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Our Trip Was Different Part 3

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Years of driving past billboards with tiny lethal doses of Fentanyl on them next to piles of cocaine or whatever, years of that and the fact that I had two kids who told me to ‘come back’ whenever I left for a few days had me kind of worried about the drugs aspect of the trip. But the fear and anxiety and all of that were secondary compared to the fact that no one seemed to have access to any of this shit. Everyone said buy it on the dark web, but it felt too traceable.

Robbie, who in years past was always holding, was no help on this front. His connections had either washed up or he had burned them all. He probably burned them, because he was in the process of burning his crew since I had met him. Nothing personal, he was just slowly circling around meeting this girl. The same thing had happened to his brother. Like all girls, Robbie’s girl wasn’t into Robbie’s friends. Like most girls, she wasn’t all that into drugs, either. Around the time that she moved into Robbie’s apartment, the last of the fake-ecstasy-slash-meth somehow disappeared. Robbie started eating mushrooms when he went out to clubs, because girls, even Hunter’s girl, are somehow more comfortable with ‘natural’ drugs.

We hit up old friends we hadn’t talked to in years and asked them for drugs. It was embarassing, but we had no alternative. I considered buying a Bolivian Torch cactus and shipping it to my brother, John, to figure out how to get the mescaline out of it. I looked up how to make DMT. We got nowhere. Two weeks before the trip, it looked like we were going to eat dinner and drink wine and go to a show like civilized people.

A week before we were set to leave, I was on the phone with the New York State Police. They were looking for a project manager to implement some crazy thing and they were having no success with it and the county police commissioner was yelling at me. It was strange. I felt a kinship with him. I felt he was angry at incompetence, and I was highly sympathetic to that. The recruiter, being an incompetent recruiter, which I’m sorry to say is the norm in my experience, had failed to mention that I would be working for the police in this role and that I would need to take a drug test. It was pretty funny, because the role paid twice my salary at the time, and I was worried that they would offer the job to me right before the trip started.

I hung up the phone with the police and my phone vibrated and there was a text from Hunter, ‘One thing’s for sure…there’s a whole lotta drugs in here…right now.’ There was a picture of capsules full of little crystals and ten tabs of LSD.

A few days after that, my brother John scored some magic mushrooms down in Delaware. He came up and we ate a couple grams and watched Fear and Loathing. At some point we stopped the movie and went outside to smoke weed next to a stop sign.

“The philosophy of this sign is merciless,” I said. I felt it was telling me not to go on the bachelor trip, that I should stop everything because it was clearly a bad idea. And then I thought it was telling me to stop thinking about things like that. And then I thought it was telling me to stop figuring out what it was trying to say to me.

After a while, Hunter said, “I don’t think he likes this stop sign,” and moved our smoking circle to his bright-as-hell front stoop. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was upset that no one was enjoying my clearly mind-blowing stop sign revelations. 

I think we finished the movie, but I’m not sure. I think the TV was still on when I laid on the floor in the fetal position and tried to go to sleep. I was freezing cold and Hunter put some kind of long weird skinny drape over me.

I woke up three hours later and got the kids out of there. We went back home and brushed our teeth. I got the one on the bus and the other to the daycare. Then I went to work.

I was glad we had done the mushrooms together because I was thinking I had better shut the fuck up about stop signs in the future. I felt I had talked too much and what I needed to do in the future was just blast music. My family’s tendency is to talk about everything endlessly. It’s the thing we like to do. Especially my dad. But with these drugs, it was best not to talk.

A week or so later, I needed to go to Walmart to pick up random stuff for the trip, like a pair of briefs that I could stash the molly in so that I could get into the club. You just never knew how hard they were going to search you at the Brooklyn Mirage.

Hunter had found a strain of cannabis called White Widow at our local store, which was strange because my brothers and I had been looking for that strain for years, ever since I had first smoked it with this half Asian half Jewish chick on a bench in SoHo. It was the one strain I ever smoked that hadn’t immediately put me onto a time dilated hell path leading straight to sleep.

