Tuesday, September 14, 2010

A Story [with Mike]

I.

I remember the day as if it were just a few days ago, how many I don't know. The sun came up as the clouds parted, birds began making poetic noises in vain attempts to understand one another, and the familiar, unfortunate smell of tobacco wafted downwind towards me, as it always seems to do. There I sat idly, scratching my head at the cafe, wondering; waiting.

“I don't get it.” I said, aloud. A flash of a Mick Jagger effigy with a mechanical mouth, singing about needing something he wanted hummed through my head. I shook my head, and the lights dimmed.

It was at that very point when my lingering frustration that involved groups of people, grouping together, came up: “Who are we, anyway?” I thought to myself. Nothing but a bunch of insolent- “People.” Answered Mike, to a question that was obviously rhetorical. And as rhetorical-question-answers often go, I found it to be both conclusively true and stupid. And furthermore, uncalled for.

Mike beamed with sincerity as my face went flush with the depressing hue of stale teen angst. Maintaining eye contact, I began formulating a plan to kill him and eat his body – not just for the protein and assorted nutrients, but also to join the hordes of people who have joined a Club not far from the lowly depths of the Mile High Club. The Club in question was a gathering that shone bright the proverbial light at the other end of the tunnel: the Perfect Crimes Club. Yet as quickly as it had began, my light-hearted fantasy of a perfect world faded into a dramatic picture of battle.

What if, instead of focusing on lowly single digit crime sprees, I attempted to incite a revolution? It didn't matter, what it was about, really. That I knew from countless examples of the false tenets of major religions and the layered paradigms of social thought and strategy. Assumptions that remain proved conclusively 'true' based on faith and numbers, and perhaps some elbow grease to hold the entire mess together. But another daydream took place!

Another daydream took place, this one awash with a God-sent-me-here attitude followed by a series of moving-people-out-of-the-way motions. I finally knew what I had dropped out of college for – to figuratively incite the revolution of a gigantic group of hopelessly hopeless people, to give them something to first fight about, and then smile about. I would commence with my perhaps megalomania-induced, grand scale social psychology experiment. I would cast an entire group of people, unified in their collective despair, against another, significantly smaller and more rich group of people - and I wouldn't even have to think of a team name. My proponents? The Untouchables, of India.

Bereft with hope, these Untouchables were the perfect medium to impregnate with my voracious idea. Not to mention that I felt quite the altruist sitting at the coffee shop with Mike that day, periodically letting out laughs that would make both Rupert Murdoch and Bernie Madoff blush with envy, staring out as a cow grazing would, across the masses of materialistic splendor that I would happily skip over to achieve my end-goals. The most dangerous game was a story of human nature perverted to a point by an individual who owned an island. Mine, I reasoned, was a story violent and vile in its truthful virtue; the everlasting story of human nature.

My dream had reached a Mariah Carey-like climax, but now it was time to gain weight. Mike shook me as I stared as a cow grazing would (oriented in a north-south position), “Let's hit the pot-shop,” he said, in a tone unbelieving that his request could be feasibly granted, “You know, get some herb.”

'Get some herb', I repeated to myself. The way he shad aid it made me shudder. If any other state looked at the California Example of Marijuana Legalization they would find out just how quickly things went awry: blatant examples of legalized 'drug-dealing apartments shops', countless amounts of illegally run 'Marijuana Collectives' operating well within 1000 feet of public schools, and pro-pot advertisements virtually everywhere.

As far as the eye could see, a picturesque suburban landscape lay littered with small plastic medicinal tubes with stickers that boasted what city had last been successfully grown in, what area code remained lenient in green matters, and what strain proved to be hip. What other state in their right mind would attempt releasing their ban on the green leaf with results like this?

Visibly annoyed, Mike grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me once more, so we got the pot.



II.
'The Sickness'


Back at the apartment I dragged opposite the lit, ever-receding end of the joint. I could feel the sickness take a step back, pick up its fists as if ready to fight only to motion with one hand that a second or two would be necessary. Finally, it began taking steps back and fell asleep pantomime on what appeared to be a chair laying near the door. The sickness was gone, and this plant was perfection.

One could practically see groups of societal undergrowth arranged darkly, in a circle, laughing lazily, passing lit yellow-wrapped sticks around. Soon the world would find itself covered in a colorful mix of these small plastic medicinal tubes and assorted 'sticks and stems', the melting pot of yesterday quickly being overridden to a simmer, to become tomorrows medicinal stew.



