gosub

I'm in the bedroom that is sometimes mine, with my good headphones on, fumbling ownership of a chaos to coltrane. And sometimes I don't think about what it means, what mine means, what hers is, where things lie when every botched thought is a piece of puzzle schlock, registering a shock of binary blotch...00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Back from stackheap overflow when we gossubbed 2000 and returned from the edge of the earth, sanity slack, civility hacked, cracked to pieces of smacktalk and square braquetext and dexhex gibs that sounded fine, sublime for real, when life-force congealed balletic ballistics on the entry wound to entry-level living, decasyllabic meal, too perfect to conceal.

Raz is throwing nag champa at me while we listen to lorena mckennet, lovely lilting celtic harmony is what I label it.

We played kings in the corner, three rounds.

The first felt dull, that kind of gloomy dull, like life forced fractional smiles at the one half-joke uttered during the game, the only words said, like the night is truth, the darkness at the end of everything, our light so sad and small, i see through the modern façade of the kitchen fluorescent, and we're shuffling around the old 52 cards like 52 weeks of differing point value, 52 familiar sounding horoscopes in another planetary revolution, one more round.

I think I won that round. Then she said I should smoke a joint and I said I didn't really want to but she persisted. Finally I gave in and smoked and after that first taste and a bit of buzz, the room began to flow with more electricity, and kootenay memories crept through me, stealthy, with the reverbed choir feeling of west-coast dreaming, and I was glad she'd suggested the joint, and I finished off the well-rolled bomber (more of an F4U Corsair) but I became nervous that my inevitable trancing out would create tension, create an addition to that long series of lovers' quarrels, but the cards were looking psychedelic and I had a hand of seven reds, how odd, and raz was telling me about what her mind does with the tarot deck, and then she moved on to the subject of ghosts and said there were two that she had let into the room that wouldn't bother me if I left them alone, which was fine since I didn't notice them anyway, and a little part of me started doing the calculus on ESP, which is a lost cause since I don't know calculus, and the paranoid end of that started fitting slight anomalies into a pattern that would justify believing in the idea of poltergeists meddling with my life in symbolic, but banal ways for reasons just beyond the fringe of reasoning, which caused an even smaller part of me to realize that a much larger part of me would rather live in a world sans ghosts and suggested that if I needed to, I could make rationalizations for why ghosts were absent, indeed impossible even if there was an accelerating rate of unexplained anomalies and coincidental data, not that I've ever been faced with enough strangeness to need to make such rationalizations.

And the rest of me played kings in the corner with something like muscle memory, using about half of what I needed to use of my brain during my stint at the bakery, and I felt like playing this game was psychedelic and hyper contextual and a routine I could do that felt good, like playing tori amos' “winter” properly.

So now I'm selecting from a playlist that is an amalgam of raz's digital music collection and an archive of pitchfork's 200 greatest songs of the 60s.

I switched back to "the dark night of the soul". I'm not really "into" it, but loving it as ambiance, because I couldn't deal with king crimson. I could go with yes, but I’m nervous about the possibility that I'm foisting too much in this communal space, out of place, and besides, novelty is better right now, and raz has some cool music I haven't listened to.

I just put a camel cancer stick out, and into a coke can. The air is thick tonight, alcohol makes my roommates smoke like chimneys and I’m starting to dislike second-hand smoke, but I think breathing a lot in for a month or two isn't really a big deal - and some might call my metabolic pulses of piano improv "noise pollution", unless we're in a more communal music making mindset.

I was very sensual with raz just now, casually, sometimes cluelessly so, a sort of quasi-erogenous oblivion phasing in and out of awareness as synesthetic counterpoint to socially dense thoughts, bright billowing patterns...

Yes, I'm stoned again tonight and enjoying it when it doesn't make me paranoid about if I'm doing something wrong, if she's doing something wrong, if we're doing something wrong, if we're going to fight tonight, if we should fight tonight, if the world is just on increasingly fleeting downtime till the next total war that will profit a small elite, damn horrific historical context.

