13 posts tagged “smoking”
Restructured to make a little more sense. Still haven't gone chronological, though. Everything that has been added in this iteration of the compendium has (new) next to it. Six (new)'s under non-fiction and five (new)'s under other. So, eleven entries worth putting on the revised compendium. The last time I did one of these was about this time last year. Not a good sign.
Non-fiction Stories(with no organization whatsoever):
(new)You're Creepy, Hunter - A girl tells me I am creepy. I get even.
(new)Phoenix - I don't think I am supposed to write about something that is supposed to be anonymous. Oh well.
(new)Strange Format - Saturday Show - Seriously the strangest format or lack thereof I have ever used. Almost like a poem. I've bad luck and things get out of hand.
(new)Graham's 21st Birthday - "No, dude, we're walking home. It's like two blocks."
(new)Dead Cicada - A woman is assaulted while holding her child. I intercede.
(new)A Warning - First Friday's in Richmond!
Salvia Gets Too Real - Fourth and worst trip on Salvia.
The Most Puke I Have Ever Seen - Imagine this next scene. Try to visualize it with me. My eyes open to the ceiling, my body shocked out of deep REM sleep. My legs and waist are moist. . .
Drunk People - An interesting twist-- I'm not drunk in this story. For once in my life.
Black and Mild
- I'll miss drinking with friends on top of the roof at my old
apartment. I will miss that Mediterranean market, with its natural
soaps and cheap spices. I will miss all those families who called the
cops on me when I played music too loud on Monday nights. Ahh
Hunter Takes it to the Limit, Throws Up Everywhere - In The Top Five Drunkest Nights
Pissing in Pools I & II - My double standard on people who pee in pools.
A Retelling of the First Time I SmokedA Trip To Walmart - Seriously one of the best destinations while high. Interesting, entertaining, sometimes a little creepy.
To Move My Body - When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. This story has procession of Segways!
The Things I Remember - I somehow wake up at 2PM in my dorm, still drunk from the night before. A rough bus ride does me in.
Hunter Blacks Out, Goes To Patient First, Blames Free Beer - Pretty self explanatory.
A Tucker Emulation, It Seems - The very first story I wrote.
Handcuffed, Robbed, and 6 O'clock Rush - Pretty self-explanatory. Breakfast club.
Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues - I get high, and drive. Sort of.
Lebanese: A "Nice Guy" Failure - Nine Guys, One Girl. I get the girl and ride off into the sunset(upstairs), but turn out to be a "nice guy."
JMU, PART I
- The first and, since, only time I have been breathalyzed. There is
no part II. Part II would be better though, as it includes doing
mushrooms, a starving French guy, five plus parties, nearly getting run
over, really drunk chicks with australian accents, and BLOODHOUNDS.
But this story has none of that.
THE WEEKEND - A three day bender, with a decadent interlude of cheating debauchery. All set to the soundtrack of the very trite Garden State.
Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning -- This story is far too long to hold your attention. Do not read it.
Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):
Saint Dympna - My favorite.
The Sink at Sunset - Guy has mobile home of a heart. This is life at 20.
Shells - My drug induced interpretation of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly caused this short. Later turned into a short fiction piece (for a class) called Mise en Place or The Writer.
Nine-Tenths is Nothing - Our children are here to replace us. One man attempts to slow this process by proving he is better than them and protecting his wife from kid perverts.
The Last Boat to the Disappearing - A seven vignette fiction piece about flaming zombies. As much as I wish I had written them gay, they are actually on fire.Story Starter Exercise - A brief story about a friend who got kicked up and did a lot of drugs while living in the woods.
Other:
(new)At The Edge of The Neighborhood - Vivid zombie dream.
(new)Shut Down or Reset - Up late? Two options. Special bonus feature: scene from this year's Best Friends Day @ Hadad's
(new)A Haiku - About a day I spent at the river getting drunk with someone I didn't know. She was taken and I fell and cut myself on a rock. Then there is a sexual allegory at the end. There, I ruined it.
(new)My First Near-Ticket on a Bicycle(new)Autumn - The Greatest and Best Time of Year
Can Blood Cells Have Car Accidents? - Thoughts after the fire.
Janus - Girl cheats on me. Girl dies in short story Sink at Sunset.
Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part I -- I test my voice recorder during a toking session. Heavy on the dialogue.
Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part II -- The better half of the overall recording experience. A lot of in depth high conversation.
Friend's Mom Finds Out About Hunter's Livejournal, Missiles Fly - Probably one of the more significant events in the history of my online writing.
Under a Hot Chicago Sun - I didn't even know my neighbors name.
H-D-P-E Does Not Spell "Hope" - Recycling is hopeful. I am not.
It Is Only Hubris If I Fail - Childhood with a heavy dose of failure, sprinkled with Sloane Crosley.
Sick Dream D.A.N.C.E. - Dreams are fun. Dreams about partying and religious fanatics that all have the same face... strange. Sick dreams are most disturbing.
Rape, Tacos, and Love - I get raped, noticed for my writing at a party, have sex for the first time high, eat really good tacos, and listen in on a nasty girl shit.Tainted Elephant Oil Prices Dowsed in Sickly-Sweat-Stained Dreams - More sick dreams, musings on family life and relationships.
Metal Shows - Are awesome. Especially when you know the band. Even if it's at a lame venue.
Derelict Father, Are We the Cause of Our Suffering?
Shit's Run Its Course - I inherit a bike from a metal head who stole it from a crack head.
The Bear, The Bee, The Rhino - I connect with mother nature, understand things I never thought possible.
Night Luck - I have only gotten in trouble with the law when sober. Sobriety really takes the spine out of me.
Condom Debacle - A young Hunter hides a partially used condom in duct-tape.
Jesus Freaks - I lament about my hatred for street-preachers. This is a Facebook classic.Bloody Knuckles - It wasn't a game that gave me these.
Diphenhydramine - The first time I ever tripped on a deliriant.
Bulgarians are Hardcore - Intoxicated 5 times the lethal limit, this Bulgarian gets hit by a car and sent to the hospital for minor head trauma.
Sunchips? - Do you know why they call them sunchips?
LIRICKES - The funniest rap "lirickes" you'll read all week.
The Binary Universe and How Choice Works - With diagrams and shit.
Poems - A little too sing-songy.
Soundscape - High times.
The Nature of Souls and Soulmates - Got a decent response for this one.
Scanner Darkly and the Universe as a Vague Set of Prepositions
Demon Play, Demon Out - Your shoes are not an extension of anything that matters to your person.
Clocked Out - A New Year - 2007. Some things get better, other things are mentioned less.
New - I miss writing.
This is a collection of things I have written that I think are at least half worth putting back up. Since last I did one of these, I have added two short stories and maybe ten other forms of writing. With 19 solid "Stories," 7 short fiction pieces, and over 25 others, I would like to think that what I do for enjoyment is steadily becoming something I could do for money. Years down the road, that is. Enjoy.
STORIES(with no organization whatsoever):
Salvia Gets Too Real - Fourth and worst trip on Salvia.
The Most Puke I Have Ever Seen - Imagine this next scene. Try to visualize it with me. My eyes open to
the ceiling, my body shocked out of deep REM sleep. My legs and waist
are moist. . .
Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning
-- It turns out that drinking in the dorms is a bad plan. But, for me,
I have a great night, only to have it ruined by a morning hangover and
the loss of my license.
Hunter Takes it to the Limit, Throws Up Everywhere - In The Top Five Drunkest Nights
JMU, PART I
- The first and, since, only time I have been breathalyzed. There is
no part II. Part II would be better though, as it includes doing
mushrooms, a starving French guy, five plus parties, nearly getting run
over, really drunk chicks with australian accents, and BLOODHOUNDS.
But this story has none of that.
Pissing in Pools I & II - My double standard on people who pee in pools.
To Move My Body - When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. This story has procession of Segways!
Hunter Blacks Out, Goes To Patient First, Blames Free Beer - Pretty self explanatory.
Drunk People - An interesting twist-- I'm not drunk in this story. For once in my life.
A Tucker Emulation, It Seems - The very first story I wrote.
The Things I Remember - I somehow wake up at 2PM in my dorm, still drunk from the night before. A rough bus ride does me in.
Handcuffed, Robbed, and 6 O'clock Rush - Pretty self-explanatory. Breakfast club.
Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues - I get high, and drive. Sort of.
Lebanese: A "Nice Guy" Failure - Nine Guys, One Girl. I get the girl and ride off into the sunset(upstairs), but turn out to be a "nice guy."
A Trip To Walmart - Seriously one of the best destinations while high. Interesting, entertaining, sometimes a little creepy.
A Retelling of the First Time I Smoked
THE WEEKEND - A three day bender, with a decadent interlude of cheating debauchery. All set to the soundtrack of the very trite Garden State.
Bloody in '08 - A New Year story, complete with someone who attempts to smash a full, unopened champagne bottle over his head.
Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):
Nine-Tenths is Nothing
- Our children are here to replace us. One man attempts to slow this
process by proving he is better than them and protecting his wife from
kid perverts.
Saint Dympna - My favorite.
The Sink at Sunset - Guy has mobile home of a heart. This is life at 20.
Shells - My drug induced interpretation of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly caused this short. Later turned into a short fiction piece (for a class) called Mise en Place or The Writer.
The Last Boat to the Disappearing - A seven vignette fiction piece about flaming zombies. As much as I wish I had written them gay, they are actually on fire.
Solipsism - A creation story. A story with Robots and Gods and space battles. A story with a twist. A story that kind of sucks, but has novelty.
Story Starter Exercise - A brief story about a friend who got kicked up and did a lot of drugs while living in the woods.
Some others:
Can Blood Cells Have Car Accidents? - Thoughts after the fire.
Janus - Girl cheats on me. Girl dies in short story Sink at Sunset.
Black and Mild - I'll miss drinking with friends on top of the roof at my old apartment. I will miss that Mediterranean market, with its natural soaps and cheap spices. I will miss all those families who called the cops on me when I played music too loud on Monday nights. Ahh
Under a Hot Chicago Sun - I didn't even know my neighbors name.
H-D-P-E Does Not Spell "Hope" - Recycling is hopeful. I am not.
It Is Only Hubris If I Fail - Childhood with a heavy dose of failure, sprinkled with Sloane Crosley.
Sick Dream D.A.N.C.E. - Dreams are fun. Dreams about partying and religious fanatics that all have the same face... strange. Sick dreams are most disturbing.
