Surrealist Texas...

... is just normal Texas. Texas is the weirdest.
Christmas eve, and it's sunny outside. Not too far away, there is a tornado threat. Palm trees shiver under pine trees, which sweat in the heat. Every front yard is a light show, blinking LEDs making me paranoid and crazy. I watch Rudolph and his compadres take the same two-step-leap 30 times in the space of a minute. A deflated pile of fabric by day, an internally illuminated and suggestively posturing snowman by night. A huge truck, a huge truck, another huge truck.
The lake is probably uniformly one and a half feet deep. A white egret stands on one leg, and pounces at a fish. It's bounty shines green in the sun which is still above the horizon at 5 pm. The egret drops the fish half a foot before gracefully snatching it out of the air again at a better angle for swallowing.
The bicycle's can shift while you're coasting.
Weird shit.

Christmas Day
This morning I rode the bicycle that took my mother around Ireland 40 years ago. My father ran in front of my pulling huge branches out of the path. Sometimes we had to get off the path to circumnavigate entire trees. I was barefoot. We passed an athletic woman, in her 50s, with a sheep on a leash. She was reading her iphone. The sheep said "bah." That was all.

College Application Essay

Found this on Facebook as a Note. I should try to hunt down the other ones, though I remember being especially fond of this one. Forgive the pretentious title, I was young.

Once upon a time, a girl sat on a hill. She looked out over a city and watched the leaves tumble from trees in warm waves of decomposing life. She watched a crane, a bright yellow maze of steel bars, lift blocks into place. She saw mistletoe above her head, feeding off of the tree whose shade she took thankless advantage of. She thought of a friend who could, at one moment, be closer than herself and the next could be leaving without pause. She wanted to shout to the mountains and the blackberries how wonderful it was that they grew and moved. Instead she smiled, and prayed that if anything could be unstoppable, it was the cycles she observed. The parade of time, binding and unbinding, sleeping and dancing, was both below and above everything she’d ever experienced. She refused to forget that.

Pay attention to the fluidity of time. There are so many ways to get caught up in details, to detonate before the bomb is placed, to build reactions without fuses. Events are less powerful than trends, like currents overpowering fallen trees. I have never wanted to freeze time. The moments that I treasure are the rapids; when time is moving so quickly that it’s miraculous that I can even keep up. A frozen river is no river at all. All it has is hope to flow again.

No one analyzes a curve only by its endpoints. The derivatives are important through first, second, and n-th degrees until they’re zero again and again. The same is true of life. It’s terribly seductive to look at time as starts and finishes, instead of an unbroken flow of events. But any single second is an opportunity to begin or end, so any infinitely small instant is a potential point of inflection. This can get lost in definitions; motion is too easily forgotten.

Books Books Books Books

I went to Powell's City of Books with my brother, and picked out four books that I really wanted as Christmas presents. Mythologies by Roland Barthes, Naked Lunch, Le Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet (same guy as La Jalousie, the first book I read for Reed), and La Naissance D'un Pont by some lady. I have this vague memory of the title, so I think it will be good.
I also found a book of Italo Calvino's essays at Goodwill.
Then Christmas came around and I got a zillion other books.
There they are. This is intimidating.
The Electrical Reference is pretty exciting. It also teaches addition and multiplication. And how to bend conduits. I don't even know.
Most excited for Naked Lunch and Mythologies though.

Currently reading Dead-Eye Dick by Vonnegut and Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russel. So I need to finish those too. And I never finished the Monkey Wrench Gang...

Drugs, Writing, and Magical Realism

Look, I'm not an English major. I was almost a French major, but, hear me out.
I think I'm drawn to literature about drugs, and even writing about them myself, because they create a world that's like the real one, is the real one, yet is totally parallel. I've only read one book that fell under the genre of "magical realism" (Bless Me, Ultima and I was really bored by it) but I think there are some similarities.
In the really harsh definitions of magical realism, they demand that there is magic, but in this definition that I stole from wikipedia there is no demand for that : "...man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of another name could be called magical realism."
Junkie and Trainspotting demonstrate a fundamental poetic denial of reality. Heroin creates an alternative set of goals, an alternative hierarchy, an alternative mental state that exists inside of the real world. Hunter S. Thompson uses drug-addled adventures to create poetic predictions about the state of society and the future of the world. The American Dream is dead because while he hunts for it in this crazed state, the perfect way to find it, he can only see its shadow. 
In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test the Merry Pranksters are in a tribe within a tribe. Counterculture within counterculture within Culture. Their emotions and their desires are based on experiences outside of the mundane world, yet must take place within it. Their motivations are mysteries.
I guess I should read 100 Years of Solitude and maybe some Borges and then we'll see if the comparison stands. I've just been looking for a genre to put all of this into, and I'm coming up short. I know my brother got me Naked Lunch for Christmas, so I'm excited to continue my obsession.

Sleep Deprivation Trip

The night before my last night in Madrid, I couldn't sleep. I laid in bed. I took a 2 hour nap later that day.

The next night I went clubbing until 6 am. I slept some.

The next night I didn't sleep at all, I left for the airport at 2 am.

I was on a plane for the next 24 hours.

I arrived in Corvallis at night, unpacked from Madrid and packed for Country Fair, and  I left at 3 am. When I arrived I had early morning tea with my mother and started the day.

I don't know how to count the sleep deprivation. I usually just say 4 days. But it was at least 4 days, plus 9 hours of jet-lag, plus lousy (2-3 hrs) sleep the two nights before.

That night at the Country Fair, I went to that Ritz. Communal showers and a sauna left me clean and comforted. The only problem I felt was slight nausea, out of no where. We walked back towards camp through dark paths. It was a 15 minute walk that I had taken easily 100 times in my life. I didn't need light. 

But my mother's eyes were worse than mine. I told her that I found the lantern disturbing, its LED turning the forest into blacks and whites instead of golds and shadows. But she insisted that it was necessary. How could I argue, it was night. 

The lantern bothered me more and more. I walked in front of it to avoid seeing the source. I walked behind it to be more in the darkness. I found myself holding back tears. It swung as my mother walked, its path following her shifting feet and swinging arms. 

The nausea increased and I felt seasick. The whole world seemed to move with the lantern. I watched the forest rock in front of me. I walked far enough ahead to be out of reach of the light, trying not to betray my panic. The world calmed down again.

I became aware that I was in an altered state. The trees were making patterns that I had never seen before. Branches seemed to switch places, creating tricks of depth. The nigh-time gray scale faded from bright to dark, then bright things looked dark and dark things looked bright. The shadows stuttered.

At this point I took on a I'm-tripping sort of mindset, and decided to ride it out and see what it would bring. 

