Bad

When deers get mad and get red eyes and scuff their hooves and get dangerous. When cute animals such as bunnies, chipmunks, small dogs, and even lobsters fight back with AK’s and handguns. Starbursts that kill. Poorly animated 1980’s strawberries, and cherries, and stuff, donning nucular arms, and even nuclear arms, and sharp teeth. Huge biceps. Trouble. Girls kissing you to death. Preme baby Koala’s with high-pitched voices fighting guerilla wars for good. Pure sickness. Heavy fierce drum and bass in the steamy jungle night, enjoyed by children. Bunnies poisoning our water supply. Chipmunk chemist murderers. Eleven year old girls driving Ferrari’s. Ferrets doing bong hits, and then fucking things up through careful manipulation of our legislative system, and then doing more bong hits. Plain nuclear drum and bass death, but in rainbow. Me dropping a nuclear bomb on the state capital. Fighting. Sheer heavy beef. ..for justice, for pink, and for the sheer good of all things.

Doing right, through guns. / When animals hunt back. / The Duke boys knocking you out in a fist fight, but they’re gay.

Take back the night.

Take back.. .America.

One day in San Francisco my girlfriend Erin and I were going to this rave in 3-Comm park. But first we were stopping at this get-together at her friend Sarah’s. On our way to Sarah’s we rode our bikes across the bleached concrete and hot sun of that sort of industrial part of the Mission, which boarders South of Market. It was a Sunday. I saw this familiar face standing by the side of the road, she was like a pilgrim, a vision even. It turned out to be this girl we knew, one of Erin’s friend’s. She was standing there next to a banged-up chain-linked fence, and a vacant lot, on like 16th, and like, nowhere. Just her and the sun. I guess she was waiting for the bus. Or maybe she was a messenger from God, saying, ‘Chris, Erin, yes, when you actually leave your house to see other people, you will find other people. The bountiful world can be yours if you only just go out and get it..’ I had noticed this girl a few days earlier, we had noticed each other, I think. She was smokin’, like, Amish-style hot. Today she was wearing a plain, white cotton button-down shirt. Her eyes were blue and so clear. She reeked of responsibility and self-care. She was like child-bearing hot, it was biological. Her skin and her hair were so soft, like go-to-bed-early soft, maybe even work-at-a-health-food-store soft.

Erin told her that we were headed to her friend Sarah’s, and that then we were going this rave thing. It sort of sucked standing there at first when Erin had said that, I mean I wanted the girl to think I was hot, I didn’t want Erin to blow my upstanding facade with all this rave business. I didn’t want the girl to see through my own button-down shirt, through my own subtle earth tones and mild manners to the fact that at core these days I was really just a slobby stoner boy. The girl was quite surprised by our plans but pretended to think raves were cool.

I wondered, ‘was I already no more the Amish husband of this girl’s dreams?’ And now it seemed like Erin and I were both already pretending to be totally awkward and ignorant about raves and such things. Raves? What are raves? It was like now we were now suddenly both British tourists who had just come from a bird-watching book store, or church, on to who-knows-what-next in this crazy world. The mention of the rave had changed the dynamic between us and the girl and now we were more dangerous and edgy. Maybe we’d jump her, or slip her drugs or something.. Maybe we were on drugs right now. I couldn’t really tell what she was thinking of me. ‘Respect’..

We made our way to Sarah’s too awesome, tv-sitcom-nice apartment. Once inside I was immediately reminded of how ridiculously hot all of Erin’s girlfriends always were. Sarah was a knockout. All these girls had such incredible taste, just like Erin. Sarah’s apartment was all beachy faded white and creme painted wood with just the right one broken antique bench or chair whatever. Her kitchen had this nice view and a chalkboard and a simple wooden church pew type bench. It was like we were in a grange hall on an island off the coast of Maine, just back from swimming, all laughing and tickling each other, and squeezing lime into our Cerveza’s in the afternoon sunlight while Lauryn Hill sat with us smiling, singing us her favorite songs on an acoustic guitar.

Sarah was all smiley, and standing there so cute in her perfectly faded Levi’s and blonde hair. (Her apartment was across the alley from the original Levi Straus building from the 1800’s). She laughed and was so nice, ignoring me just the right amount, as if to indicate that there was sexual tension between us, or could be. Or maybe she was one of those girls that was so nice and so confident that she was able to embody all of this subtle body language just to make me feel a little good, just because I was her guest and dating her friend. She asked us what we wanted to drink. Erin said a beer. I think I said ginger ale, or seltzer or something.

"Are you sure you don’t want a beer?" The eye contact was just devastating. The attention was all it took to throw me into a whirlwind of fantasy:

Sarah and I were dating, we were engaged. We were head-over-heels in love. She would do anything for me, and I for her. She cared so much that she would weep for me every minute in her cable-neck sweaters while she wove, and played the harp, in our cottage in Glouster by the sea, while I loved her back by risking my life all the time on my dangerous whaling trips, supporting our family; her, me, and our unborn child. Or maybe I just imagined us having awesome blushy, crushy, romatic sex in some church somewhere.

"Uh, yeah. I guess I’ll have a beer."

"Sure?"

"Yeah." I noticed her body as she went for the fridge. Wow, Sarah was an uncommon beauty. She could totally be in one of those commercials where just the right subtly hot, interesting looking girl (Sarah) throws a balled up paper napkin at the just-right, rugged kind of guy, in the pizza place. He opens the napkin up to find she’s scrawled a set of latitude and longitude coordinates on it. So drives his new jeep (or whatever) up the mountain and finds her, and they laugh and spend the rest of the day swimming and partying in paradise or whatever..

I’m standing with Erin and Sarah and their friends in the kitchen, and I’m trying to act how I imagine Sarah would want a man to act, sort of rugged and dreamily present, and only half interested, like the guy in the jeep commercial maybe. But I bet I probably came off more like more of a stilted C3PO though, who had just asked for a ginger ale.

