He called for his bowl

A bowl of herb, a glass of wine, and an orgasm to end the evening. Not as high on self anymore.

In limbo. Could get higher, but it's a work night. But I'm high enough to want to write about the usual recreational subject. More and more, drugs are a drug thing. More and more. A self-reinforcing loop. Enforcing. Encircling. I've been carrying the angel and the devil into it. So there's always guilt amid exaltation. Gloria in excess diablo. But I know I'm forgetting certain states. But I don't really mind the self-reinforcing subject, even as the angel whispers shameful laments. And I don't mind writing portentious things that I criticize others for writing. It's all good. Taking drugs to write words to take drugs to. It's the Shambhala mindset that finch was perpetually ranting against. Well I can't argue that it seems disgusting, when the drugs wear off. It's like MSG. It's not supposed to be good for you.

But I remember things. Reasons. For being. Dead reasons. Resurrected reasons. Graves of reason. Encountering epitaphs on the oregon trail. The guy that died of dysentery. No reason, unless you look microscopically.

What I discovered, after a riverbed of carcasses. It's so important because it's mine. The stately rot on foamy pebbles. So beautiful because it's in my head. So ugly because it's mine. So important. Imagery bubbling up from the unconscious in a rotting stream - the herrings seem red but they're not - the metaphor is imposed, a false shade. Electron mace was an intended image, not tied to association. A shade of granite, charged. I'd rather have it forever unfulfilled, blueballs till the lifeforce dies. Dried stain of fecund uselessness.

Pill-Grim Happy Funtime Life-Amp Simulator Version 3.2

I'm prolonging my jagger high with white wine, and dating Aki tonight. Aki proved to be a far more fascinating conversationalist than I'd imagined. I’d written her off as a bliss ninny. But she’s more of a bliss nanny, making sure I get my share, like the other kids who’ve been so lucky. Because she has ladles of oodles of bliss to serve up, washer-board style. A magic wand, and I have rock hard tasty abs. Yes, it’s my turn. She always had this smile ready, for every occasion, it bowled me over, I didn't know what to make of it. But tonight it rolled over me like fondling foam. I riffed on her, jizzed on her face. She wiped off my juice, sweet as you please. She’s my happy ball of fun. I don’t taunt her. This is all coming at the cost of my sanity, but I’m happy to go mad, sink into her smile, taste the geisha, feel her melt under me, become my mattress, she knows when to respond, like Now. Now I want you to rise to the occasion, you know where to go, girl, you know where I want to hear your glossolalia.

We told a story together, based on fragments of trips, and television shows, and shared mythology, and odd personal anecdotes. It was about two ninjas, except they weren't turtles. But mutagen was involved. She riffed on me, with me. It proved to be a real jam party.

This white wine tastes almost good. Blanc. The golden tint. It satiates the craving. A minute ago, I was jonseying for a beer - a beer, you can't buy beer this time of night, BEER, the designated drug of the proud working class, was not available on demand, in Nelson. But White Wine was. Another drunk jam party at Jonathan Deon's parents' house, this time with Aki. She makes everything better. It's the usual stupidity, in which I feel like I can do no wrong, or the wrong I do doesn't matter. I connect with my inner asshole, and it gets me chicks like Aki.

I'm drunk on weed. Imagining life as it should be. The proper regime of my aesthetic unit, my legions, sworn to defend the fatherland porch, a splint off faction that will spark the Canadian Civil War of 2061 to 2065. It just goes on and on and on, as journey observed.

Aliens look like Asians. Coincidence? They both have the same number of letters. Coincidence? Aki is releasing my endorphins. Coincidence? It's infuriating, how da bitchez and hos have that power over me. The Elf Tykes almost abducted me tonight, to make me face the trans-personal-oberfetus-starchild. They were going to ruin a Strauss Tone Poem for me, clockwork orange style, one Vic Sagerquist said contained the greatest five minutes of classical music ever written about fifteen minutes in, one I wasn't all that crazy about anyway. There are lysergic crystals coating the walls and DMT vapour in the air. It feels vintage. But it's older than that. It's ancient. And yet binding to modern synthetic molecules. It's the necessary prodigal perversity, to get into medieval mythology on your ass, and gnostic certainty. You don't know yet, but you will one day. You’ll snort it off a hooker’s backside, but you’ll never kiss her. Like those other deja-vu daze. The stock market will crash, and then magically rise, quasi phoenix, from the ashes.

The Quasi Phoenix at the Quackadero. You never would have imagined, Pill Grim. But run the emulation enough times, and your reverie will become reality. Like Aki. The moans you couldn’t imagine, the syncopated squeak that responded to your spontaneous maneuver that somehow allowed your body to squeeze more bliss chemical through the ancient monkey cock mechanism. So you is me, but there’s another one that I’m not. I will gather a motley crew from umlauted sickheads. I will fuck the help. I will make bastard babies. I will sow my seed, and not care, not share, never know where my genes are going. And I will grow a garden with Aki, in old age, retirement. It’s wabies will sabize the passerzbye. It will be.

The hospital parking lot

I walked through the unused lower parking lot of the hospital tonight. It was quiet and eerie, and felt profound. The Hospital, the tallest building in town. A serious place, the place of birth and death, where the business of living gets down to the essentials, the heartbeat and breath, maintaining, maintaining, maintaining, maintaining, the changing of medication, maintaining, maintaining, or failing on the fourth floor, the final floor – but at least on morphine, if you’re sinking into the place where destructive pain-management is something that might as well be done. It comforts me to think we’re decent enough to abolish unnecessary pain on our deathbed, even if our religious-nut girlfriends are sobbing on our stomachs while we’re on the nod. It was the first place I ever saw, probably the last place I will see.

