There are some things I miss about Michigan. Apart from my so-called “friends and family,” the greatest twinge comes from being separated from Meijer. Anybody who has ever lived in the Great Lakes region knows that Meijer is the greatest grocery store in all the land. Meijer invented the hypermarket concept which was later stolen by Wal-Mart, who put a clever spin on the idea by imposing crackhead ideologies onto their customers. Meijer does not condescend in this way, but I do know that some sort of scheming is underfoot. Each Meijer location has been reconstructing its own interior in perpetuity since 1972. I don’t know what their objective is, but you really have to be on your toes if you hope to find out where the bread aisle is each week.

My policy at Meijer is to use self-checkout lanes whenever possible. I don’t know how I’ve been tricked into doing the work Meijer’s staff is paid to be doing. Maybe Meijer should start leaving shipping boxes full of groceries out in the middle of the aisles and just have customers stock everything while they shop. Then if they attached mop heads to the bottom of carts they would no longer need to staff the store and you wouldn’t need to deal with the mutants who work at Meijer.

The reason I haven’t been updating this time is because I’ve been embroiled in a move across the country. Since then I haven’t had access to the internet, which has felt like a grotesque sociological experiment and left me incapable of completing many basic human tasks, such as anything related to communication, commerce, navigation, and the accumulation of knowledge. It’s OK now, though: I bought a laptop and am prepared to put more work into eKarjala. That’s because I’m now living in Berkeley, California, where there are many very inspiring hobos.

Actually I can’t really tell who’s homeless and who’s just crazy. One time after tossing a Frisbee around with a friend, this random guy starts haranguing me, “That Frisbee isn’t a cross! It must be satanic. The Christians won’t like that. You better get that godless artifact out of here before they see it.” I was all, “Yeah, whatever that means.” Then he proceeded to enter a car that was way nicer than I could ever afford and joked, “Actually, I majored at Frisbee back at Harvard.” Maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all, I thought to myself, except for the fact that he was clinically insane. But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it turned out he was the mayor.

I’m quite familiar with the common tin can vagrant, but the sheer scope and diversity of crazy people in Berkeley is stunning. Back when hands-free earpieces for cell phones were becoming popular, it always seemed like people were talking to themselves and I had to train my brain to process these people not as lunatics but as mere douches. Now my brain’s relearning its old method of evaluation. On a daily basis I pass by dozens of people who are continuously broadcasting their own crazy little radio station. Sometimes I pretend to be waiting for somebody outside the library, but really I’m just listening to one of my favorite homeless personalities going on one of his classic rants about bicycles. Maybe I don’t quite understand most of what’s being said, but it’s still riveting radio. And each passing day it makes a little bit more sense.

I used to be OK with winter until the later winter months of February or March, but I grow tired of it earlier every year. This year I’d had enough by the second snowflake. The first snowflake inspired great merriment and I said, “Oh, look! A single snowflake is wafting down from the heavens. It is a true Christmas miracle; an angel has blessed us with her beauteous–Oh, fucking Christ, here comes another one of those asshole snowflakes. And it landed directly in my ear. That’s wonderful. I love having a snowflake in my ear. If it hadn’t landed in my ear, I think I would have probably scooped it off the ground and stuck it in there because this feels fantastic. Now I will walk around like I have scoliosis because my spine is trying to contract into itself to stay warm.”

I can’t deny that winter is a magical season. This morning while I was involved in the character-building activity of scraping ice off my car, I stepped into a giant puddle, which soaked my foot. Right, it’s perfectly cold enough for ice to form when it’s on my windshield, but when it’s on the ground water is suddenly able to remain a liquid. As long as we’re ignoring science, how about snow that bursts into flames whenever it hits flesh? How about snowflakes that turn into bees? If that happened, nobody would even question it. We are all resigned to the fact that winter can do whatever it likes in order to dick with us. People would just say, “Oh, here comes some of that bee snow. I was wondering when snow would start turning into bees. This bee snow is extremely painful. But I’m still going to live in Michigan, because I’m an idiot.”