Crackpots #3: Brace Belden's Halloween Gift Guide (Patreon)

 Halloween coming up next week...what delights await us??...maybe we should get pissed off... lets conjure up a really nasty guy, someone insolent like Madison Cawthorne, except let's uncomplicate it and make his legs work (I guess that's Matt Gaetz)..let's snap a picture of him in some twisted racial costume...we'll post it anonymously somewhere in the future when he's in a tight race....or should we have him be a liberal to make the apology more weepy ?... Either way I'm excited for it! Maybe this will be the year our enemies humiliate themselves and hidden victories are revealed..

October is a NIGHT TIME month. In San Francisco, October would see us all go crazy under the brief flash of misplaced summer heat. For two weeks sometime in the middle of the month the City can turn into a furnace, and I'd watch the temperature sprint up to 90 degrees (totally unknown during the actual summer, temps ranging about like late April anywhere else) and once it hit that everyone had permission to go totally berserk because we'd get to wear short sleeves at night. People go so bonkers in the heat, I don't know what does it...Maybe it's like how Victorian guys would pass out from the hard-ons they'd get when they saw the ankle...in SF I guess you could see your coworkers nasty tattoos for the first time under the yellow glow of a streetlight, and this would drive a lot of people permanently insane.

  It used to be in San Francisco (gimme a break) that if you set out anywhere but the bar districts after 10 PM you could practically have the place to yourself. When I had no money and no one to beg any drinks off of I used to just walk around, way out there, totally empty, shuffling around deserted streets that stretched out and out forever, streetlights, something in the bush, every so often a bus accelerating down Geary. My main thing is I love sidewalks...I go crazy for them. I always stop and carve my initials into wet pavement, you can see it all over SF and I guess New York now too...I carve "BB"...I don't know why more people don't do it...I like seeing some hearts around initials and things like that, but who knows, I can't ever account for anybody else.

But actually, if it's late enough, forget the sidewalk, in SF you could walk straight down the middle of the street and it was so silent and deserted that if you got your eyes poked out you’d still be alright. I guess maybe you’d be eaten by a crackhead now. I wouldn’t know—I moved to Brooklyn to be a professional podcaster…

Speaking of podcast: Matt at Ghost Stories for the End of the World has wrapped up his Belgium series (which I’ve plugged before)…here it is…it’s a year long…in truth I don't really listen to podcasts all that often but I like his cause he talks slowly, it's interesting, etc, I think some of our fans might like it. I'm sort of just recommending things here cause I guess I should but I do like some things. Here's a strange painting I saw in Belgium this year, when I was out there for the tribunal...what could it mean?

Anyways now I can’t sleep, I sleepwalk, I sleep bad, I have bad dreams, I talk sometimes (total nonsense I'm told...not worth repeating), I sleep all fucked up in a physical way like someone popped a bullet right into my lower spine and my limbs spazzed out (I guess I mean akimbo!). Whenever I see someone walking around with one of those Brooklinen bags I want to drop a hand grenade in it.

The sleepwalking is relatively new. It turns out I have a “sleep-related eating disorder” or an "eating-related sleep disorder" depending on how you look at it, although mine is firmly in the parasomniac camp rather than a real eating disorder (I assure you my eating habits are thoroughly ordered). What that means I rise like some mummy and shuffle to the kitchen and just eat anything I don't have to prepare---crackers, dates, nuts, granola...it's straight-up just called Sleep-Related Eating Disorder. Honestly, I thought it was fake or I was finally losing my mind cause I'd never heard of anything so absurd, I hate eating late on account of I get such bad stomach aches in the morning if I do, and now I get them all the time because of my disorder...it's so goofy and stupid and it made me gain some weight a while back...plus I eat all the dates that I was saving for the morning....I should count myself lucky though... Consider what the scientists say:

"Eating episodes are characterized by rapid ingestion of food with preference for high caloric foods, but patients sometimes report ingesting non-edible or toxic items, such as cigarette butts and preservatives" See? I'm lucky..some poor schmuck out there gets up at 2 AM and chows down on cigarette butts. This world really has one of everything.

Check this out: Single photon emission computed tomography during an episode of sleepwalking supports the co-occurrence of sleeping and waking states caused by selective activation and hypoactivation of neural circuits —I take this to mean I am both awake and asleep at the same time. And this is precisely, exactly what it feels like! A half-state. It's really something. I was always confused as to how people started wandering around their towns like dementia patients, operating door handles and navigating stairs and things like that, but now I know. They're in a half-state, and in a half-state you can do a surprising amount of things... now that I think about it, if you need to be locked into a full state to turn a door handle then sleepwalking's gotta be the least of your concerns.