I got back to camp and wandered aimlessly. Everyone else was going to bed, but I said that I was going to walk the paths. Somehow I had trouble leaving, though. I milled around, a growing feeling of aimless fear joining my nausea. I walked one direction and saw the branches, still moving and switching and pulling the same tricks as before, but now it all felt very threatening. I walked towards the stage and saw the towering panels that made up the stage set. The negative space they created with the trees and the sky made me feel so small and helpless. The trees kept tricking, making shadows in ways I could not anticipate. This familiar world, where I lived for 2-3 weeks every year, looked completely different and beyond that, it hated me.

I started crying. Graham walked back from the bathroom and I asked brokenly if he'd ever tripped from sleep deprivation. He held me and told me about one time when he had seen dinosaurs in wall paper. Even though I felt safer with Graham, the environment was getting worse. Things seemed bigger. Light still made me sick. Graham suggested I go to sleep. When he said it, it seemed like the right thing to do. I got into my sleeping bag, laid down, and closed my eyes.

As soon as my eyes were closed, and my limbs contained in the sleeping bag, I felt my head fall lower than my body. I felt that I was hanging upside-down, underwater, in a coffin. I sat up, put my hand over my mouth, and held back a scream.

I switched my direction, so that my feet were where my head was and my head was on the other side of the tent. I no longer felt like I was hanging upside-down. I fell asleep.

The next morning, I felt better. But throughout the day, I would see the same branches, the same shapes that I had seen the night before and all of the feelings of fear and rejection would come crashing back down on me. It was somewhere between a flashback and being triggered. In those moments, I was mostly afraid that this place that had been home for so long would now always be a place of fear.

I wrote everything down in the form of a letter to my friend Eric. I felt a little better. 

When I woke up the next day the place had lost its danger, and was back to being home.

Moral of the story, go to sleep. Also, sleep dep is a good way to have a bad trip.

A hard day

I woke up with a head full of dreams. As of tomorrow I'm going to start writing down everything I can remember when I wake up. It's like sitting through class without taking notes. So much thought and learning (of a sort) is lost by forgetting dreams.
I found out a high school classmate of mine died on the 18th. Josh Nelson. I didn't know him well, but he was in many of my classes, and I have a lot of memories of him. He had a very distinctive voice, and speech patterns too. In physics we were learning how to counterbalance something heavy with something light. He was our heavy. He sat in a leather harness for a long time, until he turned green and threw up on the classroom floor, at which point he was removed from his hanging position. He was a great runner, and brilliant kid as far as I knew.
It reminded me of Levi Duclos, who died over winter break last year. Again, someone I didn't know well, but who was still in my life somehow.
I can't imagine what his friends are going through.

Now I am somehow supposed to gather the courage to work on Paideia. I have been. It's going slowly but surely, I guess. I've been spinning fans to Pretty Lights "Out of Time" when I take breaks. My arms are tired but I feel myself getting closer to the -flow- that firedancers talk about.
Tonight I think we're going to the Country Fair for a solstice party. I hope that being there can clear my head.

My dream last night.

I didn't write this one down right away because it was too dark and I didn't want to rethink it. It wasn't a nightmare, but I woke up breathing really heavily, and I was pretty emotionally involved in it, though not really scared.
There's some vague stuff I remember about a grocery store... but the important part is in a white VW van like I used to have. My friend Jordan had just killed a man. He'd shot him. Somehow the bullet had also injured Boots. Someone mentioned that it had hurt his hands, to which Jordan replied "there's not much of them left" he seemed emotionless, but also so hurt by it all. My other friend was drinking hippy tinctures like they were booze. He was trying to get drunk. It seemed so silly to be trying to get drunk off of healing liquids, especially when something so dark was happening.
He walked down the stairs to the basement of the van (classic dream architecture.) Then I woke up.
Maybe tomorrow I'll write up the crazy one about the kid I'm silly-crushing on. For now my eyes hurt from too much computer today.
It feels good to have written so much.

Christmas dream: I compete in FPS again and totally fail. The boy calls me and asks if we can film ourselves having sex in positions that look like one position but are actually others. I go to a movie theater and he's there with some other girl. He talks to me, goes over and kisses her, and talks to me again. Subconscious jealousy? Hope not.

The Rhythm of Life or and Explanation of the term "Mental Breakdown Wednesdays"

This semester there was a special rhythm to my life. Namely, I would work on Sunday night, and do little on Monday except go to class, and maybe get a head start on homework for Wednesday. On Tuesday, I would read all day for a class on Tuesday afternoon, then I would do a problem set, study for a quiz, and prepare for lab. That's a long day.

By Wednesday, I would often have some caffeine, and I would be spent from Tuesday. I'd be in class from 10 am to 3 pm or later. Then, I would be tired and crazy. 

These nights would often end in me graffiti-ing a bathroom, telling one of my closest friends I had a crush on him, taking off my shirt and doing handstands, laying on the floor in the GCC and grumbling, or sewing a colorful pouch wherein to put a confession of infatuation. Very rarely would I get work done on a Wednesday unless it took place in the early morning.

Then, on Thursday, I would read all day for French that afternoon, then do a math problem set and a physics problem set. On Friday, I would experience similar feelings as Wednesday but there were socially acceptable ways of taking out that frustration. Like, getting shitfaced or dancing all night.

Anyways, this rhythm basically defined my life and mental state. I thought it should be immortalized.

You may notice that my Sociology reading is not budgeted anywhere. I don't know when that happened, but it usually did. Usually during the hours of 5 am to 8 am on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I guess.

Everything is darkness, and what isn't darkness is fucking Fluorescent lights.