So I decided we should test that out, too. I smoked it on the way to Walmart. It was only once we hit the parking lot that Hunter said to me, “Smoking weed and going into Walmart is not the move.” He said it was  something about the fluorescent lighting.

“Well, shit.”

We went in there and started looking around and we were walking down this one aisle full of men’s clothes and suddenly it flipped into the women’s section. It was trippy as fuck. We were walking down the aisle and the whole store just flipped around us. I don’t know.

It took us like 20 minutes to find out where they kept the underwear, and come to find out they had it all under lock and key. Which totally made sense because back in the high school cross country days, my friend used to go into Walmart and take tank tops out of their packages and toss them over his shoulder and walk out. He always had fresh tank tops and my shit was always dingy.

So we started looking for an associate, and they were all acting kind of strange and not looking a hundred percent like employees. Hunter found out about twenty minutes later that the store had been closed for half an hour. So we left, which was bad, because I didn’t have another time when I could get all this shit and the trip was coming up fast.

I ended up going back to Walmart the next day while talking to a coworker on the phone about this crazy project that was going to be due in a few days. Kids were arguing over shovels and I was pacing the clearance aisle, talking about SFTP servers.

The work deadline was really fucking with me in the beginning. Not only that, a friend’s girl had called me out of the fucking blue that morning, the same friend, in fact, who used to shoplift tank tops. The last three times she had called me, people had died. I’m sure this was no exception to the rule, but honest to God I just didn’t have the space for it then, and I still don’t, and I am to this day letting that shit ride.

Shit. Let’s start over. Where the fuck were we. Good Christ, how did a structure sneak into this document? The point was there we were, wearing blankets and shit like that, standing on a Ford Bronco. How was it a Ford Bronco and not a Jeep? I don’t know. The back seat was sick because you could look up at the sky, but the seats weren’t comfortable, like to the point I didn’t even know how to sit. Or was that the drugs? At that point, I could taste MDMA on my face every time I licked my lips. And I had never put MDMA on my face. I don’t think. Shit. Anything’s possible.

And that was the point, man, that’s what I learned. Anything is possible. Shit.

For a couple thousand dollars and a million text messages you could get ten guys together in New York, walk into a 200 year old steakhouse and make fun of the rich. We tipped the waitress $600 and went outside passing baggies around and jamming them in our underwear. Like I was telling you, I bought these technicolor high-waisted briefs for the occasion. I got them at TJ Maxx the day after the failed trip to Walmart.  One of the best purchases I made. And shit, I made a lot of purchases. A dash cam for $99 off eBay so we could have evidence in case we got into an accident. Bear spray. A fire pan off Amazon so you could have a fire where there is no fire ring. If you don’t know about camping in the desert, well you’ve got a lot to learn. I mean you don’t, because for instance, we saw a girl walking in the desert with barely any clothes on and not carrying any water and I assume she survived. In the middle of the goddamn Mojave they have a visitor’s center. But for some reason you have to go to Barstow to get anti-venom for Sidewinder bites.

Shit.

When I came home from the trip I wanted to lay in bed thinking and thinking. Then I wanted to write this memoir and go out and do it again. I saw my kids for about ten minutes and I was ready to go again. It’s true I had missed the fuck out of them. But shit, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and they are still here. The work deadline was looming only a few days away at that point. It was an incredibly useless exercies, but it was also a puzzle. And puzzles are kind of my thing. I always say Drugs, Music, and Driving. But I should add puzzles in there. But then again I don’t even know how to do a Rubik’s Cube.

But let’s start over. Shit. Jesus. I’m wilding tonight off this coffee and coming down from that work deadline and immediately planning my parents 40th anniversary party that’s happening this weekend. I’m going to get a bullhorn, just like Hunter S. Thompson. Start yelling at people. But what was I saying?

