Category: Uncategorized

After my last piece, and the dream I just woke up from, I decided these are often absurdly detailed enough to start keeping them in a journal. This will be updated every time I have the detail, memory and mood to record it – a bit like Recent Changes for Starving Completionists. In a general effort to make this site more “human friendly” I’ll dispense with the long winded solipsistic introduction and jump right into it.

6/29/24 – I was traveling in a car with some friends and saw a post that the friend I’ve been calling Sugar Tea was long distance traveling with a friend called Lost. I saw a social media post from Lost that said:

“Just got in the car with Sugar Tea. Love her!”

Sugar Tea does not usually use she/her pronouns but I should probably explain that my wife and I met in the queer art milieux of Los Angeles and LaPorsha regularly uses she/her pronouns to refer to he/him friends in our personal conversations and often appends the -sha suffix to these people’s names.

The car I was riding in parked and Sugar Tea and Lost’s vehicle pulled into the parking lot quite far away on the other side of the lot. I should add that both parties were traveling quite long distances in opposite directions and the meeting was coincidental. No idea from where or to where in either case. Lost lives in Canada. For a long time Sugar Tea and I stared at each other from across the parking lot and then at an invisible signal smiled, advanced toward one another and embraced – I haven’t seen him in many years and a real life meeting would go similarly I imagine.

He was wearing a cream colored sweater with comically large shoulder pads and wavy arms similar to the recent wavy leg denim trend. He also now had one large breast in the center of his chest and although I couldn’t see this through the sweater I knew it had one perfect round pink nipple. We talked for a bit, caught up – I remember no details of our conversation.

When he went to travel on there was a moment of panic regarding locating his vehicle. They had parked at a tiny San Diego style independent burrito shop with a cartoon mouse and slice of cheese motif. This detail is quite obviously derived from a post with a similar drawing I saw last night on Joshua Ploeg’s Facebook advertising vegan grilled cheese sandwiches. He couldn’t find the car but we quickly realized that we were looking at a small sign and speaker for taking drive through orders that was counterintuitively downhill from and behind the restaurant itself.

He found the car at the real cartoon mouse and cheese burrito restaurant and they drove on. I never saw Lost although she is also my friend and I’d like to see her. The parking lot morphed into the Spring Valley Shopping Center parking lot of my childhood (and long stretches of adult life) home. A doughnut shop, something it has never had, appeared in the corner and someone handed me $13 to go get doughnuts.

This place was known for their regular glazed and old fashioned doughnuts and run by an Asian family. A very young girl was at the cash register and I ordered one of each. She entered each item as seven dollars for a total of thirteen dollars (I’m aware the math is wrong) and I was slightly taken aback by the price increase. I handed her all the cash but it had turned into $18 and she handed back the five dollar bill.

She gave me six of each kind of doughnut in two long plastic wrapped tubes but they looked like day olds and unappealing. Unexpectedly things turned into a comedic situation where everybody in this family was trying to eat all the doughnuts before I could. They would jump into the air and start chomping at the empty space like sharks and their teeth became the sharp teeth of sharks as well.

This allowed each chomping person to float in midair and fly forward ten to fifteen feet with their body extended behind them (also quite like a shark). We were in a grassy park now and this all felt very fun and playful. I was trying to run from everybody and shove all the doughnuts in my mouth so they couldn’t eat them at the same time when I fell into a swimming pool and got all my doughnuts wet. The game was called off and they took me back to the doughnut shop.

I was in a basement now looking longingly at wall coolers full of Vietnamese style Soy Milk but the extra five dollars must have blinked out of existence because I couldn’t afford to buy any. One brand came in short cans marked with the logo of White Rabbit milk candy. The prices were written on small pieces of cardboard in the loose but elegant style of shops around Oakland’s Chinatown (mostly Vietnamese) : $1.19 for the short can and $1.29 for the normal Vitasoy glass bottle.

We all looked at a chair with a fine Italian men’s suit laid out on it and the family joked about how I would always come into the shop to hide from Giovanni – my old boss from a Chicago Italian cafe. The mother laughed with her hand over her mouth and told a wholesome story that feels less wholesome in the light of day. One time Giovanni had put on a thigh high leather boot with a high heel and stomped on her eyeballs while her head was on the ground.

It had pushed her eyes into her head a bit and caused them to become bloody but she was still laughing about it and talking about how thankful she was because it caused her to see the world differently. The energy was like one of those scenes in an anime where one character suddenly expresses something about another character that they have long appreciated but never verbally acknowledged. The doughnut shop then shifted into a larger version of Giovanni’s cafe filled with adult wannabe mafia guy sons – in reality he only had a teenage mall goth daughter.

They had various pouches of exotic seeds and herbs that they were trying to swallow to get high – an activity they were trying to convince me to join them in. I declined out of fear of accidental poisoning. In my waking life my wife just started convincing me to take vitamins but I have an irrational fear of Vitamin D poisoning based on an account I read of Arctic or Antarctic explorers dying horrifically from it after eating their sled dog’s livers.

Now I was in junkie mode and had another guy with me who looked like the character Super Hans from the British sitcom Peep Show. We tried to casually climb down some other narrow wooden stairs into a different basement, figuring that as they were mafia types it would be full of drugs, but an adult son put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. Suddenly I got stuck trying to climb back up the stairs and was trying to grab onto the top to stabilize myself. Two ornate Moroccan knives rested on the top edge of the banister and a windowsill.

The scene shifted and I was sitting with Papa Giovanni in the shade on what must have been his private sheep farm (Cremaster 3 again). We were looking at a slanted wooden mechanism that applied reddle (an archaic earthen dye) to his sheep in a manner similar to how I imagine Temple Grandin’s cattle press must work. We discussed Diggory Venn, the reddleman in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a conversation I held with Joe Preston in real life.

In the dream version of the conversation Papa Giovanni was not familiar with the character and made a rude noise at the prospect of reading Thomas Hardy. I don’t know if he read at all, the only books in the cafe were a phone book and a Bible. I suddenly wondered why we had never cooked mutton at the cafe if he had a private sheep farm. An adult daughter, different from his mall goth daughter, appeared at my side and offered an explanation:

It was her fault – when they slaughtered and dressed a truckload of sheep they had loaded them up with the intestines tied off but not removed. When butchering a carcass you tie off the intestine before removing it to prevent the contents from fouling the meat. All of the different sheep’s intestines had popped at once like a plastic shopping bag full of water balloons. Once again a more unpleasant image to my waking mind than it was to my dreaming one.

It was time to say goodbye. Me and Papa embraced fondly and he checked to make sure he still had my current telephone number. In real life we never exchanged numbers and usually parted with him making disparaging remarks about my presumed sexual orientation and Jewish heritage. I assume he’s actually dead by now.

I turned back. I’d almost forgotten my shoes – an expensive pair of Italian leather loafers. He laughed. He’d been hoping I’d forget the shoes so he might keep them but now returned them in good humor. Presumably we had the same shoe size.

*******************************************

An interesting bit of trivia is that the 30 mg preparation of Temazepam, a benzodiazepine prescribed for insomnia, and the 70 mg of Vyvanse, a prodrug that metabolizes into amphetamine and feels insane if you don’t have ADHD, look almost identical at a glance. Technically one is maroon and blue while the other is orange and blue but this distinction is lost through the orange plastic of a prescription bottle. I have insomnia while my wife has ADHD and we both keep our pills by our bed for convenience.

In what is absolutely a terrible idea I have been gradually increasing the amount of temazepam I consume in a single night due to the classic quandary of diminishing returns and a misguided drive to chase a pleasurable “intoxication” effect. I take four a night and was down to four at the time of this incident. In a strange twist of fate my wife also happened to have exactly four Vyvanse left in her bottle.

A common side effect of benzodiazepines is that they tend to make you forget where you last put them and in some cases even hid them from yourself. That was the situation when I woke up yesterday but a quick look around yielded a pill bottle with four gel capsules of the proper color. Of course it’s easy to say I should have read the label, as of course I should have, but considering I was neither aware of the superficial resemblance or the matching counts my less rigorous identification is at least understandable.

As the time of night to begin “winding down” manifested I repeated my usual evening ritual by removing the four capsules and placing them under my tongue to dissolve. All gel cap exteriors taste more or less the same so the first moment I realized something was amiss didn’t come until the internal powder began to dissolve sublingually. Temazepam is sweet – I’ve often wondered if this is a quality of the drug itself or an added ingredient to make the pills more palatable.

The second one seems unlikely as without bypassing the time release gel caps like I was the flavor of the powder should not be discernible at all. Interestingly enough Vyvanse is also sweetened so most of the powder had dissolved before I caught the aftertaste of not just bitter, but the specific bitter that characterizes stimulants. This was the moment I picked up the bottle, read the text and realized the gravity of my mistake.

Vyvanse is unique in that it has to be metabolized in the gut to become amphetamine – prodrugs are interesting if anybody wants to read up on them. I might question if sublingual absorption is capable of this at all if not for the unique hell the last 36 hours have presented to me. I ran downstairs and attempted to rinse any undissolved portions from my mouth. If I were thinking more clearly I might have attempted to collect any remaining powder for my wife – after all the absence of Vyvanse for the next four days is as much of an issue for her as the overdose is for me.

My bottle of Temazepam was tangled in the blankets – containing the same four capsules I’d remembered. I suspect it was about as effective as pissing on a fire but I quickly placed the sedatives under my tongue so, like the characters in Osmosis Jones, the two substances might battle it out for control of my body’s equilibrium. I highly doubt that the future will offer opportunities to bet money on similar circumstances as one would for MMA or a boxing match but in the infinitismal chance this does happen don’t be a fool – put your money on the Vyvanse.

Before I go into the landscape of my latest hell I thought it would be interesting to outline my personal history with excessive consumption of stimulants. They are hands down my least favorite drugs but that doesn’t mean this was my first dance with “Hitler’s Dandruff”. Youthful bravado, nihilistic boredom and the combination of constant availability and rock bottom pricing are not to be overestimated.

Previous incidents in order:

I: After returning to the West Coast in the wake of 9/11 in 2001 I heard from El Rancho alumnus Justin Two that methamphetamine fetched outsized sizes in Chicagoland due to strict control of red phosphorous. I bought a ball (3.5 grams) and used a counterfeit Greyhound ticket to return to my recent home – reasoning that my profits would bankroll the rest of the trip.

I wouldn’t call my consumption an overdose but with a recent needle fixation and no other drugs at my fingertips I did redose frequently and fail to sleep during the cross country trip. For whatever reason I was never assigned Moby Dick in public school but I’d burned through it in an infamous Ocean Beach house in the week before my departure. Certain residents of this home had just gotten out of jail which resulted in speed, or ‘Chardonnay’ as the beach bums called it, making a major comeback.

On top of Melville’s classic my recent pilgrimage to Fort Thunder gave me a crack at the Load Records back catalog and a CD of Astoveboat album New Bedford. Astoveboat was the precursor to legendary Providence noise rock groups like Lightning Bolt, Olneyville Sound System that also chose to forgo guitar and focus on bass.

They were also arguably the most consistently thematic project in the city’s experimental landscape – plodding along with an electric bass, two empty oil drums and some kind of electronic fog horn every song of theirs either spoke of killing whales directly or addressed the culture and legends of whaling ships.

The combined effect of the novel, album and methamphetamine coalesced into one cohesive philosophy – more than anything, deep in my very bones, I wanted to kill a whale. Ocean Beach offered scant opportunities so I made do with occasionally, and futilely, attempting to kick seagulls. My favorite shirt at the time bore the legend “A DEAD WHALE OR ASTOVEBOAT” next to a bloody human handprint.

It was in this mindstate that I hid the drugs I was muling in a stick of gel deodorant and settled in for the long ride. While I kept my own cache secret it must have been only a small portion of what the other passengers brought themselves. Sitting toward the back of the bus, a toothless old woman offered meth themed jokes and original poetry:

“We spin, we spin, we’re spun, we’re spun

We are the tweakers, the geekers and the ekers

Disconnecting your car’s radio speakers…”

The jokes were essentially Jeff Foxworthy with a different theme. I didn’t think any were especially funny but with enough demand I’d be happy to edit them in. I was injecting another one to two points a day in addition to the larger dose I took before boarding and becoming increasingly paranoid, antisocial and batshit fucking crazy.

Somewhere along the line I ended up with one of those spiral bound notebooks commonly used by conspiracy theorists and people experiencing psychotic breaks. In my scribbles the whale became a symbol for God himself and I had endless theories on how one might go about killing this entity. I remember something about cave paintings, something about how the killing blow required absolute faith but mostly I’m happy that whatever was happening in my head was temporary.

A few years later I found this journal on a San Diego trip and stapled the wildest sections to the kitchen walls of the Blog Cabin.

II. This is the first event I would call an “overdose” and definitely the cringiest on my part. It was 2004 and I was lucky enough to be in New York for the Deitch Projects opening of the Riddle of the Sphinx installation by Dearraindrop. It had been around four years since my Fort Thunder trip and while I’d started a pen-pal friendship with Ben Jones of Paper Rad my contact with Dearraindrop’s Joe Grillo had been limited to an offer to print a zine of theirs for my tape label (it never happened).

