The disappearing icons....

I've recently made a vow not to watch the news or read the paper anymore, because I just end up getting bent out of shape. The morons of yesteryear have birthed a hideously dim version of themselves, a sort of alpha-cretin that is the pure essence of pointy-headedness, that has gotten hold of the Gearshift of Power and is running amok like a coked-up orangutan in the White House. There's a part of me that whispers seductively in my ear not to worry about it, just buy the biggest SUV you can and have it converted to use endangered species as fuel (cut out the middlemen at Exxon), find a big-titted, 3/4 plastic failed-actress exotic-dancing LA trophy wife and stick it to everyone in reach to get what I need to maintain my lifestyle. Then there's just the part that's smart and slightly noble that says I'm happy where I am, but I'd still like to get ol' George W.'s wrinkly nut-sack in a vice and twist it until he hollers and agrees to listen to the people who are smarter than him, which includes everyone from Condolezza Rice on down to the lowest yeast-infection in a porn-stars flapping genetalia.

Testing, testing...is this thing on? This has been a test of the emergency political-angst system on txrave.org...over...

I went out to see DJ Mark E. Quark at a local spot called the Cirrus Room. I was planning a fun-filled, frolicsome evening with myself, some grooves and a bottle of smuggled Monopolowa Vodka, and I was really looking forward to getting out of my house and out of my head for just a little while and catching some serious thumpety-thump on the dancefloor (you know how well us white-folk dance.)

Anyhoooo, I decided that I needed to get something to line my stomach before I began the intense process of destroying my liver, so I went to P.F. Chang's, a "happening" Chinese bistro. I managed to find rock-star parking very close by the busy downtown area, but when I entered I found the place filled with rather slimy yuppie-larvae types with cell-phones attached permanently to their earrings; the wait was an atrocious 1.5 hours, so I decided to bail and go for some sushi at Pango's instead.

I walked out to my car...my car...WHERE IN THE NAME OF MANY-PHALLUSED GANESHA IS MY FUCKING CAR?!? Apparently some tow-truck driving scumster had been bird-dogging the spot and just waiting for an unsuspecting schmuck (that's me) to not see the sign partially concealed by a shrub and park there. I was in the restaurant 10 MINUTES and my car had disappeared like a mooching brother-in-law when the bar-tab was due. Then I did a very boy thing...I punched a nearby garage door. Yes, I know it was stupid (I quickly realized this when my knuckles swelled up to twice their original size.) I'm not normally prone to such displays, but there's something about tow-truck drivers and meter-maids that sends me from the comforting confines of rational thought into the screaming banshee-embrace of utter and complete rage. I think I acquired this trait during a stint in Boston, where there's no place to park and if you DO park you get a ticket or towed no matter what time of the day it is or even if your car is buried in 4 ft. of snowdrift.

I ended up having to call a friend to drive me out to the airport and pay $130 dollars CASH ONLY to get my car paroled (that's for a total of TWO HOURS) of towing and stowage. What a racket. I could only think murderous thoughts while I cradled my aching hand and plunked down twenties in front of the Jabba-the-Slut looking piece of trailer-trash at the towing office. I hope she gets leprosy and her labia rot off.

So instead of a relatively inexpensive night where I got to eat some good Chinese or Japanese food, I spent a wad of cash and ended up dining at McDonald's...yet ANOTHER thing to blame tow-truck drivers for. I ended up good and soused by the end of this evening, and at some point in a drunken discussion on the dancefloor with random people it was decided that there would be a 10th circle of Dante's hell created for meter maids, tow-truck drivers and Fran Drescher (from the TV sitcom "The Nanny" because she's REALLY annoying.) We still haven't decided what tortures to inflict on them, but I'm sure I'll settle on something eventually. Maybe having their extremities slowly dissolved in the stomach-acids of immense Venus Fly Traps. We'll see...