A sign at the entrance to the lot said: “Exit with Caution”. Seemed extra meaningful, like it was directed at me, like it was a theme. Made me remember when things seemed meaningful. Those crazy times. Gave me hope that one day, seeking truth would again become meaningful, and not just a cheap three minute, or three hour high, a chemical dynamic, a motion gone through for self-gratification, with the full understanding that the comedown will reverse all polarities, reveal the joy and clarity to be a farce, smeared circus clouds, and all that’s to be done is to try and fight the inevitable downer with sad and desperate coping mechanisms, patterns, pharmaceutical remedies extracted from griffonia seeds, heavy metal therapy, checking out the one good ‘80s thrash band I wasn’t aware of, the one I was saving in a dusty cup of activities, 1001 Things To Do In The Information Age, digital bounty, good for maybe two hours of enjoyment, then I’d better think of something else, anything, or be forced to face the void, feel the freeze of how life is nothing but distraction, chaos that’s becoming too predictable, too patterned, meaning what we want it to mean, but ultimately nothing, like the more I know the less I care, like knowledge is apathy at best, terror at worst, bliss until the neuroses took over, and now that’s what constitutes truth: paranoia and depression, the final authorities.

How come THC is manna from heaven for just about everybody here in the valley, but I get this mindgrinder? Maybe because they selected themselves to be here, whereas I came right out of the trees, or at least the hospital that overlooks them – a genetic incongruity, trying to trip happy but stumbling painfully. I haven't liked the green haze in ages. But at least it’s interesting. Makes me think of how emotional intensity increases with age. Everything becomes a drama. An Odyssey. 

So if emotion mounts over time, making every day an epic struggle, how does that square with the fact that I'm mild mannered and reserved and self-questioning as an adult (let's be charitable) than when I was a kid? Wouldn't childhood, with all its tantrums and crying be the more emotionally intense time? No, because then, if you feel an emotion, you express it, without reservation. You cry. You laugh on inappropriate occasions. You rage. But as an adult, you've learned not to express what you feel, no matter how strong it is. You've got to keep that shit inside, be upright, part of society, this great venture we're in, this enterprise - never show your weakness, your true self, nobody wants to see that, it's ugly. Let's pretend we're different, better than we are, better than our neighbor. Who wants to be lesser, a loser? Comrades in competition, I give you: capitalist psychology. Though the commies have their own ingrained lunacy. And the middle way motherfuckers, they’re crazy too. That’s why suicide is a constitutional right, in Norway. It’s the accepted way of expressing displeasure. Wear a diaper and blow your head off.

When you're a child, a tantrum is just another tantrum. It's a release. The emotions aren't that intense because you roll with them, like a good lock in a jazz improv - they're just there, taken for granted, the purity of surety. But put the always powerful human emotions, ultimately the result of the ever-changing chemical cocktail, nesting in strange loops, into the stupidly sophisticated mind of an adult, in society, with all its higher level games, so high-level you forget they’re games – then you take them deadly serious. Then emotions must be suppressed. Then it’s a death struggle not to go berserk - death before dishonor. When you’re an adult that has got to the breaking point, to the point where you’re screaming and throwing things – that is fucking scary. Because that is deeply suppressed emotions coming through like a tsunami. And you’re not a child anymore, so you’ve crossed any number of lines. You can’t even fathom the extent of it right now. You don’t ever want to have to think about it, the damage you caused, are causing, by flipping out on your friends, your family – it’ll never be the same again, you’ve revealed your ugly, weak, self. You must be strong and finish the freak out – burn your bridges. Burn everything – to the ground. And burn the ground. Scorched earth. Scorched mind. Death before dishonor.

There is an alternative. The psyche-ward. You'll have lost control, they'll put you in manacles because you're a maniac, they'll re-boot your brain with electrical impulses or lobotomize you with lithium, or seroquel, or a surgeon's saw - understandably, most opt not to be considered crazy, it's not an acceptable way out. Emotional intensity.

What do you do with emotional intensity? Sometimes it's not enough that behavior based on feelings be suppressed. Sometimes you think it's wrong to even feel things. Or maybe it would just be easier if you didn't, then there'd be nothing you had to suppress. So you could try and numb yourself, but the brain is a beast, not easily controlled. Medication, psycho active medication, just gets you into tight loops, creates consequences, dependencies creating chronic dissatisfaction, destruction of dopamine-producing cells. So how do you change, or cease feelings without medicating yourself sick? You go through "therapy" of some kind, a self-examinating, that just leaves you more neurotic than before.

Who is you? Mostly me, but I'm not alone. Just isolated. There are others out there like me, just isolated, like me. Some in neurotic nets of co-dependency, or communal reverie, some who in theory might lead fuller, richer, happier lives. Maybe my poverty is I never sank low enough, never had it hard enough to appreciate the good, hadn't had the dao hammered into me till it stuck right through. Just halfway crazy, a mediocre maniac, good for halfway good writing.

