That’s me. This is essentially what my dreams looked like last night while coked to the gills on Trazodone . . . I was The Starsailor riding upon a starry chariot pulled by fiery red horses inside The Trazozone. Or anyway, that is the harmless lie I have chosen to tell myself. Truthfully, I cannot tell you if those dreams which I dreamed last night were any fun or not, but all evidence points to them not being fun.
IT WENT LIKE THIS . . .
I awoke gasping for air and extremely dehydrated. I glugged down a liter of water from the thermos on my windowsill and lay back down for another hour, though I could not sleep. My clairvoyant system was fully online. I still felt a distress far away, and was sad at it. And instead of getting up and distracting myself from that psychic pain of unknown origin, I Instead I did a thing I sometimes do, which is a sort of harmful compulsion or bad habit I wish I could be rid of: I thought about my entire life.
And I thought also of something my friend Hali had said to me long ago after she’d tearfully left our house in Oakland and moved back to Chicago:
I woke up this morning and was glad to see that it was snowing. And then I remembered everything else.
Pretty much . . .
Eventually I managed to rise from my bed as if emerging from a coffin. I opened the curtains and clicked on the electric kettle. I did a few sets of pull-ups in the space between my living room and antechamber and wondered at it all. And then I made a cup of absolutely mediocre coffee and went about the business of being world-famous celebrity Hollywood Ryan, whatever that even means anymore . . .
I leave for the United States in exactly one week. I’m flying to DC and then immediately going to Richmond to see Bethany and her sisters, and hopefully meeting her nephew Theodore, who is my hero . . . and then I will go to New York to film a bunch of stuff. I don’t know where I’ll go immediately after that, but most likely I’ll drive through Rochester and see Freya, then into Canada to visit my friends in Toronto, and finally to Chicago . . . before flying to Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
I nearly died twice in January . . . nearly didn’t turn 38 years old! And yet I live. So saying, I’m not really afraid of anything at all anymore. There is some part of me that feels a dread in going back to the US though. It almost makes me nauseous. I feel much better here in Europe. The only reason I’m going back is to film and hang out with my friends. The problem is that there’s a lot of cold-hard living to do in the spaces between those things. Well, what the hell . . . it’s just what I got to do. The only way to stay out of trouble is to either grow old or make cool stuff, so I guess I’ll concentrate on the latter. It sure beats growing old . . .
I am calling this thing (logo pending (lol)):
. . . and in this thing I will go to different cities and “interview” my friends. An episode comprises a single city and two friends who live there. Every episode begins with a sort of dreamlike hallucination in which I am singing an Elvis song in a karaoke booth in Berlin. And then I wake up or am woken up in that episode’s city beneath an underpass or on a train or whatever the hell else, having suffered a sort of severe narcolepsy or amnesia or perhaps I have merely dreamed this place and these people, or am the dream of some sleeping giant . . . perhaps I am merely someone’s memory or else an astral projection. Who knows! But in every episode I end up running into one of my friends, yet we don’t know each other. And without explanation they bring me into their world. For instance, my friend Hali is a prolific musician and ham radio operator. She will take me to her studio and, without explanation, go about doing the things she does while I observe and ask her questions and hallucinate. At some point I collapse again and wake up somewhere else in the city. Now my friend Gayle, who is a professional clown, leads me to her home and dresses me up like a clown and takes me with her to a meet a bunch of other clowns she knows. And so on. I love it!
Here is tentatively who I got for each city:
NEW YORK CITY
CHICAGO
LOS ANGELES
SAN FRANCISCO
- Laura, the multimedia artist / my BFF
OAKLAND
. . . and so on. That’s what I got for now. And Laura gets own episode.
MEANWHILE . . .
Here in Europe I got people for London, Berlin, Barcelona / Madrid, Tallinn . . .
Hali and McCune are doing a lot of the music / sound effects too. Yeah! I basically want every single element of this thing to be stuff my friends make. I know so many talented people who are not well-known and yet should be, and so I figure I will honor them in this way. Now that I have been spared by unseen forces in order to continue my life upon this earth, I must create for myself a reason to stay alive. It’s only fair I make myself as useful as possible. Yeah!!!
Well! For now . . .
