04 January 2018

listen: i don’t need to take a BUZZFEED QUIZ to know which of the BIG SIX romantic poets i am

duh: i’m lord byron

come on y’all

hey which one are you

hopefully you’re william blake because that guy rules

(p.s. i was just reading about byron and i saw this line: “By Byron’s twentieth birthday, he faced overwhelming debt.” lol yeah)

04 January 2018

dude

percy shelley’s tombstone says
 

NOTHING OF HIM THAT DOTH FADE
BUT DOTH SUFFER A SEA-CHANGE
INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE.

 
which is from ‘the tempest’ (which is real good)

whoa that rules

03 January 2018

I went to New York City for two weeks. I asked three of my friends to alternate staying at my house so that Dante wouldn’t be alone.

Before I left, I wrote a care guide. It looked like this:

Here is the full text for posterity:

WELCOME TO MY STUPID HOUSE

Listen: Rules are dumb. Let’s face it, man . . . they just are.

THAT BEING SAID: There is only one rule in my house, and that is to Not Let Dante Out. If Dante gets out it would be catastrophic. He very much wants to get outside, which is why you have to be vigilant. Like, if you’re leaving, keep your eye on him. He will sometimes dart up to the side of the couch and attempt to jump out that way. You must not let Dante out, because if Dante gets out then I will probably never see him again, and then I will for real have to die of absolute sadness.

Dante is all I care about in the whole world. I mean that. You could set all my things on fire and kill most of my family (sorry guys), and I would be OK so long as Dante were safe. Think of Dante as my heart. I need my heart. If my heart were to vanish, so too would Ryan. I would collapse to the ground and shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the West. I will turn into a pile of ash and go to that howling infinite place beyond the grasp of human imagination. Please don’t send me to eternity just yet.

Just watch that little bastard is all I’m saying. After nearly a decade of taking care of Dante, I have this muscle memory where I check to see where he is when I get home, and then I check to see where he is again when I leave. He has absolutely no survival skills and cannot exist out there in that godawful world. Neither can I, but I have no choice. Dante is a cat, and like most cats he was born retired. He never has to go out there. He doesn’t know how lucky he is, but that’s OK, because I know. So just don’t let Dante outside. He’s very sneaky. Don’t let him outsmart you, because he will try.

– – –

You are welcome to do whatever you want in my house so long as it doesn’t hurt Dante or get me evicted. I guess don’t shoot up heroin or film pornography in my living room without the necessary permits. Other than that: feel free to eat, sleep, bathe, chill, cry, bone, have an existential meltdown . . . whatever, dude. I just don’t want to come home and sit down in a puddle of bodily fluids or find out that someone pawned my guitars. I trust y’all. I don’t think y’all’s gonna do any of that.

Eat all my food. Make fucking popcorn for all I care. I have a huge bag of epsom salt in the bathroom, so take a fucking bath. I just cleaned the tub. There are clean towels in the closet in the hallway. My sheets are clean. I dried them with lavender dryer sheets. You can have sex in my bed as long as you lay down a tarp. That’s a joke I think.

– – –

Dante:

1½-2 cans of food a day. His food is in the bottom cabinet to the left of the refrigerator. There are rubber food covers somewhere, probably in the drying rack. Just feed him whenever he’s hungry~

Give him treats if he’s being annoying. But don’t give him like god damn 30 of the things or I reckon he’ll barf.

There is some cat deodorizer bullshit on top of the metal shelf above his litter box. I’d sprinkle a li’l of that shit in his box every time you sift it. There are also secret charcoal packs hidden around his box . . . but you’re definitely going to know when he takes a dump. The dude has intestinal problems, so you can’t really blame him.

(Alayna: Give that dude ½ a tablet of his medz every day. The container is on top of the microwave. The tablets snap in half. There are like some rubber gloves in the drawer above his food. I wear them because I am terrified of accidentally poisoning him with whatever bullshit I have on my hands. Dude, everything is poison now. Have you noticed that? I don’t know. I just feel better poppin those little pills into his mouth when my hands are (relatively) sterile. I’m a big baby and I care way too much. Maybe that’s not a bad thing though. . . .

Brush that dude sometimes. He gets haggard, man. He’s a big fluffy cat. There’s only so much he can do for himself.

