California! You beautiful son of a bitch. I miss you so much.

I’m going to come back to you soon!!

My room is dimly lit with lanterns and red Christmas lights. I have gotten rid of my mattress and I sleep on the floor now. I have a really bad haircut and in a few weeks I will have a gold tooth. It’s beginning to look like I’ll probably never get laid again.

I wonder sometimes what happened and it almost makes me sick. I mean, hell, you should see my day-to-day life . . . it is strange and dreamlike, at least from where I’m sitting. Next to the place where I sleep on the floor I have a journal, and I have been writing everything down. God, it’s all trash. I wrote a few weeks ago that I had a tiny little baby crush on a girl (hell, I have crushes all over town), but when I stop and think about it, I don’t really like anyone in that way. And I’m all right carrying on in this way, alone, and in this red flickering room. This girl is nice and I like her, but I will eventually sabotage it, and so in my head I have already stomped out that diverging path, and have decided it would be all right if we never saw each other again, even though it would be nice to see her too.

It is not so much that I have eluded reality, or that reality has eluded me . . . I can still see it shining plain, and sometimes I even reach out to it, and try to grab it and know it again. But I have gotten older, and have gotten far away from the thing. I spy on it but it cannot be mine. I feel so far removed from everyone and everything that, you know, what’s the point in trying to connect to it any longer. If I was ever going to be able to participate again, I would’ve had to turn things around some time ago. I look at pictures from Oakland, from those strange strange times, and I think: Yes, it was happening even back then—I can see the change—and now, here in this place, wherever that is, I am much further along the strange path, and I have no desire to leave it. The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run—that sort of thing.

Though hell, if you want me to be honest, I’m pretty god dang lonely these days, even though by design I have to be . . . Still: I would sure would have a good time watching a movie with someone, or walking around Hawthorne at night, now that it’s so cold out. . . .

The sun will be up in something like 16 minutes. That’s what they’ve told me, anyway, but who knows. I will wake up in the afternoon and finish building a shelf, and then I’m going to go across the street and get a cup of coffee and talk to the lady behind the counter. Last week she said to me in earnest—and it startled me, because it didn’t at all feel perfunctory—she said, in a sad little voice: “You doing all right?”

And I leaned in and I gave her the jerk answer. It was automatic. God, was it ever. I cringed as I heard myself say it. I said: “I’m alive I reckon . . . for whatever that’s worth!!!!”

I think maybe I will apologize to her for saying that. She’s so nice to me. What a big dumb jerk answer from a big dumb jerk. I’m sorry, lady. I’ll tell you that in person soon enough probably.

And now I unplug my red Christmas lights and blow out the lanterns. My room is twisted, man. This is a crazy place to sleep. I don’t think it has seen sunlight since April. What a strange dark trip. What a long heavy thing this is! I laugh like hell when I think about it—laugh because I can’t cry!

hey what’s up

big gaping hole where my tooth used to be

yeah!!!

My right front tooth broke again. It shattered completely when I bit into a piece of toast, which is how it broke the first time. I managed to collect a few shards of it from my mouth, but the rest had turned to dust and gotten lost in the toast, or had ended up down my throat.

I kept what was left of my sad old tooth, which was a decade-old porcelain crown. I don’t know why. It is useless now. It has served its purpose and now it is dead.

I remember the first time my decommissioned police car was stolen in Oakland, and how upset I was about it. It was recovered a week later, but by then I had already felt all the emotions I was ever going to feel about it, and so I felt nothing. Four weeks later it was stolen again from the same street, and all I could do was laugh.

And so this is what I did when my tooth broke again: I felt nothing and I laughed.

Except it didn’t taken long for me to feel something, because beneath this fake tooth was a wretched little vampire fang that was once my real tooth. And now it was exposed to the world again—was exposed to hot and cold air, and hot and cold beverages, and so on. It also looked weird and hideous and made me look weird and hideous too.

It was Saturday evening when all this happened. I called the emergency line on the back on my dental insurance card. A woman on the other end said it was too late to come in—all the dentists had gone home for the night. She told me I would have to call again first thing Monday morning.

For the next two days I stayed inside and chewed with my back teeth. I drank lukewarm water and lukewarm tea. I brushed around the vampire fang. I talked and breathed as little as possible.

On Monday I saw a dentist. She brought in a sort of tackle box full of differently-shaped temporary crowns. She tried dozens of them to find one that most closely matched my left front tooth. Eventually she succeeded, and so she went to work sanding and drilling and carving and so on. It took a long time. I fell asleep in the chair a few times. The dentist woke me up when she’d finished customizing the temporary crown. She glued it into my skull and told me to be careful when flossing. Then she sent me home.

This thing is awful. It is crooked and feels rough when I slide my tongue over it. It is also pre-stained yellow, which sucks, because my dentist pointed out that my teeth are actually pretty god dang white! She handed me a mirror. “It might stick out a little,” she said. Holy lord! It stuck out a lot!

For God’s sake, man, I have got to get this thing out of my mouth. I can’t stop thinking about it!

Next Monday I have an appointment with another dentist. This is the dentist who repaired my crown a few months ago when it was still salvageable. I told him then, and I’m going to tell him again Monday morning: “Doc, I’m going gold.”

The receptionist told me on the phone that it would take about a week and a half for them to make it in the lab. I already have an appointment scheduled for the end of the month to get that gold tooth permanently fitted into my mouth.

Before she hung up, the receptionist laughed and said: “Looks like you’re getting a gold tooth for Christmas.”

To which I replied: “Merry Christmas, little Ryan.”

Apparently these things can last something like thirty or forty years. I’ll let you know how that goes. Until then—oh, God!—I guess I’ll continue to talk and breathe as little as possible. Hell, I’m sure everyone’s going to be happy about that!!

RYAN STARSAILOR
☆彡
1988–2019
WORSE THAN SOME;
NOT AS BAD AS OTHERS.

Matt and Kerwin and I found a cat by the river who looked like Dante. He was very friendly and came right up to me. Whoa!

(lol)

((‘interview with the vampire’ was the first R-rated movie i ever saw))

(((it was also the same night i discovered that my mother and father and older sister secretly smoked)))

RYAN STARSAILOR
☆彡
1988–2017
“IT WAS FUN
FOR A WHILE.”

i sleep on my back, with my arms in an X-shape like a vampire

Which part of your body is most alien to you? I think about this sometimes!

For me it’s probably my feet or my back . . . I don’t often see them! I can’t see my back without a mirror obviously, and my feet I am seldom near, except maybe when I’m taking a bath or something.

How strange!

These parts of my body feel like coworkers who work in different department, or maybe distant relatives who I only see every four of five years. . . .

I guess I am most familiar with my hands, and then next in line would be my face. Though, hell, if I’m being honest, sometimes I look in the mirror and that thing seems foreign to me as well.

Uh oh!!!