and meaning it at thirty-one  and not ceasing turning up, and trying to have some fun  although thirty years out fun seems like a construction  put together by google to sell simulacrums  Vonnegut bangs the earth from a coffin in Illium

so what's my bridge  and who is my Maria  and why am I not fighting in my 2016 Segovia  and who is Pablo  and is he weaker than I am  and will I be a man and shoot him when I know I have the chance  feel the burn, vote for Sanders  vote your conscious  vote against planned parenthood  (how can I vote in complex oligarchic system  when I can't even sort out why I must find meaning in my own existence?)  and when I die someone will pick up the pieces of my life  and categorize me as a wannabe-artist, romanticizing type  and if I get hit by a car  I'll tell the E.R. don't save me  cause northern California doesn't need  another M.S. in civil engineering  who works in consulting  and dates a cute Asian girl  well it's all so fucking cliche  it makes me embarrassed to be myself  I am not a muslim  but I was once I believe  I was married in the Hadhramaut in 1933  to the daughter of a sultan from a southeastern wadi  before the R.A.F. came swooping in to save me from disease  down with the M16s  killing people doesn't work  they just come back as jerks in polo shirts  reracking in the middle of a turn  kill me ISIS, politicians lose your shit  because a privileged white kid got cut short  on his free ride to retirement  and I'll live stream it  I'll facebook share it  I'll even put on google glasses  so I can broadcast how it feels to be alive to all the masses  I will raise my kids as Shinto  I'll renounce all my possessions  I'll turn storage space to plowshares  and RAM to homemade breakfast  and I'm glad they have the atomic bomb  cause if I were in the army  I'd volunteer to be the guy  who leaks the diagrams to buzzfeed

we'd spent the whole night drinking  Hong Kong thinking is all deciphering  from where in Asia the girls are touring  their dresses boring  a cigarette burning in my hand  I'm rereading Hemingway again  I'm counting the hours until I land  I'm thinking of texts I'd send  if the plane went down in the Pacific Ocean  I've got an instruction manual on my gmail:  "if I die young here's what to do"  I'm thinking back to a past life  when I was a Hindu girl who wrote her's in a notebook  Portland alone with nonfiction in tow  mid January, covered in snow  heater's on but still cold  twenty-two but still old  and Trevor says his friend's in Spokane  fighting opioids  I drove thirteen hours alone back from Seattle  well it was not the trip that I thought that it would be  but I took some somber solace  racing through a darkening Oregon  alone with Serial for that long  will make you think of how it'd be  if you were framed for Hae Min's murder  back in 1999  climate change a lie, markets on the rise  Kanye still in school, I guess I was five  well I was smiling in a polo sweater  bundled up for inclement weather  now my coat sits in my closet unworn  cause I don't like to hold things when I'm hammered  best be off to East Bay  Wednesdays are boring  bedroom's a lonely place  plus it's better to get shit-faced  where your problems are sixty-seven miles away  they say 'go back to Berkeley  get your PhD  see her weekly'  well a ghost of myself from the '20s comes nightly  to say that this West Coast Scheherazade  was not meant for me  well I'll come back as aristocracy  and never want for high society  so don your saris on Diwali  and light your shochu in the flames of Hi-Matsuri  there are two devils on my shoulders  while they get younger I get older  but someday I'll figure out the reason  that it's never been appealing  to be twenty-six or seven  too crossfaded to be penning  manifestos on TextEdit  post-poetic, haven't read it  looking back at '16  wishing calendars had never been invented

come back dogs and cats, well I fucked up  your owners do love you, they really do love you  well I thought that they were filling companion shaped boxes  but now I can see it was all true  I want to invest myself in something that can never hate me  I want to choose the name by myself, I want to write the back story  I don’t want wifi  I just want children  and I no longer want to feel nostalgic  when I’m walking around a campus  being the last one alone in the moved-out house was depressing  but every time that I’m back in Berkeley  I still drive by and look in the window to see if it’s empty  and each September less of my friends  will wish me a happy birthday on Facebook  the very definition of insignificant bullshit but still it bums me out well I wrote on their walls in a blood-tipped tiger’s tail  three pieces of evidence that none of this is real  one - I am typing this on a plane to Japan and  two - well-meaning guys agreed to be in my band and  three - when they designed this place they forgot to erase  some of the boundaries between dimensions  mentioned in a comment in passing to a starlet in training  who became engaged to an aggressive  amphetamine addict hiding in his attic  a novel he wrote at 15 about his manic depression  regarding the lessons we learned from the great war  being forgotten on the message boards  of the threads stitching together clever PS's  to A Farewell to Arms where Henry remarries  but Dumbledore’s gay appends JK Rowling  well I’m sure if Joyce had Twitter then Bloom would be muslim  and you ask me why there hasn’t been any canon fiction  since A Clockwork Orange  when I was 19 I was trying to be the next JD Salinger  and then when I was 22 I was applying to be a corporate engineer  well The Bay said  “lose your Pacific dreams"  "lose your Pacific dreams”  so now I’m spent  and my eyes are mounted submachine guns  sighted down my own trench 

