My friend Tim is moving. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he doesn’t want 95% of the things he owns. He has named me executor of his living will. I am inheriting everything he hasn’t placed in a single plastic storage that is currently in the middle of his living room.

Among the things I am inheriting is my old rundown police car, which was at one time called the Doomsmobile. It is basically a thousand times more of a Mad Max car than it was a year ago when I gave it to him. It looks haunted and insane. Tim says the car is permanently wearing a Halloween costume. It is a beautiful disaster of a car. And it’s still real fast!

He is also giving me his purple couch and his 72″ television. He says the two desk chairs I’m inheriting are worth $900 each. I guess he bought them from a failing startup for $20 a few years ago.

Oh, baby!

Hey, uh: If anyone wants to come over and watch movies on a big huge stupid TV, just go ahead and do it, man. I will commence screening new Dudes Done Wrong films here shortly. I need to talk to McCune and figure out how we’re going to run two Oakland chapters simultaneously. Maybe we’ll do one week at his house, and then the next at my fortified compound, which will be in a nearby (hidden) location?? Maybe we’ll screen the same films at the exact time, coordinated by phone, and y’all can just go to whichever house has the nicer couch / TV. We’ll see!!

As far as the Doomsmobile goes, which I will rechristen in due time: Laura has asked that we drive to some godforsaken desert near LA and do donuts in the dark. She’s going to be twenty-eight years old at the end of May, so maybe that’ll be her god dang birthday present . . . just going out there and getting real wild in the desert.

That car is going to kill me, by the way. Or at the very least I’m going to die inside of it. Darkly I have dreamed of my death inside that demon car. It is cursed and so am I. We will infect and destroy each other with our curses. We are damned and doomed and we must drive into that final midnight together. A thousand years from now they will tell tales of the sad man and his sad car, and how they lurched onto some desolate beach on the California coast and were consumed both of them by the mighty Pacific Ocean.

And on certain nights, with the right kind of eyes, and so on (lol), you can look out and see those foggy headlights cutting through the murk, way the hell down there. And behind the wheel, piloting that chariot of doom through the dark wastes of oblivion, will be a laughing skeleton in black denim.

For everyone’s sake I’m going to stop writing this now.

Come to my hypothetical house! I will have it soon! We can lean back real far on that purple couch and chill hard. God, it’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to be so beautiful you’ll wanna throw up.

Mmhm!

Castle Doomsday buddies!!

(Thanks Tracey~~!!)

this is the first quote-unquote normal weekend i’ve had in four years

those four years were spent doing godawful things for very little money!

and now it is sunday and i am drinking coffee in oakland and i am about to walk over to trader joe’s across the railroad tracks and get some stuff to eat

because god knows you gotta eat

tomorrow i go back to the thing

i don’t dread the thing

above is a picture of me talking to my people at the thing

it’s a good thing, as far as those things go

on friday i have to fly back to portland to clean up my old house there and be done with it

good-bye to all that!

♫

For my own records, this is where I have lived and when:

• 0–18: Nokesville, Virginia
• 18–18: Baltimore, Maryland
• 18–19: Bristow, Virginia
• 19–23: Baltimore, Maryland
• 23–25: Austin, Texas
• 25–27: Oakland, California
• 27–27: New Orleans, Louisiana (two months!!)
• 27–28: Manassas, Virginia (a month!!)
• 28–29: Portland, Oregon
• 29–??: Oakland, California

Man, it’s exhausting moving so much. Don’t do it. I’m serious: it sucks. You gotta go to where your buddies are and plant yourself into the god darn ground.

When I was 18, driving up to New York, I stopped to eat in Red Bank, New Jersey (lol), and I looked around I thought that I would move to a new city every two years, and oh lord, what a dumb dream that was. I somehow kind of did that! But the thing is: you get to a place, and you have to get a house and a crappy job for a while, and then you have to figure out where your post office and your grocery store is, and on and on. That and it takes like six god darn months to build your life out of nothing except coffin dust and nightmarish borderline poverty. So there’s a quarter of your time in a place right off the bat. Hell, that’s been my experience anyway.

I had me a cushy desk gig in Austin. I was a copywriter for an insanely boring biotech company right off the highway headed north. It took me exactly twelve minutes to get to work, and then I sat in a gloomily-lit cubicle (which was my own design—I had the maintenance dude remove the fluorescent bulbs from the ceiling), and I sat there and I drank a gallon of tea and water, and I felt rumpled and depressed, and I waited for the trickle of oatmeal-bland work to come my way. A year into the thing I told my coworkers I was moving to California. I remember this lady said: “What are you going to do there?” And I said: “Hell, I don’t know. Skulk around I guess??” I had no job lined up and I went there anyway. Lord was it a harrowing six months. But I made me a whole bunch of buddies and built a tiny li’l dumb empire out of nothing. My empire crumbled and I moved away. I then lived in absolute godawful empty misery for a little over three hundred and sixty-five days, and now I’m back to whatever my life is now.