Tainted Elephant Oil Prices Dowsed in Sickly-Sweat-Stained Dreams - More sick dreams, musings on family life and relationships.
Metal Shows - Are awesome. Especially when you know the band. Even if it's at a lame venue.
Derelict Father, Are We the Cause of Our Suffering?
Shit's Run Its Course - I inherit a bike from a metal head who stole it from a crack head.
The Bear, The Bee, The Rhino - I connect with mother nature, understand things I never thought possible.
Night Luck - I have only gotten in trouble with the law when sober. Sobriety really takes the spine out of me.
Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part I -- I test my voice recorder during a toking session. Heavy on the dialogue.
Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part II -- The better half of the overall recording experience. A lot of in depth high conversation.
Friend's Mom Finds Out About Hunter's Livejournal, Missiles Fly - Probably one of the more significant events in the history of my online writing.
Jesus Freaks - I lament about my hatred for street-preachers. This is a Facebook classic.
Bloody Knuckles - It wasn't a game that gave me these.
Diphenhydramine - The first time I ever tripped on a deliriant.
Bulgarians are Hardcore - Intoxicated 5 times the lethal limit, this Bulgarian gets hit by a car and sent to the hospital for minor head trauma.
Sunchips? - Do you know why they call them sunchips?
LIRICKES - The funniest rap "lirickes" you'll read all week.
The Binary Universe and How Choice Works - With diagrams and shit.
Poems - A little too sing-songy.
Soundscape - High times.
The Nature of Souls and Soulmates - Got a decent response for this one.
Condom Debacle - A young Hunter hides a partially used condom in duct-tape.
Scanner Darkly and the Universe as a Vague Set of Prepositions
Demon Play, Demon Out - Your shoes are not an extension of anything that matters to your person.
Clocked Out - A New Year - 2007. Some things get better, other things are mentioned less.
New - I miss writing.
Against a brick wall, my body hardly able to stand, my mind runs a list. There was that time in the park, when Jeff was on acid, Yetti and I high. They wanted to run, but of course we got off because we didn't. Once, when Jeff was sober, a cop pulled us over because he was serving. I was wasted, and the cop could totally smell me-- he was called off to something more important. There was that time I was on mushrooms on my roof with Lenora, when I confidently dealt with a cop for fifteen minutes. And, of course, at JMU, Patrick basically puking on the boots of a tempered veteran cop. Wasted, and breathalyzed, I got us out of that one too.
I take my backpack off and with as much discretion as I can muster, I slide it across the floor with my leg. I nearly fall over, doing this, but no one notices. My limited carry-on party stash is safely not associated with me anymore.
My back to the brick, I think to myself that every time I run into cops while I'm fucked up, I get off-- free. The only time I have ever been 'caught' was for my illegal U-Turn violation at 2 in the morning. When I was sober. In the swirling nexus of beer, wine, and pot, I think tonight will again try the theory that being fucked up makes me more supple, and thus, less susceptible to arrest.
I reassure the girl next to me, "We'll be fine," more for my comfort than hers. The bulldog hardass cop that has my ID is using someone's phone to take a panoramic of the scene. Piles of beer cans on this one table and the bulldog, breathing heavily, says, "Oooh, that's a good one." Everyone who is not a cop scowls and looks around the room to each other-- This is fucked up, right? What else can you think about cop porn?
And then the cop's phone goes off, blaring. He desperately shuffles to squelch Fall Out Boy's "Dance Dance," losing credibility by the millisecond. I chuckle to myself. Another cop, some kid who looks much younger than me, flips through a book of charges. They're charging one of the guys that lives here with 405 of an unscheduled drug. That's possession of alcohol, and he is 21. Which means he'll be fine. These cops suck. Sucks that the guy has to go to court, but I am out the door in the next few minutes with my ID and my backpack.
The Ward
I work with mental patients. Most people send these people here because they can't deal with it at home. The breakdown of their loved ones is just too much. Out on the streets of the city, more of them roam, gathering up trash and scraps. But those people, they don't have anyone to care for them, especially not themselves. In here, though, there are white walls, pale pills, and me. Everyone's seen me. I'm the big, bearded bouncer of the ward. I'm the bear-like creature that wrestles patients to the ground when they get out of control. On TV and in movies, I wear white and I am portrayed as a reason you don't want to be in the ward. In real life, I wear a faded brown uniform and I am actually one of the nicer people you will meet here. I won't disregard what you say until you're shot up with sodium pentothal, like all the doctors here. But I'm not a doctor. No, I'm like a nurse-bouncer.
I believe in listening. I believe, as long as you aren't hurting anyone, your reality is yours alone. If you asked me what I thought about the Bible, I would tell you it is an interesting story. A good story, a good version of reality, is more entertaining than anything else. Seeing the universe through someone else's eyes. Living vicariously. These are ways to reach out beyond our internal experience. Every patient I see has their own volume. A reality they author. Sometimes through incoherent babbling, sometimes through art, and sometimes through violence. There is only one particularly violent case here at Saint Dympna's Ward. A man I call "Hero." Muscles ripple over his body and hatred fuels his motives. And now I understand why. We were keeping him from something important in his life.
Rounds
At the beginning of the day, I make my rounds through the building. Nothing interesting or significant happens. The afternoons are where I enjoy my job. It is art and social therapy time in the cafeteria. In one corner, child-minds doped up on some prescribed lifestyle, they fingerpaint. One of them manages to make a turkey with her hand. I tell her it's cool, but one of the other nurses just stands there looking past his nose and he says, "It's not Thanksgiving yet." His parents were probably condescending to him, too.
In the middle of the room three patients idly drop red or black discs into a yellow frame. They are playing Connect-Four, a two player game. Click. The first player, Jones, drops his red disc into an empty slot. Click-click, two black discs fall, one from Tamera and one from Doc. I guess if you expanded the constraints, you know, the yellow grid, more people could play. The two players with black, Tamera and Doc, aren't using what amounts to a two-turn-in-a-row option(?). They're playing against each other with the same color. They're playing by their own rules.
And then, by the windows, Strawberry and Hero. The windows are the kind you see in bathrooms with the pattern that disallows viewing, but still lets light in. When they constructed Saint Dympna's Ward, they decided the outdoors would distract from what was going on inside. They may as well have built the complex underground and set up a synthesized sunlight system. Real or otherwise, the light is hitting Strawberry's flaming red hair, and you immediately understand her name. She wasn't bald upon birth. She had one single strand of the most crimson-red hair, so her parents named her Strawberry. The day the father was driving the family back from the hospital, they got twenty feet from the parking lot. And a Ford pickup slammed them. No one died, but both parents were sent right back to the hospital, twenty feet back. Both in a vegetative state on arrival. The grandparents of Strawberry put her up for adoption, but kept her parents on feeding tubes until she was twenty one. Then they sent her a letter. "Your parents are alive," it said. Well sort of, they meant. And she broke down. And she's here.
I am talking to one of the patients about their awesome rendition of the human hand via finger paints when a table flips from the other side of the room, crashing into the wall. I turn to the noise of a splintering wooden table. Against the wall is Strawberry, her head facing upward towards the heavens, eyes closed. Around her neck is a hand. Hero's hand, gripping tightly, fingers pressed inward on her skin. Inside, her wind pipes begin to strain under the pressure. Choking. The owner of the hand, Hero, his brow is smushed in on itself. His eyebrows tell her that he hates her. His eyes are ablaze with the reflection of her hair-- now dancing up from her back, situated over an air vent. It rises and falls. Rises, oscillates, falls. Extends itself outward, reaching maximum buoyancy, and falls. In this split second image, I am rushing over to bear-hug Hero and wrestle him to the ground. Before I can, a doctor gets there and tries to negotiate. She is strong-armed to the floor with a swift, balled up fist. I step over her crumpled body. The next thing I know, there is a colored pencil in my throat and I am laid out.
Roommate
It is a day before my neck covers a sea-green colored pencil in blood. A day before Hero grabs a single, makeshift weapon from a box of seventy-two potential tools, I am lying in bed-- naked. Next to me is my girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-in-disguise, with a voice angels envy. She writes her own songs and sings them to me. Sometimes they're about me, and how, in the past, I have been a stupid dick to her, but, it's okay, because here and now is what matters, and here and now is perfect. Here and now, she is snoring. Her incredible range is being utilized by runner's lungs, keeping me awake.
Before getting out of bed, I lean to her and kiss her on the forehead. In spite of her snoring, she is the most devine creature know to man. To God, or this, or whatever anything is. I stumble through the ambient light from the street, looking for my boxers. They are hidden under a sheet that was, with my boxers, kicked off the bed earlier in the night. I wiggle them up my waist, and grab my girlfriend's pack of cigarettes. Be right back, I say to her snores. I crack the door and slide through, sideways. I walk to the back of the apartment. I notice her roommate's door is open. That means she's not here. She's never here. Only in the mornings, when her alarm is blaring for hours, is she here-- sleeping. My girlfriend tells me near-insomnia is the only means she has left to get fucked up. She tells me she has a bad past. She killed people. Not on purpose, but on accident. She had been speed balling one night. This is when you mix heroine and cocaine. One is basically a downer, the other an upper. In addition, she was drunk. And driving. Swerving across the road one night, she slammed the right side of the car into a tree. The car wraps around, metal frame hugging wooden trunk, and two of her friends die instantly. Now she goes to AA meetings. Now she stays up until her body can't handle the sleep deprivation anymore, and she just passes out. Now she does art therapy. Just like a case at Saint Dympna.
I reach the kitchen in the back of the apartment. To my left, the microwave reads 0:18 where it should say 2:48AM. To my right is the door. Before I exit and smoke, I light my cigarette with the oven. This singes my eyebrow and the room fills with that burnt-hair-smell that no one seems to like. One of my feet rests in a black square while the other rests within a white one. At the door, I slide locks from left to right, and twist the door knob. From left to right. It opens and I am through, to a world of light pollution. Living in the city, you don't really see the stars. It's like being in a mental ward where the windows are only partially translucent. You get some light-- a fraction of the big picture. You are only graced with a relative abundance of stars on clear nights like this, when the air is thin and cold. I shiver momentarily, but the head rush of nicotine quickly comes to my body's aid. Aid. I am a cigarette's patient today.
