Here’s the little commercial Isabella and I shot and edited for her new small business . . . the gist of which being: Isabella will come to your house and fix and install things for you so you don’t have to ask some random dude from the internet to do it. Because if he ends up being some freak-ass creep . . . once he’s in your house, you have to get him out of there again. So why bother! Just hire Isabella . . .

She came over earlier tonight and we made tea and oatmeal and glued this thing together. I think it’s pretty good! We’re filming a few more soon . . .

Back to work!!

he heard a loud noise and got scared lol

It is 5 a.m. here in Berlin, and I have just gotten out of the bath . . . I am going to make some tea and lie in the dark and listen to music until the sun comes up, and then I will eat a handful of magnesium and sleep till noon. In the evening, Isabella is coming all the way from East Berlin to my Dracula Tower to edit her commercials with me.

We’re also going to record her voiceovers . . . and I think I’m supposed to help edit her script beforehand. Wow! I guess this is a kind of job now.

She asked me for some stills from the footage we shot so she can make QR code stickers to leave in bar bathrooms. Apparently they will prominently feature this image:

That’s my dead body in the background.

On that note, I’d like to place my Sentimentality Hat upon my head for just a moment. Yes, I know it resembles a dunce cap . . .

Now that I am wearing the hat, I have to say this (one feels compelled): there are these strange moments in time, reliably several times a year, when people from The Past reach out to me. I know a lot of people, and most of them stay within my orbit, but there are certain people who come and go over the course of many years. Often, at some point, they’ll decide to stay permanently, and we’ll talk all the time. I like it best when people decide to do this, but it’s up to them what they want to do. Sometimes you’ve just got to go back out there for a little while.

The ones who go to the farthest reaches of the universe and then spin around and come see me again . . . they don’t even have to knock when they get here because the door was never closed to them, and I’m always the exact same person they remember, and I’m always happy to see them. I get the sense from them that it feels like they are coming home.

Recently that temporal rift was reopened and thus some phantom signal came out from it. Something as huge and as old as God must be moving backwards in outer space, and heeding its inverted silent wail, remembered faces come in from the dark. I glance up and there they are again, and they all look a little sad. My instinct is to let them rest.

The other night when I received a dozen or so messages from one such person from my past, I felt a feeling in some part of me I had not visited in a while. Someone very special to me was standing in a place she had once stood before. And upon seeing her there again, it nearly knocked the wind out of me. The enormity of seven years between two points in time was instantly collapsed, and now there was nothing between us other than the distance it takes to extend an arm and touch the other. I felt that outward arm reach for me first and I pulled it close to me. It is a decision your nervous system makes for you in the time it takes to breathe.

She knew that it was safe to come on back around . . . she had, after all, seen the large conical Sentimentality Hat, which had gotten stuck on my head twenty years ago. And upon fully entering the pleasant gravitational field in which I inhabit, she was pleased but not surprised to find that the HEARTH was reliably HOT. I had kept the fire burning bright all that time.

What exactly had stirred her and brought her back my way? I wondered at it. Maybe she felt lost inside herself. Maybe someone had betrayed her. Maybe life had got her down. Hell, it could have been all three, and then some . . . hey man, we all know how that goes. But if I were to somehow put my Detective Hat on top of my Sentimentality Hat, I think my best detective’s guess would be the simplest one: she missed me. I missed her too. I reckon now we’ve just got to figure out what to do about it . . .

i am going to london

hopefully my made-in-the-USSR helios 44-2 lens gets here from poland before then because i’m filming bex’s show and i want it to look as weird and dreamy as possible ok!!!

p.s.

:,-)

Last night Monty was sending me pictures from our 2018 trip down to LA with Gayle and Laura and I felt an old familiar feeling: that I was gazing at a precious thing now long gone, never to return.

The four of us used to go on trips once a year around Laura’s birthday at the end of May . . . we’d rent a car and drive all over the West Coast together with zero itinerary, just hanging out and laughing like hell. Every day was a good day because we were together. And then the pandemic came and destroyed it all. Now we see through a glass, darkly.