I didn’t exit the hospital parking lot with caution, I tripped on the curb, it was my birthright, something to do while waiting for the death of night.

my new band

Grätüitous Umläut

massively exaggerated OPEC numbers

Citadel - some strength I can't see. Stately organ anchors an inexhorable melodic grave, a granite sculpted wafer-cookie contour, a wedge of sad century, let's keep it in context, the colt 45 made everyone equal. Citadel hum. Hum. Can you hear the hum? It's a fragment of a song, a word sung with robust melancholy. I'm trying to describe what this recalled fragment means for me. It's an aesthetic unit I guess, a little chip of something. Oh fuck this. I hate everything tonight, especially this writing. How I write. Slavishly adhering to old patterns. Horray, I've got a "voice" now. I've arrived.

I've got a headache now. Tequila isn't kind to me. Plus I'm sick. This stupid cold I thought was mild, tonight feels unbearable. It just hangs around, an obnoxious guest making everything unbearable. Able. I'm able though, I'll bear it, what else can I do? Suck off the power grid. Can't bother fighting addiction. I don't read the peak oil bloggers anymore. I'd rather act like everything's alright. Think about what cultural items today will be delightful vintage entertainment in 20 years, when I’m watching them on whatever youtube equivalent exists on the still lit internets. Haha, internets, plural, how hilarious, another opportunity to make fun of Bush. God. How tired. How tired everything is. I still sound so much like myself.

Build me a woman, make her ten feet tall. I don't care anymore. Except when I care. When I get so needy, needy, when nobody's trying to please me baby. Hey. Blow me. I'll buy you a ninety dollar hoodie. I'll share my disease. I'll allow myself bitterness. The bitter property on the monopoly board. How everything's been perfected, how there was a time in history when the million dollar chord progression was unwritten and that great combination of rock guitars was waiting for some hard-livin’ axe-men, they would stumble upon a crowd-thrilling combo while a creature of instinct would accidentally channel bowie with his whiny yet impossibly awesome voice, oh yes, it's possible, in fact mandatory, it wasn't actually a stumble, it was a swagger into inexorable rock perfection, it took a little of los angeles and a smattering of seattle, and all the bourbon-soaked roots, and half the cocaine in columbia, and it probably wouldn't end well, we'll see, when China gets democracy, and the appetite for destruction is a craving for creation, the creation of a bed and breakfast chain that makes slightly different scones in each location, from the Ozarks to the Kootenays, with a slight variance of chatter over pastries and decaf, a chat about hurricanes, and sugar cane, and raising caine, a bad pun marring a brilliant song. The perfect riff, the perfect melody, and now all that's left, for artists, is to pervert the perfection, discover an unUSED dissonance, contrive the chaos, sift noise into an ugly statement on artistic overdose - what a goddamned calling it is now. Hello? Do I want more minutes? Sure, pile them on. I know your voice, you're the Holy Grail's automated calling, you're still shooting down those vintage copper wires, you want me, I'm so lucky, you called me, Holy Shit.

This night sucks. It sucks the bag. It sucks like an electrolux. Which is why I'm writing. All there is to do. It's all so unfair. The things I can't say. The excess flesh. What the fuck is it doing here? And I thought there was no more room for self-loathing. Yeah, just keep packing them in, Seymour. We'll roll another educational film. Then we'll swallow tripe. Hopefully we'll chew it up first. We'll kill another cow. Tomorrow's mills and processing facilities. I am not proud.

It's gotta get worse before it gets better. Maybe the naproxies kicked in. Headache ebbed slightly. Just slightly. But it almost makes me feel better - opens the door a crack, the sicklight spills out. The hint of a chill on the back of my hand. Teflon slip off the sensual. So aware how sick I am. Mmm, that thinkin thang. All I got is samples. That's my pocket change, mixed with lint. I'll buy you a coffee. You will give me charity by pondering the aggregate, even a little, maybe even writing about your impression of the aggregate, this dirty aggregate, this sickly gestalt, a twenty dollar bill in my space case, case o space, but don't advertise, it's not that impressive, it's inflation.

Can't savour the candy taste of casually bandied about apocalypse, a cutesy end theme, game over in a square wave cadence. It's not guilty but it's not innocent. Tell me it's just my head. Tell me it's just my head. Ugh, oh no, that didn't work like I thought it would. Distract me. Distract me. Take my hand. No, no. No. I'm not worthy. Don't do that, I'll infect you. Do you know where the flowers are? Do you know the names? I need to know the names, you must tell me.

I've lived 25 years now. When I converse with people, it seems all re-hash. Even strange and interesting new people. And yet I'm uneducated and inexperienced. Still, it's all re-hash. I made my prison. I didn't stretch. I atrophied. I, I, I, oh God. Shut the fuck up. Wishing for that great break-out that will change my style. But wishing won't make it so. I WANT to be motivated. I want it on a silver platter. Rogers and Hammerstein. Give me my freedom. Give me my dreamcoat. Delirium is something. The curdled substantial.

I wonder why meth_maker keeps the moniker. Maybe because it's so disgusting. If there's a sentiment, I can't see it. But I could imagine it, sort of. The glammer of making meth. Glammer, that cheap magic that is found art, amicably gamical, the kind you find at the red barn, the kind you strip matchheads off to synthesize in a homemade lab, if you can call that junkfuck a home, a tornado would be a mercy wind. Phosphorus precursor poetry. This sulfuric smell is my every day is a birthday bed, it's as far as I got, it's Blaine, Missouri, we make stools, we ship them all over the country. Making hash from the split sensual post-acid haze. It's admirable to express that in poetics, despite the heaviness. I hesitate to describe what meth has made, I called him "ascetic with a cigarette", that seems enough, that's my poetic contribution to the Enigma. When I try and paraphrase the maddening fragments of his condition, I get corrected or negated, generally. But that's as it should be, as he adheres to honesty, despite the confusion, the contradictions. I think there's still potential for novelty in delirium and delusion, I could go back there, get further... but... but... I don't know. Oh. Here comes a kind of rage. Frustration.

