Wow! My computer just produced a stupid reminder, something like: “Five years ago today!” And then this picture of me standing on a log in Oregon came up. February 4th, 2015 . . . the first time I ever went to Portland. Had some phantom visited me in my dreams on February 3rd, and told me I would rue the day I ever went to Portland, and that I would still be haunted by this catastrophic life miscalculation five years later, I wonder if I would have just stayed home. I tend to trust my dream spirits, so I really do think I would have taken this premonition seriously. To this day I still beat myself up over my decision to move there. Of course many of my problems have lived in my blood since the day I was born, and are bound to me forever, but at least half of the woes that anchor me in hell are ones that I can trace back to Portland. Had I avoided that godforsaken place, I imagine I would now enjoy the silent grass-growing mood that has always eluded me . . . and yet years on, post-Portland, dollars damn me, and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar! It was not so much my time there, one full rotation around the sun, that still swims in my heart—it is the self-perpetuating nightmare vine that has hatched out of it, and poisoned everything in its path since the day I first laid eyes on that rainy pit where down below I would soon crawl and scream until they hooked me out. I thought it would never happen . . . I really did think they would bury me there. And yet escaping it was not enough. Because now my memory of it, and the sadnesses that followed me home are still a fucking dance macabre in my peripheral vision. It should not still have power over me. In the quiet of my room, when my mind is sputtering and backfiring and I am powerless to stop it, I watch and cannot look away as the tangled nerve highway leads back down through time and space to that one rotten decision . . . the crushing loneliness, the constant sickness, and all the money I threw away. And beyond it all, living on the far rim of this place, are the dark faces of those that won’t afford me any peace, though that is all I want now. I have tried to get out from under the shadow of it, but like clockwork I still have a torturous dream that I wake up there again. I did my time and paid the price. Please, let go of me. Can I just be left alone now?

Well: I think I’m going to redesign this website . . . or rather I’m going to completely wipe out the invisible machinery holding it all in place, and modernize it, and so on, even though none of you can see it, or could possibly care about it. Hah! It’s time, you know, what with all the weeks and months that have passed since I last retooled this thing. When was that? It was February four years ago I think, when I found myself in a forest dark, which is to say in the lukewarm bathwater equivalent of a city, being Portland. Oh, god, what a time that was! What a disaster. I promised my lawyer and my therapist that I would stop mentioning my ill-fated catastrophe year in Portland in any capacity, even and especially within my own internal narrative, so yeah. The point is that it’s been a while since ol Starsailor Dot Co got some work done under the hood. It’s getting downright creaky. I’m sure there have been numerous technological advances in the WordPress development community since I, homeless and destitute, coded this thing out of sheer desperation while rain-soaked and hellbent on my own destruction, sitting alone in a coffee shop in miserable wintry Oregon. It was a lot of work. It was good work. I’d like to do it all over again on safer shores. Maybe I can make it so everything loads quicker. Yeah? I don’t know. There have got to be other benefits, both real and imagined. At any rate it’s nice to work on this thing. Makes you feel like you did something, et cetera.

As far as What It Will Look Like: it will mostly look the same. To me this is the ideal layout for what I use it for, in the same way the formatting of a newspaper or a book are ideal for their respective content. This website is designed to display lonely diatribes about my deepest fears and delusions, often polka-dotted with screencaps from black and white movies nobody cares about . . . and it is meant to be easy on the eyes, and to be read in bed at night, and so on. My website is for creeps and losers just like me, OK? I don’t want it to be any more complicated than it need be. It looks exactly the way it’s supposed to look, more or less. It will always look like this. I’ve just decided that this is what it is. It’s pretty much always looked like this for all eight of the godforsaken years that it has haunted the internet, and every now and then I’ve iterated, though probably only I would notice these changes. Mostly I have taken away—have sheered off the auxiliary trimmings that distracted from my ghoulish master plan of complaining about my manifested nightmares until the day I die! I’ve got me a little dancing skeleton of a website, is what I’m saying, with me swinging from the ribcage a-hootin and a-hollerin all the way to oblivion. OK??

Though yeah, I’m gonna clean it up a little, the whole damn thing. I’ve got some ideas written down that I’ve been meaning to try out for like . . . years. I’m pretty sure the world is ending, so the timing couldn’t be better.

You know what? I think I’m going to create a subdomain and just start building the new website in real-time. I’ll even link to it somewhere and you can watch as I build it?? If you want to?? I don’t know what sort of jerk would be interested in something like that . . . though hell, who am I to judge, because I am precisely that sort of jerk. That there is some wholesome web content, after all, when most everything else is an ocean of absolute toxic waste. And who knows!! Maybe you’ll learn something! And I as well! Together: We Will Learn, right out here in the wide open world.