You’re probably going to want to light a match after he takes a dump. Holy lord. Trust me. There’s a box of em on the shelf above his litter box.

– – –

My wifi network is Donut Secret House.

The password is tinylittlebabies.

– – –

I’m having a lot of fun writing this. It feels hilarious and dorky and mom-like to write out so much shit just because I’m going out of town. I can see why moms like doing this. It’s satisfying. Yeah.

– – –

I will be back January 3rd. I reckon y’all’s switching off?? Just let me know when you can and can’t be here so my little dude doesn’t go unfed. H’okay???

What else should I say. . . .

Um. . . .

Laundry and mail keys are on the refrigerator . . . and uh . . . feel free to use any of the hundred bottles of shampoo in the bathroom and uh . . . there are cotton balls beneath the sink . . . I recycle, because I’m a responsible citizen of this planet . . . . . . . there’s incense in my room, if Dante gets real smelly one day, or if you just wanna chill. . . . . . .

Oh! Don’t open the sliding glass door. Dante is extremely strong and can burst through the screen. He will then chase the black cat across the alley. That’s bad! That’s in violation of The Only Rule!!

– – –

I guess that’s it. Dante is very nice. He’ll be nice to you probably. Or anyway he’ll warm up to you if he’s icy at first. Can you blame him? You have to protect your heart, otherwise people will shit all over you. Cats are born with that knowledge in their secret little brains, bless their secret little hearts.

Yeah! Can ya dig it!! You’re alone in my apartment, and you can get real comfortable and not care about anything. Hey baby, that’s what I do.

Call me if you have any problems!!!! Tell Dante I love him!!!!!

RYAN ☆彡

02 January 2018

I have been in New York City for round about two weeks now. Before that I was in the godforsaken wasteland where I from, which is some bumfuck podunk shithole in Northern Virginia. I saw my family and felt real weird about everything. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back again except to see my grandmother. She is old and tired now, and has her own apartment in something that I would classify as two or three steps up from an assisted living facility. What do you call that? A retirement home? She has a miniature kitchen and a living room and a bedroom and a big bathroom. If I were 91 years old and the sort of person who had no choice but to keep on living (I hope to be neither), I guess that’s the sort of place I would want to end up. Though in reality I will, several or many years from now, find an abandoned gothic castle in some forgotten place in Europe and live there in a tattered kimono and a purple velvet robe and my leather jacket that they will bury me in in Antarctica.

Uh, anyway: about New York City. . . .

I have stayed with my friends Tim and Jenny. It was real fun at first, but for the past two or three days I have noticed my body is deteriorating from the inside out, and I must go home so that I can be alone and sleep for 14 or 15 hours. I will do this on Saturday I think, when I will still be alone, since Kerwin is far away in North Carolina. I am so exhausted from walking 10 miles a day in 11 degree weather where the cold wind cuts through my denim jacket like a thousand god dang razor blades. My skin is dry and I feel old. Even now I know I should sleep, what with it being five in the morning, and having slept worse and worse by orders of magnitude since I got here. I think that I am sad because I cannot be alone here, even though I like my friends very much and want to be around them, since I don’t get to see them a whole lot. And then there’s the quiet catastrophe that I am certain is real . . . by which I mean the little white pills I have taken on and off for six years to keep me from going absolutely insane. They are for sure waning in their effectiveness. I am terrified of what it will mean when they finally do nothing at all. I don’t think they’ve done anything to me since I got here. Lord . . . if they don’t start working again when I get home then I must prepare for the disaster that will follow. You and me and everyone else who visits this back alley of the internet will bear witness to it if when that comes to pass.

Maybe I should go to sleep now so that I don’t wake up feeling like a rained-on duffel bag full of shredded newspaper and vampire turds. Maybe also there is no way around it. Well, what the hell can you do man! My skeleton is rattled, and god knows I love that thing, so I guess I will give it a soft place to heal.

Yeah. There you go. I’ll be back soon, and boy do I have a lot of senseless trash to put here. It’s got to go somewhere. That’s the lie I tell myself anyway.

Here an intentionally overwrought image of my face that I suppose an American teenager might publish:

ryan starsailor ☆彡
02 january 2018
05:13 am EST
brooklyn, new york
stupid / tired / at eternity’s gate

(this strange website
greets you this evening.
all is well. good-night.)