lazy eyes and other such phenomena

The magic and ultimate joke in pot smoking is that you'll inevitably be placed in situations time and time again where you'll be on the edge of figuring out or experiencing something you never had before. The joke comes in when you realize you don't have the mental facilities at that moment to properly understand the situation placed in front of you, or the experience you are currently experiencing. Or at least what you should do next, whenever you're not busy thinking about how you are physically existing in whatever realm you're fixated on breaking-down for the next 10 minutes. However I can't confirm this is the case for everyone. I can't confirm this isn't also true with alcohol, or anything else for that matter. But, I seem to walk into it at least once every six months. The big one was at the end of last summer, on a beach in San Diego.

So I had been hanging out with Alexis all evening after ditching Juan and Ben at our hotel, conveniently located in the one strip-mall-hell portion of San Diego. Nothing worthwhile for them to do in the immediate vicinity. This was only a marginal concern for me at the time. Alexis had the good sense to suggest they buy booze or something, and diligently drove them. That was around 8pm, just after I had requested we make a stop at the best Mexican food place I'd' ever been to. The one where between the years 2000-2003, I used to walk to at 2a.m. with Sara in order to procure the $2 bean and cheese burritos. Usually with cobbled together change, because this was when I was still either pretending I didn't have about $14,000 in accrued child-support monies in the bank, or denying I had any right to touch it. It was surreal present-day. Only because Juan and Ben were there though. These story-lines had absolutely no business mixing.

After a solid four or five hours of talking in her living room, attempting to watch Power Rangers episodes and other assorted mini-quests, many things happened. I used her laptop for the first time, without realizing how actually mind-warping that would be for me until it happened. I was sitting there typing on it, high as a kite trying to find that Zach Galifianakis/Kanye West video... When I thought to myself "You are now pressing the very same keys that were used to talk to you starting around eight years ago." Then I let it soak in a bit and looked over across the room to see her and her fiance waiting awkwardly as the video loaded. Now I had watched this video literally dozens of times with what seems like just as many people because I geniuinely loved it so. If there were an experience I was familiar with at that time, it would have been "Watching the Zach Galifianakis version of Can't Tell Me Nothing with other people." I was very familiar with what that felt like. I associated it with my day to day reality.

It wouldn't be a little later, when she took me to see the mantle in front of their front door, until it really set in. Our relationship was completely real at one point, and I had been trying my best to ignore it up until then. The centerpiece of this mantle was an Easter-themed christmas tree centerpiece, covered in pastel eggs and white fluff. In early 2001, shortly after I had moved to San Diego for good, I was applyling for a job at this sandwich shop a friend of mine managed. This friend used to live in Arizona with her friend Julie, and Alexis had visited them a few times, and they both eventually moved out to be around Alexis, and probably more likely the majesty of San Diego. I had never really pondered that I wasn't the only one who moved to San Diego after meeting Alexis in a Smashing Pumpkins chat room until just now. Crazy.

So anyway, the other girl of the two, Charmaine was a manager at Togo's. Coincidentally right next to the hotel in strip-mall-hell Mission Valley I would stay at years later in the near present-day state of the other part of this story. I was going to apply there, because with her as a manager, I was obviously a shoe-in to get hired. And this is at the point where I had not a whole heck of a lot of work experience, and was still pretty terrified I wouldn't be hired anywhere in this bustling metropolis. So Alexis already worked there. For what would be I'm sure a short period of time, as she had a crazy-erratic work career until this point. Now because of the whole Sara/Alexis thing, that would later become the Kathleen/Alexis thing in a different form... I wasn't hanging out with Alexis at all, really. I'm sure the fact I pretty much pseudo-broke up with her after I got back from my month-long initial San Diego visit had something to do with it. She had sent me an email back then, in November 2000, saying she hadn't detected a bit of the person she knew we were in the same room that few times during that month. She hadn't felt like I was her friend at all then and didn't think it wise we remain friends anymore in this computer aspect either. I took this opportunity to defend myself with the very-true defense that during that visit I was in an extremely awkward and un-natural position, and the circumstances of why I was there made it impossible for me to replicate anything like our relationship up until that point in reality. This is completely true because I was only there under the concept I was living with her best friend at one point, Sara for a month because we had been online-dating for about 10 months. I wasn't there to see her. I was there to see her schizo-affective disorder-striken friend who would get suicidal because I wouldn't come and visit her. Alexis had immediately asked when she could come pick me up from the airport before I came out for this visit. I told her that wouldn't be a good idea, because Sara didn't like my relationship with her and I didn't want to cheapen our airport-moment together. Or whatever. Alexis abrupty went offline after this. When I finally did meet her at the trolley station a few days into my visit, she didn't even look at me for a good five minutes. It was almost like it wasn't really happening.