•   •   •

FINALLY, ON A COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE:

I am about to do something with my life that you might consider big and dumb and stupid. Maybe, by the time you notice what I have done, you will roll your eyes, because you’ll have seen it coming all along. I sure feel that way, and I haven’t even done the thing yet. Why am I teasing something that I don’t plan to reveal just yet? Who knows! I can get away with it because this is my stupid website. If you don’t like it, get your own stupid website, you creep! Though yeah, it involves an APPRENTICESHIP in a WEIRD PLACE . . . and baby, I can’t wait. God, I was designed for this mystery job, ever since I first hatched out of that meteor 500 years ago. I’ll write more about it soon. I’ll shriek it out from on high, even, just for the hell of it. Who cares?

Oh yeah! Laura’s sister Helen is visiting me in Berlin by the way:

We’ve been seeing a lot of cool stuff!!

OK I’m going to bed now~

happy birthday baby ryan

“Well, turns out I don’t have cancer.”

“Looks like you got a pretty bad case of being human though.”

“Shut up.”

[roll credits]

people in berlin smoke inside their apartments which i think is fucking bonkers lol

nice

Well, I spoke to my lawyer about this, and he gave me the OK to talk about it here . . . so, yes, it’s official: my birthday is on Sunday, and I’ll be 32 years old. The world will eventually get its revenge on me, and kill me dead, but so far I have somehow, against all odds, managed to circumnavigate death. It was just dumb luck. I reckon that’s the secret though: to keep living, all you have to do is not die. There’s only so much you can do, of course, to stay alive. If something wants to kill you, it will. The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. (And so on.) On your end, with whatever trace of autonomy you have been afforded, all you can really do is eat and sleep and tell yourself a bunch of lies, hoping that’s enough to get you to the next sunrise. Sometimes you imbibe unhealthy substances to disconnect yourself from any higher thought for a while. Other times you just give in and jerk off. At the end of all this, in that ultimate moment, what was it, really? Whatever you got hiding in the shoebox beneath your bed, I guess. Forget about anything else . . . it will have never amounted to anything more than what it will finally be, once the music stops for good: tears in rain, et cetera. For those of you in the back, you should know that I have put in minimal effort. My self-preservation instinct is, frankly, a critically damaged machine . . . an angry, backfiring rat’s nest of tangled wiring and dying circuitry shrieking out circus clown music in the darkness of my mind.

Anyway! Happy birthday, Ryan.

I made a wishlist if you wanna get me something. I mean, go for it:

HERE IT IS

lol

I keep having these horrible nightmares that I live in Los Angeles. If I get kicked out of Germany, I’ll have no other choice than to go to LA and finally get my PI license. I don’t know what else I could possibly do. So a few things on this list are me future-proofing my life. I wouldn’t tie my shoes without a backup plan. Though yeah, I suspect these particular things on my list will be self-evident. Everything else is just for KICKS more or less. Hey man . . . there’s nothing wrong with getting your kicks. What the hell else are you gonna do??

Remember: If you don’t call or text or email me on my birthday, which is January 26th, I will haunt you after I die. Actually, I don’t like my birthday at all, and feel embarrassed by it, so in death I will leave you the hell alone. But you can talk to me on Sunday anyway if you want to! That would be nice. Get it while it’s hot, why don’t you.

okthanksbye

In WILD AT HEART, Sailor Ripley says that his snakeskin jacket represents his individuality, and his belief in personal freedom. Yeah. Laura and I were just talking about how TELL ME A STORY is one of Iggy Pop’s best songs, and how it is more or less about personal freedom. I mean . . . a lot of his songs are! That’s why the dude rules. We said a thing in unison that we of course already knew: that personal freedom is pure and beautiful and essential.

Though yeah: baby, go ahead and wrap a snakeskin jacket around me, cuz personal freedom has got to be prerogative #1 for any red-blooded sinners out there. Or at least it is for me! Like the fella said: Go ahead and fly around . . . IT’S THAT EASY! Live free while the rest live in fear. Just do it, man. Who cares. What’s the worst that could happen? You lose your life? Baby, you got that thing for free!!!

Finally:

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

Mmmhmmmm!! ☆

No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned that what it was all about.

this is just one of the passages i always think about

Man, here is a creepy thing nobody warns you about: if you live long enough, you start to encounter clones of people you’ve met before. Sometimes you meet someone and they share uncanny physical similarities with someone you were friends with 15 fuckin years ago. It’s scaring the hell out of me. What in god’s name is going on here?? Off-brand doppelgängers, man. Crazy stuff. Maybe I’m finally losing it. . . .