rest in peace dude

philippe druillet

Last night I managed to fall asleep at one in the morning, which is way earlier than usual . . . I usually sleep at six or seven in the morning. Out of nowhere I felt a mysterious and utter heaviness come down upon me like a curtain of lead. This pretty much never happens . . . I almost always have to “decide” to go to sleep. I would never, for instance, fall asleep during a movie. Every night (or early morning, rather), I’ll think: “OK. Now we have to go to sleep.” But this time it was not so. Perhaps out of self-preservation, in order to save me when I would not save myself, my body had made the decision for me!

I closed both rows of curtains on all my windows . . . a solemn gesture which felt like preparing a submarine for submersion, or reinforcing a fortress before a siege. Now cocooned in total darkness, I lay down on my couch and immediately fell asleep. I had a strange and vivid dream that I was with this girl I used to know, but we were here in Berlin walking in the middle of the street which was devoid of cars. It was a winter evening and we were the only people out. I saw a sort of rundown park nearby, one that does not actually exist in Berlin, and told this girl I wanted to check it out. On the other side of the fence I heard a small orange Persian kitten crying out from a pile of shredded newspaper. Carefully I hopped the mangled rusty fence near an encampment of tarp tents and touched down near the kitten. I knelt to pick it up and, as soon as I had clutched it in my hand, I saw four or five more orange-and-white kittens rolling around in the newspaper, a whole litter of them. Some of them had runny eyes and noses. It was cold outside and they were all alone here.

In the dream, I thought of the logistics of bringing them home: I would need kitten food and food bowls, a litter box, blankets . . . I would bathe them in the sink when we got back, and have them seen by a vet the next day . . . and then I would foster them while I found them homes, and so on. I called out to the girl and told her I had found some kittens. I began to take off my jacket so I could collect them in there and keep them warm during the walk home. Just before I could put the first kitten in my jacket, it was as if I were struck by a bolt of lightning . . . I awoke in the darkness of my apartment drenched in a cold sweat. I groaned . . . I had been so excited to take the kittens back to my apartment and make them a little nest on my bed. Why couldn’t I have just got to that part!

As I mentioned in some other sad thing I wrote here the other day, I cannot seem to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. I think this is actually killing me. In addition to all the other little sorrows in my life that I cannot get rid of, being completely sapped of vitality and also unable to sleep no matter what feels like being alive while also being dead. It is life-in-death. I’d almost rather just be outright dead. At least then there is some finality to it. I can say for sure that I would not wish this rotten feeling upon anyone. So I lay there in the dark for an hour or two while rain poured down from the grey sky and soaked my balcony beyond the forcefield of my blackout curtains.

Having no alternative, I eventually decided to just get the hell on with it and begin another worthless day of my life. I made a little coffee and a little smoothie, read a little, wrote a little, played a little FINAL FANTASY XVI, took a little bath . . . and on and on. And then around one in the afternoon, exactly twelve hours after I’d first felt that megaton brick of despair and exhaustion come crashing down upon me like a tidal wave on the river Acheron, I felt it once more. I was so tired just then that I had tears streaming down my face. I placed my phone in the antechamber of my apartment and then returned to my bedroom and shut the door. I wanted that thing as far away as possible from me, fearing it would influence my dreams, or worse. I turned out the light and curled up in the center of my bed. Closing my eyes, I felt myself falling into the center of the earth . . . I had a childish wish that someone were there to hold me and stroke my hair and tell me I was safe. I supernova’d into about a billion completely insane kaleidoscopic dreams in which I visited or was visited by essentially everyone I have ever known. Time compressed in on itself and I stood there in the center of it till I was compressed along with it. I felt no pain other than the tremendously odd cratering sensation of ego death, which I had experienced only once before while on mushrooms.

Upon waking, it was as if I had been hurled out of that psychedelic rainbow vortex from the end of 2001 . . .

Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth. I took in a huge lungful of air and felt completely emptied of all the good chemicals your brain relies upon to keep you from jumping in front of fast-moving objects. With an unfeeling hand I parted the curtains next to my bed and saw that the sky outside was black, and all the apartment buildings around me had unlighted windows. This filled me with dread. If you had told me a thousand years had passed, I would have believed you . . . I felt deeply alien inside myself just then and only vaguely trusted any external stimuli. I did not want to look at my phone but I needed to know the time. It was past midnight. I was so dehydrated I went into my kitchen and glugged down two liters of water straight from the tap. I sat down on the floor and wondered what I ought to do with myself now that I had completely destroyed whatever tattered sleep schedule I had held on to before. I felt nauseous and my entire skeleton ached . . . and yet the damage was done: I was wide awake now and not even an elephant tranquilizer would have felled me then. And heaven help me, I thought about the dream kittens again, and felt that phantom emptiness from having been deprived of their company. Perhaps, I thought, it would have given me some purpose, however illusory . . . these days I’ll take any purpose I can get . . .

It is nearly nine-thirty in the morning. I could tell you how I filled the last nine hours of my life in the darkness of night, but I think it would just make us both sad. So instead I will conclude this post cartoonishly. As anyone would tell you, I love doing that:

same

Back in the Old Oakland Days, I had a crush on my friend Toups’ friend Alison, both of whom lived in a town called Lafayette in Louisiana . . . Either he must have told her I liked her, or else I asked him to (which seems more likely), but somehow I ended up writing her letters all the time. And with each letter, I included a $2 bill. Back then I was working the register at Donut Farm, and at least once a week someone would pay with a $2 bill, and when I’d tip myself out at the end of the day, I always kept them to send to Alison. It went on like this for some time until I decided to go visit my friends in Texas and Louisiana, which meant I would finally meet Alison too.

And so exactly 11 years ago, in July of 2014, I flew to New Orleans and stayed with Leila (whose birthday is today!), and then took a bus from there to Baton Rouge and on to Lafayette. I remember the bus dropping me off in the middle of nowhere, and I had to walk into town. There were no sidewalks or anything like that, just dark untamed Louisiana wilderness screeching with insects the size of my fist. Finally I entered Lafayette, which was an idyllic little Twilight Zone-feeling town . . . it was peaceful and immaculate in that 1950s sort of way. It felt like a Hollywood backlot in that sense. I loved it immediately.

I met up with Toups and he showed me around town. This dude was like the mayor . . . he knew everyone. Every bar or diner or venue we went to, even just walking down the street, people would wave and say hello and he would introduce them to me. Everyone was so kind, and they were all curious as to why I had even come there in the first place, to which I would say: “Because I’ve never been here before.” I put it together that Lafayette isn’t exactly a place you end up in by accident . . . it has to be your destination. And so tagging along with Toups, I felt like a sort of celebrated guest. When playing pool at a bar near his house, multiple women either offered to buy me a drink or asked me to two-step. This blew my mind because certainly nothing like that had ever happened before . . . nor has it happened since! Incredulously I inquired with my guide of the source of this phenomenon, my sudden popularity there, to which he replied: “Well Ryan, we don’t get a whole lot of new people here, and so everyone knows you’re new. Plus you look a little more cosmopolitan than a man of Lafayette.”

I spent three days in the town Lafayette. I went to a few cookouts and birthday parties, drank cold beer and ate ice cream with half the town, saw some local bands play (including Toups’ own), met a bunch of babes and cool dudes, and every evening at sundown I walked down pristine streets and through cozy neighborhoods in the balmy Louisiana summer heat. My skin and hair looked fantastic. Back then I was convinced that you had to live in a big city or else life wasn’t any good . . . I was a complete idiot, and absolutely wrong. Lafayette was a sort of paradise to me where everyone was always hanging around having a good time. What more could you need? I remember thinking I ought to have just stayed there, and even still today I wonder at it . . .

