“Do you run?” I asked.
He laughed. “Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We’re criminals, Doc. We’re not like these people and I think we’re too old to learn.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
The Curse of Lono
Yes, people, it’s time. It has been many months since I wrote you last, and I can’t pin a reason on it other than sheer laziness…nope, that’s not it. Perhaps it’s my advancing age and the arthritis beginning to cramp up my fingers and twist them as crooked as a politicians campaign-contribution ledger. No, that’s not it either, as I’m only 29 (looking up the business-end of thirty, but that is another grim tale.) Mayhap it is a streak of obstinacy, contrariness even, that causes me to balk at doing anything that would bring any of you a thimble-ful of hilarity; you’ve made your own misery and I’ll be damned if it’s me that pries you out of it, even for a moment. But I always end up in your mailbox, don’t I? So I guess that can’t be it. I think that it is just a lack of enthusiasm in my life; there is little drama, which is fortunate and desirable, but neither has there been anything to rhapsodize. Fortunately, I am blessed with occasional mania and have the imagination to manufacture my own drama, and when these elements combine with sudden fluctuation in hormones, well…many of you have seen the results, ranging from weird letters from work at all hours of the day to months of rapacious drug-abuse and semi-self-destructive behaviour…
Here we are barely a paragraph into my screed and I’ve already digressed crab-wise before I’ve gotten to the subject and also insulted the only people who seem to listen to my gibberish anymore…but I won’t apologize…it’s just not in me…I lost that gene in a transcriptional accident shortly before birth…no matter, it would only hold me back…from what I haven’t an idea as yet, but I can sense it over the horizon the way a soldier smells chaos.
There’s a plentitude of filth in store for this issue, a veritable grimoire of grotesqueries for you to shudder at. You’ll push this small tome away but your eyes will be pulled back again until you have dragged your mind through the muddy depths and it is as sullied and dark as the cesspool in a slaughterhouse, and if I’m lucky you’ll curse my name and beg for more. It’s the same kind of attention that serial killers like Ted Bundy secretly crave, but my energies are put to somewhat more productive use…
Towards this end of entertainment, I have procured several items, all of them legal (at least until the Holy Rollers begin leading the Republicans around by the nose in public instead of the balls in private): a 1.5L bottle of Concha y Toro Cabernet Suavingnon/Merlot blend to loosen and relax the muscles to allow the fingers to type with agility in an effort to keep up with my thoughts; soft candles for gentle light to allow my microscope-and-fluorescent-lighting-flayed eyes to focus on the screen; some dark-tainted incense that smells of ritual and musk to stoke the dark cerebral centers; and finally some straight-up drum-and-base played on a pair of 15 inch Cerwin-Vegas rated to 400W constant peak, powered by an Onkyo amplifier with the “planetbuster” volume option, loud enough to sink Hong Kong or raise Atlantis. Digital was MADE for drum-and-bass…this music shakes, rattles and rolls the aural neurons and causes them to fire in formerly latent directions…it’s good for you, as long as you don’t destroy your home or start hemorrhaging and end up on a metal slab in the San Marcos coroner’s office.
Here goes…
The Bitch is Back…Forget the Women, I Need Drugs…Cock-Lanterns and the Essence of Disturb-A-Thon…Sweet Creeping Jesus, How Much Did I Take?…An Absence of Morals or Just Dirty, Dirty Fun?…
Heh…it’s nearing the time when the slavering populace will decide between Al Gore and George Bush, Jr. It’s a veritable storm of mediocrity, a furious conflagration of soporific bottom-feeders who couldn’t get jobs in the private sector if they paid for them. Al Gore…he just wants to be your friend, the blue-blooded bastard, and also to give my money to crack-addled welfare-mothers and corrupt highway contractors. He’ll tax me to insensibility. And what can be said about George Bush, Jr.? Well, quite frankly, a whole lot, and none of it would get by the FCC on regular television, I can assure you. Actually, I think cloning was perfected many years ago and they just haven’t told us what a rousing success it was with Mr. Other White Meat. Gore’s campaign motto should be “a vote for Bush is a vote for the monarchy.” George Bush’s should be “I’ll legalize cocaine”, and none of this side-stepping bullshit about how he hasn’t admitted to any wrong-doing or party excesses.
I’d have more respect for the little twink if he’s just strap on the pair of dusty cojones he’s kept hidden under his Swank mags from his wife all these years and admit that he partied like the Marquis de Sade in his youth in a manner that would have made Caligula retch into his own codpiece. He could maybe pick up an extra 1-3% of the undecided (but highly party-oriented) voting public in the form of hippies, rave-kids, porn-workers and defense-attorneys. It doesn’t seem like much, but in a race this close he might be tempted to try ANYTHING…the people who would be appalled by such an announcement certainly aren’t suddenly going to get a conscience and vote Democrat or, God forbid, Ralph Nader; they have to love the sinner and hate the sin, if they even give lip-service to their credo, and they know that a refusal to vote might mean 4-8 more years of Jews, women and minorities making headway in the country, and they certainly can’t have that…besides, when ol’ George gets into the Honkey-House he’ll just be another puppet to the people his dad’s been peddling his ass too lo these many months.