I'm somewhat sheepish about that little shimmy towards political posturing. That doesn't happen much anymore, I wore it in my youth like a lucky hat, found I loved it at times. Well, politics usually comes back when anger does. Most people can't be too politically involved without anger of some kind. Most people can't care. And anger usually comes from local issues that might be global ones as well. Like if you are personally affected by racism. If you're middle class canadian caucasian nelsonite, probably not too much. Classism is more my bzsazg.tygds

Cue catastrophic quarrel. It’s getting hard to deal with it. I SO don’t want to take that trip right now. Maybe I fucked things up, or maybe the situation is just chronically fucked up and destined to fuck us up no matter what anyone does. I'm sure there's some combination of things I could do to make everything alright, but it's obscure, the winning chess strategy, not something I would hit upon through my ponderings.

This situation has led me to radical thoughts, quick fix squirms out of the fire, like saving myself future grief, but I know I just need to get through the moment, finch’s chilling mantra. I haved vowed not to deal with it many times in the past, but when I'm stoned, I feel apologetic when things go wrong and obligated to "deal" with it, whatever that means. And I don't want to throw in the towel, and vindicate people who said it was stupid for me to come here. I think it would be weak. Me and raz, we should be able to work out our problems.

I want to stay here, and help pay for rent and food. Don't want to abandon raz and meth in this adventure, small, humble, but noble, I think, in a way. It feels awkward to attach any weight to it, humour is light and easy and we like irreverence, I like it when I'm stoned. When I try to explain myself, I often just fuck things up further, especially if I'm stoned, or otherwise inebriated, and not able to strategically smooth out my explanations in tactful, sensitive language, although even when I can, it doesn’t help much, usually. I try to empathize, I think I do to some extent, and I see why she feels how she does, I can relate to her insecurities and ego issues, her manias and depression, her desires and her voids.

I’m distracted by kitchen rattles and hoping they won't disturb the sleep of our roommate. He's not merely a guest, the idea is that we're all equal in ownership - that's my idea anyway. Meth is vital, as I see it, for keeping things together, buffering me and raz from the other’s volatile wavefronts.

I can't trivialize feelings, even when alcohol’s involved, the folly of inebriated empathy. Oe thing drugs have taught me is the nature of state boundaries, mind states. I've sworn so many times I would just refuse to deal with it when it got impossible to deal with. But that is a state-bounded thought as well. I don't know much but I know how about the enflaming of bad associations
and the creation of feedback loops, there’s some overlap in our psychology, there’s some buttons we push and understand in our dysfunctional but loving co-dependency.

Meth sleeps deeply, thankfully, might be the result of his anti-psychotic meds, they sedate him – strange, he doesn’t seem the type to need insanity-blocking medication – apparently he used to cut himself and hear voices and all kinds of hard to grapple with intensities, but he seems very chill with us, maybe slightly melancholy at times, but generally jovial with a keen interest in music and art – he laughs more than I imagined him to and he’s often active in our conversations on film, tv, celebrities, snacks, and trashier aspects of pop culture.

Raz is the only one of us who is currently working a job, and she's also in school, and has schedules, and immediate, pressing responsibilities. She returned home from the video store. She is on call, had to go early, through the snowstorm. Stay late. She has to learn everything with lackluster assistance. I feel for her. Not enough, or as often as I should. But I loved her especially today for soldiering through her day, doing what needed to be done, coming back, and actually being fairly sunny in that radiant desiree way, being cute and bouncy and silly and grabbing at me constantly. She even made bagel sandwiches for us all, good ones, monterey jack and cheddar, smoked turkey, mustard and jalapeno peppers. I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen.

We watched a movie called “hard candy”. It pissed me off in a lot of ways and the ending disappointed me, but I have to admit that I was often involved in the story, it wasn't a bad thriller, somewhat original premise involving a not-so-innocent adolescent pedophile victim. Then we watched the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Wow, it's seven AM. How did that happen?