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So today I was sitting at Solar De Cahuenga on the corner of Cahuenga and Franklin, which is my usual haunt if anyone I owe money to ever wants to come find me, and after a particularly draining and bizarro phone call which I shouldn’t have answered but did anyway, the guy siting next to me made a comment about something I’d said on the phone- something about my hair. I looked at him for a second and then cracked a smile. We started talking about writing, books, I told him about Narcisa and all my other projects and he told me he runs a magazine. I said which one and he said “have you heard of FOUND?” to which I replied “umm yes, I am obsessed.”

FOUND is a compilation of love letters, grocery lists, photographs and other things that people find on the street. Send all your found shit to them and they will publish it.

some letters people found on FOUND

Now I’ve spent hours and hours of my lowly existence sitting on Howie Pyro’s couch laughing at this magazine and the sheer brilliance of the effect that looking into other people’s lives, even for just a glimpse, has on the human psyche. I don’t know if it’s therapeutic or just entertaining to live vicariously through other people for moments in time.

That is why I enjoy Jonathan’s work so much. I think I get off on it, being there but not being there. It’s like something I experienced last time I was in Brazil, riding through the favelas on the back of the motorcycle. At first I was scared shitless and did not want to go in to Rocinha, did not understand the De Facto government of the Drug Lords and why I had to take my helmet off when we passed the police barricade or why I had to show my face at all times and take off my glasses too. It was so foreign and I didn’t want to be there. So we left.

But as soon as we left, I wanted to go back in. I was curious, I wanted a taste. I wanted to live it, just a little. And then get out on command.

That is what FOUND magazine allows the reader to do.
That is what NARCISA allows the reader to do.

Fucking brilliant. Now I’m here, reading the issue of FOUND that Davy gave me before I left the coffee shop, between bouts of editing Narcisa and watching Forensic Files and smoking cigarette butts.

The whole conversation was inspiring though. It really put some fire under my ass to get this new project going with Jonathan, a book that will feature scanned journal entries that we’ve each saved over the years. It’s eerie how some of them mirror each other exactly. I am still kind of freaked out at how much our minds have melded.

I gotta go.

A