Fried: A history

Life is a puzzle. The objective is to avoid the solution. When you figure it out, you lose.

Day 1

I’m going to get down a few things, after getting a bit warped and absorbing Shambhala, but before I’m so tweaked and burnt that I can’t say anything intelligent for weeks.

Here’s an idea: There are two realities. The reality that is, the objective facts, most of which are hidden to us. And the reality of what we perceive, the miniscule fraction of objective reality’s facts we’ve strung together to form our personal worldview, our emotional response to what we think of as knowledge. Both realities are real. One is incomplete. The quality of our incomplete perceptual reality is what we bring to it – our fears, hopes, emotional graces and baggage.

I think I went braindead. I can’t remember what the point was in what I was writing. It’s getting fragmented. I guess I was trying to lay the foundation for the statement that we CAN tweak our personal reality, willfully, but to a very limited extent. Most people anyway. I can see the possibilities for tweaking, how reality can be what I want it to be, but I can’t do much about it. All I can do is be aware of the mind mechanism at work, selecting for me, narrowing my options for what to do, how to perceive.

I feel stupid when I’m stoned. But I think faster, in rich and complex ways that I can’t articulate except through nonsense poetry, when I think in counterpoint, synesthetically, and ideas must be compressed in jabberwocky.

Nico played the food court. Just Nico, a tiny stage, a guitar, and a sound system. Jazzy lounge covers of Nirvana songs. I said hi. Don’t know if he recognized me. I’m trying to go into the crispers-eating headstate. Oh yeah? Alright, that’s cool. Dead-eyed responses bring me down.

I was going on an emotional trip about people – my inability to connect with them. Then, at the campsite, nature arrests my attention. A freak storm rolls in, driving rain and wind, camp gear flying. We have to hold onto our pavilion and tie the drapings to the poles. I stop thinking about connecting to people, and think about how fragile the grid is. The reality of being outside. Nothing like a big balls-out storm to sober you up. The storm passes, people cheer.

I’m “thinking” I should be insular, but I’m “feeling” the duty and the craving to do something involving people. Remembering the guys in the car, complimenting the dealer on the quality of the rails he sold them. I have 2 bottles of cough meds. I could go stone crazy. Maybe I should. Maybe I will. If people aren’t going to involve me to my satisfaction – I’m so on my own, it feels like… I want to change my values. Here I go. Spiraling down to despair.

She opens the door to the van: “Hey Johnny”. A benign jab. “Hi”, I reply softly, a mournful singing tone, high, “hi”, ingratiating but non-committal. I hate how I sound sometimes. I’m still in storm-mode, but thank God the crazy wind stopped. Still got damp clothes and damp thoughts. I want to drop the needy nag splinter and just be cool, or fuck cool and have fun, one or the other, not this THC-induced over-analytical uptightness. Well, plenty of time for that, but I started writing this in the first place because I was being analytical and seeing the ugly real side of everything, as well as the stupid menacing paranoid neurotic side of everything I created from perfectly real facts, my social awkwardness, my lack of friends, my small stature, my loser-style, which I use to hold a bleak view of life. Yes, I’m sitting in a van writing, at Shambhala. This isn’t the place for emo-goth bullshit.

I’m saying things in a non-stylish, non-artistic, but articulate way. I’m writing insular experience like an extrovert. But it’s sad that if I were to get poetic, it would just be cryptic fragmented franken-metaphors born of personal signifiers – my few objective facts, pushed together to form a junkheap fiction. Heh, too many metaphors. Too many lawn ornaments for this tasteful neighborhood.

I see no brave front in writing anymore. I dropped the shield, it was weighing me down. I wanted to go out, meet people. Now I still want that, but I can’t tweak reality to get what I want. Neuroses get in the way.

I just looked at finch’s kids, who are camping with us. I was thinking that this bitter cocktail of emotions flooding through my blood and brain must be freakishly removed from their reality. From their perspective, I’m worrying over abstruse, self-created hallucinations, bizarre, paranoid interpretations of reality. When I say “self-created”, I don’t mean I have control or intention. I mean my “self”, my memories, what has stuck to the scratchy analog recording of my cortex, the junk that makes up the character I play here, this stuff “selected” the aforementioned bitter cocktail. I could have maybe tweaked a variable here and there, or with a Herculean effort, turned the tide of my emotion-driven worldview, but I didn’t. The process – perversely tied to “self”, did its work and I live with the result. And write about it.

I have tequila and DXM, except this year the booze is finch’s. And I always forget what a precious resource alcohol becomes after eight hours at Shambhala. I have an urge to get buzzed into some predictable intoxication, before getting into hardcore alterants.

You wonder what time it is, huh? I’m blissfully ignorant of that fact. Someone answers. It’s 10 to 3. See, I say? Time’s really dilated here.

