How’s this for a sentence: I’ll have a car again in five days and then it’s back to leaving the house at 2 a.m. to hang out at the cemetery where my friends are buried.

i sometimes wonder if i have blasted off too far away from whatever it means to be relatable to people. i certainly can’t actually truly genuinely connect to most people. i think i know maybe four or five people who occupy the same brain-space.

i have become a cartoon character. i am a parody of myself! multiple people have told me this, mostly strangers who have nothing but an outsider’s perspective, and so maybe they would know better than anyone actually. at some point i stopped being ryan [whatever] and became ryan starsailor. and ryan starsailor is a whole other thing! it is a full-time job, baby.

i remember my cousin telling me once that he had watched me slip beyond the realm of “hey that’s a knowable guy” and get sucked up into a psychedelic cartoon world of my own creation where no one could follow me.

“you’ve got beautiful stuff inside you,” he said, and he made a sort of face like the very thought of me was painful to him, “but you’re in the funny papers now.”

did y’all watch tiny toon adventures? there was a character named gogo dodo and he was insane. he was my favorite character. he lived in a place called wackyland. it was like a surreal looney-tunes-themed dali painting. here is the only real image i could find of it, which i got from the, yes, tiny toon wiki (of course that exists). anyway:

i’m gonna let y’all in on a little secret: god dude i totally live in wackyland. i don’t know how to bring anyone else into wackyland. as i recall some of the other tiny toons characters visit gogo in wackyland and they’re like “what in the fuck is this shit.”

i have always made friends very easily, and generally people take to me quickly! (i am usually very hard on myself so let me have this one ok.) but as far as getting too close to the starry multicolored void-cynclone, hell, nobody wants to do that. they really don’t. i think this is why when someone is initially interested in me in, say, a romantic sense, they figure out pretty quickly: “i don’t know how you’re supposed to date someone like this. i’d rather just date a normal guy. this guy lives in fuckin wackyland.”

sometimes they keep me around, i don’t know why. my first serious girlfriend, who in my mind is a saint and a bit of a masochist, liked me a whole bunch—more than any other person had before or since! i’ve said this elsewhere but she’s the only person who was still laughing at my awful jokes five years later. up until the last day i could get a laugh out of her. (i even (painfully) remember the last joke i ever made, and god love her, she was mad as hell at me, but she laughed anyway.) man i was 100% gogo dodo in laffy-taffy-cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs-cartoonland around her all the livelong day and she loved it. she is a beautiful and mysterious person to me because of that. she was hilarious. probably the funniest person i’ve ever met besides my buddy hali palombo. she was the straight man. she was good. she was real good. god i miss her.

the other longterm relationship i had . . . hell that one i still don’t understand. i think the reason she liked me was because she was really confused. i guess that was interesting to her for a little while, to feel confused by a person. because she sure didn’t like that i stayed up till 5 a.m., and took long walks in the dark where i got drunk by myself, and made jokes in front of her friends that made her face turn red. . . . she said i “vibrated past reality” which is a real good expression that i don’t think existed before she said it to me. nice!!!!

hell i don’t know guys i’m just musing on some shit. got me a cup of coffee and i’m thinking. please come visit me in wackyland. i’ll figure out a way to open the seal. you can stay as long as you like. it’s very good and fun. i’ve got it real cozy in here and i’ll say nice things to you if they’re true. i wouldn’t mind having some company.

oh god oh god wackyland

taken one year ago today! (says tracey)

i’m batman by the way

(a week and a half later i would have my mind totally blown the hell open, never to be the same)

i have been hit on / flirted with by a teenage girl basically every day i’ve been back in my hometown. see they think i’m their age. i am not proud of this! this usually happens at the bookstore. the bookstore is the only place i hang out besides the booze aisle at some crappy grocery store next door

and listen: i ain’t gonna take them to prom or nothing but i respect that sort of confidence!

today at the grocery store (i ran out of coffee) the cashier who rang me up asked me if i ever went to shows in DC. her name was “astri.” i thought that was neat. i told her so! i said “whoa, that’s a cool name” and she stuttered and stammered her way through “thank you” and i was like oh boy this poor girl thinks i’m in my chemical romance or something :-/

(one time when i was visiting my dad in tennessee some guys made fun of me for wearing a scarf and asked if i was in arcade fire (???))

(to my family / the authorities: i am not hanging out with teenage girls!!! hell i ain’t hanging out with anyone these days (sad face (so lonely (lol))))

How many of these have I done? Hundreds?

Here’s a new epitaph for me:

RYAN STARSAILOR
☆ミ
1988–2018
HE KNEW WHAT HE WANTED
AND HE WASN’T AFRAID OF BEING ALONE

ok so apparently that was from an essay my sister wrote about me (???)

here it is

hmmm i am kind of embarrassed

but also what nice things she said!

thanks dude ☆

(though, hey, i just wanna say i don’t think you would be a huge fuck-up if i hadn’t jerkishly complained about your christmas presents one year)

my sister sent me this with no context

(it is not a complex question and it has a simple answer: “a big huge idiot who can’t take it straight”)

((also i’m pretty sure the only people who have ever asked that question are the cops (followed by: “and when was the last time you saw him crying outside that abandoned gas station?”))

starsailor

sailin through the stars

no one around

cept a buncha f*ckin darkness

☆ミ

well: The Elder Ones visited me in my dreams last night, and they presented me with an all-you-can-eat nightmare buffet filled with the familiar faces of loved ones

and today i “woke up” (i don’t actually sleep) and realized that i probably don’t trust anyone anymore.

THAT’S BECAUSE
WE KNOW WHAT WE WANT

AND WE DON’T MIND
BEING ALONE