I told Monty those pictures had me on the verge of tears! To which she replied:

The last trip we ever took together was in May / June 2019. We went to Tahoe and then Reno. I began dating Pallas shortly afterward and had the best summer of my adult life. To be quite honest, I could have done without most of the intervening years (lol)~

I spent most of today in Friedrichshain filming little commercials with my friend Isabella, who is Gego’s mother. She is starting a business where she helps women in Berlin build and fix things in their apartments so they don’t have to rely on a Creepy Guy From The Internet (CGFTI) to install a light fixture or wire an electrical socket.

Apparently when Isabella first moved into her apartment, she had a weird experience with an electrician who came into her house and made her feel deeply uncomfortable. So after she pushed him out the window to his death, she began teaching herself how to do everything . . . and she really can do it all. She showed me!

And now, provided you are a woman living in Berlin who needs home improvement assistance, she can be hired to come and fix your shit for you.

Gego was happy to see me, but he soon became confused as to why I was there carrying a lot of bags, and reasonably misunderstood the nature of my presence. See, he associates me with coming to get him to bring him back to my place. And while Gego loves staying with me, he hates having to sit in a carrier to get there . . . so he totally ditched us and hung out under the bed the entire time! It literally looks like he’s defiantly crossing his arms in that picture I took.

We worked for several hours . . . I suggested she incorporate a Creepy Guy From The Internet scene to drive the message home. Thankfully I was on hand to play that guy. I even wore my Hooters shirt:

We also filmed a few scenes at her studio nearby, where she gleefully operated a buzzsaw and a power sander for the future viewers at home . . .

Now satisfied with having helped each other successfully ward off existential dread for at least eight hours of our lives, we went to a cafe nearby and sat outside eating bagel sandwiches and sharing a slice of pie.

At one point, while discussing our respective childhood miseries, a grey-haired woman chiefing on a cigarette approached our table. Isabella, seeming to know the woman, proceeded to exhaust the entirety of her knowledge of the German language having a brief conversation with her.

The woman had with her a dog-like cat named Niko, and the two of them were on a walk. Niko lay down and waited nearby as her owner socialized. I heard the older woman mention Gego and figured Niko and Gego were friends or at least tolerated one another well enough. Gego freely roams his own neighborhood, and so I imagine he has made a lot of friends and enemies there, mostly the latter (despite being universally beloved on the internet, he is a bit of controversial figure in real life (he is actually insane)) . . .

Isabella and I walked back to her place so I could collect my things. Naturally, I tried to take as many pictures of Gego as he would allow. And naturally, he threw a huge fit about it!

I said farewell to my friends, gave them both a hug (which pancaked Gego between us), and descended the long red-carpeted stairwell in the direction of home. Beneath my arm I had with me a painting Isabella had given me in exchange for helping her film. It appears to be a pair of root vegetable lovers (radishes?) embracing. Or anyway, that’s why I see. I am going to hang it in the antechamber of Starsailor HQ at the top of the Dracula Tower where I live . . .

For GOD’S SAKE . . . the first light in the sky has alerted me that dawn approaches, so I really ought to sleep. Farewell for now!!!

checking in on emel

isabella said: “the universe is always bailing you out”

Other than Letterboxd, I do not have any social media anymore. Don’t worry: I’m not going to sit here and tell you how great it feels . . . even though it does . . .

However: I was going through my phone and I found some of the memes that people used to frequently send me along with a single word:

“you”

There seems to be this unifying popular perception of me as an eccentric mysterious unemployed movie-loving stoner sage dropout who stays up till dawn and is frequently on seemingly nonsensical adventures while the rest of the waking world is stuck at work. I’m just going to go ahead and tell you that all of this is absolutely true.

Behold:

For you, the day Ryan Starsailor graced your home and told you the story about doing acid with a hot Trader Joe’s cashier in Golden Gate Park and then driving a police car to the top of a foggy mountain at 3 a.m. was the dumbest day of your life.

But for me, it was Tuesday.