this post is dedicated to ricky jay, who died today, and who was the greatest magician on earth, and also a real cool dude who was in some of my favorite movies. he was only 72 years old.

if you ever get a chance, watch him in david mamet’s THE SPANISH PRISONER and HEIST, which is what the screenshots i took above are from. man, and do yourself a favor and watch RICKY JAY AND HIS 52 ASSISTANTS where he shows off a bunch of card tricks and just hangs out with an audience for an hour and talks. the dude was true blue. he was real as hell.

i am actually genuinely upset. i guess i’m gonna sit down and watch heist again for the thousandth time because i don’t know what else to do. rest in peace, dude.

ah, the world! oh, the world!

Two stories involving people I used to know very well and hung out with like every day:

LAUREN

A few weeks ago I was at Trader Joe’s in Emeryville, a place where I am embarrassed to admit how often I go there, and I was walking around with my head down feeling like a real piece of filth on account of all the recent suicidal ideation. I got a bunch of vegetables and some quinoa and chickpeas, which is just about all I eat anymore, and I was walking to the checkout line when I saw a girl who completely vanished from my life some years ago now, never mind how long precisely. This was Lauren, who was one of my first friends in Oakland. We worked together at Donut Farm for maybe a year and a half until she abruptly quit. I still saw her a lot after that because she lived with my friend Rachel K., who was also one of my first and very best friends here, and who was the de facto manager of Donut Farm. Well, the thing is this: it had taken some time for Lauren to like me because she hates pretty much everyone. So she doesn’t initially give someone a chance—you gotta break through the ice barrier and maybe she’ll warm to you. I felt very glad when Rachel told me I had.

Lauren and I would drive around at night in my police car after that because neither of us could sleep. We went all over the place and I liked being with her. Sometimes we just did laps around Lake Merritt drinking coffee. This went on for maybe six months. Then, one day, she had some sort of falling out with Rachel and moved out. Overnight she unceremoniously dropped all of us and completely went away without telling us where she had moved. I think Lauren just had to completely wipe her life of what came before and start new. I never saw her again after that.

So at Trader Joe’s a few weeks ago, there she was in the checkout line. She said, “Ryan. You’re back.” Somehow she had known I had been in Portland for a year, and was back in Oakland again. We talked for a little while and I felt like maybe she didn’t really want to. She had probably said hello to me automatically without thinking about it and immediately regretted it. Probably I’m just thinking of it that way, though hell, I can’t read her at all. She always scrambled my character-reading abilities. I said good-bye and hugged her, and it was real stiff. What was real for me felt perfunctory to her. She doesn’t strike me as someone who likes affection, so who knows. Man, I was so happy to see her though.

Before I left, I grabbed a teeny tiny little baby cup of coffee (TTLBCC) from the back of the store and then went out the side door. In my peripheral vision I saw her standing by the wall looking at her phone. I kept walking because I didn’t want to bother her again. I popped my trunk and put my grocery bags in there. I covertly glanced in her direction and saw her darting away like she didn’t want me to see her. I thought, you know, what the hell is that? We had been friends, for god’s sake! Well, she’s gone again, and I reckon I’ll just have to live with that. I guess I’m still allowed to miss her though.

•  •  •

AMANDA

I worked with another girl at Donut Farm, who was Amanda. She was tall and had short blonde hair and man I sure did like her a whole lot. We used to watch VHS tapes like every night. Like crappy ’70s horror movies and all that. She lived with Rachel K. too for a time, but moved out after she met some new guy. Before she quit, I gave her my old mattress. I don’t know why you’d want someone’s used mattress, but I gave it to her anyway. She moved to Richmond with her boyfriend and lived in some punk house with a bunch of punk kids. There were some other houses in this little corner of the Richmond Annex, and so they had fires all the time in the very center. I went to one once with my spirit-brother McCune. She took us along to Little Caesar’s to get some HOT-N-READYS for the party. She had just bought this classic car. I’d never seen one like it.

Anyway: The fire was OK. Truth is, I didn’t have a whole lot to say to Amanda outside of the Donut Farm house. I don’t know . . . I guess it had been some time since we’d spoken, and she’s real cool and nice and all, but I never really had any deep conversations with her. She did give me this elaborate tour. In her bedroom was my old mattress. I didn’t see her again at all after that. I didn’t know what had become of her.