Just to inform you all...it appears that I am in direct violation of the FBI's drug policy and I am completely unsuitable for a position in their fine organization...the question I failed was the "Have you done drugs in the last 10 years?"...whoops...I thought maybe they'd WANT their agents to know what they were talking about, but instead I guess they want only the clean-cut, die-hard, drugs-are-the-scourge-of-the-country, Captain America types with solid family values.

Apparently the FBI has learned NOTHING of history or human nature since it’s induction as a bastard offshoot of the Department of Justice in 1908 (at the request of Roosevelt, whom I guess decided that another police force was a GOOD thing.) They completely lost the “War on Alcohol” and allowed organized crime a foothold in the country which has NEVER diminished, don’t seem to be able to stem the tide of drugs into the country, and their agents probably are turned into cyborgs as soon as they pass the academy. When it’s not busy harboring traitorous spies at the top levels of it’s organization, they spend their time using the Ricoh statutes to seize property from people with 1 joint on their boat while cocaine merchants drive panel-trucks full of powdered jack-em-up over the Rio Grande and straight into clubs, high-schools and local lawyers’ noses. Basically they’re a rather bloated local police force.

The CIA on the other hand is pretty much paid to fight dirty, hence their agents have a tendency to BE a little dirty because they HAVE to. You don’t send boy-scouts to poke sticks and heroin-trafficking terrorists. Their mission states (this is direct from their website): “Providing accurate, comprehensive, and timely foreign intelligence on national security topics” and “Conducting counterintelligence activities, special activities, and other functions related to foreign intelligence and national security, as directed by the President.” They put out the World Factbook, which tells you where to go on vacation if you want to die in a creative and spectacular manner. Like other government data, it is highly suspect (for instance, they admit that Iraq has had nothing but military strongmen in power since 1958, yet they still list it as a Republic...go figure.) Plus, a lot of finagling can go on under the auspicious heading of “special activities.” These include bombing Cambodia, using cocaine to finance right-wing wars against communism in countries where there’s actually nothing to own anyways, and various “Black Bag” ops to topple and/or assassinate leaders who aren’t quite up to the U.S. standard of moral behavior (no sarcasm at all.)