Shit. I’m in a loop. Our friend Mike was in a loop for a very long time. We’re all in a loop, I guess. I told my son he shouldn’t be scared of dying. Look at the plants, I said. They die in the winter and they’re reborn in the spring. It’s the cycle of life. He asked me if a human’s life cycle is to die and then come back, as if he was asking me about a caterpillar or some shit. I said how the hell should I know. Sure. Why not. Everything really is a loop. He told me death would hurt because all your bones would break.

So I always wanted to write some dumb shit like this, but I didn’t have anything to say, really. Naseem Taleb blew my mind when he wrote that most writers write their whole lives trying to find something to say. I think I stopped writing for a decade after I read that. Like Truman Capote’s critique of Jack Kerouac, I felt that really I just enjoyed typing. But I also read a book about Jack Kerouac called, The Voice Is All. Apparently, Kerouac would go around writing things as if he was sketching scenes in a sketchbook, where you normally would keep sketches, only it was words in a notebook, which is where you keep notes. And he just really got good at capturing the essence of a moment off the cuff and that’s how he would write. And I read On the Road maybe a hundred times you know. I didn’t find it until I was…Jesus how fucking old am I now. But I didn’t find it by the usual route, the old summer reading list. I found it in a bookstore called ‘Books for America’ off Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. Jesus fuck I am old.

That bookstore was the fucking shit. It is gone now. It died before Covid. Fucking hell.

So yeah. I wanted to write some shit about my life, but I didn’t know anything, really, and nothing had happened. I couldn’t seem to explain anything new about being a dad. Sure, my kid says psycho shit that would make most parents, I imagine, curl up in the fetal position and call in a shrink, but I mean on the whole he’s fairly normal. Not to me of course. But he goes to school and comes home and his teachers say he’s a joy to work with and he tells on his classmates if they do something wrong, like use a tissue for a napkin or whatever the fuck. And yeah I got this job at an ad agency after working in restaurants for decades and everyone was like, holy shit you are really good at working in an office, which was because I had read a bunch of books about management and shit like that when I was a young kid so I could be good at Amway. 

It all seemed interesting enough. But it wasn’t compelling. Like if I could explain it in a way, maybe it could be interesting to someone else. If anyone ever gave me a drink and asked me questions, which did happen every five to ten years, actually, I would go on and on about my whole life. And those were the times that I realized I was my dad. Shit. So yeah it was interesting to talk about, but not to write about and/or bother anyone else about.

But then shit man, we pulled off the craziest trip I have ever heard of. It was so crazy, that when I was sitting at a restaurant called Nacho Daddy in Las Vegas watching a music video, the only thing I could think was that these rock stars didn’t even know what it meant to take drugs. Vegas itself seemed like a Busch Gardens version of a German village. It was a fucking joke. Sure it was cool and we had a great time. But the idea that Vegas wanted to steal our money and chew us up and spit us out and all of this shit I had heard while researching for the trip…was a fucking joke.

We pulled that shit off with, well there’s no other way to say it, with aplomb.

Shit.

And then suddenly I felt like you know what, that’s some shit I could hang my memoir on right there. The goddamn universe had given us a message, and I could count myself among those people able to type and think in a somewhat straightforward way and remember shit…what the fuck am I saying? I could bring back a message of some kind. And of course that was folly and I knew it all along when I was there. I knew there was nothing from the experience that I could bring back. 

But maybe I was wrong. I hope I was wrong.