Last week I went to get Thai food at this place called Tuk Tuk in downtown Berkeley. I got my take-out bag and walked out, and there she was on the sidewalk waiting for her friends to file out of a car. I walked past her without knowing for sure it was her. Her hair was so long, and I don’t know if I misremembered or something, but she looked shorter than before. I always thought she was 5’11” or something but she was definitely 5’9″. So I kept walking thinking it was probably just her doppelgänger or something. Well, they went right into Tuk Tuk. And I followed behind them and waited for them to sit down. On the street through the big glass window I recognized her boyfriend. I texted her asking if she was in Tuk Tuk and she said, “Yes! I had a feeling it was you, but it was dark. Come in!” I went in! She stood up and hugged me. I hugged her boyfriend too. I guess we’re gonna “get coffee” soon, which is something I kind of hate doing . . . I don’t like catching up. You know? What’s the point. But I do wanna see Amanda. She was very friendly, which she always is. It was a far different experience than seeing Lauren, who I guess inexplicably hates my guts, or at least still hates everyone on Earth, and I’m just caught up in the fray. . . . At any rate: Yeah! It was cool~

•  •  •

And what became of Rachel K., who was my best good friend? I was always around her house when I lived on Mead. I really did come over just about every day. I helped her with dishes and cleaning and I always chopped firewood I brought over from this underpass in West Oakland. She even asked me to come over one day because she missed her ex-boyfriend. She was pretty tough and I never saw her cry or get gooey until that day. She told me I was the first person to see her cry in probably ten years. I walked over to the stump where she was sitting and hugged her while she cried into my shoulder. And I remember staying over that night and sleeping with her in her bed so she didn’t have to be alone.

One day we just stopped hanging out together. She had asked me to watch her dog, and I couldn’t, having said I could before (Dante couldn’t take it!), and she got real mad at me and our friendship just fell into a pit. I missed her all the time but she ignored me, which, c’mon, is a pretty extreme reaction to have!

And then Christmas Day 2016, when I was alone in Portland, having spent the whole day watching movies by my fireplace, I got this email from her:

Maybe it’s because I just watched Swiss army man drunk on expensive white wine after eating Latkehs with my dad in PA, or maybe it’s because Zach sent out a Christmas wish, but I was thinking about you.

How are you? Are you alive? Well, even? Are you warm and tan? Probably not, I am cold and pale. Are you in Oakland, still, again?

I miss your evil, and yes I was pissed and considered you a bad friend because you ghosted me after you agreed to watch my dog and then I got mean and ghosted you. But hey, friends are hard to come by, and we’ll all be ghosts soon enough (not soon enough).

I responded, saying, Jesus God Almighty, I sure did miss you. I told her I was trying with all my might to come back to Oakland, and that when I did get back we’d be friends again. I was excited as hell.

In April I was hired by this real great publishing company in Oakland near Temescal. I told her we should hang out soon, and she said “Yeah dude!!!” I ended up being so busy with having just moved that I let a two months go by. I didn’t hear from her for some time after that, and I was distracted, and so on. Finally I sent her a text asking if I could visit her classroom, now that she was a high school art teacher, and she said: “No. You haven’t even made time for me since you got back.” To which I said: “That’s fair, yeah.” I never said anything again after that, and so I haven’t seen her again in all this time. I’ve been thinking about writing her a letter and leaving it in her mailbox for six months. I think I’ll do that this weekend. I suspect that Rachel is like Lauren in that she has very few friends by design, and to protect herself she puts distance between herself and you when she feels slighted in some way, accidentally or otherwise. Hell. That’s a real bummer.

•  •  •

Well, what else is there to say? I reckon sometimes you love people and they go away, and then somehow you end up seeing them or talking to them again, and you remember how much you love and miss them. I don’t know what will become of any of this, probably nothing, though at the risk of sounding sentimental I’ll say this: I sure am going to keep on loving and missing these fine people. They were my friends, and they were nice and decent to me a long time ago now. For whatever it’s worth now that it has ended, I still remember that feeling.

First, a word on inversion, which is the flavor of the month for me near as I can tell:

. . . then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true – not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity”. ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave—yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead”. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Anyway: It has been rough as hell for me lately. Hand to God, I’m really trying my best. I don’t wanna give up, because to quote a friend of mine, I don’t want to transmute the love I receive from others into pain. I don’t want my pain to hurt anyone of the people who love me, and so it is reason enough for me to crawl out of this godforsaken bog if only to be good for them after all they have given me. Anything else would be selfish I reckon. (Isn’t that such an adult view to hold????)