To All and Sundry Members of the Laity:
It has been a goodly passing of many moons since I enraptured you all with one of my fetid epistles. I’m sure that those who haven’t run screaming from the buildings upon seeing my e-mail address on your screen are waiting, patiently yet eagerly, for whatever pathetic screed I feel it necessary to inflict this time.
I’ve found as of late that my will to write has, like Elvis, pretty much left the building. I don’t know what my problem is; it might be the passing of my 30th birthday lo this bygone April 13th, 2001 coupled with physiological changes in my metabolism that are causing me to be completely lackluster in my desire for communication with ANYONE whether it be by phone, e-mail, smoke-signals, semaphore or pony-express. I just haven’t been FEELING IT lately.
Is this old age? Is this what causes some balding men to buy Harley’s and leather, or to buy the affections of much younger women that they can’t afford? There’s the terrible angst of, “Where do we go from here? What else is there to experience?” I don’t think drugs are the answer, but I’m sure I’ll find out for sure at a later date. Physical exercise? Maybe the desire to capture the lost fitness of youth figures into it, but it won’t ever happen; at 20 I never got injured or if I did it healed by the next day. Lately at 30 if I get injured (which appears more and more likely) it will be WEEKS before it feels less like intentional torture. Sex? Fat chance; scientists don’t get much play. It’s not like I leave work and have to punch my way through a crowd of young, hard-bodied wahines eager for my unctuous regard. I’m fondling myself in the shower so much I get an erection every time I hear running water…just a joke, don’t attempt the visual…
Well, there we go as usual, babbling my face off. This digression into pain and weltschmerts was strictly unintentional, but it happened anyhow so I can’t (or won’t) take it back; it’s part of us and we must move on…
The real reason that I wrote you all was to tell you of a wonderful event that I went to a few weeks ago. For the past few months, I’d been either working or out of town almost constantly on various jaunts to see a large array of acquaintances, and it had taken its toll, so I planned to stay in town and devote myself to myself for the entire weekend. I heard of a one-day event in Austin called Eeyor’s Birthday, and I decided to go see what it was all about.
I awoke on Saturday morning feeling strangely fabulous, stepping outside aghast and agog at the weather and the honey’d essence that seemed to be borne on the hill country breeze like nasal photo-negative of the Ganges. It was, in layman’s terms, a fucking beautiful day. I decided that the convertible needed a workout, so I took it for a personal 2-hour hand-scrub, vacuum and detail at the local do-it-yourself car-wash.
A Side Note About The Car and Convertibles in General:
Yes, The Car. It seems like it was built specifically for spring in the Central Texas hill country. It’s a Satan’s-brimstone-ass red 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with black pleather interior and top. It’s all in tip-top condition, and has an air-conditioner that will keep the condensation from forming on your beer on those long, hot drives through-and-to nowhere. My dad was forced to get rid of it by my mother, who was griping that the front yard was looking like a refurbished Classic-car sales lot (not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, but women’s priorities differ from ours, and not just biologically.)
Since it's a classic, in excellent shape, and they quit making Oldsmobiles, the car is going to be worth a lot (actually, it already is), so he decided that I should keep a-hold of it until such time as he decided to sell it; out of sight, out of mind as far as my mother was concerned, so I reaped the benefits all around.
It’s truly a thing of beauty, destined to receive yells of delight from the men, quantifying eyes from the women, and smiles from everyone. I’ve already had several offers to buy it, and I’ve almost been car-jacked, so I know it’s worth looking at. The great thing about this car is THE FEELING that the car gives you while your pelting down the road with the gas-slurping engine growling in 4th at 90mph on a stretch of hilly road on a sunny day. It’s total contentment and satisfaction with your place in life, utter happiness on four white-walls, disinterest in the average hard-top world. It brings out the beauty of a squashed ‘possum and causes one to have no need for scenery that can’t be appreciated at under 70mph. It’s a big-ol’ hunk’a Detroit steel made back when the secret was cubic inches and not technology; the gas-tank would hold an entire Pinto, cost more to fill than most third-world countries’ GNP, and belched out more reeking combustion by-products than a whole slew or burning Kuwaiti oil-fields It’s a truly AMERICAN piece of machinery and I love it.
And now, back to our story:
After the scrub-trek with the Red Narwhal, I polluted my way out to the site of Eeyor’s Birthday, a small section of Peace Park (goddamn dirty hippy name; should have been called, “Where-Ignorant-Peacenik-Layabouts-Go-To-Get-Their-Hea ds-Kicked-In-By-The-Local-Constabulary Park”). I managed to find a spot right next to the park, which was a FUCKING MIRACLE in itself and should be proof enough for me of the existence of God (but it isn’t). I had to muscle out a bus-load of retards to get in, but the spot was worth the hassle of having all those bastards in football helmets waving their little mittens and spitting up on themselves, making “aargh-aargh” noises in desperation.
I retrieved my green shoulder-bag from the back seat. I’d bought the bag in Montreal one year for $7 US (I love the Canadian exchange rate) and that day it was holding everything I’d need: sunglasses, phone, water, some granola bars, a book, anti-histamines, various writing implements and a brand-spanking new notebook to scrawl my in-depth observations, as I felt it was important to get down my thoughts on this day as they happened for that true edge that I like to write from (and it’s oh-so-rarely that I achieve it these days.)