To qualify, it’s not that there was something so wrong with my relationship with Erin to make me lust after all her friends all the time. I didn’t even lust after all of her friends all of the time. And I thought Erin was totally hot. It was just that she just had some extremely hot friends. And you know, I’m a male. And I have distress. I’m a hunter-gatherer, an honest hunter-gatherer.

Erin and I went into the other room and we sat on the carpet with other pretty girls, and maybe a guy or two, who were also really nice to us. It was hard not to break into a shit-eating grin at this point, I think I might of. The room itself just blew me away. The wind was lightly tossing around the off-white linen curtains, and the warm afternoon sun played in the 1920’s leaded windows, which were cranked open at different angles, like there was a party going on. It was just a few of us there on the floor, and we were all like attracted and interested in each other. We could hear each other speak. I looked at the half-open nice windows and I imagined that if we kept living moments like this, then we would truly be living, we would truly be living like I always imagined people truly lived, like at the turn of the century, and in the 1920’s, when so much of the nice things in this country were built. All the money and the nice architecture, people enjoying their time with others who were just like themselves. And that was the thing, Erin’s friends were so familiar seeming. So rugged and relaxed, so friendly and not pretentious. They had such good taste. I guess Erin knew most of them from this summer Unitarian youth group thing she used to go to in Massachusetts. They were back-East people. They were just like us.

I kneeled on the off-white canvas type area rug next to her friend Jenna. Jenna was wearing this catalogy nice-fitting pink blouse which happened to really showed off her nice smallish breasts. She had long brown hair and all these freckles, and these little circles under her eyes that made her seem so human. So much of my life in San Francisco seemed to be spent around people from cultures that were so widely different than my own. Make-up, cologne, and people always bragging about themselves, constantly bragging. Seriously, the bragging never stopped. I hated it. And here I was finally, with these people who wore clothes I liked, and who weren’t bragging, and who were even telling stories that were self-effacing in ways. Erin and I never had friends enough in San Francisco, or we had them but we never hung out enough, or we never quite identified enough, or followed through enough. We weren’t really part of a regular social community. And here we were at Sarah’s, and it felt so nice.

But we had to leave soon. We started telling people about the rave that we were going to. I was wearing my bright, unusually yellow sneakers, and I remember that as we talked about the rave my sneakers seemed to take on more and more prominence in the room. Finally it seemed like maybe there was like light shining from them. Erin had on these noticeable light blue sneakers. Were Erin and I cool? Maybe I was doing the thing that I often did, of joining with the Protestants until they trusted me and sort of liked me, and then breaking their rules of conduct by being kind of overly flashy and entertaining, maybe making some of them like me even more, and maybe leaving some of them in the dust. I couldn’t help it, I was a half-Irish class clown. We told them we were thinking of riding our bikes to 3-Comm Park(!). This girl immediately told us this story of friend of her’s who had gotten badly beaten and robbed trying to ride her bike home from that area one night. You did not want to be around Hunter’s Point at night, I guess, not on bicycles.

It was crazy that we were leaving such a good time but we couldn’t waste our 45 dollar tickets, plus we had been planning on going to the rave for so long. Leaving that apartment that evening felt so very, very wrong, like this familiar mistake that I make over and over again in my life, leaving the breadbasket of community and connection and things good to go to attend some two-dimensional prior obligation, some old habit of entertainment and consumption.

Riding our bikes home I felt so alive and sensitive in my body. I had been opened up to those people, it was like the cells in my body were all pushing up to my skin to kiss and receive their nourishment.

We got home and Erin called us a cab. I took like ten or fifteen huge bong hits, seriously. We arranged our outfits a little (I was still wearing the same button-down shirt and corduroys). And I duct-taped my weed to my inner thigh, which hurt a little.

Being that stoned and being in a car (neither of us had a car then), and being driven by someone else, was almost just too much. The ride was so smooth, I could barely tell where my body ended and where the seats and the cab began. Luckily I didn’t have to pee. The seats were this warm, jet black vinyl. I imagined I was like in a dark coffin-limousine-cab, being driven under the bright green trees of central park on a humid late afternoon in August, the kind of ride where you specially treasure the warm wind in your face.

We pulled into the parking lot of 3-Comm and I immediately realized I was in a different country. Zillions of young Asian kids. No white kids. No white people anywhere. Tricked out cars. The most incredible music coming out of the hugest, most carefully separated car stereos, like super tweeked late ‘90’s jungle with like the most buttery resonant bass imaginable. South Asian rap music. Dancehall. What Cd was that? Wo, what Cd was that!?

We got out of the cab and it drove away from us. We stood there like the two most out of place people in the world, like the American Gothic couple standing right in the middle of the Potrero Hill projects, with guys like actually tapping their hands with tire irons, and people getting robbed at gunpoint. I was kind of scared. No one looked like us. Everyone was street. Everyone was Asian. Everyone was like, 15.

As we went through security I noticed all the kids had these highlighters on strings around their necks. Lots of visors, weird baggy pants, achny, t-shirts I didn’t understand, groups of kids not speaking English. Girls were getting the contents of their purses thrown out, fake lipstick and perfume that was actually drugs, things like that. I wasn’t even slightly scared about the weed taped to my crotch. In this crowd? We made our way through, and we were walking by this group of pretty innocent looking schoolgirls. They were giggling in Thai or something, and suddenly one of the girls’ eyes rolled completely back in her head and she fell face forward, smashing her face and body flat on the concrete. All I saw were the spooky whites of her eyes when she went.

We kept walking in this slow sea and I looked around at everyone, their brown faces and their dark eyes, their hard to understand strain of drugged-out, street, deep teenage apathy. I mean these kids did not care. They were doing drugs I didn’t even understand. I suddenly had this flash that we were walking into the stadium among thousands of the living dead.