A lot of deja-vus. Poetics from narcotized clear eyes. Insular or not? Why am I on this theme? Maybe I should do acid and get another theme. Or maybe that would just amplify this theme to nightmarish size. My trip – the ache inducing beautiful faces. Out of my element, but I have my drugs, my stash. I have my pharmacy. Thinking about 5htp for now. Carpet party on Sunday?

Day 2:

After DXM. Wow. Dissociated. Wandering the crowded paths. The first hour was the grimy plumbing it always is. Feels wrong. Nausea. Why did I do this? I thought I’d lie down on the beach, smoke some pot, stare up at the stars, so clear on the ranch. I told Jenna I was so fucked up it wasn’t even funny. But I’m laughing. It was profound, but I can’t remember why. Profound moments of puke. Yikes. I hurled. Me. Which was a good thing in retrospect. How did that happen? It just happened. It wasn’t a nightmare. I was thinking about whether I should find a toilet when I stumbled to the ground and tossed my cookies on the dirt, somewhere by the outlying food vendors. And then again, half a minute later. Yes, I can understand how people can like puking, once all the nervous business about whether or not you’re gonna do it has been settled. It was epic for me. I’ve held in the sick for 16 years. I’d done my staggering robo-dancing at the main stage, shuffling backwards each beat. Of course that’s why I puked. You don’t dance with a belly full of robitussin. Duh.

“Are these glow sticks any good?” I ask the asian girl in front of me on a path I think leads to Ewok Village. I hadn’t bent them right and I’d accidentally thrown away the connectors, so what were supposed to be rings were half-illuminated sticks placed in my jacket pocket. “Be happy,” she instructs me. I am, but I’m too dissociated to look happy. I’m a googley eyed freak.

After walking between the camp, the town, and the stages twenty-something times, I stagger into my tent and decide to end the night with a few good pulls on my hash pipe. I drift into delirium, unable to sleep just yet. The visuals are disturbingly precise and utterly surreal – a flotsam of mental junk, fragments of television commercials and techno, mind-bogglingly specific, all narrated with a half-nonsensical but hyper-syntactical pastiche of voices. I keep waiting for some kink, some break, in the stream of words, but it never comes. It just bubbles onward. I remember that this flavour of hallucination is unattainable without DXM and cannabis. I remember why I used to chase hallucinations, and how freaky a pursuit it is.

I’m amazed all my stuff is accounted for in the morning, including the glowing apparel, mints, and various things I bought at the general store

But everything is in slurred fragments. Sleep dep and old age. Dividing up a triscuit. Okay, enough arabesque. Yes I can ornament. So what? I’m not burned out yet though. DXM doesn’t really do that. Not like E does. I still have a certain vitality left. Reasons for hedonism and forced happiness remain. Justifications for self-abuse. For treating my brain like a toy. Helicopter rides. Profound moments of puke. Trade your DMT for PMP.

Day 3:

I’m on E. Conversation flows like water. I’m open all the way. I can talk about anything. I remember that I told myself NOT to talk about ANYTHING or the crash would be worse, laden with regrets. But I don’t care. Because I see that there is nothing to regret. It feels great to talk about my sex life. Half the ecstasy of ecstasy is saying the things you don’t say, can’t say, when sober. I can dance now. Not in my crazy way, but in a more natural, fluid way. I feel the beat in every nerve. I am the music. The music is great, especially at the fractal forest. Beautiful people dancing. I dance down the paths with my arm around finch. I talk to everyone. They talk back. We’re all family here. We’re open.

Back in the fields, I run into a couple. I’m playing the invincibility theme on my portable yamaha. The guy and his girlfriend, dancing to nothing in glowing rings, stop and approach me. He says he does it differently, and proceeds to play the main Mario theme, with full counterpoint. I’m blown away. I invite them to our camp, we have tequila. We all chatter under the pavilion, ecstatic conversation, getting to know each other, full of opinions, all seeming to jive, not in agreement, but in mutual respect. I chat with Jeff, the musician. We talk about music, and piano technique, and Keith Jarrett, and peak oil. Holly is here, one of the Vernon girls. I’m getting to know her. I smoke too many cigarettes, smoke them like weed, won’t notice that I’m hurting my throat till the next day. I don’t notice that I’m biting my tongue either. I’m chewing gum to keep my hyperactive jaw busy.

The couple head off to town. Finch goes to sleep. I’m left with Holly. Holly Lemon. That’s her real name, apparently. Happy to hang with her, she seems to need someone too. But now I’m questioning everything I just said. The hit is wearing off. I’m running out of words. She keeps talking. I struggle to keep my good vibe outwardly unbroken, respond to her verbalized thoughts with fake affirmations: “um hmm, nice, yeah, right on”.

Three druggies wander in to join us. They’ve been up for a long time. The girl, Jenn, says she’d smoked crack. “Was it totally disgusting?” asks the big kid. “Did you like it?” asks the blond one. “No.” She shakes her head with a sigh. “Yeah, I liked it for, like, the five seconds I was high.” The blond one has just discovered E. He likes it. Says it changed his mind about chemical drugs. He also says, just one time and you’re hooked. He doesn’t seem to mind being hooked. He can say all sorts of things that appall my noveaux-cynic sensibilities, from a position of insulation. He’s high. I tell him I’m crashed. I crash hard. But I’m not trying to fuck with your trip. I don’t want to bring you down. He says, “I want to bring you back up.” He’s not a bad guy. They’ve got powder E. They’re putting it in everything, a juice bottle, joints. The big guy pours some powder on paper and says I’m gonna have to parachute it. I figure out what he means, and do it. They want to see Bass Nectar at the Portal. I’m still unenthused. But Holly tells me I just did E, and I’ll be up again soon enough. I say alright, and reluctantly get up. The guy says he thinks I’d be fun to hang with. So I go. The sun’s coming up. I’m telling the guy what I know about E, how much is neurotoxic, that even the pure stuff is an amphetamine, so you’re gonna feel speedy. And notice I’m talking again. I guess I’m up again.