He and his melanin-deprived buddies will run the U.S. like some whites-only country club, and woe betide any poor jigaboo, kike or wetback that crosses them, and even a few of the more socially liberal crackers like myself may not be able to hire enough lawyers to keep them out of jail when the Nazis kick in their doors and read them long, disjointed Warrants of Arrest for speaking against the state, as it were…
It’s a pity that as probably the greatest country in the world we can’t cough up anything more than these two reprobates. New revelations show that ol’ George W. partied a little TOO hard and ended up in the pokey for doing a whiskey-run while tanked. I personally don’t give a shit about what happened in 1976 when he was a young buck, and in a perfect world it wouldn’t matter (because people LEARN from their mistakes if they’re smart), but George has been running on character issues…and if you’re going to throw stones, you better be sure you’re bullet-proof (a lesson that Palestinian youths still fail to realize…)
God, I’m sorry to ramble these funky fantasies into your personal spaces, but I can’t help but shudder when I think of our candidates…isn’t there any kind of common-sense candidate out there? Someone who’s socially Democratic but fiscally Republican? Maybe with lotto-fever running rampant we should just put 300 million names into a big hat, shake it up and pull one out…charge 100 bucks a chance and pay off the fucking deficit at the same time…hell, even ghetto-dwellers can afford $100, if their shoes are anything to go by…
Enough of this political diatribe…they tire me, and I just wish that someone would shoot one of them after they get elected so that either of their vice-presidents would get the top post…
I’m just beginning to recover from a horrible bout of the flu. I’ve had to go to work with it the past few days because I have much to do and little time to do it…it was miserable because it was the kind of flu where you aren’t SEVERELY sick, just sick enough to feel like Satan’s hemorrhoid all day. I know it is the result of doing something this weekend that I haven’t been doing much of as of late…roll your ergonomic computer-chairs closer to the flickering monitor, my cronies, and I’ll tell you a chilling tale…
I was recently re-introduced to a friend of mine from a long time ago by the name of…well, let’s not go there, the innocent Zarah must be protected…oopsie…anyhow, we were re-introduced by another longtime “friend” of mine who seems to dote on her quite a bit because he would like to do vile things to her with various parts of himself. I’m including this little bit of information at the beginning in order to make him froth and squirm…you know who you are, don’t you, you bastard? Did I tell you yet that I had the probable opportunity to molest this person in various horrible manners and yet I DIDN’T?!? Hah! Twist in the wind, you fucker, I’ll show you how it played out…
I was thinking about going from my current domicile in San Marcos back to Dallas this past weekend in order to see Riz, my grandmother, and perhaps get in a little dancing at the Ruby Room on Saturday. I received a call from Zarah a few days before; she asked me if I wanted to go up to Dallas with her to meet some friends and go to something called a Disturb-A-Thon. I figured, why the hell not? and offered to drive (mainly because I’m a control freak and I always need an escape route.)
So anyhow, it turns out that we're staying with a friend of hers by the name of Lilly Lawless who's in some kind of dark death-oriented Goth band (teen angst carried over into adulthood) that will be playing the disturb-a-thon.
Didn't do much the first night. The goth band played some house party full of IT/corporate types in full costume at a very ritzy house, and were as out of place as a Cosmopolitan magazine in the men's room of the Stuckey's truck-stop off Route 71. There were these up-and-comer yuppie types in a 3-story house with hardwood floors on lower Greenville and then there was this slightly scruffy anomie band playing discordant, atonal crap in their midst...I kind of dug it. The weird thing was I ended up meeting a girl I'd been out with a few times back in my partying days (never made it with her...too crazy). She's about to get married and start cranking out a passle of puppies, and she's a rabid reformed Christian to boot (I found her drunkenness quite ironic). She is now as interesting as a colonoscopy...I liked her better when she was on drugs...you could never tell when she was going to go left on you and begin screaming at nothing...
After that there was some of the usual after-hours drinking back at the goth house, which I did not participate in except to fuck with the drunk, depressed people and see if I could get them to jump off the third story (didn't work...they were too drunk to jump and probably would've landed on a raccoon or something and survived to write even worse songs about their tragic but tragically failed suicide attempt...) I spent the rest of the night trying different options to corral Lilly's kitten to where it wouldn't suddenly decide that my head looked like an immense chew-toy in the middle of the night...it had apparently decided that my chest was equal to the difficulty of K2 in climbing toughness, and had used its little claws accordingly. I, of course, had done my best Nolan Ryan impression and flung the cat across the length of the attic we were staying in, but my aim isn't as good as it used to be and it missed the open window and crashed into the area beside it with a somewhat satisfying squelch-and-squeal; so much for the defenestration of the feline. After that it was just a matter of finding the correct number of chairs to stack so the cat couldn't escape from the kitchen area, and removing all of the plastic/paper/trash the cat might find amusing. If there'd been any clean knives I would've cut the little bleeders paws off...
Night number 2 made up for it, in spades.
The next day consisted of peeling myself from the floor (Zara and Lilly slept on, blissful and drunken, unaware of my ordeal with the cat.) I spent some time with the parentals and my grandmother, and unfortunately saw my useless sister for a brief period. I also went in search of a nun's costume for the nights festivities, but had to settle for a monk's cowl with a huge glow-like-Chernobyl-farmland cross (they didn’t have one that vibrated) as a Halloween uniform. All the better to touch you with and make new sins for which you need to atone, my dear...
So anyhow this Disturb-A-Thon thing: I’m definitely a student of human weirdness, and whenever people get together in a big group strictly FOR THAT PURPOSE, I’m definitely going to show. I was pretty sure before I went that it would probably be a rotten, nightmarish place to be on drugs, and I was truly correct in that assumption (even though I was not on drugs at that time.)
The place was dark, first of all, the kind of dark that only dwells in the abyssal plains of the North Atlantic, and the darkness was occasionally broken by small, amorphous blobs of candle-light that pooled like barley-colored blood on the walls and floor and cast slightly ominous shadows on the immensity of the warehouse beams overhead. We stumbled around carrying amps and drums and other nefarious-looking yet harmless (unless you had your hearing-aid turned up when they started) gear. We finally managed to find the “stage”, a raised umbra in the otherwise shadow-torn blackness. I piled the gear I was carrying on the dias (I wondered if it might become a mess of virgin-parts at some point in the show) and wandered off to let the others grok or whatever they do before a show.
There were quite a few people there, the vast majority in costume; it lends a kind of anonymity to people, and the opportunity to get loose and giddy was being wasted by none of those who were wasted, which was pretty much all of them. There was a great deal of groping going on, and I was approached by two delicious specimens who looked like crosses (no pun intended) between Mother Teresa and Frankenfurter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They said that they had just arrived and that their priest had buggered out on them (pun intended this time) and they needed someone to confess to after they’d “…been around a little.” Well, that was all fine and dandy, but it looked and sounded to me as if they’d already “been around a little”, life-experience speaking, of course. They were in disguise, and there’d be no way to hunt them down and kill them slowly if parts of me started bloating and falling off, so I told them I’d find them later and moved on.
