People in Northern California have adopted an unconscionable piece of slang, which is “hella.” It doesn’t mean anything. Most slang is convenient shorthand or a colorful way to express something stupid, but “hella” is an adverbial intensifier which can be arbitrarily inserted into every sentence, and it sometimes is. I do not exaggerate. I live across from Berkeley High and hear phrases like this all the time: “Man, this shit be hella whack!” and “I gots to teach my students hella biology.”

In the last three hours alone, according to anecdotal evidence, things have been hella: cool, cold, hot, silly, good, bad, decent, hellish, apple, giraffe, Watergate Scandal, the, 1934, potatoes, $3.07, and hella. You can also say “hecka,” if you want to rob people of even more life energy. But I don’t know why I’m even talking about this. If this slang migrates outside Northern California and into the American consciousness, the problem will become indelible. I know it’s just an inane little word, but until you hear it said fifty times within a single hour like a jackhammer going off inside your skull, you have no idea how big a nuisance it can be. Signs are indicating that usage could already be spreading. I think I even heard somebody answer their phone, “Hella?” You must listen very carefully to what I’m telling you: “hella” must be contained. We’re all at risk. It is the colloquial avian flu.

I have decided to phase twist ties out of my life, because they’re a true annoyance. If a tie is tightly twisted, it’s impossible to tell which way you’re suppose to twist, and if you choose the wrong direction it only makes your situation twistier. This always nettles my goat, but in reality I’m not upset with the twist ties—I’m mad at myself for twisting the wrong way. The only thing to do now is own up to my error and begin twisting back the direction I came. Once in a great while, however, twisting this opposite way is also wrong. There are never any witnesses around when this happens, mostly because nobody has ever sat down and watched me retrieve a piece of fruit, but I can promise you that this has happened to me about a dozen times over the course of my life, and I’m tired of being silent about it. In these instances my anger transforms into an abstract feeling of confusion and loneliness. I retwist the tie in my original direction, which has somehow become correct, but by now I’m not even hungry for plums or nectarines or whatever bullshit fruit I have in my little plastic bag. I’m too emotionally spent to even weep, which I know will come later. The best thing to do in the meantime is eat some clementines, which come in cute little wooden crates as if they were shipped especially to me from the tropics.

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.

Everybody knows that dollar stores are great places for poor people to pretend like they actually participate in the marketplace. Few people are aware that these same stores also hold astonishing secrets. In my latest Pulitzer-losing article, I blow the lid off the dollar store mystery bag scene.

Occasionally somebody you’re talking to won’t hear what you said but can tell that you’re probably trying to be funny, so while they’re asking you to repeat yourself, they miscalculate and begin politely laughing at your tedious little quip. They’ll be chuckling away like you’re a great comedian while simultaneously asking, “What was that? Hahaha, you’re funny even though I didn’t hear you.” Sometimes I like to call these people out, these people and their web of counterfeit delight. I’ll say, “What was it exactly about my inaudible declaration that amused you? At least try to conceal your chicanery, you worthless fraud.” But they just stand there with a mouth-breathing grin on their face and say, incapable of understanding a single word I say.

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.