In those dreams where everything is as clear as if we were all wearing corrective lenses, all that you want to be is simple to accomplish. You make a left on Round Lake and there you are to the right, a bright blue house with a large lawn sign that says “We Are Alive.” We make things complicated, talking ourselves out of joy and mastery; experience happens only when you stick around. If you are feeling like the days slip you by without anything extraordinary to divert your attention then you are not alone; this happens to the majority of people that eat bread. Also, that sensation of sand slipping through your fingers is nothing but fleeting, it will be replaced by the feeling of waiting room anxiety. Waiting to die, waiting to tell it out so the legacy of regret and misconception is not lost once the body goes and it goes. I don’t write anymore, time is precious but so is this that I do, so is the game of words and magnetic poetry in my head stuck to the door of what’s left of my creativity. And, the last time I had a daydream you were there waiting for me to drive over five hundred miles to have some beers. In recovery, of everything that felt good, for twenty minutes or twenty years. Even cigarettes.
Category Archives: Altered States
The Horror
Things happen while intoxicated, alcohol will never -ever!- make you sound any smarter or definitely make you think any clearer -quite the contrary. Like my friend who uses it as a social crutch while the other just comes out of his shell and has the funniest anecdotes, before he has one too many. Then, you guessed it, it’s sinister. Alcohol is the one true exorcist and I gotta tell you that as a former agnostic and paradoxically confused on the whole aspect of G-O-D, those demons come out violently and out for others. It finds those restless souls just moving around waiting for their house to be remodeled, waiting for their host to find a decorating style and keep it, still quite vulnerable. The things we share, the things we say, the people we… touch and the mistakes we make. Some of us are not built for affairs or just that moment before you black out where you said that one thing you regret. Here comes Alice and her reason for existence, she may not be that kind of person but she’s always there to add cumin to an already spicy dish. She does not worry about others when her sights are on someone special that has decided -earlier that evening- that they were going to just “drink.” It’s the calling of the intellect that supersedes physical attraction, the one thing men are programmed to be concerned with. We diet and we quit our vices, including the excess of alcohol to avoid encounters with people that will aid us in our decadence. And so it happens, alone in a darkened room, you and Alice no longer concerned for what you say or who you hurt because, well, you and her have been taking shots all night and this late, well, any other salvations have hit the sack and, well, she keeps telling you how human all of this is… she’s beautiful in her imperfections, isn’t she?
Got caught in the act at the very wrong time
Found it like striking a match on the gasoline fire
Watch the slug that slides along the edge of a razor blade; It’s about the pain
To the mundane…
So I am very close to landing a great job that starts at five AM. I refuse to quit caffeine and for the next three to five years, do not EVER suggest I switch to decaf!
“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.” -P.J. O’Rourke
The Cage
Me and Mia
As I was walking through a life one morning
the sun was out, the air was warm, but
Oh, I was cold
And though I must have looked half a person,
to tell the tale, in my own version,
It was only then that I felt whole
Do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it
Fighting for the smallest goal: to get a little self-control
I know how hard you try. I see it in your eyes
But call your friends, ’cause we’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat what’s rotten
And what’s eating you alive might help you to survive.
We went on as we were on a mission, latest in a Grand Tradition
And oh, what did we find?
It was Ego who was flying the banner, and me and Mia, Ann and Ana
Oh, we’d been unkind
But do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it
Fighting for the smallest goal: to get a little self-control
I see it in your eyes, I see it in your spine.
But call your friends,
’cause we’ve forgotten what it’s like to eat what’s rotten
And what’s eating you alive, might help you to survive.
And even the nights, they could get better
And even the days ain’t all that bad
And after a week of fighting, as more and more it seems the right thing
But do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it
Fighting for the smallest goal: to gain a little self-control
Won’t anybody here just let you disappear?
Not doctors, nor your mom and dad, but me and Mia, Ann and Ana
Know how hard you try. Don’t you see it in my eyes?
Sick to death of my dependence, fighting food to find transcendence
Fighting to survive, more dead but more alive
Cigarettes and speed for livin’, and sleeping pills to feel forgiven
All that you contrive, and all that you’re deprived
All the bourgeois social angels telling you you’ve got to change
Don’t have any idea. They’ll never see so clear.
But don’t forget what it really means to hunger strike
when you don’t really need to
Some are dying for a cause, but that don’t make it yours.
And even the nights, they could get better. -Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, “Shake The Sheets”
That song, and after years of denial, has taken me back to the place that shaped a large part of my personality. This is my idea and this is The Cage:
We dropped an average of three hits of acid each around six-thirty that evening, possibly an hour or so later and everything began to fall apart, slowly, unraveling like that knit cap I refused to stop wearing that winter. There were seven of us that night, possibly more but we were too high to notice. By the end of the evening, sometime around two in the morning, we had aptly named the experience as “D-Day”; a war had indeed taken place. A car was on fire on the highway, while I sat on the breakfast bar in the kitchen and took stock. “What the hell am I doing?” What the hell were we all doing? It started hitting us while sitting at the diner, yeah, we had to leave. Piling in two cars and three miles from the restaurant, Rich and I began a ten minute long laughing fit. Our bellies about to burst, we got it, there was this amazing joke and it was zen. Or so we thought, for by the time we returned a few hours later, someone would get slapped and the collective high would become dark and sinister. But we were still high, together, all of us had our experiences that night and could never say we would have done the same thing on our own. Damn, what was it we were laughing about, anyway?
I truly miss those guys, all of them. “The Cage” was a cultural mess, stereotypes bundled in friendships and ideas, good pot and cool music. There were beds, most of us slept on the floor, some of us were getting laid. It wasn’t the sixties, this was seven years ago and MTV had taken a turn for the worse; a worrisome state of affairs for Generation X after Kurt’s death… more on that later. So, I pretended a book I had indeed begun to write was going to get published, a book about them, us. We had deadly crushes on each other, self-destructive out of drama with the freedoms we exploited. As individuals, we were painfully flawed and I do not mean that lightly. Some of us were suicidal drivers, others were binge drinkers. Few of us were “nice all the time”, while all of us were guilty of at least TWO criminal offenses, possibly every day. We were “retro” before the word needed quotation marks and even hating someone had to be done “as a group”. There were short trips, bundled in a mustang, legs intertwined with the minimal sexual forethought. The days of carrying a three-foot bong inside your “Dakota Sport” without thinking twice about it are indeed gone. In the novel I had been writing while living there, I had special names for all of them and their cars, which actually had names anointed for one reason or another. Too long has passed, however, and after one of us had a kid… things, changed. Sure, nothing stays the same, but life had truly changed for all of us, some I can simply assume. And that is sad.
These people actually exist, The Cage was christened so after one morning I awoke to a pigsty and letting the kids know a little cooperation goes a long way, the front door whiteboard asked to keep The Cage clean. This is beautiful, revisiting a place you always avoided on your way to work… I think the clouds may be clearing, it’s summer in freakin’ Florida people!