As an aside, I’d pretty much already made up my mind that there was going to be no sort of tomfoolery going on between myself and anyone there that night. Strictly speaking, from an epidemiological standpoint, I didn’t figure that getting buck-ass-naked and cooter-slime-wild with ANY of these people was a particularly good risk, jimmy-hat or no. I told myself to concentrate on cold showers, naked Wilford Brimley, and pictures of advanced syphilitic encephalitis I’d seen in a pathology book to control any untoward urges I might dredge up, and it worked admirably. It helped that everyone there could probably be qualified as “aesthetically challenged”, and the ones who weren’t were obviously more deranged than Bill Clinton’s damage-control team.
Occasionally I had been feeling droplets spattering on my hood and shoulders. I had thought nothing of it, believing it to be stray body fluids from passers-by. Now I looked up and could just make out in the hazy candle-light the form of an immense chandelier, but where the lights would normally be there were bloody, severed pigs’ heads, dripping occasionally onto those underneath. I wondered briefly if they were kosher, but decided it wasn’t worth asking the guy with spikes through his cheeks about; he seemed occupied with not screaming like…well, like a man with spikes through his cheeks.
Various other bits of weirdness stick in my mind…there was a large slime-pit thingy with oil or maybe some kind of industrial lubricant that people were running and slipping and skidding through…many of them were naked and I assumed this preceded some kind of furious copulation in the dark corners of the warehouse. There were many naked people in various states of gravity-induced sagginess. There was a big tunnel-of-lust kind of affair, like a huge human Habitrail made of plastic and aired up with several big blowers, that I could sometimes see people’s opaque shapes (some with various protrusions…piercings or dildos or something…) running about. There was a very old man with his nipples literally TWISTED around some small wooden dowels, and he had a spike through the head of his penis and a lantern hanging off of it. He was leading an even older (if her breasts were anything to go by) woman in bondage gear and strap-on dong with her hands bound behind her; both wore masks, I assume so we couldn’t bust George Bush, Jr. with the fact that both his parents were at the event. I also saw several chickens and a goat running around the place, unmolested as yet, but I assumed that they would either be sacrificed, raped or worshipped later on, perhaps all three. I also formed only one opinion that night; these people were SILLY.
At some point during Lilly’s performance (pretty good voice for such angsty work) one of the pigs’ heads plummeted from its spiked perch and did a ker-splat encore right in front of the stage; in the flickering illumination it looked like George Schultz had put his head through the ceiling of his downstairs apartment to tell us to turn our goddamn music off and go to sleep. Luckily the illusion lasted only a moment, and then a fairly good-looking fairy (costumed girl, not gay man) came to examine it and laugh; she began to caper around it and cackle like a loon, and it was readily apparent to me that her pharmaceutical gas-tank read “maxed-out.”
It was all pathetic and yet amusing in a detached, scientific way. Vaguely I wondered what most of these people did for a living, then decided that they were probably upper-management material. Whatever. I don’t particularly care what people get their jollies with as long as it’s consensual and I don’t have to pay for it. The place would have been INTOLERABLE on drugs, though; I was right in that respect. We hung around there until about 2am them loaded back up and went back to Lilly’s house, where she met up with her roommates, who were on their way to a party. They had a brief but intense conversation, then the roommates departed.
I’d wondered what the convo was about, and I quickly found out when Lilly glided over to me and proffered her hand, palm up, in which lay several small clover-leaf-shaped aquamarine tablets.
“Want some X?”, she grinned.
Ahhhh…drugs…many thoughts ran through my brains…I was an adult, not overly given to the life of excess that I formerly engaged in…I’d never be able to run for office unless I had an entire lottery-worth of hush money, and even then it would require a few well-placed deaths before I could begin claiming that I was as unblemished as a fresh $100 bill and my saintliness made me a candidate for canonization BEFORE I was dead. I’d had many an adventure on varying amounts of good and bad pharmaceuticals, and it had been about 4 years since I’d engaged in any SERIOUS debauchery while zonked. Hell, I’m grown, I have responsibilities…on Monday.
Of course, who am I to refuse free drugs proffered by nubile women? I am a weak man, as are all my kind, and while I am given to bouts of sybaritic recreation, I don’t often have to opportunity anymore.
I took the tab.
Ecstasy is a very strange drug. It’s not really my thing to love everyone, or even anyone for that matter, and I’ve only done it about 10 times or so. It’s expensive as hell usually, and the results are only occasionally what you were looking for; the 2 times it had been a lot of fun were on stuff that was from OUTSIDE the U.S.
This was from outside the U.S. Definitely.
It begins as a pretty good feeling, then a really good feeling, and then you find that the drapes are especially pretty and there’s a healthy glow around everyone you’re with. The next thing you know, it would require a come-along chain and a bulldozer to get you away from the couch. Some people get all touchy-feely on the stuff, but I just like to sit back and feel the river flow over me and listen to some music…the only thing lacking was a decent dance-floor and a world-class DJ, but I settled for a pretty decent stereo and some tunes I wasn’t familiar with…they still sounded JUST FINE…
Lilly, Zarah and a hippy-fellow named Patchen seemed to be getting into the swing, but Lilly and Zarah were nuzzling and cooing and Patchen seemed to be having just a fine time, grinning and watching the two of them. Nobody got naked or anything…it was an entirely mellow experience…the second tab was taken about 2 hours after the first had gone screaming into my gullet…the second peak was stronger than the first because my system had already been “primed” by the first…I found myself on the couch and probably making “the face” that all users seem to acquire, though I occasionally had the supreme will-power to relax my jaws, which were clamping furiously.
A few hours later Lilly emerged from her kitchen carrying several mason jars full of…something vaguely organic looking.
“Here, eat some of these.”