I focus on the cherry, which is glowing brightly against the wind. In French, they call it le fraise. "The Strawberry." It makes me happy that some things are naturally universal, like this. Fire. The color of it, the idea of it, is intertwined in human history, I think. But now, though not everywhere, there's electricity to give us warmth. Century old technology. Wires in the sky. Big cylinders, converting energy. These things aren't beautiful. We don't relate to power plants. Fire is so basic, so elemental, that its beauty is ingrained in us. Especially now, as I shiver on the back porch of the third floor, 2425 E. Fields, apartment six. Alone, sharing my experience.
The faux-gold emblem of a camel on the side of my cigarette isn't wearing scrubs or a lab coat, but right now, he is my doctor. With every deep drag, the cold retreats from my skin. Doctor Camel will be with you shortly. With a sufficient headrush I go back inside. The roommate's door is closed as I walk by.
I lay down next to my girlfriend and wrap my arms around her. In the bathroom adjoining the two bedrooms, a light is on. The roommate is in there, taking a shit. Plop, is the last sound I hear before a blaring alarm wakes me up in the morning. My girlfriend is gone to work, having woken me up briefly to say goodbye. I don't remember this clearly, but I remember it happening as the alarm was going off in the background.
My girlfriend leaves for work at six in the morning. It is now seven thirty. The alarm has been active for an hour and a half. Before leaving, I put my clothes on and go into the roommate's room. Blankets cover her windows, making it dark, but trapping the sound. The constant beep, beep, beep gives me a headache. I can't imagine what it is doing to her dreams. Several prescription drugs lie on her dresser, filled in those transparent orange bottles you get from pharmacies. One of them has pot in it, the only thing she didn't quit. Medicine bottles are like the next step up from your standard issue sandwich bag.
I hit the off button. Next to the alarm, I notice a box of colored pencils. A sea-green pencil is upside-down in the box. I flip it around to be right-side-up. I get the idea that I will bring this for my two favorite patients at the ward, so I leave a note for the roommate. In the note I am telling her they are being put to good use and that I will have them back to her at the end of the night. Or, the beginning of her day.
Physics and Biology
Two ideas cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. This is why I have a hole in my neck. A sea-green pencil and my neck had a dispute over who should be where. Over the hole is a big white bandage framed in surgical tape. In the ward's cafeteria, there are also holes. In the walls. From Hero and his massive fists.
Hero, the patient that stabbed me, he tells me he is sorry, but she had to die. The other nurses and doctors believe he is only sorry because he is now in a sort of solitary confinement. Fettered to the walls with some metal covered in nylon, something they use in special cases like this. Special cases that also call for a muzzle. A face mask, situated around the back of the skull like a belt on a waist.
After I was stabbed, Hero was quickly surrounded by the rest of the staff and backup is summoned. There are now five individuals encircling him. He punches the wall behind him to, they assume, show his strength. These are those cinder-block walls painted over white that you see in nearly every institution. They are strong, but where his fist lands, the wall crumbles in around his arm like a sand castle. The surrounding crowd takes a collective step backward. Hero has frightened a ten legged monster. A mob.
The monster rears its head forward, toward Hero. It is another nurse, breaking from the crest of the outward semi-circle, making his way for the center. Everyone calls this nurse Big Mac. This is because every day, at lunch, he has a hamburger from a burger chain. Every day, a standard helping of processed perfection. On Wednesdays, that's today, he shares his number seven selection with millions of other Big Mac guys out there.
"And then he bit my ear off. He bit my fucking ear off," Big Mac tells me. "He cups my chin with his big hand and lifts me. I am two-twenty-five, man!"
It's true, he's a big guy. You don't eat number fours for breakfast every day and lose weight. He turns to me and hands me his pack of cigarettes, saying, "I know you're not ready to admit that you're a smoker. Here." His bandage, a painted window frame on his face, covers a sewn up ear. His smile nearly reaches it as I take the cigarette.
Yeah, I tell him, I smoke, but I'm not a smoker. Buying my own pack, that would make me a smoker. A prisoner.
"Oh yeah," he says, "they want you inside. Something to do with the maniac." He's referring to our very own Mike Tyson. I go inside and start my Wednesday morning in the ward's basement.
Odds
"Four-hundred-to-one odds is what I'm up against," he says, "and I can't defeat four men in brown suits because they have shock-sticks and stinging spray cans."
My superior tells me I am the only one Hero will talk to, and here I am, listening to the tail end of his story. Being surrounded and tasered is the last image Hero remembers before waking up bound to a metal-dungeon in the basement of Saint Dympna's Ward. I ask him what he means by four-hundred-to-one odds.
"These are numbers I have no problem with," he says.
No problem with doing what, I ask.
"Killing."
Oh, I say, killing four hundred innocent people without a thought. Like Strawberry. He takes offense.
"I'm sorry, but she had to die. Just like everyone I've killed."
Why? Why is the red-head that likes colored pencils dead? Why couldn't she live. She was the soul survivor of a car accident, an orphan, a smoker. Why couldn't Strawberry live, I ask him again and again. He is silent for several minutes, refusing to tell me anything beyond "she had to die." I ready myself to leave and motion to the guard at the door. The guard is going to put the muzzle back on. Before he does, Hero, he says, "Wait." He'll tell me.
Strawberry sits across from him, happily dazed by the day's regimen of drugs, coloring. She draws a bronze sword and says, "You're going to have to kill me." Hero looks up from his blank page, but she remains coloring. Now she is drawing a deeply tanned hand gripping a hilt of a bronze sword. She barely colors in the lines. It's all blurred.
"What did you say," Hero asks her, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers, stopping the colored pencil. She looks up and, using her other hand, removes his. She goes back to drawing an arm, saying, "She is waiting for you, but you have to get out of here first. And then you have to be led."
Hero says he can get out himself. He can make it on his own, as he has before. He has used rocks to crush skulls. He has toppled war elephants. He has traveled countless distances. But this is different. Strawberry explains to him that he needs guidance, and there is only one person in the ward that can help. One person he can rely on.
"And that one person," he says in the metal dungeon, chained to the wall, "is you."
Gods
"Isn't that what we are?" she asks, looking past the steering wheel in her hands. This is my girlfriend driving me back to her place. We get off of work at roughly the same time, and there she is, outside in her Red Honda. It faces away from me, so I sneak up and push on the trunk, rocking the car. She twists around and looks out the window, laughing. I smile at her and open the passenger door.
Now we're on the road, heading to her place to cook dinner. I have just told her about Hero and she seems overly interested. Any man that can usurp her attention from me in any form and I suddenly feel less confident. And, Hero isn't just any man. He has served in World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam. He has used swords, pikes, and the occasional axe. A battle-axe, like his body. God, his body. A tank build. And she, unlike everyone else, doesn't think he's crazy.
"I mean, we're talking about Gods here," I remind her, "powerful entities who control the course of mankind."
She says, "I know." What we are, she thinks, are individual gods, encapsulated within our minds. "Just listen," she says, "willpower." She looks over, her black-hole pupils radiating to amber. Amber stretching, in tendrils, to blue-green. She looks at me, her crinkled forehead accentuating her word, Willpower. My eyes meet hers. I see the whole universe in a split second glance. And then it is refocused on the road.
"Willpower?" I ask. Willpower, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, is "the strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans." She tells me this, her driftwood-brown hair streaming through the invisible wind. The wind streaming through her hair. The wind streaming through rolled down windows, outside to in. The mind streaming through it all.
"And what makes us different from ants?" she prompts me.
"Well, in regard to willpower?
"Yeah."
"We have more."
Right, she says, we have more willpower. From an ant's perspective, humans and larger animals are gods, who have the ability to exert their unstoppable will over them. We can smash them, burn them, save them, arrange them. Through our imagination and innovation, we wield unending power over them. So, above us, out there, is there anything advanced enough, through tool use or mental/physical prowess, to play god with us? At parks, this is why she tip-toes through blades of grass. Why her eyes are focused on the ground more than ahead. She doesn't want to arbitrarily end the life of a lesser being. Because why couldn't a galactic foot just snuff out our life?
She asks me what's so hard to believe about a goddess watching over Hero, using him for the benefit of mankind. She asks me if I think it's as romantic as she does. She asks me if I'm going to help him.
Paranoia
One of the patients here has a severe case of psychosis. The third player in Connect-Four. The second black disc. His name is Doc. The reason his name is Doc is obvious. He was a doctor at a local college campus, taking care of students. In student health, it's pretty much the same thing every day. Kids worry about having unprotected sex with more than three people in the last couple of months, and they need to get tested. Suspicious partners looking for proof. Others with concerns about the heroine they shot last night. Some not worried at all, carried in on stretchers from alcohol overdose. And then there's Doc, who worries alongside them-- for them and himself.
Some of the time he is genuinely concerned about his patients. Other times, he is genuinely concerned about his patients suing him. His patients, with their rich mommies and daddies and their combined law degrees. Or worse, political backgrounds. Mafia ties. Alien descent. And it started with simple auditory hallucinations. The kind of thing you can write off as a mistake. Hearing your name whispered in the wind is nothing. Suddenly your name becomes a list of things-- everything but the name itself. "James" becomes: fame, tame, maim, trains, feign, blame, anything to convince yourself you're not crazy. You're in a crowded room and everyone's talking, someone must have been talking to another "Greg" over by the window. The high pitched police siren and distant jackhammer sounds you just heard combined to make a sound similar to "Monica." Having a more unique name makes all of this self-convincing difficult.
After the initial stages of auditory hallucinations, then come the delusions. The conspiracies. Doc, he says he would change his route to work every day, just in case someone was watching him. Ex-Special Forces do this, he says. They're powerful tools, and just because they're not in use anymore doesn't mean the government is just going to let them live out their lives. What if they snap and kill innocent people? They could. What's from stopping them? Knowing that they are always watched by someone, that's what. So what's to stop them from watching Doc, he thinks. Maybe they worry he'll start removing people's innards to sell on some Chinese black market.
And near the campus, there's a tobacco manufacterer's headquarters. The name's not as important as the placement. It is two blocks from where Doc works. He says it's ironic, and comments on the smoke stacks around the city. The tobacco company owns all of them. They're all venting nicotine into the air, getting us addicted. And that's controlled by the Bildeberg Conferences. And those by the lizard men at the center of the earth. And that's about the time that he checked himself into Saint Dympna's Ward. Not because he thought he was crazy, but because he knew it would be one of the last places they would look for him. And here I am, watching him from across the room, thinking to myself about the nature of paranoia. Paranoia like my fear of Hero, and my girlfriend's fixation on him. It is not so much Hero that threatens me, but the idea of someone being better in her eyes. Hero fights for his Goddess over the course of eons, in hallmark conflicts across the globe, and I help loose realities focus on dabbing fingers in paint.
