Man, this was a year ago exactly. That kinda makes me sad. For all of that June I had felt rotten as hell about a whole bunch of things . . . and then once I got to July I knew Bex and her band would be staying with me, and so I felt all right again. They rolled into town on July 20th, having come from a string of shows in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, and played a show at Stay Gold in Ghosttown a few blocks from my first house in Oakland. I let Bex and them crash at my place afterwards, and in the morning I made a last-minute decision to drive down with them to Los Angeles where they had a show in Glendale with Chalk Talk.

I wrote a long piece about those two days. I had a real good time and I thought I ought to write it out. I specifically remember standing in the lot behind the venue before they went on, smoking a cigarette Maddie had given me and thinking to myself: “This is a good thing that I am doing. I’m glad that I’m doing this.” It felt like the sort of thing I’d always done, and now I had the chance to do it again. I had just spent half a year of my life hanging out with people who I don’t know at all anymore, and who are ghosts to me now. But the people I met on that little trip a year ago, I talk to them pretty much every day of my life. I miss them when they’re not around.

Well: Chalk Talk are touring again in December, from Texas up to North Carolina, or something like that, so I’m gonna meet them at some point along the way . . . probably at their New Year’s Eve show, which I think is in Savannah or Asheville. I have other things I gotta do when I’m back in the US again . . . but I will let it be a mystery for now, because a lot of it is to a mystery to me as well. The point is that something is going to happen to me, and it’s important that I make something happen to me or else then I’m in big trouble. Ex nihilo nihil fit. See, you’ve got to place things like this for yourself in the future or else you’ll go insane . . . trust me!!!

i keep accidentally watching movies about lonely french women who wish they were dead

‘vivre sa vie’

i asked one of my oldest friends what my problem is. in other words: why can’t i take the world straight, and why do i keep ending up in a perpetual personality loop where i can’t escape myself. she said this among many other things. it was all absolutely true, but this sums it up

(lol)

I sent out an SOS on Instagr*m asking for someone to send me a package with weed gummies and the new Zelda, and brother McCune pulled through! He even included a postcard with his own likeness, on the back of which he wrote me a nice message that included the phrase “Euro poon”. Oops!

Inside were some weed gummies hidden and mixed among some non-THC-infused candy, that new Zelda, and the deodorant I used in the US for like 15 years. German deodorant is really bad for some reason . . . I really don’t get it. Like come on.

Anyway yeah . . . I’ve been having a really good time with all three. Thank you my brother.

I keep saying I want to write all this out, which I have a little bit, and with urgency I must finish just so it has someplace to go, and so I can feel less insane . . . but I’ve been having a difficult time sitting down to type, or really sitting down to do anything at all. All I’ve wanted to do is sleep. Something is wrong with me. I told someone that lately I feel like a facsimile of myself, and the real me is watching the fake me on television in purgatory, and I can’t merge the two Ryans again. I’m stuck in a bad dream feeling like the fake. It is a surreal and awful feeling to feel outside of yourself like that.

In A SCANNER DARKLY, the two hemispheres of Bob Arctor’s brain began to compete with one another . . . they cease working in tandem. As an undercover narcotics agent, he has infiltrated a group of dope fiends in order to weasel out their supplier. Inside the house where he lives with them are hidden scanners which monitor everything. Later, in his office, he watches videos of himself and the dope fiends that were recorded by the scanners, but as his brain begins to split in half, he doesn’t even realize he’s watching himself. A doctor performs a routine neurological examination at the point of no return:

“It’s as if you have two fuel gauges on your car,” the other man said, “and one says your tank is full and the other registers empty. They can’t both be right . . .”

I mean, yeah! That’s how I feel, more or less, that two gauges are giving me conflicting information. I don’t know what to do with when received external stimuli that I need to survive is incongruous. And then inside I feel scrambled as hell. It all feels like nonsense to me. It makes me feel nauseous and exhausted and deeply alone to inhabit a little purgatory island inside my brain. Neil Young said he was deep inside himself but he’d get out somehow. Did he eventually pull that off? Did he leave instructions in some other song??

Well: Even though I feel absolutely bonkers, I suppose I’ll have to go on hiding it a little longer until it disappears. Maybe I can just ride it out. I have of course experienced worse. This just feels different is all. I think that is what scares me about it.

Anyway, maybe it’ll help me if I finally finish that thing I’ve been writing. Or rather, I’ll watch through a glass darkly as the carbon copy phony version of myself does it . . .

Why not end with another Philip K. Dick quote:

An hour after I have woken up from the dream I can still see in my mind’s eye—whatever that may be; the third or ajna eye?—the garden hose which my wife in her blue jeans is dragging across the cement driveway. Little details, no plot. I wish I owned the mansion next to our house. I do? In real life, I wouldn’t own a mansion on a bet. These are rich people; I detest them. Who am I? How many people am I? Where am I? This plastic little apartment in southern California is not my home, but now I am awake, I guess, and here I live, with my TV (hello, Dick Clark), and my stereo (hello, Olivia Newton-John) and my books (hello nine million stuffy titles). In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person. Where are the roses? Where is the lake? Where is the slim, smiling, attractive woman coiling and tugging the green garden hose? The person that I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

The Russian Girl did not end up killing me the other night, but she did take this picture of me next to a lake in Grunewald. She also gave me a Marlboro Red, which I smoked out of my little plastic Hunter S. Thompson filter I always keep in my right breast pocket for some reason. (The reason is that I’m an embarrassing loser.)

Something happened to me about two hours later. It happened entirely in my mind. I was sitting with The Russian Girl in a park in Charlottenberg, and I felt what you might call ego death, even though I was stone-cold sober. It was a horrible feeling . . . like an absolute loathing or revulsion for everything. Some French philosophers might call this THE NAUSEA. Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out how to explain exactly what it is I felt, but I didn’t like it so much. It’s been difficult for me to really do anything since then to be honest. Which is to say I’m still feeling the hangover effect of it. I’m so exhausted and sad. I wonder what you’re supposed to do about that when everything else stops working . . .

I saw a Swedish girl on T*nder last night. Her bio was in Swedish, so I translated it:

Gotta say . . . that rules lol