"Like it wasn't really happening" had become mentally dulling to the point where I was getting comfortable with actually seeing Alexis. The unearthly wrongness of actually interacting with her under these circumstances had congealed over the last few months, so now after I had seen her a few scattered times, she was forming a new formless identity as someone I actually saw from time to time. I thought this was a healthy way of getting to know someone. Like I didn't already know her well enough. It still was very jarring to see her man a sandwich counter. Such an iconic presence to in my life was being presented to me in this entirely wrong and eerie context. And now I'm sitting there in front of her writing down my Social Security Number on a job application across from my girlfriend I really should have no business being with, and feel terribly awkward being seen with for that matter.

I don't know how it went down, but it was eventually discovered during our time in this sandwich shop that one of Alexis' co-workers had access to Acid. Alexis was getting off in two hours. This acid could be got by all of us afterwards. By god, a magical serendipitous adventure was being dropped in our laps. So me and Sara go off to dick around the mall for a while, waiting for Alexis' shift to end. We go into this crafts store and buy a few snacks and spot this ridiculous easter egg tree on the clearance table. It is decided by me we have to buy this. I cart it along under my arm like its a small pet for a while before stowing it in Sara's purse. We get back to Togo's and explain to Alexis we have no idea why this was purchased, but you had to just believe it was going to come in handy later.

So cut to an hour or so later, and I'm snorting Ketamine off of a mirror in an apartment in Hillcrest. I am seated on a couch next to Alexis, and for once I am taking the right drug at the right time. Whatever anxiety I had about our situation was out the window and I actually for once felt like the person sitting next to me was the same person I knew from before. Everything was going to be OK, for tonight anyway. We were given our acid in sugarcube-form. The rest of it was left in the co-worker's freezer, it was the only way to keep it fresh. In retrospect, Sara and I may very well have bought a shit-ton of acid. Costco-mentality, I suppose. We request to be dropped off at Balboa Park. We figure we can easily wander around there all night and be relatively un-disturbed. At some point during our mid-level break with reality, we're sitting on one of the old outdoor stone theater walkways, chatting. Alexis then whips out every mix cd I've ever sent her from her purse, in their original packaging. And it never occurs to me to find it surprising she just carried them around with her like that. Later she asks if she can put her head on my shoulder, and we pretend like it doesn't mean anything.

At some point we decided to whip out the fluff tree. It became named Craig, and blessed with the ability to beep and light up when we were walking in the correct direction. Craig became the mascott of that evening, much in the manner of the ferret in Kindergarten Cop. I never saw Craig much after that night. Until I'm visiting Alexis during Comic-Con '07 and she brings me to the front room to look at her mantle, and there is old Craig the fluff-tree himself, sitting there as the centerpiece. The first thing you see when you walk in her front door. I glance at her fiance to share my delight and excitement. He does not look happy. He looks like he's heard this story 100 times, and never wants to hear it again. The reality of this situation set in initally when I used her computer, now to see her fiance "pull a Kathleen" and confirm in so many non-words the situations on both sides of the battlefront may be the same... something clicked.

The fiance passed out about an hour later, after making a cryptic comment or two to me like "So you're just here to go to Comic-Con?" Alexis was going to give me a ride back to my hotel. It was about 2am and we're getting in her car, on to the freeway when she asks me if I'd be open to driving to the beach instead to smoke another bowl. This is a fine idea, I say. And it is. The beach is also an extra 20 minutes away and nowhere near my destination. We had been in the same room as the fiance all night, and he was asleep at this point, so this decision felt extra weighty for whatever reason. It was like the feeling I got when I realized Adam was calling her almost every half an hour when we hung out alone together for the first time in 2003. After I broke up with Sara, and was already dating Kathleen at this point. We were just hanging out in my room for eight hours watching Purple Rain and trying to steal whiskey from my roomates, I didn't understand why he had to keep calling. Until I did understand, anyways. He wouldn't be able to call at this point, it was very late at night, and we were driving to the beach in the year 2007.

Now to clarify, we've been smoking pot and drinking beer throughout the evening in modest amounts, and I'm a little worn out mentally, as much as I don't want to go home in any shape or form. So I'm trying to wonder to myself if I'm reading into this current event as meaning anything in the scheme of things. Its at least an opportunity to talk to her, I think. There are about 300 questions I'd love to ask her that I've been wondering about for years. I'm sweeping through our entire relationship in my head as we're driving there, and it dawns on me this is the only time in my life I've had her alone and I've actually been in a position for that to mean something.