Finals week was insane. Freshman year was nothing like this. Nothing. I'm going to try to describe the mind-fuck I experienced in its totality.
It all started at Spring-Fall Thesis Parade. It was lovely and I kissed everyone and drank lots of champagne, but specifically I slept with a friend (the boy from Benzos) and told another friend that I had written him a note on one of my many "Mental-Breakdown Wednesdays" that said "you are the most beautiful person I have ever met" and was in a little pouch I sewed and beaded.
They are housemates. Don't worry.
I gave him the note to much heart-pounding and awkwardness. Actually, all that happened was I was working on a Soc project in the ETC, and my partner happened to sit right across from him. So, we did the project and I happened to have the note in my pocket because I'd been planning to deliver it eventually... so I set it on his desk and said "This is for you I'm leaving." He said "Thanks" and smiled a little bit as I walked out. I probably shouldn't have looked back. His smile is incredible. I had an entire dream where all I did was try to describe his smile. This blog deserves a few dream journal entries, they've been good lately.
As for the other guy, we had sex again a day or two later and then the night before I left he came over just to cuddle, which was interesting. I really like him too, I just haven't had 8 dreams about him. We're closer friends though, by a long shot.
So I was dealing with all of this "what's he gonna say?" "what does he want from me?" "will this work" "why am I sleeping with my friend when I'm crushing on his housemate?" "why am I so attracted to ALL of the anarchists? They're dirty and weird..." going on while I had the hardest week ever in terms of school work.
Entry on the hardest weekend, now entry on the hardest week. This is a jolly fucking journal.
In a lot of ways, it was awesome.
I did a Soc final on Friday of reading week. I had kinda let myself go in that class, so I did a lot of studying for it even though it probably didn't require 8 hours of studying and 4 hours of testing.
Then I studied for Multi. I copied out all of the definitions, theorems, and proofs that we were supposed to know. It was six pages double sided. It felt incredible, because as I went through them I understood them. It wasn't that I had memorized them, it was that after all semester of problem sets and classes and quizzes and tests I had internalized enough math that it wasn't about memorization. I could understand these concepts because I understood math better. I could have choked on the test and still been proud and satisfied because of that. The test went okay.
Physics. I studied hard, and had something of a similar feeling as in math. Ordinary Differential Equations are my bitch. Waves and certain other sillinesses are not fully understood. But I think I got the important stuff, and I'll review the rest.
The test was bullshit. I had the math test from 1-4, and then the physics from 6-10. I left at 8:30. I was done. There was nothing else I could do. But everyone else stayed and kept working, even though the professor had told us he didn't expect us to take the whole time. Luckily, I had a bottle of champagne in my pocket and was able to start drinking about 30 seconds after walking out of the building. As planned, I walked into the canyon and yelled "I have of late but wherefore I know not [...] Man delights not me, no, nor women neither though by your smiling you seem to say so" into the calm darkness. I'd had that monologue stuck in my head all week.
Followed my friends around, smoking mugwort angrily, and proceeded to find out that everyone else had as much trouble with the test as I did. They just sat through it and checked their answers. I refuse to torture myself for nothing. I do not apologize.
Then came the french paper.
I slept in the next day, as I had earned it. By the time I got out of bed, I had 28 hours to read the last 30 pages of Proust, and write a 7 page paper in french about the prose rhymes in the book. I had already read about 80 pages of theory on them, and the other 200 pages of the book. Also, I had a thesis, and had put a lot of thought into it.
So I thought, no problem.
I finished the book at fucking 6 pm, leaving me 23 hours. Proust is hard to read, alright. Also, the phenomenon of Reed Releases started during finals week and wasted a lot of my time. They're confessions of love/lust anonymously posted on tumblr and facebook. They're frequently really awkward and juicy. Especially when everyone is to stressed and tied up in themselves to actually interact with anyone. Finals week was a perfect time for shit like that to catch on.
Anyways, I panicked a little bit, and had to go to the ETC. I still didn't feel okay, so I went to Em and borrowed her empty cigarettes  and her mullein and lavender. I rolled almost 20 mugwort, mullein, and lavender cigs, of which I smoked at least one an hour for the next 14 hours. I also gave some away. The probably saved me. Finally, I went back to the ETC where I got something of an outline worked out and typed up all the quotes.
At 1 am I laid down in bed. At 2 am I thought maybe I could knock myself out with Death Note. In retrospect I should probably have watched something less TOTALLY AWESOME.
At 3 am I facebook chatted the boy from Benzos, who was still in the library. I decided that if I wasn't sleeping, I may as well be working. On the way back to the library I ran into a few friends who were going home. They thought I was crazy.
When I walked into the new pit Hugh laughed. I sat down and opened my computer, and he left his to sit next to me. He pulled out his fat sharpie that he uses for tagging and wrote FML on my arm. It still hasn't washed off. I laughed. Then I wrote.
The chunk that happened between 3 and 7 am was the best. It was about 50% of the essay. At 6 I started crashing. I went to the Stim table where this kid who's name is weird and I forget it all the time asked me if he could buy whippets. I said "yes, gimme an hour, I wanna do a bit more work." At 7 I was really hurting. I thought maybe whippets were an appropriate study drug in this case. No one else agreed, but it made sense to me. I went to the Stim table again, and we went back to my room. He paid about 50 cents a pop, which is pretty generous on my part, but I was gonna use his cracker so I didn't really care.
We went up to the second floor of the library, just outside of my math classroom. We took turns, sitting on the floor with little blue cartridges piling up between us. The hum final was about to start, and one of the cool freshmen walked by us trying to find a good place to do the test.
The guy was really paranoid, so we hid everything every time we heard footsteps. Still, she's pretty smart.
"Are you doing whippets?"
".... yes. do you want one?"
"Uh, no thanks, carry on."
We did. I had my first really dissociation experience on the ground up there. I closed my eyes, and I felt totally a sort of spinning. I opened them and the world did not appear to spin with me. My legs stayed splayed, unperturbed. I closed my eyes and felt the same spinning. Not a dizzy spinning, just an alternative stillness that had a bit more wiggle to it. And I felt that that space was where I wanted to be.
I did 5 whippets there, and then we went our separate ways.
I got the boy and Hugh and went to buy them breakfast. One of the Commons workers with whom I have a rapport asked me how I was. I laughed and acted like a crazy person. I wonder what he thinks of me.
Eating breakfast was fun. I mostly sat in a sad ball, laughing at what Hugh and boy said. Dylan came over and sat with us, being sad about his finals. GabeJake came over too. He had somehow confused the schedule and missed the math final Tuesday, so he was taking it on Thursday. He was also a bit perturbed. The vague happiness that sticks after a few whippets pulled me through.
I did some more work, but the whippets wore off. I went back to Chittick with Strugz Browne and did 3 more whippets. I also spun my fans a bit, which calmed me down.
Back to work.
Look, the essay happened. It was pretty good, in the end. Maybe I'll post it here after its graded, so I can look back on it. Some of my other essays are lost to dead computers, which makes me sad.
Fuck, finals week was crazy hard.
That's basically all I wanted to say.

Benzos

My best friend took benzos a while back.
We were heading to a party. She ran off with my friend's dog while we tried to cross the street. I made sure someone was going to be with her.

