I often have strange sort of dissociative episodes . . . I’ll read my own writing, or think about my own memories, or I’ll see a picture of myself and I’ll feel as though I’m looking at some other dude’s life who happens to have the same face as me. It does not feel like my own life. It’s not scary or anything, and it’s not as though I perceive this Other Ryan to be my doppelganger. I know it’s me! I just feel removed from myself is all. Well, and maybe it’s no surprise that the thing I look at I don’t like at all, and I wonder how anyone else could either. I just see a cheap fraud. Hmmm. Should I be concerned that my personality is splitting in half? Maybe it has always been that way in less pronounced ways. I know there are distinct, uh, modes of myself . . . and I have always considered those Ryans to be different entities altogether. Maybe for all of us the singular nature of our personalities ain’t true at all, and what I’m experiencing is The Real Deal.

Maybe not!

Find out next week when they put me in a straightjacket!!

all of my websites went down this morning because white supremacists and nazis DDoS’d my webhost

I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.

I am fully aware that everything is nonsensical chaos with no real thread stringing it all together. I know that people do things out of apathy or self-preservation or thoughtlessness, and that 99% of the time it truly is nothing personal. And as far as I know the huge unfeeling universe is not out to get me. Sometimes at night I believe in the unseen and unaccountable old joker, but that’s because in moments of extreme exhaustion and sadness, which are my eternal ailments, I become wholly delusional.

Maybe it’s time to quote this again:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

. . . well, you know, that being said: The naive childlike part of me wonders what I ever did to deserve the things that I tolerate and endure and suffer through twenty-four hours a day. I can’t even escape it when I sleep. Last night I was talking to my friend and I got horrendously upset and drank a bunch of wine so I could pass out as quickly as possible. I woke up at four in morning almost screaming and my body was soaked in sweat. I had to get up and change and put a towel down in the spot where I had been sleeping. I went into the kitchen and glugged down a liter of water and I felt like leaving the house and walking around Berkeley in the dark but I went back to sleep instead. I woke up again at six. I had been dreaming of someone and even though I was awake then I couldn’t shake what had been real enough to me in my dreams seconds before. And it scared the hell out of me!

I’m the old man in the chair next to the fireplace with his head in his hands. I am a freak laid bare at eternity’s gate! Maybe it’s easier to just accept the malignancy and get the hell on with it. I tried to change and I didn’t change one bit. I tried for many years! Well, what’s the point any longer? I’d rather just lay low and be alone against the others. Alone by myself! I tried so hard to be nice to everyone. I’m going to keep on being nice to everyone. It’s just that I don’t see my life as an investment because I am not immortal. As the fella said, king or pauper, this is what awaits us all:

Hah~! The triumph of death, baby . . . the only kept promise!

Yesterday after work I walked five miles all over Oakland and Emeryville and Berkeley. I got a sandwich and ate it in a park by myself. I refilled my prescriptions and skulked around by the Bay. I went to the grocery store and bought some motherfucking vegetables. I thought all of this would help me, and it did, but the whole charade collapsed into a skeleton-filled sinkhole as soon as I got home and stopped moving. I sat on my crappy purple couch for a long time and tried to make my mind a total blank. I don’t think it worked very well though because I still felt that bad craziness all night long and into today. Who knows, man. I have many times attempted to make friends with the thing, but of course the thing is going to kill me eventually. There is no way it can’t. People die of many things, but this is the thing that will finally kill me if I don’t die in a plane crash or whatever before it gets to me. I will die with a chisel and hammer in my hands . . . die leaning against a 5,000-foot high tombstone for planet earth!

. . . upon which, in my final stupid desperate moments, I will have inscribed

THE NIGHTMARE
IS FINALLY OVER!

Hooray for Hollywood! I’m going to go walk around the block until my chest stops vibrating.

What an absolute nightmare, man. I will apologize here on my own website for expressing that sentiment so often, but then I guess that’s what y’all (whoever y’all are) have come to expect. If there were a running theme to all of this trash, or a thesis or whatever you want to call it, it would be this: “Please, for god’s sake, I can’t take this anymore.” Hah!