I have no intention of addressing Joe’s struggles or legal problems here. For this next bit keep in mind that I was new to drugs and had never really been a “cool kid”. I’ve never been the “fashionably late” type – when I first started going to shows I usually had to show up hours early to try to find the band outside so they could sneak me in even though I was under 21. I was either really good at this or it was just easy In the pre-internet days.

Riddle of the Sphinx was free, all ages (despite free beer) and never hit capacity. I probably just rolled up with a suitcase because I had nowhere to pregame. In the nearly empty gallery there was a refreshment table with orange juice, pita chips and, for a few minutes at least, Billy Grant’s (main Dearraindrop animator) prescription bottle for Adderall.

This is going to sound really stupid because it was really stupid but Dearraindrop made drug themed art so I assumed the drugs were supposed to be refreshments and not wanting to look like a square I quickly popped out three of them and instantly knocked them back. Joe and Billy were both quick to tell me that he’s only prescribed the amount he literally needs and I’d just condemned him to three days without his necessary meds (much like I just did to my wife on accident).

To make matters worse I don’t like Adderall or tolerate it well without turning into a total maniac. The pills were 50 mg time release so within an hour I was a total menace. I talked the ear off of anybody that made the mistake of getting too close and Joe had to keep reminding me to take a few steps back and give him personal space during our frequent one sided conversations.

SLOW JAMS, an interesting performance themed band that seem to have disappeared from this era’s history without leaving so much of a footnote, had built their show around a small trampoline they jumped off as each member dropped lyrics. I kept running up and upstaging them by jumping on it myself. I tried to grab mics to freestyle over songs.

It wasn’t just the Adderall. This was my twenties and it took a long time for me to learn how to respect a stage by becoming a performer myself. I got far more grace than I deserved especially because I still somehow got invited to the afterparty with catered Thai food. I still don’t know if I was considered “inner circle” or my Adderall bravado did the heavy lifting. I always loved Billy’s work and wished I saw more of it. Dearraindrop and Paper Rad were like mirrors of each-other: Joe Grillo’s shadow hid his compatriots as surely as Ben Jones’ obscured the other members of Paper Rad.

Someday I need to write a piece about how these two groups and FORCEFIELD brought the ethos of collective punk living to fine art and saw their movement co-opted many years later by more commercial groups like Meow Wolf.

III: this was a stimulant overdose in the classic sense. In San Diego a strange old woman described in the piece White Tiger’s House had been selling me Norcos and gave me a bag of insulin syringes after becoming homeless by the reservoir. I was supposed to get her a tent in exchange for an entire bottle of her next norco script. I wish I’d done it – not for the pills but because she had too many health issues to be at the mercy of the elements.

As soon as I had the needles I fantasized about finding cocaine. Instead I kicked an empty cigarette pack in a parking lot to find a few grams of meth. An IV meth rush and an IV Coke rush are totally different sensations – that didn’t stop me from trying larger and larger hits until I fucked myself up and had a terrifying night. Most of it was spent in the bathroom desperately trying to urinate. The whole story is in the piece “I think that the universe was intending that to be my meth wallet” and the stuff was a curse until I got it stolen trying to sell it off in Oakland.

IV: This brings us to this last, and hopefully final, incident. There’s a special horror to thinking you are taking chill out pills only to dissolve 280 mg of lisdexamfetamine in your mouth. I don’t understand this stuff. It should only be equivalent to 60 mg of Adderall using conversion charts. That dose would be manageable but my body still feels weird, it comes in waves and my hands and chest kinda hurt. I really hope this is the end of it.

I would feel weird about talking about this next part if the phenomenon wasn’t so well documented. I’m talking about “stimfapping”. Jim Goad wrote a famous piece about this – being absurdly horny but the mind is racing too much to follow any single fantasy to the denouement as it were. After an entire night I was able to, without getting too graphic, coax out a limp dribble that left me less relaxed than before I started.

The first thing I did when I realized I had no chance of sleeping was draw a portrait of cminent Nahuatl poet and statesman Nezhualcoyotl. I’ve been getting in lots of online arguments (before the stims) about the Mexica and US domestic violence stats. I won’t go into much except to say that without a written language the Aztecs had quite a well developed poetry culture.

While Aztec society was highly stratified the one option for upward mobility was to distinguish yourself in poetry. If you’ve ever read the Edda of Scandinavia and know anything about “kenning” the Mexica had a unique form called “disfrasimo”. European kenning is about metaphorical nicknames for all kinds of stuff – “destroyer of twigs” for fire is one example. The more of these you can fit into an oral saga the better Skald you are.

In disfrasimo every thing can be called by two other things. Since Tenochtitlan was in a lake for example “in atl in tepetl”, translating as ‘the water the stone’, is a way to say city. The other crazy thing is in usage they nest within one another like programming subroutines. The way to say poetry is “in xochitl in cuicuitl” – the flower the song.

Ok, I’m gonna use a bit Of English here but if you want to say “we were saying poems as we went to the city you could do something like:

“We travelled to ‘in atl’

We repeated ‘in xochitl’

We repeated ‘in cuicuitl’

We travelled to ‘in tepetl’”

Obviously I could have worked harder at using more Nahuatl in that but the takeaway is the more of these you can squeeze in the greater your wisdom -and the more status you can attain. It may seem difficult to understand how listeners were able to follow while the second half of one of these couplets could come long after the first but was required to give it meaning.

German can be somewhat similar: some important part gets put off until the end of long complex sentences, verbs maybe, but listeners just naturally follow.

The Mexica stuff I’ve been arguing is about number of sacrificial victims. While some sources claim tens to hundreds of thousands the digs at Templo Mayor in Zocalo, DF have turned up 729 definitive sacrificed remains snd modern estimates are hundreds to low thousands annually.

Anyway while my data is solid that’s mostly the Vyvanse talking. I made an idiotic mistake, my body still feels weird and I doubt I’m sleeping tonight either. Don’t be stupid like me. Read your pill bottles. I’m gonna close my eyes for no reason now.

I was up fairly early because I was a High School student. It would be another three or four years before my father’s health would begin to seriously decline so on this particular morning our garden remained in robust health. A colorful array of free standing flowers, bushes and trees burst from the earth like the inflatables in the earliest performances of Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde before it was discovered that the mechanical apparatus used to create this effect overpowered the natural acoustics of the orchestra.

It wasn’t a regular school day so I had a bit of extra time. Sipping leisurely from a mug of coffee I regarded a wall of plumbago – a fast growing, hardy shrub with blossoms of a delicate periwinkle blue. My father favored it because it required little water and came in thick enough to shield our sprawling side yards from the suspicious eyes of gossiping neighbors.

He was an avid smoker of cheap Mexican cannabis and even legalized medicinal use was still years away in California.

As the plumbago flowers wither a system of sticky hairs along the calyx allow the seed pods to latch onto the fur of any passing mammal and thus continue to propagate themselves as far as hoof or paw may wander. For a family of long haired hippies this particular feature was an absolute nuisance and most evenings were spent picking and combing out the colorful hitchhikers.

On this particular morning I caught sight of something unexpected: a round, brown pod among the flowers. It would be a stretch to refer to myself as an amateur botanist but I had been taking a scientific interest in seed pods specifically. A week or two earlier I had brought the pods of the Ruellia, or wild petunia, into my physics class to ascertain the mechanism by which these capsules explode in the presence of water to spread their seeds.

(for any interested readers this process is known as dehiscence and in recent years a Thai High School student named Itthipanyanan has had an asteroid named after them in honor of their research on this exact phenomenon. In my own Physics class we hypothesized that the process involved an internal rigid skeleton and a water soluble natural adhesive but our experiments were cursory, unpublished and no celestial objects bear my name.)

The brown pod in the plumbago likewise ignited my curiosity and I began my investigation by prodding it with my thumb. In an instant it pivoted eight legs around to grasp the tip of the offending digit and began to bite me due to the fact that my identification of this object had been woefully inaccurate and the “seed pod” was actually a large common Garden Orb Weaver spider.

While this species is venomous the venom does not pose a threat to humans and I may well have managed to shake it off before it could break the skin. Rather than any pain I remember a loud buzzing in my ears that I’ve also experienced the two or three times I’ve accidentally walked through the webs of the larger black and yellow orb weavers and needed to shake the arachnids from my head.

There are certain spider species that produce such sounds but in these situations I believe the sensation to be endogenous in origin – a panicked vibration from my own nervous system as some primal part of me recoils in horror from the alien invertebrate that has suddenly gained proximity to my skin. A kind of “don’t let it bite you in case it can kill you” alarm as it were.

Had the spider been radioactive and my life a 1960’s comic book I might have gained superhuman powers and inspired one of the most successful film franchises in history but this story is about deftly dodging exceptionality to manifest mediocrity time and time again. With no asteroids named for me and no spider based superpowers we may now advance to the centerpiece of this episode: my SAT exam.

It must have been my junior year of High School because that’s when SATs are traditionally taken, this allows me to place this story in 1996. I had no interest nor aspiration toward any university but my mother insisted I take the exam and it seemed reasonable enough to comply. Opportunities to place oneself in a formal hierarchy with one’s peers are relatively rare and, in the spirit of competition, at least somewhat entertaining.

The exam was being proctored at my school, San Diego High School, and the start time was several hours later than a regular school day allowing me the opportunity to casually drink coffee and get bitten by spiders. It would have been better for me if it had started earlier as the spider bite left me somewhat “out of sorts”. I’m only now realizing this but the event cast a large enough shadow on my life to be featured in the lyrics of the only song I recorded on four track that year with my friend Gabe Saucedo: Bitten Kitten

“Bitten Kitten, bitten by a spider

Bitten Kitten, fell in apple cider…”

I was always pretty good at taking tests, shaken up or not. In 1996 the SAT was comprised of two sections, verbal and math, each worth 800 points for a total of 1600. I don’t remember having any issues with the verbal section. In the math section there were one or two word problems I was having trouble figuring out so I moved on to better manage my time.

One of them was about ducks. Something about ducks coming and going or breeding and dying in a pond and how many ducks you have left. When I try to remember it now all I can think of is the old country joke about the missing pond because it froze around a bunch of duck’s asses and they flew off with it. That definitely wasn’t it.

This is the thing about the duck problem: it bothered me that I couldn’t figure it out so the numbers stuck in the back of my head and later on I finished another section early and with my leftover time I figured it out. I knew how many ducks there were. It would have been easy to turn the booklet back and write the answer in but they told us we weren’t allowed to do it.

At this point in my life I had just started exploring abandoned buildings but beyond that I was a boy-scout and a follower of rules. I didn’t drink or use any drugs, I wasn’t a vandal or a counterfeiter and I never told any lies. I was exactly as insufferable as I’m making myself sound: a little wise ass with a superiority complex.

You could say that my ducks were in a row but I was burdened with a senseless morality that kept me from pulling the trigger.

Now I’m an outlaw. I just got a tattoo of a skeleton pissing on his own grave. Back then I didn’t have any tattoos and I didn’t like loud rock music and I didn’t turn the book back and write how many ducks because the proctor said it would have been against the rules. After the test I asked my smart friends how many ducks they got and it was the same amount of ducks.

It’s ridiculous that I still remember this. One of the things I’m trying to do with this whole writing project is explain what it feels like to be me and remember so many pointless little details and be constantly drowning in information that I can’t put down or let go. It’s interesting that for a person who never forgets things I don’t really hold any grudges. I remember all of the things that people did that I wasn’t happy about at the time but I don’t hold anger for anybody or thirst for vengeance.

I think it would be unbearable if I did.

When the results from the test came back I had 1510: 800 for verbal and 710 for math. That would have been fine except for the fact that my two smart friends I asked about the ducks both had 1600s. While I still didn’t drink or do any drugs I was starting to go to shows and parties and I started to grow apart from my friends who were smart but not cool and spend more time with kids who were cool but not smart.

Their names were Anna Solomon and Matt Groesbeck and they probably had prestigious colleges picked out and have careers in their chosen fields now. I stayed over at Matt’s house once – he lived in Mission Hills and his parents kitchen had marble counters and a kitchen island and dangling light fixtures in brushed aluminum. We ate pizza with pesto on it. I’d never seen it before in my life because in 1996 only classy rich people ate that and my rich neighbors ordered six foot long sandwiches for their annual party and had no class.

Anyway I’m sure I could have just taken the test again and got a 1600 but the fact that my friends had a higher score bothered me enough to still remember it but not enough to do anything about it. Now that I think about it I think this probably affected the lyrics to Bitten Kitten too. The song continued:

“Angry Kitten, lost all of it’s legs

Silly Kitten, doesn’t go to High School

Can’t do Algebra, unemployable…”

I was making fun of my friend Gabe Saucedo who engineered the song and played bass and drums on it. I hadn’t picked up the bass yet so I played a glockenspiel style toy piano with vocals and harmonica. Gabe had briefly stopped going to his last year of High School at the time and was struggling to find a job. He might have even complained about a job he wanted requiring an algebra test.

While Gabe was the obvious target of this mockery, now that I have the widened perspective of maturity it seems obvious that I was also struggling with my own feelings of inadequacy from my imperfect test score. I had fallen in love with Trigonometry after learning that the Pythagorean Theorem was actually a simplified version of The Law of Cosines and it stung my adolescent pride to have come in second in my favored arena.