1916 - Battle of the Somme  July 1st to November 18th  Belligerents: British 4th army, French 6th army, German 2nd army  The British forces, led by Generals Haig, Rawlinson and Gough, alongside their French allies, who had been weakened throughout the year by German forces in the battle of Verdun, attempted to penetrate the German lines on the Western Front and reclaim some territory in northern France, with the ultimate goal of capturing the town of Peronne. At this they failed.  first time 19-year-olds had been burned alive in tanks  ten-millionth time rich guys in armchairs  conducted a pissing war with human ranks  30,000 cases of shell-shock and nervous breakdowns  resulting from unceasing gunfire  and watching your friends' dead bodies piling up on the ground  300,000 dead between both sides  and by the end the British trenches only advanced about six miles  2016 and I’m alone in my room  and I’m upset cause I smoked again and I’ve been trying not to  and I can’t get the vocal production to sound quite right  on the song I’ve been working on for these past 3 nights  well it’s been raining so god damn much  now my chiminea's soaked  and Renee Montagne stepped down as Morning Edition’s host  and the Alice Munro book that I ordered on Amazon  was sent to my old address in Berkeley  oh how will I go on?  during the winter  between November 1942 and February ’43  60,000 German boys younger than me  found themselves surrounded by the Soviet army  they froze and starved to death in Stalingrad  cause Adolf Hitler was too proud to surrender  the ones that lived were sent on trains  to end their days in prison camps of Siberia  during the winter between writing  the third and seventh songs for this album  my car was broken into twice  and I had two laptops stolen  the second time I said  "can I just skip ahead  to the part where I’m done feeling shitty about this?"  my bassist noted  "that'd make a good lyric"  well you're god damn right it did 

well I applied to teach high school  to cure my occupational depression  and was rejected  now I’m sitting underneath of my desk  trying to figure out  just what to do now  it was the way out  now the plan’s all gone to shit  what is my life about  I had put all of this sadness in a box and a key  dangled lower and lower until it was within reach  and then I looked around and thought:  "well I don’t like this metaphor about boxes"  I just got disappointed like  everybody else who doesn’t need a song about it  this is the eighth song I have written for the album  and I thought that at this point  I would have figured out some way around this  small town ennui that persists to fucking haunt me  from A to G street while I’m throwing up  and getting myself kicked out of Blondie's  I fucking hate this 9 to 5 bullshit  I heard that David Foster Wallace loved his wife  and that his literature was critically acclaimed worldwide  but he still hung himself from a rafter on his patio  he left a private two page suicide note for his widow

book club on Friday  come by, come find me  I’m making a home for increasing sobriety  cause drugs make me hate myself  that’s excluding alcohol  remember when going to bed blazed was tantamount  to retracing all of my life in a single bout  while nightmares from childhood flashed like a DSLR  well SF is Fine was the result of self-loathing  for smoking on weekday nights and all weekend socials  and Lose Your Pacific Dreams is a reaction to LSD  and seeing how steep that slope is to insanity  I wish paranoia took a backseat to discovery  but novelties are coming less frequently than miseries  just look at the New York Times headlines on any given morning  just look at my entire discography of recordings  I thought that my psychedelic well was much deeper  I thought that my penchant for molly was healthier  and I thought the first time I encountered this stranger in me  I would be old and smart enough to strangle him immediately  I’m learning to tolerate the self I suspected  I’d always become back when I was in college  but time is a cruel and unusual punishment  I just turned twenty-one, I am failing hospice