“These” were mushrooms that had been hydroponically grown by a friend of hers, probably in a bath-tub full of cow-manure and grow-lites. I figured “Why Not?” and allowed her to dole me out a portion. These were dried out from being in her freezer, and on the Ecstasy the consistency truly left something to be desired. It seemed like we were there chewing for a long, long time, and I found out why later…
A hint for drug-users: Never allow someone who’s already bent beyond recognition to allot YOUR share of mushrooms. We HAD been there chewing for a while because (it was figured out later) we had each eaten what someone later referred to as “…a heroic dose…” of the psilocybin compound…somewhere around 4 dried grams each…
About 30 minutes after finishing the last of the mushrooms, the ol’ Third Eye popped open with a bang-and-clatter, looked around and screeched like my dying brain-cells as they were flushed down their individual toilets. Just sitting there was…interesting…in a way that sitting normally is not. Things were going yellow and purple and green, and I got a good look at everyone else and may-dayed it to the furthest corner of the attic, knocking over a heart that had been sitting on a bed of nails along the way. Was that real? Shit…I just needed to crawl away from the others, who were morphing into various horrible shapes…get as far away as possible and ride it out…the music had taken on an ominous tone, as Patchen had popped in some Autechre, very hemorrhage-inducing Kraut techno…it was both evil and thrilling at the same time, what the disturb-a-thon was SUPPOSED to be but only came off as pathetic because humans were involved in it.
Actually, the music is the only thing I like about doing drugs of any kind, which is why I’ve stayed away from stuff like cocaine and speed and gone mainly for the hallucinogens. You really understand music from the inside (of your head) out when you’re on hallucinogens; it’s everything that you want it to be. A good DJ will take you down into the dark depths and bring you back up into the light of dawn, and it’s all in YOU. I’ve often wondered (though reasoned to the negative) if people hear stuff the way I hear it. I doubt it, because everything is filtered through our own experience; everyone attaches to a different thing in music.
The only thing really bad about a trip like that is that even really HORRIBLE stuff sounds good…I’ve gone and bought records while still high from the night before and been APPALLED at the sound of it a few days later. Hell, even Britney Spears would probably sound like the second coming if you were bent. The plus side is that when you get the GOOD stuff, it’s a real consciousness-expander, and you can often call the feeling up years later and find the peak in that night and carry it with you throughout the day.
Enough hippy talk.
I was ripped and riding it like a champ, when the perpetual party-machine Lilly suggested that we drink some Absinthe. Zarah and Patchen looked at each other and crawled away to their private heaven or hells for the duration of the night. I just grinned at Lilly as if to say, “What else you got?” and grabbed a couple of glasses.
Now, let me give you a little background on Absinthe, also called “Le Fee Verite” or “The Green Fairy” by the pesky French. It is an emerald green liquer made of various herbs such as veronica, fennel, star anise, hyssop, nutmeg and others distilled in a 75% concentration of ethanol. It’s major ingredient is derived from the plants Artemisia absinthium (Wormwood) and Artemisian pontica (Roman Wormwood). It was first documented by the ancient greeks during the reign of Pliny the Elder in 100 A.D., though addition of Wormwood itself to wine dates back to the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, circa 3550 B.C. The drink was very popular in the late 1800’s, but due to it’s toxicological effects and psychosis-inducing pharmacology, it was banned in almost every civilized country except Spain by 1915. It’s major active component is thujone. It is a neurotoxin that causes euphoria and mild visual hallucinations, as well as a range of bad effects from gastritis, seizures, psychosis, tremors, coma and death with chronic use. Van Gogh’s insanity is blamed on chronic Absinthe use.
It sounded like a good time to me.
The usual method of ingestion is to get a sugar cube on a spoon, dribble some Absinthe on it, light it on fire until it caramelizes or you lose some hair, then mix it into the remaining Absinth and sip. It is the nature of the American to profane all of those sissy European traditions and do it in a typically USA fashion: we poured a good three-fingers, mixed in a little sugar, set the whole thing ablaze and drank it down still alight. She had prepared me for the taste with the simple statement of “…it might burn a little.” Oh, yes it did.
Urk…
I will make the vaguest attempt to describe my feelings at the time. Patchen and Zarah had been watching us, and they twittered nervously and moved farther into their corners, eyes shocked and staring, when they witnessed the ritual of drinking. I leered at Lilly briefly, and she met my challenging stare with daggers of her own, then I noticed that her eyes seemed to get a little glassy and tear up, then all the muscles of her face stopped working at once, her face gave in to gravity and tried an Olympic-class dive to the floor. She reeled briefly, then flopped back, boneless as a jellyfish, onto the floor and lay there not moving or talking or even twitching at all.
All of this took place in the time it takes for Iraq to declare the U.S. a bad influence.
Then it happened.
My throat suddenly felt inflamed, like my esophagus had taken a motorcycle ride with no helmet and gone over the high-side at 100mph in a gravel pit and landed in a festering puddle of whiskey. I was completely paralyzed with the pain of it, and my eyeballs seemed ready to plop out and dangle by their optic nerves. I moved my eyeballs, trying to see which part of my body was going to pull a Chernobyl and melt down first, but my attention was called away from the visual cortex to an emergency in the stomach area. It felt as though my stomach, liver, pancreas, gall-bladder and spleen had all gotten into a violent argument as to who was going to leave first, and instead of leaving had concentrated on beating each other into submission with lead pipes. I pulled a Lilly and TWA 800’d my way to the floor, where I lay, wishing someone would drop a cinder-block on my head. I truly believe that I kept my gorge from ending up on the ceiling by main force of will. It took me perhaps 20 minutes to recover enough to curse, and about that time the mushrooms were beginning to release their hold on my psyche. I imagine that if I had accidentally cut myself my blood would have eaten a hole in the floor.
Eventually we all passed out in various areas at around 10am or so, and I myself was content that I had done my partying for a good long time. We emerged from our besotted slumber at about 6p, whereupon I had to drive myself and Zarah back to Austin. I think the combination of drugs and stress had lysed every T- and B-cell in my body, because I had the flu even before we arrived back in Austin.
The next day I awoke to an empty-feeling in my gut area. I looked over and on the pillow beside me was a note from my liver: I quit.
