TOO LONG, DON'T READ:

On Saturday morning at 6am my phone rang and I answered it. I was watching World's Greatest Dad, this after I had watched The Cove and About A Boy. Three movies that I'd never seen but I knew existed. I was awake in the middle of the night and wanted to watch moving things on a screen with my brain off. When the phone rang, it was as relief. I operate a 24/7 Psychic Hotline. I mean I don't really operate it, people call and I sometimes answer. Actually, I only answer about 15 percent of the time. People usually call asking about relationship troubles. I'd say 75 percent of the calls that I answer are from women from the South asking if their man is being unfaithful. Most of the time I say that they are, because if they're calling other people on the phone to ask this, they already know the answer. This time the person was a man. At first I thought he might be drunk so I raced to the phone recorder and started recording. We talked for 20 minutes and he confessed to thinking that my Psychic Hot line was "bullshit", living in a town without 7-11s, playing with a Ouija Board, and trying to choke a woman to death with his bare hands.

LISTEN TO "A FAILED ATTEMPT". (It's 20 minutes long, don't get pushed around, listen to it at work!)

When I finally ended the call I decided that my brain is no longer firmly planted in reality. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, I'm just out here willy-nilly reaching out to people for what could be the VERY WRONG reasons. I'm coming to believe that I no longer know what is a joke and what is serious. On Friday afternoon I got an email from a man who wanted to come to the house to look at paintings that I had for sale. I told him that I'd be at the Hollow Earth/Vera Craft Fair the next day and that I had a show on the 18th, but he told me he was going to Japan and had to buy holiday gifts. He soon came over with his wife and they bought 43 paintings. I never really know what to price my paintings at, people say they're usually too cheap. For the amount of time and effort that goes into them, I think it's a pretty good deal both ways. I had made 40 Ronald Reagan paintings for the craft fair (I said I was going to make 100, but I ended up sleeping a lot instead) and told them that I'd prefer to sell them at the fair. He asked what I was charging and he said he'd pay $10 more for each. At first I was elated, I'm flying my mother to Seattle from Cleveland and that ticket cost arms and legs. Now I could live extravagantly on Theo Chocolates any time I'd like. An hour after they left I realized that I just sold all of my paintings and I wouldn't have anything to sell at the craft fair. Then I wondered who my audience is and if I even have a message. I always wanted people to buy my paintings and put them above a kitchen sink where they'd get kind of wet and eventually they'd end up in a thrift store. I saw a painting of mine of a cat juggling World Trade Centers at a thrift store in Chicago for $20 once. It was there for three weeks, I felt it was a triumph. I'm not even trying to say anything, I'm like a malfunctioning robot doing flips. People are like, "MAN, THAT THING IS DOING FLIPS, LOOK AT IT!"

• Anthony Trollope had a reputation for unpunctuality and insubordination.

Three years ago I tried to pioneer a new sleep schedule called 36/12. It means that you stay up for 36 hours and sleep for 12. I figured it would be more efficient that way, you'd save the time having to wake up one day. It turns out that you're just worthless during hours 28-36. Regardless, I've been back on 36/12 lately, so I can get a lot of work done. I learned to stay up for as long as I wanted while working 3rd shift at Kinko's. I figured out a way to just make my brain and body stay on. It's totally unhealthy but also wonderful. Things get really bright and sharp during some periods. After the Psychic Hotline phone call on Saturday, I slept for 10 hours. It was 5 pm when I woke up and I was kind of mad that I didn't see the sunlight that day because I've been depressed lately. Regardless, I got right to work because of the show and started painting. I made six paintings in six hours. Then I took a shower and then made an omelette with four eggs. Four eggs is way too many eggs for an omelette, you should only use three. After I ate the omelette I went to the basement to paint more and noticed a river of water in the area where I paint. It was coming from the room where 80 percent of my belongings reside in boxes. When I opened that door my brain went blank.

I grew up pretty poor. I mean, not totally poor, but I have a feeling that I'm not going to change into Philip Pirrip. It's not a drag though, life is life, let's party. I've always been very financially responsible. I usually have decent savings, I've never bounced a check, and except for college I've never been in debt. Working at and owning a record store in Chicago, I learned what records were valuable. I started collecting them little by little until I had 8,000 or so, usually from estate sales or record stores. I've always thought of my record collection as a giant financial pillow, so if I ever needed money I wouldn't have to find a job, I could just sell them until I invented ways to make a living. I got pretty good at inventing jobs and still had a lot of records left, how nice for me. Don't get me wrong, I like music. People in general tend to like music. It's just that I hardly played them. Most of them were sitting in a basement room where I now live. AND THEY WERE NOW UNDERWATER.

• You're all wet, you goons!

When I saw those boxes all mushy and darker brown than normal, the ones that I had rented a giant truck and paid dudes money to lift (I'm chubby and prefer to stay that way), my brain stopped. I had no idea what to do. There were so many boxes and so much water and I didn't know where to put anything. I don't believe in karma or fate, but as my mind raced for reason, it was clear that telling a man looking for psychic answers that he was going to win the lottery was half of the reason for this dilemma. Perhaps selling those paintings to those people was the other half. There seemed to HAVE to be some reason for what happened. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on Ruben's iPod while I was moving records. Ruben is my roommate and he has 14,986 songs on his iPod. When it was over IT CAME ON AGAIN. After that, "My Hero" by Foo Fighters came on. Seattle was laughing at me. It was saying: "CAPER THIS, LITTLE MAN." I moved stuff for hours and eventually my friend Tim Cook came over to help. That guy came over at 7:30am on a Sunday morning. We moved boxes for 2 hours and decided to smoke a cigarette on the back porch. A woman who was watching the house next door arrived home and I asked her if her basement had flooded. She informed me that it hadn't and asked if mine did. I told her it did and that I was traumatized. She then asked me to give her a cigarette. She was on the other side of a fence and it was still raining, so I walked through the rain to give her a cigarette. Then she asked for a light. Eventually Pete and April came over and they continually vacuumed water seeping into the basement while I made piles of records on every available floor space. Heather came over and brought Gatorade and cigarettes. Thank you so much for my friends. There are so many more awful things that can happen than losing a bunch of plastic and cardboard squares to sewer water. Grant sent me a link to Dave Segal's article and I sure was glad my things didn't go that way. It was somehow better for me to see Larry the cat laying on a drying original copy of Sun Ra's Super-Sonic Jazz than to just have your things stolen. The whole point of this is to tell you that my roommates are in Mexico on the Sub Pop retreat and I'm watching Megan Jasper's chihuahua. That dog bit Pete! It should probably learn the LEXICON OF MANNERS.

Have you seen The Cove? I thought it was a real snoozer. I guess it's a total bummer that people eat food, but why are dolphins more important than any other living food? I'm going to make a parody called the Mouth, and it's going to be me eating Haribo Gold Bears by the handful. People will try to film me but I will push them away. You should invest in this film!

I'm really sorry that this column isn't about nightlife, I haven't really left the house. I DO KNOW that I sent $7 to the band Witch Gardens for a copy of their cassette tape and I never received it. I've been texting one of the members randomly in a roundabout ploy to get my money back. I simply text her last name with an exclamation point. This is stalking, I am under arrest.

Since you've been asking, I am indeed related to Paul Erdman of the Love Family. Thanks for reading this really long thing, you just made my day. (First comment: okay, this guy's time is up.)