Got stoned to the bone and watched MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, which I love but had not seen in years. It reminded me of around this time in November 2018 when Matt and I watched it probably four or five times in two weeks, or else we’d have it on in the background while doing other things. We missed McCabe when he wasn’t bumbling around on our TV. I can’t help help it: even now, many years later, I am still endeared by McCabe and identify with him . . . he is of course a sort of fool, just like me. I see myself in his foolishness. I am the same kind of fool.

That November was pretty rough for me for reasons that don’t matter anymore, and which were almost certainly all my fault anyway, but it does not bring me any despair to think about that time now, though for some years it did. The only pain I feel from its remembrance now is the pain of knowing that whole era is long gone. It was a good era . . . maybe it was the best one, if you really want to know. I tried to hold on to it as long as I could. I bent it till it broke off . . . bled it till it ran dry! And yet still one day it slipped away. I turned around and it was gone from me. Maybe sometimes that’s just how the thing goes. Hey man, I tried . . .

I am thinking of all the strange little stretches of my life I have experienced since that November in Oakland . . . there have been so many of them. Back then I would not have seen any of them coming, one after the other, and not letting up even until the present moment. I’ve been all over the world a dozen times since then, and yet lately I have had the uncanny feeling that I am currently in one of the strangest epochs yet. Wow! It does not feel like I wandered into it so much as woke up inside of it, that sort of dream-within-a-dream feeling . . . but I can never shake myself out of the original dream, so everything that is happening to me feels like it is still one or two layers removed from reality. A dream that does not end continues to build upon itself. At any rate, I think I have decided I like it.

I am in Seattle with Felix and his sister Jupiter . . .

. . . who are so cute I want to jump out of the window, and mostly I have been watching movies with them, or else reading or writing or doing pull-ups . . . and sleeping as much as possible. I am trying to put on five pounds before I return to New York on the 20th. Since August when I left Berlin, I have been to over a dozen states and three times as many cities . . . have walked and flown and driven and bussed and train’d every which way across this godforsaken continent. I have wondered if my hunger and fatigue have contributed to this dreamlike feeling. Yet even full and rested here in Seattle (perhaps for the first time since I left Europe), I still feel that surreal feeling . . . sometimes stronger than I think I ever did before.

At least the flow of linear time has been more or less consistent. The seasons are the same in my dream. I still need to figure out where I’m going to spend Thanksgiving. I will either go with Caroline and her family in Northern Virginia, or else go off someplace alone, maybe up to Vermont, and do whatever it is I do. Of course, I would prefer to be with other people if I can swing it. After Thanksgiving, I got a few days to kill before I head back to New York for the third time, so I think I will go up to Detroit and Chicago to see Kelsey and Gayle and Sarah and Hali. I feel like I’ve got to keep moving around to stay out of trouble. And anyway, Kelsey has a new cat named Trish I need to meet . . .

All I’ve done today is sit on my ass and watch movies with the cats, and yet I am exhausted. This gummy absolutely sledgehammered me and I have no idea why . . . normally with this stuff I got the constitution of a god damn mountain! Well, what the hell, I really think I ought to go to sleep. I feel like a real fool tonight, and nothing good can come from me carrying on like this for another hour, never mind two or three. The dream I will have tonight will be a dream within a dream within a dream. Not unlike the man himself, it will be heavy, and weird, and seem to go on forever.