The lyrics were improvised on the spot and he flipped me off at that moment with the hand that was fretting his bass. The drums were recorded last with an odd bit of syncopation on the piano melody setting the time signature. Like most of my friendships at the time ours was built on cordial mutual hostility. It took me a long time to realize that not everyone enjoys that particular style of repartee.

I think I’m still trying to figure it out.

The song ended with two measures of meowing to the melody, a short harmonica solo and the final words “I’m stupid…”

Unfortunately all of the recordings of Bitten Kitten are lost unless somebody I sent it to, like Roger from Monotract, still has a tape somewhere. I got into SFSU at the least minute but didn’t stick with it and only finished my degree in my mid twenties. After the SAT was over I walked to the old downtown library to look for graphic novels before taking the bus home.

My usual stop was a couple blocks up Broadway by the Chee-Chee Club and I was about to learn what a difference a couple blocks can make. It happened gradually but it slowly dawned on me that everybody besides me in the bus shelter was either buying or selling crack. I don’t think anybody was smoking it but seeing it at all was still a shock to my innocent sixteen year old eyes.

On top of all of this for reasons I still don’t understand the homeless population of mid nineties San Diego often used snuff instead of smoking cigarettes. Along with the constant spitting out and handing off of plastic wrapped chunks of freebase there was the mucus heavy sniffling and snorting that accompany snuff-taking and the distinctive sharp scent of this spiced tobacco.

The primary dealer was an intimidating flat topped bull-dyke who took umbrage with my attention and suggested I direct it elsewhere:

“Why you looking over here? You need to turn your head the other way to look out for your bus coming before it gets twisted off your skinny neck!”

That all sounded reasonable enough to me and I silently complied. I was still a little bit out of sorts. It had only been a scant several hours since I’d been bitten by a spider…

I’m absolutely at the point where I need to be moving big blocks of this text into a document and then editing things down and polishing stuff up to a single book length manuscript. I’m not going to jinx myself by dropping names but it seems that there is a decent fit out there in the world of publishing and the next step is for me to do the thing. So of course I am here – writing another piece in a desperate bid to procrastinate.

A huge part of procrastinating is making deals and bargains. Like the old cartoon where the cat dies nine times to become a room full of diaphanous, numbered feline angels there are a committee of selves that all have to be appeased and satisfied. What you might call my best self wants me to get straight to work on the manuscript – I clearly don’t lack for creative energy and reading back over the old stuff to clean up grammar and fix details is enjoyable enough.

To get right into mundane boring shit the largest obstruction is a question of tools. I’ve started a few pieces in physical notebooks but the overwhelming majority of my output over the last year and a half has been typed directly into the WordPress app on my iPhone X. I haven’t gotten as comfortable with a portable writing device since my Boss Dr. Groove drum machine was still functioning and I wrote songs on it constantly while traveling and performing as Bleak End at Bernie’s.

The main thing that makes tools comfortable is their constraints and limits – just as the drum machine forced me to compose using a set of sounds, rolls and a single synth “bass” voice this app and phone must create boundaries somewhere that help lull me into enough of a sense of imposed structure to just get to writing. Unfortunately the big limitation I have figured out is that if I want to export my own text I can only seem to highlight a single paragraph at a time so I’m goi g to need to switch over to the laptop with a broken keyboard.

That’s the main thing I’m putting off. If my “Best Self” wants to just focus all of my energy into making a manuscript and getting it done as soon as possible my “Worst Self” only wants to play video games. Right now I’m playing through a series of visual novels published by Capcom called Gyakuten Saiban or The Great Ace Attorney. These are probably the first games in the genre to achieve real success in North America though there a couple of “cult” titles that have come close.

The bigger one is a cyberpunk sci-fi title on the PS1 called Policenauts where you confront a mystery as an amnesiac astronaut-turned-detective in a world of drab anime visuals. If there was a short list of “core curriculum” classic video games that explore the medium’s potential for storytelling this would definitely be on it along with Dark Souls and BioShock. Unlike those games Policenauts interface makes it hard to play by modern standards and I’d imagine the vast majority of people who download it for emulation give up an hour or two in.

The developer, Hideo Kojima, has definitely seen greater mainstream success with his Metal Gear and Death Stranding series but is also known for forging an eclectic path with the platforms and genres he chooses to develop for. My favorite games of his are the Boktai series for GBA and NDS – top down vampire hunting action RPGs that originally had a photocell hardwired into the gameboy cartridge so that players would have to go outside and charge in-game weapons with literal sunlight. He also did a few more visual novels/graphic adventures with the Snatcher series and a line of rhythm games called Beatmania that use simulated turntable and mixer controllers.

When I try to think of another developer with as broad and varied as a footprint the only thing that comes to mind is Creatures Inc – a company that worked on the Pokemon games, Earthbound series and created the iconic Gameboy Camera.

The other visual novel that achieved something of a “cult” following in the US is a sequel to the hugely popular SNES JRPG Chrono Trigger. Along with the dramatic shift in genre Radical Dreamers was never released outside of Japan and never had a physical release but was instead part of a satellite based subscription download series for the Super Famicom. A fan translation has been floating around for about as long as SNES emulation has existed but it also looks like it got an official release bundled with Chrono Cross in 2022.

Anyway I wanted to use the series of lawyer games to explain how my “Goldilocks Just Right Self” ended up brokering a deal between my “Best Self” and “Worst Self” to impose both structure and a deadline on my procrastination. I never had any kind of video game console growing up, instead we jumped from the Commodore 64 to a series of PCs, but I bought myself a GBA during the pandemic with the express purpose of modifying it for RCA outputs and using the Gameboy Camera to create ultra low resolution video feedback.

My friend Josh had gotten me into emulating the GBA library about a decade earlier but I wasn’t paying much attention to video games when it first released and had never seen one outside of a kid playing a Dragonball title on a public bus. Now that I had the hardware the cheapest way for me to grab a handful of games was to order a mixed lot of Japanese cartridges on eBay and hope that the gameplay was simple enough that language wouldn’t matter.

The Ace Attorney game was about as far from that as one might imagine but I picked up on the basics of what was happening from the Judge’s robes and gavel and the frequent splash of the English word “Objection!” across the screen. With no way to comprehend any of the other text my only option was to pick menu options at random until something seemed to advance the narrative. For whatever reason I stuck with it until I was finally able to throw the first trial and secure a Guilty verdict for my client – even this felt like a huge success.

I was planning on trying to finish the entire game through simple trial and error but unfortunately I lost the cartridge on my next trip to Redding. LaPorsha was still in the hospital in Chico from our big accident (the featured photo is our medivac) and I was taking rideshares into town about once a week to stock up on groceries and black tar heroin. On my second to last trip the dope was taking forever but I found somebody selling a Klonopin script so I popped the benzos like candy to keep the withdrawal at bay and once the heroin arrived and I took my first shot it sent me over the edge into a blackout.

I was still carrying around the thick plastic bag from my discharge at the hospital as a sort of purse and I either dropped it somewhere or somebody plucked it from next to my oblivious body. Unfortunately I hadn’t even gotten around to putting my jewelry back on so I lost all of my rings, including my handmade wedding ring, when this happened. For whatever reason the cartridge for Ace Attorney was also in this bag – thankfully my GBA and other games were at the house.

I wandered downtown Redding in something like a waking dream state for two or three days. The first night I was essentially kidnapped by a group of men in either a squat or sparsely furnished house and they tried to put me on the phone with someone from my bank to raise my Daily Cash withdrawal limits so they could clean out my account. I was just conscious enough to ask that withdrawals be locked instead and after what must have been some degree of argument I snapped back into focus wandering the streets alone.

My kidnapping came back to me in flashes so I decided to call the police. Unfortunately I had no idea of where I’d just come from or memories of the house’s location. I thought that I had recognized it but the door I was standing in front of belonged to a terrified old woman who was also on the phone with the police. All things considered I’m lucky that I wasn’t arrested myself or searched for contraband but I think the police were confused as to whether I’d been drugged or taken everything voluntarily.

That all happened just before dawn. The next time I snapped back into consciousness I was waking up from sleeping behind a dumpster. Somewhere along the way I had lost my shirt but found a black pea coat a couple of sizes too small for me. I wanted to get back home but I didn’t want anybody from the homeless camp I copped my drugs in knowing where I lived. I’d already had to deal with one of the anonymous Craigslist rides being a tweaker.

He helped me cop dope and his mom sold me some Vicodin but he also seemed to be stripping parts and the stereo off a dead truck on our property and was just generally unreliable. The last time I caught a ride from him we ended up hanging around a casino for hours while tar was “on the way” and it gave me flashbacks to other situations where tweakers pretended they’d help me find heroin just to keep me around for unrelated schemes or gas money or whatever it was.

From there we were parked on the side of a suburban white trash street pretty similar to the ones I grew up on. The overarching situation was like one of those word problems where a farmer has a fox, goose and corn that he needs to bring across a river in a tiny boat and certain things can’t be together. First I was waiting in the truck because the “dealer” wouldn’t sell if anyone he didn’t know was inside the house.

Suddenly some junkie chick showed up to the truck because tweaker bro’s girlfriend had just pulled up and I guess they couldn’t be seen in the same house together. She gave me evasive answers when I asked about being able to actually buy dope but she was getting sick too and squeezed the alcohol out of disposable wipes to strip the residue from her smoking straws for us to smoke off of foil. Basically nothing but still more than nothing.

When I was a strict vegan me and my friends would use the term “pork breath” to refer to any of the animal based products that pop up toward the bottom of ingredient lists rendering otherwise edible foods non vegan. From an essentialist perspective there aren’t really animal products in the bread or whatever but that tiny drop of a whey or egg derivative means it’s tainted. When I was fully strung out there was a similar but opposite sense of getting some minuscule level of relief from things that had merely touched heroin or been in the same room as it.

Tweaker guy came back to his truck and said that he wasn’t able to buy heroin because his girlfriend showed up. The junkie chick disappeared – it was likely all bullshit and he was probably at that house for meth. I can even see him telling the junkie girl that I might be able to find some heroin as a pretext to get her to come out to the truck.

I’m used to guys constantly lying to their girlfriends about what drugs they took and who they’d slept with. It’s basically male poverty culture and a large segment of my adult friends fit the archetype. I must have somehow never got the memo because I couldn’t see a point in lying about any of those things. Not that my way was necessarily any better – girls didn’t usually seem that happy to hear about how loaded I’d gotten or who I fucked in the brief windows where we weren’t in the same city as each other.

Anyway Tweaker Guy and his girlfriend took the lying cheater and indefatigable investigator roles to the next level. He turned it into this whole kind of Dukes of Hazzard game where he’d speed away from her by hopping over curbs but she’d eventually turn back up because she was tracking his phone. There was some level of mutual playfulness in it but I’m sure he also told her that he’d stopped using meth and wasn’t fucking anybody else and I’m sure it drove her crazy.

They’re probably still together – the expended energy of his constant lies and gaslighting combined with her constantly tracking his every movement must have made for a hell of a sunk costs fallacy.

Anyway even for a procrastination piece I’m getting desperately sidetracked. Over my two days in Redding I would take the bus over to my bank to be able to withdraw the maximum one hundred dollars daily with no Debit Card or ID. I bought my phone back from this kid with bright red hair who was almost certainly connected to the kidnappers and was crushing up and snorting what were almost certainly my Klonopin like every noob who doesn’t realize that benzos aren’t water soluble and therefore don’t work in mucus membranes.

I didn’t feel like fighting him over that shit. I’m sure he died the first year fentanyl took over. I know the type. I ended up under this bridge where a bunch of people lived in the park then took buses to try to buy a rechargeable power bank for my phone. On top of everything else some random dude had gotten me with a counterfeit hundred on my last transaction. I was completely sleep deprived and not thinking straight and needed to get the hell out of town.

Thankfully this kid I met working in a little electronics repair shop offered to drive me home as he was getting off of work. I still see him from time to time when I need to fix a busted screen or something. He used to be a model because his dad is Thai but him and his sister came out tall with a super unique look. Now he seems to be satisfied working for an older mentor type at the repair shop.

Jesus – details, details, details…. I’m sure at least half of them are completely uninteresting but I need to get every one out like some kind of exorcism. My GBA didn’t have a backlit screen so I looked into modding it but learned that just buying a Nintendo DS with a GBA slot would be easier. It came with a flash cart full of games and I bought LaPorscha a 3DS so we could try playing some games together.

That turned into a pair of 3DS’s and we got really into Monster Hunter together. Now we have a pair of Switch Lites but I feel like we got duped because 99% of games don’t support local wireless multiplayer and are only built around single screen play. We could get a wireless controller and either use a phone tripod or stare over each other’s shoulders but all those solutions feel inelegant and stupid.

Right now we’re doing It Takes Two. I don’t think it quite deserves the Game of the Year it got in 2021 but it is a lot of fun and the puzzles have been the perfect difficulty level for us to tackle as a team. When I first found a Super Nintendo I got a flash cart with Goof Troop and really wanted to play through together but LaPorsha thought it was boring and wouldn’t play.

The Goof Troop thing still stings but It Takes Two does feel like a bit of a consolation prize. We play sex swapped for the novel identities – I’ve never been a British ex-pat mom in wide leg denim shorts before and LaPorsha has never been a White dad casually sliding into Middle Aged chubbiness. Neither of us had been immortal dolls.