So we're getting to the parking lot at Ocean Beach, and I look over and become convinced I need to kiss her, this has been going on far too long. The last time I did I got interrupted by Sara, and it was while watching Saved By The Bell in 2002, a million years ago. Its absolutely absurd it hasn't happened at this point, I'm completely convinced I'm acting in the name of the just and righteous. I decide that when the car stops. If I don't make a move to get out of the car, I will be signalling I don't want to get out of the car, and stay there with her. If she responds to this and also does not make a move, I will know she is thinking the same thing. If she was really driving me here to hang out on the beach just to see the beach, getting out of the car would be her first move. If she is driving me out here to get a moment alone with me, she will be confirming this by not exiting the vehicle when she sees I'm not.

So we stop. I don't move. She doesn't move. This goes on a few seconds. I snap from nervousness, and open the door to get out, and she follows. My mind is completely blown. In a panic I decide to bring up how this location is actually where I had my first date with Kathleen. Its true, but I have no idea why the hell I'm talking about it. She walks me down the beach through the cliffs and we get to the location to smoke this bowl. And we do so. And I get progressively higher to the point where my mind is completely burned out. So I'm sitting there next to Alexis on a rock looking out at the ocean. At 2:30am, nobody in sight, completely quiet, with dozens of questions running through my head. At one point she says to me "I'm really glad you're here." And I'm so stoned I can't figure out what to do. Neither can she because she asks me if I want to go back. I say not yet. A silent minute passes, and this time I say I want to. But I don't. I get driven back and dropped off.

We hang out again the next day after I go to the con with those other dudes back at the hotel. But its much more subdued and this time its oddly a downer, despite the still quite high spirits. Its presented to me by Alexis I can stay over on their couch and she'll take us all to the airport in the morning when we leave. Later, Alexis goes into another room with Adam and comes back saying that she's actually gonna have to drive me back tonight. But as a parting gift she's drawn me up bus directions to the airport so we can just ride the trolley there the next morning. Tonight I am driven back to my hotel with Adam in the backseat monitoring the proceedings.

I need to say something, anything before I get out of the car, besides "it was really nice to get to see you" like usual. So I ask "Hey, when are you guys getting married? Because I'm so there." She looks back at him awkwardly and says "Uh...." and informs me there's no set date anymore. There was a set date a month prior to this I had read online. A month prior to this I was also still together with Kathleen. I drank so fucking much on the plane ride home.

secret blooooooooooog

I've never had a secret blog before. I'm gonna go ahead and make the inaugural secret blog post. With secrets!

Eight years ago or so. Actually, nine? As an obsessive Smashing Pumpkins fan who has scoured the internet during many lunch breaks spent in the high school's library, when I wasn't cutting articles out of the immaculate magazine archive, I had identified which Pumpkins websites were worth a damn via a combination of Yahoo! indexing and personal investigation. There was one called The Smashing Pumpkins Collection (at smashingpumpkins.net... hasn't been active for god knows how long...) which was obviously heads and tails above all other. It seemed to have the most primary-sourced information, a huge RealAudio(!) bootleg archive... it was amazing! And I would go over it day after day. Everything except the chat. I wasn't supposed to go in the chat because that is the one thing the library forbid. No chatting! This was 1998, that shit was scary.

So my brother died and yadda yadda we got a fairly sizable insurance check. Before that I had talked my elderly uncle into purchasing a computer (to help with our homework! no joke!) solely so I could use it. My mom was now in a position to purchase a computer of her own. Which I greatly supported. Now what was the one thing I couldn't do on the library computers? Chat, yes. I had done this before and it was a bizarre novelty. I had only had unrestricted internet access for about two months before this, and it was still a new thing. And living in Vermont, for whatever reason, The Smashing Pumpkins weren't liked by anyone in a radius of a few miles. Not just a passive resistance either... people fucking hated the Smashing Pumpkins. And I was nearly completely mute absurdly pale young fellow with horrible posture and gigantic t-shirts. So I would go in that chat room and just sort sit around. I wasn't that invested, and it wasn't all about the pumpkins, but it was something. For whatever reason, I would hang out in this chatroom for hours not really saying much. I was absorbing. Over the course of a month or a few I got the familiarity with the regulars and I was just sorta there.

So there was this girl Alexis that I started noticing there around March of 1999. She could really have been anyone at that point, I wasn't really that involved in this chatroom, it was just something I'd open up and forget about while I was reading about Nirvana b-sides. I can't remember when it happened, but the chatroom at some point became less about the Smashing Pumpkins and more about absurdist comedy. I started to really get into it around then. Maybe too much. To the point our little clique had a fail-safe in the event the website's official chatroom was dead... through ICQ we all were directed to a pre-designated mIRC chatroom. So one night the official chat was dead, and we all went to IRC. There were a bunch of people initially, then around 2 or 3 am it dwindled to a few, then it was me and this Alexis girl in there and we were talking, like, for fucking ever. To the point where it was sunny outside and my mom and my sisters were starting to wake up and I had to pretend I just woke up and hadn't been up all night. I remember there was a Scooby-Doo marathon on Cartoon Network that day. We didn't stop talking until around noon. I still have this chat saved. She does too. Which is nice to know.

