12:52 - September 13, 2003 yeah, well.
Uh, yes. Insanity. All week I'm moping around feeling sorry for myself because I never do anything and then suddenly Friday comes and it's OVERSTIMULATION.
At 9 p.m. I'm reluctantly allowing myself to be dragged out the door, my mind going all the while about how it's just going to be another stupid fucking party that I'll want to leave at midnight. Jump to 3 a.m. I'm sitting on the floor in Gail and Robin's house laughing uproariously about something called 'Secondhand Taco Disease', drinking a Sex on the Beach, eating flautas, and ranting and raving unsteadily and loudly about how I want all girly girls to go die.
Yeah, well.
At one point Robin and I were passing a bowl and the glass of Sex on the Beach back and forth to each other at the same time, so when one of us had the bowl, the other had the drink, and vice versa. Thinking of Lara and I's previous conversation, I said, 'Imagine this as a documentary on college excesses. Camera's focused on us passing this bowl and this drink. To the side a little, Gail is swaying and bouncing and singing the Beastie Boys. Camera pans. We see wine glasses all over the floor and a broken CD player.' It's perfect.
18:48 - September 11, 2003 naturally
To be honest, I've been having a shitty week. I don't know what it is but it seems like I never have anything to do and my options are as follows (the same as they always are but it feels different somehow): read, listen to music, do homework. Go hiking. Um, walk to Andrew's, walk to Nick's. When it gets late I care more about it. The apartment is all falsely lit huge institutional bright lights, and my head is all full of muck... nothing productive, just muck. For me, boredom doesn't stop at boredom... it escalates into a full on funk. I realize it will go away, but it doesn't make it any better while it's happening. I feel like I did last year at this time, that I need to force myself to do things to fill my time, instead of just doing them naturally.
23:16 - September 09, 2003 forever and not at all.
I get home and go into my room and next to my computer, taped to the desk crudely by its corner, is a white sheet of notepad paper that says, in my handwriting: 'What if pot was the elixir for switching lives?'
Ummm...
hahahahahahaha!!!
Yeah, I remember that night, at best, fuzzily. I guess Lara found it and put it there. The urgency, finding a green pen, finding paper, doing it before what you want to write slips right out of your brain and onto the floor along with the rest of your coherent thoughts:
What if pot was the elixir for changing lives? What if it were? You just smoke it and suddenly you're in a different world, or enough of one that you see things completely differently, and in many cases, more clearly, in more detail, and to a greater depth. You're in the same life, but you see it in a way that is different enough that it could be anywhere. And what if there were a party and you invited every person you've ever known to it? The combinations.. the combinations. My first grade reading teacher and the boy I met in a hotel swimming pool when I was 14 in Washington, D.C. The quiet girl in my fiction class and my piano teacher from when I was preschool-age. Imagine what it would be like. Imagine your brain exploding. Imagine heaven being like that, only outside of time so it lasts at once forever and not at all.
09:16 - September 09, 2003 eerie things
What a... strange week. Starts out with me writing this creepy creepy character sketch for fiction class that was a mix of a few people (those people, oddly enough, mixing to make an insane, suicidal, illogical, mysterious human being...). It ends with him fading, bone-white, into the snow outside of a vegetarian cafe. (Hands like a pile of twigs...) I successfully weirded myself out after that. It was probably 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night. I was waiting for Lara to come pick me up for the party we were going to go to. Until she got there, I had no idea what to do with myself to stave off the feeling of impending doom, so I wandered around the kitchen for awhile and ate a few things and did a little homework, but everything was creepy and by the time she got in, an hour or so later, I was in bed, covers up to my chin, staring at the wall with my teeth chattering and my brain whirling.
The next day Andrew calls while I'm trying to revise the creepy character sketch to make it less creepy. 'Do you want to come get stoned with me and Chell and Chris by some water somewhere?' he asks.
'Well, I kind of have to...'
'No isn't the right answer!' I hear Chell yell in the background.
'Yeah, no isn't the right answer,' Andrew says, laughing.
So we're all walking down the path by Boulder Creek and at the crossing between the near path and the far path we walk in front of an old man in an orange shirt riding a decrepit old bike. He stops to let us pass, and we nod at him and keep going until we get to the creekbed. When we turn around, we notice that Orange Shirt Man is still watching us; he's turned his bike the opposite direction to stare. So we pick up and move a little farther down the creek until we find some other rocks to sit on, and when we turn around, O.S.M. is about the same distance away as he was when we were on the other rocks, still on his bike, staring at us through the trees.
Chris, who is wearing gym shorts and knee-high cowboy boots, swaggers a distance towards him, plants himself between two trees, and stares back. O.S.M. retreats a little. Chris advances. O.S.M. retreats. Chris stomps his cowboy boots on the forest floor. O.S.M. puts his feet on the pedals and slowly, reluctantly rides away.
He passes on the other side of the creek a few times, slowly and deliberately, staring the entire time. The creek grass dyed red for some unknown reason looks like blood. It's like this guy killed a bunch of people right in the creek, at least, it wouldn't be totally out of line to assume that.
Five minutes later, we're in Andrew's backyard.
And last night there's a huge windstorm, blowing branches and leaves everywhere and knocking out every powerline in Boulder. I have never seen a storm here, I don't think. They don't happen very often. So everyone was going nuts. Lara comes to pick me up at Helpline and all the streetlights are out and the whole Hill is covered with screeching girls and firecracker pops and honking horns. In our apartment complex, flashlights shine out of windows and emergency lights glow red from within the stairwells. The electricity keeps going on and off, flashing on and off. There's this eerie white line behind and above the black mountains, moving northeast. I'm strangely relieved we're southeast from where it is. Where it falls, it sheds light, where it sheds light, one sees all this destruction, all these felled trees and lashing branches.
What... a strange week.
14:11 - September 07, 2003 summation
perfect summation of my saturday nights:
i'm sitting on the couch staring at the floor when chris runs by with an insane look in his eyes, hefting a green grenade water balloon. half the room follows. half an hour passes. i'm sitting on the couch still staring at the floor when the door opens and jeremy runs in, wearing a green ski mask and waving his hands in the air, screaming 'pow! pow! pow! i got beer, fooo!'
