what do i want to do?
maybe i want to be inside.
maybe i don't want to go on a ridiculously circuitous tour of nelson at night.
or maybe what i want is just to wander around in a confused state. i'm not
sure. when i'm tweaked, i don't know what i want. it's a maddening mystery.
it's nice that i write in all sorts of states of mind. various disparate
transient paradigms motivate me to describe their existential essencehood of
essex county. then, when i'm feeling a certain way, and feeling, correctly,
that no one understands me, i can go back through my journals or shamelessly
public blog posts and find the only person that can relate - my past self, the
one i didn't remember until now, the whole way of looking at things i'd
forgotten about. okay, that's a little too deep. or just deep enough. maybe
that's the depth i want. not sure. my dipstick is a shady sod.
maybe what i want is a little wine. maybe i'll open up one of the
mediocre bottles - or let's be honest, one of the bad bottles. it's okay, it's
still wine. and i don't want to open a good bottle. i'm a bit arrogant but also
guilty. i don't know if that's relevant but i'll report it anyway, might be
pivotal to the case they're building for, or against me, 200 years in the
future, the bicentennial of this crux in my life. maybe wine will be the last
stud in the terkel.
actually, what i think i need is fresh air blowing on my face. the cool night
breeze. it's the only thing that can maybe take me out of my head. i need to be
out of my head. and yet, it seems the sickness is the only thing worth
expressing, and expressing is the only worthwhile thing to do. it's the
"genius is pain" artistic martyrdom that sounds so pretentious most
of the time.
no, actually, i figured out that it's waves crashing against me. and there's
some nausea involved. that means i should take one of those non-drowsy
anti-emetics. so i will. i'd take a drowsy one if i had the choice. i'll also
drink some water, because it's clear and transparent, feels pure and tastes so
much better than beer, and bad wine, and anything else, it's golden, it's
gravy, it's good, it's god - it's water - and when i'm tasting water i forget
how sick in the head i am right now. maybe i'm not. maybe i just feel like i'm
sick. but maybe i'm actually healthy. maybe it's healthy to mix capitalization
conventions. maybe walmart will hire me, even though i demonstrated against
them. maybe i'm a team player.
i'm coming to admire the non-meaningful. but when i do that, i call it sublime,
and it starts to mean things, and then it's fucked. and syntax starts to flow
like mercury and molasses. and i feel compelled to make it right in writing.
which is a fool's errand, but he took the job. just because it looks a certain
way to me doesn't mean it is. it's all about feelings. we may not
know bleep all... but emotions fucking rule. in the land of the hysterics, the
stoic is king. or maybe not. bleep.
i was just bowled over by a wave of sickness. had to lie on the bed and talk
myself down. calm myself. felt like i'd poisoned myself. but it was just a
wave. it happens. better than being actually sick, like diseased or something.
after a while, i felt sort of calm - still sick but. finally took that sickness
pill. it's waves. but why do i have to keep doing it and writing about it?
damn, it makes everything look ridiculous. do i have to write about that too?
it brings on another wave.
goddamnit, i had to crash in bed again, and ride out another wave of sickness,
vertigo, the collapse of paradigm, tweaked, twisted
once i resign myself to being "down", as in, crashed, i feel a little
better, not good, but not horribly ill in a kinetic way - if i'm still trying
to be up, or thinking i ought to be, it's bloody, brutal, a battle i can't win
- when i'm officially crashed, i can be jaded
it's disgusting that i write about drugs so much, but there's anatomical value
in it. i should watch tv online because i've done my "duty" as a
writer - but i still need some kind of job, and wording will have to do. there
are nice things in the world, good pure and impure things, but i can only
conceive of them, experience them through a sick head, synthetically altered,
incapable of feeling pleasure in a normal way, perverse - and this is over
dramatic bullshit, state-bounded transcription of transient neurosis. just
chapter 593 of the tractate, of the elemental exegesis, the leviathan in the
room -- through a scanner darkly. phil lost a lot of good friends, including
himself, through the dystopia of the sepia-toned sixties turned seventies,
semen-stained silk and std feeding frenzy.
i'm hoping i can see those good things again, more properly, when that anti-emetic
pill kicks in. raspberry flavor, like my girl, one of those good things. i'm
ashamed of myself for wanting to philander in earlier times. i'm lucky to have
her. she benefits from me too, i know. but man am i lucky. i feel better when
i'm with her. she's one of those people, who i would quit drugs for, because
she's so much better, although when i'm synthetically altered, like now, it
seems to me that love and human relationships are just as synthetic as any
pharmaceutical mindstate. but shortly, that won't mean anything. no, i
shouldn't call it sublime, but i will, the sublimity of the sublime label,
under a secular banner, wordplay in the bristling grass blades, grasscut hand,
fresh mown lawn...
so many good things in the world, remember when baseball was good? kids today,
they have to find a way to make steroids good. things change. baseball was
pastoral. now it's at&t center. but it's also got a jumbotron. but remember
the new york nickerbockers? we won't see their like again. until the apocalypse.
no, i kid. i bought in, i don't want things to burn. i'm sorry i've given my
sister anxiety, with my apocalyptic bullshit. it wasn't necessary. or maybe it
was. like everything's necessary. but goddamn, that's gotta be bullshit.
tautological bullshit. tautologies are tautological, and bullshit is bullshit.
it's sick, that sickness is so meaningful to me, that it makes me write the
most important stuff. it's a kind of torture, but i guess i'd gladly take that,
to having my nuts electrocuted, because i'm a sheltered canadian cracker, and
"white" is a fitting emblem for privilege, and sickness, pestilence,
pale horseman, apocalypse, death - how archetypal, dawg.
i'm so proud of myself, i haven't even mentioned what drug i'm on. what
restraint. what artistic discipline. less is more. hemmingway knew the five and
ten dollar words, but he didn't need them. was the sickness worth this writing?
can you put a price on it?
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