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correspondence 5.14.24

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From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Tuesday, May 14 at 21:10
Subject: Shit

Caffeine in the afternoon while listening to Tool in the coffee shop that’s playing Taylor Swift. They’re planing Taylor Swift all over the goddam world. Goddam Taylor Swift. Goddam caffeine in the afternoon on a lopsided couch with the goddam internet out. You ever heard of a ledger board? My wife said ours was rotted and no one believed her. Goddam house is falling over with no internet in it. Goddam caffeine in the afternoon and in the gap between Lateralus and Disposition you hear Taylor Swift. SEO’d mother fucker god damn shit. I was supposed to get a birthday gift for this kid. I just remembered. Shit. Talk to you later.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Wednesday, May 8 at 13:00
Subject: low volume days

Coastal town, down south of Thailand: A young man in his late twenties is having breakfast with his father. The son holds up his phone and takes a video to send to someone back home. The father smiles at this someone. I have my earpods in, so I don’t hear what they say. They could easily be Swede or German and I wouldn’t understand a word. But I imagine the son’s saying, say hi to mum, and the father says, hello love. We are having a lovely time despite the heat. The water is warm, like a hot bath, and hordes of jellyfish wash ashore. Everyday the beaches are strewn with translucent sacs. Scientists say it is the hottest year and the weather is off by 3 or 4 degrees.

The world that our children will inherit is unimaginable. So read him Cervantes. Even when he howls.

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Our Trip Was Different – Part 1

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Who would have imagined that you could drive a rented car into the desert with a head full of acid as a father of two. Hell, as two fathers of two, when it comes down to it. That’s what we were. Our children were young. We were modern day fathers, too. Responsible for all the compassion and tenderness hitherto assigned to the womenfolk. And damn good at it, too. Or good enough, perhaps. Who could say? The world was cold and unconcerned with compassion for children. Compassion was for the marginalized. And I have to admit, we didn’t have enough to go around.

Maybe he did. My brother, Hunter, seemed to be able to face the world on simpler terms. He had faith in people. He was an optimist. He smoked a shit ton of weed.

I had the idea for the trip based completely on nothing but driving, drugs, music, and pure Gonzo journalism. I had idolized Hunter S. Thompson my whole adult life, from the time that I finally understood that the rapture and armageddon were metaphors. I remember the first time I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t understand it. I was in college. it seemed like a disjointed, piece of shit film about nothing. In those days, Gladiator was unquestionably the best movie I had ever seen, followed by Dave with Kevin Klein.

Then I smoked my first joint at Trevor’s house and I knew I would die. I couldn’t stop laughing about it. I played Come As You Are by Nirvana, the studio version, over and over. And then I watched Fear and Loathing days or weeks later. On the air mattress that I leaned up against the wall like a ghetto Murphy bed during the day. I was laying there with my girlfriend who would become my wife, with an expensive, fucked up Dell laptop on my chest. There were cockroaches on the other side of the bar of light under the door. My roommate, whom I had seen maybe three times, was an olympic figure skater. Or maybe just on the figure skating team. He ate chicken with mustard. Molly, my girl, fell asleep before the end of that version of These Are a Few of My Favorite Things was over.

I had only just learned about Johnny Depp from the movie Pirates of the Carribean and I thought his name was Orlando Bloom. Holy shit. I was greener than Tobey Maguire in Fear and Loathing. I was finishing up a college career not much more experienced than when I had started. But shit, I had found Molly. She was the key. Imagine if I had gone to strange, quiet parties and joined the rugby team with my best friend Emmanuel. It was more like a club, actually, I don’t even think they were a sanctioned team. But yeah, he’s had a life and a half. He went to Kandahar. He grew up with role models that were honest with him.

Jesus Christ.

I watched the movie many times. I was sensitive to weed, so I would basically have life altering trips based on one toke. And sometimes I would have two or more tokes. If I wasn’t doing that, I was blacking out on Goldschläger at the pool hall with Emmanuel. It was a strange time. I had spent the first few years with Molly sober as a stone as she took me to parties with her honor fraternity and played flip cup. My friend, Trevor, had this house near to the college with this immense basement. My other friend, Kathleen, was always on the verge of showing up there with psilocybin mushrooms. I would listen to Tool outside her apartment sometimes and we would go eat lunch. She never did come through with those and it would be almost two decades before I ate my first one.