AND WHAT ABOUT ALISON? I met Alison that very first night I got in. She was tall and beautiful and had long brown hair. We spent all night hanging out and talking at the aforementioned bar with the pool table, and around 2 am she drove me back to Toups’ house. I gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek and went inside. A few minutes later, back at home, she sent me this . . . I can’t believe I kept it but then of course I did:

This was a long time ago when the world was still pure and beautiful in ways that it is not any longer and can never be again, so you’ll have to forgive the perhaps annoying cuteness of this exchange. Alison and I were young, and we were, all of us, still entranced by life, enriched by life, drunk on it even, and believed that it could be good and dignified, and all would work out in the end. So much for that! But what was Alison trying to say all those years ago? At the time, I thought that in her midnight tipsiness, she might go and confess something to me . . . I don’t know, “I think you’re cute!” or some such thing! Or anyway, I was hoping she would, and I would’ve said it right back to her . . . but she fell asleep before anything came of it, and I fell asleep too. I saw her every day, but I didn’t bring it up the rest of the time I was there.

On that last night in Lafayette, she told me she was moving to Chicago for grad school, and I told her I’d come visit her sometime. I meant it. I said goodbye to Toups and took a night bus from downtown Lafayette to Houston, almost got stranded there in the worst part of town, but eventually caught a connecting bus to Austin, which is where I was headed. In Austin I did acid and went swimming at night beneath a full moon with my childhood friend Jason. And a few days later when I flew back to California, I met my best friend Laura Rokas for the very first time. I never did make it back to Lafayette, and I never did see Alison in Chicago. In fact I never saw her again at all.

I thought about Alison again today because not only was it exactly 11 years ago that I met her, but I also happened to find a $2 bill in my desk that I’d got in the US last time I was there. The two are forever wedded in my mind. I looked her up on Instagram and unsurprisingly she is still just as cool and beautiful as she ever was. I scrolled way down until I found what I was looking for, which was the picture you see at the top . . . that’s the first letter I ever sent her. The caption is “My Oakland penpal 🌻”. Naturally, I felt a sadness and the leaden weight of time. Alas!! I should have said something to her back then, about my liking her a lot, but I thought it was more fun to be coy. I thought I would always have enough time. I was of course a complete fool, as I have been so many times. I wonder what became of those letters I wrote her. Does she remember me? Does it even matter? If you are cursed with an excellent memory like I am, and you make as many bad decisions as I have, then you can be sure that the sting you feel from eternally recalling your own stupidity is as potent as a gunshot. Now multiply that sensation by a hundred-thousand, coupled with the fact that everyone else has forgotten all the things that you can never forget, and the emptiness of the other side of your bed will feel as vast and lonely as a tomb. And I would know.

Recently I have not been able to sleep for more than an hour or so. I have also not really left my apartment nor seen sunlight in weeks. I certainly have not had any meaningful interactions with human civilization. And forget about camaraderie and intimacy! Berlin is a city of four million people and I may as well be living on the fucking moon.

My pallid complexion and downcast expression say it all: I got a pretty bad case of the Summertime Blues.

The other night I bought my ticket back to the US. On August 27th I fly from Berlin to Amsterdam to Washington, DC. They say I will be gone again for some time, and who’s to say how long exactly. Right now I have only a vague idea of where I’ll be and when . . . or why.

Currently I am completely unmoored from reality, and my next adventure will not bring me any closer to it. At least I won’t be alone . . . I’ll be with my friends pretty much everywhere I go, minus that good aloneness you feel when traveling from one place to the next. It’s like the fella said: there’s no prettier sight than looking back on a town you left behind. I am so excited to feel that sensation again every few days, knowing there is always someone waiting for me at the end of the road. I will still be treading phantom-like on the crater rim of reality, dropping into other people’s lives and then dropping out again, never having a truly tangible one of my own. But there are worse fates. I’m currently living one.

For the next five and a half weeks, I will endeavor to read as much as I can, write as much as I can, watch as many movies as I can, and on and on, till it is time to board that evening flight across the Atlantic. And then I’ll go about wandering the earth again now that I am imprisoned in what feels like the epilogue of my life. As far as spending time with other people here, I won’t count on it. I give up. I’ll just have to settle for seeing the citizens of Berlin go about their day from behind the glass of my neighborhood laundromat where, alone and residually stoned and fried by insomnia, I do laundry at seven in the morning because my lifestyle is arguably insane and at least a little bit sad.