I got bored of the party, and went back to campus. I ran into her, and Lyle, and Ben. I think I would describe their reaction to her behavior as "bemused." Anyways, she was moving as if all of her limbs were weighted. She was slurring her words and seemed unaware of her impact on the environment.
We waited in ODB while Ben and Lyle did something, lying on the floor. "I'm taking another one" she said. I asked what the recommended dose was, how many she had taken already... It had only been an hour since she'd first dosed. "I'm planning to take all of them tonight," she said. Her friend had sent them in the mail. I trusted him to give her the right dose.
She didn't seem happy. She didn't seem sad. She seemed in touch with her emotions, in the kind of way that lets them boil over before they're completely processed. But her emotions often get stuck in the processing stage. It seemed alright. She didn't want to remember, she said. That's why she took them.
We went to the GCC, because Lyle and Ben had things to purchase at Homer's. One of the rooms was still recovering from some kind of administrative Event. There were cookies, soda, fruit and water still sitting out. The tables were all covered in cloth, and the crumbs of whoever had used the room. There were still vases full of flowers.
Perhaps the most beautiful part of the night was right then. Lyle and Ben had departed to watch a film, and my friend and I stood alone in the room, watching our classmates walk by unawares of the treasure we had found. We could hear the hullabaloo of campus on a Friday night while we nibbled on our reclaimed loot. I stuck elements of the centerpieces in my hair, mostly roses and other blossoms. It  was pinned in such a way as to accommodate many of them, and my head felt heavy afterwards. I wanted to put some in her hair. "Only the ugly ones," she said.
We left. She had wanted to escape campus, and also talk to a boy who she worried had feelings for her. We sat, waiting for the night bus in Eliot Circle. She leaned on me, her head drooping and weaving from side to side. I held her. When someone walked by in the distance she yelled "WHY DON'T YOU REALIZE HOW SMART YOU ARE?" Impassioned, she continued this train of thought. "Why don't Reedies realize how smart they are? They're so stupid for not realizing it." I think she vented a lot of things that she'd been holding in.
Then things got a little darker. She took the last pill. She couldn't remember taking the other ones, and was disappointed that there was only one left.
We were talking about her happiness. She was unhappy at Reed. I said I didn't know how to make her happy here. She said that happiness wasn't the most important thing, especially here. I still thought it was important, and I thought that it would make everything else easier.
This conversation continued. I said "I love you so much." She said "You don't love me enough." We were quiet for a while while I cried. "Are you crying?"
"Yes."
"Oh." I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was to the effect of that was not the intention, or that's too bad, or I'm sorry.
The night bus came. She talked to the driver. He asked what kind of benzos she'd taken. "It ended in -azepam," she said. "They all end in -azepam," he laughed. Liana came, and was entertained by her uncoordinated, enthusiastic thoughts. She flopped around the bus. She refused to wear a seat belt and fell on the floor. She invited herself over to the house of some people we didn't know who were riding the night bus home. We explained that it wasn't a party, it was their home.
She asked me to marry her, seriously. I said I couldn't. She asked why. I said we were too young and it wouldn't work. She was unsatisfied with that answer.
We dropped Liana off at the HoL, and my friend was going to go with her. I thought about leaving her and just riding the night bus back to campus. I decided to make sure I felt comfortable with the level of supervision she was going to get.
Walking up the stairs to G's room, she said "I want to die." I freaked out and she laughed. No one else heard. She also asked me to marry her again. I said the same thing.
She fell asleep in G's bed. I decided that was safe. I walked home.
I walked back, taking the long way on Ceasar Chavez that would let me walk down Unicorn Trail (previously known as Rape Trail) to get home. I like it. It's dark and small and feels like my nighttime walks in Corvallis.
My path took me by the Hotboxxx. They were having a party. I thought about just going up, and joining them. I decided I was too emotionally fragile to crash a party, even if I was friends with a few of the people who lived there.
I walked home, and sat in Chittick. Jordan was there, and the common room was full. They were loud and happy and frivolous and I liked the idea of escaping into that. And I did, in a way. I didn't think about how my best friend had just told me that, at the very least, she was having suicidal thoughts. That she felt so alienated. I didn't think about it, but I still felt it.
I had texted a friend at the Hotboxx earlier, and he finally responded. They were not going to be watching the gay marxist porn he had promised me, but I should "vien rendre visite" anyways. I stuffed 40 whippets into my purse, and biked up the hill.
He offered me booze but I wasn't really in the mood. I had a bit anyways and we sat on his porch and I listened to the conversation. The party had shrunk substantially, and now it was just a bunch of tired people lounging around in the cold. I used my coat as a blanket, and gradually sank into my friend. First we were sitting next to each other, then he laid down and I leaned against his legs, then I ended up in his arms. Everyone else was inside, by then.
We talked, and kissed. It felt so much better, to be wanted in this simple way. "Do you want to get out of here?" he asked. When we got up, his couch was covered in rose petals that had fallen from my hair. We walked down the Unicorn Trail, and then onto the Psych roof. We made out there, till he said "I'm too drunk for this," at which point he walked back home. There was another pile of roses where my head had been.
I realized I'd left my bike in front of the Hotboxxx, so I went back to get it. He was walking towards campus too. I walked down the trail with him, and then got on my bike to go home.

This was the hardest night of my semester, I think. Kissing made it a little better. But I also don't know how to tell him what that night was like for me. We've since gotten a little more involved and it awful not being able to tell him that.

The next day, a dormie came up to me laughing. He said he had a "funny story" to tell me. His friend had been at the Hotboxx the night before, and he said she'd been annoyed that I had been cuddling with the boy. They'd had a "thing" of some sort, apparently. Then she'd been really pissed when we went off together. He then said that she'd been just fine once the boy had told her that we'd just gone off to talk and that's all.
I CAN'T STAND IT WHEN PEOPLE LIE LIKE THIS.
I texted him something silly and dramatic: "Did you lie to someone about last night?" No response.
I went to Canyon Day and talked to a nice carpenter/teacher who was very interesting and nice, and I interviewed the canyon manager to write an article for the quest. I drank apple cider. It felt awful. I called him. I think I texted him more. I wanted to talk to his housemate who was at Canyon Day, who I really admire and would take advice from any day, but he ran off before I could.
Finally, I walked by the Hotboxxx on the way to Safeway, and the boy happened to be outside. I told him what my dormie had said and asked him why this would be the case. He said that he was surprised and would look into it. Later he texted me that he'd talked to her and she was "fine" and sorry that it scared me. Not really a resolution, but I felt I had done what I could.

And the same thing goes for my friend. She doesn't remember anything she said, or did, that night. So I can't ask, hey, why would you say something like that. I can't say, oh, are you feeling suicidal? I can't tie our life, and thoughts back to that time because for her it didn't happen.

Later that day she came back to campus. She was still acting different, but insisted that the effects were gone. That night she made sushi for a party. Many people were drinking but there if there is one rule for benzos it's DON'T DRINK BOOZE. She took a sip after we'd all told her not too. I wondered if that was also... I don't know.

She remembers making sushi. She says that she must have been functional if she could make sushi.

Organizer Deleuze

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Deleuze mélange parle des idées suivants : dire, c’est faire, le déséquilibre de la langue et les disjonctions, puis le but/limite de la langue et la tension y inclus.

Les connections entre tout ces idées étaient un perdu en l’effort de les lire, pour moi. Alors j’ai essayé de les organiser. 

Je ne suis pas tout a fait satisfait, sur tout parce que je ne comprends pas tout a fait le "but" ni la "limite." 

