11:44 - February 14, 2003
subversive
Social conventions are just an excuse not to take the time to get to know people well enough to realize what their meaning is.

I miss dark rooms dusty with.. well, dust, but the museum kind, not the ancient grandmother's house kind, and stars on the ceiling and fluffy comforters thick with limbs sharing each bed with five other people whispering so as not to awaken parents sleeping nearby and toppling CD towers stuffed with good music, boys and girls with legs thrown over one another in a huge nonsexual pile, lying on the floor when it gets too hot with eyes closed, air on your neck, music soft, understanding.

Our assignment in creative writing class today was to go do something subversive concerning the dreaded V-day. The example given was to go to a restaurant alone, wait til someone of your gender got up to go the the bathroom, then slide over on the bench next to their date and ask them for their number.

I would do it (and you know I would) but I'm going to be on a bus from Boulder to Denver, and then, tomorrow, on a plane from Denver to Los Angeles. I asked him if that was subversive enough to count. He looked confused and then laughed in the other direction.

12:23 - February 13, 2003
east-west
Yesterday I walked home from main campus instead of taking the Buff Bus. After coming out the wrong door of the administrative center after having dropped the class I so wanted to drop, I found myself lost in the tangles of Kittredge, a semi-off-campus-sort-of mass of buildings with fancy names and ponds in between them. I watched the geese walk cautiously on the ice as if they expected to fall through (understandably, as it was wearing a T-shirt kind of weather and the ice was slowly growing mushy) and the smokers smoke and flirt on the bridge. It was so warm that I deja-vu'd the whole time (yes, I made it into a verb) about orientation... I stayed at Kittredge then and did cartwheels all the way home from the cafe with a beautiful girl I had been playing pool with.

Anyway, when I emerged from the mass of buildings onto an open field, Will Vill looming, enormous, in the distance and the expressway running like a slash in between, I noticed suddenly how much like the plains Boulder looked, facing east. The land dropped slightly at a barely-there angle, and then stretched out forever and ever; Superior, Lafayette, Westminster, and at the very end of my vision, Denver, fading into the distance. Facing west, though, just by turning 180 degrees, the mountains shoot up high into the air barely two miles from your face, still coated in snow and enveloped in wind. To the north a bit you can see the Front Range extending on and on.

It made me want to start walking west, into the mountains, and keep walking and keep walking until I got to the other side, camping along the way in caves uninhabited by bears or snakes and eating freeze dried food. Who wants to do it with me?

01:21 - February 13, 2003
oh, oh, oh
Somehow we've managed to find someone a good deal more gullible than I am. In the mere span of a half hour, we (well, mostly they.. I can't take credit for simply sitting in the corner suppressing laughter) had her believing that Chell had a collapsed lung from a fight he got in with a frat boy who he told had a small dick, so the frat boy pulled a knife and hit Chell 'between the liver and the kidney', but somehow still punctured his lung, and he's not able to show you the mark because it's below the beltline, but now he has to use a respirator to breathe. (This respirator that we showed her is actually a bubbler we made from Brendan's spare asthma inhaler, and it's clearly resinated almost fully through and reeks of weed, plus looks NOTHING like a respirator.) We said that Chell has to use the respirator at least once per half hour and wears it as headgear at night. But the headgear broke and he returned it to the hospital, who gave him his money back, but insurance had covered it the first time, so he found himself with $200, with which he bought an ounce of cocaine from a homeless man named Coyote who lives under the expressway. He then sold the coke for a profit of 1,200 and used that to buy a quarter pound of weed, which eight of us smoked all in one night. Or actually we just tried to, but passed out after awhile and when we woke up it was gone. To this day we don't know where it went, but we suspect that we left fire near it and it all went up in flames while we slept.
Aaron decided to get back at this frat boy for stabbing Chell, but unfortunately that night he was tripping on psycheledic mushrooms, so he never got to this guy, but ripped off the arm of a friend of a friend because he thought the arm was a poisonous snake. I mean, it was dislocated anyway, but Aaron just put the 'frosting on the cake', so to speak. And then he was scared the guy would tell, so he shot him twice in the head and ran off.

I couldn't stand it. I was falling on the floor in the other room, whimpering and screeching and spitting and fairly ROCKING in hysterical laughter. She believed ALL of this, up to the part about Aaron KILLING someone. Aaron's about as likely to kill someone as Martin Luther King, Jr. is, but... and although Andrew was tensed up tighter and tighter in a ball in the corner, shaking with guffaws and Chell was smoking weed with his 'collapsed lung', or had been, at least.... she just kept asking. 'Really? And then what happened?'

When she figured it out, finally, after she murmured, eyes wide as saucers, how sick she felt and how she couldn't believe he had KILLED someone and why were they telling her this and she didn't know what to do... it just dawned on her suddenly, I guess. I don't know. I felt terrible. She was more embarrassed than I've ever seen anyone. My sides were sore from laughter, and I felt so bad.

On one hand, we completely humiliated her, and we're assholes. But on the other, she believed Aaron ripped someone's ARM off.

Oh, oh, oh.

13:30 - February 12, 2003
i can remember
I guess it's just hard socially; what with being in the circle and having to pass it from one side to the other without having any and all. But it's not even that bad. I love how potheads are all just 'well whatever dude do what you want and it's cool with me' in addition to a little good natured teasing. I love that attitude. It's so easy to deal with.

