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15:44 - April 28, 2003
paint on the stucco
I just called my dad and in the course of the conversation he said this:
'I wouldn't let you paint my house because you're not conscientious, you're not careful, you're clumsy, and if you spilled ANY paint on the stucco it would be the END OF THE WORLD, because you cannot get that stuff out.'

I started laughing, in amazement. 'Did you just say the end of the world, Dad? The end of the WORLD?'
He was not laughing. He hadn't been kidding. 'That kind of attitude is exactly why I wouldn't want you doing it.'
'The end of the WORLD? STUCCO GETTING PAINT ON IT?'
'This is exactly the kind of immature...'
'PAINT ON THE STUCCO??' I fairly roared.
'This is exactly the kind of attitude that convinces me...'

This kind of attitude? What has happened to him? He grew up in the sixties, smoking a lot of pot and ducking the system. Granted, he minored in Finance. But still. Paint on the stucco.

It's a crystal clear example of materialism sneaking up and biting you in the ass right when you least expect it. And not letting go. If I had said to him thirty years ago that he would be that concerned over paint on the stucco, he would have said to shoot him if he ever got that way. I'm sure of it. And now...

(shoot me if I ever get that way.)

21:54 - April 26, 2003
i love today
Most of today is, has been, consumed in flashes, flashes consumed in haze. Everything is seen from above, everything that can be seen from above is pointed out; the squirrel gnawing on a nut under a tree and the cloudless blue sky and two super-stoned girls huddle together at the light at Broadway and Euclid like they're holding an umbrella and it's raining hard. It isn't raining, but we think if we face each other we won't be facing anybody else and nobody will notice, but we know everybody notices; the rows of kids on the Buff Bus, the biker behind us, that guy in the Ford. Suddenly it's warm, green spring... suddenly. The sidewalk slides by beneath my feet. We skip wildly down Pearl from the bookstore, arm in arm, skip high and long, through crowds of parents and children and hippies and the goths who always make out in front of the government building. She was reading Samuel Beckett loudly to me in the quiet bookstore as I swayed back and forth on the 'magic ladder' the one with wheels that lets you reach high bookshelves. 'This book is going to change my life,' she says, waving Flatland, 'and the book you're holding should change yours too.'

'It's Exquisite Corpse,' I say, looking at it. 'It's about necrophilia. I don't want it to change my life.'

Today is a day for celebrating ourselves, we decide, only half-kidding, as we walk past the wine shop. 'I want to sit in an outdoor cafe sipping wine with the slanting afternoon sun turning it burgundy and watch the people walk by and eat rich extravagant food,' she says, so we go to Boulder Cafe and do exactly that minus the wine, since her 'forgotten I.D.' trick, though expertly attempted, doesn't work.

'This sounds strange, I know, but if I were living in ancient Roman times, I would go up on a cliffside and have an orgy with a bunch of women and grapes and wine,' she says. I agree. We should say that during a lull, in the room with all of our (guy) friends and see what happens. Probably nothing. Probably some guy saying, 'Well, I would too.'

'Do I seem really dismissive when I'm high?' I ask, concerned to the point of pleading, suddenly, and in the next sentence being dismissive about her answer. I almost stumble into the bookshelves. These stacks and stacks of pages I have not and will never read. All I'm doing is thinking. I don't mean to be dismissive. But when she's asking me if this isn't this the perfect day, I am staring over the roof of the bank at the mountains and thinking about sliding behind the rocks in Evanston while the cops' searchlights strobe the beach like a sombre disco, for no apparent reason. 'It's easy for you to say,' I don't say out loud, because it's the snippy little bitch voice in the back of my head that isn't very loud. And besides, I am having fun.

There is a guy striding, pacing actually, back and forth in front of the music building on his cell phone, yelling excitedly and probably drunkenly. 'I mean she was a fucking Amazon, man,' he bellowed. 'Six foot four, 190.. 200 pounds at least, and by twenty minutes into it she was headbutting me. I just booked it to the bar and took shots of whatever was strongest...'