When we got in we walked around to see what all the areas were. Some parts were really crowded, and we were going from one area to another in these really crammed concrete tunnels. Crammed with warm sweaty bodies, and not much talking. There was a huge main stage area that was mostly happy hardcore mixed with some cheesy big name elctronica (I can’t remember, the Chemical Brothers or something). This area had lots of glow sticks and white girls with bleached blonde hair etc. It was the area where the stupid people came to party, not where the people who really were into the music danced. Then there was this sort of psychedelic merchandise area under the stadium. Then we made our way back through the tunnels to the areas around the stadium where the better music was.

There was a big psych trance tent. Here you had the cool, more enlightened set, maybe we had seen them before in San Francisco or whatever, painted bodies and somatic awareness, etc. There was the breaks area (dudes), there was this like electronic funk-jazz area with some hippy types and more regular festival-goers types, who maybe drank or whatever (no we were not stopping here). And finally we made it to the drum and bass area.

To get between the areas you had to walk under these concrete arches, and with all the partying and debauchery going on in this August setting sun, I got this distinct impression that I was somehow in ancient Rome. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was empty. It didn’t matter how good the music was. I felt empty inside. Everything seemed like this big giant empty.

In the drum and bass area there was this giant blown up Nintendo-style gorilla next to the dj, and this green laser that kept writing out the words ‘concrete jungle’ on this giant triangular concrete wall that we were next to. This area had a mix of different people. Certainly a lot of Asian kids. Lots of dudes. Surprisingly a lot of girls too. The music was absolutely bangin’. Deep over-the-top bass. It was so loud that you had to stand pretty far back or the high end would hurt your ears. The music was twisting in and out of focus in this really nice way because of the wind. The wind was nice. I watched this group of girls right up at the speaker stacks. There were seven of them and they were all dressed in yellow super hero outfits and were wearing no ear plugs. They were karate fighting and dancing and laughing together. I looked around and saw other groups of girls with matching costumes, three blue super heros, some goth princesses, all kinds of candy-visor raverettes. Danny The Wildchild was spinning and it was an absolutely blazing, heavy set. I watched this one couple dance together in these striped shirts (striped like the canals of Venice or Olympia). They were doing this super fly rock-a-billy type ballroom dance right on top of the regular rhythms that everyone else was dancing to. That was about the best thing I saw all night.

When the set ended Erin and I sat down and talked a little, enjoying the nice evening breeze. Pretty much immediately several teams of huge yellow-shirt security guards swooped in on us. They would like haze us, flanking us every few minutes with their V-formations of their huge suspicious bodies, as if to say (in the voice of a robot), ‘Do not relax and enjoy yourselves. Do not smoke pot or consume any alcoholic beverages.’

Eventually I retreated to the porta-poddies and smoked. I smoked for like, ever. It was clear that the porta-poddies were conspicuously not patrolled, and that this was the place where you were supposed to do your drugs. There were no lights on in this area and it was this really sketchy, dark, dusty scene. It was really windy that night. It was nice to be inside the porta-poddy and have the windbreak for smoking. Of course it was so dark that you would like drop half your bag in there if you weren’t careful. It was quite except for the nice wind whistling and howling through the slats of the porta-poddies. There was the occasional blinding flash of the lighter and the nice glowing orange orb of the kind ganja being toasted, the occasional crackle or snap of the odd stem or seed. I finally re-emerged, totally baked. There were rows of porta-poddies and rows of guys re-emerging from who knows what, all ignoring each other because drugs are illegal. I always found it ironic that when you really start living the high life, you so often find yourself in like dark rows of porta-poddies, or in bushes with really sketchy people around, or in urine-soaked alleys. I looked around and I was pleased, because how was now seeing everything immediately indicated to me that I had managed to get myself really, really high. The sodium lights and the stadium, the wind and the hills in the distance, the birds, the whole scene was like perfectly digitally electronic, a digital master of a nature that was so fluid, analog, and complex. The shading and the texture, the sounds and the meaning of objects, it was all so specifically refined and blended, designed just for my particular psychology, my particular taste, my mood and temperament. I was in like Morocco now, or Bagdad, or maybe on an oil platform on some warm breezy equatorial sea somewhere. The stadium looked.. nuclear. Like it was a giant stereo, or a government weapon, designed to provide me with the best drum and bass that money and technology could buy.

I came back and Dieselboy was already underway. Erin was a little upset that I had taken so long. His set was really tight. Highly detailed and pretty smokin’, but a little too tinny for my taste, a little lacking in the low-end. It was dark now and everywhere we looked people had these surgical masks on, or else bandanas, and they were all inhaling something. It was kind of freaky, like they were all these medical zombies who might kill us..

I think the last thing I remember was being in the back of this tent where the Black-Eyed Peas were playing. I liked their music but it was late and I was so tired and stoned. I remember just wanting to lie down on the grass and fall asleep. It seemed like I could just do that, in just my thin cotton button-down shirt and corduroys with no blanket, and with the wind blowing over me from under the flaps of the tent. I felt so human and cuddly, so tired. I wanted to be reconnected to the earth. There was this other couple there in the back of the tent with us. I was looking at them and they were seeming so familiar to me. I think the girl commented on how tired I was. I guess it really was time to go home..

Have you ever seen that Simpsons episode where Homer grows ‘Tomacco’ and all the farm animals get really addicted to it and then when the Tomacco runs out they all get really mad and try to ram through the walls of the farmhouse for the last Tomacco plant? All red eyes and hooves, and snorting nostrils etc:

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Angry Death Bull

I’ve killed your whole family and I’m after you. My name’s Maverick. I’m a professional baseball player and I have a large, dark Magnum mustache. My wife is hot. I make a lot of money. I win. I keep my house really clean and my body is my perfect temple. I never get tired. I murdered my children with a baseball bat..