In some cases, people with sleep-related eating disorders have histories of alcoholism, drug abuse, and other sleep disorders. Very interesting...I'm taking this all from some government thing. The NIMH. But what do they know...it's probably true though...

When I used to do meth, which was really only for about a year or maybe a year and some months, I would stay awake for days...stuck in a half-state...It's hard to describe but it's like you can see through everything, x-ray vision, and your teeth chatter....you can really feel your skeleton. I think meth should be classified as a psychedelic. Heroin, weed, benzos don't make you see or hear shadow people--- Ice does, and the shadow people really do talk to you. I couldn't hear them too well, though, mostly just whispers etc, I guess my baseline hold on reality was way too high to afford them any purchase. Still, meth did a number on me! Waa-waa. Whose fault is that?

All that was just to say I would recommend William Burroughs Jr., the son of William Burroughs if you can even imagine, and his two books about being a tweaker. I like them better than most of the stuff his dad wrote. He died relatively young and in horrible pain...SPEED is better but KENTUCKY HAM is pretty good too. My stepmom gave this to me a million years ago (when I was YOUNG, not when I was all bad)...a great book for TWEAKERS.

Back on speed I'd be UP ALL NIGHT. What did I do? Couldn't really tell you. Meth has a way of unlocking parts of your mind, the only problem is you can't choose which ones and you can't stop unlocking. That's the reason tweakers seem even crazier than other kinds of fiends; their wirings all fucked up.

You unplug a tweaker from the speed machine, they just pass out for a week, they're sick and weird but I used to work in this real street-level detox in San Francisco later later later in life and some of the speed freaks we had in there, after a couple days out like a MAID patient, would be filled with electricity, hustling their jaws around, touching their penises (not in a horny way, almost like a nervous thing, sitting in group with their hands in their pants just jostling their nuts)---in short, they were tweaking again, only without the meth. These guys were a thousand times more advanced than me, my use of it was so abbreviated...I promise not to talk about drugs here really, it was all so long ago anyways, but with this topic of sleep (I guess) and October it's hard to avoid it...

Really I'm here to tell about the wonderful things I enjoy this October...I've been reading this book THE BROTHER about David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenbergs quisling brother, it's pretty good, I'd like to do something on the Rosenbergs some day, I love their Death House letters, but they can make me really sad..."All the ingredients of victory are present in spite of a long and tedious road"...wonderful..."I have the curious feeling of living in a world beyond whose walls no other world exists...the 'street' no longer forms the magnet...the carefully drawn demarcations of the area in which I am permitted have dissolved, because there is no longer any other area...." that's from Ethel, they shouldn't have put a woman like her in a position to write something so sad as all that, but that's the government for you...

 I’ve always been a night time guy. The way my brain works is I’m practically incapacitated mentally and about half way physically until around 6 PM. Then my synapses all fire at once (I truly really could not tell you in my own words what a synapse is or does but I imagine five hundred miniaturized gas jets positioned around the body that let off blue pyramids of fire that put into motion great masses of arcane machinery which in turn set in motion the flexing of muscles and bones that let me give a thumbs up to a bus driver)...so it's in the evening when I get an intense energy and lustily embark but then I'm up so late...nothing's more boring than hearing someone complain about sleep in some way, but you'll have to live with it, at least I'm getting it out of the way right now, and wasn't I earlier so sympathetic to Ethel Rosenberg, such that I deserve an equal amount of sympathy for poor old me? I'm only kidding...

It's gonna get cold soon, and nasty out. And then it gets dark so early... I have been walking at night again, usually down to the water but the water in New York doesn't feel the same as the water in SF, which gives me Chinese smells and island jungle drums, but all things considered it's alright for now and Manhattan looks good when it's lit up at night...

Great song for night time on a mission alone!— “YOO DOO RIGHT” by Can. 

 Sometimes I stay up almost all night reading (I am reading a book of short stories by, and I love this chicks writing, ANGELA CARTER, there's a good one called "Elegy for a Freelance" some of you might like...). Reading's supposed to put me down and sometimes it does...but I also wake up early, sometimes just a few hours after passing out..but its alright, I manage, and what I do then is I watch youtube videos. I watch interrogation videos of murder suspects, I like the ones without commentary...not going to link to those, are you crazy, who gives a shit, but I find them hypnotic...they can sometimes put me back to sleep, especially the lulls when the murderer and detectives are all silent while they all think of the next lie to say....doesn't work if I got a bad stomach though, sick from eating dates at 4 AM...anyways here IS a youtube video some friends made it's actually really a movie called RAP WORLD, I liked it a lot.

OH yeah, back to Halloween..I went as White Shaft last year. This year I will go as Austin Powers which I mostly already have the clothes for but I gotta get some ruffles. Here is the wikipedia for Austin Powers (disambiguation).

Have a Happy Halloween! That's all I gotta say for now.

BB