'hey don’t you want to join the march on the 21st?'  'hey don’t you want to write posts about the executive orders?'  well I answer with a rather apathetic ‘not really’  I am just an impartial observer  who’s trying to picture what my daughter’s history textbook  will say about 2016  conveying a path as plain as day to 2020  when we find ourselves immersed in world war 3  while I’m still trying to navigate the DMV  please don’t hand me a gun  cause I don’t hate anyone  I am not an adult  and I have no opinions  If I’m thrust into crisis then I'll probably run  If I’m trusted by anyone then we’re probably fucked  I don’t know where my grandfather and namesake  got the bravery to sail to Normandy  at the ripe old age of eighteen  cause I am now twenty-three  and I’m as useless as can be  well I sure picked a good time to record guitar songs like these  let’s take another trip back to my college years  not introspective and possessing of no fears  job was a fantasy  school was reality  easy as shit and sometimes girls would talk to me  Pitchfork and CoS didn’t post about Trump daily  pissed off white coders didn’t rant on my news feed  I had conversations that didn’t devolve  into circle jerks lamenting the state of humanity  I’d never seen depression from the inside but still cried  I’d never seen any real life but still was afraid to die  I was in it for killing four lokos four nights a week  now I’m in it so thick I wanna forget how to speak

things are already different from when I started  my mom tripped ayahuasca and now seems to get it  and I find that I don’t miss my good friends as often  and then when i see them it’s fine that it’s quick  and this Austin skyline at sunset reminds me  of who I had been in 2013  alone in a city but content and enjoying it  and now time alone makes me want to go and cut my wrists  I wanna get off the internet but that would kill the band  I wanna get off more often but when I’m fucked up I can’t  and I’m fucking up subtly but nonetheless constantly  and I fear this menagerie will come crashing down around me  I reread my journal from fall 2014  and was amazed by the quantity of sangria i was consuming  and the number of novels i was putting away  afternoons in the grass while my girlfriend was programming  dinner in Chinatown before napping to "Holocene"  and playing along with "Ghosts of the Great Highway"  then Sergio and Alberto would come by to drink scotch  and I’d leave to smoke spliffs and then dance my face off  now Thursdays I talk to two or three people tops  and I try not to look at 538 and fox  and Kimiko wants to help me and I say that you’re doing  all that is possible, and it’s perfect, it’s working  but either this life was not what I was meant for  or early adulthood has not broken me down cause  I find myself pining for unpredictability  I wrote a whole album just to relive that part of me  I wrote two whole books cause I foresaw this reality  and I wanted to keep my twenty-somethings company  but now he’s the enemy  why did you abandon me?  why did you shun art for rooftop sixty-nine-ing?  why didn’t you apply for a Fulbright or something?  why didn’t you major in english and history?  how could you assume this would all be so easy?  you think that you’ve made it?  well you’re nothing  you’re dead to me  but maybe this is the part when I break it  when I finally appreciate the sheer luck I was handed  so maybe I’m done investing in this emotionally  I’ll quit music to play cricket with Pakistanis  make friends with baristas, drink mimosas on weekdays  and look back on this trilogy with synthetic complacency  and all that seems fine for someone whose fantasies  were killed by stock options that dividend quarterly  but this personal lobotomy that I’ve been conducting  is starting to hemorrhage so I’m thinking  of changing my name again  and moving back east  and ceasing to contact anyone who ever knew me  I’ll stand on the stages with no expectation  for anything to ever come from all of these daydreams  where i’m doing lines at an apartment in the East Village  playing a house party fucked up in Cambridge  sawing my hands off in Grand Central Station  making a living off of sexual frustration  and aren’t we all dumb shits  and don’t we all know it  tell people I’m nineteen 'til I fucking believe it  completely forgotten how to calculate integrals  got a drunken tattoo of The Sun Also Rises  I’m getting my French down and talking to strangers  and said yes to drugs that I’ve always been scared of  and got to a point where I’m broke  and don’t care that my degree says that I’m an adult  cause I’m not and I’ll never be  I’m the king of hypocrisy  I’m fucking hysterical  got a record on Spotify  got a job wrecking paradise  got two different parties I can go to  to watch the world end  as the hydrogen splits and the shockwave rolls in  while I’m thinking about if I want one more drink  and everybody around has got their heads in their screens  and the record that’s playing is The Strokes’ ‘Is This It’  well I guess that it is (walk across the bay bridge tied to who you think you'll die with they say Outer Sunset's cute kids on macbooks in their bedrooms)