So I follow these people to the beach. They’ve been rolling all day, I think, they’re full-on bingers. They seem like they’ve known each other for years, but in fact, they’d all met that day. This is what happens at Shambhala, among the young. Strangers wander into each other to form little cells, tight-knit groups in some perverse party bond – I join theirs for the day. It doesn’t fray. Until I run into marco at the beach. I sit down with him, because I can’t take the naiveté of the E cell. The big kid is veiled in shades. The pierced girl looks zombie deadpan. The blond guy’s jaw is going crazy, his teeth are jittering. He’s reached a breaking point, he breaks away. I like hanging with marco because he knows both sides of it. So we smoke hash. It helps. Despite the paranoia, which is inevitable, it gets my mind working again, which is preferable to zombie-town. By Sunday, most of the hedonistic people here, which is most people here, are zombies. I’m in good company – if quality is quantity. If brain-dead is good. Marco says that pot is the only thing getting him through his crash. Yeah dude, me too. Thanks for the hash. He gives me two more hits of E. I tell him I don’t want to deplete his stash, but he says I’m doing him a favour. Passing the torch of hedonism, I say.

Me and marco watch the crowds walk by and play “spot the sketched out people”. Until we realize that everyone is sketched out. Then we discuss the difference between “sketched out”, and “spaced out”. Spaced out is when you can’t focus. Sketched out is when your tired mind is trying to hyperfocus. That would be me right now. On my second wind things feel faker – it’s not so much love as energy, dirty energy, a wasteful fuel. But it’s something. Better than being crashed. Marco tells me he’s on his sixth wind. I’ll never be the partier he is. And thank the void for that. Blond guy wanders back. He had to hurl. Puked up his last hit. His brain said no. He looks better though. Marco tells a friend where to get pure MDMA caps. He’s got shit in his pocket. Go get the good stuff. It’s all bad stuff though. And everybody says it’s pure. Pure as folk. Pure as the dendritic ablations.

I have to piss. The line to the porta-potties seems endless. Other than that, I’m fine. That powder E I took is delaying the downer. I feel like dancing. But I know I’m going to need some more, soon. Well, I tell myself, I’m experimenting. I want to see if I can take another hit and get back to that blissful plateau where everything I see and do and say is perfect. Yeah, it’s a “science experiment”. But really, I just want to get high again. It’s the desperation of wanting to maintain the buzz. Nevermind dancing or people or music or philosophy or activity. I just want the body feeling, the warmth that makes me forget physical and worldly concerns, and lets me float above all nastiness with a positive outlook on everything. But I’ve discovered that you can’t get back to the bliss of the first pass. The roll degrades in quality each time you try to get it back.

Shit, I’m feeling faint. I nearly fainted. Had to lie down. But I avoided a full-blown panic attack. Okay, I think I can write again.

Yes, the roll degrades in quality on each pass. More E becomes simply an anti-depressant. A method of staving off the crash. It can pick you up again, but it can’t bring back the magic. So you just do more, at a more rapid pace now, because tolerance is building, and the best you can get out of a hit is maybe two hours, tops. And in the meantime, you’re getting worn out, and not knowing the extent of it. The delirium of self-abuse.

Walking back to camp, I decide, that second hit isn’t doing it for me anymore, because I’m second guessing every thought. Too many doubts. I need more chem to fill the hole that is ripping, ripping into me. But first. I take a soma pill. Flexeril, prescription muscle relaxants. Also excellent sleep aids.

Then I drop another hit of E. But my body’s done. I have to sleep. The soma’s kicking in. I thought that 3rd hit of E would overwhelm it and perk me up so I could go on my bender. But the soma is king. Which is just as well I guess. Maybe the third E is kicking in too. I feel a mild euphoria. And my body grows heavy under soma. The combination is like heroin. I’m sitting on the folding chair under finch’s pavilion, with a drooping head. I’m going on the nod. I’m nodding off. I’m going to the land of soma. I have a pretty good sleep. Dreams in which I am wrecking cities and stomping on things. But it feels innocent and good.

Day 4:

So I did a lot of E. Now I’m crashed. Very crashed. So crashed. Can’t think of anything to do that doesn’t remind me of how burnt out and depressed I am. Except, listening to melancholic techno like Miss Jane sooths a bit. Reminds me I’m hollow, but there’s a sort of beauty in that. I can’t figure out how to bounce back – but I can wallow therapeutically. Live in the miserable moment. Living in the moment is the best thing here and now. I don’t want to think about Holly’s ambition to be a heavy machine operator. That’s too worldly and connected to associations that bring me down. I don’t want to think about my job, my art projects, what I’m going to do with my life. But I do like thinking about the physical sensation of wrapping Holly up in a blanket repeatedly last night when we walked into town for some hot drinks. “Thanks for the chai tea”, she said in a cutesy voice, so sweet. I didn’t want to make a move because even though I was high, I knew it would create tension later, because of the fakeness of the state bounded ecstasy activity. And I was just happy to be talking to her. Even though she was attractive and I would have been even happier kissing her. Now I’m not high, and it would be real, being sensual with her. But I’m too down to try anything.

