“There is a war between the ones who think there is a war and the ones who think there isn’t.”   –Leonard Cohen as remembered by the author

***Context: the writer lives in Oregon while their brother lives in a state that continues to prohibit the recreational use of marijuana. The author’s brother has thereby requested a vape pen to be mailed to him. Interestingly, the author just finished _Chronic City_ by Jonathan Lethem which his brother mailed to him, as though a parallel piece of contraband, a conveyor of truth not allowed to leave Manhattan, and the connection between weed’s seductions: riding manic paranoid energy v. being at peace. In the book, Perkus Tooth conveys some truth about riding that paranoid mania into a place of letting it go, with lots of fun avant-pop conspiracies lacing the journey.***

So P___ wants a vape pen sent to him and we bought two cartridges and a pen for him. The one he wants we’ll send, and the other we’ll keep. The consideration of which has a lot to do with the fictional character of Perkus Tooth. To what extent is the flower of the brain that is paranoia an intrusive weed* or a delightful bloom. “Nothing crazy heady for someone who might experience anxiety.”

________________*PUN NOT INTENDED! Very euphoric, feeling personable but not equipped to socialize viz-a-vis normal expectations, very distractable.

Gentleman at weed store: “This has got the anchor for the eyes that will keep you going down crazy thought trains you can’t get out of,” or something like that.

Maybe it has something to do with whether you want one of two conceptualizations of reality validated–

EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED VS. EVERYTHING IS DISJOINTED

Weaving the conspiracy v. walking the dog

“This pot’s making me feel like bugs are crawling on me,” P__ says, “Or maybe a bug is crawling on me.” She considers her leg. “What’s this?” I’m too deep into this writing project to request clarification.

Another indication that Forbidden Fruit is made to destroy your attention span, flow with the disjunction that is America and not fall down the rabbit hole of why. Forbidden Fruit is the joyful outcropping, the apple of the garden. Everything is ok–but what happens when stimuli is not readily and beautifully at hand. What will discomfort amount to? And what of when you remember the greater context of this shithole society?

“Why bother? The world cannot be disenchanted, this was his new motto. Reside in whatever small cave of the real you can gather around yourself and a few friends. Walk the dog religiously, the dog has things to impart. Only watch the weather–when it stopped snowing, disbelieve his theories.”

Anyway I was having big thoughts while reading _Chronic City_–mailed to me by the same brother I am theoretically mailing this weed pen to–and listening to Car Seat Headrest after ***smoking*** Jack Herrer in a spliff.

“A ball on fire at the center of things” among other grandiose lyrics has a very Perkus Toothiness–there is an essentialness that it all may be boiled down to; it has to do with feeling connected, at peace, whole, full of meaning, feeling comfortable with where you are, in life and in the world–do you get there through next-level theorizing and dot connecting, or through thoroughly realizing who you are as an individual living in this world? It struck me how easily we may let this reality turn us schizophrenic–the academic and intellectual power shows us how we’ve inherited a racist system that still carries the weight of a legacy and purpose of destroying black bodies and the physical and structural power around us kills and imprisons black people. A cop accidentally enters a neighbor’s apartment at night and murders that neighbor in the confusion–this is all random and insane but the exact product of how this was all prescribed. The idea that putting the pieces together solves anything is the truly insidious idea. Letting that go is the real salvation.

“reside in whatever small cave of the real you can gather around yourself and a few friends. Walk the dog religiously, the dog has things to impart.”

P__ has a dog–will he get stoned and walk her?

These thoughts came to me as a fantasy of what I would say on a local slow-living bicycle podcast: “I could have continued to try to connect the pieces and find the ultimate means of sharing the accumulation of truth I had uncovered, a means uncorrupted by the power under the scrutiny of my lens, but the point is the society has developed precisely so its most prodigious critics become schizophrenic by the process of deciphering and revealing their truth; you perpetuate violence, you’re its victim, or you go crazy in trying to extricate yourself from that binary. All there’s to do instead is to find presence and flow and connection with the world and people around you. The bicycle serves as a symbol of that process–you know that apathy in the face of climate change is appalling / carnage in the streets from a car-centric urban reality is horrifying / experience of public space disjointed by class is unfair–the bicycle allows you to live and express that truth while having fun, getting exercise, and interacting peacefully and dynamically with your community.

The bicycle is like this weed–not a manic condemnation of a fucked up world but a beautiful acceptance that what is a war with those who think there is no war doesn’t have to kill us who think there is one.

We’re doing our best and deserve to be happy.