The odd thing about this trip was that usually afterward I’m consumed with guilt and refilled with determination to get my life in order, but this time I wasn’t. I’m started in my career, I’ve got a steady if somewhat meager income, I’m not partying all the time (I rarely even leave the house anymore except to sit at friends’ houses and bullshit), things are going well, and I figure once every four years isn’t such a bad thing…
Finis
(For Now)
He laughed. “Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We’re criminals, Doc. We’re not like these people and I think we’re too old to learn.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
The Curse of Lono
Yes, people, it’s time. It has been many months since I wrote you last, and I can’t pin a reason on it other than sheer laziness…nope, that’s not it. Perhaps it’s my advancing age and the arthritis beginning to cramp up my fingers and twist them as crooked as a politicians campaign-contribution ledger. No, that’s not it either, as I’m only 29 (looking up the business-end of thirty, but that is another grim tale.) Mayhap it is a streak of obstinacy, contrariness even, that causes me to balk at doing anything that would bring any of you a thimble-ful of hilarity; you’ve made your own misery and I’ll be damned if it’s me that pries you out of it, even for a moment. But I always end up in your mailbox, don’t I? So I guess that can’t be it. I think that it is just a lack of enthusiasm in my life; there is little drama, which is fortunate and desirable, but neither has there been anything to rhapsodize. Fortunately, I am blessed with occasional mania and have the imagination to manufacture my own drama, and when these elements combine with sudden fluctuation in hormones, well…many of you have seen the results, ranging from weird letters from work at all hours of the day to months of rapacious drug-abuse and semi-self-destructive behaviour…
Here we are barely a paragraph into my screed and I’ve already digressed crab-wise before I’ve gotten to the subject and also insulted the only people who seem to listen to my gibberish anymore…but I won’t apologize…it’s just not in me…I lost that gene in a transcriptional accident shortly before birth…no matter, it would only hold me back…from what I haven’t an idea as yet, but I can sense it over the horizon the way a soldier smells chaos.
There’s a plentitude of filth in store for this issue, a veritable grimoire of grotesqueries for you to shudder at. You’ll push this small tome away but your eyes will be pulled back again until you have dragged your mind through the muddy depths and it is as sullied and dark as the cesspool in a slaughterhouse, and if I’m lucky you’ll curse my name and beg for more. It’s the same kind of attention that serial killers like Ted Bundy secretly crave, but my energies are put to somewhat more productive use…
Towards this end of entertainment, I have procured several items, all of them legal (at least until the Holy Rollers begin leading the Republicans around by the nose in public instead of the balls in private): a 1.5L bottle of Concha y Toro Cabernet Suavingnon/Merlot blend to loosen and relax the muscles to allow the fingers to type with agility in an effort to keep up with my thoughts; soft candles for gentle light to allow my microscope-and-fluorescent-lighting-flayed eyes to focus on the screen; some dark-tainted incense that smells of ritual and musk to stoke the dark cerebral centers; and finally some straight-up drum-and-base played on a pair of 15 inch Cerwin-Vegas rated to 400W constant peak, powered by an Onkyo amplifier with the “planetbuster” volume option, loud enough to sink Hong Kong or raise Atlantis. Digital was MADE for drum-and-bass…this music shakes, rattles and rolls the aural neurons and causes them to fire in formerly latent directions…it’s good for you, as long as you don’t destroy your home or start hemorrhaging and end up on a metal slab in the San Marcos coroner’s office.
Here goes…
The Bitch is Back…Forget the Women, I Need Drugs…Cock-Lanterns and the Essence of Disturb-A-Thon…Sweet Creeping Jesus, How Much Did I Take?…An Absence of Morals or Just Dirty, Dirty Fun?…
Heh…it’s nearing the time when the slavering populace will decide between Al Gore and George Bush, Jr. It’s a veritable storm of mediocrity, a furious conflagration of soporific bottom-feeders who couldn’t get jobs in the private sector if they paid for them. Al Gore…he just wants to be your friend, the blue-blooded bastard, and also to give my money to crack-addled welfare-mothers and corrupt highway contractors. He’ll tax me to insensibility. And what can be said about George Bush, Jr.? Well, quite frankly, a whole lot, and none of it would get by the FCC on regular television, I can assure you. Actually, I think cloning was perfected many years ago and they just haven’t told us what a rousing success it was with Mr. Other White Meat. Gore’s campaign motto should be “a vote for Bush is a vote for the monarchy.” George Bush’s should be “I’ll legalize cocaine”, and none of this side-stepping bullshit about how he hasn’t admitted to any wrong-doing or party excesses.
I’d have more respect for the little twink if he’s just strap on the pair of dusty cojones he’s kept hidden under his Swank mags from his wife all these years and admit that he partied like the Marquis de Sade in his youth in a manner that would have made Caligula retch into his own codpiece. He could maybe pick up an extra 1-3% of the undecided (but highly party-oriented) voting public in the form of hippies, rave-kids, porn-workers and defense-attorneys. It doesn’t seem like much, but in a race this close he might be tempted to try ANYTHING…the people who would be appalled by such an announcement certainly aren’t suddenly going to get a conscience and vote Democrat or, God forbid, Ralph Nader; they have to love the sinner and hate the sin, if they even give lip-service to their credo, and they know that a refusal to vote might mean 4-8 more years of Jews, women and minorities making headway in the country, and they certainly can’t have that…besides, when ol’ George gets into the Honkey-House he’ll just be another puppet to the people his dad’s been peddling his ass too lo these many months.