My first impression as I crossed the street and made my way down into a semi-dry riverbed was of some kind of throbbing coming from the area of the party, a rhythmic sussuration that seemed to move through the ground; it felt like I was walking on earthworms. I emerged through some trees on the far side of the stream-bed and saw a huge and colorful crowd of people many meters in front of me. There were people coming and going, coalescing and dispersing around a circle like oil globules on a local lake. I could see it was a drum circle, but like no drum circle I’d ever see before. There were simply dozens of people with every kind of primitive instrument you could imagine. I was surprised not to see any cave-man fur-wear and mammoth tusks. I decided to forego the drum circle for now and just walk around, getting my bearings and laughing aloud at everyone around me like some acid-soaked bedlamite.
I happened to run into a guy who eyed my notebook with obvious distrust and asked if I was a reporter. I told him no, that I was just going to write some friends in Boston (a little bullshit here, but this IS going to people in Boston, so not SUCH a lie) and asked if I could pick his brain about the event. He said sure, so pick away I did.
Eeyor’s birthday is the longest running 1-day event of it’s kind in the U.S.; it’s been going on almost longer than the Grateful Dead and Phish combined. It was started in 1963 by a UT English professor (couldn’t find out his name) who used to have a small spring party in his backyard on Friday afternoon sometime in the fourth week of April. The event itself moved to Peace Park (vid. my above attempt at renaming above) in 1974 and has been here ever since. In 1986 it moved to Saturday (something to do with the drinking age being moved to 21, but I couldn’t get the connection from him.) I can only assume that the name came from when Eeyor lost his tail and Winnie the Pooh and friends decided to throw a party to make him happy again (I overheard this from someone who appeared rather inebriated, so I don’t know how true it is, but she was cute so I put it in the story.)
The event itself is actually a fund-raiser for various local charities (I had utterly no idea.) The organizers promote the event and make their money from concessions, not cover-charges. I talked to a man who told me that he’d done work with a needle-exchange program that on-the-sly received some of it’s funding from the event; on-the-sly because needle exchange programs are apparently illegal in Texas. He was self-employed and said he didn’t have anything to lose by helping out, but he had the hard-used look of a man who had come to grips with the spike many moons ago and beaten the odds on it. He mentioned that there were 5 or 6 lawyers in the U.S. who would defend people pro bono who had been arrested for exchanging needles, and there was even one who had published a newspaper advertisement saying he would publicly embarrass any DA who attempted to prosecute anyone for this “crime.” After that, he got busy and I began my sojourn.
It was interesting to note the variation amongst the acres and reams of exposed flesh around me, tan and otherwise. The scars and fat-dimples were out in force for everyone to see/appreciate/shy from/pretend didn’t exist. The day was an excuse for the fantasy vs. reality cliques to make a showing…it made for a drug-friendly kind of eye-candy atmosphere, though it seemed rather chock-full of “damned dirty hippy” throwbacks reeking of patchouli in a pathetic attempt to cover weeks-old B.O. (Hint: the U.S. has running water.) Not that I mind hippies particularly. As a species they’re relatively harmless, stick to themselves, and they’re easy to run over on their bicycles (though it takes FOREVER to get the stink off your bumper.) Every freak in Austin had made its appearance.
The crowd was a curious mix of the tie-dye and cell-phone crowds. There was a really lame cover-band playing a protest song from 30 years ago, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio”, with none of the righteous indignation and anger that the song was about. Strangely and ironically, the police looked on while directing traffic and tapping their feet. The band mouthed the words worse than ol’ George W. trying to sing “Guantanamera”. The band fucked-off and the music changed to not-quite-trance, the drug-music of a new generation. It’s like the people who dance to it…cold, impersonal, and uninvolved unless the police flash their badges and tell you to go home, ruining your high.
There weren’t a lot of fitness buffs in the crowd, no tanned and slick muscle garnered from hours in the gym and weeks spent sweating over a pile of chicken-breasts and broccoli, but the people still managed to look beautiful and relaxed. The only evidence of exercise I saw the entire time was dancing, hacky-sacks, chasing wayward dogs and metabolism acceleration through chemical alteration.
Passing by me was a contingent of Vikings (there’s the cave-man fur I was hoping for…shouldn’t you be in the drum circle banging a log?) and the fantasy wonks didn’t seem to realize that Amptguard wasn’t until next weekend and Scarborough/Texas Renaissance Festival weren’t for a LONG TIME. It appeared that many of the women had sprouted fairy wings (how original.) There were a few out-of-place (even here) Goth-types scurrying around from shadowy patch to shadowy-patch, looking as if they’d dissolve like an Alka-Seltzer if direct sunlight even batted an eye in their direction.
I sat down for a moment to rest my weary bones, slurp some agua, scribble notes and ogle the hussies. I noticed one shapely young thing with a small dog seated not too far away. Should I start up a conversation? I could already hear the replies:
“I have mace.”
“Fuck off, dweeb.”
“Hey, Gunter! This guy’s bothering me!”
I decided to observe a decidedly Hong Kong policy of laissez-faire.