I also wanted to describe the feeling of starting old habits. I have a very tame experience of addiction, involving the slippery combination of weed and tobacco. It was very surreal to visit with my English cousin in Bristol and see him chainsmoke spliffs, and do the same when he visited me in Portland. When I asked him about his weed smoking he said, “buy a bag of grass and smoke it til it’s gone.” I love getting stoned and writing or playing music, or really doing anything with creativity involved. I’ve always wanted to structure my life around it. However, when I bag of weed and am smoking tobacco, I’ll first have a productive euphoric series of getting stoned and then making something, and then building a tolerance and suddenly smoking a spliff every 90 minutes and becoming too hazy to accomplish anything, get depressed and see production level off entirely.

Perhaps, after quitting smoking for the better part of a year, I can recognize when I want a cigarette for cigarette’s sake, ignore it, and make this sustainable. Essential perhaps now I can be a grown up about it.

When I was coming back from the WinCo I was thinking about when I played music. It became clear to me that I was never good at writing and performing songs that would move people. I wrote songs for and performed a persona that I thought would move people. It sounds ludicrous to pretend, in hindsight, like I was doing a Stanislov embodiment of a character, and that I thought people would get it. At best, I had faith that what I was doing mattered, and that who I was in that moment was creating something that mattered, something that everybody would eventually get. On someone level I knew it was for my benefit, for me to eventually get who I was, and that I needed myself to fulfill these absurd pursuits, so I could know how it felt to be me doing that.

I am at that point of optimism–I just starting smoking cigarettes again, I just bought an 1/8 of weed, and I’m again posting to my wordpress about how it feels to be me smoking different strands of weed. This time I will make a habit of this. I will trick myself into a project that allows me to explore the vast world that is myself, using the delusion that doing so allows me convey something worth sharing that might describe what it feels like to be someone else.

The problem occurs to me that, as I have set it up, all of these supposed essays will be about Coffee Cinex. I would love to get this project supported through the donations of weed geocached in Southeast Portland but I have no idea how to initiate the actualization of such a fantasy.

I’ve described the ambition to journal full-time through the off season of my current profession. Retrieving weed in hidden locations in the city, smoking and writing about it sounds like a pretty ideal method, but, til summer’s over, I gotta go to work in the morning.

The moon hangs like the blade of an ax tonight.

I saw it as I got to Powell on my walk to WinCo and a clear line of sight to the East (by NE) made it appear, a perfect half with its open wedge ready to chop into reality at a 20 degree angle. It also occurred to me in that form because I had just smoked a mostly tobacco, partly herbal smoking blend with some broken up Coffee Cinex sprinkled in while listening to Saves the Day’s second album, and my senses yearned for a refreshing wave of synchronicity with which to make the difficulty late-night crossing of the four lane urban highway.

Of course, a moment of reckoning makes me realize that the song from which this line comes is on the song “All I’m Losing is Me” third full-length album, which I would not hear on my walk to WinCo. Of course, now I am listening to it because I am in my bed in the minutes after finishing the previous Saves the Day album my 32-year-old self was listening to.

If I were writing this on my phone it would be full of the laugh cry emoji.

But of course now I can’t confirm that the moon indeed still does hang like the blade of an ax tonight as I am inside, and in truth it has probably already risen further above the horizon so as to no longer seem to be on the verge of *SWOOP* then *CHOP* a grave canyon into which I could disappear or what have you.

A lot of splendid phrasings came to me on my walk, about where I live, how it feels to live here, and what myself and others do to occupy their time here. If only I could remember them all! The most clearly recalled one is only thanks to it being the opening line to a song a listened to a bunch at age 15 as it was the only song released on the website of my favorite band in anticipation of their big new album, after they got signed to Vagrant and showed their sonic versatile with an acoustic EP of tender almost folky ballads. I liked the song but hated and resented the album as a whole, as when it came out I couldn’t find a copy of it in the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico where I was on that much anticipated Tuesday, and so quickly it became popular in that there were other people that knew and liked the band.

I have employed a variety of writing strategy to wrangle the thoughts of a stoned walk, one being that I relisten to whatever I listened to while walking and getting stoned. However, the point of the walk was to buy some beer to drink while listening to the Tiki Cha Cha club at midnight, which is what I’m doing now (midnight:09), and I don’t want to listen to Saves the Day’s second album a second time in the span of one hour. I propose instead an alternative writing project: I continue to write about going to get beer from WinCo while listening to the Tiki Cha Cha club, and then, when it’s over, go smoke another spliff while listening to Saves the Day’s second album, investigate to what extent the moon appears tonight to hang as might the blade of an ax readied for swift and lethal descent, and if there was anything I left out.

As the host of the Tiki Cha Cha club presently narrates, “there’s more beautiful music for beautiful people just like you.” That’s a lie: he said it minutes ago and I transcribed it below the previous paragraph as it was very much in progress.

I’ve been drinking a lot, which is something I notice at the end of summer, as I celebrate the anniversary of my solar return in the moment of the year when the sun both culminates in intensity and noticeably seems to go away hours earlier, just at the moment we realize the summer, if it continued unabated, would overthrow reason and the day-to-day expectations we have of our society and each other. This late August we began to tear down confederate monuments by the dozen which is really great but instigated its own kind of horror and madness through what instigation resulted. Someone who likes to drink a lot doesn’t really need an excuse though.