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The Henchman

My name is Magnum. I work for Maverick at his fencing and poison company. I’m kind of a right hand thug. I kill whoever Maverick says..

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Mad Cowy

I’m an aging Lutheran man with seven children. I wear glasses. I look a little like a thinner Roger Ebert. You see, I’ve had this stroke and my mouth sags and I talk a little funny. I have grey hair and wear many versions of the color blue. I try to be a decent upright citizen and I raise my family with very strict discipline. I stand proud but am somehow always a little feminine or ‘no-ass’. Sometimes I get really angry, that’s when I get all red and frustrated and where my droopy mouth and stroke damage really start to show..

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Crazy Ram

Some know me as ‘Killy’. I’m extremely dangerous. I am a missel of pure murder, a pipe bomb, a shaft of direct death. Boba Fet and a suicide bomb at the mall. I’m about to detonate..

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King Shit

I’m James Earl Jones as the African king in the movie ‘Coming To America’. I smoke huge cigars and kill whole nations with my guerilla wars and expanding plantations..

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Bull Ram

Shhhh.. It is rare to get up this close to wildlife that is this large and this dangerous. You can see by his soft blueish coat and teary shy eyes that he is really a very wild animal indeed. He is not used to such close contact with humans. He might kill you at any moment by sheer accident..

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Whitey

I kill the forests.

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Preen

I play tennis and use tampons. The whole world dies to pay for my lunch. I’m always going the other way. I’m better than you. I’ll ignore you to death..

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Sketchy

We’ll have a fun afternoon together. Then I’ll inject you with heroin and give you food poisoning..

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Scott

Yeah bra, I’ll rock climb you and row you to death. Then I’ll tie you up in my rugby shirt and bury you somewhere.

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Britney

Storm Trooper fake plastic death. First I’ll flirt with you and get you to crush on me in the summer rain, all in my cutoff jeans and flip flops, etc. Then I’ll give you GHB and take you to the water slide park and watch you drown. Then I’ll drive over your skull..

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Infinity

I’ll kill you with my slow banking.

I just glanced out my kitchen window. I saw my really hot neighbor walking up the drive, pushing a wheelbarrow. The late afternoon sun made me squint, and it saturated her whole blessed scene. Her with her white t-shirt and jeans. Her with her hips and her red hair, and her perfect cute face. A nurse, working the land. The poignant thing is, the yard work doesn’t really need to get done. The yard is gorgeous just as it is. She does not have to do anything. No one is paying her a penny to work out in the yard, she just chooses to do it. She wants to. This is how my really hot neighbor is spending her afternoon, being outside in the yard, weeding, smelling the amazing blossoms, and dirt, and the fresh cut grass, bathing in the perfectly cool-warm air, listing to my other really hot neighbor talk, watching the children bike and play their way home from Lincoln, and just pushing the wheelbarrow, pushing it in between the flowers and in between the tall grasses, pushing it up the sun bleached driveway, pushing it in her white t-shirt, and in her jeans, and maybe sweating a little bit, on this perfect May Tuesday afternoon.

I was looking at a picture of my dad gardening this morning. I was so struck by the level of grace and pleasure illustrated in his limbs and posture. Such a thorough yoga, just swimming in enjoyment. My dad liked gardening. That is what is so fascinating about gardens to me, people garden in them because they actually want to. They do an activity that they actually choose. And you can see it, you can drive down the street and you can see people in gardens, gardening, on purpose.

Of course it’s not entirely uncommon to come up to someone in their garden and have them immediately call out a defense like, ‘if I don’t get these weeds out of here, they will just take over’ or, ‘I have to get these planted, or else they will never get planted.’ It can sometimes be a vulnerable place, showing yourself to someone when you’re doing something that you really like, something that’s just for you.

The act of a person doing something that they really like, that they really are into, and that maybe takes a little effort, and that is really just for them, and isn’t to please anyone else, this is my single biggest turn-on.

I like jogging around Capitol Lake. And when I see people walking there it makes me so happy, because I know that they are mostly just walking there because they want to. It is not for their job, or for school, it is not to impress people, it will not get them much farther in the world.. Often people are just walking alone. And not even quickly for exercise. Can you imagine that? Direct living proof of people knowing their bitter-sweet mortality, cherishing it, cherishing their lives as they live them, knowing that living their lives is only a small part, and that they are just one person, who lives, and who will die.

It is just you on the land, with wind, the sea, the moon, the bushes, and the dogs. You, and your feelings. People don’t think you’re cool. People don’t think you’re smart. People don’t give you any money. There are no prizes anywhere for taking a walk by yourself. People mostly don’t even see you. It is just your life. And it is short. And it is all for you. You love yourself. You love your life. You love everything. At that is it.

I’ve been up all night. Everything is butter. Everything is an intricate matrix of units, each perfectly designed for my consumption. I just peed. As the pee bubbled in the toilet all the bubbles each had their own little voices, eyes, and consciousness’s, little minds of their own, busy in their blathery conversation, just like as if I were on LSD. When I move my hand right now I see trails. I ask people who have not taken psychedelics, if you’re up all night do you see trails when you move your hands? Do you ever see trails? Are you ever up all night? Am I really just slightly crazy because of the amount of acid I took so many years ago?

At about five am I started watching the movie ‘Vanity Fair’. I totally liked it. It didn’t really matter to me that the movie moved quickly and I didn’t come to care about any of the characters really, or feel much. The movie was just a continually changing formula of if and how each character might attain and retain money and status. It was like digital. Pure math. Just pure counting and plotting. In a way the movie was like a list. When I am ‘on drugs’ I experience the world less like a wet sea of emotion that fills me and moves me, and more like a series of lists and integers that I keep track of and digest.