Sword And Shield
Through the fractal cafeteria windows, I see a pastel smudge of red. It is my girlfriend's Honda, colored outside the lines. I walk outside, sneaking up. Only the eyes of the tail-lights know I'm there. I press my hands, palms down, on the trunk, and rock the car. My girlfriend laughs. I get inside the car. This is the part where I tell my girlfriend everything Hero told me. Right before she goes off on what it means to be a god, and whether or not I'm going to help him.
Goddess was the shield, Hero the sword. Sort of like Christianity- of truth, and of faith, but less about spreading a belief. They were armaments for the good of mankind. And these gods, they're real, every last one of them. These gods don't have specific affinities, they work more like a loose net of visitors to our planet Earth. They don't always stay, unless they like what they see. Some came too early, seeing basic creatures--humanity in its early stages-- and left for more fruitful ventures. Others have come, set up shop, making business of the human condition. Others come bearing pity. Some genuinely care.
To think that Earth was so special that it would only have the one and only god, and that god would make Earth the pinnacle of all creation, this is absurd. Earth is just another spinning atom. Another wave on the beach.
Goddess visited Earth first as a spectator of the great battles humans would wage. Because Gods don't have warfare, this was sport. Gods don't do battle in the physical sense, they just deny each other joy. This is worse than death. Human warfare began small, with boney fists and hurled rocks. This is when Goddess enters the picture. She witnesses Hero. Hero, standing tall over the body of a little girl, bruises all down her cheek like bludgeon-tears. All around him, four men, bigger and broader than Hero himself. The girl stole something from the men, a fruit. So they beat her. And Hero stepped in. But it wasn't enough. Hero's tall body takes blows for the girl. One man falls, eyes gouged to mush. Grapes smashed, red wine spilt. The other three men bring rocks down on Hero's back, his body wrapped tightly around the girl, protecting her. And then Goddess steps in. And ever since, he has been her sword. Defending the defenseless here and there. Acting as Aegis.
At this point in the story, the Red Honda has stopped, dead, at a red-light. My girlfriend leans in and kisses me on the lips. She looks up from closed lids and asks, What happened next? I tell her, You'll love this.
Hero fell in love. Unfortunately, to be with her, he would have to die. But she was his shield, and thus made him invulnerable. It was torture. She was just an echo. A shadow. To have her exist seperate from himself, he became detached and angry. In battle, this served as his edge. He would slay a million men putting himself in impossible situations. To die. But now she loved him, too. And she wanted him to experience what he had given so many defenseless individuals. Life. So they were both unhappy, serving each other.
One day, in the last couple of decades Hero says, other Earth overseers hear of Goddess and Hero's love affair. Repulsive. God and man. An abomination. So the gods, they take away Goddess' joy. They made her mortal, no longer able to protect Hero. It was his turn to play shield.
My girlfriend urges me to continue. But that's all he told me, I say. The next thing I know, he's complaining about being downed by nurses in faded brown uniforms. We talk about Hero's idea of gods, she asks me if I'm going to help him. It depends on what he wants me to help him with, I tell her. Then she asks me what I was thinking about cooking for dinner. Some sort of seafood, I say. Shrimp, she agrees. We head to the market before going home to her place.
Applause
A room full of applause, and the only sound is my girlfriend's high heels clack, clack, clacking her up to a stage. Through a field of waving hands, she struts, down a swath cut in black foldable chairs. She is accepting an award at a local elementary school. This is where she works. Not here in this particular room, we're in the cafeteria-- a large room with high ceilings and white tiled flooring. The windows are tall, crystal clear gateways to the outside world. The outside world covered in bright green grass and metal playgrounds. The kind with bridges that connect towers, with little useless steering wheels made out of plastic. And those steering wheels, they take you nowhere, except in your head.
My girlfriend reaches the front and scales the stairs stage-left. She looks out over the crowd. A multitude of individuals, clapping silently for her. I wave my hands too, back and forth, rotating to a point, stopping, and rotating back across the air. I clap the same clap that a girls' chorus might use in one of their songs in an elementary school just like this one. But not this one. There is no singing here. But there are spirit fingers. Applause.
Waving hands begin to descend against laps as my girlfriend raises an open palm out toward the crowd. Her right hand, thumb crossed inward, reaches her chin and then up away from her body. She says, "Hello." She goes into her wordless speech about art. This is what her award is about-- art. She is getting an award for revitalizing the school's once-dying art program. Dying, like the deaf community itself.
With advanced hearing aids, the deaf needn't learn a sub-culture so detached from normalcy. Hearing is important. And they can fix what's wrong with you. With advanced procedures, stem cell research, transplants. They want to help you, restore your ability to experience the world. What little perception we do have, it is to be cherished, and everyone sitting around me, they're missing out. Missing out on tone. They're missing out on music. And sirens and distant trains in the night. Babies crying. Lovers grunting. Girlfriends snoring. They're missing out on the obnoxious alarm going off in the next room for an hour and thirty minutes.
While they're missing out on sound, we're missing out on heightened reliance on sight, smell, touch. The nuances of tone have nothing on the nuances of facial expressions and hand gestures. Maybe we're missing out. But the numbers don't lie. Majority is normal. If not that, then plurality. If not that, whoever's in charge of things is dictator of Province Normal. High arbiter of all things usual.
Dying or not, this packed room of the hearing-impaired is all focused on the woman at the front of the room, high above us on stage. Single-handedly, she saved the art program at this school. She struck a deal between the school and a local church. On weekends the local church would use the school for one of those twelve step programs. This quasi-religious recovery-program off-shoot of the church would help fund the school's need for art classes.
I went to Glorify Recovery, the twelve step program, only once. I went because my girlfriend wanted me to. She was going to show her support for the program. More like her support of their support, I told her when we entered that cafeteria a few years ago. She scowls at this remark. This is the kind of thing that got her writing songs about me with phrases like "You're a stupid dick. . ."
My girlfriend, the tower on stage, links everyone's mind to a single concept--intent. She says art is intent. The physical embodiment of your art aside, intention is, in and of itself, art. Expression, something these kids need to understand is not limited because of their "disability," she says, is the essence of art. Her intent was to save the art program, so, during Glorify Recovery, the twelve step programs on weekends, she sells art. All proceeds then go back into the school's art program, and she sees none of it.
Glorify Recovery was on its first step when she sold four paintings. The first and most difficult step-- admitting you have a problem. Four people went up on stage that first meeting. They all left with a painting. All of them feeling relieved of some pressure, and wanting to help a good cause. One guy, a sex addict, he goes home with a transitional piece about a goldfish that was squished. He really hit it off with my girl. Being a sex addict, I didn't trust him. Infuriated that she would even talk to him, I walked back to my apartment. A twelve block walk, because my girlfriend wanted to draw people in and sell art, to fund the expanding horizons of her students.
The guy, he said he was going to give it to his wife, whom he had cheated on. She didn't know. She wasn't there for his soliloquy on that. She was at home fucking his best friend. The goldfish guy would find them and leave, infuriated like me. I saw him in a gun shop that day, while walking those twelve blocks. I couldn't imagine why. He had just discovered he had a problem and he can work through it with the support and love of his new found recovery group. I couldn't imagine why he was in the gun shop until I read the paper the next day.
I didn't kill anyone and I didn't need a gun. I was just a stupid, jealous dick who disappointed his girlfriend. Time and time again. And she broke up with me. It wasn't until I started working at Saint Dympna a year ago that I realized my problem, admitted it, and got back together with her.
Ceilings Don't Exist
Something strange happens before I exit the bathroom in the cafeteria here at Saint Dympna's Ward. When I exit, everyone in the cafeteria is staring up at the ceiling.
It is May 18th, Thursday, when I go into the bathroom in the cafeteria. The bathroom door is wooden, with a metal plate drilled into the middle, on the right side. This is for hands to push, but all around the plate, there is evidence to the contrary. Grease stains from a thousand hands, avoiding the metal, pressing the wood. I avoid all of it, and press the top right corner of the door. Probably still contributing to the expanding stain of hand oil.
Inside the bathroom, I now wash my hands.
With furtive grace, a silent giant creeps.
All movement outside the bathroom ceases. Through the thick wooden door, I can't hear this, but it is happening, going on without my involvement. I go to exit. On this side of the door, there are no grease stains from hand oil. Just a metal handle. The door only opens one way, and on the inside, you have little choice as to how you will open it. How you'll get out.
Met with gaping mouths, I then look up. Before words can spill from my mouth to ask the others what happened, everyone falls to the ground in unison as a blast of air explodes against our bodies. Chairs and tables shatter and little game pieces go flying. Paints splatter and mix together against the patients, nurses, the walls, the floor-- everything covered in a sick mix of brownish orange.
The cafeteria is ceiling-less. The blue sky and clouds are now fixed within a blank box. On every edge of where the ceiling would meet the rising walls, there are flames slowly rolling down the white paint. This probably releases some sickeningly toxic fumes, because several people are throwing up on themselves.
Hero once told me, "The gods won't hesitate to cleave the tops of mountains in order to crush the misbehaving villages in the valley. They don't view humanity as a group of individuals. When they punish a small group by killing them, that's like kicking your dog. Where you kick the dog, that's where it's going to hurt, but only because it sends a message to its brain telling it that it's going to hurt. If the gods punish one group, the rest of humanity is supposed to learn. And like a dog having been kicked many times throughout its life, it's supposed to fear."
City officials would later tell us it was two low currents of air that ripped our roof off. Riding one of those currents was a low flying jet. The jet was flying fast enough to cause a delayed sonic boom. That's what knocks us all down. They didn't comment on the flaming walls or the toxic paint. Our problem, they said. Dressed up with a tie and suit, but Our Problem was the message.
A problem my superiors didn't address was that of a missing patient. The building's foundation somehow shook and loosed Hero from his shackles. Fearing him, no one said anything. His prison lie cracked and empty.
The Sea
"Imagine your home by the sea. Standing on the beach, feet deep in the water, your home before you-- in flames," she tells me. This is Tamera telling me a story.