Anyway: I ain’t making excuses. I drink a lot all of the time, and one of the times I like to get a little tipsy, if you will, is during the Tiki Cha Cha club, that Monday midnight KBOO phenomenon that takes schmaltz to John Waters levels, but without any explicit pinning down of what or for why. In “taking elevator to new heights” and making souflee of cheese, is this punning DJ simply the connossieur of an era when mainstream music was well-produced and symphonic, sincere and committed, and classic in a distinctly dated way at a time when every recording was both the participation in a distinct and passing cultural moment, but also the revolutionary attempt to heave culture forward.

These are questions I ask when I’m not simply wrapped up in the bossa nova instrumental covers of rebellious rock songs, dancing slowly by myself with images of Lawrence Welk melting behind a smoky haze with sunglasses on. My life is a real-time montage of someone following the script’s suggestions for being me. The arranging for Lawrence Welk’s piece “Drifting and Dreaming” finishes up as I fade through the history of the 20th century through the lens of this 100-year-old room. How many others sat up late, stared and typed in turn, paced, and thought about why here why now why this

My preference instead of leaning into this idea that I drink a lot and falling into the self-involved Bukowski fatalism of it, that it’s my personality and not my, is to see it as an element of what I do. One who fights who they are finds themself doubling done on the things that they were trying to avoid getting wrapped up in, as opposed to letting them run their course, and learning their important lesson.

I should note that I might normally having written this in my journal but I think I left it at someone else’s house. As you can see in past posts, journal entries have served as source material. Indeed, I would have loved to have sketched the moon as it hung like the blade of an ax tonight, but in truth the whole nature of this weed-review site is very much in flux. For tonight it is Philip K. Dick-style time machine in which I may use the Tiki Cha Cha club and this 21st-century laptop word processor to post-World War II noir myself into my own pulp existentialist hero in a time loop of his own making, in which I describe each narrative in the simplest terms in order to find the pattern and maybe there decode a reason why. Spanish guitar and vibes make the searching worth it, and as the woodwinds build with the strings lightly behind it’s almost as though the clarity is, if perhaps not inevitable, entirely beside the point. The strings surge and its 2/3s through an Almodovar film in which you realize the movie star was the supposedly dead mother all along and she raised him in the only way she knew she could: through film.

Well I almost hypnotized myself, but I didn’t, I just listened to the music!

I call bullshit if the host claims not to intentionally be playing with the sounds and tropes of colonialism, the problematics of reproducing an America where a white middle-class man can pick up the Hollywood recording of a movie symphony playing a harp-heavy arrangement of a stereotyped composition meant to sound “exotic,” and present himself as the international connosieur of culture. He knows what he’s doing and it’s at once a thrilling sonic voyage and the most outwardly boring part of my week. I usually put it on and immediately fall asleep. Sometime I buy Coffee Sinex on my way home and get stoned and write a blog entry in my weed review blog….

Where every night is 😀 Friday night and every morning is 😦 Monday morning. So we make the most of what we’ve got left as the world spins off its axis, where sometimes you just gotta step off…

I woke up at noon today after working too many days in a row. I had several engaging and lucid dreams. I am already wide awake and excited about the world, but the weed definitely helps. I believe it’s also clarifying something that is slowly becoming clear to me: the thoughts I have when I’m stoned are not thoughts that are important and need to be conveyed–they are thoughts that I have when stoned that feel important and like I need to convey them.

When I got to WinCo someone got my attention. They’ve been cracking down on people who live outside, and it seemed like the man among others there had just been kicked out. He held out 2 dollar bills and asked if I could buy some dog food. “There’s a can of Pedigree for 70 cents. Here’s two dollars, keep one dollar and thirty cents.” I gave him a dollar back and said I didn’t it and where the food was. He thought for a second and said, inside and then to the left. I realized it was a silly question, because through the main entrance (that forces an immediate right), everything is to the left, and I would find it anyway. I was just kind of anxious that I would get lost but really I was just stoned and everything was going to be fine.

The can was 73 cents but you’d have to be an asshole to dwell on that, and even more so to insist on giving him the 27-cent change. Most people wouldn’t acknowledge him, but of those who would I’m sure there’s a sizeable contingent that would ring up his food separate and give him a receipt. It’s cute when people consider themselves to be in a community, but to think our society at large is anything other than poorly repressed fascism blows my mind on the daily.

A little bit ago I got stoned and watched Monday Night Football, which I forgot had existed, and I took some notes.    