Though, let’s face it: Maybe it’s too late to undo things I have done which have hurt others. Lord, I sure hope not. Thing is, I have this dark suspicion that it’s time to pay the piper, or whatever. . . . maybe my awful reward is to have the pistol turned on me, so to speak, and I stand there with my eyes closed waiting for the bullet to hit its mark! by which I mean me. Maybe my eternal punishment is to suffer through my own horseshit that I put everyone else through over several decades. You know? Maybe I ghosted too many people, or was vague or indifferent when I could have otherwise been warm. It is I guess a sort of Christian thing to believe in punishment for wrongdoing. I think it was good ol Christ himself who coined the “eye for an eye” bit. I can’t say I don’t altogether deserve whatever is coming to me, real or imagined, though I hope if those certain people are reading this, for god’s sake man, it was never anything personal. It was just a whole bunch of my own self-loathing I put y’all through. I lead you into the labyrinth and, just when you needed my insurmountable iron-clad friendship, I turned inward and confused you. I really am sorry. I cry about it sometimes. Really, what else can fine American like myself do in such times?

I haven’t slept in a long time . . . maybe thirty-five hours or more. I drove eleven hours from Portland down to Oakland last night, and I sure did go straight to work in the morning. I was languishing all day . . . no good in this weakened state! And I was vulnerable to my friends in a way that could maybe be construed as a sort of cry for help, or at least overly sentimental, even for me. . . . though hell, if I felt comfortable enough showing you that, y’all best believe it’s because I felt I could trust you. I mean you could have knocked me over by blowing on my forehead. I’m a bag of leaves, man. I’m a god damn human-shaped wad of feathers! and not the pretty kind either. I’m talking the real son of a bitch kind of feathers. I supposed those are the only kind of feathers I could get mixed up in.

Wow! These metaphors are bad. And to make matters worse I am competing with myself to make them worse and worse. Oh well!!!

Thing is, I know for certain I’m cycling big time. It is exhausting as hell. I’m split into three parts . . . maybe more . . . all competing to live in the same reality for some reason, and hating every second of it. I am torn asunder!!!

EXHIBIT A:

See, I got my GP to write me a prescription for my old medication, which was much better than the worthless little M&M-looking sons of bitches I gulp down now. The psychiatrist who prescribed those to me, who I think is kind of a hack, no offense to him, had no idea how to read me. That’s kind of weird, man. Haven’t you been doing that for decades? Psychoanalyzing lowlife punks like myself?

Well: I am writing this because my spirit-sister Laura Rokas told me I need to make these posts less suicidal-sounding. I can see it now, reading over them again. So there you go. Maybe it is concerning that I said I was getting rid of a lot of my possessions. The truth is that I have been forced to cross over into another stage of my life, as you do from time to time, and I look around and I see all this stuff and man I kind of hate a lot of it, or at least I have no use for it anymore. Once, some years ago now, I (insanely) pulled up to Golden Gate Park in a decommissioned police car at 3 a.m. and just walked up to some weird dudes and bought acid from them. I took it to New Orleans the next day for my friend Leila’s birthday. We did it and had a real good time. But I have this memory of her looking around her room, all twisted in the head now, and saying the things she liked were sparkling or golden . . . she sincerely liked those things. She collected the things that didn’t sparkle and made a pile to get rid of them the next day. Yeah? That’s how I feel. If I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with something anymore, it’s gotta freakin go. I don’t trust inanimate objects anyway, especially when they’re made of plastic. Jesus God Almighty that stuff is scary.

At any rate, I’m not jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, for shit’s sake. I am inverted, pretzeled, and fucked out, though hell, I imagine it’s only for a little while longer. But! Don’t worry!!! Well, only if you want to. . . .

☆彡

hey does anyone wanna come over and watch a movie or go on a walk with me or something

no pressure or anything

just, hell, i sure would wanna do that with you

for the first time in my whole life i just don’t have the energy to be everyone’s friend right now. and i can tell it’s making some people nervous because they think i don’t like them anymore or something, what with my Daily Correspondence having dropped to zero. it is as if the morning paper stopped showing up or something! i don’t know. until a few weeks ago i was reliably checking in on everyone and all that. man, i just can’t do the thing right now. i want to more than anything and it’s making me sadder than hell that i can’t get outside of myself. truth is, i need everyone else’s help for a little while. you know?? i hope it won’t be too long before i can be your friend again. and really i don’t need a whole lot. i just wish i had someone to talk to is all