So, fuck, that’s one of the inspirations I had for the trip when I planned it. Driving from LA to Vegas all fucked up.

I might as well just tell you now that I drink and I drive a lot. I understand that it’s wrong. Even I am scared to tell you. I just feel that I am a better driver than you. Or anyone. I am the smartest person alive. I can do it. I’m not sure. One of my other brothers, John, has a few DUI’s. One time a cop had to pull in front of him and slow down until John’s car crashed into him. I love that story. I am very concerned that innocent children could die in that story, even though it already happened. But God help me I love that story.

I fucking love driving, you know? And we all do, in my family. My father is a truck driver. We drove to Florida and back to Delaware a hundred times as kids. My friend, Eric, says that a road trip on an interstate is a commute, not a road trip. But I disagree. To me, there’s nothing like zoning way the fuck out, staring dead eyed at the road, driving as fast as you can get away with for as long as you can. Straight down 95 or i-4 or whatever the fuck.

So when it came time to plan my brother’s bachelor party, driving was important.

Second on the list was music. Intense, soul fucking music. God’s music. House music. Psychedelic music. Rap music. Whatever the fuck. Fucking choral music. Loud as fuck, that’s the key really. Loud enough to shake your breastplate and make you feel a little bad for people at the red light.

My brother and I were introduced to real, loud house music by my cousin-in-law, Robbie. I don’t know, I guess I had listened to a ton of Deadmau5 and some others before going to that first fateful All Day I Dream event on Governor’s Island in 2016. Robbie took me to church that day. I guess, fuck, shit I guess I had had Molly (the drug, not my wife) on the steps of my Boston apartment back in 2012 or 2013. Jesus Christ I have been alive for a long time. But that didn’t prepare me for the pill that Robbie passed me at or around 1 PM on that epic Sunday. Shit. Jesus. That show reorganized my priorities.

Of course I understood at that point that all of humanity needed to go to church, and what we called church at that time was a complete mockery.

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Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall

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I don’t know what the fuck to do. Have a vision. Don’t have a vision. Plan for shit don’t plan for shit. Follow your interests. Don’t have any interests.

That’s why I’m working on these paving stones.

I swear to God that is my life right now. Paving stones.

I decided on paving stones because sometime in August, four months after I began attempting to ‘open’ the above ground pool that came with this house, my wife said, ‘for my birthday, it would be cool to have a pool party.’ So for two weeks I fully committed to getting this damn pool open which had hitherto been a struggle for reasons I don’t want to get into right now but at some point I might.

So I fully committed to getting the pool open and in two weeks I did get it open. I thought I was the shit. Then it got fucked up again and I really had to learn all about pools and shit.

But two or three weeks later I knew damn near everything about pools. Like the ten percent of things about pools that you need to know in order to make the water clear. That’s what I know.

So then I swam in the pool and it was awesome. And then I sat in a chair in the sun after the three minutes I was in the pool, since, as Mitch Hedberg pointed out, that’s exactly the amount of time you can have fun in an above ground pool. And I realized it didn’t matter that you can only have three minutes of fun. And I realized I didn’t figure shit out by realizing that, it’s just that three minutes is some amount of time and having fun is some amount of good so it turned out to be some amount of worthwhile.

And I said fuck man I’ve never been able to do shit in my life but I got this goddam pool open. How did I do that?

And I literally spent weeks thinking about that damn pool ahead of everything else.

Now it’s silly as shit. Because I got kids and a job and all of that to think about so who gives a fuck about a pool. No point in really focusing all my energy on a pool.

But then again the pool was beautiful. I had made something beautiful. Just the water. The outside of the pool looked and looks like shit.

Maybe if I focused on something similarly complex (that is to say simple as fuck), I could make that beautiful. Maybe that would be a worthwhile thing to do.