I am orbiting a black hole, and I feel as though I could be blown off the surface of this planet and thrown into that black hole once and for all at any given moment. I told McCune today, you know, that the two of us are two insane losers . . . real maniacs! Junkyard dogs staring down the barrel of oblivion and all that. I said to him: What are creeps like us supposed to anymore? Where’s the gettin place, man? Where does a fool go when all the sand has finally settled at the bottom of the glass?

I have no great purpose, if anyone can be said to have a great purpose. This is a torturous feeling. I can’t get my hands on the thing and I was a god damn lunatic to think I ever could. I was always destined for the landfill called eternity just the same as any of us screaming bags of garbage . . . but I can’t get comfortable with the thing no matter how hard I try, even though a lot of other people seem to be able to get there. I walk around and I try to touch it and talk to it and interact with it in any way, maybe with a sort of manic desperation, but it’s just layers and layers of shadows in the fog. None of it feels natural to me. Even things I like, or which briefly sustain me here, or whatever the hell else . . . I truly feel as though I could walk away from them forever at any time and never think about them again. I could stand up and leave it all.

Dante was in my window tonight, and telepathically I communicated to him that he was the only reason I’m sticking around this stupid planet. Without Dante I would wander off into a snowstorm in just my underwear in Antarctica and fall face-first into a snow mound and stay there until someone carved me out. And then, as stipulated in my will, they could toss me into the volcano called Mt. Terror which is nearby on Ross Island. Yes, I think that is what I will do someday when the little sadnesses I absorb every day, and which eat away at me like moths, finally get all of me.

For now I’m just pissing in the wind, baby . . . just putzing around this strange and endless nightmare that continues to grow increasingly frightening to me. It is not for lack of trying that I have fallen short of whatever I had dreamed up for myself and ended up in this godawful other place. A decade later and I am the muddled scrambled soupy version of the thing I have always been, and my receptors are all fried and my insides are rotted and lonely and swampy. I had recently gone a long time without the little white pill I need to live, and man, it sure did warp me a lot. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sensation of having absolutely zero serotonin in your brain, but it is one of the worst things I can think of. I have been completely drained of the stuff for a month now and I am terrified that I won’t be able to get back to that place I was before, which was also truly awful, but not so awful I couldn’t stomach it. I can’t sleep and I go out there alone every night and talk to people who don’t love me. I told Kerwin recently: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to announce stuff like this, but I was planning on going on an eight-month bender.” Hah!

It all feels so slippery. I don’t know how else to put it. I ain’t got no friction in my life anymore. The closest concrete thing is the hideous grain of living day-to-day. My small triumph is getting into bed every night. There is no thing awaiting me when I eventually have to leave my bed. My faulty programming is sometimes just straight enough for me to seemingly competently move through three-dimensional space and not scare people with my feelings. Heck! on any given day maybe that’s the most I can ever hope for. I just wish someone would grab my skull and squeeze it until it turned to bone meal . . . or at least shake me around a little. The lights have gone out up there and the machines are quiet. It’s driving me insane. Maybe I really am finally losing my mind. I need a jolt!

I have lurched into this great sullen desert and there is no way out. I said I was circling the black hole, but maybe I am the black hole. Like Gritt Calhoon, my hero, I am a black hole with arms and legs. Dry heat upon my brow, and all that. If I were a sociopath I guess I would be compelled to use this emptiness to run for office or start a corporation. Instead I’m just pissing in the wind. I’ll never get my hands on the thing. I had it once, but now I know it’s never going to happen again no matter what I do to try to get at it. And I have convinced myself in the absolute deepest layers of my ancient poisonous DNA that I am undeserving of the thing anyway. What kills me is that I tell myself I don’t want it, but maybe it’s all I want any longer. And now, as the fella said, we are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice. . . . We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances. Whatever it is, it ends badly. There is no other way. It must end badly because it was begun badly and was bad the whole way through. Oh, god! Talk about a sickness unto death. Life is prison and the only way to escape it is to die inside of it.

does anyone else have a bad feeling about this? by which i mean: do you suppose that it all just continues on like this, changing very little with the exception of your mind and body, which only get worse and worse by orders of magnitude with each passing day???

David Mamet’s ‘HEIST’ (2001) is REAL COOL and A CONSTANT SOURCE OF INSPIRATION TO ME because GIVE ME A BREAK THIS STUFF RULES