We rocked with laughter on the bench behind him. Everything and everyone was so surreal. What I never said at the right time was that a haze is not always bad, nor is it always a haze. The blades of grass even, so sharply drawn, and the scenes we kept picturing, from above; the children with balloons and the guy who stopped to talk to us, flowers drooping from his left hand, and the waiter asking with barely suppressed amusement if our 'stuff was good', knowing beyond a shadow of doubt that we were stoned because we took an hour to decide what we wanted and another two hours to eat it.

I love today.

16:01 - April 25, 2003
fine
Haven't been anxious about something as mundane as going to class for yonks, but something about Econ recitation really pulls the wrong strings in my stomach. I've had to realize it doesn't matter so much why, not as much, anyway, as deciding how to get through it. This is how I know I am stronger than I used to be. It is the exact same feeling, the queasiness, the vomit taste in my mouth, the dizziness, but five years ago I'd be straight back into my house, my room, or I'd be in the nurse's office on a cot. Today, I scrunched into a corner of the bus, next to an open window. Today, I stopped on every stair of the building to catch my breath and swallow and get my bearings, but I kept going up, up until the 3rd floor, down the hall, swallowing, sliding into my desk. The classroom was too bright, the kids too quiet. I watched the review and I took the quiz and then I left and now I am home, feeling perfectly fine.

23:35 - April 24, 2003
things happening
I've never tried to write to a background of Bartok, but there's a first time for everything, and I have to calm down to avert a panic attack... new coping methods each time.... one has to work, right? sometime?

I can be so swayed by words. I just spent my Thursday night hauling keyboards back and forth down a dorm hallway and then discussing drowning, the last gurgling breath, lungs filling and distorting and failing. Why do I discuss these things when I know I'll be thinking about it and gasping for air the rest of the evening? He shudders and curls up, and shakes a little, but he forgets the next second, and, predictably, is off about Dante's Inferno, describing all the terrible punishments for the terrible sinners in all the layers of, well, YOU know the story, and my stomach turns and turns and turns even as I continue to talk about it, pushing my limits, seeing if I can keep it up, because I used to do the same thing with vomiting... talk about it obsessively until I thought I would collapse, just to see if I could. Strangely enough I keep thinking: my body is surrounded by air, empty air, and it is smothering me. I need a hug. (the story continues on repeat:) but.. I can't have one because this is Boulder and no Nora or Erik exists here.

He does sit close enough though for the heat of his body to give me some comfort; it's not all empty, not the room, at least, as we surf the internet for SparkNotes on the book so we can... who cares, who cares, who cares. I can't stop thinking about it, the drowning. How can I ever deal with things happening if I can't deal with thinking about things happening?

01:21 - April 24, 2003
the epitome of this fort
Chell: I wonder what it would be like to completely lose my mind for one day. Just one day, though, not any more than that.
Aaron: ::burps::

12:28 - April 23, 2003
running in the rain
Evidence.
It'll still be here when everyone else is gone, if everyone does in fact leave, if I do in fact end up completely alone. It'll still be here. These moments when the rain falls hard outside and I could easily run across the world in bare feet, propelled simply by ecstasy. Everything I spend so much energy saving is still in my head; it hasn't gone anywhere. If I lost every document on my computer, if this diary was tangible and someone ripped it up, it would all still be in my head; if every piece of music I'd ever written and every music file on Sonar or Finale was corrupted, it would still all be in my head; if every pastel drawing I'd ever painstakingly shaded was torn to shreds, it would all still be in my head. and therefore not lost at all.

