Bad

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.