There were signs of impending divorce all over the house. The dog wanted to be around us because he was lonely and the man with the guitar sang his sad songs in the bedroom down the hall because he wanted to be alone. Leila and I were dressed in kimonos and sitting cross-legged on the floor. On her lap was a book about fairies.

“Look here,” said Leila. She pointed to a drawing of a ring of mushrooms. A ruined old man in tattered clothing was on his hands and knees crawling away from it. “This is a fairy ring.”

I told her I didn’t know what that was.

“If you step inside a fairy ring, the fairies make you dance with them. They pull you around and around and around. And when they finally let go, you realize decades have passed—and suddenly you are very old.”

She closed the book and stood up. In her pink kimono she examined her own room. “I see things I like and I see things I don’t like. I want the things I like to stay forever. I want the things I don’t like to go away.”

And what do you like? I said.

“I like the things that are beautiful.” She pointed to a picture hung up above the fireplace which showed the migration paths of birds from North America to South America. “Like this. This is good,” she said.

Leila walked to the other side of the room. She took off her kimono and laid it out neatly on her bed. “This too,” she said. “I want to wear this forever. It’s telling me secrets right now.” She laughed.

The mason jar on her bedside table was empty. I picked it up and said I was going to the kitchen to fill it.

Leila put her kimono back on and padded over to me in her bare feet. Her face was rosy. “Downstairs I have blueberries,” she said, “and there’s nothing I want more right now than blueberries.”

Quietly she opened the door and crept down the stairs. Her kimono flowed behind her. With the empty mason jar in my hand I followed her to the lamplit rooms below.

It is 6 a.m. and I am trapped in a Starbucks in Houston, Texas. I took a bus from Lafayette with a stopover in Houston—and it was here they denied me passage to Austin.

If I could cry I guess I would have cried when they told me they couldn’t reprint my $90 bus ticket, and that I would be stranded in this fucking city until I figured out what the hell to do with myself.

With nowhere to go I sat in the station squeezing my backpack with what little strength I had left in me. The twisted scum you see at every Greyhound station haunted my stronghold and lustfully eyed my bag and my shoes and my jacket. I can’t imagine why—it’s all shit.

Nearby two idiots talked about how they wanted to assassinate the president. Several diapers were changed just inches from my leg. A cooler full of ice and hot dogs spilled out onto the floor. Some guy asked me if I had a sandwich in my pocket.

I stared at the sky from behind filthy glass and waited for the sun. I figured when it came up I would be relatively safe—and maybe then the dead-gazed psychopaths outside would disperse and I could go somewhere that was quiet and not lit with hateful fluorescent bulbs.

But they decided to clean the lobby around 5 a.m. They threw me out onto the street. It was still black and shadowy. As soon as I walked through the doors and into the humid grease-stained nightmare of downtown Houston in July, a dozen or so people descended upon me and asked for money and drugs and sinister favors. And I said to them: “Jesus, look at me. Do you really think I have any fucking money?”

A woman approached me as I struggled to get away, saying, “I just got out of jail. Can I have some money?”

“I have nothing,” I said. “Nothing. I’m stuck.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t spend a year in jail.”

I didn’t know what else to say so I said this: “OK.”

I kept walking.

For a mile I traversed the ugly parts of this town. I saw dozens of shirtless men in their fifties curled up in the grass or in the doorways of darkened businesses.

And now here I am, finally, alone in this stupid coffee shop. I have had way too much coffee and can find no friendly faces. There is a live Crosby, Stills & Nash album blaring from the speakers. My ex-girlfriend is mad at me and there’s blood in my mouth.

I have no idea why there is blood in my mouth.

In an hour I will start walking again and attempt to find some way to get west. There is a woman waiting for me 160 miles in that direction. She has said I can sleep in her bed while she is at work. I cannot imagine a more beautiful thought to cling to. Maybe that thought is the only thing keeping me alive right now.

And listen: if I get out there and they do kill me, I hope it’s quick and painless.

I love you all. See you in hell. ☆

I have probably sounded like a delusional psychopath my entire life

NEW ORLEANS—Ryan “Baby Star” Starsailor announced today amidst the torrential rainfall and violent chaos of the 7th Ward that he had come out of retirement and would resume his previous non-occupation of traveling the United States of America under the pretense of “wanting to hang out and write some crap.”

