01:23 - Friday, Oct. 10, 2003 open-mic night in terms of the entire universe
5pm, sitting in the ampitheatre with Chell, who is trying to discreetly roll a joint on the flat blue platform of his notebook. My creative writing teacher is off in the corner of the ampitheatre, biting his pencil and frowning at a volume of stories. Chell keeps glancing around nervously at the teacher and the few bikers who occasionally do a loop around the stage. Suddenly, just as he gets the weed all piled, HUNDREDS of people troop into the ampitheatre, wielding cameras, stepping over us on the benches, flowing through the aisles.
'Are you guys going to USE this ampitheatre?' Chell asks a passing woman amazedly.
'We're taking pictures of trees,' says the woman.
'Ah,' says Chell. We book it.
An hour later he is happily blazed in the middle of Norlin Quad, and we have proved that God exists, that time is only one of a million constructs and we experience things as a function of time because of our place in the equation, and that matter cannot be created or destroyed, so the brain cells within with consciences operate can die and be absorbed into some other physical matter, but the consciences themselves can only break down into other types of consciences.
If we have an infinite number of possible consciousnesses within the realm of possibility, they must all necessarily exist. And we have been, are, or will become a part of them at some point in time. Everything that can happen must. We are God because we see everything all at once.
After this it's kind of hard to go to open-mic night, just because you can't even THINK about open-mic night in terms of the entire universe all at once. Man.
21:23 - Wednesday, Oct. 08, 2003 no more studying
One fucking sentence. It's enough to make me drop everything and run to the bathroom because I think I'm going to puke. I don't, of course. I never puke. Do you not have any compassion for anyone except the one you choose to have compassion for?
I know, I know. We only want to touch the people who don't want to touch us. Broken record. But give me a break for once, will you?
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On another topic completely, Lara and I were on Norlin Quad studying for respective tests and suddenly the lawn sprinkler system kicked in, almost directly under Lara and right in her face. We screamed. We ran. Etc. We were soaked, our notes were soaked. No more studying.
19:28 - Tuesday, Oct. 07, 2003 milking the coconut
A half hour within Lara's and my apartment:
I come home and Lara is trying to make rice. The second she puts the pan on the stove the entire kitchen goes up in smoke and we both start coughing. 'How do you make it not do that?' she screams, and I shrug. I can't cook; I can't even make soup or hardboiled eggs. The only reason I was able to make banana bread and stir-fry noodles yesterday was because Nick was over my shoulder the whole time shouting instructions.
She goes into her room to finish up something, and during the ten seconds that she's gone, the rice fries to black and the smoke turns acrid; I run into my room to get my table fan and she runs out of her room and screams when she sees the rice, pouring it down the sink, sending up another cloud of smoke. We wrest all the windows open.
'What if the smoke alarm goes off?' she asks. 'What do we do?'
'I guess we say 'ahhhhhhh' a lot,' I respond, and turn the fan to 'high'.
It's so ridiculous that I can't possibly make it worse, so I go get my coconut that I bought from Wild Oats and attempt to poke milk-holes in it. We do not have a screwdriver. I try knives and forks and cheese graters, but to no avail. Finally I whack a Sink pen with a volume of Kafka short stories and the deed is done. This coconut has more milk than any I've ever seen. It fills up a whole tall glass. Standing by the sink, it looks like I'm milking it as if it were a cow.
There is also no hammer, so the only way to crack it open is to throw it violently on the tile floor. I raise it above my head and toss it down, again and again, happily; it's therapeutic.
'The people below us probably call us 'those bitch girls upstairs,' Lara says in passing.
'Damn straight,' I say.
The coconut breaks and flies into a million pieces all over the carpet.
The blackened rice pours down the sink and clogs up the garbage disposal.
At least nobody will ever marry us for our homemaker skills.
12:49 - Monday, Oct. 06, 2003 this is what i have to deal with at 8 a.m.
The classroom I have Intro to Fiction in is a tiny little workshop-style room that must also be used by complete psychopaths at a different time of day because every time we go in there, there is new fucked-up stuff written up on the blackboard. Today there was a stick figure with two arrows coming out of its crotch and neck, saying 'RNA polymerase'. Another day there was a detailed description of what a 'zeitgeist' is.
So, I think it was last week, we were haphazardly critiquing papers when suddenly this kid named Shayne who sits across the room from me snaps his head up, points at the blackboard behind me, and says, 'WHAT is THAT?'
'Look behind you,' I tell him, 'it's worse.' Behind him there is a drawing of a seven-legged octopus with the word ABORTION written above it in block letters.
'No, no, no,' he yells, shaking his head. 'I'm talking about the GIANT COCK.'
Directly behind my head there is a three-foot, detailed drawing of a giant penis, complete with gigantic hairy balls.
Jesus.
02:12 - Sunday, Oct. 05, 2003 blocking the moon
I was telling someone on the phone today that I can't really remember my last few weeks, that they run together like wet paint and swirl, and, really, it's kinda right. It's partly because of the smoking, but it's partly not because of the smoking... and it's also not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all. When paint swirls, each colour leaves its print in spiral. It's twisted, but it's there, it's clear.
Andrew, Chell, Jeremy, Kaegan, and I drove up to the Rocky Mountain National Forest today and had swordfights with dead logs among the lodgepole pines way offtrail. I looked up and Andrew had a stick on his head. 'I'm an elk,' he said, 'a one-horned, symmetrical elk.'
On the way back we stopped at a local place that promised homemade pies and soups... it turned out to be straight out of the 60's, with a grizzly old waitress/owner and pictures of Marilyn Monroe all over the walls, and purple and yellow neon lights. Quiet elderly couples ate at the tables around us as we tried to sound as non-stoner-college-kid as possible, and I think we succeeded, even when Chell, poring solemnly over the menu, said, 'I'll have the... the... uh... the... uh... the... uh.. uh... two minutes.' Meaning he needed more time, but she took awhile to pick that up. 'I love being totally out of my element,' whispered a red-eyed Andrew when he thought no one was listening.
Me too. So I didn't completely lose it later when I had to be somewhere where being high is just a ridiculous concept and I still hadn't come down. Instead I played an epic game of Scrabble that lasted three hours and used every single letter in the bag except one 'Q' and ended up with the final scores only two points apart.
I can just recall it being pitch black and me being on the side of cliffs, white-knuckled on the wheel, Faith No More blasting, everyone else in the car asleep... I have terrible night vision and out there there are no streetlights. There would be mountains in the way of the sky, but all it looked like was black, so when the mountains fell away and there were stars and the moon dappling the clouds creamy, it was like we just fell off the face of the earth onto the moon where the sky is upside down. On one hand, there's the yellow lane markers, which is all you can look at driving on a night like this, but on the other hand there are these cliffs and the upside-down sky, even the mile markers and the dirt roads that are state highways in this part of the world. The moon lights up a strip of Chell's sleeping face where his eyelashes fall on his cheek. That strip continues on out of the car and down the side, up the sloping parched hills to the dull red rock faces at the top that we can't see because it's just black, blocking the moon.