So I decided to get the weeds out of the front walk. I thought it would take five days or so. I’m still working on it 9 days later and probably have 3 to 4 days of working on it left.

And I keep forgetting that nothing matters but that goddam front walk. As long as I make progress on that shit every day I am allowed to go to sleep at night. Fuck it all. All except the pool and the front walk. And my kids. Maybe my wife. But definitely the paving stones.

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Yard Work

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It’s not that I have figured out so many things that I can now just go fuck around in my yard trying to make my house look nicer. I’m not trying to make my house look nice because it’s the last bastion of disorder in my life. I’m trying to make my house look nice because it’s one of the few things outside of myself that I can have some effect on. It’s easy to forget when talking to people about what kind of paving stones you have in your front walk that you’re not done with everything else. It’s only that you have to start somehwere. Paving stones may seem trivial but removing the weeds from the cracks improves the way the house looks to a surprising degree. No one is going to walk up and think, “Hey look at this front walk, there are no weeds in it.” But people who walk up a front walk with weeds in it may think, “Nature just has her way with everything doesn’t it? We’re all going to die. Our children are going to die. The universe will slowly burn out to zero degrees Kelvin and everything we build is only to distract us from that fact.”

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Different Things Are Different

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A walkway covered with moss in the context of a forest house may be beautiful while a walkway covered with moss in town might upset the home owners association. The degree to which we should interfere with nature in our lives depends on the effect we are trying to produce, or the context, or location where we are. How manicured should your lawn be? Should it be able to host the PGA tour? Well then, will kids not want to play on it? But perhaps kids are not meant to play on it. If you want a lawn kids will play on you make it nice and you don’t pile sharp rocks around on it. Sometimes you want a place for kids to play and sometimes you want a Zen garden. One thing can’t always be another. For some reason, I don’t know why exactly, a screwdriver that is one size feels better than a screwdriver that uses interchangeable bits.

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Clean Something, Clean Anything

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It was the strangest thing, after I got done writing that last post I read three articles about hating on white people and stuff like that, and then I went inside and started washing dishes. Then I did that cleaning project I wanted to do: take shit from under my bed and dust it off and sweep under there and shit like that. I told…what was my wife’s name again? Molly. I told Molly I would do it sometime soon yesterday. So I did it today. Why not?

Anyway I had no intention of doing that shit when I was sitting out there on the balcony. I figured, fuck it, I’ll just write a bunch of shit down. Fuck this day. Waste it.

It was either the coffee or the writing that gave me the energy to start cleaning shit up. Or it was because I went into the living room and Morgan was there talking on the phone and I was going to say something to him but I figured I might as well do the dishes first while he was on the phone and once I started actually moving my life from disorder to order in that way, I had the strength to move forward onto bigger projects.

After I cleaned under my bed and shit, the apartment felt pretty good, less dusty anwyay. I heated up some quiche and I went back out to the balcony. Morgan and I sat there just staring out into the day. It is really nice outside right now. It’s too much too fast though. I miss the spring. It was spring yesterday, but today it will be summer. Who knows if we’ll ever go back to spring because last week it was pretty much late winter.

But we’re always romanticizing something that probably isn’t real. Like the idyllic part of our childhood before we became self-conscious, and other shit like that.

Now I’m laying on the bed, typing more shit. It’s about time to go to work. I guess I have to get dressed and set up the feeders for the cats. What else? I guess that’s really it, although I should start work on Molly’s website, or else apply for a job, and I really should get back on my exercise program before I lose all the gains I was seeing, at least I should do the sit-ups. 

I don’t know if I’ll do any of that. I might just lay here and fall asleep. Fuck it. I have a weird life. Morgan asked me if I would ever get a tattoo. I said I didn’t know. When I was 16, I wanted flames going up my arms from my wrists like the lead singer of Linkin Park. He said that would have been ok. I said yeah but everyone would know that I had gotten that tattoo in the 90’s. 