Aussi, entre chaque sphère, je trouve qu'il y a aussi une connexion inévitable. La, j'ai inclus seulement ce qui me paraissait désiré et conscient. Est-ce que la tension du langue est crée par l’auteur, ou vient du langue propre ? Je ne suis pas encore décidé, et cela changera beaucoup, je crois.

L’étranger et L’indigène

Le Horla commence avec un home très commode chez lui : « J’aime ce pays, et j’aime y vivre pare que j’y ai mes racines. » (1) Puis, un être vient de brésil lui déranger jusqu’à son suicide. Pour l’échapper, il faut seulement s’en fuir jusqu’à Saint Michel, ou Paris. Quand il n’est plus à sa maison, son cocher souffre à la main de l’être, alors c’est évident que l’être reste à la maison, sauf que son influence parait plus grande quand l’homme s’échappe à la bibliothèque puis se trouve retiré à la maison.

 C’est bizarre qu’il soit toujours en train de décider si ce sont des hallucinations, ou bien un être hors de lui. Cela vient soit de l’étranger ou soit tant proche que ce soit de lui-même. Au même temps que l’être vient d’ailleurs, il se sauve par se déplacer. Pourquoi cet être trouve-t-il des racines plus fortes que celles du narrateur ? Quand le narrateur se regard dans la glace, il voit son image supprimé par le Horla. Le Horla lui a enlevé de sa vie. Il est un conquérant de terrain, d’une manière.

Quand le narrateur détruit sa maison, il coup les racines. Puis, sa raison pour le suicide est qu’il ne peut plus s’échapper. Mais je crois qu’il faut se suicider parce qu’il n’y est plus. Cet être parfait lui a remplacé. 

The Innocence of Self Prejudice

Ourika says that she doesn't remember much from the time before her rescue to France. She doesn't mention seeing any racism apart from what was directed at her. She alludes to gazes of disdain, and there is the one instance that suggests that she has no future. Still, her exposure to racism is almost nonexistant. In fact, especially for the time period, it's she is unusually sheltered.
But it tears her world apart regardless. She sees herself as ugly, and loses all hope. This first struck me as a remarkable internalization of... what? Her treatment? There's hardly anything external motivating this crisis, as far as I can understand.
What it seems to come down to is isolation. She speaks about Charles's unilateral relationship with her, which diminishes her own secret by not even guessing that it was present. Her moments of connection occur when she feels that someone relies on her. But she can't rely on anyone. She calls the family she lives with her "protectors." This implies a separation between her and them, and by extension her and the real world because they protect her from it.
Her race takes on a role beyond her. She belongs where she is in every way except that she is black. Race creates her isolation, which creates her unhappiness.
This race problem is strange, because it seems to come from her alone.

Never Let Me Go

I just had this weird flashback to the movie Never Let Me Go. I think my reaction to that movie was the strongest I've ever had. After it was over, I cried for half an hour. Not tears falling gently down my cheeks cried, but uncontrolled sobbing cried. I thought about killing myself. It seemed like the only thing to do. There is always someone exploited, always a way to sell out and profit from other people hurting even harder, always naive hope. I saw the people's organs like mines in the Congo. Weird, to dehumanize it, in retrospect. But it's all so real.
Anyways, just a weird snapshot from the past. I kinda want to watch it again. Maybe subjecting myself to emotional trauma is a good way to become a better person.

Renn Fayre Office

Monday in the Renn Fayre office, lookin' at tumblr porn and planning a week long festival of knowledge in the room that generally hosts the preparations for a three day bacchanalia. IRONY. Well, kinda. In another sense, Renn Fayre is also a celebration of knowledge. A celebration of surviving the knowledge.
This weekend was unusual. Some dormies did an endurance audiobook project in the Chapel. They read As I Lay Dying for 5 hours straight. They thought it would take longer, but it was still great even if they didn't go totally crazy. I brought some butcher paper up and planned out a potential vaudeville show for Reed Arts Week. I hope it's not pretentious. Amendment: I hope it's not too pretentious. I have this image of people dressed like children pretending to be pirates on a raft. They're lured into deep water by mermaids in police hats. The mermaids aren't singing, instead they sound like approaching emergency vehicles. My rotating red light is on.
Sirens, get it.
Anyways, the atmosphere was really cool. I took some video for them, and fetched a sandwich.
Then, Edith and I went off to watch a movie with her Man-Toy. It was about Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Mumford and Sons, and the Old Crow Medicine Show going on tour on a train. It was a private showing in the theater, just 6 people. There was enough sentimental americana on screen to fatally wound any devout cynic, but there were no casualties.
Later that night we were going to go to the Zappa dance, but then we were too tired so we laid in bed. At 11:30 ish, Edith got a text from the Man-Toy suggesting that we go to a "Truly Epic" show after party at his house. How could we resist?
We spent a while getting dress, and then we were joined by some other kids. Sisu carried us valiantly up to NE, and we listened to bluegrass. Funny moment:
I say to Wyatt "how about that bluegrass huh?" He says "That's not bluegrass" I say, "Um... what is it then?" "Back Yard Hip Hop Shit."
There were bluegrass bands inside. He was talking about the people rapping by the fire. Situational humor, but I will laugh about it rereading this.
On Sunday I got out of bed at noon. Then I went to Page of Cups at Backspace. Jesse Lane opened for  them, and he was really good. Page of Cups had a lot less energy than I had seen them have before, but I still love their songs so whatever.
Then Edith, Em, and Lauren showed up as they were finishing and we went to a bluegrass show and ate calzones and pizza. Edith and Em ordered "elixers" since it's an "elixer bar" and they had all kinds of weird combinations of nettles and bilberries and lavender and things. They were FANTASTIC though. I don't know what they used to sweeten it but it was taaasty.
Anyways, not a lot of work got done but I'm still sick so I don't give a fuck.
Happy almost-end-of-the-semester slump. It was riding right on the heels of the mid-semester slump. Bullshit.

Rien, Existé.

En fait, je n’ai pas trop pris de cette partie du livre. Les choses plus grands son ce que je trouve possiblement valeureux.

Mais, je suppose que l’influence d’Anny sur la perspective due narrateur est intéressant. Elle vit hors des désires humains, et cherche une perfection du fantaisie. Les hommes sont des utiles pour créer ce qu’il faut. Leur raison d’être est basée sur ce projet hors d’eux même.

Le narrateur parle de sa vie à Bouville comme vivant hors de lui, avec Rollebon qui lui supprime. Mais sa révélation semble tout changer, et d’un coup il faut se comprendre d’une autre manière. Quand il cherche hors de lui, comme avec la racine, tout valeur devient complique.

