I want to write more about this later, and at length, but I was just standing alone in my kitchen at 5 am drinking tea and eating fruit and listening to music like a real loser, and I felt this absolute dread that I’m afraid nothing is really all that fun anymore. I spent six months traveling around, and I had a good time most of the time, but now that I am back in my own apartment actually sleeping in a bed again, and being truly alone if I want to, I realize that the tens of thousands of miles I endured there and back again have not left me with as much as I thought it would. There is still some crucial element missing that I can’t exactly place and it is a sadness to me.

It’s like the fella said: Look me in the eye and tell me I’m satisfied. Well, I ain’t!

And see: I have done such things in the past. I have spent entire years of my life floating around, having weird bad-interesting experiences, seeing old friends and new freaks, and on and on, and I remember it being more fulfilling. Maybe it’s just that it feels played out now in some sense, since I’ve done it so many times. Such is my tale. Still: What did it become this time? I passed some time and got what I could get out of it. I reckon that’s the best you can hope for sometimes.

I know when the fun stopped. There is a sort of curse on me that I think about it every day whether I want to or not. It’s a ghost story on repeat in my mind, is what it is. It ended November 2019, and never came back. I told Monty earlier that I often think about one of the last times I was in Portland at the same time as her, just before she moved, which was April 2019. I was in town to see her and Molly and The Pink-Haired girl, who I was in love with at the time. It was the first time I ever met her and everything. And somewhere in the middle of all this, Monty and I had this essentially perfect day. It was 4/20, so we went to a dispensary and bought some gummies, and then got ripped out of our skulls and walked for many miles through SE Portland, which is where I used to live, laughing like psycho idiots. We even went to Tom’s and had coffee, which is what we used to do every Sunday. Eventually we ended up at Laurelhurst Park and did cartwheels in the grass. Everyone was sitting on blankets and talking. And across the way from us, an old dude in denim and a cowboy hat was sitting on a picnic table in the shade playing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ for everyone. We lay in the grass stoned off our asses and transfixed listening to him play. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it was a beautiful day in the spring and nothing was wrong. It was, god help me, A Fun Day.

Next day I went to an amusement park and a rollerskating rink with The Pink-Haired Girl, but I’ve written about that before . . .

And when I went home two days later, Dante was waiting for me:

What is my life now? Five years and nearly six-thousand miles away from all that, I guess my life is being alone and eating fruit in my kitchen an hour before the sun rises, which it is now, so I really ought to stop writing this and hide before it’s too late. Whenever you stay awake so long you can hear the birds outside, you’re in big trouble, and I’m in big trouble. But I want to write about that house I lived in back then and all those people who came around, and how that was The Last Good Year, even if it is painful.

Yeah, well . . . so long for now~ ☆彡