P11

Artist: Sample Pictures, Microsoft Windows

Recently I did acid. I saw the heavens descend from the stars and eclipse reality's ordinary physics. It's good to know that my third eye hasn't calcified.

I was with my friend Cabius. Cabius is Lithuanian and he's a crazy man; not as crazy as I, but I'm Polish, so we have good synergy.

Cabius told me that he always thought that teeth were a sort of archaic principality. He looks forward to having a mouthful of steel fangs. He has holes punched through the inside of each one of his ears. Cab and I met selling make up.

The party was a college party. The dude throwing it, Chris, had said he been partying like this for 6 years straight. We're all kings of our own kingdoms.

When me and Cab got to the apartment we looked at each other with a smile and found the backdoor. There was a fire pit and it was cold. Cold for SoCal in December is like 45. I was wearing a thin dress shirt, jacket and beanie. Perhaps pants. The party reminded me of people getting drunk. It reminded me of youth. We knew we knew so little then... Now at twenty seven we think we know what we've experienced. Naivete doesn't disappear with youth. Anyways -- we popped the tabs and walked back inside. Upon entrance I realized we were the only white people there.

I was born middle class and white in America. I'm dumb enough to know everyone but the rich are a minority. At the party I met a girl. She was a real minority and she was beautiful. I remember her name. She was a fish. Her name was Nemo. She had big, beautiful eyes like a fish. She talked to me about being from somewhere out East; I want to say Cleveland, like I know I'm wrong but want to say something anyways. Now she wants to be a model. She could be if she wanted to, she looked beautiful. But I'm an ugly kind of beautiful.

I was so in love with the peace of everything I couldn't talk to a fish. I couldn't appreciate her the way she wanted to be, I couldn't pay attention to anything. I just sat, absorbing the moment in silence... When she stared into my hollowed, electrocuted eyes I could tell she wanted something but I watched it pass. I watched everything pass. I said something. I don't remember what it was. I remember her friend came to get her. I don't remember her friends name, but I remember she looked familiar, like the daughter in a family I've once seen in a more intimate setting. Like a sitcom. Maybe she was an actress. Everything was amorphous. Everything still is.

Once the girls were gone I saw I needed to adjust my congruence. I got up and went back outside where I sat down next to Cab who was huddled against his wife smoking a cigarette. I sat down and I think we smoked about 50 cigarettes before nothing happened. Then I wandered around.

++

The innards of that taxi on the ride back pulsated with a familiar motion. Like the waves on the beach of my youth. Boogi boarding with dolphins.

DECENt TO THE TOP

25 is when I started questioning the bad. Before that I only questioned what everyone told me was good. It takes time to unravel the roots of passive aggressive parenting; to unravel the roots of any stringent form of parenting. To unravel some eye space in my privileged cocoon. Some never question the way they were brought up. Maybe more than some. I still can't explain why I'm so angry sometimes. I'm sure there are still plenty of issues within me that will go unresolved for some time; but I'm only human and etc..

NARCISSISM

I struggle with my reasoning to get high. I'm older. Why do I fuck with perception like it's still as malleable as it was when I was seventeen? Cuz it always will be. Like weed is good for me; it's good to be dumb when I'm so predisposed to being high strung. It's what I need to relax. We all need our delusions.

I work out a lot now but can't help but feel like death. I go to the Golds Gym right next to the Metro Station. I look at the scars on my palms during my breaths in between sets and clench my fingers to see if they can hurt my palms. My hands are callused and peeling. Maybe I should wear gloves... But then how could I suffer so apparently? There's a lot of douche bags and I might be one. I hate the gym. Suffering was once a sacred thing to me; a thing I could only openly do in the comfort of my house. Now, in this plastic laden temple of torture equipment, it's the only way these people know to suffer, to equate to the rest of humanity. It is the purest form of suffering they know because it designs the most recent perception.

For a while, after I moved here, I would look in the mirror and see a vacancy, like I was born without a soul. Then I would get high and watch my soul pour from my eyes till speaking became hard and every vessel in my eyes strained and I couldn't see beyond my nose.

The secret, I know, to dealing with my tenseness, is breathing. I know because...because-- of this girl, Kayla. A brief hiccup of a connection between two shy, artistic kids. She was beautiful. She taught me to breath. I've heard it a hundred times before her. From personal trainers, professional athletes, singers, yoga masters. Simple words in a vulnerable place... my room -- alone --

The addiction is rooted in the loose soil of my frontal lobe and I keep telling myself it's a suitable treatment for my condition. I'm a little high right now writing this. If you rely on something to get you through the day can it be conducive to achievement? I guess I want to achieve. Is that true? I look in the mirror and I see.

I feel old--sometimes--sometimes I feel young. Like I can be one of those humans photo'd into the boards along Sunset, staring into the Hollywood mountains with their jaw slightly apart, a welcoming home for the bugs. Sometimes I'm imaginary.

Maybe it's more about appreciation. Maybe it's about being able to communicate with ourselves.
Art is appreciation, as one of my favorite designers posed once in an interview... Art is as much feeling inspired by work as producing it. Another cycle...another circle. It's being able to listen to our own heart and take in the silence of the universe and riding that wave. It takes knowing our breath. We can't communicate with others, we can't love others, if we can't love, if we can't talk to ourselves.

I know I'm spoiled, and I know I'm rotten. I'm gracious for both because it teaches me to see past the walls I constantly construct in order to preserve the more idealistic notions. Some are just so attached to their time here; it perplexes me. We already live forever don't we? Why would you want that body to last? It's just flesh; it's just blood; a consciously advanced organic computer...

I've lapsed. I've lapsed. I see you lapsing. Driving. Appreciating your breath without realizing it. Once you realize it does it become different? No. Realization is constant. And it's not possible for our minds to achieve such awareness without practice, and we are not taught this practice. We are not taught to be aware. We are taught to be bought. How to buy. How to sell. Economics. Industrial, communal systems of production and consumption.