III.


Mike fell asleep at the apartment so I took a bike ride around the block. A unique transparent fog hung in the air, thick and like a blanket, sagging. The pedals clanked in rhythm as the freewheel kept time and etched notes that rang for days. The clouds that lay above bore scenes of fluffy armor, unfolding.

Each formation of cloud recreated an aging youthful fantasy of cute, pillow-armored, fighting animals profiled, before battle. I began thinking of how similar the cruel realities of war would be for both humans and animals, so relentless and unforgiving in its ugly consequence – even for one wearing coats of cloud-mail.

And then it happened - a gargantuan flurry of red motion and machine had narrowly avoided colliding with me and had veered too far left into oncoming traffic. Pedaling again, I realized there was more honking accompanied with most of the sounds and smells associated with burning rubber.

I checked the crotch of my pants to make sure that I hadn't wet them. I hadn't, but it was close. No one checks for no reason. I just couldn't believe: In ancient Rome, the streets were alive with chariots, horses, slaves, animals - and here, in this bustling megalopolis of millions of modern people, complete with a complex light-controlled traffic-controlling infrastructure – here, we couldn't handle this? A lone biker in the midst?

Frustrated, I forged a path to the corner store. The corner store is also known as the 'convenience store', for rather obvious reasons. Inside, they will sell you every vice you could want, except for marijuana.



IV.



I walked into the convenience store feeling like I had just cheated death. That's another subtle joy and reason why I ride a bike on a daily basis, because it really makes you stop and think. It makes you lick your finger and put it to the wind even when you know exactly where and how hard the wind is blowing from; because it's obvious. Because your hat flew away in the wind, behind you, and when you chased it, it fell in the gutter and got soiled and you began to cry.

So I went inside and got an ice cream bar. Though it wasn't that easy. I had to weigh out and strike a gentle balance between the sacred forces of logic, and reason. Intuition told me that I had wanted ice cream, and I knew that to be true - but two of my favorite brands had merged together to fight for the cause of my ultimate cold-food desire. I stood there, a mentally beat man. Lost in anguish I pondered, “Klondike, or Snickers, Klondike or Snickers?” but couldn't know, I couldn't know.

I began to think of the almost quantum amount of things I would do for a Klondike bar at that time, it was an infinite and temporal regression of my frontal lobes and I felt like it was necessary to achieve it in a snack. I stood there though, quiet, silent and had realized quite suddenly, that I would do almost anything feasible of man, for a Klondike bar. Even, in general.

It was then that, though that a thought wafted over me and I began to think of Heaven and Hell, and right and wrong. The eternal struggle; Good versus Evil. The color black and the color, white. Opposites and things opposite to them. All of these are thoughts that I thought at that moment, which is, and was, and always will be the same moment that I saw the Snickers Ice Cream Bar.

I laid eye on the glorious Snickers bar almost immediately following my previous thought. That glorious king size looking bar just begged me for my forgiveness, and I was just ready and willing to accept. Such a subtle charm, I thought to myself, Such a subtle charm! I was living the life of a man, in denial. That Snickers was the devil, and I knew it. I was like the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who said that he'd know pornography when he saw it. It was awful, though. Simply awful. So I got the Klondike bar and rode my bike home slowly, with one hand.


To be continued.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

: ) / :(

Drug Talk
E. Allweil


You don't know how much it bothers me that I do drugs. Not 'bother' in the sense that it was wrong, and it's a bad thing, and that I shouldn't have done it. Rather, a bother like certain heartbreak; an ever present constant reminder of the fact. A fact like you've done it: you did it and now it can't be taken back. It's been done and it's over, but it keeps coming up.

I think it's somehow due to the intertwining of the senses. You smell the taste that got you to feel high. And it comes up again, when it is smelled on the street or worse, in a friend of a friends, or a given family's function. It flirts with your mind and permeates the soul, the smell of opium on a crisp day, the lush verdant green of a sticky smoke, a lovers lips tinged with a tar like tobacco.

Yet sometimes life reaches up and touches the top of the objective happiness chart and one begins to go over feelings that brought them great joys and pleasures. With a smile one continues to go about the pleasantries of daily existence; the smells, the feeling, the various joy. The people, the places, the events, and the experiences, all shared underneath the umbrella nest.

