I feel truly awful today . . . and I don’t need a crystal ball to know why lol

i wrote this one winter night back in berlin when i first moved there in 2019, just a few weeks before my birthday . . . i think about it sometimes because all these years later, it’s still a true thing in my mind:

If it’s not fun it’s not worth doing . . . and I know that if I stopped believing in myself then there will be no one left to believe in me, and I’d finally vanish. I miss these people who are gone. Do they miss me too? The worst feeling in the world is knowing you never meant as much to that other person as they did and still do mean to you. It can’t have all been for nothing, though grimly I know now that it was. It had to end, and it did. Time bottlenecked into this and left me here alone on the other side. Where are you now? Have you left me the last of the dum dum daze? Where are you now when I need your noise? The walls close in and I need some noise.

lol

there’s a brightness in your eyes
i see it all tonight
in the darkness of my light

yesterday i took two trains and traversed a dreamlike tower of liminal spaces and dark hallways and back rooms to surprise someone there

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

My custom black and gold Starsailor jacket arrived from Scotland today . . . I was measured for it last spring when I was in Edinburgh. The Aero Leather factory is in a cute little town called Galashiels about an hour away by train. I passed by rolling green hills in the Scottish countryside to get there. It ruled! And Galashiels itself is idyllic . . . outside of towns in Japan I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere so immaculate.

Though yeah: they took me into their beautiful underground bunker and a nice guy named Denny let me pick out all the STUFF. I of course chose black leather and brass / gold hardware to match my belt buckle and tooth. Afterwards I departed and strutted along the main boulevard there and got a huge avocado sandwich at this vegetarian coffeeshop. ONCE SATIATED, I headed back to Edinburgh.

That was about a year ago, but I didn’t have Aero begin working on the jacket till this past February because . . . well, I don’t remember, actually. But it was made by hand by a single person in about eight weeks. Her name was on the tag. I had read all over the internet from fellow Aero Dorks that she is the best there is. I believe it!

Anyway . . . it’s 2:48 am here in New York City and of course I’m still wearing the jacket over my pajamas. I gotta break this thing in!! But I shall resist the urge to sleep in it . . .

With this thing on I am impervious to the dangers of the world. It feels like wearing a suit of armor. Plus it looks cool as hell. Though of course I now bear the burden of being The Coolest Guy in Town. Take it from me: it ain’t exactly easy . . .