He and his melanin-deprived buddies will run the U.S. like some whites-only country club, and woe betide any poor jigaboo, kike or wetback that crosses them, and even a few of the more socially liberal crackers like myself may not be able to hire enough lawyers to keep them out of jail when the Nazis kick in their doors and read them long, disjointed Warrants of Arrest for speaking against the state, as it were…
It’s a pity that as probably the greatest country in the world we can’t cough up anything more than these two reprobates. New revelations show that ol’ George W. partied a little TOO hard and ended up in the pokey for doing a whiskey-run while tanked. I personally don’t give a shit about what happened in 1976 when he was a young buck, and in a perfect world it wouldn’t matter (because people LEARN from their mistakes if they’re smart), but George has been running on character issues…and if you’re going to throw stones, you better be sure you’re bullet-proof (a lesson that Palestinian youths still fail to realize…)
God, I’m sorry to ramble these funky fantasies into your personal spaces, but I can’t help but shudder when I think of our candidates…isn’t there any kind of common-sense candidate out there? Someone who’s socially Democratic but fiscally Republican? Maybe with lotto-fever running rampant we should just put 300 million names into a big hat, shake it up and pull one out…charge 100 bucks a chance and pay off the fucking deficit at the same time…hell, even ghetto-dwellers can afford $100, if their shoes are anything to go by…
Enough of this political diatribe…they tire me, and I just wish that someone would shoot one of them after they get elected so that either of their vice-presidents would get the top post…
I’m just beginning to recover from a horrible bout of the flu. I’ve had to go to work with it the past few days because I have much to do and little time to do it…it was miserable because it was the kind of flu where you aren’t SEVERELY sick, just sick enough to feel like Satan’s hemorrhoid all day. I know it is the result of doing something this weekend that I haven’t been doing much of as of late…roll your ergonomic computer-chairs closer to the flickering monitor, my cronies, and I’ll tell you a chilling tale…
I was recently re-introduced to a friend of mine from a long time ago by the name of…well, let’s not go there, the innocent Zarah must be protected…oopsie…anyhow, we were re-introduced by another longtime “friend” of mine who seems to dote on her quite a bit because he would like to do vile things to her with various parts of himself. I’m including this little bit of information at the beginning in order to make him froth and squirm…you know who you are, don’t you, you bastard? Did I tell you yet that I had the probable opportunity to molest this person in various horrible manners and yet I DIDN’T?!? Hah! Twist in the wind, you fucker, I’ll show you how it played out…
I was thinking about going from my current domicile in San Marcos back to Dallas this past weekend in order to see Riz, my grandmother, and perhaps get in a little dancing at the Ruby Room on Saturday. I received a call from Zarah a few days before; she asked me if I wanted to go up to Dallas with her to meet some friends and go to something called a Disturb-A-Thon. I figured, why the hell not? and offered to drive (mainly because I’m a control freak and I always need an escape route.)
So anyhow, it turns out that we're staying with a friend of hers by the name of Lilly Lawless who's in some kind of dark death-oriented Goth band (teen angst carried over into adulthood) that will be playing the disturb-a-thon.
Didn't do much the first night. The goth band played some house party full of IT/corporate types in full costume at a very ritzy house, and were as out of place as a Cosmopolitan magazine in the men's room of the Stuckey's truck-stop off Route 71. There were these up-and-comer yuppie types in a 3-story house with hardwood floors on lower Greenville and then there was this slightly scruffy anomie band playing discordant, atonal crap in their midst...I kind of dug it. The weird thing was I ended up meeting a girl I'd been out with a few times back in my partying days (never made it with her...too crazy). She's about to get married and start cranking out a passle of puppies, and she's a rabid reformed Christian to boot (I found her drunkenness quite ironic). She is now as interesting as a colonoscopy...I liked her better when she was on drugs...you could never tell when she was going to go left on you and begin screaming at nothing...
After that there was some of the usual after-hours drinking back at the goth house, which I did not participate in except to fuck with the drunk, depressed people and see if I could get them to jump off the third story (didn't work...they were too drunk to jump and probably would've landed on a raccoon or something and survived to write even worse songs about their tragic but tragically failed suicide attempt...) I spent the rest of the night trying different options to corral Lilly's kitten to where it wouldn't suddenly decide that my head looked like an immense chew-toy in the middle of the night...it had apparently decided that my chest was equal to the difficulty of K2 in climbing toughness, and had used its little claws accordingly. I, of course, had done my best Nolan Ryan impression and flung the cat across the length of the attic we were staying in, but my aim isn't as good as it used to be and it missed the open window and crashed into the area beside it with a somewhat satisfying squelch-and-squeal; so much for the defenestration of the feline. After that it was just a matter of finding the correct number of chairs to stack so the cat couldn't escape from the kitchen area, and removing all of the plastic/paper/trash the cat might find amusing. If there'd been any clean knives I would've cut the little bleeders paws off...
Night number 2 made up for it, in spades.
The next day consisted of peeling myself from the floor (Zara and Lilly slept on, blissful and drunken, unaware of my ordeal with the cat.) I spent some time with the parentals and my grandmother, and unfortunately saw my useless sister for a brief period. I also went in search of a nun's costume for the nights festivities, but had to settle for a monk's cowl with a huge glow-like-Chernobyl-farmland cross (they didn’t have one that vibrated) as a Halloween uniform. All the better to touch you with and make new sins for which you need to atone, my dear...
So anyhow this Disturb-A-Thon thing: I’m definitely a student of human weirdness, and whenever people get together in a big group strictly FOR THAT PURPOSE, I’m definitely going to show. I was pretty sure before I went that it would probably be a rotten, nightmarish place to be on drugs, and I was truly correct in that assumption (even though I was not on drugs at that time.)
The place was dark, first of all, the kind of dark that only dwells in the abyssal plains of the North Atlantic, and the darkness was occasionally broken by small, amorphous blobs of candle-light that pooled like barley-colored blood on the walls and floor and cast slightly ominous shadows on the immensity of the warehouse beams overhead. We stumbled around carrying amps and drums and other nefarious-looking yet harmless (unless you had your hearing-aid turned up when they started) gear. We finally managed to find the “stage”, a raised umbra in the otherwise shadow-torn blackness. I piled the gear I was carrying on the dias (I wondered if it might become a mess of virgin-parts at some point in the show) and wandered off to let the others grok or whatever they do before a show.
There were quite a few people there, the vast majority in costume; it lends a kind of anonymity to people, and the opportunity to get loose and giddy was being wasted by none of those who were wasted, which was pretty much all of them. There was a great deal of groping going on, and I was approached by two delicious specimens who looked like crosses (no pun intended) between Mother Teresa and Frankenfurter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They said that they had just arrived and that their priest had buggered out on them (pun intended this time) and they needed someone to confess to after they’d “…been around a little.” Well, that was all fine and dandy, but it looked and sounded to me as if they’d already “been around a little”, life-experience speaking, of course. They were in disguise, and there’d be no way to hunt them down and kill them slowly if parts of me started bloating and falling off, so I told them I’d find them later and moved on.
