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.

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!

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 . . .

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.

this is the door to my apartment . . .

I was trying to find a picture in iPhoto and searched “dog” and this picture of Nicole the Polish Girl and me shaking hands in an elevator in Tokyo came up instead?? Does my computer think I am a (junkyard) dog in the sense that I inexplicably always seem to be hanging out with babes? Hey, relax! They’re just my friends!

(Nicole, give me the go-ahead and I’ll come to Warsaw at the end of September as you suggested I should. I will gladly take that five-hour train ride to have a wild night with you and your brother again. Lord knows I could use one of those . . .)

Anyway, this is what I was looking for:

A few hours ago, someone very special to me reached out from the abyss and told me she missed me in a way that almost made me cry. I miss her too. I replied with this, and then told her how much she means to me, just as she had.

I went looking for some pictures we took the last time I was with her and found these:

Of course she would own a wearable lower half of a mermaid . . . and so naturally I had to try it on.

That trip to see her, as well as the one I took the previous summer, are something akin to north star memories. I keep them frozen behind glass because of how deeply meaningful they are to me. Their significance only grows in this place, the further those days get away from me in time. When my mind begins to turn toward The Dark Path, I think of that time I spent with her and am rescued from my despair. In hindsight, both trips were only three days long, and yet those six days remain salient in my mind. It’s just true that they are some of the happiest memories of my life and it’s because I spent them with her.

I love you, Pallas . . . thank you for loving me too.

:,-)

LORD HELP ME: I’ve been posting things on fuckin YouTube. I mean, it’s got to go somewhere.

Here it is . . . you can click / tap on this thing to take you there . . . but only if you want to:

I also added it to the links in the top bar of this very website. I told you I was desperately trying to create reasons to keep waking up in the morning. This is merely one segment of it. Or perhaps this is just the lie I tell myself. Well, whatever . . . it’s working for now.

And just now I finally wrote a bio / description at the top of my YT page:

STARSAILOR TV is the creative work of a deliberate fool called Ryan Starsailor. Hey, that’s me!

This website is pretty bad, huh? So here is my contribution to homo sapiens the world over: I am not here to sell you a product or service, edify you, indoctrinate you, inundate you with “content”, nor cause you permanent brain damage.

The things I upload here are closer to something like this: “I was alive. Here is some evidence of it, if you’re into that sort of thing. If not, that’s OK too.”

Yeah? Come on back sometime. I’ll be posting regularly from now on. What the hell else am I supposed to with my life? Sit around and grow old?? Forget it!

Anyway . . . hope y’all enjoyed that!

Because I had not uploaded a video to YouTube in literally 15 years, I came to find that there are mountains of bullshit you now have to navigate in order to simply upload a video. This strengthened my cartoonish disdain for modernity, but that’s a topic where I’d sooner die than explore here. Anyway, one of the milder things you have to do is create a thumbnail for your video. I began to make some and immediately felt like a sick freak. I am categorically adverse to making the kinds of thumbnails you see on that godforsaken website, so I made something I would actually click on. It feels more honest. (I apologize for having just come off like Holden Caulfield.)

See here from what is, for some reason, my most-watched video:

And here is the video itself, which is graffitied with a bunch of dumb UI you can’t turn off:

FINALLY . . .

Now that Elina’s internship has ended, I have rehired her as my intern here at STARSAILOR CO. I’m making her business cards and everything. I asked her if we could film one thing a week, even if it’s only five minutes long (five minutes takes about 10 hours to edit, by the way), and I believe she agreed. During her inevitable intermittent absence (she has a new boyfriend (who’d better have a healthy intimidation of me (I’ll plant his Italian ass if he hurts her))), I will carry on in her stead and try to put out TWO MINUTES of something. Where I come from, that’s better than nothing at all.

Also, should we start streaming again? Elina and I had a show last year . . .

It was essentially two hours of me sitting on the couch playing something on my TV while Elina ruthlessly roasted me from my bed and cackled like a hyena. I’m sure at least one gentle soul out there enjoyed this . . .

It is five in the morning, so I’m going to eat a fistful of magnesium and hope for the best. These days, that’s all I can do.

☆彡

LISTEN:

I updated my cute little sidebar with my musician friends’ most recent work:

In order:

• Bex / lifepath99’s first single MISFORTUNE
• Chalk Talk’s newest album SUN LIES HEAVY
• Brother McCune’s band NIGHTHÄMMER’s newest album S T R U G G L E R

They are all radically different from one another. I love it . . .

Anyway, for those who came in late:

LIFEPATH
“MISFORTUNE”

This is Bex’s new project . . . I dig it.

I’m going to film her show on the 17th when I’m in London in a few weeks because what the hell else am I good for. She has also asked me to film “BTS shots”, which I had to look up either because I’m old or I have simply never encountered it before. It means behind the scenes, for the rest of you fools out there.

I’ll get to use my new lavalier mics . . .

. . . and then make a thing for her and splice the rest into a separate thing I’m making. I’m an artist now, you know.

CHALK TALK
“SUN LIES HEAVY”

My friends Chalk Talk released a new album last September, but I shamefully neglected to plug it here on starsailor dot co. This is me making amends for this disgraceful omission. Katie, Nina, Fia, Stella . . . as your surrogate brother, roadie, and driver: I am proud of you. I promise I will finish writing the story of the tour I joined you on soon. I just took the long way is all . . .

NIGHTHÄMMER
“S T R U G G L E R”

Finally, Brother “Big Delicious” McCune’s band NIGHTHÄMMER has released a new album called S T R U G G L E R. These guys love naming stuff that is annoying to format! (jk smile) The fact that this dude is a father, independent business owner, prophetic stoner sage, and on and on . . . and still makes time to routinely put out new music is wild.

I have known this guy for 20 years. And so I know it was McCune’s hand that penned this description of the album:

Man takes up the sword to shield the small wound in his heart sustained in a time long past, beyond remembrance. Man wields the sword so that he may die smiling in a distant place beyond perception.

Yes.

Support my friends if you can! They are fine people.

Well . . . so long for now!