I watched a big man with a large dog stop next to the little girl with the tiny dog to make small talk…the tiny dog snarled and bared its teeth, talking big shit, so the big man with the large dog moved on. I laughed out loud at the scenario.
It was a good thing to see so many healthy, happy dogs; the hippies don’t appear to shower often or well, but they keep their pets spotless, a sort of Dorian Grey of personal hygiene. There are no little, yappy dogs here; even the small dog from my previous paragraph was around knee-height. The small ones were probably eaten at the entrances, or used as hacky-sacks when they started to yip. It would be an interesting spectacle to air-drop a few cats in at the height of the party (strictly for scientific purposes, to study chaos theory, of course.)
I decided to schlep my ass around the area a little more and I came upon a statue of liberty curiously done up with Eeyor’s face, except it was all in the metallic bronze-gray that the oxidized statue in New York Harbor looks like. It was quite weird-looking, but it seemed to have its own crowd of onlookers, who appeared to be waiting for it to do something. From the amount of people with dilated pupils lurching around in place, I would guess that ol’ Eeyor was already clanking around doing a rondolet in their heads.
At this point I was near the drum circle, and it seemed to have expanded. I decided to have another palaver with the soft ground. The drums were shifting and changing slowly, and it’s something I only noticed after I’d been sitting there, entranced, for a short-seeming 45 minutes. They drag you in by your auditory canals. I wished I’d had a DAT to record some of it, because this was a decidedly UN-lame drum circle. There were tons of people around, and there were some damned dirty hippies playing something I began to call “Beirut Double-Dutch” that involved someone swinging around a flaming piece of heavy-grade rope while other silly someones jumped over it, occasionally getting hit and igniting their hemp-wear; I wished some of the women would do it…maybe it’d remove some of that leg-hair…
Anyhow, the drums would change slowly, building up to a frenzy of pounding and screaming (like discount night at the whore-house) and then drop back to a mellower, drifty sort of vibe. There was everything from snares to doonbecks to Ozarka jugs tapped with sticks…need I point out the modern primitives reference? When it slowed it seemed like what banana pudding would sound like if it could be played on hi-fi without getting your needles sticky. Many would just continue to pound away at the same rhythm if it were up to them, but occasionally someone would shift into a discordant note and the others would shift to match to avoid the horrible clash, and that’s how it changed…kind of like people, eh?
The vibe was friendly and the sun was sunny, but I wondered how long it would take to change. What time would the alcohol crowd make its showing? The drug users I wasn’t worried about, they just wanted the vibe and the action and the frenzy and the weirdness, but sure as politicians lie there would be some set of drunk fucks that would screw it up for everyone, and then the Austin police would come crashing in like helmeted tornados to atrocity everybody.
I decided I didn’t want to stick around for this, so I moseyed down this path that other people seemed to be taking. Along the way there was a performance art group with a zither, a mandolin and some guitars playing frantically while some fruit-loop lady interpreted. I didn’t bother to suppress my laughter, but they didn’t seem to notice.
Down the path there was an actual SOUND-SYSTEM going, and actual DJ’s playing. I’d forgotten how good a decent system sounded outside when there were no walls for it to reverberate off, and the music was actually pretty good. I saw people out there whom I used to party with back 7-8 years ago, and everyone was dancing and having a good time; daylight rave, but nobody looked cracked out. This was an older, mellower crowd who’d just come out to enjoy the sunshine and the music and the company of others amongst some greenery.
I took a seat next to a large tree and read, listening to the music and tapping my feet, occasionally rising to complement the groove with movement, but mostly just sitting and reading. A guy I didn’t know pointed behind me with a grin on his face and said, “Hey, don’t you know that guy?” I turned to look and almost got a faceful of naked man-sack. Yes, the first and only naked person of the night had made his arrival.
Well, he was very naked, which was obvious. What was also obvious was that he was NOT sober, but he was NOT drunk, if you get my drift. There was no animosity, not here, and maybe even some admiration for somebody with the balls (we could see them) to get into the buff out here in bug-land. He proceeded to dance a little (gawd) and amuse the crowd with various flopping parts of his anatomy. (Note to self: NEVER dance naked unless you’re alone or being paid enough money to move somewhere far away with no communications network in place.)
He finally tired or was just too bent to stand, so he went and laid down behind the DJ booth (and it was a high point of amusement when the DJ turned around and there was a naked guy lying wrapped around his record case; he played it off beautifully and just got another record.) Girls were walking by, laughing and placing daisies on his crotch. Someone finally got him up and got a poncho on him just as two cops were walking by…everyone kind of formed up ranks between him and the police so they couldn’t see him…it was a nice show of solidarity for someone who wasn’t really bothering anyone and was a source of humor.
After a while, I decided that it had been fun but it was time to go, so I packed up my stuff and headed home, sun-burnt and happy, with a good memory of Eeyor’s birthday. I saw the naked guy in cuffs and pants being carried away by the police as I was leaving. I had a feeling he’d be well-received in jail…