Check ignition and may God’s love be with you. Alcohol is the only drug I’d consider doing right now. Shit, my MP3 player ran out of juice.

Half-hearted is the best

because full-hearted is retarded.

You don’t get a hearty laugh out of that.

Half-heartedly chasing after others. I’m sorry Raz, I shouldn’t have said that in that email, but I was just being honest, and it really is nothing. I want you, but you’re not here. Nothing else is here either.

Chipped a filling in an MDMA grind-a-thon. I could see his teeth vibrating at regular intervals. Weird things happen when synthetic chems intersect organic beings of complicated cognition. I’m sorry all I can write about is drugs. But that’s all that seems to have any meaning, when everything seems to come down to chemicals. I’m so dry and sore everywhere. I want to transcend the situation with writing, remove myself from this pitiful mindwreck by becoming a character. But I don’t want to contrive some half-baked ideal of “healthiness”. The desperation of trying to find something, ANYTHING, that hasn’t been tainted by the cruel dynamics of E – that’s worse than just being down.

I haven’t come close to bouncing back yet because all I can think of is how down I am, and how everything is fake and meaningless. I try to remind myself that the downer is as fake as the upper. But whatever I think, I feel the downer, longer and stronger. It’s what I’m left with.

So I came to Shambhala, got an extra day off work to be here. Shirked my work for supposed recreation, drug-fueled, naturally. I work hard, I play hard. But the playing got too hard, started to feel like work. So I’m thinking of shirking play. But I’m too worn to want to work. So if I can’t work or play, what do I do? Write, I guess. Tell people I’m doing a realtime journalistic thing. Addled: The Untold Story. Or the Oft-Told Story.

Yes, the downer is as fake as the upper.

Wow, I couldn’t figure out which letter the word “yes” started with for a minute. Yes, I am addled. Somebody is setting off firecrackers behind us. Somebody is inhaling nitrous balloons.

Looked in the mirror.

I look dead.

I feel dead.

Who am I?

I have this awful image of myself in my head. A caricature consisting of all my insecurities. Yes, the downer is as fake as the upper.

I tried to be a hedonist this weekend, but I didn’t quite pull it off. When I got back from Shambhala two years ago, after all the E and acid, I tried to write and play music, but all it seemed to “express” was the feeling of being in a dull and miserable situation, wanting to be back home, but being stuck in the arrow lakes trailer under a drizzly sky for what might as well be a life sentence, since every second was an hour. Well, I was stuck in a dull and miserable mind. No wonder I couldn’t shake the aesthetic.

I keep forgetting I’m still on soma. Any energy I might have left over from my little bender is being sapped by the soma pill. But it is relaxing my muscles. Small mercies. Just take it with a grain of salt and a gram of soma.

Just watched a wasp.

My throat is starting to burn. Why the hell does my lower right eyelid keep twitching? I think I’m coming down with a cold. Maybe goldenseal will knock it down a bit.

Lessons learned, re-learned, pain earned, brain burned – point taken, sold for more drugs. Life is a puzzle.

on the chasm floor

I sure made an impression didn't I?

I can't write anymore. All I can do is work and sleep. When I come back from work there's nothing. I'd write some flowery poetic metaphor about all this, but I'm empty. I'm fingering a little rind of someone's sympathy. Why'd she mention the sky pussy? I'd put it out of my mind. Now I can't help but think about what I lack. Why don't I attract?

Stop leaving me for dead. I'm not dead, yet. Fucking patterns, tapped, tapwater, emotions on a stingy hospital drip - I'd rather they just pulled the plug. Ugh. What do I have to do? I'd like to complete the transition to being a machine, but unfortunately, for the time-being I feel things, stupid human cravings. People leave me dry.

What's the fucking point? Corrado Soprano's question, an old mobster crying at a funeral. They milked it for laughter, but they didn't turn it into an easy irony. It wasn't a transient moment, between the switching of mood medication. Corrado did get back to pseudo-health at the psyche ward, for a time, roped the guards into his card game, but the alzheimers caught up to him. He never remembered owning Jersey. There was no fucking point. Or maybe there was. The question seems pointless.

My grandma's been slipping. Alice. Well it's been happening for decades. It's so slow. A little piece at a time, a little subscript of the mind. You can't call it dying, cause you can't really see. But whatever it is, I think I should face it about now. Cause I don't know what to think, how to feel. I get uptight when I get deep into it, so I avoid it. She had a stroke of some kind, a minor thing, but now she's confused. I'm prone to feeling better about the situation by callously jumping the gun on euthanasia. Like, oh, what's the point of trying to live with this inevitable decay? It's just increasingly desperate and futile. And then I scream at myself. Futile? To strive for what quality of life you can in your closing years? But the ugly details of life weigh me down, despite idealism. It's awful to be this negative, because it's not. But it is. We still visit her, and chat - she's not completely deaf, just 95% there. But she's still herself. She still enjoys her matinee smokes. But she can't live by herself anymore. She's going to have to go to a nursing home. One of those places where people go to die. One of those clichés I don't like to be real, one of those shitcrumbs bristling from the asshole of truth.

