IN THE STARRY GLOOM OF THE HIGH CASTLE IN WHICH I DWELL

. . . I lie on my back on my couch facing away from the windows, obscured by sheets and towels, on account of my not having gotten around to hanging black-out curtains. The sun is rising and I’m awake for it once again, which is a miserable feeling. I really ought to fix my sleep schedule, but I can’t break the spell! Anytime I try to sedate myself with Trazodone, I end up way oversleeping, what with that stuff being extremely potent. With a full pill you could put a clydesdale in a coma. As for me, I take what is essentially a crumb and I’m knocked off my ass for 14 hours. I’ve got plenty of time anymore now that my life has been stripped of all meaning, but I wasn’t exactly trying to spend it all in Nightmare Land, which is where I go whether I sleep naturally or artificially.

Yesterday I woke up and my pillow was soaked and I had tears streaming down my face. I had been crying in my dream and was crying in real life too. I’m sure you can guess why. What does it mean when someone has nightmares every single night of their life? I can’t ever get out from under them. I wake up completely shattered. I spend the next few hours with one foot still in the nightmare until I am as sure as I’ll ever be that I have fully awoken . . . and even then, who really knows, and what’s the difference anyway? I serve no purpose to myself nor anyone else in my waking life. I already told you what my big problem is, which is that I have found myself on the other side of the border once again, if you catch my meaning. Up here in the tower, I live like Count Dracula. I’m not really alive. Rather, I feel as though I’m just pitifully pantomiming my life, emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. I am watching myself on television.

. . . The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her “I want to live” was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

Yes.

. . . and as my friend Philip K. Dick wrote in VALIS:

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, and my stereo and my books . . . In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless . . . 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.

Yes.

And see, I thought I knew the depths of myself, and how deep I could go. I thought I had been to the deepest layer, and had got out again. I was mistaken. I am experiencing despair in ways I had not thought was possible for me, which is saying something. I completely understand now how a perfectly normal person can wake up one day and drive a tractor-trailer off a cliff, or whatever. I get it. Whatever feeble mechanisms of self-preservation were in place before, the ones that have kept me around for 36 years, they have vanished. I don’t have a death wish but I also don’t care. I’ve said as much before. It’s like dark matter inside my brain, a sort of inexorable truth that I can’t shake, and which permeates everything I do. It is the filter through which everything passes. Nothing gets around it. No light can escape! You should care about your life and what happens to you. It is almost repulsive to me that I cannot care about myself . . . because I desperately want to care! I don’t know what it means when you want to and yet you can’t make yourself do it. I guess as usual I am my own experiment. Wait and see!

Once again I feel the heat of the sun warming my apartment through the sheets I have hung up, and I hear birds in the trees outside my window. This fills me with dread when it ought to do the opposite. Ahab says something melodramatic about how light and all loveliness is anguish to him since he can never enjoy it anymore, and that the path to his fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon his soul is grooved to run, by which he means his final act of self-destruction. Yeah. Well, time to dwell on my own fixed purpose from within the landless latitude of my nightmares. I’d bet money that’s where I’m headed in a few minutes, though I’ll tell you what, I’d give just about anything to be wrong.

lol

I want to write more about this later, and at length, but I was just standing alone in my kitchen at 5 am drinking tea and eating fruit and listening to music like a real loser, and I felt this absolute dread that I’m afraid nothing is really all that fun anymore. I spent six months traveling around, and I had a good time most of the time, but now that I am back in my own apartment actually sleeping in a bed again, and being truly alone if I want to, I realize that the tens of thousands of miles I endured there and back again have not left me with as much as I thought it would. There is still some crucial element missing that I can’t exactly place and it is a sadness to me.

It’s like the fella said: Look me in the eye and tell me I’m satisfied. Well, I ain’t!

And see: I have done such things in the past. I have spent entire years of my life floating around, having weird bad-interesting experiences, seeing old friends and new freaks, and on and on, and I remember it being more fulfilling. Maybe it’s just that it feels played out now in some sense, since I’ve done it so many times. Such is my tale. Still: What did it become this time? I passed some time and got what I could get out of it. I reckon that’s the best you can hope for sometimes.