So through the rest of that school year, and through that summer where I had this data entry job in an office building... I would talk to her whenever possible. Sometimes on the phone, whenever my mom would go to sleep... I had to answer on the first ring so as not to wake anybody up. Now, I was jaded as fuck way before this point, so I wasn't buying into of that internet relationship bullshit. People who did that were weak and probably cat enthusiasts for all I knew. Still, I was absolutely crazy about this girl. To the point where I was sending messages to her idle ICQ account at 3am saying goodnight, solely so I could fall asleep myself. My high school was depressing to the point where I had completely ignored it at this point... there were girls who I knew were into me, and I thought they were attractive, sure... but everybody was just "too stupid" for me and on the whole, Brattleboro, VT was far too slim pickins for me. I spent most of my schooldays asleep, attempting to escape as many classes as possible. Eventually, I'd just end up leaving at lunch, or earlier.

So yeah, I had this crazy intense friendship with this girl in San Diego, to the point where I'd be getting mail from her and my mom thought I had fallen in with some internet cult or something and was whoring myself out across the country. I dunno, my mom's fucking weird.... But when you get Posh Spice dolls in the mail for your birthday from people you've never mentioned across the country... you have to explain these things away somehow... and those weird phone bill charges... I was 15 at the time, that's completely insane to think about.

For whatever reason, the idea to push this relationship legitimately into the sinful (or whatever they call it) never occurred to me. I legitimately loved this girl so much I didn't care what sort of relationship I had with her, just as long as we were talking everything was great. Also, with my embarassment about the whole concept of internet relationships (I was in high school for fuck's sake. My pants were an issue!) I didn't want anything like that on my plate. So I never pushed for anything, were were just floating along having a fine ole' time. I just assumed everything would work out OK.

So a few months into this, her friend Sara that she's mentioned a bunch (Think about Ghost World here, and that's seriously a legit close visual to have here. Alexis is Scarlett Johanssen and Sara was the Thora Birch) starts to pop online. She has a website with fucking zany HTML so I figure "damn, Sara's pretty fucking awesome" and there's not that unspoken friendship line like with Alexis, so I was essentially handed a diluted Alexis with no pre-conditions. Whatever built up shit I had probably came out on Sara instead of the intended target... Alexis had just started to actually have an outside life and shit, so our communications got a tad bit less frequent. Somebody had to suck up all that free time, and wouldn't you know it, Sara was around all fucking day. Had no idea why, but it worked out OK for me. They would both three-way-call me randomly some nights and I was the happiest boy in the whole of New England. At least 10 times superior to anybody I had around in real life, yes.

So Sara was around way more, mostly because she was way more of a shut-in than Alexis. And was home-schooled. (Wait, nevermind, I just realized they both were. Look, can you imagine a 15 year old boy from Vermont stumbling upon two hot home-schooled chicks in California and they were really enthusiastic about him and took the time to call him from time to time?) And with the three-hour time difference I started to run into her a lot more. At this point, by the end of the summer, this internet thing had gone from an enthusiastic occupation to a complete 24/7 absorption. Whatever phantom feelings I still had for Alexis got sucked up more and more by Sara and I just let it happen, despite knowing early on Sara was baaaad (crazy)news and considerably dumber and less fun than Alexis. I couldn't remember though, or maybe I just wanted to forget.

So that fall or so, I had a video-editing class in high-school and by contrast it made every other class I had completely worthless to me. On top of this, these events made me completely disconnected from everything that was happening in real life and this ghost existence with my san diego people seemed far more promising... I'll finish this later.

I'm gonna go ahead and say Jay-Z knows what he's doing 400 steps ahead of Rihanna, and despite Umbrella, he already heard Shut Up and Drive and Don't Stop the Music and that's why he got the fuck out of there before the first chorus was over.

Flirting with Disaster was on TV yesterday. I never read very much into the Lily Tomlin/Alan Alda characters as being completely realistic at the time. Though after reflecting on events from the storied life of myself, I'm gonna go ahead and endorse them. Hippies know very well what bad things shouldn't be feared. But what they have no conception of is what good things people need in their lives in order to remain happy. If they had any idea what it took to keep themselves happy, they wouldn't still be buying weed to this day. They wouldn't still be hoarding all those records they've been hoarding for years because those damned record stores just don't know what to pay for vinyl these days. They wouldn't pretend their fucked up daughter is a product of their peers when the truth is she's an obvious product of two self-absorbed drug enthusiasts who never got their shit together. They wouldn't spend whatever free money they had buying useless shit from thrift stores, when the amount they spend on such probably equals the amount they could spend on worthwile items their brains would focus on if said brain had any focus at all.