Quick-sand recession as your weight buries your feet, the air all salty around you, clean and clear in your lungs on the intake. Chest rising, chest sinking. Exhale.
Waves are strange the way they lap up, slide up on and in and around your toes. The glass of water seems flat. From space, the brilliant diamond eyes see flat water atop Earth, but everywhere, close enough, there it is-- choppy. Up, down, up, down. Expand, contract, expand, contract. To that glass of water, that little ocean, we are gods--like the sun, and it's daughter, Luna, the moon.
"There is a storm in Hero's lungs," she says, "Push-pulling in the fire by the sea."
Another story Hero has told someone about his struggle. How did he convince Tamera? Science.
This is Tamera's idea of romance.
"Imagine you were engineered, genetically and behaviorally to need someone. You would roam the earth with emptiness until you found them. Every detail matters in the equation, especially the eyes."
Eyes, the window to the soul, she tells me, are the most important physical feature for this engineered person. Once they lock with another's, they can tell one thing about them--whether or not they are their match.
"And the person you seek is the same way. Engineered like you. All of your attributes are the most attractive possible in that person's mind. Everything you say matches what they would ask."
Like signals and receptors in the body, she tells me. Biology. I took that, I tell her, in college. That and psychology. I know how it works.
"And imagine standing there, on the beach, sinking. Watching your home go up in flames. Your life sabotaged by those who created it, those involved in the project to bring you and your lover together. Sabotaged because it was becoming beyond their reach, beyond their abilities to stop. And that person you have been searching for your whole life, burning up inside. Your receptor gone, and now you have nothing left. What do you do with your life?"
You find your offspring, she tells me. Find the child born to human and goddess, birthed right there on the beach. Make sure it's alive, she tells me, and you will be whole. And make sure your creators suffer.
Final Vignette
It has been three days since the roof of Saint Dympna's Ward was torn off. Unexplained as it was, the only thing I can believe now is what they have given us. Maybe a god really did swoop in an shave the top of the building off, capturing Hero in the process. Maybe a top secret special forces team took him back to the lab where he was created. I am too small a man to say one way or the other on such big concepts. Too big are they to examine objectively. Too close am I.
I realize that Goddess and Hero, they weren't serving each other by being sword and shield. They weren't created in some lab to fall in love. They just were in love. And maybe that makes some people crazy. It makes me insecure, I know. But with her, I am stronger. Able to take on more stress, more pain. More joy than I ever thought possible. I realize you don't have to be a hero or a god to overcome the problems you create in your life.
I look at her in the kitchen doing the dishes all alone. I get up from my chair and put my book face down, stopping the story mid-sentence-- characters frozen at my will. I walk up to the sink and stop. My right foot is in a black square, my left in a white. I roll up my sleeves, tucking them into themselves and pick up a bowl. I turn on the faucet and begin washing it with soap and a sponge. She looks over, sees my soapy and wet hands, and smiles at me. This is worth my time. This is worth my time and we don't have to be saving the world for that to be so.
For B-B
if I were to continue this story(WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO, SO DO NOT READ BELOW, I would begin with the ending, and the end would begin like this. . .
Control Theory
People would like to think they can control things. More than that, they believe they control themselves. They feel like their actions are not just a series of circumstantial events that narrow their reality. I believe that, too, now, faced with the end of the universe.
"You are important," he tells me.
I don't believe him, but he tells me he knows me better than I think. My soul is bound to the same fate as his. The same as the love of his life.
When I was sixteen, my older brother told me something disturbing. Our parents got married on the basis of a "psychic feeling."
Hero showed up three days ago and told us, "You have to come with me. Both of you."
He shows up at my girlfriend's apartment while I'm helping her with the dishes and says we have to leave, immediately. I don't know why we listen to him, but we do.
My parents were married after six months of seeing eachother. This is not the strange part. My mother met my father once, at a party in college. It was the only party she went to. My father and her hardly exchanged words. The next week, my father gets a phone call. My mother had spent days looking him up. Trying to figure out his number. My father picks up the phone, and it is my mother. She tells him, "I think we are meant to be together." He says he feels the same way.
Three days ago, we tell Hero to wait while we discuss it in the kitchen. He tells us we will come with him because it is our destiny. And he seems certain, like it has already happened. In the kitchen, I disagree with what my girlfriend says is a "feeling." An inclination. A draw to him. I tell her I have a draw to her, and that going with him, I would be abandoning that draw. That sense of protection. But she says she feels more strongly about this than anything else in her life. I get a sick sinking-into-myself feeling. Does she mean she feels more strongly about going with him than staying with me? She goes. And I, of course, go with her.
And now I am faced with the end of the universe. Whatever authored all of this set up safety nets in case the lifeforms living within attempted to gain control, Hero tells us. We are in the middle of a field, where it is now raining. My girlfriend, she is screaming at Hero to stop.
"You are important," he repeats with a new inflection, "does not mean you are good." He shakes the gun in my face. Killing me is the only solution, he says, and I am almost.
"I'm over my jealousy," I tell him. I swear, I am. But it is not good enough for him. My jealousy is the result of an experiment that controlled two human beings, from birth. It made them believe they were meant to be together, and the result was me. The first child, my parents planned. The second child was me. I was an accident. I was meant to look like an accident, he tells me, raindropps splattering on his lips as he speaks.
Whomever I have a child with will die. My seed is virus ridden, he says. I tell him I've been having sex with her. "Only upon birthing the child, severing from your love, will she die," is his rebuttle.
The gods had left Earth a long time ago, and they set in place an agreement with several governments of this world. To ensure the safety of Earth, they must devise a way to destroy Hero and Goddess' child. Their child, my girlfriend, and I, the weapon intended for her destruction. Hero tells me she is his daughter. And I must die.
He squeezes the trigger and I am shot. As I lay bleeding, reality begins to shatter around me. My girlfriend is screaming, holding my head up, blood on her hands, and in the distance I hear Hero sobbing, muttering that he had misinterpreted the situation. Everything was safe, until the daughter, my girlfriend lost or was severed from that which she loved. A child would have continued the love, as it did for Hero and Goddess. My girlfriend was the last thing holding this world together. My world. And I was the last thing holding her world together. Our world.
(But since the story was already finished, this is just an interesting, overly complicated backstory to where I was eventually headed if I hadn't stopped writing when I did. I think it's fun to make things more epic than they really are, but in regards to this, I realized that epic or not, true love is a special rarity that few people ever witness or take part in. I am a part of it. A part of something meaningful.)
Last night a few things happened that I never thought likely. I got a number of drunk calls, was raped, ate the body of Christ himself, and fell completely in love.
You heard me correct, raped. Not like penis in my anus, no, though I did make the joke while at the party: "Do you believe in puppy love? Because I tried it once and their assholes are too small." I was at this frat house drinking, and their rule is $1 or a joke they haven't heard for a beer. Because one beer is not worth a dollar, I usually go and lay down some awesome jokes for free beer. I'll usually print off two pages of jokes and bring it with me. This may seem lame, but I get free beer. And the only thing that tastes better than free alcohol is stolen alcohol. And I wasn't in the mood to get arrested.
So, there I am, standing in a hallway talking to some friends, when I am raped. This unfortunate looking girl, overweight and covered in plate-mail mascara, saunters up, grapples both of my amazing buttcheeks, and starts humping me. I turn around and shove her back, "What the fuck are you doing?" She bounds away into a room of dancing bodies and disappears. Her friends are laughing their asses off at this. "Your friend just raped me," I tell them. One of the girls, also highly bruised from the ugly stick, tells me she dared her friend to do it. "That's great," I say. This is a group of girls from my dorm that have neither looks nor personality. They are devoid of all redeeming factors, and deserve to be put out of everyone else's misery.
It's weird having random people know who you are. I was standing walking up to get beer and this chick was in front of me. I stand there behind her waiting, and she turns, looks at me, looks away, and then turns to me and asks, "What's your name?"
Me: "Hunter"
Her: "What's your last name?"
Me: "Caldwell"
Her: "Oh, I was just on your facebook today."
I am like, oh, awesome, whatever, I'm trying to get beer.
Her: "I read some of your stuff, it's really good. I wanted to leave a comment and tell you I thought it was good, but didn't know if that would be creepy."
I am elated to have her know me through my writing. She tells me she was with one of my friends from Hampton Sydney, so it's not like it was completely and utterly random, but it was still a weird, warm glow that carried me throughout the night. My ego was totally busting at the seems by the time I left that party, which was like 30 to 40 minutes in. I had promised to play wingman for my friend Sean, but the girl he was trying to hook up with never showed. To my knowledge. So, I left to go smoke with Lenora.
It is so strange, the way memory works. I believe it is called something like state-dependent recall, where, when you are in an altered state, you can recall doing things once in that state again. For example, in the movie Beerfest, the two brothers are drunk as shit the first time they go to the underground drinking competition. Once they're in Germany looking for the place again while sober, they can't find it. In order to find the place again, they get one of them roaring drunk. And it works. This is totally the case with Lenora's apartment on this particular night. For some reason I walk four streets in the wrong direction, using flawed logic instead of inate directional sense. Eventually I come to, realizing I am walking in the direction of oblivion, and return to the correct street.
I come to the door, call her, and she comes down to let me in. She opens the door slowly, seeing me, and stands there, knees bent in what looks like attack position, smiling at me. She is unbelievably cute. I smile and she says, "C'mon!" and we rapidly ascend into her apartment. I take my jacket off and lay with her on her bed, where she is watching Dirty Dancing on her laptop. It is the last few scenes, and she is explaining everything to me. She makes fun of Jennifer Grey("Baby") relentlessly. I join in.
Her(singing it): "I have nooo hiiips"
Me(singing): "Oooor tiiiiits"
Her(singing): "And Iiiii have a witch noooose"
Seriously, Lenora is the funniest girl I know. You have to get kind of close to see this, but hell, I'm about as close as they come, and she says some of the funniest shit ever.
Lenora let's me read a poem she wrote about me. It pretty much nails me and my relation to other girls. They are all background. I think about this the next day while walking, and it is absolutely true. It's like all the girls I have wanted to get with or have gotten with have been filler.
We smoke out of my bowl and come inside to watch the coolest video of I have seen in awhile. It's from a movie called Les Triplettes de Bellville. In the movie, three retired singers from the 30's help a bicycle rider in some fashion. That's all I really know about it at this point, but I really like this video. I have watched it like ten times, and I plan on renting the movie at some point.
