“Well, turns out I don’t have cancer.”

“Looks like you got a pretty bad case of being human though.”

“Shut up.”

[roll credits]

people in berlin smoke inside their apartments which i think is fucking bonkers lol

Well, I spoke to my lawyer about this, and he gave me the OK to talk about it here . . . so, yes, it’s official: my birthday is on Sunday, and I’ll be 32 years old. The world will eventually get its revenge on me, and kill me dead, but so far I have somehow, against all odds, managed to circumnavigate death. It was just dumb luck. I reckon that’s the secret though: to keep living, all you have to do is not die. There’s only so much you can do, of course, to stay alive. If something wants to kill you, it will. The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. (And so on.) On your end, with whatever trace of autonomy you have been afforded, all you can really do is eat and sleep and tell yourself a bunch of lies, hoping that’s enough to get you to the next sunrise. Sometimes you imbibe unhealthy substances to disconnect yourself from any higher thought for a while. Other times you just give in and jerk off. At the end of all this, in that ultimate moment, what was it, really? Whatever you got hiding in the shoebox beneath your bed, I guess. Forget about anything else . . . it will have never amounted to anything more than what it will finally be, once the music stops for good: tears in rain, et cetera. For those of you in the back, you should know that I have put in minimal effort. My self-preservation instinct is, frankly, a critically damaged machine . . . an angry, backfiring rat’s nest of tangled wiring and dying circuitry shrieking out circus clown music in the darkness of my mind.

Anyway! Happy birthday, Ryan.

I made a wishlist if you wanna get me something. I mean, go for it:

HERE IT IS

lol

I keep having these horrible nightmares that I live in Los Angeles. If I get kicked out of Germany, I’ll have no other choice than to go to LA and finally get my PI license. I don’t know what else I could possibly do. So a few things on this list are me future-proofing my life. I wouldn’t tie my shoes without a backup plan. Though yeah, I suspect these particular things on my list will be self-evident. Everything else is just for KICKS more or less. Hey man . . . there’s nothing wrong with getting your kicks. What the hell else are you gonna do??

Remember: If you don’t call or text or email me on my birthday, which is January 26th, I will haunt you after I die. Actually, I don’t like my birthday at all, and feel embarrassed by it, so in death I will leave you the hell alone. But you can talk to me on Sunday anyway if you want to! That would be nice. Get it while it’s hot, why don’t you.

okthanksbye

In WILD AT HEART, Sailor Ripley says that his snakeskin jacket represents his individuality, and his belief in personal freedom. Yeah. Laura and I were just talking about how TELL ME A STORY is one of Iggy Pop’s best songs, and how it is more or less about personal freedom. I mean . . . a lot of his songs are! That’s why the dude rules. We said a thing in unison that we of course already knew: that personal freedom is pure and beautiful and essential.

Though yeah: baby, go ahead and wrap a snakeskin jacket around me, cuz personal freedom has got to be prerogative #1 for any red-blooded sinners out there. Or at least it is for me! Like the fella said: Go ahead and fly around . . . IT’S THAT EASY! Live free while the rest live in fear. Just do it, man. Who cares. What’s the worst that could happen? You lose your life? Baby, you got that thing for free!!!

Finally:

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

Mmmhmmmm!! ☆

No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned that what it was all about.

this is just one of the passages i always think about

Man, here is a creepy thing nobody warns you about: if you live long enough, you start to encounter clones of people you’ve met before. Sometimes you meet someone and they share uncanny physical similarities with someone you were friends with 15 fuckin years ago. It’s scaring the hell out of me. What in god’s name is going on here?? Off-brand doppelgängers, man. Crazy stuff. Maybe I’m finally losing it. . . .