I could play oldschool Mario forever... I played it long enough that I only got five hours of sleep. Thank god I don't have a Nintendo in MY room.

I just have snippets now. Of everything. 'Uhh.. yeah, it's going ok. My roommate sleeps in this fort in our room. Umm...' and the one word 'yeah' and how it conveys so much to other people when you start laughing and you bury your face and all you can say is 'yeah'. I notice so much more sober, but it's not as amazing. Tumbling into the fort at 8 PM and waking up Andrew, curled in a corner, sleepy, rubbing his eyes and hugging the blanket as he reluctantly makes room for us. Aaron's head blowing up like a balloon and floating away on a faint white string. Chell's eyes so abruptly changing colour that I shrieked and he looked thoroughly confused. The naughty Coke can, meeting its bloody fate at such a young age.. 'it was talking back'. And before. I remember the first time I met them. I almost didn't go over there because I was tired.... this was back when I was sleeping over twelve hours a day just from boredom. And I almost went home because I was tired. But their smiles were sincere, something I wasn't used to, and I followed them up eleven floors to this huge sprawling dorm.. I mean.. dorms aren't supposed to be that huge, but this was huge... and then I smoked with these four strangers and there was no awkwardness, not even from the very start. I love how things happen and you don't even notice them while they're happening. You don't notice them until months later, and then you can't imagine what would have happened if you hadn't gone over there that one night.

And remember, I'm sober.

I really don't think that weed is the problem. I never did, but it was making it impossible for me to see what the problem WAS. The harder I tried, the more backwards it got, and I would forget where my thread was going. The thrill of it, the 'Oh my god! I'm so high! I can't even think!'... it was all gone. The standing outside a bus stop and discussing what would happen if our skin were made of clothes and our clothes were made of skin. The almost literal feeling of floating all the way to the gas station and floating back, the wondrous taste of food, the amazement at the sound of music. The amazement at new ideas. It was fading, and it kept fading, and it would flare up occasionally, but really it was just gone.

I never used to feel sick. It used to be extremely clear, the stomach seemingly free of the acid, the muck that constantly plagues me and makes me almost always nauseous. It used to take that away, and now it intensifies it. That's all. I think that might actually BE all. The rest might have been group dynamics. When I think about it I don't even know what the change is. Still. But at least this time I can remember what I was talking about.

11:57 - February 11, 2003
quitting
So it has been decided that I'm going to quit smoking weed, for awhile at least. I've always said to anyone who challenges me on the fact that it isn't addicting or any more harmless than sucking any smoke into your lungs, and sometimes to people who don't challenge me at all on that, that the second it got to be a problem I would quit. Up until now it hasn't been a problem, but after this weekend I've been constantly turning the idea over in my head, which isn't working quite as well as it used to, and decided that weed may not be the problem or it may be. On the off chance that it is, I'm stopping for awhile. It's time now to test those confidently spoken words 'it's not physically addictive.'

It'll be hard, though, all addiction aside. Almost all my friends smoke and they do it all the time. Even when I don't think they're high, they probably are. Andrew's 'bus face' is a perfect example of this. And Andrew... it'll be impossible to tell him I'm quitting. I actually already hinted at it and he was better than I'd expected about it, but I don't think he thinks I'm serious. We've always laughed about people quitting and how funny it is that people actually think it's a problem. Now I've become one of those people, and I have nothing to say about it or for myself. There's no evidence anywhere that weed is the problem. But my head is all mucked up and backwards and I can't muck it up anymore right now, I just can't.

00:19 - February 11, 2003
surprise
wow, what a huge surprise.

Where do you fall on the liberal - conservative political spectrum? (United States)
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01:01 - February 09, 2003
everything was wrong
I looked around just now and almost everything seemed very wrong. The TV swirled side to side and dipped as I looked at it, or even as I looked beyond its perimeter; they just got a new one and it's too big for the room. It dominates the whole west wall and turns the room from scruffy to semi-trying-to-be-slick with its sharp corners, etc... and it's not even that, but my stomach turns. The last three times I've smoked pot I've felt sicker and sicker. At first it's fine and I laugh a lot as usual, but it's a shaky laughter with a lot of gasping and soon it turns into the metallic taste behind the tongue and in the throat and I have to leave to avoid everything dipping, because in my room it somehow doesn't, not as much, at least. Something is turning sour. Most things, really. As I looked around from person to person, no one seemed real except for Andrew, long and lanky and silhouetted against the far corner bringing a cigarette to his mouth, and Lara, rummaging through her purse with one hand and wildly conducting Philip Glass with the other. Everyone else had the Nintendo images reflected across their faces in the rebound light from the newer bigger screen.

People are starting to go overboard, especially Chris. Drunk every night and something worse happens than the last, something nobody can believe he's doing, and nobody really knew him to begin with, I don't think, and even less so now, so we can't ask what's bothering him even when we, or I at least, am pretty sure something is. Bothering him, I mean. I'm still so dizzy. He said maybe it's time for me to quit, mostly empty Jack Daniels in his hand, eyes glistening. I couldn't look at him.

It's funny and terrible, the difference between last night and tonight.

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