I promise that I’m getting to the bargain and other things but I just wanted to throw out that if another Switch Lite couple picks it you can pay for one full copy and the second player only needs the free demo to play the whole thing together. You can even play without internet if you happen to be in bed or on a couch.

Ok so the first game I finished on my NDS was a clever little touchscreen puzzle story with great pixel graphics called Ghost Trick from the same developer as the Ace Attorney games. You basically use your ghost to trigger small motions in chains of otherwise inanimate objects to create Rube Goldberg reactions most often intended to save human lives. I also got into his Professor Layton small puzzle visual adventures but have only just started seriously tackling Phoenix Wright’s case backlog.

I think I started with an official translation of the NDS version of that GBA one I’d started with and blasted through it rather quickly. The basic format is that you press witnesses for more details and present evidence if it contradicts their testimony. After a few twist and turns you always end up with an innocent defendant and a Scoobey Doo style murderer, in both motives and mannerisms , who subtly transforms from one of the witnesses that had been there the whole thing.

Through the dozen or so entries it stays pretty close to this basic formula while occasionally tossing in lie detector or emotional analysis mini games. It was working out perfectly for procrastinating and I was finishing up a title released specifically for the NDS when a couple of things fell into place. First, a Facebook comment from Benji about the value of arranging “hopeful scenester” stories next to “strung out in a parking lot” stories made me feel that I needed at least one more homeless hard drug piece to allow the manuscript to perfectly balance on a single point of contact like those Star Wars toys they gave away at Taco Bell.

The other thing was that I started playing Dual Destinies, the first Ace Attorney for 3DS, and the “Boy Scout ethos” and moral hyper objectivism that characterize not just this series but the majority of games marketed to children in Japan on Nintendo hardware was starting to bum me up. I was already thinking about various incidents in my former street life and now I found myself pining for the “fast and loose” flavors of “outlaw ethics”.

This cracked the case on my procrastination and my three separate selves sat down at the bargaining table to work out this beauty of a compromise: I have to put down the video game, that was boring me anyway, and direct my focus to writing a piece on the hard drug using homeless camp behind the Emeryville Home Depot and my own place in that ecosystem. This will be the last piece I am allowed to write in the spirit of procrastination and I must afterward get right to work on the manuscript.

However a quick glance at the dashboard of this bloated exposition showed me that I’m fast approaching the upper word limit regarding g length I like to impose on these pieces. While this wasn’t my plan at the outset I think it makes the most sense to turn this into a two parter and leave Emeryville for next time. Instead I’ll end this half by talking about what happened the final time I attempted to return to Redding to score heroin.

We first got plugged into the little scene down there through the usual method of attempting and failing to dose at a local Methadone Clinic then talking to patients until somebody could help us out. It was never particularly reliable, half the time we would just drive on to San Francisco because the block was dry, and of course we knew that we had to have been getting taxed on some level.

We always showed up with enough cash in hand for at least a gram and always drove to do that gram somewhere else instead of clearly parking and living right in the same neighborhood. What I’m trying to say is that we were clearly neither local nor homeless and it would have been foolish to expect local or homeless prices. I’d never been naive enough to think that I could pick up anything without at least getting the person who served me well but my kidnapping and short time on the block were putting things into brighter focus.

The big thing I learned was that my main plug who I’d been copping balls through was up charging me enough to grab an additional gram and a half for herself. This was right about where I would have expected the “price of doing business” to sit were it not for the fact that she made a big production of asking me for a hefty break off every time on the insistence we were shopping at cost and she needed a kick-down to get well. While either of these arrangements are a base necessity doing both at once is excessive and I wasn’t feeling particularly “done right by” considering the length and volume of business I’d been bringing her and what I perceived as our level of friendship.

I should have just given her the break-off that last time, her various dishonesties notwithstanding, as that had been our arrangement and just shopped for a better arrangement my next time around. The combination of recent market data and the sudden Klonopin blackout had me stumbling off with vague promises to “get it to her later”. She had been getting used to getting what she’d been getting and wouldn’t have been feeling too “done right by” either.

She was generally well liked and had decent pull out there and I can see the night going quite differently if I had used my final seconds of clarity to tell my ride that I was ready to head back up the mountain. Unfortunately benzodiazepine blackout stories aren’t especially known as sequences of wise and prescient decisions and considering several worst case scenarios I feel like I pulled a decent straw.

I sometimes wonder if murder would have been on the table for my kidnappers if it wasn’t common knowledge that I was married and the coveted assets would have gone directly to my wife. I might as well wonder if I’d recognize the same people in a subsequent conversation – with the exception of the almost certainly dead Manic Panic dude I doubt I’d have any idea. My liquid savings weren’t anything astronomical but any multiple of thousands looks like a lot to short sighted homeless hard drug addicts.

The thing that really shifted out there was that word of my spending power had spread and instead of anybody trying to form a long term mutually beneficial relationship everybody had this attitude that I owed them something. I don’t remember meeting the bike chain kid before this afternoon but him and the chip on his shoulder grew in focus over the course of the day.

As usual shit was dry around the Post Office but I met this chill kid with long blonde hair who said a guy he knew might be able to come in about four hours and in the meantime he’d sell me a dub to get well at market price with the understanding that I’d break him off a comparable piece once I got my hands on weight.

An hour or so later I ran into one of my earliest Redding connects and he could take me by the Thunderbird Motel to get my ball. We were killing time before the drop was ready grabbing cups of water from the El Pollo Loco across the street when I ran back into the kid with a length of chain for locking a bicycle draped over his shoulder like a sash. I didn’t even know if he was especially tight with the blonde guy who’d helped me earlier but I had met them together so I asked if the other dude had a phone so I could let him know that something else had worked out but if he was still around I’d get him back.

From this moment the kid turned into a ball of rage and started ranting nonstop about how I’d “violated” and “broken the code of the streets” by buying drugs when they became available instead of holding out for a theoretical “friend” of a stranger who just as easily could have never showed up or not what had what I needed when he did. That’s the world of street copping heroin: you wait around and chase one lead after another until something works out so you can finally grab your drugs and go home.

Chain kid wasn’t really anybody – he didn’t have connects or know much of anything about how shit was supposed to work. He was just young and broke and homeless and possibly dope sick and either spun or meth or pissed about not being spun enough and today he decided that all of this was my fault because I had some money and came to the streets to chase dope once a week instead of living on them and chasing it several times a day.

I had every intention of getting the blonde kid back because he’d done me a solid and I never knew when I might run back into him but the chain kid insisted on walking with us and his energy was clearly building up to something ugly. The walk took us straight through a transit center and all the buses were free because of COVID and the one that I needed to get to the grocery stores across town was just sitting there ready to pull out.

Honestly I should have just jumped on it right then and told chain boy to go fuck himself but the blond kid was just across the street by the Post Office. It wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world – we’d exchanged a twenty dollar bill for the same size chunk everybody did for a dub and as it got toward sundown somebody would be walking through selling.

What I did do was walk over to the side of the Post Office and give him his dub while chain boy was stomping behind me psyching himself up for whatever his move was gonna be. I was onto the train tracks and just across the street from the buses when he came running up screaming that I had to break him off too. It was probably a stupid move to even try to break a point off because I had to pull out the ball and as soon as he saw it he started swinging his chain and screaming that he was taking all of it.

I quickly closed my fist around the dope and started blocking his chain with my wrists but he got a couple small cuts across my nose before I was able to grab the chain and throw it over the fence we were standing next to so he couldn’t use it anymore. After that he started trying to kick me but, this might have been partially due to adrenaline from getting hit in the face with a chain, it only felt like the fake choreographed fighting we’d done in High School Drama Class for Three Musketeers.

I’ve never really been a fighter. I’m sure I could have handled him if it had been a life or death situation but it wasn’t life or death – it was get-the-hell-out-of-here-before-the-cops-come-or-lose-your-dope. After everything I’d gone through, and was still going through, to get it my sharpest instincts were honed toward doing everything in my power to hold onto that chunk of drugs.

With his chain over the fence nothing this kid could do was going to cause actual damage but we were in a high cop traffic area and there was zero chance I’d get through a cop interaction without opening my palm. I needed to figure out the best moment to run and where exactly I would run to. A couple more lanky junky dudes were walking down the street and one of them tilted his head in my direction:

“Hey, we’ll help get him off you if you break us off from that dope…”

In the corner of my eye the bus I’d almost gotten onto a few minutes earlier was finally pulling out. I sprinted over to the back door and breathlessly thanked the driver for not shutting it in my face. The same three dudes ran after me but in a half hearted fashion that showed they knew they couldn’t do shit to me on the bus or at whatever populous stop I chose to get off at.

That camp was completely burnt for me – it had been stupid to come back at all after everything that happened with the kidnapping and how I left things with my usual lady. The dude who’d helped me cop the ball was just standing there as everything went down. He’d already gotten his break off at El Pollo Loco and I don’t know if I would have intervened if someone came at him with a chain either.

It’s hard to say how you’ll react in any hypothetical situation until it’s already happening and you don’t have time to decide.

When I got to FOOD-4-LESS I cooked a big yellowish shot in the bathroom. The plunging quality of BTH had done more damage over the last couple of years than the 20 of off-and-on before them and it had been at least a year since I’d last bothered trying a vein. I stabbed the insulin needle directly into the only area with visible muscle on my body – the edges of my hips.

LaPorsha was about to be getting out of the hospital anyway and deep down I knew if I let her slip back into it our combined forces would have us right back on a daily. It was time to hang it up and get on Suboxone. The next time I decided to try the streets, one of my recent birthdays, the only thing around was white fentanyl powder and I face planted and needed Narcan from the second foil puff.

Haven’t felt much urge to go searching for it since.

Back in 2000 Dan Bigg at Chicago Recovery Alliance said that I was the first confirmed street Narcan overdose reversal caught live on camera. I assume that’s probably true and I long ago lost count of how many there were since but at least a couple were last second self-administered. The entire process became something I got way too numb to and I took it for granted that there would always be enough doses and someone to administer them on time.

I started to feel indestructible.

Looking back though if I hadn’t stopped in 2020 and kept using for the period where actual poppy derived tar was slowly phased out and replaced with a mix of fentanyl analogues and whatever they used to make it look dark and chunky – I wouldn’t have survived that. In a roundabout way Chain Kid could have saved my life.

He’s almost certainly dead.

A rough attempt at a User Friendly Table of Contents

I’m interested in the mechanisms by which English words or phrases become adapted into the phraseology of native Japanese speakers. For things like baseball as “beisuboru” or Merry Christmas as “Merii Kurusamusu” the origins are fairly obvious – the concepts referred to didn’t exist in Japan until they were brought with Western Influence in the 19th and 20th centuries so it made sense to use the foreign word for the foreign thing. We do this in English too of course with words like sushi, origami and karaoke.

Most recently the one I’ve been curious about is the exclamation “Oh my God!” pronounced more or less the same way except that the final “d” sound is often omitted. There is no direct translation as invoking a deity to express shock isn’t really a thing in Shinto or Buddhism. I may have just answered my own question but when I heard characters shouting the phrase in anime like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Tokyo Revengers I wondered if there had been a specific English language television show or movie behind the utterance’s recent surge in popularity.

I’d read about the incident that kick started the adoption of the repeated word in the title but for those who haven’t I’ll give a brief summary. In postwar Japan the popular fashion for juvenile hoodlums was based on preppy American Ivy League styles. While this might read like one of the bizarrely costumed gangs in A Clockwork Orange there are two things to keep in mind to help it make more sense.

First off in the years immediately following the Japanese Surrender Western clothing had not yet become the official uniform of the white collar “salaryman” and the early adopters were seen as a sign of societal decay. Secondly the styles aren’t incredibly different from the later “mod” movement in England. In fact one of the names followers of the subculture gave themselves was “mobo” – a shortening of “modern boys”.

This brings us to the “Oh Mistake!” incident of 1950. As being on the cutting edge of fashion often is dressing like a “mobo” was incredibly expensive. Western garb would have been impossible to find second hand and had to be made by custom tailors. VAN Jacket, the first “Ivy League” style Japanese clothing brand, didn’t launch until a year later in 1951. Even then the store was so far outside the buying power of the average working class young man that its stickers were often stuck to empty rice bags and carried around to create the illusion of being able to afford shopping there.

This makes it easy to imagine the motivation of Hiroyuki Namigawa, a “mobo” who worked as a parking attendant at Nihon University, when he robbed a coworker at knife point and made off with the vehicle and nearly 2 million yen. He hid out afterwards in his girlfriend’s apartment but it only took the police two days to track him down. Presumably he was trying to pass for a nisei, a foreign born Japanese person who doesn’t know the language, when he shouted out the two words that would take the nation by storm:

“Oh mistake!”

As always this is all background for the personal anecdote I’m going to start getting into now. LaPorsha and I had our wedding on July 5, 2014 on the outskirts of Tijuana and decided to travel to San Luis Obispo’s Madonna Inn for the honeymoon. Madonna Inn is famous for brightly colored themed rooms like the image in this piece’s header and neither of us had ever been before.

This presented something of an obstacle as we wouldn’t buy our first vehicle together, a diesel Mercedes, until after working the trim season toward the end of that same year. Presumably there is a bus or train that connects San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles but that isn’t what we went with. I forget how we made the trip from Tijuana to San Francisco but from there we took a bus to a friend of LaPorsha’s in Half Moon Bay with the intention of completing the trip by hitchhiking.

