☆ STARSAILOR ☆

At noon I fled the Outer Sunset in San Francisco and boarded a MUNI train bound for Embarcadero Station, then took a Richmond Red Line BART to the East Bay. I got off at the Downtown Berkeley station and headed to Trader Joe’s to STOCK UP on as much fruit and protein and fiber as my body could tolerate just then. Back outside, I found a shaded spot on the curb, far from the madding crowd, and ate every single thing I had got. I’ve been wandering around like the degenerate I am ever since . . .

I am writing this from VICTORY POINT off Shattuck Avenue, not far from UC Berkeley campus . . . near as I can tell, it is a combination coffeeshop, bar, and safe haven for socially awkward Berkeley kids to play card games and board games, of which this place is seemingly stocked with hundreds. I did not realize so many existed. The sun does not set for another two hours, around 7:30 pm, so I reckon I will stay here till then. Outside it is a warm and breezy day, in other words that baseline Bay Area weather everyone loves (and pays out the ass for) . . . and yet I still think it is too bright for me to be out in it. Sorry!

HERE’S THE THING: I could be anywhere right now, but I’m hiding out here in Berkeley because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I was supposed to meet up with some people I know in the city tonight, but they seem to have vanished. Well, that’s California for you . . .

And so where will I go once the sun does finally set into the Pacific Ocean, perhaps once and for all? I wish I knew. Like the Ancient Mariner, I reckon I am doomed to wander the earth forever, telling my tale of woe to anyone too polite to run away from me . . . doomed, even, to stay upright until someone offers me a bed or a couch or a stretch of floorspace in some corner of a seldom-used room. When I wake up tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have to figure out what to do and where to go all over again. LISTEN: I can take it. My soul is prepared. How’s yours??

(Days later . . .)

They say I only have a day and a half here until I return to New York. The entire time I have been in the Bay, I have wondered at it . . . wondered at my being here! It was of course worth it to come here so that I could see as many people as I did . . . I saw Laura and Alayna and Emma and McCune and Joanna and Lucy and Molly and Hannah and Melody and Harrison . . . I got to hold my nephew Tower in my arms again. And yet I feel in some sense worse off than I did when I left the East Coast two and a half weeks ago. I have had nothing but nightmares the entire time, and upon waking, I have to conceal their terror or else I’ll swim in it all day. If I have a dream about someone or something, it DOES sometimes come true, however far-fetched, and so I have to be careful what I dream about. When it comes to manifesting Emel-Elizabeth the Estonian Girl in Berlin or Nicole the Polish Girl in Tokyo, sure, I can do that all the livelong day, and gladly! . . . but having a nightmare that winds up being a premonition is not something anyone wants, especially the dreamer himself . . . who in this case is, of course, me!

Today I awoke still stoned from the night before and never fully snapped out of it . . . and hours later, upon walking down Shattuck Avenue beneath that particular kind of late-afternoon Northern California sunlight, I had the sudden sensation that I was completely adrift in time. I came unstuck. I felt myself go backwards in it . . . and from then on, as I wandered around the East Bay in a haze, I was cursed with a sort of time sickness . . . I cycled through all the many eras of my life that I had lived out there and felt a terror knowing I did not belong in any of them anymore. I had survived all that suffering, had been made strong and fearless in a bone-deep sense by it even, and yet today I still felt the same dread and confusion as the younger version of myself who had countless times aimlessly walked up and down those same sidewalks under the same sun. I was even wearing the exact same clothes, just with more holes. Looking around, I saw the cobwebbed windows and empty storefronts of all the places I used to go that no longer exist . . . entire blocks of nothing. I was a phantom haunting my own life. I felt nauseous just then. I felt so physically and emotionally exhausted I could barely stand, but I kept walking anyway.

Without a single thought in my head, I walked until I got to the lake. There was a breeze over the water. I was reminded of the thousands of other times I had felt that same breeze in that same spot. And the sun, having no alternative, shone its dying light upon the nothing new as it once again lowered itself beneath the crater rim of the many houses which encircle Lake Merritt. The sky was awash in fiery orange as I made my way up the grassy hill in front of my old apartment building. I stood in the middle of the street and instinctively reached into my jacket pocket to retrieve a key that no longer exists.

Eventually I awoke on a Soltrans bus from El Cerrito del Norte bound for downtown Vallejo. By then it was nighttime. I was still wearing my sunglasses. Outside I saw the twinkling lights of a refinery bordering the San Francisco Bay . . . there was something pretty about it. And there from the bridge I saw Mare Island off in the distance. Darkly I wondered at my dreams. I wondered if I have been seeing glimpses of that mortally intolerable truth. I groaned. Now is not the time for that. I don’t want that yet! Can one choose? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve earned peace or deserve happiness, but if I could just get my hands on either one of them, even just for a little while, I would be deeply appreciative of whatever entity saw fit to grant me some reprieve from the current of pain under which I stand. And then what? What is my purpose? Are you going to show me soon? Shall I continue to await your orders from the place that hides the sun? Either way . . . here I say, as always, to the sad and tired face staring back at me in the mirror:

BEAR THEE GRIMLY, DEMI-GOD.