It is how I lost the ability to sleep last night in the first place. Yesterday I made the mistake of spending too many hours in a linear, list, consumptive mode. Sometimes I do this. Sometimes I can’t sleep afterwards. Yesterday I got on the internet and I became addicted to scanning people’s friend pages on ‘my space’. Then I got addicted to searching German model train websites and uploading countless pictures of miniture houses and cars that I liked. I have this part of me that can break into this totally OCD behavior. Is it because I am an addict, or do I really have some OCD?

I used to smoke huge bongs of marijuana in San Francisco and bike up huge hills in the sun all day long. I felt no pain. I never got tired. Never ever. I just liked to go.. up. It was digital. It was like I was on a rail. It was as if I had been reduced to the second dimension, just a line. My girlfriend at the time (Erin Sweeney, who is awesome) used to grab hold onto the back of my bike seat and I would peddle for the both of us as we made our way up the hill. She called it ‘rack assistance’. This is what they called it in these Swiss train videos that we used to watch constantly. They were these really nice videos, where you would just take these quite subtle rides all over the Swiss countryside. When the train went up a particularly steep part of a hill it just locked into this special track so that it wouldn’t slip backwards. Rack assistance.

I feel like I lock into rack assistance sometimes. Sometimes I don’t know what else to do.

Yesterday I had plans with a friend. But he got sick and couldn’t hang out. I wanted to drive to Yelm and play mini-golf with him. I don’t have many friends in Olympia these days who can hang out with me in the middle of a weekday. I wanted to fill my afternoon with someone, with a land of jokes and crazy images, and views of things that we were continually presenting. I wanted to prove to myself with one more day that I can live in western Washington and enjoy it as the garden of Eden that it truly is. I wanted to have a day like Harry F. Water, "traveling to school down scenic Cascade mountain roads in [my] noisy car" "think[ing] of new uses for numbers and new things to count." Water jokes, "If I had lavender skin and an Eastern European accent perhaps I could get a job on Sesame Street". (Voice of Mcloud:) I want to live in Olympia with lavender skin. And like on Sesame Street, I want to fill my landscape with the rainbows of friendships and of the things that I make up. But yesterday wasn’t a time where this was happening. So how would I spend my day? I don’t live in Portland where I know people who don’t have day jobs. And I still can’t quite afford to buy my digital camera. Writing wasn’t seeming to be really getting off the ground.. I could have gone on a really sad and mopey bike ride. A sad tired one. That’s the thing, I am sad, and tired, underneath things, pretty much a lot. I am lonely.

So then I get into something on the internet, and I somehow click into this addictive trance that lasts.. for hours. (Voice of Ariana:) When I do it it feels so narrow, but it feels like sliding forward, so effortlessly, easily, so quickly. Like sliding on ice. It is a narrow pleasure, a small high, but a place where I feel safe from bad feelings and feelings of uselessness. (Still voice of Ariana:) I’m not really doing anything but at least I can do it really fast. And that’s totally how it is, what I’m doing is so unimportant, the surfing experience is generally so completely shallow and empty, yet I’m clicking back and forth from each thing to the next with such lightning speed. I feel masterful and powerful in my manipulation of the mouse and the web content. I imagine it’s the way that I might act if I were to get really good at an interesting job that I might have, or a sport, or if I were worth 500 million dollars and I was able to truly express myself creatively with the rapid purchases I made, so often, and the places that I went, and with the expensive activities that I engaged in…

I feel powerless.

It is a strange problem for me. Or maybe the most perfect appropriate problem. I’m so into meditation, and Buddhist ways of thinking, and I have spent so much time doing drugs, I grew up well off (so I have little to prove), and I’m third house Sagittarius (big slow Jupiter), so I have such a tendency and interest in observing things rather than in doing things, in playing with perspective rather than in creating something physical. It is little wonder that I have wound up in a place of such little personal power…

Sometimes I have all the power, but it is only because it takes so little engagement on my part for me to have my wide general view of things kick in, and for me to be completely marveled, marveloused, and satiated once again. It is a ratio of gears. I am connected to the very biggest and slowest planet. So it only takes a very slight movement of my gears to incur a tremendous amount of torque. By the same token, I have to understand the whole giant system of everything in order to learn or do any little thing that is connected to it. This why I am a terrible speller (spelling is connected to nothing), and it is why it usually takes me at least two years to feel at home and confident in a town that I move to. My birthday sits rights at the peak of this situation. If I were an earlier Sagittarius, or better yet, a Scorpio or a Capricorn, the ratios wouldn’t be so extreme.

So, I do just a little bit and feel done. Everyone is busy. Everyone is walking fast, trying to accumulate so much of this or that, these days. Me, I feel like I could just swim and pick vegetables with extremely smart people and that would be it for me, that would be all I need, the end of my goals. I know this is a very sketchy thing to admit to people. No goals? But what it actually is is that I live an extremely rich and multi-dimensional life from the outwardly simple looking activities of just being with, and working with, and playing with, extremely smart people. Fishing or weeding would seriously do the trick if the people were really smart. A lot of times I don’t trust that people can understand this as true and actually brilliant. I downplay it all, and I make negative comments about how the story is really that I just don’t do anything. I sort of start to believe it myself. But sometimes it is actually that I am doing nothing. My thing, which doesn’t look like a lot when it is happening, sometimes isn’t happening, because I am not with the people that I need for it to be happening with enough.

I don’t have quite enough friends where I live. I don’t interact with my friends quite enough. And the groups often aren’t quite large enough for me. There is not that critical mass that my machine requires to stay revved up, lubricated, efficient, and buzzing with resonance. I have lived for periods of time when I have had this critical mass, and I know the difference. As much as I may be a shy, slow, insecure, etc. person, I can be a very social person, I need to be. I miss this.

I’m 32. I like living in my nice one bedroom apartment. Unfortunately I’m not moving back to camp, or high school, or the dorms, or red square, or the Suburban Oasis… I’m not moving back to the fun land of lots of smart people right there all the time with plenty of time on their hands.

