Trying to see you / I’d knock off your doors / Dying to see you / I’m down on the floor . . .

ALAS!

I am in a coffeeshop in East Hollywood, having woken up in Cera’s monstrous bed, and having flown from Albuquerque to Las Vegas to Long Beach last night . . . I was supposed to land at Burbank Airport, but was shuffled around like cattle by the airline on account of the lack of air traffic controllers there, what with the ongoing government shutdown. They are not being paid so they all stayed home. And so saying, I am so exhausted and haunted by a sort of unplaceable sadness which has manifested into tears. If you want to know the truth, I am I have tears rolling down my cheek from behind my black sunglasses at aforementioned Perhaps I should feel embarrassed but I don’t. Lord knows I have tried to comfort people when I saw them crying in public . . . but I think my crying is concealed enough that no one will notice.

Well, what can you do other than carry on, having no alternative, into that collapsing tunnel of time towards the ultimate moment. I just try to do my best between the high spots. Today I have, for instance, diligently swallowed three of the little white pills that sustain my precarious instinct of self-preservation whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And yet they were ineffective in this necessary thing. Every now and then, despite all my efforts to keep from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off, I go kicking and screaming into The Dark Place. I wake up with a major serotonin brain drain, such is the case today. I’m deep inside myself but I’ll get out somehow . . .

As I have said, I cannot quite pinpoint the source of this unique cocktail of Ryan Sadness, but I think I have an idea. In the last week I have driven from Tennessee to Leila’s house New Orleans, flown from there to Colette’s apartment in Austin, and driven 700 miles through northwest Texas into New Mexico to stay in a cute little pink house with my friend Mikaylah in Albuquerque, which is 3.5k above sea level. I was not getting enough oxygen in my blood and brain on account of the elevation of the high desert. There is also the full moon and the autumn equinox . . . that has got to be twisting me around. And of course yesterday my body was jolted by the crash landing into the valley of the dark paradise which is called Los Angeles, yet another timezone, the third in a week, here at the edge of Western civilization. There is another reason I feel this way, and in the tradition of being perhaps embarrassingly honest, here it is: I like someone in That Way, a feeling I have not felt in such a long time. It is almost alien to me now, and so I am surprised at it. I must not fear though. Even still, I miss this person so much I feel a tightness in my chest. A real physical sensation! for God’s sake . . .

Finally, and there is no escaping it, I struggle every day with the eternal emptiness and melancholy I feel now that Dante and my brother Jeb are gone forever. For two years I have roamed the world like the cursed Ancient Mariner, but I have mostly kept this sadness a secret on account of I don’t want to be a bummer. As soon as you tell someone your cat and sibling have died (in my case, both my brother and sister), you drop on a nuke on a conversation. The other person feels a reasonable paralyzation. What can they say, really, when someone admits they carry with them the most devastating sadness of all? It is a sadness that never goes away. And though it has transmuted since that final day of Dante’s life when I saw him unconscious on an operating table, never to wake up again, and me telling the doctor to end his life now that we could not save him . . . and exactly a year later receiving that awful phone call from my dad at three in the morning while I was cat-sitting for friends in Belgium, him saying Jeb had died suddenly on the other side of the planet, and me suffering alone in that house in a foreign country for a whole week . . . it will drill you into oblivion.

And now I am now crying again. In half an hour they will kick me out of this coffeeshop and I’ll be back on the street with my tears which scald like molten lead. King Lear said that, more or less.

I’m listening to Big Star’s second album and he just said . . .

I loved you, well, never mind / I’ve been crying all the time . . .

. . . and earlier:

I feel like I’m dying / I’m never gonna live again / You just ain’t been trying / It’s getting very near the end . . .

Let us not get anymore dramatic than I have been already, though yeah . . .

Last night Colette texted me and asked if I had survived the long journey from Texas to New Mexico. I told her that as far as I knew, I had. And she said something very nice: “It was great to hang out with you, Ryan! Truly no one else is like you.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I badly needed the encouragement just then. I suppose it is true that an upright man is never a downright failure, or anyway this is the lie I have told myself, but I sure have felt beaten down lately. I’ll take any kind word I can get, especially from someone I love.

On Friday I will drive through the night up I-5 from LA to the Bay Area to get to Vallejo by six in the morning. I’ll bet I skid into town a half hour before then, exhausted as hell, to get into the Hesh Van and travel to Salt Lake City with my brothers McCune and Harrison on our long excursion to Montana. I am told there are hot springs all over the place there, and I am hoping I will benefit from their restorative powers. Listen: I lost my chemicals. I need my chemicals back or else I am doomed forever, and maybe even longer than that . . .

Farewell for now! I have only consumed three hundred calories today, and so now I will walk with Cera to this Vietnamese place down Virgil Ave. to get banh mi. Later, Amissa (and her dogs) are coming over to watch ROSEMARY’S BABY with us. I don’t doubt we will eat little gummies and maybe I will feel a little better. If not, I hope that feeling will come to me soon. I can’t carry on much longer in this way or else I risk permanent damage, and Lord knows I’ve got enough of that to haunt me for the rest of my life. How’s that for being dramatic!

Won’t you tell me what you’re thinkin of? / Would you be an outlaw for my love? / If it’s so, well let me know / If it’s no, well I can go / I won’t make you . . .