Post-eating, we kind of make out, and you know, get around to sex. I have never done anything high, so this was a brand new experience for me. Let's take note of some things.
1. Kissing while high is among the greatest things ever.
2. Holding her was like the best feeling in the world. Just the warmth and her company.
3. Everything was amplified. Every curve of her body that my hand rode. Every breath breathed.
4. Last time I jacked off while high, I almost shit myself.
So, I am worried that I will cum too soon, because this is like the most incredible shit I have done with my life. And I am doing it with her, which makes it ten times better. I'm trying to maintain, but, then, her roommate comes home, and she kind of freaks out because we don't hear her after she gets in. "Don't you think that's weird," she asks me. So, paranoia supercedes my hornyness, and we stop having sex for the night. It is still in my system the next morning, and it makes me suck, and it doesn't feel as good as it did during the night. A poor tradeoff, that morning. But I'm not complaining as long as she isn't. I like being good for her, and, in Sahara's the night before, she whispered to me that the sex was really good, so I'm not worried about sucking once in awhile. Especially because I can apply the typical, "I was high" excuse. A classic.
I am more paranoid than horny at this point-- I guess preservation is more powerful than sex. I lay there, reasurring her and thus, reassuring myself. I am a little sketched out, as I don't live in that apartment and am relying on her judgement when it comes to what's out of the ordinary and what isn't. But then I think about it. You know, really think about it, and I came to the conclusion that, even if somebody broke into her apartment, what is the worst thing that could happen? I get shot? Dude, I am so unconcerned by bullets. I sit there and realize that, for Lenora, and through my love of her, I would stop at nothing to defend her. All the rules go out the window when you fight for someone you love.
Things I am not afraid to do to you if you break into my girl's apartment while I am there:
1. Kick/stab/punch/bite you in the balls
Seriously, I don't care. I am going for your weakness.
2. Snap your neck.
People say I am an angry person sometimes. This comes in handy when you need the strength to destroy someone.
3. Stomp on you/your balls.
I watched wrestling excessively as a kid, so I am pretty much certified to power-bomb you into the tile floor and commence the hoedown. Except I will actually make contact with your body.
4. Light you on fire.
My girl has a lot of hairspray and lighters laying around. This would pretty much make my day if I could do this to you. So many times I have seen this in movies and just been like, "BAD-ASS."
So, I lay there, her sleeping in my arms, and I finally hear her roommate. She goes to the bathroom adjoining their two rooms. Through the cracked door, light and sound escapes into my girl's room. I can hear her roommate sit and begin peeing. Then I hear "sploosh." I think to myself, "No way." Another one. Plop-sploosh. I am listening to her roommate take a shit. It is like the grossest end-night image I could imagine.
Chuck Palahniuk said, in Fight Club, that all we can ask of perfection is one moment. That moment stretches and engulfs time when she's around. Before long, we are both asleep.
So, when you're high you get strange perspective on things. Here are some statements or thoughts that caught and fettered my attention tonight:
-The "magic number" is 19. I'll have to see if it has any mathematical
significance in the morning. If not, that guy was just fucking with me
when he said this. I was talking to this guy, who I cleverly deduced("Hey, you're wearing a stoner cap, do you smoke" "Yeah dude") was a stoner. And I was like "You realize I effectively split our group into two groups of three?"
"Yeah man, but wait 'till you see more complexy patterns. Like, higher numbers. And, remember this, the magic number? It's nineteen"
-You can spare your life by giving homeless Dutch people your pack of cigarretes and lighter. This is called a concession. Or a trade for your life.
-The evolution of the dance. It is attached to music, which, by virtue of evolving itself, advances dancing.. Think about it, dancing is tribalistic. You can look at long past cultures to identify this. The African continent and the Americas are huge contributors to the advancement of this sort of thing. And, look at a lot of popular music. It changes, and with it, the dances. You see your parents' or grandparents' dancing style from their time, it is so radically different, and it is part of a constant evolution.
It is really funny to see a chick dancing to a style of music with a mismatched style of dancing.
-Words have pretty narrow functions sometimes. And then, some words just sound wrong when applied to certain things. Example: I overhear someone talking about a "Champions Honor League." Champions? Really? When I think champions, I think swords, blood, colloseums. Not your average 4.0 student with his stunted sense of style and smug and/or gloomy persona. No, I think heroes. Legends. Champions.
The last sane story I will tell begins with four guys walking twelve blocks in the cold to get to a party. A party that isn't going on that night. So, four more blocks over, to a party where some girl we'll call "Jill" invited Theft. "I'm bringing someone" he told her. Someone(s), it turns out. When we get inside, Chocolate, Theft, Roman, and myself all mingle at the door before spotting the keg. I am immediately ahead of everyone, leaving my friends behind. There is a couch against the wall, next to the keg, and in front of the beer pong table. People are sitting on the couch like it is a fucking riser for the beer pong game. Their legs hang over the edge of the couch and form a gauntlet to the keg. This gets increasingly irritating as I drink more.
The next thing I know I have five solo-cup sized beers in me and I am out on the porch negotiating with Tony, a kid from my dorm, to give me some of the liquor he brought with him. He has major OCD and won't let me drink out of his bottle. I tell him this is probably for the best, since, you know, I have aids from all the buttsex I have. Apparently I say this very loudly, because a group of people turn to stare at me. The girl in the group is hot and I decide saying "Yeeah, you heard correctly" is the appropriate response. I don't say anything else, as I am back to bargaining for liquor, the devine nectar of the gods. The girl turns around and giggles. Tony agrees to pour some of his draft into my red cup. He tells me it is Bacardi 151. I tell him I love him. We throw back together. He wretches and I lick my lips, telling him I am indebted, and that 151 is delicious.
I head back inside for more beer since I have no more liquor. I pass Theft on the way inside and shake my empty cup in the air at him. He takes a second to register this, turns, and asks, "Dude, you're going back already? How many have you had?"
"Like five," I tell him.
"Let me catch up!"
I smile and walk away, tripping over the gauntlet of feet stretched casually across the floor. This pisses me off so as soon as I get my beer I chug it and fill up for a seventh. With my seventh beer in hand, I head back to the porch outside. The porch rests on the second floor of an apartment building. I want to test its integrity, so I give Theft my beer and begin jumping up and down. Because, testing something with YOURSELF that could lead to your DEATH is an awesome idea. Theft is saying something to me, but I am too busy testing the strength of the pillars below.
Theft: "Dude, it's concrete"
Hunter: "That just means we'll fall faster, right?"
Theft: "Uh, what beer are you on?"
Hunter: "Mmmm, like.. like seven... and some 151 that Tony gave me."
Theft: "Jesus man, I'm on like four, give me a chance to catch up with you."
Hunter: "I knew a guy that ate just ketchup. It was gross."
Seeing that I was 100% capable of sustaining a real conversation, Theft takes this time to introduce me to "Jill," the girl that invited him. She is cute, with short brown hair, bobbed, and piercing eyes. I shake her hand and she smiles. I am not revolting to her because she is probably more drunk than me. Distracted, she shambles off into the party. I ask Theft if he is hooking up with her. I must have almost yelled it, because he's giving me the buldging eyes, slice-across-the-throat hand movement. "Oh," I say. "Nice."
I head back inside and pass the couch. This time, I step on everyone's feet. Someone calls me an asshole, but I tell them they are impeding my intoxication. I get an eighth beer and Chocolate and Roman say they're headed out. I am giving them high fives and hugs like they're departing for some long journey that they'll never come back from. I turn around and some random guy is behind me, so I high five him too. I am a happy drunk tonight.
Terror strikes. The keg is dry. I almost begin weeping, because I am no where near as drunk as I want to be. Jill sees that I am distraught and comes up to me.
Jill: "There's another keg in the place behind this one. Just go around back, outside, and take a left."
Hunter: "You are my hero."
I end up following her to the next apartment where she waits outside to smoke. You know, on one of those ancient fire escape things, the pitch black metal and what not. Inside, I am packed between two fat dudes that smell like shit. Luckily a girl entertains me while I wait to get to the alcohol. She asks me if I'm Hunter. Hunter Caldwell. I say yes, and ask her why the hell she knows me. I am enamored. I feel famous. "You went to James River, you were in my graduating class. I guess you didn't see me much." It just got scary. I have never ever seen this girl in my life. She tells me her name as she exits and I tell her I'll look her up on Facebook sometime. I immediately forget her name.
I finally get to the keg, fill up, and leave. I go outside and my current entertainment, Jill, is gone. I decide to drink this beer as fast as possible and go for another. I do, and a guy from my dorm comes up behind me saying, "Nice." I turn around to see who it is. It's some kid that absolutely zero people like. I've never had a problem with him, but think that fate has given me a means to my own entertainment. I talk to him for awhile, making sarcastic remarks about his leather outfit. Before I go for another beer, he asks me what my name is. Not being very creative in my drunken stupor, I tell him my name is James. That's my first name, so technically I wasn't lying. Throughout the rest of the night I would tell him my name was Fred, Jason, Jackson, Jefferson, Earnest, Bunsburry, and Captain Kirk. I think he finally got it by the last one.
After several more beers, I am out on the terrifyingly high fire escape. Jill is sitting on the stairs leading up. I guess to the roof, there aren't any third floor apartments. She's smoking a cigarrette, and I ask her for one. I am not a smoker, but when I drink, I do smoke. The nicotine-alcohol concoction is nice for a head rush. We sit out there and smoke, talking. I am not going to lie to you, I remember nothing of the conversation, and I'm not going to pretend I do. She asks me to hold on to her cigarrette and heads inside to use the bathroom. The kid from my dorm comes by and asks my name. I think this is somewhere around the use of "Jefferson." "Cool," he says, and I head inside, leaving Jill's and my cigarrette behind on the rail.
After awhile, I am drinking another beer out on the porch, talking to Theft, when Jill comes up. She asks me if I have a girlfriend. I am honest, so I say yes. I kind of wish I didn't right now, because the question is not subtle at all. I tell her yes, and am surprised to hear her explain the friend zone.
She says, "Oh, because you can climb the 'Friend' ladder or the 'Fuck' ladder." Ooo, girlfriend means "Friendzone"! I'm not a cheating bastard, but am disappointed to have been put in a less-than-awesome category.
The rest of the night between that and getting back to the dorm is unimportant. We did go to another party, but it was totally lame. The last thing I remember before getting back to the dorm is riding on Theft's back down the street.
