i keep accidentally watching movies about lonely french women who wish they were dead

‘vivre sa vie’

i asked one of my oldest friends what my problem is. in other words: why can’t i take the world straight, and why do i keep ending up in a perpetual personality loop where i can’t escape myself. she said this among many other things. it was all absolutely true, but this sums it up

(lol)

I sent out an SOS on Instagr*m asking for someone to send me a package with weed gummies and the new Zelda, and brother McCune pulled through! He even included a postcard with his own likeness, on the back of which he wrote me a nice message that included the phrase “Euro poon”. Oops!

Inside were some weed gummies hidden and mixed among some non-THC-infused candy, that new Zelda, and the deodorant I used in the US for like 15 years. German deodorant is really bad for some reason . . . I really don’t get it. Like come on.

Anyway yeah . . . I’ve been having a really good time with all three. Thank you my brother.

I keep saying I want to write all this out, which I have a little bit, and with urgency I must finish just so it has someplace to go, and so I can feel less insane . . . but I’ve been having a difficult time sitting down to type, or really sitting down to do anything at all. All I’ve wanted to do is sleep. Something is wrong with me. I told someone that lately I feel like a facsimile of myself, and the real me is watching the fake me on television in purgatory, and I can’t merge the two Ryans again. I’m stuck in a bad dream feeling like the fake. It is a surreal and awful feeling to feel outside of yourself like that.

In A SCANNER DARKLY, the two hemispheres of Bob Arctor’s brain began to compete with one another . . . they cease working in tandem. As an undercover narcotics agent, he has infiltrated a group of dope fiends in order to weasel out their supplier. Inside the house where he lives with them are hidden scanners which monitor everything. Later, in his office, he watches videos of himself and the dope fiends that were recorded by the scanners, but as his brain begins to split in half, he doesn’t even realize he’s watching himself. A doctor performs a routine neurological examination at the point of no return:

“It’s as if you have two fuel gauges on your car,” the other man said, “and one says your tank is full and the other registers empty. They can’t both be right . . .”

I mean, yeah! That’s how I feel, more or less, that two gauges are giving me conflicting information. I don’t know what to do with when received external stimuli that I need to survive is incongruous. And then inside I feel scrambled as hell. It all feels like nonsense to me. It makes me feel nauseous and exhausted and deeply alone to inhabit a little purgatory island inside my brain. Neil Young said he was deep inside himself but he’d get out somehow. Did he eventually pull that off? Did he leave instructions in some other song??

Well: Even though I feel absolutely bonkers, I suppose I’ll have to go on hiding it a little longer until it disappears. Maybe I can just ride it out. I have of course experienced worse. This just feels different is all. I think that is what scares me about it.

Anyway, maybe it’ll help me if I finally finish that thing I’ve been writing. Or rather, I’ll watch through a glass darkly as the carbon copy phony version of myself does it . . .

Why not end with another Philip K. Dick quote:

An hour after I have woken up from the dream I can still see in my mind’s eye—whatever that may be; the third or ajna eye?—the garden hose which my wife in her blue jeans is dragging across the cement driveway. Little details, no plot. I wish I owned the mansion next to our house. I do? In real life, I wouldn’t own a mansion on a bet. These are rich people; I detest them. Who am I? How many people am I? Where am I? This plastic little apartment in southern California is not my home, but now I am awake, I guess, and here I live, with my TV (hello, Dick Clark), and my stereo (hello, Olivia Newton-John) and my books (hello nine million stuffy titles). In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless; unfit for an intelligent and educated person. Where are the roses? Where is the lake? Where is the slim, smiling, attractive woman coiling and tugging the green garden hose? The person that I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

The Russian Girl did not end up killing me the other night, but she did take this picture of me next to a lake in Grunewald. She also gave me a Marlboro Red, which I smoked out of my little plastic Hunter S. Thompson filter I always keep in my right breast pocket for some reason. (The reason is that I’m an embarrassing loser.)

Something happened to me about two hours later. It happened entirely in my mind. I was sitting with The Russian Girl in a park in Charlottenberg, and I felt what you might call ego death, even though I was stone-cold sober. It was a horrible feeling . . . like an absolute loathing or revulsion for everything. Some French philosophers might call this THE NAUSEA. Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out how to explain exactly what it is I felt, but I didn’t like it so much. It’s been difficult for me to really do anything since then to be honest. Which is to say I’m still feeling the hangover effect of it. I’m so exhausted and sad. I wonder what you’re supposed to do about that when everything else stops working . . .

I saw a Swedish girl on T*nder last night. Her bio was in Swedish, so I translated it:

Gotta say . . . that rules lol

just the other day i quoted ‘the book of laughter and forgetting’ here . . . and then two days later milan kundera died. i liked that guy. i’ll quote him again:

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

rest in peace

In one hour I am going to take the S-Bahn south from Schöneberg to Grunewald (literally “Green Forest”), which is a massive forested area on the outer rim of Berlin, to meet a Russian Girl there. I am to meet her outside a weird little restaurant / bar within Grunewald, where we’ll shotgun a few beers or whatever, and then get to walking. I told her I’m down to walk five miles (eight kilometers (lol)) AT MINIMUM, as I consider anything less than that to be a Baby Walk. She said, “да” and I said, “YeeeaaahhhhhhHHHH duuudddeeEEEE!”

So we’re gonna do it. It is imminent. All I need to do is brush my teeth and then I’m out the door.

Am I going to bring some of the edibles I received in a package from California yesterday? CAN this girl be trusted? Find out next week at my funeral!!