RYAN STARSAILOR
1988–2022
☆彡
‘IT ALL AMOUNTED
TO PRACTICALLY NOTHING—
BUT IT WAS FUN
WHILE IT LASTED.’

aw

My good buddy Tracey Lien went to my good buddy Laura Rokas’ gallery opening in San Francisco tonight. She took these pictures of Laura’s work. Whoa! Talk about some real cool stuff!

Baby I’m proud of you!!!

Here is a picture of me and some strangers in Kyoto a few years ago. They were all from England and Australia. I have never forgotten that the woman whose hand I’m shaking was named Gidget. What a name!

We were all drinking these Kirin lemon vodka things. At some point we ran out and so I accompanied this insane French guy to a nearby convenience store to get some more. It was snowing outside and we were very cold. When we got to the convenience store he grabbed a huge plastic milk crate they were using to unload loaves of bread and filled it with lemon vodkas from a fridge in the back. The staff there looked horrified. He was just chucking dozens of these things into the milk crate, which I’m sure was a pretty weird and rude thing to do! We got maybe 40 or 50 of them. We cleaned the place out. He paid for the whole thing.

On the walk home he told me had left Hong Kong in a hurry because he had stabbed someone over a gambling debt (???) and maybe that person was no longer alive. To which I said: “Oh, baby.”

Anyway when we got back I gave Gidget a few of those lemon vodka things and she shook my hand and complimented that absolutely godawful “haircut” I had at the time.

The guy in the back with the ill-fitting sweater and equally bad haircut was a big time jerk. I caught him kissing a girl who had passed out! He tried to carry her back to his room in the hostel and I said, “Hey man, come on!” He told me to piss off! I grabbed her friends and they rescued their friend from this cheesedick psychopath.

I went upstairs and took a shower. I had pulled a muscle in my leg and walking around 15–20 miles a day in the dead of winter was miserable with a bum leg, so I held the shower nozzle over my pulled muscle and tried stretching and bending it. I don’t know why but I also remember sitting down and crying for a long time.

At the post office I asked for stamps, on account of me having a lot of letters I need to write and mail out—and when the woman behind the counter asked me if I wanted Christmas stamps, I told her I wanted Kwanza stamps instead. There was a large line behind me and when I said this I turned around and flashed my gold tooth at the people there and some people look horrified and others looked at me in the way I hoped they would: as though I were a big huge dumb idiot.

She said: “Shoot, we’re out of Kwanza stamps.”

To which I said: “I’ll take Hanukkah instead if you’ve got em.”

They did have Hanukkah. She handed me a little booklet and I opened it and inside there were twenty menorah stamps with “HANUKKAH” written on the left side and “FOREVER USA” written at the top.

I said: “These are great!” and I paid the woman and left.

Next I had a package to drop off at a UPS store, which is way up Hawthorne, and past my house, and so on. It was an errand that would only take 10 or 15 minutes. But there was ice all over the car and the roads were still slushed with dark snow and I groaned thinking about all the traffic I would hit at Hawthorne and Cesar Chavez.

And then as I turned onto 9th Ave. one of those strange little mundane miracles that I love so much entered my life. In the middle of the street was a UPS truck with its hazard lights on. I drove up to the truck and rolled down my window. A UPS guy was unloading boxes onto a dolly. I said: “Hey man. Can I give you this package?” He walked over and read the label. “Oh yeah!” he said, and he took the box from me. I love it!

I went home and had a fire in my fireplace. Kerwin and I drank a whole bunch of tea and watched huge sheets of ice slide off the farmers’ market tent across the street. What a fine day!!

Now I have some letters to write. Minus the birthday letter I sent to my father, I have nineteen Hanukkah stamps left. Who’s in for one?! Shoot me an email with your address!!!

happy birthday dad

eight really is the best number isn’t it

8 looks so cool

so does VIII

ok that’s all i got

i just love eight / 8 / VIII !!!

it’s just me and dante now

and we live on the floor!

ah man, i miss oakland so much. boy do i ever! as silly as this sounds, it had become part of my identity, and now that part is gone. nothing has come to replace it!

i miss my buddies. i gotta get back to my buddies.

oh hey it snowed today by the way

i took these on my way to this clinic i go to once a week

at the clinic they did what they do every week, which is to take my blood pressure and weigh me and ask me, on a scale of 1 to 10—(1 being utter despair and 10 being balls-to-the-wall super-happy)—how OK i am

today i told them “somewhere between 3 and 4”

and then i walked home in the snow

it was cool

ok bye