“I just got sick of paying bills, man,” said Starsailor, wiping tears from his eyes. “Those Oakland streets were really chewing me up. I have a lot of fun over there and I’m gonna stick around for a long time, but I gotta start going places like I used to or I’m gonna pop.”

Starsailor, whose recent trip to New Orleans awakened him to the fact that he had been vacantly staring at the same walls for far too long, says he plans to completely change the way he earns money and fills the hours in order to accommodate his desired lifestyle of transience and discomfort.

“When I get back home I figure I’ll drive rich people around in that old police car me and John have to make some money. I’ve done it a couple dozens times in San Francisco and people go nuts about it. Maybe now that I’ll be making my own schedule and earning every penny myself I’ll have time to go off and finish my novel. That thing needs to be done already—before I’m done, if you know what I mean. It just isn’t happening right now. I’m spread too thin. If you saw me right now you’d say, ‘Now there goes a broken man.’ I’m static and vapor. I’m a ghost’s fart.”

Before losing consciousness, Starsailor had this to add: “Baby—what else can I say: I’m back. I’m ready to go places and write and sleep on your couch while you’re at work. I’m a free man. I gotta be free. I was dead for a while but now I’m alive again. As alive as I’ll ever be, anyway. And that’s something. It certainly isn’t nothing.”

Vincent van Gogh said “I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.”

In that vein, though on a much less significant level, I saw this picture and then made this website.

Well . . . you heard it here first folks!!!! The ol’ Star Sailor is coming out of retirement!!!!! Getting on planes and buses and walking where those fuckin things won’t go!!! To get somewhere!!! (To get nowhere!!!) To sleep on your couch and hang out with you!!!!

Seeya soon you sons of bitches!!!!

My friend Hali and I call money “fun points” and we just talk about how much fun we can have with what little fun points we have

If you were to ask me what my greatest goal in life is I would say: “To find a purple kimono covered in moons and stars”

I don’t feel well. I closed all the shutters in Leila’s room partly for the novelty, but mostly because I’m tired of seeing the sun. A thunderstorm woke me this morning and I figured it would keep raining all day—in fact I hoped it would, I haven’t seen rain in three months—but it stopped around noon and the sky has been clear since.

Beyond the closed shutters and ten feet below me is a little garden. I tried to get to it but an iron-wrought gate kept me from entering through the back door in the kitchen. When Leila gets home I will ask her where the key is. For now I am trapped inside this ancient house.

All day I have watched the light move across the sky, have watched the plants shake on this desk whenever I tap a single key on my computer. The air conditioner is on and the room is cool. The rest of the house is steamy and humid but it feels nice.

At this point I have had three cups of tea and a sip of Leila’s lukewarm Anchor Steam she took from a bar last night—a bar where you can get a haircut while you drink. I found an apple in the refrigerator and ate that too. It didn’t do much for me though. My stomach is so empty it hurts. I have considered walking to Cake Cafe a mile away to get something to eat. I haven’t been there in three years. I remember it being good. But I also feel fine not leaving.

And anyway the door is still locked, and I still don’t know what to do about that. I could open a top-story window and climb down but I don’t know how I’d get back up. If I fell I might break something. Despite the State of California’s near-daily insistence that I have health insurance, I don’t actually have health insurance. So I’m here.

The entire house shakes when a truck passes. At least a hundred have passed by today. I don’t know if that’s normal. I’ve only been here a day.

In the darkness Leila and I walked beneath gaslit lanterns and alien vegetation. She told me a cyclist was hit by a tractor-trailer just blocks from where we were. She said someone took a picture and she had seen it. The cyclist was decapitated and his legs were separated from his torso. People are getting raped and mugged too, she said. New Orleans is a strange weird beautiful place, but it is also terrifying sometimes.

A complete stranger has just called. She says she wants to take me to a park. I told her I would go as long as she had me back by six-thirty. That is when Leila returns, and when the two of us will eat those little squares from Golden Gate Park just to see what happens.

Tomorrow I go to Lafayette. On Monday I go to Austin. After that I guess I’ll go home.