As my friend Hugh “Huge Ackman” Jackman says in ‘The Prestige’ (2006): The world is simple. It’s miserable—solid all the way through. Yeah. Hain’t no way I’m forgetting that. How could I?? At least now I can afford to eat, and I got me some walking-around money, and I got my buddos. The sky is blue and I’m an insane idiot in Trashtown, USA. Hell, why not. For god’s sake, it’s sure ain’t Baltimore. Does that count for something??? I wonder.

I’m going to stop wondering right this very second!

Man, back in Oakland! I feel real good about it. Hell, I hardly ever feel good about anything. And hey: Don’t get me wrong . . . it ain’t like I’m happy! And thank god for that, because lord knows I don’t want anything to do with that. I wouldn’t know what to do with the stuff if I ever got my hands on it anyway. I reckon I’d probably just take it out back and send it to heaven.

Anyway: I got me a job at a place, and I go to that place and do a thing every day except Saturday and Sunday. I guess that’s how it goes. I absolutely do not dread going to work at all, so maybe that’s something. I work with four beautiful self-effacing cynics, so hey, that is for sure something.

It has taken me all of five days to confirm in my heart and soul that 90% of Portland was a complete waste of time. Oh well. In ‘No Country For Old Men,’ a sheriff says to Tommy Lee Jones: “Can’t stop what’s coming.” Portland is in the past now, and so I will say to all of you: “Can’t stop what’s [already come].” Yeah. Regret is dumb as hell and a real waste of time. You let it pass through you, and then you get on with the thing. And anyway I don’t exactly regret Portland . . . I met a lot of fine people, and got to experience snow and rain again, and so on. Too bad the rest of it revolved around a totally inverted sleep schedule, a severe vitamin D deficiency, a lot of flakery, and a seeming eternity of darkness and loneliness (oh, wait . . . this part continues on even now, and will continue on till the grave  ((hence “eternity” (lol))).

Last night McCune picked me up and we went to a secret place where you pay $12 and they give you all the tacos you can eat. Along with my beautiful friends from the Pipehouse, we discussed the upcoming PIPEFEST III video, which I reckon we’ll start shooting soon since ol PIPEFEST III (yes, all caps) is happening sometime in May.

To The Belgians I say: If you wanna show up again, then please do. I promise I won’t be (as much of) a sludge-sucking fucked-out world-weary idiot this year. I’ll be all right, or as close to all right as possible anyway. You can even stay with me. I’ll have a house by then so long as someone doesn’t kill me, or I don’t kill myself, or the Western world isn’t finally wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. I think I’ll also have a motorcycle too. I can only ride around with one of you at a time though.

Finally: My friend Violet asked me to “do something” with her this weekend. Maybe we’ll go to the Irish pub I used to work at. Maybe not!

Well: That’s it. I’m in Oakland. Are you in Oakland? If you are, then we’d both be in Oakland. Wouldn’t that be nice??

OK!

Sunset eased that big bitch into a Love’s gas station and threw it into park next to the filthiest pump there was. “I’ll get the gas,” he said. “You go inside and stretch those legs of yours. And for god’s sake, get a fucking cup of coffee for us both, won’t you?” I nodded and flung my denim jacket over my shoulders. I readjusted the little pin on my lapel—the one with the black cat on it—and jerked the door of the convenience store open with a fierce tug. Inside was the end result of nicely-dressed white men perched in faraway sparkling glass skyscrapers using mathematics and psychology to reverse engineer the base instincts of an American populace who wanted to be comfortable and have it all come easy whenever they felt empty and alone, which was every moment of their miserable waking lives. Everywhere I saw camouflage cowboy hats, hot-pink beer koozies, lighters shaped like handguns . . . flashing, shrieking, useless plastic garbage lined every aisle that wasn’t already crammed with cheese-flavored sawdust.

lol

Aw heck yeah, man. I used to write these detective stories about two swingin dudes named Midnight and Sunset. I guess I’m gonna start doing that again!

I wrote like three of those dumb things. They were a lot of fun to write. One of them was based on a true story! My friend’s duck was savagely murdered in the night and I attempted to find the killer while high on acid. So I fictionalized it and had me a good ol time doing so.

Never did find that killer, though. Damn psycho is still on the loose.

Yup!