Alors quand il est laissé par Anny, qu’est-ce qui change ? Il ne s’attache plus a elle, et il sent une liberté. Mais juste avant il croyait qu’ils avaient eu les mêmes pensées, au sujet des instants parfaits et les aventures. Mais son révélation n’est pas l’aventure, et il n’a pas le même avis qu’elle. Avant de partir pour Paris il avait une sentiment d’aventure, et il n’aurait pas le même avis qu’Anny sauf si elle vient d’écraser l’idée d’aventure elle même.

Voilà peut-etre quelque chose de valeur :

Il semble que Roquentin a besoin de suivre. En partant de son vie d’aventurier, il suivi son ami, si je me rappelle bien. A Bouville, il a suit Rollebon. Avec l’Autodidacte, qui trouvait en lui une sorte d’inspiration, il n’en pouvait pas réussir d’etre son modèle. Une fois en Bouville il a suit son sens d’aventure meme, toujours suivant jamais conduisant. Et quand il n’a plus rien a suivre, il trouve l’existance.

La Révélation

Avec le narrateur, puis l’Autodidacte, on a lu deux histoires de révélation philosophe. L’Autodidacte est humaniste et socialiste, et le narrateur est existentialiste. Mais celle de l’autodidacte venait quand il était entourait du monde, et il le sens encore quand il regard des autres. C’est hors de lui de cette manière. Encore, quand il revenait de la guerre, il se sentait en anomie avant de trouver les Socialistes qui lui donnait un group et une codification déjà fait.

Le narrateur était seul en se découvrant. Il lui fallait des expériences, le sang coulant, la main spécifiquement qui existait. Encore, tout n’est pas rangé. Sur le banc et aux jardins, il a encore des soucis sur ce qui existe, qu’est-ce que c’est la fondation d’exister etc.

On voit une contraste avec L’Autodidacte qui voit son compréhension comme clair et immutable, et puis le narrateur qui n’a pas tout deligne. Ici le nom « autodidacte » est ironique, parce-que en fait il comprend le monde avec l’aide des autres, et le narrateur fait son éducation lui-même.

First Ever Fire Fan Burn

I burned. It wasn't particularly good, because I was massively afraid. Fire makes NOISE. That much fire makes lots of noise. Another thing fire produces is HEAT. Toasty.
I spent 3 hours sewing wicks on instead of going to a protest. I hope they last forever. I hope it was worth not getting pepper sprayed. It probably was.

La naissance non-voulue ou la suicide non-accomplie?

Quand le narrateur essaye d’arrêter ses pensées, il le trait comme s’il ne voulait pas naitre. Mais en fait, s’il existe après cette décision qu’il existe, il existait avant, non ? Alors ce n’est pas une arrête de naissance, mais une suicide. Peut-être parce qu’il n’a pas encore su que ces pensées étaient son existence, ce n’était pas un suicide. Mais pour moi, il semblait comme un suicide.

Alors il n’a pas arrivé à arrêter son existence par volonté. Cela enlève le pouvoir de choix. C’est normale pour cet homme qui ne se contrôle pas, qui attend la nausée ou l’aventure sans le prévoir ni le demander. Mais d’arrêter son livre, est-ce un choix ou une nécessité ? C’est cela qui mène le changement. Il ne vit plus pour Rollebon. Est-ce qu’il a décidé de l’abandonner, ou bien il a fallu l’abandonner et il ne pouvait plus. Cela est peut être un problème de compréhension de ma part, parce que pour un moment je ne savais pas s’il l’a abandonné ou fini. Mais, s’il y avait une naissance, je crois que c’est en abandonnant le livre, non en  voyant qu’il ne peut pas arrêter ses pensées.

Reading About Things That I Have (Never) Thought

My french lit class this semester has been in sharp contrast to my summer reading. Over the summer, I read adventure stories. On the Road, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Bonfire of the Vanities... adventures. And novels about heroin: Trainspotting, Junkie, a little bit of Requiem for a Dream before the library demanded it back. I've taken drugs, I've gone on adventures, but the pleasure in reading about other people's experiences with these things lay in the differences of their approach. I do not recall any point in On the Road when I thought "of course! I would have done the same thing!" or a part of EKAAT where I would have felt the same way as Tom Wolfe without his deep involvement in the local zeitgeist. Bonfire of the Vanities was even more difficult, but that's to be expected since the master status of all of the characters is ass-hat.
And the books about drugs... they were like fairy tails. People who felt so very much and so very little at the same time. People who looked for absolute simplicity because the smallest twist was a knot in their stomach. A lifestyle that rejected all of the pressures I felt. Foreign in the extreme.
And now this french literature: Le Pere Goriot by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Du Cote de Chez Swann by Proust, and now La Nausee by Sartre. It's so close to me. I've lived and thought it all before. Maybe not in so many words, but sometimes in many more words. In pictures and hours of meditation and so many places and feelings. Before our first discussion on Le Pere Goriot I laughed with my friends that they thought all of the characters were silly and unrelate-able. My problem was that I identified with them too much to see the story. Proust, I was reading at 10 pages an hour. If I was lucky, I was absorbed in his ruminations. If I slipped though, I read the book as poetry, looking for rhymes and rhythms and getting lost in the SOUNDS so thoroughly connected that when the syllable came along that concluded the phrase my heart leaped with gratification. There it was, what I had been waiting for, handed to me. And now Sartre. He writes about adventure... And about loneliness, about how the perfect memories of places you've been a thousand times and are totally familiar fade to nothing. How when you tell a story it's like you remove yourself and all of the honesty from the situation...
There's so much.
And I'm so tired. The physics problem sets have been deadly, of late. Hardly sleeping. Mostly reading.
Don't even get me started on the political sociology we've been studying.
David Griffiths gave a lecture about the Higgs Mechanism today. Barely understood any of it, loved all of it.
I spin fans so much that even before I start each day my arms are sore. At the end of Looking For Love But Not So Sure by Pretty Lights I spin as fast as I can in the horizontal plane above my head and under my arms, sometimes the fans follow each other and sometimes they stay on one side of my body and alternate up-down-up-falldrop.
I'm consumed.

Le Passé et les histoires

Comment juger la valeur de la vie? Dans la scène du bar avec le docteur et M. Achille, le narrateur semble pouvoir juger leurs valeurs de leurs apparences et leurs actions. Mais pour lui même, il regard toujours a son passe demi-perdu. Il pourrait raconter ses histoires, pour gagner le rang social du docteur, mais il trouve que ce serait malhonnête et en plus il en a mare de raconter ses histoires. C’est comme si son passe ne lui appartient pas, et cela le fait ne plus exister.

Alors sa visite imminente avec Anny fait tout cela moins clair. Son passe lui cherche, et lui revient, d’une manière. La lettre était écrite de Bouville même, alors elle était plus proche qu’il ne pourrait jamais croire. Le symbolisme d’Anny comme le tout de son passe est peut être trop, mais sa manière de l’oublier est aussi semblable aux histoires. Il a oublier les détails, en gardant ce qu’il pouvait, jusqu'à il y avait que sa sourire, puis cela aussi est parti. Alors il pourrait facilement raconter son « long corps » mais il ne le tient pas. Il l’a oublié, mais il le garde d’une façon aussi. Puis, peut être tout reviendra, ou deviendra plus présent.