I thought about it and I probably wouldn’t get a tattoo because who has the time or the money to do something like that. It would be cool to have a tattoo, but the way I live I probably wouldn’t get around to planning something like that. According to my value system it’s frivolous. I try to only do things that aren’t frivolous, at least that’s what I tell myself. And then I sit around on balconies staring off into nothing.

But some people just go around doing things that they want to do. They go to work and they work and then they come home and just do things. But I can’t even think of things that I want to do when I really think about it. Like Molly asked me yesterday, what do you want to do? And I tried to think of an honest answer because most of the time I would never assert myself about some shit like that because I just go along with whatever she wants to do and I couldn’t think of an answer. Besides have sex. Sex and eating, that’s all I do. I like drinking, too, but I like that less and less as it hurts more the next day or the night of, even, when I drink just enough to feel good but not enough to knock me out. I know there are things I want to do, I think, I never thought it was just going somewhere and eating, but maybe it is.

I mean sure I want to go hang out with the girl I was formerly obsessed with, but I don’t even know what I want to do with her, just go dancing I guess or sit on a bed talking, basically anything that seems like it’s leading to sex. Or eating.

But I also like just sitting and talking with people. I like talking with people, especially the girl I was formerly obsessed with. I like playing basketball, too, and writing down dumb shit. I like learning shit, I think I do. Sometimes I even like cleaning, but I don’t know if it’s just because I feel like if I’m cleaning, I’m safe from my inner critic, the one that tells me whatever I’m doing isn’t right, that it would be better if I did something else entirely. And then I do that and it’s the same thing. It’s always something I can’t even do, really, or won’t do, because I’m scared. I should just go around doing things I’m scared of, I guess, is the lesson. I don’t know.

Fuck it, I think I’ll go to sleep.

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Dark

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This girl made me think. Why does that happen? There was a girl in Boston who made me think.
Sure I’m always thinking, but I’m usually thinking the same thing. Some variation of the same thing.

But in these two instances, all the lights in my head went on for a blinding few seconds. Then they went out with a hiss and I found myself on cold, damp, soft weird shit, just shivering there.

A neurotic mess: myself, but worse.

The first descent in darkness was interrupted with some real practical type shit. I got fired, so I had to find a job and make money fast and I’m no good at that. Working seven days a week saved me from suicide or enlightenment.

Then this most recent descent.

My inner life was cruising along at medium shitty, nice and comfy. Then I met her and the ride got bumpy. I thought, why these moments of transcendence, mixed with these hours of extreme neurosis and nausea?

I asked: why am I stuck in this marriage, why can’t I just do what I want, why don’t I ever do drugs or listen to music in the dark or jump off cliffs?

Then I found the answer to why I don’t do those things. It wasn’t because I’m married. It’s because I believe that life is stupid and pointless, and I believe that if it was designed, it was designed to fuck with me.

Ten years ago, when I found out Genesis didn’t really happen, I laughed and said, you’ll never fool me again, Culture. Society. White men in long robes. Fuck y’all. I bought a bottle of Chivas, like my new hero Hunter Thompson, and I went to fuckin town.

Ten years I believed in nothing. You don’t know! I said to everyone. You don’t know shit, none of you do because none of you can, and anyone that thinks they know anyone is deluding themselves. And more power to those assholes, because I’d love to be able to delude myself. But I couldn’t delude myself. I had seen the truth, and it was an abyss.

Ten years I worked in restaurants thinking that the reason I didn’t get out of it was that I wasn’t using my free time effectively.

Ten years and longer than that, I lied with abandon, fashioning a chameleon armor around my starving, angry soul to keep everything away, to keep alive in a world that couldn’t give a shit.

But how is it that these two girls broke in where others didn’t?

Probably something to do with sex and something else to do with my mother.

Gotta go, bitches. More later.

Spoiler alert: I still don’t believe, and I’m still married.

Click here to go to part two.