Disclaimer:
I wrote this letter before the deal went down and have since been proven right on some parts and dreadfully wrong on the rest; mea culpa, I can accept that, along with the shame of having been one of the many tools who thought it might be fun to go play with our toys in the sand. Unlike the Republican and Democratic parties, I can learn from my mistakes and make sure it never happens again. The morass that is Iraq shows no sign of stopping or lessening, and perhaps the only thing we can do is to pull out and allow the region to reach its own sordid equilibrium (even though Iraq will probably end up as an extremist religious theocracy that hates us whether or not we pull out now or later). As it stands now, we've basically served as recruiters for various horrible extremist groups around the world and we're probably in for a rough ride. Americans haven't learned to believe in evil yet, and they somehow think they can stop terrorism, but the truth is that any retard who has a computer can get online and make a bomb and blow someone up. Don't be in a hurry to give up your rights because you think it will make you more secure; it wont.

And now to our pre-war post (warts and all):

“The last time the French demanded “more evidence”, it came marching into Paris under a German flag.”
-David Letterman

War sucks. I'll agree with you on that. However, it is my firm belief that sticking one's head in the sand is not the way to carry out foreign policy. Isolationism doesn't work, especially when you're the biggest target in the world. Admittedly, when we hit Iraq (and I do mean WHEN), it will be the first time in our history that we have been pulled into a conflict without first being provoked. The times they are a-changing...

I watched Colin Powell give his speech to the UN to try to get unanimous support for an attack. I think his argument was weak and unconvincing, and it is my belief that Bush doesn't really have CURRENT, utterly damning evidence of misconduct by Iraq in the weapons category. That said, I think that there has been more than ample misconduct in the recent past to justify his fears that Iraq is developing some crazy weapons over there to ensure that his regime remains in power and also to sell to the highest bidder (or craziest, if they plan to use it on us.)

On the UN website there is a list of Iraq's violations of its agreements with the UN that is as long as your arm. Here is a link to a paper on another site (not the UN) that lists, as of *1996*-*1998*, some of the suspicions on Iraq:

http://globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/crs/Crsiraq2.htm

There is NO QUESTION in anyone's mind that Iraq has done a great deal of killing in the very recent past. The site Physicians for Human Rights (www.phrusa.org) has a very long list of problems relating to human rights that Iraq has been guilty of. Actually, we're not sure they're guilty of them because they haven't let human rights inspectors into Iraq since 1992. So since we didn't actually SEE them gas the Kurds, and the only evidence we actually have are flimsy eyewitness accounts and soil samples containing breakdown products of nerve agents, I guess they haven't really done anything (deep, deep sarcasm here.)

