Good news: the Doomsday Clock has lurched closer to predicting the total annihilation of our species and the world as we know it

I can think of maybe a dozen or so times when I blacked out, or should have died, or fell asleep thinking I was dying, or whatever . . . and I have wondered if that was when I broke off from the thing and woke up in this. Or maybe I have inherited the memories of my dead predecessor, and have continued living in his place. Did someone put me here or did I kill him? I don’t know. Maybe I am him, which is maybe the worst case scenario. I don’t want to be Ryan anymore. I really do want the whole thing to go away. I’m probably dead already. Wait! That’s definitely the worst case scenario, because I’m still somewhere, even if I don’t know where that somewhere is. Maybe I never knew. This has got to be a dream or else it’s hell. Is Hell a dream? Lord. For now I am trapped inside whoever I am wherever I am so I may as well suffer through it until either someone appears and explains the whole thing to me, or I go to the grave with the song still in me~

just so you know

i know how all of this comes off

and by “all of this” i mean ALL OF THIS

too late to grow up now

gonna keep seeing the world as black and white, even though i know it’s not

there’s a lot of nuance and greyness that i am ignoring because it’s not as fun

gonna keep writing like a one-dimensional pulp-fiction detective

i know how bad this stuff is

hmm

does that make it better or worse i wonder

(This post will be easier to stomach if you pretend I’m 19 years old and just finished the first day of my first college-level philosophy class. Please, if you can, pretend for a second that I’m not a delusional 29-year-old man who thinks that the whole world is huge scam made out of cardboard and held together with pipe cleaners and twine, and that the true nature of reality (lol) is intentionally kept hidden from us by desperate little men in their pasteboard masks.)

OK:

I don’t read the news anymore. I don’t believe in politicians or celebrities. Television and newspapers and magazines and websites all that other HORSESHIT. . . man it’s straight up a big mountain of trash and I don’t believe in it. Taken as a whole it may as well be a big room of balloons to me, I guess, if that even makes sense. I reject THE WHOLE WORLD. That place blows and I don’t need it anymore.

I have known for a long time, and you’ve probably known too, that that stuff depresses you and makes you feel worthless on a molecular level. It is maybe insidiously invisible a lot of the time because of your constant exposure to it. How do you even escape it? I guess you just don’t look at it. It’s hard as hell not to. I’m trying anyway, because I’m unmarried and have no children and will probably be dead in 10 years.

So now I have Project Gutenberg open and I’m reading these public domain sci-fi short stories from the ’50s and ’60s. Today I was reading ‘The Tunnel Under the World’. Hey!

And, for god’s sake, not to sound like one of those assholes who says “I don’t even own a TV”, but I really am leaving my phone in airplane mode pretty much all the time, or just not bringing it with me. I’ve been doing that sometimes and it makes me feel a li’l better. I mean it’s at least one thing I have control over to make myself feel better. The rest is still a huge nightmare that is going to crush me into sawdust sooner than later. OK.

I wrote a short sci-fi story for my friend Mikaylah’s (<3) little literary journal thing. Should I post it here?? Maybe! I gotta make more of that stuff. What else am I supposed to do? I tune out when I make stuff. All the other crap in my life isn’t enough to not make me feel insane, and I feel insane anyway.

Well there you have it. I’m a child. Bye.

I saw ‘Blade Runner 2049’ opening night

and then I saw it again earlier in November

It’s real good. It sounds good and it looks good. It’s a cool thing.

They’re saying it failed miserably. And because it’s been out for nearly two months, it has begun to disappear from all the theaters in the Bay Area. So on Saturday night my junkyard brother McCune and I saw it again at AMC Bay Street in Emeryville. We smoked a joint outside and went in and sat in the second row. We were blasted out of our brains and ready to LIVE IN A NEON HELL for three hours.

I thought, you know, maybe this time everyone will just shut the hell up and watch this thing. I have talked to a lot of people who went and saw it, and have compiled multiple confirmed reports of the movie-goers there being huge dumb assholes. Like particularly so! Not an isolated incident! Or just me being overly sensitive because I like ‘Blade Runner’ and want to watch it! It’s insane. Previously I had heard people scoffing and laughing and god damn machine-gun farting during every quiet emotional not-funny scene. Every time I went I saw at least a dozen people exit the theater twenty minutes before the movie ended. What is this? What happened??

Everything seemed OK this time . . . and then some cheese-eating turd three rows behind us kept making this theatrically loud “PFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTT!!!” sound seemingly indiscriminately. Something innocuous would happen like . . . Ryan Gosling would be taking a shower, or drinking a cup of coffee, or his hologram girlfriend would be talking and he would go “PFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTT!!!” so that everyone could hear him. Oh, god! I wanted to lace up my starry black punching gloves and uppercut that human cockroach straight into space!!!!

I wanted to turn around and scream: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?”

. . . but then of course I would be just as bad as him!

HEY MAN

WE GET IT

IT’S A MOVIE

WE KNOW IT’S NOT REAL

THAT’S WHY WE CAN HAVE FUN WITH THEM

I am, as far as I know, not a Replicant. I am not an artificial human with no soul created and enslaved by my human masters to do menial tasks on Off-world colonies. But, uh, I can use my imagination and wonder what that might feel like, and then sympathize with the characters in the movie who are Replicants, and who do feel pain and sadness because they are unwanted and unloved???

I don’t know man!

Back in McCune’s truck, he said: “We don’t deserve movies anymore.” He was referring to the human race (lol). Yeah.

Anyway: I like that movie! I look forward to watching it alone in my own house soon. Good riddance, idiots!!!!!!

BONUS:

The idea of walking to my death in Antarctica came from Lawrence Oates, the English Antarctic explorer who died during the Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Dude had frostbite real bad and feared he was slowing down his team, and so he sacrificed himself by leaving their tent one morning so that his friends might have a chance to get home. They all ended up dying in that tent, and Oates was never found. Still: What a guy!

My friend Quinn was saying last night that her preferred way of exiting the world would be to overdose on morphine. I said, “Nah man.” I wanna EARN my DEATH, for whatever that’s worth. I always remember that Werner Herzog quote that’s kinda about that:

I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing.

Yeah OK!

Hey: I’m gonna give this whole “meditations on self-destruction and death” theme a break. I think we’ve all had enough of that trash for this week!!!

Stay tuned as I continue the tradition of complaining about things in a cartoonishly teenager-y way while posting screenshots of subtitled movies where characters are talking (mostly to themselves) about how life is a senseless terror and that we’re all doomed from the moment we first open our eyes upon this spiritually bankrupt hellprison of a world~!!

A concerned reader phoned the Starsailor offices late last night and informed us that no, we would not just go to sleep and die in Antarctic conditions. I guess I had always figured hypothermia would set in, and my nerves would die, and so too would the pain of my own imminent death. Was I misinformed? I don’t doubt it . . . hell, I hardly know anything at all. I’m an idiot.

This reader, they said that my lungs would burst and that I would choke to death on my own blood. Hey, man. If that’s what it’s gonna be, that’s what it’s gonna be. Can’t win em all.

Is that what happens? Will I choke to death on my own blood after my lungs explode? I’d probably have to be on Mars after sunset to hit those kind of temps, yeah? I don’t know. You tell me!

Why oh why can’t my body just cool down to the point where I go insane and hallucinate and then die sleepily in the loving embrace of the Grim Reaper??

Can’t I just have this????

OK just let me know. I need to know! Thanks~