I was telling my father last night that the old world has slipped away from me and I am living in an inverted one that looks the same but has a sort of sinister veneer over it. To which he said: “Um. Uhh.”

It feels like my doppelgänger stepped out of his fucked up world and put me in his place. I know these streets and I know these houses, I know these forests, and on and on. But the god dang cruelty of time has got in me and I am looking at it all with tired world-ending eyes.

On my grandmother’s kitchen table where I write every day is a little calendar. It is flipped to February 20th, 2014, which is the day she fell and never came home again. There’s a lot of little stuff like this all over the place. I emptied out her refrigerator, everything inside of it having expired two years ago. Who else was going to do this? Who was going to come around and take care of these things? There are newspapers from January and February 2014 all over the living room. . . . This house is a museum of a great woman, and of my childhood too I reckon. The appliances all are from the 1980s, and look just as new as they did the day she bought them. All the chairs and tables are the same. I look at old photographs and see a very small smiling version of myself sitting on the cream-colored couch that I’ve been kind-of sleeping and sobbing on for over a month. But my grandmother is gone, and so all of this feels so creepy and hollow. That’s what this whole town feels like to me now. That’s what I feel like too.

I drive by my old schools, and my old house. I go to places where things used to happen to me. Things aren’t going to happen to me anymore here. It has all been played out. The other night I drove to this field where I went the night I got my first car. There were fireflies everywhere! Now it’s the dead of winter and the field is empty and I’ll probably never see fireflies there again. It is all very Twilight Zone-feeling.

Man. They want to tell me that I’m alone, or isolated. I’ve been alone and isolated for years. This place gets in me like a god dang ghost and makes it all worse.

why is it that no one in this country can spell “definitely”

my dad just told me i look like sinead o’connor

RYAN STARSAILOR
☆ミ
1988–2019
HE HAD ANSWERS FOR EVERYONE
EXCEPT HIMSELF

last night i accidentally texted the drone / doom musician iphigenia gras, whose roommate i kind of dated, and we got to talking and we decided we’re good buddies. she’s real cool. her music is real cool too. i saw her perform at the life changing ministries in oakland, california a few times. i brought her donuts and she never made me pay to get in.

just took this picture. that’s me. the other guy is dante

☆ Inertia Log ☆
Day 32 of Total Isolation From Any
Well-Intentioned Human-Shaped Entity:

I was hurled out of every stress dream imaginable (including the one where my guidance counselor tells me I don’t have enough credits to graduate high school) and checked my phone. I had to make a lot of calls and do a lot of PR. You know I guess there have been a few celebrities who have shaved their heads, and now it’s out there, it’s public perception that if someone shaves their head they’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. To which I say, of myself: Well, I’m no crazier than I ever was, I don’t think. In the core of my brain is a totally rational, laser-beam-focused halfwit who sees things from a top-down Sim City map . . . but there is swirling machinery all around me, and God knows I can’t get a lock on it. I mean I can a little bit. I know what I am . . . I have been this thing for a long time. Too bad about those things I have absolutely no control over.

And like all personality-having mammals, I experience horrendous grief when I lose something I care about, though maybe my feelings are amplified, because of this awful awful incurable ailment, and I struggle with being hyper-sensitive, and afraid everyone will leave me, because usually they do. My fears and feelings are not unwarranted I don’t think.

Some days I am so fucked out that I don’t even really feel anything at all. I get in the car and drive around at night, very cold, and I am wearing a Ryan-shaped mask that is perfectly still. I am still a good driver. I can rip around those backroads and make sharp turns and spin the car around very easily. You know I’ve always got cars, and how to use them, and can feel everything about them and can maneuver them however I want. Hell I was going 40 mph in reverse yesterday, way the hell down Lonesome Road. It is all that makes me feel good: driving around in that car and escaping from invisible enemies in my head. And listen: when I drive, and when my face is expressionless, feeling nothing, it is not because my heart has shriveled up Grinch-style and I am a cicada shell of a person. I have just been so fucked out and emptied that there is no juice left in me to shake around. When it comes back to me I will repeat the cycle of feeling everything and being fucked out again.

Now I am skeletal and air-thin. I have bags beneath swollen eye sockets so thick and badly-colored that I look like I’m turning into Darth Vader. My roommates in Oakland asked for a picture of my head and I had to take four or five so the lighting blocked out my terrible eyes. I don’t think I’ve lost any weight—I’ve been eating and exercising every day, mostly to have something to do, and to keep my mind off faraway people, but I am still spun together with twine and pipe cleaners and electrical tape. I wonder if there is any hope of restoring this body. After a certain point the many days and years of pitch-black sorrow manifest in your skin, and in your face, and you look ghoulish. No sleep, no love. It will tear you to ribbons, I swear it will.

There is about a foot of snow on the ground and I feel so very rotten.

snow country

i took a really long bath. i dumped some epsom salt in there and everything. had a candle burning and i was sipping from this bottle of wine. and then i got out and looked at myself in the mirror. i had just bought a pair of clippers to cut my own hair. man i totally just shaved all my hair off. i started with like the 6 guard, then went down to 4 (which is a mad max haircut) and then went down to 2 and 1. i look like i just joined the marines. and you know what, it ain’t that bad. i don’t hate it. i’m not going to keep it like this, but i’ve never really seen the shape of my own head, so it was interesting in that sense i reckon. i think i’m going to let it grow out to mad max length, hang out with that for awhile, and then go back to having it long on top and short on the sides. i don’t know, man! i’m turning 28 on tuesday. i thought, why the hell not

uh, i will say this: it’s really cold

(i would post a picture but i think that would finally get me committed)

i have purple lips

and huge purple rings around my eyes