The UN has been as effective at stopping conflict as a rabbit is at halting an 18-wheeler. There are many, many resolutions condemning Iraqi violence towards its own citizens (as well as other places), yet they never seem to manage to acquire enough "evidence" (meaning Pol Pot steps forward, blood dripping from his right arm which holds a still-twitching head, and says, "Whoops, you're right, I DID murder 1/3 of my country’s population. My bad.") to take any action.

The liberal view is that everyone has a right not to get killed for displaying any opposition to those in power, and that view is correct. However, there exists a gap in resolve that allows your average three-bong-hit Ghandi to stand up and occasionally get bloody to give people those rights and make sure they keep them.

As for the oil argument, I saw a direct quote from Mandela in S. Africa saying that the U.S. is after Iraq's oil because it produces 65f the world’s oil. Aside from being completely wrong in his figures (Iraq produces about 5f the world's oil, UN figures, and most of it is drilled for and distributed by French companies...any wonder why they pussed out, aside from being French? NOW who has the oil interests?) his reasoning was silly. We don't get even a fraction of a percent of our oil from Iraq, so there goes that argument. As for getting more from them in the future, how long do you think it's going to take to rebuild the country so we COULD get oil from them? Do you think a war (which is NOT cheap) and a Marshall-Style post-war plan (which will cost more than the war, probably) justify the POSSIBILITY that some companies may produce a profit for the US (and it'd be a DAMN long while to see that happen)?

Oh, and they also say that they don't have any nerve agents on hand, even though every goddamned news agency on the friggin' PLANET reported that they tried to buy over 1,000,000 autohypos and doses of atropine from Turkey a few months ago? Atropine is what is given in the autohypos as an antidote for nerve agents such as Sarin, Soman and VX that block acetylcholinesterase. The only other use for atropine is (in MINUTE doses) as a pre-treatment for anaesthesia. So suddenly Saddam has decided to start removing goiters? Don't think so...

So Bush may be banging his little tin war drum to distract from the fact that he has an enormous deficit to deal with and the economy is in the toilet (and yes, I DO wish Clinton was back in office.) I just wish Bush would find his penis again, that way he’d keep his hands off “the button.” That’s the nature of Capitalism, nobody does something for nothing. We are not claiming to be altruists in this conflict, it just so happens that a greater good for the Iraqi people will come about if the Hussein regime takes a powder. I mean, it’d be nice if they had someone to vote for besides ol’broom’stache, eh? Remember those elections, when he received 100

A rave gets spoiled...

Background:
This was written shortly after Airport 3, a mega-rave scheduled in Austin, was cancelled by police/city councilmen. The promoter, Noah, is now out of the rave business.


The locals admit that Noah had his insurance papers but didn't "submit" them in time, and even though he had a "hearing" the Thursday before the rave, where the locals could SEE that he had his P's and Q's in order, they STILL shut it down. Beauracracy or bullshit? I vote the latter. I don't recall anything in the constitution under the Right to Assemble article that mentioned anything about having a permit from the city. We're supposed to be founded on the principle of compromise and understanding, that even if we DON'T understand it we still allow it as long as those involved take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
The article was fairly unbiased and all, but I'm getting goddamn tired of people whining about all the drugs. There's no more drug use than in the general populace, it's just more obvious and easier to target. You'd have to shut down every high-school and college and bomb Columbia to even make a dent, and even then it'd be so miniscule as to make almost no difference.
From Romance era poets who smoked opium for the dreams, to Freud who used enough coca to kill a small horse, from the hard-core Harley-riding 50's crank head, to the 60's flower children (some of whom are now running the country, incidentally), people have been mis-behaving and using drugs since their discovery, and even if there weren't any we'd all spin around on our lawns until we fell down and saw God.
We need to quit telling monster-under-the-bed stories about how Ecstasy and other "club drugs" will turn you into an instant social liability/human-drive-by-shooting with a daily drug intake equal in cost to Canada's GNP. I do cancer research for a living, and there's not a scientist that I've met that hasn't experimented with drugs at one time, and damned if they aren't better people than some of the mud-sack glad-handing politicians I've met who drink themselves silly on afternoon Scotch tipples and have no idea what it's like to hold a job that's USEFUL.
It's also FAR past time for people to take responsibility for themselves. If you do drugs and freak out, it is YOU who must pay the costs/penalties and not the venue or the person who threw the party.
I must emphasize, simply MUST, that in the beginning and the end, everything we do and reach for is about taking the music and ourselves further and being able to SHARE that experience with others. THAT is the most important thing. If we have to take it back to cutting locks off abandoned warehouses in bad neighborhoods, that's just fine...I've done it before and I'll do it again, only NOW I can afford a lawyer...

