AS OF TODAY I have watched 200 movies since January 1st. Wow! My 200th movie was FIREWORKS (1997). It ruled. Now I just gotta hit 300 by December 31st . . .

☆ STARSAILOR ☆
WORLD TOUR 2024

Well: I fly to DC on Saturday morning. I get in around 3:00 pm (that’s 15h for the rest of the world), and then I will retreat to my fortified compound in my hometown for a week or so before heading north on a cheap bus to New York City . . . and then across the Canadian border into Montreal, which I have not visited since 2010. Whoa!

For those of you in the back who don’t want to zoom in on my nerd ass picture, here ya go:

This is, YES, a partial / tentative list, and I am probably going to cut into more of the Midwest and through Wyoming and Colorado and all those places as well. I feel like I need to make it Montana as well, which is one of like five states I’ve never been to. And I want to see Yellowstone again, for god’s sake, which I have not been to since Shaina and I visited during the pandemic. This was initially an ill-fated trip on account of I got us stuck in a swamp of salt sludge 130 miles out of Salt Lake City in the middle of the night, and then we sat in the car under the hateful sun for fourteen hours as people drove by and honked and laughed at us until a tow truck with tank treads yanked us out and back into relative civilization. Shaina was pretty upset with me . . . but once we pulled into Salt Lake City and got Chinese food, she cheered up a little. Speaking of which, the other day Shaina sent me some pictures from that trip I had never seen before:

That’s me wrapped in my army blanket (for some reason) on a long stretch of nowhere on the backroads of Wyoming, destined for Jackson Hole and thus Yellowstone. We got in later that night and slept in the rental car in the middle of an elk reserve until a park ranger knocked on the window at sunrise and told us to get lost. In the evening, we found a secret hot spring (via a website I stumbled upon that had not been updated since 1998), and once we had climbed down a steep hill leading to it, we lay alone on the smooth stones in the spring till the water came up to our necks . . . and jumping into nearby Snake River whenever our skin got too red. We smelled like rotten eggs for days. Anyway, that’s me sleeping like a perfect little angel surrounded by grazing elk as the sun shone upon upon the Teton Ridge, way the hell over there.

Also . . . why do you guys keep taking pictures of me while I’m sleeping???

Here’s me in Chicago back in November when I visited Gayle and her dog Lolita:

. . . and Kelsey took this one of her cat Mimi and me when I drove to see her in Detroit a few days later:

I can only assume my friends captured these precious little moments on account of I looked like a perfect little angel and a friend to all animals, both of which are true.

To be honest, I’m pretty excited to go to Trader Joe’s and Target again. It’s just true. I’m sorry. But first thing I’ll do is hit up Wawa and get coffee, which is of course what I did exactly one year ago when Bethany picked me up from the airport:

I gotta go see that girl in Richmond, now that I think about it. I definitely will. How could I not? We met during the second pandemic summer, and I drove to see her in the middle of the night, and we ended up parking in a big field next to a rural airport. I took this picture of her:

We would later find out that the reason a dozen cop cars came screaming past us as I took this picture was because we were dead center in an active manhunt! I don’t know why they didn’t stop and question us, now that I think about it. Though yeah, I love Bethany. I just know where gonna end up at Wawa together at some point. It is fated.

And I gotta go visit Caroline, The Goth Barista, whom I also met during the pandemic, and who countless times walked with me at midnight when we both felt a little lonely. I am writing a thing about how I had five strange-bad days in Rochester, New York last November, and how I spent Thanksgiving with Caroline and her family since I had no place else to go, which was so kind of them. This is one of the images I am going to include from that night:

OK!!! I had been working on another post about an absolutely bizarre email I received through this very website a few nights ago, but I’m way too stoned to finish it. Listen, I’ll do it tomorrow, on my last day in my apartment for some time.

For now . . .

Through nothing I had done but what I’d not, 
my sight lost that great Sun that you desire,
known too belatedly in time for me.
There is a place down there not grim with pain
but only with sad shades whose deep laments
sound not as screams but melancholy sighs.
I take my place with children — innocents
in whom the bite of death set lethal teeth
before they’d been made free of human sin.
And there I stay with all those who were not clothed
in those three holy virtues — though I knew,
and, guiltless, followed all the other four.

virgil explaining how he came to inhabit the outermost circle of hell where the virtuous pagans dwell in a large castle. they are not in pain, just kinda bummed

mo and joe came to see me in schöneberg

. . . i badly needed it!

. . . having a rough week over here!!!!!!