So, I get to the dorm, sloppily swipe my card a few times, and rush upstairs. Yes, stairs. Even drunk, I have a four-floors-or-less stairs policy. I live on the third floor and I refuse to be that lazy. I have to take a hurculean piss, so I go to the bathroom. I see two shoes sticking out from under a stall door. Somebody has been partying way harder than me. It kind of reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, and I wonder if the shoes will curl up and disappear.
I am willing to ignore the person, take my piss, and be on my way, but then the groaning starts.
Hunter: "You alright in there, man?"
"OoOOOARH!"
Hunter: "Dude, you don't sound so good, you need some help?"
He starts puking, "BLAAAARRRH!"
I finish up and look under the stall. There is dark, viscous liquid coating everything. The toilet, the floor, the wall, his arms and shirt. It is fucking gross. I reckognize him. It is "Somedude2" from my story "Drunk People." We'll just call him "Toilet" in honor of his submission to the porcelain god.
Hunter: "I am so getting you some water man... it's like. . . a cure-all"
Toilet: "BLllaaargh"
I go to DasBox, knowing he is the only other person awake at four in the morning. I ask him to help me. I don't know for what, maybe moral support. Or maybe because Toilet is a fucking tank of a person, and immobile to someone like me.
We keep supplying Toilet with water and he keeps throwing most of it up, or just pouring it on himself. Toilet has been arrested before on campus and is on the verge of getting kicked out of the dorm, so I can't leave him in good concience. We decide to move him. But first we get a trashcan so he can throw away his shirt. It is literally caked in brown and black throw up. I don't know about you, but the second I start throwing up black shit, get help for me, please. We get him to his room. I walk inside, and try to get Greez off of Toilet's bed. I tell him he has to move. And he doesn't listen to me. This pisses Toilet off and he says something to the effect of "I'll fucking kill you." I don't really remember, but I recall it being commanding. And besides, this guy is an ox and could destroy Greez. Greez hears him and springs into awareness, moving to the floor. Some random girl is on his bed.
I mention the last part, about Toilet, because that may very well be me soon. Heading back out into the drinking world, beyond my limits and what not. My friend Luke is coming back this summer, and let's just say I can drink a lot, but not like it's my job. Like, if you're in the military, you kill people for a living. If you're Luke Koftan, you drink bitches under tables for a living. This man keeps drinking after he has won drinking contests. People actually tell him, "You don't have to drink anymore, you know."
"FUCK YOU," is his response. So, I have some catching up to do. With a family history of alcoholism and my Irish heritage, here's to the last sane story I ever tell.
Because I want to write about something, and I was just reminded of the first time I ever got high:
It is freshman orientation, and I am working the Fencing table with a friend of mine and my girlfriend at the time("Jane" again), who was a junior. We have fun cracking jokes on freshman, because, hey, we're no longer one of them, and that's what we do. Freshman suck.
Jane gets a call on her phone. It is Paul Ruecroft, a senior at James River High. He and my good friend Luke are hanging out and want us to join them. I didn't know Paul well, other than the fact that his father taught my sixth grade science class, but Luke and I had become pretty good friends by this point, dominating any class that we shared. So we go over to Paul's house, enter, and head straight to the back of the one-story building. It is kind of run down and packed with random shit.
Let me explain the setup to you. Paul's parents were both huge hippies back in the day. His mother is sitting on the bed, his younger brother is sitting across from me. Another family member, female, is there. The rest of us are positioned around a gravity bong(GB, for all of you who don't have better things to do with your time than say everything out, fully). Now, you may be thinking, "where is the father?" Good question. While we're in this nearly vacant, white room smoking bud, the father of the household is paralyzed from the hips down in the room next to us, asleep. Mr. Ruecroft had been in a biking accident a year prior, and was basically fucked.
9:00PM: Mrs. Ruecroft tells us we have to be relatively quiet. There is someone in the next room who works for the county. Yeah, my sixth grade science teacher. We could get "in deep shit." I get the impression that people who smoke too much are really paranoid. Paul takes the first hit off of the GB. The resevoir is dirty. As my first time smoking, so far I am unimpressed.
9:05: I am taking mental notes on how to hit a GB. Of course, being a noob, I botch the first two. I drop the bottle, half full, into the water and it looks like a jet engine streaking across the sky, smoke pluming up and into my face.
9:15: A lot of sexual inneundos about "sucking correctly" are made. By now, on a fourth GB, I have it down. I turn to Luke and inform him that I, and I qoute, "Don't feel anything yet." His only response is, "You should take more."
9:25: Luke is telling me not to talk to Satan if I see him. Being stupid and naive, fear washes over my heart. I am not an atheist at this point in my life, and my belief structure allows the fear to be acceptable to my reality. "Don't talk to Satan if you see him, he might convince you to give him your soul." I believe him, but quickly forget and begin poking things.
9:30: I take my seventh and final GB. Somewhere between 4 and 6, I have been poking my girlfriend relentlessly. She is visibly uncomfortable. So, instead of being logical, I be high. I continue poking and groping on her body.
10:10: I am in the back seat of a car, on the right side, Luke to my left. In front of me is my girlfriend, and, driving, is Paul. We are on one of the most treacherous roads known to man--Old Bon Air. Let me explain. This road is home to over thirty car-related deaths, ranging from people flipping their cars at the bottom, in a creek and drowning, to vehicular manslaughter. It winds, with many trees and branches hanging over the gnolls that encase the road. Mostly drunk people die on this road. Luckily, we were just high as shit.
I decide that unbuckling my seatbelt and opening the door will be a good idea. Apparently, I didn't realize we were in a moving car. I begin stepping out of the car as Luke bounds across the backseat, slamming me back with a swift elbow to the chest. He basically saves my life.
10:19: We have arrived at Wendy's. I didn't realize, until now, that we were on a food run. I had been viewing our exodus from Paul's house as I would view a movie while high. If you've watched movies high, you know exactly what I am talking about. Every scene is interesting and totally unrelated to the subsequent scenes. Like a group of interrelated short stories that have nothing to do with eachother. What I am saying is there was a lack of cohesion to my thought, and I'm not going to lie, it was awesome.
10:03: We are still in front of the bright menu. There are like 3 cars in line behind us. Paul slowly turns around to look at Luke and I, probably to ask us what we want. I just see two bloodshot eyes and a huge grin. I begin laughing uncontrollably. Everyone laughs, but Paul pulls us back together to focus on food. The employees in Wendy's are alerted to our high, I am sure.
11:30: We are in Luke and Paul's friend's house. His name is Cory, and his entire family is getting high. This is awesome. I feel like I am on the Underground Railroad for Smokers. The Wendy's is long since destroyed, my girlfriend has left, and Paul has lectured me on making her uncomfortable. I say, "whatever," and proceed to join a group of people sitting in a circle passing a pipe.
12:40AM: We finish passing the pipe around. I am riding another high. Cory, Luke, and I go for a walk around the neighborhood.
12:50: I decide that ding-dong-ditch will actually be fun, for once, since I am fucked up. Luke and I go up to a random house. Cory stays behind on the street because he is a very paranoid person.
12:50:05: I ring the doorbell as fast as I can. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
12:50:15: We have forgotten that the "ditch" is key to playing.
12:50:20: The door begins to open, we freak out and start bolting.
12:55: Cory is nowhere to be found, and we can't find his house. Nothing in the neighborhood looks familiar.
1:00: We see a man in a robe and boxers marching down the street toward us. We walk by and say hello, immediately cracking afterwards. Definitely the guy who came to the door. He is now stampeding around the neighborhood seeking retribution. We are apparently bigger than he thought we would be, because he doesn't even question us.
1:10: "Psssssst." "Pssssssst." What the fuck is that sound, I ask Luke. We are in front of Cory's house, but aren't sure which one is his. All the lights are off.
Luke: "Were the lights on when we left?"
Hunter: "Uh, yeah, I think so."
"Pssssst," a sound eminates from the bushes.
Hunter: "No, seriously, what the fuck is that?"
Luke: "Cory? Cory, is that you?"
Cory pops out of the bushes and stumbles towards us, scared shitless.
Cory: "Dudes, I thought the cops were coming."
Apparently he had run back to his house, told everyone to hide, locked everything up, and turned off all the lights. He closed up shop.
Inside, I pass out under a table in the living room and have the best sleep I have ever had. Luke and I walked back to his house the next day, and I was a changed man.
My head is still spinning from the weekend. I went to Farifax to party at my girlfriend's. There is a terrifying amount of money in Northern Virginia. I was kind of sketched out at first, you know, a little uncomfortable at the prospect of being the peon of the group, what with my Richmond background and all. But no, the culture is the same almost everywhere you go. There is Subway. Sheetz. Taco Bell. Blockbuster. Everything you'd expect in any suburban area. The Suburbias of Richmond share all the same aspects, just at a different(see: lower) living standard.
It was my first time getting hit on by a 0-star girl(out of 5). According to Tucker Max, a 0-star is that fat girl who, in addition to being obscenely unnattractive, also has a terrible personality. She is loud, overly foreward, awkward, and all around obnoxious. He calls them "Wildebeasts" and says that "basic human rights do not apply to them." And she hit on me.
I am upstairs toking. Despite all the money in Nova, we smoke out of a ghettoblaster. I laugh at this in my head at the time and out loud after I've been smoked out. I am a bastard.
I head downstairs tipsy and high and I go to grab a beer. As I walk into the kitchen I hear, "I really wanna make out with someone." I glance over and see her--Allison, with her chubby cheeks, thick-rimmed emo glasses, and she looks at me.
I grab a beer. What the fuck is she thinking? No one will make out with her. She is She is at a party filled mostly with 18-19 year olds. Most of them girls. Is she lesbian?
She contorts her hefty body on the couch to see me grabbing a beer. She goes, "...But you're already taken." Damn straight, bitch. And even if I weren't... are you... are you serious?
I am not drunk enough to respond to this situation frankly. I grab a second beer. I want to be honest, so I load my proverbial gun of truth. In other words, I start drinking seriously.
It was a fun weekend, I just thought I'd document that one instance. Plenty of shit happened, including something absolutely horrifying. It's a subtle glow, warm and pulsing through your body like an ocean of vicodin.
Hunter: Oh man, cold pizza.
Jeff: Greatest. Food. Ever.
Hunter: I see my first slice.