In my handful of years of hitchhiking experience I had learned that finding rides was much easier with a female companion. On every one of these journeys though the women I travelled with were white or white passing and I was still learning the kaleidoscope of ways that race always makes a difference. It wasn’t as hard as trying to hitch by myself but things were extremely slow going.

The first ride might not even have picked us up until the second day but eventually a pair of friendly hippies in a camper van got us down to Monterey. Early the following morning a talkative mom brought us into Big Sur. We were in her car for less than ten minutes but she abruptly opened up about her struggles with stealing her young son’s prescribed Adderall. There’s a certain kind of woman that always seems to view LaPorsha as a confessor and immediately start unburdening themselves in her presence.

From there we somehow ended up at the exit just outside a popular spiritual retreat called Esalen Institute. I think we might have gotten a ride from Big Sur from somebody who worked there as a cook. They probably thought we would have an easier time finding a ride South from a departing student but we were at that exit for a really long time. As much as I’m struggling to remember exact details from all of these rides I feel like I can vividly recall exactly how the trees, cliffs and ocean looked from the piece of shoulder we had to wait at.

It might have even been a departing cook who gave us the next ride. The only part I feel confident about was that this ride took us all the way through to Cambria. I know a girl named Mika who grew up in this town and the name always reminds of the Pre-Cambrian era of geologic history, once thought to predate the beginnings of even the simplest life forms, but I’d never been to the place myself. Our ride into town is also the only time I remember getting a glimpse of Hearst Castle.

We were pretty hungry by this point and went into a place called J.J.’s Pizza. Cambria was in the throes of a water crisis – the town’s wells and aquifers had run dry and it isn’t anywhere near any rivers or other sources of fresh water. It looks like they were able to have the Army Corps of Engineers construct a desalination plant later in the same year we were there but this seems to have caused environmental issues and may no longer be in use.

There were signs in the pizza restaurant explaining that water would only be brought to customers that specifically ordered it and everyone had to be conscientious about needlessly wasting it. The only other patrons inside the establishment were a family of Japanese tourists in colorful outdoor gear. They were drinking fountain cokes and there was a situation because the husband had accidentally drank from his wife’s straw and now she wanted an entirely new soda.

I’m not sure if they didn’t understand the signs about the water crisis or didn’t realize that soda fountains start with local fresh water before adding carbonation and syrup. I guess it all comes down to a cultural difference I still don’t entirely grasp the depth of, judging by their two children they had clearly shared more than a straw, but apparently his blunder had crossed a boundary of cleanliness which rendered the cup of soda entirely undrinkable.

The serving person was equally incredulous. They offered a fresh straw but couldn’t seem to wrap their head around the situation requiring an entirely different soda either. By way of explanation the husband blurted out the popular English catch phrase while his wife quietly admonished him in their native tongue:

“Mistake! Mistake!”

Eventually the server either replaced the soda or brought it into the back and poured it into a fresh cup without a straw to create the illusion of replacement. I hadn’t yet read about the famous “Oh mistake!” incident in 2014 but now that I have I find the contrast striking. In just over sixty years the exclamation has evolved from something yelled out by a knife wielding hoodlum to an apology from someone in a marriage so sexless even putting his mouth on something making indirect contact with his own spouse’s beverage is intolerable.

Of course I could be wrong in seeing a contrast at all and not even “Japanese Scarface” would knowingly share a soda, let alone cocaine, straw. Maybe it’s not a sign of a sexless union at all and observing strict taboos around food and beverage serve to maintain a smoldering level of erotic tension. I used to message my one Japanese friend, the artist Tetsunori Tawaraya, with these kind of questions but for now I’m comfortable living with a bit of mystery.

The last time I’d reached out I wanted to know how the artist RammEllZee was referred to in Japan with what seemed like unpronounceable phonemes in his name but the answer, Ramery, wasn’t particularly satisfying. Maybe someone else from Japan will reach out to tell me that nobody in the entire island nation would drink from a cup after another mouth has touched the straw and explain the exact moment that “Oh my God!” became part of the common lexicon. Maybe I’ll just continue to wonder about both of these things.

I’m comfortable with either one of those outcomes.

By the time we’d finished eating whatever it was we’d ordered it was already getting close to dark so we decided to spend the night in Cambria instead of attempting to continue hitch hiking. We had a decent amount of luggage with us, LaPorsha never went anywhere without a huge rolling suitcase back then, and I remember a long walk across town to an overbooked youth hostel followed by an equally fruitless trudge out to the beach. Eventually it became clear that we’d have to rough it.

What we weren’t traveling with was a lot of bedding – we didn’t have a tent and had only brought a single blanket. To get us off the streets I found a stairwell leading to a rear antique shop but it was miserably cold. Ironically we were sleeping next to one of those standing gas heaters popular with outdoor dining in San Diego or Los Angeles but I had no idea what kind of fuel it used or how one might turn it on.

I borrowed a tarp that was draped over chairs at a cafe around the corner and this allowed us to accumulate enough shared body heat to sleep for a few hours. At the crack of dawn we trekked back to the highway and continued our trip down to San Luis Obispo. We might have got there on the following day or it could have taken us two of them. I think this ride was with a young woman who lived in a generic housing development and showed us pictures of little sculptures she made of Tim Burton characters on her phone.

The spot we were dropped off at was nowhere near The Madonna Inn so we had to figure out a couple of regional transit buses. Due to our method of travel it had been impossible to get prior reservations – a trip that I had expected to take one or two days was easily three times as long. It was a long walk from the entrance of the hotel complex to an actual reception desk and once we got there we discovered that there were no vacancies whatsoever and every room was usually booked out at least two weeks ahead of time.

I’ve still never stayed there or even set foot into the more picturesque sections.

At this point we were pretty exhausted and ready to throw in the towel. I wrote earlier that I thought there might be either a bus or train connecting San Luis Obispo with Los Angeles but now I remember there definitely was because whatever it was we found it and took it. Instead of The Madonna Inn we got a room in a random hotel on the west side of downtown Los Angeles near Figueroa for just over a hundred dollars.

It was kind of fancy, there were fresh flowers and trays of chocolate chip cookies, but it was also kind of trashy. I walked over to Spring Street and found us some morphine pills – we weren’t at a point where we were using opiates every day but considering we lived in Tijuana it was something we were getting into the habit of. At some point I found a huge cockroach in our room and I caught it in a bag and brought it down to reception.

They weren’t really implying that I had brought it in myself but they weren’t offering any kind of refund either. It was a hotel in downtown Los Angeles for just over one hundred dollars and we were the kind of people who walked to Spring Street for pills and lived in Tijuana. What I’m getting at is that we fit the profile of their target clientele and they weren’t particularly concerned with us leaving a bad review. I doubt we even bothered with it.

The next morning we went downstairs for what’s commonly called a “continental breakfast” – presumably to reassure people it won’t be English food. There were fresh trays of the cookies and waffle irons set up with pre-measured cups of batter and the “fresh squeezed” juice machines that still seem to be there in far cheaper, trashier hotels. I’m not talking about any kind of machine where you see the actual fruit – I mean the plastic tap machines that I imagine are loaded with large space bags of juice from concentrate.

This marked the end of our “honeymoon” and we returned to our apartment in Tijuana. Our actual wedding night had been pretty miserable because Barkev, who was acting as officiant, was so focused on getting laid that he lost our tent and instead of camping on the beach with everybody we caught a ride with him and the girl back to town. She was incredibly drunk and we got pulled over and had to bribe police – two or three times.

Our “honeymoon” wasn’t much better but at least it seems to make for a better story. In a few more months we’d go trimming and buy our car but we’d already had so many negative experiences with Mexican authorities that we never even drove it over the border. I’ve written about police harassment being the reason we decided to leave but in retrospect it could have just been the car.

Every time we went “home” it either hadn’t helped with the journey at all or was left in a parking lot on the U.S. side where we’d have to pay ten dollars a day. Either option felt stupid – long journeys on buses and trolleys didn’t feel like freedom but neither did being on an expensive timer to have a car in walking distance the next time we walked across.

Different people might have driven across and dealt with living in Tijuana with an American car – we definitely saw license plates while walking around that showed that wouldn’t have been impossible. That wasn’t us. We left.

A rough attempt at a User Friendly Table of Contents

Me and LaPorsha were an unhoused couple for most of our relationship. We got together at a spot in Echo Park called 1830 where I’d noticed that the skylight in the rear stairwell looked like there would be just enough room to climb inside it and sleep so I was asking if I could start renting it. I got turned down but the visit where I showed up to ask led to each of us being informed of our mutual attraction and we’ve been together since.

That’s a convoluted story – maybe some day I’ll actually tell it.

Our first few nights together were spent in a sequence of apartments and houses she was able to crash at but never the same place twice. I’d put an ad up looking for a room on Craigslist and got contacted by a tiny passive aggressive fedora wearing adolescent Frenchman. He was at a music academy in Hollywood when he called and I was just down the block trying to convince tourists to take pictures next to me dressed as Wolverine from the X-Men for money.

That part was a coincidence – I hadn’t written anything about Hollywood or my “job” in the ad.

He lived in a giant loft right in the middle of downtown that was basically a slab of cement and bathroom. It must have been insanely expensive but his parents were paying for it and I think he only wanted a hundred dollars for however long I was there. Mostly it seemed like he was dealing with culture shock and loneliness.

He let me have LaPorsha stay over once but afterward it could only happen on the odd night where he wouldn’t be coming home. It’s not like we had super loud sex or anything happened but the whole place was basically a single room and our combined energy can be a lot for people. Mostly it seemed like this kid wanted me to himself.

I went on a trip to Mexico and when I got back we briefly stayed in Santa Monica and then Koreatown. One was a roommate situation and the other was a sublet but neither lasted for much time. Soon we were back to crashing with whoever we could and wearing out our welcome with both of our families. There were some other stints in weed trimming land, Tijuana and New Orleans I don’t need to get into here but eventually LaPorsha decided we should buy a van.

I was trying to find pictures of this thing but I’m terrible at taking photographs. LaPorsha might reactivate her Facebook to grab one for me but if that doesn’t work the best I’ve got is a closeup of a mantis nymph on the window from the parking lot of my tutoring job on Slauson. Either way I’ll get the nymph in somewhere.

We lived in the van and got on methadone and eventually I quit my job because the van kept breaking down and making me call out last minute. Finally it broke down for good leaving Jesse Owens Park and we pulled into a spot off La Brea near our clinic that it only moved from when we sold it. We were fortunate that it coasted to a stop in front of a possibly squatted house with an overgrown yard.

A tall and thin scarecrow-like man lived inside who we called “High Yellow” due to his complexion. We never called him that to his face and he never bothered to offer a name. When I did cross paths with him he talked relentlessly but sometimes it was interesting stuff about the history of the neighborhood, the area around Washington and La Brea, which used to be known as the “Black Hollywood”.

It’s unfortunate that I wasn’t writing yet at this time because a lot of this, like the fact that the Post Office had been a popular theater and night club, was pretty interesting and I don’t know if he’s still alive or anyone else remembers. A lot of other times it was endless “listen young blood” type lectures and even though I was a junkie in a van I didn’t particularly feel like taking life advice from a friendless dried out vagrant living in a haunted house.

The important thing was that he never complained or gave us a hard time about where we were broken down and living. For the most part the neighborhood silently tolerated us and we were conscientious about staying inside the van and out of sight. At one point a Jamaican man living in the apartments directly across from us parked so close to our rear bumper that we were effectively trapped inside.

We laid our sleeping things out in the far back and all of our possessions were piled directly behind that blocking access to either the sliding side door or the driver and passenger seats. I was able to open the doors a couple of inches but he had a fancy sports car and I didn’t want to risk scratching it so we had to wait in bed until he moved his car. I brought it up the next time I ran into him on the street and he launched into an angry diatribe:

“I pay rent here! You want to tell me where I can park my car? What about when you piss in the alley and my window right there! When the sun shine you smell all of that!”

I apologized and told him I hadn’t noticed the window and would walk deeper into the alley to avoid windows in the future. There were no public bathrooms around and, with the exception of morning visits to the methadone clinic, no business in walking distance allowed the homeless to use one. As long as I’m on the subject we all shit in plastic bags and threw it in city trash cans – far from ideal but a lot better than just squatting in the alley and leaving it.

Anyway things were in an ok place with neighbors except for a few occasions where LaPorsha and I had long arguments walking down the closest alley. BJ, who you’ll be meeting soon, emerged from his tent to tell us we had to keep quiet to avoid causing flak with the families living across the fence. This would soon become especially ironic.

The real breaking point came when an older Black man on the block realized he could peek though our back doors to see LaPorsha changing. This led to his wife, who could only be described as “saditty”, starting to complain to LaPorsha while placing no blame on her husband whatsoever. The fact he was going out of his way to spy was irrelevant, in her eyes LaPorsha was “loose” and “immodest”. Things almost escalated to a physical confrontation involving the woman and her adult daughter. Thankfully things never reached outright blows but a clear change was in the air.

The block we’d broken down on had an obvious street sweeping sign but before Christmas we were always left alone as if it didn’t apply to us. Now tickets and notices were coming up every week – clearly the anonymous complaint line work of this particular neighbor lady. We had to get rid of the van soon or it would just be towed. The engine was shot but I found someone who wanted the body.