I guess I have to get it together and move to Portland, and improve my time in Olympia until then. I guess I have to learn to find ways to maintain a critical mass of community even when I am at an age where red square isn’t really happening very much anymore. I need to get a cell phone..

But can you imagine, working two to three days a week, an easy two to three days a week at that, for full-time pay? Can you imagine having the best apartment in the nicest neighborhood? Can you imagine having your life be so easy and comfortable, like country club easy? Can you imagine giving all that up, to make some really hard move, to work five days a week at some hard, uncomfortable place for much less money? All for your future, all for your mental health. I have no savings, and it’s gonna be a slow transition, baby steps.. Did I happen to mention that not only am I the slowest moving planet, but that my rising sign is the slow and nesty Cancer?…

Yesterday I was walking into the bank and there was this annoying beeping sound. What was it, oh someone had left their card in the machine, again. I swore this kept happening to me, like every time I went to an atm lately. People are so careless. It’s annoying because I have to deal with the fact that I’m tempted to steal their card and try and use it, or maybe just leave it there, and let the beeping continue. This process that I go through each time stresses me out a little..

Yesterday it was all warm and windy, with some light nice rain. I walked up to the beeping and I pulled the card out. And I just sort of turned, and held the card out, in the air, away from me, toward the parking lot, toward where people might be who might have left it. From the back window of a nearby silvery parked car, an old mystical woman said to me, almost as though she were an actor in some kind of divine drama that I was suddenly a part of, "he just left". She kept watching me steadily, as I just kept holding the card out, away from my body, and walked into the bank. My heart was pounding. My limbs felt almost bruised with all the zillions of different neuro-tranmissions that they were receiving. Under the gaze of several annoying paid bank greeters, and of the security cameras, I put the card in my pocket.

I ignored the greeters and I deposited my check, maintaining my usual coldness to the very typically way-too-overly hot, and annoyingly-fakely-flirty bank teller. I got my receipt, and I left.

Card in my pocket, I drove up the hill. The disabled man, with no short-term memory who I take care of, was riding shotgun. He was up to his usual oblivion, looking at his checkbook, reading the letters on the licence plates of cars, and other equally important and fascinating stuff.. "D.E.V…" Could I use the card? I stopped and dropped off some paperwork at the office. The warm wind and afternoon sunlight and nice light rain all sprinkled together on my face as I got back into the car. I looked at the card and continued driving up the hill.

My mind had become the singular action of methodically working out the details of if and how. I had found others cards recently. I had waited too long with them. I hadn’t thought out what to do. The back of this card was not signed. I went over how the cursive letters would have to look if I made the signature. I made sure I knew all the letters, I never write cursive anymore. I thought of the conversation that I had about it with my friend. ‘You can’t use you’re computer to buy things because they’ll know it’s you. You could do it at Evergreen. But then you’d have to have a place to receive the stuff. Plus, don’t shipping addresses and billing addresses have to be the same nowadays?’ It would have to be a store, just the right mom-n-pop kind of place, not some military zone like Best Buy.

I kept driving up the hill, toward the disabled man’s apartment, where I had to take him soon, toward all those stores that sell stuff.. If I was going to use the card I had to use it right now, before the guy called the bank, before it was disabled. Time was ticking. Was it immoral to use the card? Not that immoral, I thought. These days with all that automatic theft protection stuff it wouldn’t cost the guy a thing, only the evil billion-dollar bank, the same evil billion-dollar bank that had been raping me for years. I guess it would inconvenience the guy a little, maybe stress him out for a short time. It was really just myself and the bank that I might hurt. What one kind of expensive thing did I want that cost less than $300? What store could I get away with this at? These days everywhere checks ID. Everywhere. Snowpants! I suddenly knew of a certain westside snowboarding store. A store that was very loose, and very stoney. A store that was not very likely to have the strictest ID-checking policy. I was almost positive that they didn’t check my ID the last time I was there, but was that debit or credit?..

The car kept getting nearer to the snowboarding store, less than a block away now. Was I doing it? If it was happening it was happening right now, quickly, and as just a matter of business, with the disabled guy totally waiting for me in the car. I wasn’t making some nervous, thought-about-it-too-much second trip.

I pulled into the parking lot, not parking right in front of the store. I put my ID and other cards in the car door compartment; if they asked me for my ID I would have just forgotten it, just an honest mistake. I looked at the card. I thought of the cursive letters in the signature one last time.

I went in the store. A couple of guys, a lot of merchandise, no one too official looking. I looked at jackets and pants. My hands and arms were so week and shaky.. Were these women’s? In my shaky condition I couldn’t manage to handle the tags properly and see if they said so. I kept looking at jackets; all so over-designed, all so you-might-like-it-for-six-months-if-you-were-like,-sixteen-and-lived-for-pot-smoking. Still, I looked at the women’s clothes, and I easily imagined how they could look totally hot on someone.. One of the young snowboard guys who kind looked like Dirk or something came over my way.

"Are these women’s, or.." My voice broke. "Do you work here?"

"I don’t work here. I think they’re mixed."

"Thanks."

I kept looking. I tried on a totally subdued cream-colored jacket that had this mini green tree symbol thing on it that looked cool, totally all the good guys on Hoth or something. I saw myself in the mirror. Totally gay. Way too oversized and stoner. Actually stoner-gay. (I was not previously privy to the the existence of this genera). I put the jacket back. As I went on looking I wondered if they had a security camera that might one day come back to haunt me. I couldn’t look up for cameras a lot all suspiciously though. The jackets weren’t working and I started focusing on pants. Then I heard this noise. As if by fate, this whole row of skateboard decks suddenly dominoed over, right up near the ceiling, giving me the perfect fake reason to look up there for a long time and scan for cameras.