I think behind all these terrifying thoughts of halted breathing and stage fright and guns and tunnels is something very simple, and it bothers me that I can't get at it. This, too, is in my head, and probably out of it too; somewhere in the pages of this diary or any other diary or even in the scribbled mess of my four-year-old picture stories. Every time I find something else out I think it's IT. The car crash, the abortion, the endless fighting, stage lights, the smell of sulfur. I've tried to make an epiphany out of everything. None of these are, in fact, an epiphany. Just facts. Just facts I am too young or stupid or stoned to remember.

At times like these I think the only thing I can do is lay back and do what I can and wait for these moments of running in the rain.

01:26 - April 22, 2003
april day
sitting up sipping three cognacs after a heart attack. this is what i looked at him and thought... this is your destiny, in your new seventies jacket and your glassy brown eyes, your new york slingblade drawl.

i am stretching and snapping... don't tell me these things, it is breaking me. radiohead cannot wail loud enough to drown this out. i cannot twist the knob to glassbreakingheartbreaking volume because it's 1 a.m, although it shouldn't even matter, after all the j.lo horror i've been put through this semester at the witching hours of the night. radiohead, though, it just drifts out the window, out with the odd mist (colorado mist, once in a blue moon), out onto the hill behind my building. i harmonize it. fourths. sounds medieval. my voice breaks and cracks, twenty hours of being awake.

sometimes it is something very simple that i want. most times. me playing devils' advocate to your argument doesn't change a thing: we agree on this one idea, anyway; all anyone ever wants is to be happy. i do not bring up the complications, the dangerous ones.... everybody's happiness interferes with someone else's. [all i want is to leave my hand on the tanned back of your neck while you doze, in the sun, on an april day.]

19:45 - April 20, 2003
no joke
Although the air was free and the rocks jagged and red and the creek foamy with unknown foams, the whole sky filled with the smell of citrus when he peeled his orange, tossing the scraps in the air and breaking the segments cleanly with his teeth, then chewing furiously. Everything: orange Pinesol - super Monstrous Pinesol! - and sharp and clear with no reference to temperature. The rocks tower and she says she's going to scramble up a bit, while he scratches rhythms out on his calf and I follow her, because we're climbers. He scratches and scratches and then he catches up to us in about half the time it took us to get to that point, breathing heavily when he gets there despite himself. We see a snake and avoid the sporadic cactuses and I hit his feet and she slaps at my finger and we talk about, well, what would happen if we got pushed off... and what would happen if we just JUMPED, jumped, like on purpose but somehow still beyond our body's control? or that we should go camping, real camping, next weekend, like with tents and food and cookstoves and that, and bear-ties, whether they were necessary or not? (she: yes. he: no.) also laughing at inopportune moments, like when the camel fell off the cliff, or when I saw my cat beheading my goldfish, or when... well, the point of it was whether I would laugh if he tipped off the cliff and fell to his death. I concluded that, no, I probably would not laugh at him. But that I wasn't sure. That I could not predict these things. He laughed, tipped a bit backwards, and I caught his foot. She slept in the crevice that caught the sun but blocked the wind, in my sweatshirt and fitting perfectly (not the sweatshirt, the crevice.)

Anyway, it's 4-20 and all the pot disciples (read: most of my friends) were dutifully out on Farrand Field at four-twenty in the morning with a tent and twenty pre-packed joints while I was blissfully asleep in my bed (I mean it's fine, we planned it that way.) It turned out that the day we spent was a wonderful natural high; the hike with perfect weather, the oranges, dipping our feet in the creek. We didn't want a joint at the peak (romantically because it would have 'ruined the majesty' but realistically because we were afraid of climbing back down high.) We went to Farrand but were there really late, like 5:30 or something, and not too many people were there still, and I guess that's a travesty for some of my friends, but what the fuck, it's just a day of the year like any other day. There's a cop circling the remaining groups of people, smiling behind her sunglasses. Boulder cops.

(Not going to mention the being-really-high-right-now-like-when-I'm-writing-this-now part since it would taint the story, but geez. Why else would I have written super orange monstrous pinesol? I have the right. I did love today though, no joke.)

 

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