Retrograduation
I rambled to Roxe about the almighty
value system last time I was on coke. I love calling it coke, cause it’s
classique, cocoa in ornate script, beyond cola. Freud got a lot of mileage out
of it, he must have had a good connection. But it's gak to me. Just compresses
my conscious awareness of the rich spectrum of life's pleasures into a narrow
band, bringing me back to that garish bichromatic dichotomy, quick wringout of
vitality. Thank god I don't have a good connection. I’m a psychoanalyst like
everyone else, but I can’t find any way out of my own labyrinth, so I certainly
don’t want to supercharge the trip.
The almighty value system. All it takes is a week of sobriety and I can talk
myself into putting the art and music and words on the shelf again and going
back to the bar – to get high on low society, subvert my sober values and
obligations to be cool, shrug off the burden of stylistic integrity. So I can
ramble again. I like saying Roxe. Stokes my imagination. Strokes an alter ego,
Alt-F4, control alternate delete, inhibition’s end, a quantum experiment. See
where that takes you. Me. Who?
The run of the mill value system, personally tailored. It's complicated - it's
social dynamics - it's interlocking layers of cultural programming, carried
genetically, broadcast epigenetically, stretching back to antiquity. I'll never
figure it out. I'm a groove pattern on vinyl. I'm gritty, scratched, analog.
Haven't used the needle yet, I guess I've got enough holes for now, though they
did IV me saltwater at the hospital. In the Welfare Cosmos, every citizen is
allotted fifty grams of fentanyl in a bank vault for use thirty days prior to
death. So if you're on schedule, citizen... you're good to go. I wonder about
some people I know. Where they may be going. Prepositions - from here, they seem
to matter. It’s not time for my fentanyl yet. So I’m making due with gigapiano.
Potential samples on the horizon. I could buy them, or I could rent an
apartment for the short term, build a bubble, be another casino bum, finally
float into the profiteer’s lair, hey, for the price of future despair give me
shelter, short lived like a Monopoly venture, the game will be over soon, enjoy
it now, take a Chance, cause the community chest’s broken ribs are poking
through the skin and it’s just an ugly scene.
I don't feel the sickness right now though. Maybe because I'm in the interlude
- between healthy art-driven life, and the burn of debauchery I may soon feel,
kinetic energy, what keeps the cycle of entropy going. Funny to read about old
fixations - times when I was so giddily obsessed with those... what were they
called? Entheogens? Ah yes. The mind-expanding agents. Not that I really
invited them to turn my life upside down, I just liked the idea of it, the
abstraction, and the elvish edifice shimmering across the chasm of human values
- the unattainable, dancing elves. When I realized drugs actually had the power
to do what I was writing about, for real... I wasn’t sure if that was actually
my trip, though it took a lot of deconditioning to realize that. It’s nice to
know I can go there I guess, but... no, it's not nice to know that, it's kind
of freaky. Hallucinations aren't free, they tax your sanity.
No matter what I go through, I can never get hip to state boundaries. I can
never detach from the wheel of life and lounge comfortably in the godchair, in
hyper-reality, taking it all in. Dispassionately - obviously that's not an
activity for the Christian god, or Allah, or any of those assholes. But it
seems the most God-like thing to do, to me. And I guess that's why I'm here.
Because I'm not dispassionate. I still have passion. Passion for passion. I'm
here to feel. Squeeze feeling out of this horrific moldfruit planetrip. That’s
why I dropped into this dinucleic niche, someone’s gotta play the role. Of a
creature whose taxonomic tag bears the name “Jonathan Deon”. Parental patterns
dubbed me thus, daubed me in anglo-christian symbolism.
Would I want to retire to the God
chair? Sometimes I feel like I would. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a
partner. Sometimes that fentanyl tempts me. Five hundred well-fed rock stars
can't be wrong. Deadhead bedspread cosmonauts, craving icy celesta. Under the
bridge, he said. So archetypal, I have to wonder if it's even real. Maybe
cartoons exist. Maybe they exist when you draw blood, wherever you draw blood.
Does it matter? A mansion, a bridge, a bedroom - anyplace will do when you're
filling holes that have lives in them, families, concept albums barely begun,
burying your dreams with drugs. I have faith in fentanyl. Like I had faith in
God, the dispassionate God of enlightenment, that ground zero glory hole.
Careful what you wish for, I said. A phrase I coined, millennia-ago, as some
street corner prophet, or maybe Brian of Judea.
I'm always caught in the moment. Well, that's what emotions will do to you -
override the intellect. Emotions seem to define reality, they’re always
stronger than those prickly thoughts. They’re the load bearing structures of
reality. And they’re chemicals. Chemical composites. Complex chemistry. Organic
chemistry. That's what we are, unusually complicated beings of the molecular
level. The cutting edge, in some sense. At least in the sense that MAKES SENSE
to the densely ramified matter we call the cerebral cortex. Brown Algae beat
Low Grade Psychgnosis in the Grohman Narrows beauty pageant, but it was a close
call. Douglas Fir was a controversial judge, because there’s no accounting for
taste, and those fucking trees are biased against brainwaves, anyway.
And that's why I can't stop talking about drugs, even after I stopped doing
them. Because we are drugs. Our thoughts are enabled by mother nature's
multi-faceted apothecary, variation I for you, variation II for me, barely
binary, on a distant limb of the genetic tree, a long time ago in a galaxy far
far away. Luke Skywalker was not from around these parts. But he was closer to
the bright center of the universe than he thought.
Paint peeling from my hoarse bark, rustbloom over the slickgrate. Tyred of the
fyre, deus never got the smackdown he deserved. Still more hopscotch games to
play with language, the chalk washed off in the rain last night, the new
pattern looks familiar but I can't quite remember why, hazey daze, hazel
stopped by again, crazy, there was an interchange, somebody rasped out an ozzy
melody, somebody riffed on it, we played four-square on the school grounds, the
asphault pavement, the ball was lost down the street, tumbled down that steep
Josephine tilt, it's nobody's fault... It's still tumbling and I'm still here -
not wanting to grow up, not thinking about it much though. My worries are more
here and now, because I forget how to think long term. Retrograduation. Let's
go to Lakeside. Stop by Dairy Queen on the way, get a blizzard. Reeses' pieces
blizzard. That's the ticket. Like keystone city on the holodeck. A dream of
electric sheep.
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