Pre-Game Halloween/Too Good To Be True

Halloween is on a Wednesday this year. That means that there's no one weekend that it is closest to. Instead, there are two weekends that it is closest to. So, this weekend there was a cool party, and next weekend there'll be a great party. Love it.
Chittick started the evening early. The day before we had driven out to a pumpkin patch and bought some gourds. I had mostly ridden around on the hay ride. It was meditative. I needed some meditative after the week I'd had. Papers and problem sets and no sleep... It was harsh.
Anyways, at around 6 our common room was full of food. I had just walked back from a very pleasant 3 hours with a new comic series: DMZ. It's pretty solid in terms of art and writing, and makes me think about social responsibility which is always a good thing to ruminate on. Endless digressions. Endless garlic, too, that night. We ate a huge meal, followed by 3 pies (pecan, pumpkin, and apple) and washed it all down with fresh apple cider. There's nothing like a solid meal to start out a good time.
We costumed as well. Em wore a child's ice-skating uniform, the skirt of which she removed to make a cape. She was Princess Super-Villain. Edith had a lot of trouble deciding, but finally went as a prairie vampire, which I thought was awesome. Eric wore my stringy blue shirt and I painted tribal tattoos on one arm. He was a member of Weapons of Mass Distraction. Hilarious.
I was Delirium from Sandman. Dorky as fuck, but a great reason to buy a fishnet body suit. I wore an oversized suit-jacket and pinned all kinds of ribbons into my hair. Edith has the perfect gold-swirly vest, and I borrowed that.
But that's not the interesting part. We were bored waiting for the fun to start, so we drove to a coffee shop. Everyone there was looking at a computer or reading. We were a little out of place.
Em loves lavender, so I convinced her to get a lavender steamer and I got a lavender cremosa. They were both exquisite. It's strange, how the flavor of lavender changes so much when its hot, cold, creamy, smoked, smelled, etc. They're all special and different.
Our band of merry misfits headed out to wander the industrial wasteland/pleasant neighborhoods of SE Portland. It's quite a juxtaposition.
No one knew where they were except for me. "Where are we going?" they would ask. "OMSI" I would respond. "No we're not," they would say. But I just kept leading the way, and eventually we trudged through the drizzle and made it to OMSI and walked down the pier to hang out by the submarine. None of them had been before, and standing on the water in the middle of a big city is transcendental. I think everyone got a lot out of it.
On the way back, they were all convinced that we were lost. I promised them again and again that navigation is not that hard and calm the fuck down. On the way we found a wreath on the sidewalk and put it on a house. Everyone was still convinced that we were lost. In the end, we were a little fucked because the sidewalk we needed to walk down for the last 50 yards was closed, and our other option was to walk through a tunnel in a bike lane next to a highway.
We took the long way around.
Driving back, Ellie drove us a little bit out of the way to show us the school where she worked. On the way, we drove past a group of Reed anarchopunks, one of whom is devastatingly beautiful. I had a dream wherein the only action was me trying to find words to describe his smile. While asleep. My subconscious felt the need to work overtime just to figure out what is so goshdarn magnetic about it.
And it would not be quite so pathetic if I had not also had 5 other dreams about him. Ehem. Anyways. It looked like they were going to the Red Light party.
Back at campus, Em and I went to Harvest Ball where I ate my first candy corn of the season. That stuff is catastrophically delicious. Then we visited the SU dance, and skipped around until Edith found us to go to the Red Light. I told them I'd seen him walking there.
This is where it gets too good to be true.
Less than 5 minutes after arriving, we run into eachother. All he says is "I want to kiss you."
...
It was really nice too. I'm not sure how much kiss-description is too much (probably any) but... okay, there was this perfect little hesitation before our lips touched.
Corrine interrupted it because she wanted to make out too. It's really alright that she did though, because otherwise I would never have stopped. After they walked away, I shouted "YES" at least 3 times, and basically collapsed against a wall in ecstasy. You think I'm exaggerating. The rest of the party was mostly me dancing and dreaming about what had happened.
At 3 am I was done. Em and I went to sit on the swings for a bit first, and talked about becoming who we wanted to be. Then we went home, and I slept till noon.
The next day I mostly just daydreamed.

La Fragilité Dans La Nausée

Il me semble que la vie du narrateur est définie par les fragilités. C’est comme s’il y avait une bloque dans chaque arche qui s’enlève, puis tout se casse. Il traverse le monde, puis en un instant il n’en veut plus, et il n’est plus l’homme qu’il était. Il entend les paroles de la chanson, et la nausée s’en va. Les possibilités de tout changer sont présents aussi : « Il faudrait si peu de chose pour que le disque s’arrête » (41) Même si cette fragilité semble effrayant, je crois que le narrateur veut que les choses soient si simples. Il faut qu’ils aient une cause, ce ne peut pas être un procès. C’est comme ça qu’il peut simplifier la souffrance de Lucie par donner le blâme au boulevard. Si la souffrance vient du boulevard, ce diminue la puissance humaine, et la responsabilité humain aussi.

Writing A French Paper...

Is kind of a bitch. I should have done this over break.
On the other hand, I learned a great new idiom through my efforts: crossing the Rubicon. It means to take an irreversible step that reveals your intentions.
Cool, right?
Everyone has probably heard of this except for me.

25i-NBOMe Trip Report

Update: My school's health and counseling center sent out an email about how some people have died from 25i. Erowid will tell you the same thing. So, be aware that there are risks when you engage in risky behavior. This email was sent in the aftermath of someone taking probably 3+ tabs and running around naked punching windows and going to the emergency room. Anyways, be safe.

