(my friend jackson was with me when i took these pictures and he said “haha duuudddee, that’s a classic starsailor post”)
I have instructed my robot secretary Ingrid not to take any calls tonight, and to reroute all written correspondence to a urinal at the Greyhound station in downtown Oakland.
Tonight, you see, is DUDES DONE WRONG. I anticipate that absolutely no one will show up, which is all right with me. In which case I will watch . . . well, I’m going to watch something, I’ll tell you that much!
(What did we watch last time? ‘The Wrestler’? Man, that movie rules a lot)
I am thinking that maybe September will be DUDES DOING WRONG month, in which case we will invert the theme. Instead of a Dude getting absolutely blasted into oblivion and clawing his way back into our shared three-dimensional hellreality one last time to get revenge for absolutely no reason other than having something to do, we could watch four movies about a Dude being a huge jerk and wronging people for his own amusement. Plenty of movies like that!!
Or should that be October . . . what with all the trickin that goes on round about then!!!
My other idea is to dedicate a whole month to one Dude, like Michael Caine or something. Anytime a Cool Dude dies, we have an emergency Dudes Done Wrong to honor that Fallen Dude. Like when Philip Seymour Hoffman bit the dust, we watched ‘The Master’ in absolute silence. Yeah. That was good. Michael Caine, thank the lord, is still with us— so why not, for one month, honor the living??
OK I’m going home now to do whatever it is I do. If you wanna come over, doors open at 8 p.m. There will maybe be food. I can make you this bowl of stuff that is boring but has a lot of protein. Yeah. Seeya later, punks.
all good in their own right
I often have paranoid delusions that 1) the world is made of cardboard and fiberglass and sawdust and drywall, 2) I’m the only one who is alive (only because my awareness of myself is the only awareness I can sort of kind of prove (and even then I’m unsure / could be convinced otherwise)), 3) I’m dead and stuck inside a dream for all eternity . . . and that my dreams here are dreams within dreams, and on and on, so as to keep me fooled, 4) I’m the protagonist of an extremely boring episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’, 5) if I blink or turn away or fall asleep for a few minutes, everyone will vanish and I’ll be alone in the whole world (which is, whoa, actually the premise for the very first episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’).
. . . your standard sci-fi delusions more or less!!
A dream: Last night I was alone in a sort of 1950s-looking small town. It was nighttime and there were leaves all over the street, so I reckoned it was fall. The place seemed too clean and utopian to be real to me . . . kinda looked like a movie set or something. I walked around and knocked on buildings and park benches and trees and so on, all hollow. I remember thinking, “Ah man, I knew it! The world really is fake!” I thought about telling someone, but there was no one else around, so I got to walking.
All five of my horror scenarios had combined to form this one dream! I didn’t necessarily hate it. In fact I seemed relieved in the dream, knowing that I was alone and that probably nothing could hurt me. I ran around the streets looking inside buildings but everything was dark and empty. The only building that was unlocked was the movie theater. I had this urge to go into the basement and so I did. Down there, hand to God, I saw myself standing there, and when he saw me he darted away beneath these old brass water pipes that filled the entire basement. I went after him because I didn’t know what else to do. There was only a three-foot clearance between the pipes and the ground so I had to duck the entire time, and run through hundreds and hundreds of spiderwebs. My doppelganger was covered in the things. Once we reached the end of the huge labyrinthine basement, Other Ryan started panicking and brushing the spiderwebs off his clothes.
He said: “Dude! Do I have any spiders on me?”
And I said: “Yeah man they’re all over your back. They don’t look big though.”
In saying this I realized there were probably dozens of spiders crawling all over my back as well, so I started freaking out and brushing them off.
Well: So there we were, my clone and me, in the basement of a vacant movie theater in a cardboard town, covered in fuckin spiders!!
I sat upright in bed and started feeling around my back. No spiders! I went back to sleep and, as far as I know, dreamed of nothing this time.
THE MEANING OF LIFE IS THAT IT STOPS
I will uh elaborate on this later . . . an entire chapter in my dumb-stupid novel INJURY AND AFTERMATH contains my last will and testament and an explanation of the (likely) future event I am about to briefly outline . . . but my retirement plan, really truly, is to go down to Antarctica and walk to the South Pole with the hope that it kills me, which it most assuredly would. I have been fantasizing about this for years and years. As stipulated in my will, my skeleton is to be collected from the snow and tossed into Mount Terror, which is a volcano on Ross Island off the coast of Antarctica. For the convenience of the poor bastards tasked with trekking across that godless icy wasteland with a team of sled dogs, I have plotted what I guess is probably the quickest route for getting my earthly remains to their final resting place (and of course I used purple stars):
What will the front page of the New York Times say the next morning? I’ll take a stab at it:
LIFELONG LOSER
FINALLY FINDS PEACE
IN AN ICY TOMB
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
About a hundred years ago, during Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous Terra Nova expedition, he and his dudes reached the South Pole and then started heading back to the shore . . . but a bunch of bad weather and supply shortages eventually doomed them to a tent where they waited for the elements to kill them once and for all. One of the dudes, an explorer named Lawrence Oates, woke up one morning and said to his dying friends: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” With no shoes on he walked out into a blizzard and was never heard from again. They never even found his body!
Hmm. Yeah. That doesn’t sound so bad. It’s probably like going to sleep. That’s how I’ll do it, except the only thing I will be leaving behind is a vacant tent and a lifetime of regret!
IN CONCLUSION: When the time comes, I’ll charter an icebreaker from Argentina and go the hell down there and die. Shoot, man . . . I won’t even need a 401k for that!!!
Anyway:
Here’s a li’l teeny tiny baby anecdote that I was thinking about before I descended into utter darkness last night: all through middle and high school I had a crush on this girl named Cori. She was a grade ahead of me and I had never really spoken to her or interacted with her whatsoever, but I’d see her in the halls and I’d think, “Gosh, what a babe.” She was always hanging out with a group of cheesedick Rastafarian wannabes, but I kept on liking her anyway. One year, I think it was tenth grade, I ended up having a math class with her. It was the one and only class we ever had together. We had absolutely no reason to ever speak to each other, and she always sat in the back with the rednecks, so for months and months she was probably completely unaware that I even existed in the first place.
Anyway: ONE FATEFUL DAY our math teacher asked Cori to pass out some worksheets. She was wearing like literally a woolen Mexican poncho. When she got to my desk, I said: “Thanks a lot, Clint Eastwood.”
And in front of everyone, including our teacher, Cori said: “Hey! Fuck you, kid!”
God, I kind of love that. I remember being proud of it then. “Fuck you, kid!” Lord! That’s good.
Last I heard, she was living in my hometown and married to some psycho we went to school with and I think they have three kids together. Whoa!
Well, that’s the end of that story lol~
