i sometimes wonder if i have blasted off too far away from whatever it means to be relatable to people. i certainly can’t actually truly genuinely connect to most people. i think i know maybe four or five people who occupy the same brain-space.

i have become a cartoon character. i am a parody of myself! multiple people have told me this, mostly strangers who have nothing but an outsider’s perspective, and so maybe they would know better than anyone actually. at some point i stopped being ryan [whatever] and became ryan starsailor. and ryan starsailor is a whole other thing! it is a full-time job, baby.

i remember my cousin telling me once that he had watched me slip beyond the realm of “hey that’s a knowable guy” and get sucked up into a psychedelic cartoon world of my own creation where no one could follow me.

“you’ve got beautiful stuff inside you,” he said, and he made a sort of face like the very thought of me was painful to him, “but you’re in the funny papers now.”

did y’all watch tiny toon adventures? there was a character named gogo dodo and he was insane. he was my favorite character. he lived in a place called wackyland. it was like a surreal looney-tunes-themed dali painting. here is the only real image i could find of it, which i got from the, yes, tiny toon wiki (of course that exists). anyway:

i’m gonna let y’all in on a little secret: god dude i totally live in wackyland. i don’t know how to bring anyone else into wackyland. as i recall some of the other tiny toons characters visit gogo in wackyland and they’re like “what in the fuck is this shit.”

i have always made friends very easily, and generally people take to me quickly! (i am usually very hard on myself so let me have this one ok.) but as far as getting too close to the starry multicolored void-cynclone, hell, nobody wants to do that. they really don’t. i think this is why when someone is initially interested in me in, say, a romantic sense, they figure out pretty quickly: “i don’t know how you’re supposed to date someone like this. i’d rather just date a normal guy. this guy lives in fuckin wackyland.”

sometimes they keep me around, i don’t know why. my first serious girlfriend, who in my mind is a saint and a bit of a masochist, liked me a whole bunch—more than any other person had before or since! i’ve said this elsewhere but she’s the only person who was still laughing at my awful jokes five years later. up until the last day i could get a laugh out of her. (i even (painfully) remember the last joke i ever made, and god love her, she was mad as hell at me, but she laughed anyway.) man i was 100% gogo dodo in laffy-taffy-cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs-cartoonland around her all the livelong day and she loved it. she is a beautiful and mysterious person to me because of that. she was hilarious. probably the funniest person i’ve ever met besides my buddy hali palombo. she was the straight man. she was good. she was real good. god i miss her.

the other longterm relationship i had . . . hell that one i still don’t understand. i think the reason she liked me was because she was really confused. i guess that was interesting to her for a little while, to feel confused by a person. because she sure didn’t like that i stayed up till 5 a.m., and took long walks in the dark where i got drunk by myself, and made jokes in front of her friends that made her face turn red. . . . she said i “vibrated past reality” which is a real good expression that i don’t think existed before she said it to me. nice!!!!

hell i don’t know guys i’m just musing on some shit. got me a cup of coffee and i’m thinking. please come visit me in wackyland. i’ll figure out a way to open the seal. you can stay as long as you like. it’s very good and fun. i’ve got it real cozy in here and i’ll say nice things to you if they’re true. i wouldn’t mind having some company.

oh god oh god wackyland