All of the questions I had did not pertain to the world of the football game itself, and I felt like I was annoying my uncle asking, “What’s going to happen to Candlestick Park now that the 49ers aren’t going to play there?” “How long have there been black quarterbacks in the NFL, are there more now that it’s no longer just Warren Moon!?” “Are they really selling Navy identity to civilians by telling them to join Navy Credit Union? The navy man is obviously an actor pretending to be in the Navy—now so can you!”  

 
I didn’t realize how much my uncle was now not just a football fan by a Seahawks fan—he is the 12th man. I realized this when I asked if the whole idea of the 12th man—that the fans are so intense that it’s like they’re literally on the field in the form of an extra player—was either arrogant or delusional. He looked hurt. “It’s just an expression,” he said. I internalized my questions, took notes, and tried to compose a working essay:

 
The football with the commercials with the weed was too much stimulation. It made me think of Elizabeth Gilbert speaking of her new non-fiction work on creativity, and that there comes a time when you have to shoo away new ideas or else drown in possibilities.  I went to the room I was staying in that had TV and I decided I would pretend it was the early ’90s and that I was in my grandma’s house flipping through channels and settling on Full House. However, it was too excruciating to attempt to watch the show. I gave up and went to bed, watching a netflix as I went to sleep. 

As though lifted into the garden with a rake handed to me upon landing, I put on my shoes and sweatshirt and stepped out to resume the work I had begun earlier that afternoon. The newly planted border had been swept and all that remained was to rake out bits of plant matter and roots from recently displaced weeds. Then I remembered that the irises I pulled from the ground this afternoon needed to be kept in moist soil, as per my grandma’s instructions. As it was late in the day with light waning outside, the unfinished room adjacent to the garage was quite dim when I entered it. Opening the sliding glass door precipitated a scurrying noise which I could not tell if came from inside of or on top of the building. I hurriedly chopped off the ends of the rhizomes and buried them in the soil with the rest of the prehistoric crustacean looking creatures.

Then I went back outside and watered the new plantings from today and rewatered a few from yesterday and watched the light turn pink and dim as the sun descended behind the silhouette of trees that enshrouded the property.

That verb took some decision making. “Enshrouded.” Seriously, just me for a minute staring blankly and making funny faces.

I then came back inside and looked at my phone while a college football game played. It was halftime before I went out to garden, but now UCLA was losing by even more to the Arizona State Wildcats. Is that even right? Isn’t it ASU? Or is that the Sun Devils?

There was a KFC commercial in which Norm McDonald plays Colonel Sanders selling Kentucky Fried Chicken, but being really broad about the fact that he was in fact Norm McDonald playing Colonel Sanders and not in fact the Colonel himself, because as the audience slyly knows—the man is long dead.

I texted my friend who follows college football if he had seen this commercial and he texted back that indeed he had—and on top of that he maintained an admiration of Norm McDonald to this day!

I assumed he had a good Maron episode (which I misspelled first Marin, and then Maren), since his show manages to endear the listener to celebrity personas who you may have written off as, for example, creepy uncle types—and indeed you can listen to it on youtube. I then told him as I had just then learned, while the Bruins were losing at football and I was texting about Norm McDonald, that I had sent 600 people an email that began

We then talked about other things that were happening, for example that I was also in Washington, though far away from Seattle where he was. Relatively. It took only 3 hours on a train, then on a bike to the ferry, then on the ferry, then on the bike for a little bit, then on a bus, then on a bike. Going back’s the problem because all the buses leave at the crack of dawn because everybody’s going to Seattle to get to work. Nobody’s commuting at noon to Seattle. It would be seven hours riding a bike. I guess I could just wake up early and go with the commuters with fancy island homes and Seattle jobs.

After discovering that I had made such a bonehead move, with the arrogance to not show it to any one else before sending off the email, I became really fixated on it and starting texting other people regarding it. You ask why?, but it’s obvious—I needed people to forgive me, to tell me it was OK. I needed people to absolve me of a tiny mistake, of being human and assuming that everyone else would be human about it, too. I decided instead to take this vulnerability upstairs to the pages document open on the computer—is that how it worked: no I was fact-checking how many unsubscribes had happened since I sent the email, since I mentioned it in another text conversation.

Whatever happened, at some point I decided to get these thoughts down upstairs—name of book, right there: Thoughts Down Upstairs: High Thoughts from Deep Within. I’m getting ahead of myself on the second blog post. I also haven’t hiked the PCT, much less sat on the experience 10 years and then written a brilliant account of it.

Anyway, while the Strawberry Banana pretty much provided more of the same—inspired me to do something for myself that I knew would make me happy, getting caught up in words and strains of logic as I go through those motions (before reading in the bath, now gardening and laying on the sofa while the football played), and then incorporating connections made into a piece of writing—it encapsulated a method to continue the narrative using the content of the narrative, in the screen shots of the text messages. I think the forgiveness thing has to do with the pope being in the country recently and being among relatives.

Does any of this make any sense?