We loved older Diesel Mercedes Benzes and found a black four cylinder 240 in a Mexican owned shop on La Brea. We moved all our belongings from the van to the trunk, except an amazing collection of vintage cloisonné pins we’d forgotten, but other problems manifested almost instantly. On our first long distance drive the engine lost power, due to clogged diesel fuel filters, and the owner of the shop had to come save us.

It wasn’t much later, on a trip to Planet Fitness, that the alternator gave up. I bought a new one and the guys swapped it out but made clear this would be the last help they’d give us despite all the issues manifesting mere days after the sale. At one point they offered to just swap it out for a generic van but LaPorsha wasn’t interested. The Mercedes was fit with a handful of South-of-the-Border quick fixes.

The main one was the vacuum pump. I’ve never had a diesel Mercedes that doesn’t struggle with the part sooner or later. It plays the odd combined role of cutting off airflow to stop the engine and pneumatically powering all the door locks through the same movement of air. The quick fix was a scrap of antenna under the ignition that could be pushed in to kill the otherwise runaway motor. It also acted as an anti-theft device as the car couldn’t start unless it was pulled outward and no stranger would possibly figure that out.

Besides the overall lower engine power of just four cylinders the alternator was the main issue until we left town. The much larger issue was that it was only a two-door and we could never sleep inside of it. We went to Target and bought the thirty dollar tent ubiquitous in every homeless camp.

The website says seventy dollars now but at the early stages of the homeless epidemic it was $29.99. We thought about secrecy and solitude but a friend from the clinic named BJ, or “Black Jesus”, offered the security of close quarters in the alley we’d been parked by and we accepted. BJ had dark skin, long dreadlocks and dressed in the style of ripped and patched skinny jeans popular with “hood” guys that year. Before this we had tried various parks and it was always nerve wracking packing up before the day use crowd showed up.

The time was drifting toward the New Year and the weather was near constant rain. Thankfully I’d learned a valuable trick trimming near Mad River a year or two before. When the big storm was dominating forecasts the intense Gemini weed farmer suggested laboriously digging a trench around our tent to divert water but his wife had the easier suggestion of creating a raised platform from discarded wooden loading pallets. Most of the moisture wicks in along the seams but without ground contact our bedding stayed dry. The farmer was visibly irritated his wife’s idea had been the better one.

The second step was keeping rain off from above and as official rain flies are near useless I found two discarded Christmas Trees to run a length of twine between. This allowed me to drape over a piece of 5 mil painter’s plastic that, with the help of heavy rocks weighing it down, never touched the tent itself. No contact meant no transfer of moisture and we both stayed dry and kept our IKEA memory foam pad clean.

BJ and Marie were the original residents of the alley and despite my advice their situation was a lot less cozy. Their tent was an awkward chimera of a broken one and various mismatched poles with no fly to speak of. More importantly they slept on a giant beanbag cushion that rested directly on the obviously not waterproof tent floor. Supposedly it was so thick that the water only ever rose up to and saturated a foot or so below the part they lay on but I can only imagine the smell.

During the most intense rainstorms BJ would ask me to help him reassemble the structure but it was a losing battle as none of it truly fit together and tightening one end invariably caused another to come undone. Eventually I had to walk away despite BJ’s entreaties but he did manage to get it semi-stable by tying bits to the window bars of a shuttered business. We both appreciated the security of a second set of campers for when we had to walk to the clinic and other destinations and based on a small padlock on our zipper they never invaded our space.

The saddest part was that they had zero need to be in that situation at all. Marie had a home health aide job and had received a section 8 voucher but needed to find an apartment. During our own house hunting we found a nice nearby apartment ready to rent to anybody who had one. We still lived in the van and only knew BJ at this point, Marie was always working, so we gave him all the important details.

Every time we reminded BJ of the home essentially waiting for them he said it had slipped his mind and eventually Marie’s voucher expired without him even making a phone call or accepting our offer to take him in person. Of course Marie could have looked herself but she worked 40 hours a week and BJ seemed more interested in staying close to the drug markets than getting them off the streets. He brought in no money whatsoever through his hustling and would demand her paychecks for “drug debts” before she could so much as buy a new tent.

We were all on the methadone program but BJ was obsessed with buying fentanyl as the only thing that could break through. Marie clearly brought in more money than us but there was a feeling that we were “rich” and “holding out” because we’d purchased the car. One night we all went to do laundry together and BJ and Marie were especially high and insisted on giving us a bag of fentanyl so we could “feel as good as they did”.

Me and LaPorsha both got incredibly sick and spent the night projectile vomiting – mine was sour gummy flavored. In retrospect we were lucky not to have overdosed as we split the bag of powder they gave us without really questioning anything. The laundry thing took forever and showed us that, while we liked BJ and Marie as people, it was a nightmare getting stuck in the car for errands with them.

Essentially any attempt at reciprocity with them was tainted. We both liked benzodiazepines with our methadone but when BJ asked and I had just picked up a lot I’d sell him a few at cost but when things were the other way around he’d price gouge me or try to sell me random powder as “crushed xans”. We both smoked cigarettes but while I was happy to share while they were out bumming one from BJ invariably was brought up with some demand later.

I just got in the habit of going up to the corner store on Washington for my own the minute I ran out. This store was run by Indian or Pakistani guys who always played vintage Bollywood videos on the tv by the counter. One day there was an odd coincidence when they asked if I liked Bollywood actors, I mentioned a fondness for Amitabh Bachchan and they excitedly pointed to the screen. The man himself, in a younger role where I wouldn’t have recognized him, was taking a drink while watching a woman dance in that exact moment.

It’s a vague description but maybe a reader will know the movie. It was black & white and the men sat on the ground drinking from what I remember as shallow dishes similar to traditional sake cups.

Things settled down with BJ and Marie when we dialed the shared resources down to mutual security and things like quickly borrowing a knife to make a temporary woman’s toilet from a water jug in the night. We all continued to dose sporadically, it was actually Marie who the “Lord don’t let them fuck around and give me Diego” quote came from in an earlier piece, but we never tried their fentanyl again and when I got some tar from a middle man deal we never offered.

BJ had gotten into trouble at the clinic due to an incident where he took a security guard’s gun away from him. He didn’t get kicked out and the guards weren’t allowed to carry guns after that. I don’t know what level of misconduct would have been sufficient to get Matrix, the name of the clinic, to sacrifice the paycheck a patient represented but the most discipline I ever saw was a two or three day suspension.

The owner’s name was Mrs. Waters and as loud as she was about her contempt for BJ when she saw him he was never denied a dose.

The big issue with sharing an alley with BJ and Marie was that they loudly argued every single night. I mentioned BJ asking us to quiet down the one time we were arguing in the alley while still living in the van but when we became neighbors things either shifted or we were finally in a spot to hear it. They would scream at each other inside their tent all night every night, always on the subject of money, and as far as I could tell they never slept.

“I never imagined you would treat me like this over a god damn dollar bill! If I had it I’d happily give it to you!”

It’s worth mentioning that most of this came from BJ who never “had it” and was absolutely expectant of every cent Marie brought home.

They never acknowledged or apologized for this in the light of the day. At one point a representative of one of the family homes across a fence came to ask them to keep it down and BJ was apologetic but it started back up before too long. Me and LaPorsha can be intense ourselves but we also worried that they might have only started arguing because we were there. We had a little bit of money and, unlike BJ, only got heroin when another client who was footing the bill hit me up.

I can see how the reality that we weren’t always completely broke could set off tensions between the two of them. Listening to this every single night created some really dark feelings and wore on our mental health but we didn’t realize how much until we finally moved on and didn’t have to hear it. The other bleak thing was that Marie had an elementary school aged daughter and the relatives she was living with would send her down the alley some nights to get money for field trips or other expenses from Marie.

I’m not sure if they planned this out so Marie would be so high and incoherent that she could barely speak or if it was the only time they had outside their work schedules but it had to be hard on the girl to see her mother like that. BJ would talk about Marie having “took her medicine” and clearly resented any money going to anything but his pockets. I don’t know how they got together, BJ spoke of a Reno wedding where they were both blacked out on Xanax, but he was obviously a parasite and seriously bringing her down.

Still she was an adult and ultimately accountable for her own decisions.

I did sometimes continue to take shifts at the tutoring center while we lived in this tent so there were times LaPorsha was interacting with the couple without me. One day she was driving to the teriyaki chicken restaurant on Slauson and offered to pick up bowls for both of them. LaPorsha is an extremely picky eater even while sober but on this day she was loaded and kept making BJ and Marie swap bowls with her over and over based on which chicken looked the least fatty.

Considering they were hungry and didn’t have food for themselves I can really identify with how demeaning this must have felt. I was off work by this point but had gone to the library to try to watch the newest Steven Universe episode. Things finally changed because of the other residents of the alley – an old Mexican tweaker lived inside a giant hoard of piled up garbage closer to where the alley met the street.

I can’t remember her name but there was a terrifying looking white prostitute on our block who wore intensely matted wigs and makeup that looked like a demon in Japanese folk theater – not that it was modeled after this character; she was just awful at applying it. She had a reputation for fucking with other people’s stuff – especially clothes. Another girl from the clinic named Titi mentioned her shamelessly pawing her stuff when they got high together.

One night LaPorsha saw her stick her head inside one of the front doors when we were still in the van but when she realized we were inside she ran off and never tried again. In these kinds of homeless communities people rarely enter other’s tents or vehicles because someone is always watching. We left the back doors near our sleeping area unlocked but never saw evidence anyone else had been inside.

Anyway the tweaker hoarder guy was letting the prostitute live somewhere in his rat’s nest. There was a more-or-less clean and attractive young black drug dealer who worked our block and was sleeping with her. Sometimes he’d come around around our tent to hang out or borrow a lighter to kill time if the two of them weren’t getting along.

He started handing us chunks of drugs through the tent flap to demonstrate his gratitude for listening and not running him off. At first it was little crystals of meth and toward the end he gave me a piece of crack. None of it was ever wrapped in anything, just loose, and I stored the pieces in the tiny plastic compartments of a dollar store heart shaped box that had held chocolates.

It was getting toward Valentine’s Day.

LaPorsha took tiny amounts of the meth when feeling low energy and I got some white vinegar to dissolve the crack without heat directly inside the thin plastic so I could shoot it up. He never offered me a pipe if he even had one. If this sudden generosity was an early overture for a more sinister plan we never saw it because of the fire.

One night it sounded like it was raining but when I put my hand outside the air was hot and dry as opposed to wet and then I could smell it. The gigantic meth hoard was on fire. A resident of the homes across the fence selflessly leapt over the fence barefoot in case somebody needed help but thankfully nobody was home. Eventually a conclusion was reached that an unattended candle was the source but everyone around the clinic knew differently.

Coincidentally the nightmare-faced prostitute had moved all of her valuables out the day before and now she was nowhere to be seen. By the time we left the clinic I never saw her again. I can’t imagine what quarrel she might have had with the kindly old tweaker guy but she generally gave off evil goblin energy – an entity whose only purpose was to bring pain and destruction into the world.

Even though we had the Mercedes we also had a couple of bikes for shorter trips, river trails and days we didn’t feel like parking or carrying drugs in a vehicle. We had been locking them by the telephone pole next to Mount Methmore and the fire completely melted one of our front tires. I was planning on fixing it but a morning or two later I woke up to the sound of scraping metal to see a backhoe operator tearing through our locked chain and lifting the bikes into a temporary dumpster for the wreckage.

I really wish he had called out a warning to the two tents in case the bikes belonged to any of us but I understand homeless outreach wasn’t his job. After a bit of back and forth I was able to get him to lower the bucket so I could retrieve the bikes but the pressures of the machine had twisted the frames beyond any semblance of usefulness and I wrote it off as a loss. Before this point nobody had put much thought into cleaning up the alley – if you kept walking another quarter mile the paving gave out and you came to preliminary foundation work for a tiny dwelling that was never realized and a stripped down car I’m surprised nobody slept in.

Now social workers were coming around to try to get us into shelters, something two married couples would never take them up on, and sniff around for any other fire hazards. The big fire had come dangerously close to destroying the dry cleaning business it shared a back wall with and whatever good will we had with local residents and business owners was running thin. In a classic “too little too late” move they took away my Christmas Trees and loading pallets leaving us to the mercy of the elements.

Thankfully the alternator had gotten sorted out on the Mercedes and the transmission problems were down the road. We broke down our tent and loaded the sleeping pad into the trunk and drove down to San Diego. We attempted to guest dose at a methadone clinic in Chula Vista but, as these things usually go, we waited around for hours to learn we wouldn’t be able to. Fortunately we were already halfway through a 90 day taper at Matrix and our dose was never that high to begin with.

We began looking for an RV in San Diego – as well as heroin which we weren’t in a period of needing on a daily basis. Occasionally BJ and Marie would call us to check up or we’d call them. BJ would talk about getting an RV as well and promised they’d take us with them when they got it – a situation we almost certainly would have talked our way out of.

I wonder if they’re still alive and ever made it out of the alley. They were ahead of the curve in terms of switching from heroin to fentanyl so they’d be unlikely to overdose unless they got an ultra potent analogue or a bag mixed with RC Benzos. I’d like to think Marie got away from BJ but I can’t really see it – maybe she was happy with him in her own way.