I didn’t see any cameras. I got an armload of snowpants and headed into the dressing room. I set my sunglasses down. It would be like so typical of the universe if I totally made off with the snowpants but totally left my expensive sunglasses there in the dressing room. So I was like trying on snowpants, and remembering not to forget my sunglasses in this one integrated activity. I had that lack of ability to fully breathe that I get, when I’m nervous, or if I haven’t eaten enough. I think I was nervous and hadn’t eaten. It kind of reminded me of how I used to feel when I always used to shop in those fancy department stores in San Francisco, all completely stoned out of my mind. I realized that this just might be what would totally make this work. This was a stoner store. It was normal to be all high and nervous and out of it here.

I got my pants, and my sunglasses, and I went up to the counter.

"Found something that fit?"

"Yeah. I’ll take these."

I almost accidentally walked behind the skateboard sales counter on my way up to the register. Was I being too obvious by buying such expensive pants so quickly, and so casually, maybe just because they fit? They were 40% off, that should help. But they would still be well over $150 bucks. And I now realized that it seemed like the store guy was straight. Like maybe he smoked a lot, but just not today. He did seem a little nervous though. I followed him up to the counter, I think much too closely.

He rang me up. And as I held the card out, away from my body, toward him, I felt like a robot or something. Everything was broken down for me microscopically, into this long series of false, disconnected events. It seemed unlikely, that anything as obviously a lie as the supposed ‘single sweep’ of my ‘arm’ offering the guy the ‘credit card’ could ever possibly be believed as the real thing.

"Will that be debit or credit?’

"Credit."

The sunlight coming through the window from behind the register blinded me as I stood there, pretty much naked. And then there was this distinct echo that seemed to run throughout the whole store, as the guy didn’t ask me for ID. I’m not sure if I imagined it, but for a moment it seemed like all the guys heard it. They suddenly stopped talking, stopped fidgeting, stopped fiddling with their skateboard tools, spit out their tubes of pure nitrous-oxide, that they had been gingerly nipping on all this time, and they listened, with this like winking approval, as if this was the way the system worked in their leprechaun society, in their snowboard shop; no ID check.

I heard the first half of the receipt print. He handed me back the card. The mantra in my mind was, business as usual, business as usual, business as fucking usual. Like, maybe.. I could just be this total dick.. And like, maybe.. I was just like.. here, like.. buying these fucking snowpants, from this guy.. I don’t give a fuck.. Then register paused.

It then emitted this single ‘beep’.

Then the register continued to pause, for like, a while. Fuck! Was that the alarm bell? Was that the call-the-cops-because-this-card-is-stolen alert chime? Should I run out the door now? Should I act all surprised and totally pissed?..

Then receipt started printing again.

Yeah!! Such relief, such release. Day spas, waterfalls, birds flying up lightly in small groups, bamboo forests with happy-ending, happy-ending!, nuevo-rich Chinese people spending like, fucking cash; I was ‘rich bitch!’ He handed me the receipt to sign. I had totally forgotten about this part. I started to sign it in non-cursive, completely copying the letters from the card. Then the pen got stuck in a divit on the counter, "whoops" I said, perfect cover-up. I handed him the signed receipt.

"Would you like a bag?"

"No thanks. Thanks a lot." I was out the door. I immediately locked the contraband in my trunk, and I was off, accidentally peeling out of the parking lot as I left. I felt so alive, so white hot, yet so full of color. So empowered. I could do anything right now. I remembered some people saying that there were no security devices in that store The Gap..

Susan
Amber
Rob
Sam
Max
Rachael

(To find Robert’s post go to Amber’s blog, hit the link to blog squad home base, which is Susan’s blog, then click on ‘Rob’.)

"computers or a suit of powerbooks" / "girl in pellucid raincoat with pellucid purse"

Exactly. Exactly. Take the little good things, the crunchy, choc-full ones, the real precious special gems, and then pile them all up, on top of eachother, and like, make-out; revel, splash, play. Beacuse maybe if you can get enough, ‘if you can just get enough’.. if you can just, roll around long enough, in piles of small diamonds, and checks (made out to you), all sticking to you like wet flower petals.. then maybe, just maybe, you might actually get something that you want. You might actually find something, like fun for example. And then maybe, maybe things will be okay. Maybe you will have a good enough life before you die.

But first you gotta make gems, attract them.

Take a piece of coal. Shove it up your ass. And clench it, for like 42 or 43 minutes, until you have a gem.

Then spring, then raindrops, then, the pellucidity of yourself when you get good.

Get good.

And get little. Get small hands. Get that light, fresh, oxygenated feeling, that you get, inside, and outside, and with things. Get so small and clear. Get nothing but wintermint toothpaste and ‘the force’. get all lower-case. and mini. get ‘mini club’. get so small that you’re HUGE.

Get so simple, that the Gaudi tower itself erupts through your forehead:

(In the voice of Sam Lohman):

The Gaudi tower,

all totally dripping, and festooning, and spraying, with ribbons, and light, skinny rainbows, and monkeys, pure lines of oil paint, squeezing out, sushi, and ‘Bounty’ bars, and mini Koala bears, a girl’s head, a bouncing ball, some sunshine, animation of fucked-up flowers growing-out, like bacteria, super-8 video of people’s lives, Switzerland, mini cash prizes, Suzuki Samurai’s, and Daria’s little sister jet skiing on some more rainbows, some Skittles, a few Kia Sportages, a toy nugget of gold, some cash, some dollar signs, a few tiny hearts, three small vacations of love, and some mini private jets that are really, really fun, some puppies on slip ‘n slides, that are just slippin’, and slidin’, out, some real birds flying, and a couple of smallish two-dimensional business people…

and the music just rotating, spurting around, everything spraying into life with activity, spraying into stuff that is there, on-the-ready, and alive:

The Gaudi tower that is yourself, infused. Wearing a suit of fuckin’ powerbooks. That guady tower.