As an aside, I’d pretty much already made up my mind that there was going to be no sort of tomfoolery going on between myself and anyone there that night. Strictly speaking, from an epidemiological standpoint, I didn’t figure that getting buck-ass-naked and cooter-slime-wild with ANY of these people was a particularly good risk, jimmy-hat or no. I told myself to concentrate on cold showers, naked Wilford Brimley, and pictures of advanced syphilitic encephalitis I’d seen in a pathology book to control any untoward urges I might dredge up, and it worked admirably. It helped that everyone there could probably be qualified as “aesthetically challenged”, and the ones who weren’t were obviously more deranged than Bill Clinton’s damage-control team.
Occasionally I had been feeling droplets spattering on my hood and shoulders. I had thought nothing of it, believing it to be stray body fluids from passers-by. Now I looked up and could just make out in the hazy candle-light the form of an immense chandelier, but where the lights would normally be there were bloody, severed pigs’ heads, dripping occasionally onto those underneath. I wondered briefly if they were kosher, but decided it wasn’t worth asking the guy with spikes through his cheeks about; he seemed occupied with not screaming like…well, like a man with spikes through his cheeks.
Various other bits of weirdness stick in my mind…there was a large slime-pit thingy with oil or maybe some kind of industrial lubricant that people were running and slipping and skidding through…many of them were naked and I assumed this preceded some kind of furious copulation in the dark corners of the warehouse. There were many naked people in various states of gravity-induced sagginess. There was a big tunnel-of-lust kind of affair, like a huge human Habitrail made of plastic and aired up with several big blowers, that I could sometimes see people’s opaque shapes (some with various protrusions…piercings or dildos or something…) running about. There was a very old man with his nipples literally TWISTED around some small wooden dowels, and he had a spike through the head of his penis and a lantern hanging off of it. He was leading an even older (if her breasts were anything to go by) woman in bondage gear and strap-on dong with her hands bound behind her; both wore masks, I assume so we couldn’t bust George Bush, Jr. with the fact that both his parents were at the event. I also saw several chickens and a goat running around the place, unmolested as yet, but I assumed that they would either be sacrificed, raped or worshipped later on, perhaps all three. I also formed only one opinion that night; these people were SILLY.
At some point during Lilly’s performance (pretty good voice for such angsty work) one of the pigs’ heads plummeted from its spiked perch and did a ker-splat encore right in front of the stage; in the flickering illumination it looked like George Schultz had put his head through the ceiling of his downstairs apartment to tell us to turn our goddamn music off and go to sleep. Luckily the illusion lasted only a moment, and then a fairly good-looking fairy (costumed girl, not gay man) came to examine it and laugh; she began to caper around it and cackle like a loon, and it was readily apparent to me that her pharmaceutical gas-tank read “maxed-out.”
It was all pathetic and yet amusing in a detached, scientific way. Vaguely I wondered what most of these people did for a living, then decided that they were probably upper-management material. Whatever. I don’t particularly care what people get their jollies with as long as it’s consensual and I don’t have to pay for it. The place would have been INTOLERABLE on drugs, though; I was right in that respect. We hung around there until about 2am them loaded back up and went back to Lilly’s house, where she met up with her roommates, who were on their way to a party. They had a brief but intense conversation, then the roommates departed.
I’d wondered what the convo was about, and I quickly found out when Lilly glided over to me and proffered her hand, palm up, in which lay several small clover-leaf-shaped aquamarine tablets.
“Want some X?”, she grinned.
Ahhhh…drugs…many thoughts ran through my brains…I was an adult, not overly given to the life of excess that I formerly engaged in…I’d never be able to run for office unless I had an entire lottery-worth of hush money, and even then it would require a few well-placed deaths before I could begin claiming that I was as unblemished as a fresh $100 bill and my saintliness made me a candidate for canonization BEFORE I was dead. I’d had many an adventure on varying amounts of good and bad pharmaceuticals, and it had been about 4 years since I’d engaged in any SERIOUS debauchery while zonked. Hell, I’m grown, I have responsibilities…on Monday.
Of course, who am I to refuse free drugs proffered by nubile women? I am a weak man, as are all my kind, and while I am given to bouts of sybaritic recreation, I don’t often have to opportunity anymore.
I took the tab.
Ecstasy is a very strange drug. It’s not really my thing to love everyone, or even anyone for that matter, and I’ve only done it about 10 times or so. It’s expensive as hell usually, and the results are only occasionally what you were looking for; the 2 times it had been a lot of fun were on stuff that was from OUTSIDE the U.S.
This was from outside the U.S. Definitely.
It begins as a pretty good feeling, then a really good feeling, and then you find that the drapes are especially pretty and there’s a healthy glow around everyone you’re with. The next thing you know, it would require a come-along chain and a bulldozer to get you away from the couch. Some people get all touchy-feely on the stuff, but I just like to sit back and feel the river flow over me and listen to some music…the only thing lacking was a decent dance-floor and a world-class DJ, but I settled for a pretty decent stereo and some tunes I wasn’t familiar with…they still sounded JUST FINE…
Lilly, Zarah and a hippy-fellow named Patchen seemed to be getting into the swing, but Lilly and Zarah were nuzzling and cooing and Patchen seemed to be having just a fine time, grinning and watching the two of them. Nobody got naked or anything…it was an entirely mellow experience…the second tab was taken about 2 hours after the first had gone screaming into my gullet…the second peak was stronger than the first because my system had already been “primed” by the first…I found myself on the couch and probably making “the face” that all users seem to acquire, though I occasionally had the supreme will-power to relax my jaws, which were clamping furiously.
A few hours later Lilly emerged from her kitchen carrying several mason jars full of…something vaguely organic looking.
“Here, eat some of these.”