Until a thought creeps in, familiar and forgiving at first, but quietly becoming hostile in its pretense. A 'what if' moment, of unrefined decision, an executive decision waiting to be made, one with implications both great and small, and one that will define a certain avenue of your life forever.

Nothing bad, though. Perhaps a rocky road of truth that would have lay uncovered, hidden, hiding; growing recessively and silently in the overgrowth, just waiting to be awakened. Beckoning to be heard in a forest of thought. An El Dorado of potential for pretentious thinkers.

So you did it, and now its been done. No turning back, you're on the road to El Dorado! And yet a new thought springs up. Like fingers quick to point blame.

You remember a time past, one long ago that seemed only to exist in a bubble. Thousands of plants surrounded you, and so you reasoned that at some point they must have grown. You saw them hard at work, building as they were being built. Allocating resources left and right, their self-perpetuated growth happening, the structure closing in. A garden was forming it seemed. The very light was being converted into sugars and building together from the bottom, the sides, and the ground, up and in.

Everything was in a state of tug. Pulling and tugging on one plant over, and then the next. Each gravity being pulled and pulling, each plant now becoming part of a phalanx, each strain being pushed for their own weight and their own victory, each species for themselves until the few realized that the odds go up, for all of them, if they work together.

With every passing moment, comes more understanding. The image on the minds screen closes in on truth and begins to respond. It's as if in seeing truth it becomes a blatant roar. Or rather, it became a blatant roar. Once then, one looks around and slowly realizes that the garden is walled in, and in this realization comes the thought that in this moment of understanding, lay all of the time in the world.

This digression into a plane holds true an eternal example of a prime moment of intuition and understanding. The Ohm that everyone spoke so highly of, that that is recognizing every individual noise and sound, knowing that every drop of water flowing through the river took the high road down. Maybe this was it.

A wise man once said, 'A drop drops confused in the midst of mist and opts for Ohm, the path of least resistance'. Explaining further that this is the weary way of a conservative world trying to stick to what it's been doing for so long that it deems it best. And so it trickles down with the assurance that all will soon pass, and that it will find itself back on top of the mountain of reason, for reasons unknown, but sacredly kept. Because that is the way.

Again, I find myself on a plateau built of rational thought. Screaming from the top down, takes time until it is understood below. 'So many reasons,' the bottom ponders, 'for why he might be saying this'. A rock moves laterally underfoot and I struggle to regain balance as it crashes down below. Introspection. So I go down a different road, for here I've gone too far.

I don't know much about what I just learned, but I took this:

In the beginning I said that 'no one would know how much it bothered me that I do drugs', and I then digressed into an inquiry on 'bother(s)'. I said that this bother was recurring like an itch; begging to be scratched. I likened it to many things. Like, it doesn't matter how hard you scrub when you brush your teeth, it wont get them any whiter. It doesn't matter how much you try to get at it and where you attempt to reach it, or anything of the sort. It's ever present and will remain a constant for as long as it will linger, and until you forget. Which seems like purgatory until you collect reason.

The text also illustrates a substantial loss in memory, during and 'in' the formation of creating new memories. Many varying points were brought up in the text from the beginning to the end, and each time a different field of associated thoughts were swept in. Some sentences were about shortcomings and others were about goals. All involved the world and the reality of our construct as we know it. Mentally it formed an elegant Venn diagram mosaic, many times larger and smaller.

In the formation of new memories, and as they come along new ideas appear many and varied at a time. Some calculations and notes become lost in the process, and so they must be noted and redrawn again. Like reading a sentence over to better understand it. You reach a crossroads of sorts. If you don't understand it you begin achieving a different, perhaps less objective vision than the one you are trying to parallel. So a wise person would reread the sentence until they fully understood for the sake of knowing what it was that was implied.

So there's still hope, is what I was getting at. Different things must be significantly characterized in hierarchies of value, values, and importance. And different things must be processed one at a time, quickly, for different reasons and seemingly all at once, but all in a single file. Each given a moments time.

So what is this paper talking about, if anything at all? Perhaps that the answer to all of it lies in the pursuit. That you can technically step in the same river twice, and on a long enough time line, that anything is possible. That these fun disproportionate truths are what make life worth living. So much larger and so much smaller than the rest of us, and in provocative ways too. It keeps things fresh and interesting, change 'is what we need', right? And after needing change you step into the river again, but this time it's dried up, like some post-apocalyptic ending to a short story, or essay involving few things but 'philosophy'. Consider this paper a footnote for the new dawn.