Pink

Two large standard camellia bushes that reach the second story of a nice light blue house. The pink blossoms on the bushes are just so much. The camellias are just heaving with pretty blossoms. Together, the two tree-like bushes frame the doorway of the nice light blue house, and are themselves framed by two more camellia bushes of similar tree-like size, one with white blossoms, and one with red. The whole scene of the four bosoming blossoming camillia trees, and the nice light blue house, in the nice neighborhood, with the nice evening light, and the smell of moisture, and of the blossoms, and the fresh cut grass, and all my dreams and excitement around it all, all go together to create ‘a world of imagination’ in me as I walk:

A girl’s breasts. Her bra.

Laura Ashley.

Ribbons.

True love.

The 1970’s and 1980’s.

That iconic white underwear with little flowers that all the girls wore when I was little…

When I was little…

When I was little I had a crush on my wonderful, wonderful older cousin Lucy. Lucy would sing. Lucy would dance. Lucy would play the piano, and get excited. Lucy would play you at backgammon. Lucy lived in this beautiful, big old country house on all this land, with my aunt Margaret and uncle Christopher, and her brother and sisters. We would go there for parties. Every Christmas Day we would go there. There would be ice and snow outside. We would start the evening off in the livingroom. There would be a fire, and our parents would drink and eat cheese. Early Beatles would thump out the speakers of my uncle Christopher’s hi-fi. The fire would crackle. The smell of the scotch and the fire. The smell of perfume. The ice in the glasses was so wet, and so cold to the touch. And the regular basslines of ‘Love, love me do’ and ‘I wanna hold your hand’, they would just make my heart swell and swell, and swell with crushiness for my cousin Lucy. Minutes would go by. I’d just feel it more and more, and more. I would sit on the velvet couch, in my thin gray wool pants, with my skinny wrists, and my dress-up shoes, and the butterflies in my stomach, just trembling with love, love for Lucy, and love for the one other girl I knew from dancing school.. Later Lucy would stand near me and tell me how to play chopsticks on the piano. We would play together for a minute. And I would simultaneously soar with the thrill of her company, and plummet with the end-game of my total and complete embarrassment. I would blush, I would get hard-ons, I would suddenly leave her company for no apparent reason whatsoever… After diner we would sit in the tv room and watch ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ or ‘Oliver’, or maybe, ‘The Sound of Music’.

I remember being even younger and in the summers having these wonderful, evening outdoor parties at their house. I would be drinking my Canada Dry ginger ale, eating peanuts, and running loops around the tulip trees, and around my uncles and their tall plaid pants, ‘conversation’, and tumblers of scotch.. Sometimes we’d play baseball, and there would be goose shit to watch out for.. Or sometimes we’d play tag. Sometimes we’d even play hide n’ go seek, all the way out in the woods. And I’d find Lucy, finally, in like, a ray of sunlight and a fairy costume. Whatever we did at those parties we’d get totally bleeding-lung winded and grass-stained knee-ed. Everything would smell so great, because it was summer, and we were in Ohio. As the evening got nearer, there would be the sound of crickets and then eventually lightning bugs. I remember we would go and play out in the canoe, in the last rays of sunshine, still drinking our ginger ale, and somehow my dyslexic cousin, Dave, would manage to fall overboard, completely in. He’d be laughing hysterically and shouting shit, his wet curly head all tangled in pond plants. My other cousin Philip would be looking down on him from the canoe. He’d call him an idiot and bounce his head with his paddle. We loved Dave, he was probably my best friend, but seriously, he got a little crazy.. But I always appreciated how Lucy would never be mean to him, when he started all spazzing out..

I really loved Lucy. She was so awesome. All strong, and nice. All older than us, with her nice skin, and her dirty blond hair. I can remember her running, and smiling, spinning even, all barefoot, and out of breath with excitement, in her white pretty dress, flowers and grass all smooshed in her hair… Lucy would make up her own skits, and sing, and dance for us. And play the piano. Seriously. And then one summer suddenly she had this, like, heaving bosom, and she just kept on going. All spinning and dancing, all talking and growing up.. 

Reading is nice..

I’m looking for book recommendations..

Please.., please help..

I like..

Old, rich hearty things, like fallow fields, crunchy gravel, ‘having a fire’, Heathcliff, walking between towns.. Think Dutch realistic painting meets pretty girls meets a storyline. All on the ground. Not too much murder, supernatural elements, or abstraction, let me do all that in my own mind. Faulkner and Toni Morrison are not linear enough for me. I love the simple cornbread and slave labor of Zora Neale Hurston. I love the detail of Raymond Carver, but he can be a little on the emotionally always-harsh side for me.

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world, the way he describes girls, and drinking, and dancing, and swimming, winning and losing, what we want so bad, or what I want so bad. 

I love the modern, psychedelic, fruit-of-the-fruit-of-the-fruit realism of Bret Easton Ellis and Tamra Janowitz, ie- we’re so fucking rich. We go to boarding school, we shop in London, our dad’s the president, we take mushrooms and have sex, on our boats, or maybe we just walk around Manhattan, tortured, listening to our I-Pod’s, thinking about about the pretty girl in the wool coat, with the chestnut brown hair, who doesn’t like us the way we want; noticing the brilliance in every detail in the world..

Give me my modern day Holden Caulfield, or something..

I love outdoor stories, travel writing about hitchhiking, hut life in the 3rd world. I love hut life!! Give me half dressed boys in canoes in Brazil who hunt for their food everyday, and when it rains.., well.., they just get wet…

I love all the rungs and corners of the socio-demographic planet, Richard Scarry on acid.

Give me all that attention to detail, close-up, and realistic.

Don’t be shy, tell me some titles, even possible matches, maybe I’ve read them and maybe I haven’t. Maybe you know something that I absulotely have to read that doesn’t even fit my bill.

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!

     -Chris