One random afternoon BJ told me about his life growing up and how he’d been a pimp in his younger years. He took on a philosophical tone and mused about how on top of this profession he was until he met the one bitch that “turned him out” instead. I didn’t really get the metaphor but apparently he was talking about heroin using a slang term I wasn’t familiar with and can’t remember.

Marie had to explain what he meant to me. It was one of the few times we’d ever talked to each other. There’s a lot of folks around Matrix I hope are doing ok. A tall Creole man named Gypsy who was famously on the highest dose in the clinic. Holly who lived in the tragic shadow of her boyfriend’s fatal overdose. A woman named Angel I had to take for a walk to avoid the police and ambulance after smoking crack on her heart meds triggered spastic tics. Titi the kind hearted stripper and prostitute who was constantly being taken advantage of by whoever camped next to her. A flashy dressing young Muslim who ran an embroidery spot in the Slauson Swap Meet with his father and got strung out while dating a white girl.

I forget the receptionist’s name, maybe Donald, but he was miraculously a light skinned Black man in person while clearly a blonde haired blue eyed white child in his baby pictures.

I wonder if it’s still open at all.

A rough attempt at a User Friendly Table of Contents

I noticed on Facebook today that underground photojournalist extraordinaire Tod Seelie had just put up his photo gallery for Bike Kill 19. It’s an annual bike themed block party in Brooklyn organized by Black Label Bike Club and no doubt a host of other entities I don’t know by name. I eventually figured out that I had attended the sixth one in 2008. Nineteen minus six makes thirteen but 2023 minus 2008 is fifteen so a couple of years must have gone without for COVID or other issues.

I thought at first that I might have went in 2009 but I saw a short film had been produced at the 2008 version and quickly watched it:

I had to pause to make sure I was seeing myself on a tricycle but with a stilled frame there was no mistaking my oddly misshapen schnozz. I was wearing a green fringed miniskirt that Stephany had helped me sew from a piece of quilted drapery. One of my favorites from a style perspective but maybe not the best choice for riding mutant bikes all day as it did restrict some movement.

The event went from the afternoon into the night on October 25th. I’m a little confused as to how I got there – 2008 was a severely overstuffed burrito of cultural travels for me. Starting in New Orleans for Mardi Gras season I joined The Bus for the caravan down to Miami for the International Noise Conference then did Envy shows with Rotten Milk until we were back in Chicago.

After a rash of psychedelic hijinks culminating in convincing a party full of people to drink my urine while tripping on Amanita Muscaria I took Megabus back to New Orleans to meet up with the members of Living Hell driving to Orlando to reconnect with The Bus for that tour. Living Hell came to an abrupt end outside Detroit and I returned to Chicago until riding trains with Leg to California for a Living Hell reunion.

I hung around the Purple Haus a bit before doing a West Coast tour with Cole and Bekah using counterfeit Greyhound passes where we combined Chew on This songs with the earliest Bleak End at Bernie’s stuff. I then flew to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji with my sisters to visit family and did the first solo Bleak End sets. Upon hitting US soil I made my way up to Portland for a disastrous visit with Leg then travelled down the Oregon Coast with a stranger from Craigslist.

This puts us in September. As far as I know I still lived in “Chicago” but I’m drawing a bit of a blank as to how I was in Brooklyn for late October. After the end of the Mississippi River Miss Rockaway Armada project many of the alumni were traveling around from party to festival and so on. Did I buy a plane ticket, use the Greyhound scam or jump into somebody’s box truck? – at this point I simply have no idea.

I continue to hold out hope that the lost copies of my American Girl Diary will somehow resurface and put ducks in a row in a single fell swoop. Regardless it has not – the ducks are all over the place. All of this to circle back to this one indisputable reality: I was at Bike Kill 6 as a plethora of photos will readily attest to.

Let’s talk about Bike Kill – I’ve never been particularly involved in the mutant bike welding culture but I’ve enjoyed my snatches of proximity with it. It actually plays a role in one of my earlier memory transposition errors in this writing project. When I first wrote about Fort Thunder over a year ago I thought I remembered reading about the space in the Beastie Boys Grand Royal Magazine. However when I recently found a pdf of the issue in question I found that it actually made no mention of Fort Thunder but instead had an article about Lucha Libre on the same two page spread as one about a PNW mutant bike crew called Chunk 666.

As masked wrestling and mutant bike construction were both salient features of Fort Thunder my brain simply conflated the two different things like a strand of RNA creating a random mutation during the DNA replication process. As someone who often views my own detailed memory as near infallible this glaring error is both thrilling and profoundly disorienting.

The weather was not conducive to Bike Kill’s planned activities. The darkened sky threw down rain bringing slippery roads and cold, wet clothing for all the revelers. This did little to dampen anybody’s spirits. The 1 block radius overflowed with all manner of insane contrivances – oil barrel steamrollers, a bike where the tires were a circle of boots on rebar spokes, bikes with hinges all over the body making them near impossible to direct in a straight line and all manner of big wheels, little wheels and every possible combination of the two.

Two gigantic metal armatures of wheels spun around as bodies piled on and leaned into the centrifugal force, a bike with an arched metal bar above allowed the riders to throw their weight forward to create an entire rotation that landed them back on the two original wheels. Somebody covered the street with bread which soaked full of water and added a layer of detritus that probably cushioned a fall or two. Everywhere you looked were people in costumes and giant skulls made of yellow mattress foam.

An assortment of ramps and half pipes raised the stakes from the already dangerous proposition of doing all of this on flat streets. As night began to fall fires were lit and the favorite sport of tall bike jousting began in earnest. On top of steeds made of two or even three frames welded upwards the combatants rode toward each other holding out long poles tipped with boxing gloves or foam rubber fists. As the crowd screams for bloodshed one or often both riders are knocked to the ground.

With so much potential for mayhem it was especially bizarre that the only severe injury of the day had nothing to do with bikes at all. An excited reveler jumped onto his friend’s shoulders just as said friend was taking a step forward. All laws of physics conspired against the unhappy victim as the sudden pressure created torque at his heel the moment it hit the ground and his foot was rotated 180 degrees in the wrong direction. There used to be an online photo of this horrific injury but I wasn’t able to track it down.

To the best of my knowledge this was the only required ambulance for the entire event.

As the night continued to get cold and wet much of the crowd moved into the nearby Chicken Hut for the after party. I had somehow never met Chicken John as I didn’t join the Rockaway until after the initial build phase and I’m not even sure if he was around now. It seemed like a lot of the guys from Japanther were either living there or running things – maybe there’s a connection between them and Black Label I simply don’t know about.

I was talking to a couple of girls who were probably from Wisconsin because they were talking about getting warm but they pronounced the word like it rhymes with “arm”. I pretty much only talk to and hang out with girls most of the time so I didn’t see it as flirtation but it might have been for at least one and I was just oblivious. There was a funny moment where some guy had been giving one of them some cocaine and he pretty much seemed like a “guy guy” – like he doesn’t offer girls cocaine because he is generally more comfortable talking to them but rather in the hopes that it might “go somewhere”.

It felt very “New York”. Anyway she asked him if he could give me some of the cocaine and he looked really annoyed but did it anyway and it reminded me of this meme with Mickey Mouse’s rival Mortimer Mouse:

I’m not much of a fan of taking small bumps of cocaine but I went through with it purely to savor how uncomfortable it was clearly making him. I didn’t see much of him after that – most likely he cut his losses and moved on. I can’t remember exactly but me and the girls might have ended up falling asleep spooning somewhere to stay “warm like arm” but definitely no kissing or groping or anything like that.

The much funnier thing at the Bike Kill Afterparty was what happened with Tim Treason. Long time readers might remember Tim from the Rockaway chapters: he had been working at Cementland and was just regular Tim but after meeting us raft people he morphed into his version of one of us very quickly. He’d had a brief and intense romance with Brandy Gump but that had already burned out by this time and he was dressed kind of like a train hopping mime with striped socks, old timey suspenders, a neck bandana and a bit of mime makeup.

When we first got into the Chicken Hut I remember him squeezing the water out of his striped socks into a cup and joking about it being some kind of beverage. That wasn’t the funny part though. There was a little alcove in the kitchen where a tall girl with some kind of European or maybe Kiwi accent was tending bar and slinging cheap cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. As the night progressed Tim went back there to “help” bartend but there was obvious chemistry between the two of them.

Things escalated quickly. I’m not sure if they were full on “blacked out” but they quickly progressed from making out while kind of tending bar to just publicly having sex on the floor while, it should go without saying, not tending bar at all. The alcove for the bar was surrounded by jars of condiments and shelf stable jarred foods like pickles and preserved beets and the like. The large group of people wanting beers started loudly jeering while dumping all of these condiments onto the copulating couple and reaching under the bar to help themselves to beer.

I feel like some of these products, aimed at the sensitive areas as they were, must have caused considerable discomfort – especially the Sriracha or more apt for this particular scenario “Cock Sauce”. Nonetheless nothing seemed to slow them down or cause them to seek out a more private location like a stairwell or bathroom. Perhaps in her current state of mind she thought it would somehow count in her favor that she never abandoned her post.

By the time I’d grabbed a couple of beers and returned to the common area of the party somebody had found a bag of flour and they looked about ready for a trip to a deep fryer. I wasn’t there when it was inevitably broken up but I did happen to hear one of the guys in charge loudly chastising the bartendress. She defiantly shouted out:

“But I love him!”

I never saw Tim Treason again and I’ve often wondered if he stayed in the culture or returned to the more mainstream wiggeresque itinerant laborer lifestyle we found him in.

I’m dropping back in a month or so after first writing this because my memory of an important chunk of this night just became unlocked by a Facebook post where Harry Merry was complaining about somebody misspelling his name on the Dutch version of discogs. For any readers that aren’t familiar Harry Merry plays keyboards and writes songs – usually performing in sailor suits and looking like a boy who sticks his finger in a leaking dike in a Mad Magazine cartoon.

Someone reached out to me, maybe Erin from garbaj kaetz, to see if I knew of a show anywhere in the NYC area that Merry could jump onto. There were already bands playing the Chicken Hut – probably Japanther and some kind of punk or hardcore band. I don’t think I asked anybody in an authority role for permission. I just figured that the scheduled music would run out before the night did and people would still be awake and trying to party so I passed along the address.

I’m a big fan of eclectic bills and shows that keep an audience on their toes. I feel like underground live music shows were more diverse in the pre-internet Book Your Own Fucking Life era because everyone was setting up shows using the same resource and if two bands happened to be in the same city on the same day they’d most likely play together whether they played the same kind of music or not.

This was one of my favorite things about The Fireside Bowl when I first started going to shows there in 1998. I’ve been dipping my toe back into promoting but I can’t say definitively if live music events are getting more or less homogenous. The internet does allow likeminded folks to zero in on one specific sound and fill a night with nothing but speedcore or Emo revival acts but it also allows representatives of far flung scenes who would never otherwise cross paths to come together in the name of nightlife.

The last show I set up was for a grindcore band called Body Lice that I only learned at the last minute could also be billed as “electric bluegrass” because the percussionist used electrified spoons instead of traditional drums. The first venue fell through so things got moved last minute to a space in Dunsmuir called Pop’s Culture Center run by a mostly retired jazz saxophonist.

Maybe this all just boils down to living in a small town with a smaller scene and fewer options but I’d like to think I’m not the last person who likes to go out of their way to keep DIY shows surprising and unpredictable. All of this is to say the Bike Kill crowd was completely unprepared for Harry Merry and I may well have been the only person in the building who knew what was coming when he plugged in his keyboard.

A decent chunk of the crowd cleared the room the moment he started up with Turnpikes and Roundabouts but those of us who stuck around were treated to hits like Sharkie Supermachine, presumably named for the incomprehensible Burt Reynolds films Sharkey’s Machine, and a white knight ballad dedicated to the chastity of a popular heiress: Jailbird… keep your hands off Miss Hilton.

In my earlier paragraphs I expressed some uncertainty about what my sleeping arrangement was but I can now clearly recall sprawling out on the floor in a cluster of drunk guys as we egged each other on in contagious laughter at Merry’s accent as he searched for a ride:

“Does anybody go to Hoopa Stweet? I haf one fwend to stay on Hoopa Stweet!”

It wasn’t particularly funny so much as it was late and we were drinking. I’ve met other Dutch people and the accent is essentially the same but Merry does kind of lean into the comic potential with his bangs and specific outfits. Somebody’s cocaine dealer had shown up and as I was one of the last people left awake he was telling me about his side business of driving around with bolt cutters to steal high end bikes for clients based on requested size and model.

I certainly can’t claim I’ve never stolen a bicycle in my life. I’d like to say I’ve never taken one with a lock on it but there are these super cheap combination cable locks in Berlin that can be broken with a good sized rock and I might have done this one night after somebody else stole the bike I’d left unlocked and stolen because it was unlocked in the first place.

I remember the panic than ensued when somebody figured out that the heavy duty u-locks could be effectively picked with a cheap bic pen but I’ve never tried this trick myself or seen it done. My extremely squishy and inconsistent moral boundary at the time can probably be best characterized as a belief that one shouldn’t steal bikes whose owners have put effort into making moderately difficult to steal and I said as much to my new cocaine dealing acquaintance:

“Well it’s profitable for me!”

