10:56 - Saturday, Jun. 25, 2005
acid dreams
We were gypsies on the coast of California, that part of the coast where it's hard to get fresh coffee because you can't just drive there, you have to hike down craggy rocks and around breathtaking bends, slipping in soft slick sandals in the mud, and just to reach a coffee shop by the coast. And when you get there, because of the hike, you want to take back as much coffee as possible, so you bring giant empty applesauce jars. The applesauce jars, when they see the coffee, shrink into themselves and refuse to be filled by anything bitter; they demand to be filled by fresh squeezed lemonade and orange juice. They will not give up. They cut your hands with weight until you cave and pour in the juice. And then you are rewarded with awkward swinging heavy jars of fruit juice to carry back up the switchbacks and through the mud, back to your trailer park of summer mansions by the dock and the water.
We are gypsies in the way that we go to California in the spring or in the fall to occupy the front porches of those summer mansions that aren't in use outside of the months of June, July, and August. We pull up with our wagons and sleeping bags and we sleep on porch swings. My mom and her group of hippie boyfriends take acid at night. It's a new kind of acid. It's a mix of acid and ecstasy. They take it around a picnic bench, eating hamburgers. I am unsure if my mom is really taking acid or if she's just faking for the benefit of fitting in, so I ask her after counting three days by the stick slashes in the stuffing of my sleeping bag.
"Well, I took it the first day, and the second day," she tells me. "I stayed up all night the second day and the second day became the third day, but I didn't take it on the third day."
"Do you wish you didn't do it?" I ask.
"I wish I didn't do it the second day."
"Do you wish he had done it another day instead?
"I wish I'd only done it once."
"Should I do it?"

"Should you?"

In the grocery store, the three of us hold our hard-candy-acid-ecstasy in our fists. It is brown, like root beer candy or arrowroot. We are deciding whether to take them. We haven't decided. We are buying frozen pad thai instead. I am thinking too hard about what I would be hungry for if I took acid. I've never taken acid before and I'm trying to form a futurepicture in my head of what it would be like if I was on acid and didn't have the food that I craved within reach. I am picturing the baked salmon swirling into a black hole when I think about having to go back to the store fully washed in acid.
I don't buy any frozen pad thai, but in the hamburger section I put my acid candy in my mouth and suck. I get a pack of hamburger and start feeling floaty around register number 6. In my room at home, I can't open my eyes wide enough to stare at the sun and the sky and it is amazing and shocking. I wriggle on top of him to feel our bellies together and shriek to look, look, and feel, feel. In my bed at home, I will lose my high if I get up and look out the bathroom window. Outside the bathroom window, there is roaring parked cars and a cut down tree and cement with my initials where they paved over the stump.

16:00 - Friday, Jun. 24, 2005
work to prove wrong
I tell a lie every time I say I'm going to update as frequently as I did in high school, or in the early parts of college. I wonder if my creativity has been stilted by the ceasing of the flow of marijuana? That's terrifying. Something I'd like to work to prove wrong.

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