Up the Empire...
Scott

Okay, that's it; it's blank carbon-copies to all of you from now on; can't have you all getting together to get me drunk and married to a dancer in Las Vegas. Many of you have come through with the usual advice...be adventurous, follow your heart, blah-blah-blah...semi-lucid female wet-dreams and gyno-babble culled from too many Oprah episodes and soft-porn Anne Rice novels. They all display one characteristic, one thread running through them all, and that's lack of foresight...or perhaps "willful ignorance", the attempt to achieve bliss from denying lessons learned in the past. Love is a drug; it acts pharmacologically on the brain to affect thought patterns, boosting oxytocin, boosting vasopressin, causing the substantia niagra to overproduce dopamine for that "well" feeling and causing weight gain. You can actually become addicted to it, and I think that something like that would make you prone to denying the evidence that your past has given you. You like drugs and/or alcohol, ergo you deny that they might be bad for you and continue to do them anyhow because you LIKE THE FEELING.
The past IS NOT the past, as one of you (you know who you are) pointed out; the experience gleaned from all those moments acts as a kind of filter, steering your reactions one way or the other. Think of the past as the bumpers in a game of bumper pool; you want to shoot the ball in the hole, but things get in the way and you have to figure out some other path to go around them. The man with one arm doesn't visit the alligator farm twice, if he's smart, or maybe he just learns to HANG AROUND THE ALLIGATORS without STICKING HIS FUCKING ARM IN THEIR MAWS, which is what I've learned to do.
I have learned to enjoy the company of someone without becoming arse-over-kettle gaa-gaa for them, unable to think or function without their presence. I have a separate life and can "...have fun diggin' on somebody..." without wanting to have their babies or imagining what our house in the mountains is going to look like when we're 65.
Then there's the RESPECT thing, respecting someone's feelings enough to make a decision that they might not be capable of making themselves, i.e. pharmacological addiction to the love feeling, ergo being in love with the idea of being in love that you fall in love with EVERYONE you meet and try to force them to do the same even though you know what they're REALLY like. If you saw a friend of yours in the same situation you would advise him/her to GET THE HELL OUT. I liked my ex enough to know that hurting her some NOW will save her a lot of pain LATER, and perhaps when she's over it we can still be friends (probably won't happen, but we'll see.) I also liked my ex enough to realize that I am very oriented on what >I< want to do right now, and I cannot give her the time or attention she wants, needs and (most importantly), DESERVES. Would you bring a child into the world without being able to give them everything that they need? Many people would, but NOT ME. Same principle. Besides, I hate kids...
One of you remarked that I might have "...missed out on what could have been the best thing of your life." This is the optimistic view of someone who is a) addicted, b) in a committed relationship and c) an optimist; I am none of these things. I am a pessimist, and unfortunately I am rarely pleasantly surprised. As George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who do not possess it."
So actually the reason that I wrote this is two-fold; like daytime talk-shows, it amuses you while also making you feel superior. All of you may fall in love, fall out of love and into despair, crawl from despair back into infatuation and thence into love once again, never breaking the cycle, but I will try to stand back until >I< am ready, and I WILL NOT SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS THAN PERFECTION. Okay, maybe a little nookie on the side, but THAT'S IT! The timing, the placement and the person must all align properly, as suits my sense of kibun (what the Koreans call the set-choreography of life, like a riot with music.)

And no, not everyone on the list was female, so quit making snide remarks, women.

“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 was lying 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)