It didn’t feel like a continued conversation of abstract ethics would be especially fruitful and I dropped the matter. I was only passing through New York and didn’t have a bike locked anywhere and besides that I wasn’t in the habit of owning bikes worth very much money so his habit was both unlikely to effect me personally and improbable to suddenly change on the strength of incompatibility with my own dubious values.

While he was introduced to me as a cocaine dealer he was entirely unrelated to the earlier cocaine anecdote in this piece and the person who introduced me was not buying cocaine, the cocaine dealer never offered any to me and I didn’t enquire after it. The scraps of information about him being a cocaine dealer and bike thief might have became relevant later if this had been a mystery novel or point-and-click adventure game but instead this was a party and none of it really mattered.

We found other things to talk about or he moved on and talked to other people and eventually I fell asleep. I wasn’t sure where to work this particular detail into the narrative but one of the objects floating around The Chicken Hut was an explicit pornographic comic book by an artist named Fajardo. This kind of thing had exploded in popularity and accessibility with the internet but it was a pre-internet porno comic – like Omaha the Cat Dancer or Harvey Kurtzmann’s Little Annie Fannie.

It took me a minute to figure out the peculiars of this book due to the recent success of a comic artist named Kat Fajardo who does young adult autobiographical work like Miss Quinces on experiences connected to race, culture and gender. Here’s an e yea sentence to avoid discussing these two very different artists in the same paragraph.

The book I saw was a collection of El Desviado, or the deviant, by José Fajardo. From what I saw his preferred format is cartoonish but well endowed men (likely self inserts) engaged in sodomizing a series of buxom female partners. A bit like a more explicit Robert Crumb but working in Spanish and almost exclusively in color. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to rate the relative merit of his work against others in the field but the details I’ve included should provide enthusiasts looking to expand these very specific horizons with enough keywords to continue searching.

I’ve never made it to another Bike Kill but I just realized I must have quickly travelled on to New Orleans as I was there for Halloween and then Barack Obama’s first electoral victory announcement. I saw some photos of Ellery Neon in the Bike Kill albums and wonder if this was around the time we put on our Rave Like A Dying Rat party in a decaying structure in New Orleans on Almonaster.

Ellery had discovered a flood damaged warehouse in the middle of a field with rotting pieces of old Mardi Gras floats and metal shelves piled with thin candles and cheap plastic toys. The plan was to have a rave without electricity – light came from candles and the music was a mix of acoustic instruments and everybody drumming on bits of scrap metal and an old car parked inside. We really wanted to make “drug punch” but I think the only stuff we could get our hands on was robitussin, trazodone, ephedrine and seroquel.

I can’t imagine the punch was much fun for anybody drinking it and the party only lasted exactly an hour because that’s how long it took our candles to burn out. I don’t know if I’d call it a “success” but it feels vital and important that after being inspired to make it happen we even followed through at all. It’s nice to see a steady stream of pictures and videos that people are still having big cool parties and small weird parties. It was nice to look at the new Bike Kill pictures and see everybody actively participating instead of sea of cellphones with more people trying to document the thing than actually doing it.

For now I’m just sitting on my lonely mountain writing about the bits I remember from the things that happened a long, long time ago. Hopefully it means something to people too – either to glimpse back at something they never got to experience or feel seen and remembered because they were there making it happen.

Our tour went into a special kind of overdrive when he hit the Northeast. I talked a lot about our experiences with the Land of NOD Experiment in rural Michigan but things happened in Detroit that are worth talking about. Not the show – that was in the living room of Book’s clown punk house and mostly forgettable. When we did the P90X workout either before or after the concert I sensed the eyes of a nearby young woman on my sweating body.

This was Stevie, or as I later nicknamed her Steve Holt, we started to talk and ended up in an upstairs bedroom. I didn’t know anything about anything but she had been dating Kozmo who I’d known from Termite & Vine and evidently going through a rocky period. He came into the room then stormed out upon finding us moderately intertwined. Stevie chased after him begging that they talk about what he had just seen.

On the standard base scale I think things had only gotten to second – hand over cloth over boob. It might not have been the first time that somebody started making out with me purely to get another person’s attention and make them jealous but it was the first time that this was completely obvious and transparent and I didn’t particularly like the way it made me feel. So like the whiny little emo bitch I am I wrote a song about it.

Twenty one is my only song where I can say it was first performed in a live setting less than twenty four hours after the interaction that inspired it. Not all of my songs were written with specific people in mind, like I wasn’t thinking about anybody in particular when I wrote Equally Shitty, but this one and the one called Sealegs were. I wrote Sealegs about a girl I call James. I don’t know why I always gave the girls I got into stuff with masculine nicknames around this time – maybe it was because I always felt like the maudlin melodramatic one.

I spent the rest of that day in Detroit with headphones plugged directly into my drum machine kind of like Joel had been for the first few days of the tour. By the time we were playing our next show it was ready. It’s not particularly long so I’ll write the lyrics here:

“So dude it’s like whatever, no totally it’s cool / So happy for the chance to be your stupid fucking tool / So now you both are talking and no one cares I’m here / I guess right now I’ll take my cue and fucking disappear

And I’m so fucking fucking done / and you’re so fucking twenty one / and honestly it wasn’t fun / it could have been but no”

Now that it’s written down I’m really noticing how much I overused the word “fuck” – it was just a lazy way to add syllables when I wanted a certain cadence. The song also seems like more of a condemnation of me than her: she literally was twenty one and I was nearly thirty. I wasn’t going out of my way to hook up with girls that were significantly younger than me but I also wasn’t trying that hard not to. I’d figure it out a couple of years later.

The other big thing that happened in Detroit was with Joel and the car. Joel spent a lot of time in the bathroom any time we were about to go anywhere. He wore contact lenses and had frosted tips and probably liked to do this thing with his hair where he spent a long time making it look like he hadn’t spent any time on it and most likely had a skin care routine too. I’m only guessing because it’s not like I was ever in the bathroom with him – it could have been anything, for all I know he was just repeating positive affirmations into the mirror or something.

The only thing I knew for sure is that he would always do it right when we were about to leave and it usually took an entire hour or more.

I think Rian and I are similar in that we can’t stand interstitials – like hanging out for however long is fine but when it gets to be time to leave but people suddenly fall into these little last minute conversations on the threshold it drives us crazy. I just saw her at the Blog Cabin Reunion and most nights she’d find someone to sneak away with from the main party house back to the house we were sleeping at to not get caught up in the long goodbyes at all.

Of course Rian and Joel would have had certain long form frustrations with each other as siblings and even before this tour they had done a West Coast tour with just the two of them where they wore white suits and slept in parks and beaches and only performed in public touristy places so people probably thought they were religious missionaries. I don’t know what it was like on that tour but on this one there was tension over the amount of time Joel spent in the bathroom with Joel on one side and me and Rian on the other.

It came to a head in Detroit. Books was gonna show us around to her favorite local thrift store and just as we were getting ready to go Joel went into the bathroom. As the time dragged by me and Rian started to joke about just leaving without him and once it had been said aloud it was like we were daring each other and then we were actually doing it and Jill and Jacki were nervously laughing because they knew this was going to be a big deal but they couldn’t stop us.

I’ll never forget the moment we walked back into the Detroit house and all the lights were off and Joel was just patiently sitting at the head of a table. I just watched the movie Honey Boy where the character who’s supposed to be a young Shia LaBeouf says that everybody’s acting all the time and that’s probably true and then there are people like Joel who are so committed to staying in character it becomes impossible to tell what’s genuine and what’s just part of the bit.

Of course his feelings were genuinely hurt, nobody likes being left behind, but it felt like he was playing a villain in an oddball family movie as he casually looked up and savored our discomfort while delivering the terms of our punishment:

“Well guys… I’m not mad that you went to the thrift store without me. I am mad that you took my car though. I think you’re starting to forget whose car it is so to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future I’m going to be the only person driving my car for the rest of the tour.”

Of course it was true, it was his car and in small ways we were forgetting. We did the thing people always do on tour where we kept track of the gas money and how much we were getting from shows on a piece of paper to make sure everybody was putting in the same amount but if there was an accident or major mechanical failure Joel would be uniquely financially impacted. It was a month long tour of the entire United States and as the car was effectively our home for its entirety it was easy to start thinking of it as collective property but Joel would stick to his word and make sure that never happened again.

No matter how tired he got or how late we were for any of the subsequent shows nobody but Joel did any of the driving from there on out. The confrontational energy only lasted for a few days but the edict did not waver. I mostly just remember being constantly tired for this latter half of the tour – sticking to the same schedule with only a single driver worked out to everybody getting a lot less sleep.

We played a bar underneath a bowling alley that looked like the set of Headbanger’s Ball in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania for only the owner and his employees. I forget if that comes before or after Pittsburgh but I remember driving through a long tunnel to emerge in what looked like a new world of green mountains, flowing rivers and funicular railways.

We dropped Jill off at an airport around Washington DC near dawn and then found a place to park and walk the national mall. For the first time in my life I took in the sacred architecture and the temples built for the once human and living Gods of Democracy. We saw the White House – impossibly small in person and surrounded by crazed mystics wearing conspiracy theories on sandwich boards.

I posed for a popular ribald photo that used forced perspective to suggest the Washington Monument was my virile member – a tradition no doubt as old as colossal architecture itself: painted if not photographed.

There is much I’ll leave out here and perhaps return to because the thing I most want to talk about is what Joel’s constant position in the driver’s seat brought about. He’d gotten lost near the Land of NOD Experiment and a country cop pulled us over, recognized us for a band and asked what we played. As Joel opened his mouth he was cut off with a stern warning:

“Say something I can relate to now!”

Joel was actually in good cop form here – he answered “Classic Rock, Sir.” which was the correct answer and we were sent on our way with directions. I could see that the compulsive nature of it all and the abuse of power stung him deeply and it would become an issue down the line. I don’t know enough about Adventists to say if they have issues with the law like how Mennonites grow beards without mustaches to show they are neither soldiers or lawmen.

In Phoenix or Tucson Arizona my friend Alex Jarson from Ascetic House and Body of Light set it up for us to play in the workout room of his Bauhaus style condo complex. He hadn’t applied for a permit – if such a thing could even be possible. The police came for the noise. Generation was performing while running on treadmills and Joel yelled to turn the music up before he realized that the police were there.

They shut us down cordially enough, to the best of my knowledge no citations were delivered.

The real issue would come as we passed through the checkpoint into California. Rian and I knew it was coming but could do nothing about it. The car was Joel’s as was his rule about driving it so things could only go the one way. As far as I knew Joel had never consumed a single drug or broken a single law at this point in his life but it hardly mattered. He was intimidated by the power and authority they held over him – when it was one cop in Michigan he mostly held his composure but an entire checkpoint full of them was something else entirely.

We rolled to a stop and the officer signaled for Joel to roll down his window and asked where we were coming from. His anxieties boiled over and completely robbed him of his faculty to speak coherent words. Sweating bullets he blurted out:

“Uhhhh! Uhhhh! Uhhhh!”

From the passenger seat I irritatedly said Tucson and Joel repeated it back in such a way to suggest that Tucson wasn’t where we were coming from at all and the discovery of this ruse could well be disastrous to our future freedom. With mounting suspicion the officer next asked where we were heading to but Joel repeated the panicked noises:

“Uhhhh? Uhhhh? Uhhhh? Uhhhh?”

This time around Rian offered the correct answer of Los Angeles in the same irritated tone and Joel made his most convincing effort at repeating this in a neutral voice but the damage had been done. It was explained that we’d have to pull into a special area for secondary inspection and Rian and I repeated that we already knew this in resigned voices.

Of course there was nothing to be the least bit concerned about in the car but while it was being rifled through we were placed on black benches with guards to ensure we neither tampered with the car or tried to dispose of things we might have had on our persons. We were in a hot part of the desert and there was a small sand mound with fat black crickets near the bench.

This was all going to take a long time so to entertain myself I squatted by the mound and allowed the crickets to start climbing all over my arms. One of the officers told me to stop so I suddenly stared her in the eyes and quickly popped one of the crickets into my mouth and ate and swallowed it alive. She visibly swallowed and repressed her natural reactions of fear and disgust.

I have fairly political ideas about the use of insects as a staple food source as it seems like one of the better options to produce enough nutrients to sustain human life on a dying planet. When I was much younger I had the idea to start a crustpunk band called Insectivore that would tour around with shoeboxes full of breeding crickets in the van and demonstrate mushing them into some kind of alternative protein patty at the shows.

I also see on social media that many folks on the other side of the political aisle have equally strong opinions about not eating insects as they view it as a liberal agenda and an erosion of the American way of life. Some have even stated that they would eat their neighbors first and it seems a bit odd that they would view a near universal taboo as somehow preferable to something which in many places is not taboo at all.

We can’t be sure but many believe that the “manna from Heaven” described in the Old Testament is insect life of some kind. Less ambiguous is the fact that John the Baptist lived on bald locusts and wild honey during his time in the wilderness and he has always struck me as a worthy role model for Christians to emulate.

None of these things were really on my mind as I ate the cricket. I figured that as I knew for certain no contraband could be discovered in our tour vehicle I could take the opportunity to intimidate and lightly terrorize one of the officers without accumulating additional consequences. It was a spur of the moment decision really and they soon sent us on our way.

I believe we played a homecoming show in Los Angeles. I started making plans to move there from the Bay Area. Soon I would be thirty years of age.