I received a postcard in the mail from my good friend Molly, who I think sends me more things in the mail than anyone else. This one came from the Badlands in South Dakota, where she was passing through, and upon it is writ ‘A Cowboy’s Prayer’ which, according to Molly, is so bad it’s good . . . just like me!

A Cowboy’s Prayer
(Written for Mother)

Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow.
I love creation better as it stood
That day You finished it so long ago
And looked upon Your work and called it good.
I know that others find You in the light
That’s sifted down through tinted window panes,
And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.

I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
That You have made my freedom so complete;
That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.

Let me be easy on the man that’s down;
Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town,
But never let ’em say I’m mean or small!
Make me as big and open as the plains,
As honest as the hawse between my knees,
Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze!

Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall and fret;
You know me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside,
And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead
That stretches upward toward the Great Divide.

Hey man, I can dig it . . .

I have placed Molly’s postcard atop my books where I keep a Polaroid of Gego the cat and a vinyl copy of the soundtrack to ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN (a movie (sequel!) where Clint Eastwood’s best friend is an orangutan named Clyde), which my friend Tombo found at a yard sale here in Berlin of all places. Listen: this is all to say that I treasure the thing. Molly is one of the best people I’ve ever met . . . she’s the brass ring. And bless her heart, she always remembers me. It is a good feeling to be remembered. Try it out sometime!

Molly asks me in the postcard if I will come visit her and her cat Bernie in Portland. I’m going to be cat-sitting in Seattle this fall, and so I have told her that I will see them when I pass through town on my way up north. If there’s a best time of the year to visit Portland, it’s got to be in the fall. And I can think of no better reason to visit than to see my good friend Molly. I’m just lucky to know her is all.

There are times when I get really down on myself over the disastrous decision I made almost a decade ago to leave Oakland and move to Portland. I was only there for a year, but it was an awful year, one of the worst, and had I remained with Tracey and Laura in our house in North Oakland rather than moving there, a massive portion of my life would have gone differently, and I would have saved myself a ton of trouble. It seriously nearly killed me. And yet, there were a few people I befriended there in Portland who became and have remained huge parts of my life so much so that they are essential to me now and I cannot imagine my life without them in it. Molly is one of those people. I would be incomplete without her friendship. And so saying, the godawful nightmare I endured in that city was worth all the blood and tears I shed because it all led me to her. Wow! Thanks for everything, Molly. I love you and I’ll see you and Bernie soon~

shiro kasamatsu

Unless I am sitting on my balcony or taking out the trash, I generally never leave my apartment building before six or seven in the evening. I can think of only a few times in the past six months that I did anything outside during the day, and almost all of those rare daytime sightings were me doing Official Business or else getting an old filling replaced at my dentist’s office. If I can help it, I always go out at night . . . what can I say: I’m a Nighttime Guy.

And yet lately even going out at night feels oppressive to me on account of there being PEOPLE out there. At sundown I walked to the grocery store to get some fruit, and I felt this intense desire to be completely invisible. It is not as though I walk around thinking everyone is looking at me, but if I did happen to make eye contact with someone sitting outside a cafe or walking their dog across the street, I felt this intense dread grow inside me. I remember during the pandemic Laura had said she wished she could just wear a mask forever because she never wants to be perceived. I get that. I think I have been so alone for so long now that I have accidentally developed a thing you might say is a cousin to agoraphobia. I am not afraid of crowds or groups of people, I just don’t wanna be around them . . .

Still: it is good then that I am flying to the US in two weeks so that I do not become a permanent invalid in that way. There I will be traveling around and staying with my friends again, and thus it will not be possible for me to go on in this sad way. I feel as though I am too young to completely shut myself away from the whole wide world and all of God’s little creatures who walk upon it . . . if I live long enough, I suppose such a thing is an inevitability. But while I still have the song in me, I ought to at least bear witness to it all, whatever it is . . .

This is how I have been doing it: for the now third year in a row, I leave Europe towards the end of August and go to the East Coast. Using all modes of transportation available to a fine American like myself, I travel from one city to the next, from coast to coast, staying in as many safehouses as I can along the way. Since I am a beloved celebrity with millions of fans all over the world, I always have a place to sleep. I carry on in this way for about six months, until I miss solitude and my own bed and my own bathtub and getting stoned and watching movies every night at midnight on my own couch, and then I fly back to Berlin to be a friendless loser again. So in exchange for half a year of relative discomfort and very little privacy, I get an all-you-can-eat buffet of Hanging Out and Remembering That Life Can Be Beautiful. This cycle seems to sustain me . . . I fear the day it stops working!

Many years ago now, when I first read A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES and the whole sad history behind it, I came to identify with the doomed author John Kennedy Toole . . . I even visited his grave in New Orleans once, may he rest in peace. But I always remember the quote from one of his close friends:

Ken Toole was a strange person. He was extroverted and private. And that’s very difficult. He had a strong . . . desire to be recognized . . . but also a strong sense of alienation. . . .

This is how I have always felt, that I’m both extroverted and private. And it is difficult to have this strong urge to be around people and also to be alone. If there is a simple solution to overcome being this type of person, I am sure I don’t know it. For now I shall balance my humours, shall drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation, by living as the snake which eats its own tail. I SHALL VACILLATE BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES OF LIVING, HAVING NO HOME BETWEEN THEM, TO STAVE OFF RUIN AND DESPAIR . . . Oh! if only I could have it all! Too bad the particulars of my godforsaken illness necessitate getting on an airplane and flying to the other side of the fuckin planet in order to keep the noose from my neck!

Maybe you all think I’m joking when I post screenshots of Leo from THE AVIATOR where he, as Howard Hughes, has locked himself in a movie theater to watch movies all day for six months while slowly going completely insane, and my saying, “This is me.” I mean . . . it ain’t exactly untrue. And now my own solitary lifestyle reminds me of the scene from Warren Beatty’s underrated masterpiece RULES DON’T APPLY, where my dad Warren Beatty, as an elderly Howard Hughes, reveals himself to be controlling his vast empire in seclusion from behind a curtain in a hotel room, not unlike the Wizard of Oz:

Sorry, but this is also me. I recently even thought about building a bed desk like that before abandoning the idea, believing that it would only encourage my terminal loneliness. And anyway, I’m leaving soon . . . I won’t see my bed again until winter, if we as a species even make it that long . . .

It is three in the morning and I’m going to make coffee and watch a movie. I took a gummy about an hour ago AND THUS I sail upon its cosmic winds. Tonight I am not alone on account of I am once again the guardian of my nephew young Gego the cat. Look at this deadbeat:

When my friend Isabella / Gego’s mom brought him over last night, she said he started freaking out from inside his carrier as soon as they entered the building, and him trying to escape to climb the stairs himself. He knew where he was! He knew he was in the high tower of his old friend Ryan. When he was set free in my living room, he immediately went around the room rubbing his head on all my furniture in order to strengthen his own lingering scent from the last time. I like having Gego here because it’s always a good day when you’re with a cat. We talk to each other and sometimes he sleeps next to me. His presence reminds me that an outside world exists, and that time is flowing . . . without him, I often feel I am living alone in a space station and no one is coming to take me back to Earth. You can only endure that sort of dread and loneliness for so long or else it does irreversible damage. If you want to know how that damage manifests itself in a living organism, you need only endure my company for five minutes (lol)~

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.

I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.

In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.

It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

alan moore

I’m tired of runnin’ ’round / Lookin’ for answers to questions that I already know / I could build me a castle of memories / Just to have somewhere to go . . .

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death . . .