This is disgusting, I'm using my grandma for... the Cheese of Nihilism, part 2: The Expired Provolone Experience. I never wrote about her before. So I'll try and do her some justice. She's a wonderful loving woman, very loyal to her family and friends. Well it's symbiotic loyalty. I've seen her contacts shrink, as her mobility and verbal facility have narrowed, what old age does to the brain, constricting thought. The immediately family though, we've been there for her. And she's been here for us. It would be wrong for me to sum up the situation in the negative way I did, as if there was no other way to look at it. It said more about my current mood and insecurities than anything else. But it also said some stuff I've been suppressing for a while, so it must be worth something.

So I'm just shuffling around nihilism again, the same dance a billion people have tapped out, and a million are probably doing right now, but I came up with a few keywords that make my variation slightly original, enough to make there seem some point in typing, as opposed to lying down and...

Everyone feels like a traitor. Gained my confidence, stoked my hopes. Love is not symbiotic. There's no scrabble tonight, even. No messages, no mention. Zero. I hate coming home from those eternal shifts to nothing. So I fill the void with food and pointless writing. Food, the slow slide to obeisuicide. I work off a high percentage I'm sure - but the trend has started, because the craving has outpaced the physically intensive labour. It's all downhill from here. The decline will be rapid once I fall off the wheel, another shitheel slipped on a banana peel, but this one stays down, decides that was his last attempt to be real.

Let them flock to the peacocks, cause I don't have the fucking tactless hackdress to be a magic act and attract like a professional.

Look at them all, how they're better than me. Hey, I woke up on the chasm floor after the encore. Funny story: I always knew I'd be a Great Man, I just had that feeling you know? That I was destined for some Great Destiny - and here it is. I'm the greatest loser. The absolute bottom rung. Last in the race of six billion. Just happened to be. Dead Last. Didn't I always feel it though? How I always took the path of least resistance, like it was fate or something? Like I'm teflon. There's all this theory, supposed talent, and oh, what things I could do with it. But what I do do is never good enough. How could EVERYONE be better than me? That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? I dunno, they just bubble up around my gravity well. Yeah, the gravity of being me. They all have it easy, I'll say, being their less fucked up selves. Problem is, I can't even say I'm the most fucked up, cause they do fucked up better too. They're fucked up, and yet they maintain more successful or stoic or stylish fronts. And maybe backs too. Someone's got their back. But it isn't me. I got nobody's back - I want to, but they won't let me.

The writers' circle jerk pisses me off. Every little mutual hyperlink an injustice. So I'll write my own, non-hyperlinked monument to pettiness, name-drop no one. Or everyone. What do you want, your name or your avatar? What does it matter?

Can I talk about my dead relationship? Everyone knows it's dead. But what do you do with that? Offer empty encouragement. I'll use said encouragement to strike up a conversation with someone, whom I might otherwise not have. That will lead to nothing. Pluck a feather. Take a pebble. Stop craving. I wish basil was as good as paxil. As least AS good. Then I could get a feeling of well-being - well, adequate-being, and also feel like my nutrients crucial for enlightenment were being supplied via a natural source. No point in this scarring, except to habituate sore fingering, again and again, rubbing the pain, soothing with stinging prolongation.

Licking nipples in the air, on the chasm floor. Sneering at the sensual and subverting with cerebral, on the chasm floor. Dreaming of dishes, on the chasm floor. Wishing on the cement floor, on the chasm floor.

The Decade is Done

Interesting essay on decades, by Stirling Newberry.

modesto

“i come to lay caeser out

not to hip you to him”

modesto is glad his money ran out

finally there’s no pretext

no possibility of respect

the soup kitchen is modesto’s favourite place in the world

so now i’m eating pea soup

i’ve established that it’s hot enough.

mmm

i gotta say, it’s good

it’s been a while, but i’m getting back into soup – even broth

imagine that

“play me some beautiful dreamy music der, prince”

lord buckley says to his pianist, who promptly

plays some beautiful dreamy music, i think

but he uses it for a punchline, which is fine by me

since he is a comic, but i think it requires some visuals to get

cause i’m confused… he says “hey – heh heh…

subconscious mind, me lords, me ladies”

and the dreamy music continues

damn this pea soup is good

where the fuck have i been all these years?

i’m glad i’m back into soup

“what a gasser she was… oh lord, take me now!”

so beautiful, you wanna kill yourself, just culminate the whole deal, consummate consciousness, yeah, i dig, lord, i dig

god this pea soup is good

dayum, this is better than drugs

i guess this means i was hungry

and am now satiating

“three times i laid the kingly wig on him”

yeah, wish i was back in the early sixties, when buckley was a novelty

back when you could do drugs and not feel guilty

my god…

so lord buckley finishes his rap

and the dorky dick-cavett-esque interviewer cuts in, after a

genuine, nasal, but appreciative laugh:

“well that’s certainly the eloquence of willie the shake here, by that of lord buckley, and-

“you know why they called him willie the shake?” buckley interjects

“why?” the interviewer asks, in a kind of drawl, unconscious immediate influence, adorably distorted

“because he – SHOOK everybody!”

a snorting laugh by cavett

“they gave that cat five cents worth of pavement, a nickel’s worth of ink, he sat down and wrote him such a ___, when he got through ____ everybody got off, he was too tight a cat”

i can’t quite figure out all those words… quite a gulf of time, but thank your lucky stars, you lucky 20th century people, you’re recorded for posterity