I drove down to the Bay Area from Portland on Friday night. It took about ten hours. Kerwin and I had rented a minivan and had loaded it with 100% of my things and about 20% of his things. Dante slept on a blanket in the backseat pretty much the whole drive—though when the sun started to come up over Mt. Shasta, he climbed into the front seat and sat in my lap.

On Easter Sunday I drove Laura and her sister Eli to the Golden Gate Bridge, and then through Golden Gate Park all the way down to Ocean Beach. I hadn’t been there in a while. I used to have a delivery route that went right by it . . . but that was some time ago!

Anyway: Eli had never seen the Pacific Ocean before, and so she finally saw it that day. Years ago, when I first met Laura, she told me she had never seen the Pacific Ocean, and Ocean Beach was where I took her to see it. Hell, both sisters saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time in the exact same part of it!

Later I went to Tim’s place in San Leandro and watched Ben-Hur (1959) in High Definition. Yeah baby!!

Well: I guess I live here now. Again! I just need to find an apartment. I’m working on it! I’m also probably going to get a car sometime next week, because you gotta have a car around here.

As of today I have health and dental and vision insurance. I have paid time off and sick leave and on and on. What the heck, man.

I don’t feel much so far! I will let you know if that changes.

Bay Area Buddies! Please text me~

Seriously: Beware of any adult who is not a kindergarten teacher who says “activities” instead of “doing stuff”

e.g. “I enjoy activities”

Yuck!!

Hey does anyone want to come over and watch ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ with me tomorrow

This is world-famous French Canadian multimedia artist Laura Rokas and me drinkin teeny tiny little baby cups of coffee (TTLBCCs) in the Tenderloin in San Francisco! Laura’s sister and my honorary sister Eli took these pix the night we had a pizza party at Laura’s apartment!!

Later, after Laura’s friends and my new friends Gayle and Rachael arrived to eat a whole bunch of pizza, we recorded a video:

i’m back in california!!!! with my friends @laurarokas @spaghettsworth @elirokas & @rdsvs 🌝👍 and they love me a lot!!!!

A post shared by ryan starsailor ☆ミ (@starpuncher) on Apr 6, 2017 at 10:39pm PDT

I slept on the floor that night! In Laura’s apartment! It was very loud outside because the Tenderloin is a strange trashy Blade Runner-y place. I can’t sleep anymore, not really, so I only slept for two or three hours before waking up round about five a.m. to the sound of a man shrieking way down below on Geary Street.

In the dark I lay on the ground and tried to fall back asleep. I grabbed one of Laura’s black T-shirts and wrapped it around my head. I have absolutely no idea how to meditate but I tried to do it anyway. I stopped thinking about words. It was very difficult! Every time I started to create a sentence in my head, or describe to myself the images my mind was producing, I pushed them away as best I could.

Eventually my mind was completely blank, and I saw a desert at night. There was nothing there but sun-baked dead earth and stars in the sky. There was a sort of black vortex in the center of the desert and so I walked over to it, took all my clothes off, and crawled into it!

Inside the hole was a warm jelly-like substance. It was porous and so I could breathe. I swam to the center of the thing, to the big deep black nothingness, and stayed there for a long time. I didn’t know if I was upside down or facing east or west or anything. I still had a body because I felt the protoplasm stuff covering it. It was real nice and comforting. Nothing hurt!

And I could still hear the traffic and the yelling and the dump trucks and whatever else in the Tenderloin, and knew that I was technically awake, and in Laura’s apartment, and so on—but I was still resting in some way. I reckon it felt like being underwater. It was a strange muted semi-dream!

Laura and her sister Eli woke up and started making breakfast at 10 a.m. I got up and wandered around and washed my face and combed my hair. We ate toast and eggs and cheese and tofu. Then we went to Dolores Park and got ice cream!

Here is Eli and me eating ice cream:

 

Here is Eli and me in Dolores Park:

 

Here is Laura and Eli in Dolores Park:

 

Here is Laura and me in Dolores Park:

(Laura and Eli are related! Do I look like I could be related to them too??)

((Those are California poppies by the way. They’re so cool!!))

An hour later they walked me to the 16th Street BART station in the Mission, and then I went all the way back to Oakland and got my bag, and then went all the way to Oakland Airport to go back to Portland. My plane was delayed by two hours because of huge winds in Portland and Seattle. I put on my headphones and fell asleep. The winds abated and I got on a plane. I flew home in the dimly-lit plane. I was tired as hell.

The first part of the story, which I am putting here at the end, is this: I got a job at a publishing company in Oakland. I start next Monday. I am in Portland one last time to say good-bye, or whatever. I’m driving back down to the Bay on Friday evening. Yeah. That’s pretty cool. I’m real excited. I’m also so nervous I feel like throwing up.

My babies, I’m back.

The end for now!