I know when the fun stopped. There is a sort of curse on me that I think about it every day whether I want to or not. It’s a ghost story on repeat in my mind, is what it is. It ended November 2019, and never came back. I told Monty earlier that I often think about one of the last times I was in Portland at the same time as her, just before she moved, which was April 2019. I was in town to see her and Molly and The Pink-Haired girl, who I was in love with at the time. It was the first time I ever met her and everything. And somewhere in the middle of all this, Monty and I had this essentially perfect day. It was 4/20, so we went to a dispensary and bought some gummies, and then got ripped out of our skulls and walked for many miles through SE Portland, which is where I used to live, laughing like psycho idiots. We even went to Tom’s and had coffee, which is what we used to do every Sunday. Eventually we ended up at Laurelhurst Park and did cartwheels in the grass. Everyone was sitting on blankets and talking. And across the way from us, an old dude in denim and a cowboy hat was sitting on a picnic table in the shade playing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ for everyone. We lay in the grass stoned off our asses and transfixed listening to him play. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it was a beautiful day in the spring and nothing was wrong. It was, god help me, A Fun Day.

Next day I went to an amusement park and a rollerskating rink with The Pink-Haired Girl, but I’ve written about that before . . .

And when I went home two days later, Dante was waiting for me:

What is my life now? Five years and nearly six-thousand miles away from all that, I guess my life is being alone and eating fruit in my kitchen an hour before the sun rises, which it is now, so I really ought to stop writing this and hide before it’s too late. Whenever you stay awake so long you can hear the birds outside, you’re in big trouble, and I’m in big trouble. But I want to write about that house I lived in back then and all those people who came around, and how that was The Last Good Year, even if it is painful.

Yeah, well . . . so long for now~ ☆彡

please use this in my obituary . . . or like if the media needs a file photo in the event that i rob a bank and/or go missing

hell yeah lol

RED ROCK WEST rules by the way

i’m posting a huge thing i wrote tomorrow

i finally finished it . . .

having fun on my favorite website wikipedia dot com

my new russian girlfriend (not really lol) who i hope kills me says my name is

Райан

in russian. i love it

Yeah . . . DAYS LIKE LOST DOGS is right. How many days and nights have I sat alone in my apartment beneath the glow of the galaxy light?? I wonder. At this point, it’s nearly been a month, if you figure that I left California on the 18th of February. I’ve been building furniture and reading and watching dozens of movies, and on and on, but then there are the periods in between. I get sadder than hell in the middle of the night when my entire neighborhood is dead quiet, and I know I’m the only person in a five-block radius or more who is awake. At 3 am I’ll walk down to the 24-hour grocery store in the plaza by the cathedral, and I’ll look up and all the apartment windows are dark, and not a single light on in any of them. That’s the loneliest feeling . . . as lonely as standing at the bottom of the ocean! I asked Alayna how she was, and she said she was having a difficult time being alive, and that she was living in the dark, and I said I felt the same. I am (I told her) living in the Shadow World. My body is in the real world, and I can still see it from here, as if from behind frosted glass, but in my head I’m in the Shadow World.

Remember when Frodo puts on the ring and teleports into that netherworld parallel to reality—that adjacent dark world where everyone becomes a shadowy outline and it’s muffled and dreary sounding and he sees ghosts and a guy who is essentially Satan? Listen, that’s the best approximation I can give.

You know? NEIL YOUNG once said he was deep inside himself, but he’d get out somehow. I trust that he pulled this off. And see, that’s how I always played it, but this time I’m in big trouble because I can’t get out. This is the longest I’ve been so removed from the world, and so inside myself, and I don’t have any sort of clue how to snap out of it. Maybe one day I’ll jolt back into reality, as if waking from a nightmare, but right now I’m in a sort of invisible dungeon while my body is still here in the real world, in the HERE and NOW . . . and my instinct for self-preservation, which is at least vaguely aware that I have to eat and sleep, and so on, is the only thing keeping me upright. I lack the constitution for suicide, so to speak, so my only option is to endure this life-in-death, which near as I can tell is worse than death itself. At least then it’s just over. I’m still paying rent.

Sometimes I just stand there and forget what I’m supposed to do with myself. I have let days pass without seeing any sunlight or speaking a single word. I traveled nonstop for six months, covering tens of thousands of miles on nearly every form of transportation visiting dozens and dozens of people in round about 30 cities, and now at the end of it I feel just as empty as I did when I left back in August. I guess I figured that the sorrow I felt then would transmute into something less severe, or else different enough where I could get along, but that did not happen. This is worse. Now I am lurching through a life of no consequence or purpose and every day getting further away from what once made my life any good. This doesn’t feel like my life and I don’t feel like myself inside of it. I feel like a stranger in every sense. And hovering over all this is the terrible truth, which is that I don’t care if I live or die. Ain’t that sad? Tell you what: I’d give just about anything not to feel that way anymore. . . .

Till then it’s the Shadow World for me. It’s days like lost dogs. And if it is a dream:

☆彡

today is emel-elizabeth’s birthday. i love emel the estonian girl. she’s a very special person