Music ceases for a moment as the car is turned off and then on again. We're back from Sheetz and sitting in the parkinglot. It's an uneventful night, but we're both high, so we're both enjoying being in our heads.
Jeff: I got strawberry daiquiri flavored Sobe. That might be a little bit fruity.
Hunter: Haha, yeeeah, you might've just grown a tiny mangina.
Jeff: Eh, I tried all the other flavors and figured I'd try this one.
I laugh at him, he's a funny kid.
Jeff: Getting high is so weird. Life is all about your verbal melee-ing skills. If you can talk, you can dominate people.
Hunter: Let's not start that shit.
I know where this is going.
Jeff: No, it's totally social engineering.
Yep.
Jeff: That's the essence of it right there. But the point is, my getting high inhibits my ability to do that. Like, if words are my power, it takes away my power.
At this point I figure Jeff is bashing pot, and I'm afraid he's delivering his farewell address. This is a radical paradigm shift.
Jeff, in the most pseudo-profound tone he can muster, says, "Getting high takes away my power. I think that's supposed to be a profound statement or something." He thinks wrong.
Hunter: Takes away your power?
Jeff: Does getting high take away your power, Hunter?
Hunter: Not in a bad way.
Jeff: See, I think it takes away your power temporarily, but as a whole person reinforces you.
Hunter: I think so too, because that taking of power let's you sit back and let's your life--
Jeff: Degenerate?
Hunter: No, I mean, you view it instead of participate in it(not necessarily what I meant), and that's a different perspective. So when you come back, when you revert, and you remember that... you've discovered something about yourself or the universe. So, no, I don't really think I'm losing something so much, when I'm getting high. I just think I'm altering something so I can gain a different experience.
Jeff: Here's this. Your yes-no binary system thing... it's true, it exists. You have a plethora of options that are either in one of two states: active or passive.
Hunter: Yeah. Or "accepting" or "rejecting." Any two opposite terms. That's why I find the yin-yang fucking incredible. Like, that is a symbol that says ONE thing about the universe that is so fundamental and true. That controls the universe, that is the symbol of how things work.
Jeff: It also says to us that the Chinese were smart as shit.
This is where the conversation regarding duality stops being interesting and degrades into me saying, "Symbols are understandings." Jeff gets his turn to make fun of me. I deserve it, as my statement was true, but far too basic for its context. The next that happens is awesome. We reaccess music, a CD I had burned specifically for the night, packed to the very edge with some of the greatest high songs ever. The song "Charlie," by Red Hot Chili Peppers begins playing.
Jeff: You know why this CD is so good? It's amazing blazing music.
Hunter: I know, that's what this CD is. It's stuff that sounded really fuckin' cool when I was high. Like, I make different compilations and listen for specific types of sounds--
Jeff: I'm talking about the Chili Peppers CD. The double album.
Hunter: Hahaha, I'm sitting here just sucking my own dick, complimenting myself and everything.
Jeff: Hahaha, I don't care, I just love when we realize things like that. When I was hanging out with Mike and a couple of those other kids, we were talking about our experiences on acid. I go, "Dude, the carpet at Chris Pelatir's was just like... it was swirly." And then one of the other kids goes, "I TOOK SHROOMS ONCE AND THE LIGHTS WERE BRIGHTER." And the juxtaposition of that and how ridiculous it was made me realize how dramatic I was being. I was like, "Oh."
We start talking about sports next. Jeff says they're awesome, but regrets not being able to participate in them. I tell him I haven't been high enough to want to watch sports. I restate what I mean and say that I just haven't been the right mindset, and sometimes smoking allows that for anything. This can be a good or a bad thing, depending. But, then again, I don't believe in "good" or "bad." These are human constructs. There are things that are harmful and detrimental, but even these terms only scratch the surface of the true nature of things. It all goes back to duality, the core of the universe.
The next part I'm excluding because I don't like it. It deals with him and a girl. I'm not only excluding it for his privacy, but also because it's kind of stupid. His views on women may be true to some extent, but my experience tells me he is wrong, and that things are not necessarily one way with everyone. He thinks getting his car taken away will lead to him failing miserably and having no chance with said chick. I say that's not true, just that he would have to try harder. He talks about how to work the game, and I tell him he can just make the girl like him by being confident and comfortable with himself. He sees it differently, like she is a means to his own happiness. Disagreeing, I tell him it can be mutual. It is possible.
One of my favorite songs ever starts playing--"Final Cut" by Coheed and Cambria. It is a perfect background for the next part of our conversation. The song sets a sober, if not depressing mood. The conversation leads to the subject of death:
Hunter: I think there's real stuff in college(talking about relationships). Like, at that point you're developing different sentiments. You know what I mean? A lot of people anyway. I think that's called maturing, in a way.
Jeff: I agree. Yeah, I know.
Hunter: And I like that maturity doesn't have to change you, but at the same time, I'm only 18 right now, maturity could ruin me. I just have to mature to a certain point, you know? Where I'm happy.
Jeff: You have to be at the right place at the right time for you. Those kids that are like 15 and getting into the kind of shit we're doing right now.
Hunter: You know what it helps me realize?
Jeff: What?
Hunter: That helps me realize the phases in age, also realizing that I am getting older. And I will die someday.
Jeff: You're not invincible.
Hunter: Grasping that concept is kind of sad. That's when you give up man.
Jeff: You don't really capitulate(I love hanging out with Jeff, he's one of the few people that can challenge my vocabulary. I will be honest, I did not know this word, but I did understand it. In case you don't know, it basically means to give up. ) until years later. I mean, you'll contemplate capitulation to yourself. But it's the moment when capitulation became a certainty.
THIS IS NO BEGINNING, YEAAHH YEAAHH, THIS IS THE FINAAAL CUUUT, OPEN UP!
Hunter: No, I hate that, it's like the brain was meant to accept death.
Jeff: It was. That's just how the human species works.
Hunter(disgusted): I hate that.
Jeff: Like, what if every ant-drone spent its life trying to prolong itself instead of working for the hive? (This statement really actually worries me. Jeff, if you read this, which I know you will, we need to talk, man. That's the most terrifying statement you've ever made. Like, c'mon, we are not ants, there is no hive. To some extent, fuck humanity, I am living for myself.)
Hunter: That's why I respect people who've broken the triple digits. It's like, damn, you have an incredible fucking will to hang out.
The conversation makes its way to:
Jeff: Our parents always make fun of us, like, "YOU THINK YOU'RE INVINCIBLE"
Hunter: Haha.
Jeff: I mean, why not? We should at this point.
Hunter: Yeah, because generally we are. That's why we need to take more risks at this point in our life, because this is when we're choosing what we want in the next phase. In the next universe of our understanding.
Jeff: You could become like a motivational speaker for high people.
I make my way to explaining that every action is the precursor to subsequent actions, and thus, determinism.
Hunter: Honestly, I wish I had never learned about determinism.
Jeff: That's why I've never actually taken the time to learn about it.
Hunter: Like seriously, that is just an avenue you don't want to explore. Like, you are a logical person, and if you start knowing certain things... I'm just saying, some ideas can break a person.
And then.
Jeff: This is gonna sound really gay, but I've been reading a great book called Healing the Shame That Binds You. It's all about family systems and stuff. And how people end up, like, fucked up.
Hunter: Like interactions between people?
Jeff: Yeah, like how interactions between people fuck us up.
Hunter: Isn't it weird how we kind of mold eachother?
Jeff: Yeah. It's kind of crazy.
Hunter: It's kind of sad, because we're molding eachother and we don't have any choice in it.
The music-box like ending to the song is playing. It's melancholy, which I think is why I was. Music can totally set a mood while high. I usually avoid depressing shit when I'm high. But then the blue-grass-esque ending kicks in and I'm set. I go into Coheed and Cambria band lore. He has no clue what I'm talking about and it's all one-way conversation:
Hunter: Damn, I hate trying to explain fucking esoteric shit-- bullshit that no one should know.
The car starts playing "Salieri Strikes Back," by Warmen. Everyone is happy.
Jeff rants about something for awhile, but I stop listening and start doing air-keyboard to the song, because the song kicks ass and I can't resist. He laughs at me, and I tell him I'm good at anything involving moving my fingers really fast. It's true.
Jeff: No, I just realized what just happened. The orchestra played me out.
I laugh for like four minutes.
Jeff: You know when people go to award shows and like, talk to long?
I apologize perfusely, using the "I'm high" defense.
Jeff: No, it needed to happen. I was blathering.
Hunter: Some things just override your attention.
We talk about having our own show, online. I still, even sober, think this would be an incredible act. We've talked about it forever, and have had some legitamately funny things happen throughout our hang out sessions. I can see it working. People are famous for much, much less.
Hunter: Think about all the dumbass rich kid stoners that are forming our culture right now.
Jeff: You realize we kind of fall into that category right? (even dumbass? aww)
Hunter: I realize that, but that's why we can profit off of it.
I explain that kids are the key to making money. If you can culturally prepare them through business to be customers in the future, you are golden. Seriously, it's kind of fucked up, but that kind of grand-scale social engineering is plausible and profitable.
"Towards Dead End," by Children of Bodom begins playing. Jeff got me into them, and knows more about them than anything.
Jeff: I just realized "Silent Night, Bodom Night" is playing, and it is awesome.
The only time I have ever seen this man slip on his Bodom knowledge; however, I apply my same "I'm high" defense to this situation. Works everytime. We talk about band lore and Jeff thinks he's coined the phrase. He contends that "band lore" is a compound term and therefore original. I tell him compound terms are the first to go.
We start heading out and pass the girls we saw earlier. They're crowded around a much bigger dude who stands in a grey college hoodie with a baseball hat on his head turned 180 degrees.
Jeff: What the fuck?
Hunter: Drunk people...? Oh, it's those girls---OH, they were coming here to meet a college dude. That's kind of fucked up.
Jeff: You know that shit happens all the time.
We talk about it, and I tell him I'm totally going to write a story about it, though I have yet to do so as of writing this. Jeff goes, "Shit, now I can't write about it. But you mentioned it was worth writing, I may have just glossed over it." He mentions that that's how it worked back in the Middle Ages and shit like that. I just think it's sad, though, for both parties. A) The girls are being taken advantage of when they really think they aren't. B) Old guy has no game and therefore prowls for young ass. In my opinion, the older(up to 28-32) the better. Immaturity, mentally, is so obscene, I don't care how attractive you are. That's a killer.
We head home and go our seperate ways.