“These” were mushrooms that had been hydroponically grown by a friend of hers, probably in a bath-tub full of cow-manure and grow-lites. I figured “Why Not?” and allowed her to dole me out a portion. These were dried out from being in her freezer, and on the Ecstasy the consistency truly left something to be desired. It seemed like we were there chewing for a long, long time, and I found out why later…
A hint for drug-users: Never allow someone who’s already bent beyond recognition to allot YOUR share of mushrooms. We HAD been there chewing for a while because (it was figured out later) we had each eaten what someone later referred to as “…a heroic dose…” of the psilocybin compound…somewhere around 4 dried grams each…
About 30 minutes after finishing the last of the mushrooms, the ol’ Third Eye popped open with a bang-and-clatter, looked around and screeched like my dying brain-cells as they were flushed down their individual toilets. Just sitting there was…interesting…in a way that sitting normally is not. Things were going yellow and purple and green, and I got a good look at everyone else and may-dayed it to the furthest corner of the attic, knocking over a heart that had been sitting on a bed of nails along the way. Was that real? Shit…I just needed to crawl away from the others, who were morphing into various horrible shapes…get as far away as possible and ride it out…the music had taken on an ominous tone, as Patchen had popped in some Autechre, very hemorrhage-inducing Kraut techno…it was both evil and thrilling at the same time, what the disturb-a-thon was SUPPOSED to be but only came off as pathetic because humans were involved in it.
Actually, the music is the only thing I like about doing drugs of any kind, which is why I’ve stayed away from stuff like cocaine and speed and gone mainly for the hallucinogens. You really understand music from the inside (of your head) out when you’re on hallucinogens; it’s everything that you want it to be. A good DJ will take you down into the dark depths and bring you back up into the light of dawn, and it’s all in YOU. I’ve often wondered (though reasoned to the negative) if people hear stuff the way I hear it. I doubt it, because everything is filtered through our own experience; everyone attaches to a different thing in music.
The only thing really bad about a trip like that is that even really HORRIBLE stuff sounds good…I’ve gone and bought records while still high from the night before and been APPALLED at the sound of it a few days later. Hell, even Britney Spears would probably sound like the second coming if you were bent. The plus side is that when you get the GOOD stuff, it’s a real consciousness-expander, and you can often call the feeling up years later and find the peak in that night and carry it with you throughout the day.
Enough hippy talk.
I was ripped and riding it like a champ, when the perpetual party-machine Lilly suggested that we drink some Absinthe. Zarah and Patchen looked at each other and crawled away to their private heaven or hells for the duration of the night. I just grinned at Lilly as if to say, “What else you got?” and grabbed a couple of glasses.
Now, let me give you a little background on Absinthe, also called “Le Fee Verite” or “The Green Fairy” by the pesky French. It is an emerald green liquer made of various herbs such as veronica, fennel, star anise, hyssop, nutmeg and others distilled in a 75% concentration of ethanol. It’s major ingredient is derived from the plants Artemisia absinthium (Wormwood) and Artemisian pontica (Roman Wormwood). It was first documented by the ancient greeks during the reign of Pliny the Elder in 100 A.D., though addition of Wormwood itself to wine dates back to the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, circa 3550 B.C. The drink was very popular in the late 1800’s, but due to it’s toxicological effects and psychosis-inducing pharmacology, it was banned in almost every civilized country except Spain by 1915. It’s major active component is thujone. It is a neurotoxin that causes euphoria and mild visual hallucinations, as well as a range of bad effects from gastritis, seizures, psychosis, tremors, coma and death with chronic use. Van Gogh’s insanity is blamed on chronic Absinthe use.
It sounded like a good time to me.
The usual method of ingestion is to get a sugar cube on a spoon, dribble some Absinthe on it, light it on fire until it caramelizes or you lose some hair, then mix it into the remaining Absinth and sip. It is the nature of the American to profane all of those sissy European traditions and do it in a typically USA fashion: we poured a good three-fingers, mixed in a little sugar, set the whole thing ablaze and drank it down still alight. She had prepared me for the taste with the simple statement of “…it might burn a little.” Oh, yes it did.
Urk…
I will make the vaguest attempt to describe my feelings at the time. Patchen and Zarah had been watching us, and they twittered nervously and moved farther into their corners, eyes shocked and staring, when they witnessed the ritual of drinking. I leered at Lilly briefly, and she met my challenging stare with daggers of her own, then I noticed that her eyes seemed to get a little glassy and tear up, then all the muscles of her face stopped working at once, her face gave in to gravity and tried an Olympic-class dive to the floor. She reeled briefly, then flopped back, boneless as a jellyfish, onto the floor and lay there not moving or talking or even twitching at all.
All of this took place in the time it takes for Iraq to declare the U.S. a bad influence.
Then it happened.
My throat suddenly felt inflamed, like my esophagus had taken a motorcycle ride with no helmet and gone over the high-side at 100mph in a gravel pit and landed in a festering puddle of whiskey. I was completely paralyzed with the pain of it, and my eyeballs seemed ready to plop out and dangle by their optic nerves. I moved my eyeballs, trying to see which part of my body was going to pull a Chernobyl and melt down first, but my attention was called away from the visual cortex to an emergency in the stomach area. It felt as though my stomach, liver, pancreas, gall-bladder and spleen had all gotten into a violent argument as to who was going to leave first, and instead of leaving had concentrated on beating each other into submission with lead pipes. I pulled a Lilly and TWA 800’d my way to the floor, where I lay, wishing someone would drop a cinder-block on my head. I truly believe that I kept my gorge from ending up on the ceiling by main force of will. It took me perhaps 20 minutes to recover enough to curse, and about that time the mushrooms were beginning to release their hold on my psyche. I imagine that if I had accidentally cut myself my blood would have eaten a hole in the floor.
Eventually we all passed out in various areas at around 10am or so, and I myself was content that I had done my partying for a good long time. We emerged from our besotted slumber at about 6p, whereupon I had to drive myself and Zarah back to Austin. I think the combination of drugs and stress had lysed every T- and B-cell in my body, because I had the flu even before we arrived back in Austin.
The next day I awoke to an empty-feeling in my gut area. I looked over and on the pillow beside me was a note from my liver: I quit.
The odd thing about this trip was that usually afterward I’m consumed with guilt and refilled with determination to get my life in order, but this time I wasn’t. I’m started in my career, I’ve got a steady if somewhat meager income, I’m not partying all the time (I rarely even leave the house anymore except to sit at friends’ houses and bullshit), things are going well, and I figure once every four years isn’t such a bad thing…
Finis
(For Now)