At around 11 am a little bit of card-stock and paper towel sat on my tongue. The taste was a special kind of bitter. My tongue numbed gradually, and I sat around waiting for the 25i to kick in.
The girl I was tripping with was feeling sick, so she went to lay down for a while. After having the papers in my mouth for about 40 minutes, my body started anticipating the trip. My legs felt weird temperature differentials, and mild tingling traveled around the surface of my skin.
About an hour after taking it, we went outside together. She felt sick enough that she decided to throw up. We're pretty sure that it was mild food poisoning and unrelated to the drugs. In the bathroom, we had our first visuals. The perpendicular white lines from the grout between tiles rose up to knee level and moved, shook, brightened into a mesh of light. Then, it turned into horizontal rain, still just drops of light, falling towards me and past me, still at about knee level. Em came out of the stall and also had some kind of visual associated with the lines. Right before we left, the horizontal rain suddenly started falling up, which was really disorienting and intense.
Em's come up was very abrupt. Almost as soon as we left the bathroom the grass was breathing for her, and she could "build new spaces" in the air. After sitting outside for a while, the grass started breathing a little bit for me, and I saw some geometric patterns in the conglomerate concrete. She saw "rivers" in the concrete, and saw shadows in the grass even though it was overcast and there weren't any shadows.  She also felt very cold, while I felt especially warm and shed most of my insulating clothes. Apart from the small visuals, I had an overwhelming desire to eat a spider that was crawling on my hand. So I did. I thought it would make me understand it better. I don't think it did. For the rest of the day, spiders were confiscated from me.
We moved locales, to sit under trees. We began in a bunch of orange leaves, lying around and talking with our friends. Her trip was pretty much in full swing. I still didn't see much unless I relaxed into it. I had trouble finding that mental state while stimulated by people around me. Finally, a bit more than a full hour after taking the first dose, I took another tab and ate the rest of the paper towel that it had been wrapped in. So, at this point I had 2 full doses, plus whatever had leaked off of what Em had taken.
After having the second dose in my mouth for a while, everything started shifting. I was sitting in the leaves and bees were flying all around me. The bees ended up with tracks behind them, dark shadows that followed them. It made it look like 5 bees were a swarm, and it was really beautiful. My hands  also had the shadows, as did other quick-moving objects. I found a leaf that was scarred all over. The scars began a time loop, making the leaf shrivel and shrivel but never fully die, and never really be reborn. The scars were just always getting deeper and longer. The lines on my hands did the same, as I held the leaf.
Our friends who weren't tripping left, and things got deeper. Eventually I swallowed the second dose, and we moved out of the leafy area. Standing in the middle of the lawn in front of ODB, I noticed that my perception of space was very changed. I couldn't tell how far away things were, or what size they were in relation to thing things around them. I couldn't tell whether they were in the same plane as other things, and sometimes trees or buildings or even people would seem nearer or further away. I didn't realize how different everything looked until Em showed me her "sobriety box." She'd been taking pictures of things with her iPhone, and I had teased her that they wouldn't look the same later on. She hadn't explained, but she was actually using it as a control for how she was seeing the world. Looking through the iPhone, everything looked like it's mundane normal self. Then I could see how fucked my perceptions of size and shape really were. It worked for both of us, which is interesting. At this point it seemed that the intensity of our trips were about equal. I saw the field of grass on a time loop just like the leaf, except instead of dying it was blooming. Flowers were growing. When I told Em, she saw it too. In the sky, I saw strange patterns in different iridescent outlines. The patterns closest to that style in the real world are the giant pictographs in the desert that can only be seen from an airplane. They were mostly random geometry, but sometimes I thought I saw Kokopelli in them. The trees looked like they were made of ornate Chinese dragons. They definitely wiggled. There wasn't any definition in the leaves anymore, and branches looked like whole creatures.
Hugh called to tell me that he had my car keys. The phrase had no value to me. I couldn't see the path of 'he has my keys and wants to give them to me.' At that point Em took the phone, thinking she could figure out what to say. She ended up just telling him that we were tripping. This was a symptom of future communication problems.
We stayed in the field for a while, and at this point the intensity of my trip surpassed Em's. At certain points I saw the world melt away and all I could see were the geometric patterns, even with my eyes fully opened. I tried to stay grounded, but I wonder what would have come of letting go.
Old people were going to a concert on campus, so we decided to stop scaring them by retreating to the canyon. We were going to pretend to be normal. I could not pretend to be normal without having a purpose, because without a purpose our choices made no sense in a rational world. And our purpose could not be to run away from the people, because then we would have failed our deeper purpose: not to scare them. Em couldn't figure out why I was having so much trouble. As we approached the blue bridge, I realized how distorted things really were.
The bridge is at least 50 feet long. It looked no more than 10 feet long. I had no more depth perception. Everything was made of purple, orange and green. Sight, smell, taste, and even some sound were all connected in a way. We called the flavor of the situation "dragon" early on, to simplify things. But in my head I called it Braze. Dragons are brazy though, so it works out. The canyon looked more tropical than usual. Leaves were larger in proportion to branches, and there was none of the pleasant northwestern decay that usually defines forested areas. Bark became shiny and pointed, fractal and growing. Spaces opened up.
At one point Em said that she saw the leaves on the water glowing. That made them turn into points of light on a glass surface, and suddenly the shapes started overwhelming everything else and my vision detached even further from reality. It passed, and I was back.
We were in Chittick for part of it as well. It looked like moss was growing out of the ceiling Growing out of the ceiling in weird paisley shapes. The cieling is made of fibres glued together and painted white, and they have no rhyme or reason to their patterns put on 25-i they looked ordered and teardropped and swirly. That was one of the last things to fade, about 12 hours into the trip.
I took a whippet, because I wanted to know what they hype was about. It didn't do much. But after asking to borrow a cracker, people got very excited.

~The rest of this post was written much later.~

Their excitement began a darker part of the trip. It made very clear that they were in a different realm than I was. I could not understand why they felt the way they did. They offered us all kinds of stimulus, one kid said "hey, let's take shrooms right now!" It was uncomfortable for me. I didn't want to be around sober people. But Em did.
The visuals faded, but didn't go away completely. I laid on the grass outside, while Eric spun poi, and Adam hula hooped, and Sean played guitar. Em stood over me nervously. Her visuals were gone. People kept asking her if she was done tripping. She had started to say yes, mostly yes, oh no, there's a little bit again... But she was gone. She looked afraid of me. We felt so far away from each other now that I was still tripping hard and she was not.
It started to rain and people moved inside. I didn't move. I laid in the grass and got wet. My friends were worried but all I wanted was to lay in the grass. Everyone went inside and I could finally start crying.
Even as I was crying, about nothing in particular but mostly about not understanding other people and feeling so far from them, I had a lovely little moment. I started laughing through my tears, because it was raining, and I was sitting in the grass in the Pacific Northwest while a boy played guitar and I hugged my knees and my dark hair got wet. It was so silly, so out-of-a-stupid-movie, so exactly what you'd expect... It got to me. I laughed and cried.
My worries became more acute. A friend who had taken 2 tabs of 25i the day before found me and was very worried. He took me inside. "Does anyone have a blanket?" he asked. "Don't get me a blanket, I don't need a blanket" I said. "it's not for you, it's for me" he said.
That hurt so badly. Here was irrevocable proof that I was so far removed from him that I could not understand his intentions even when they seemed so clear. He seemed fine, he shouldn't need a blanket. I looked wet, cold, sad, and helpless. Of course someone would try to get me a blanket. But no, I was wrong.
The idiot lied to me when I was in no state to deal with things that weren't true. In all fairness, he did it out of goodwill, but it still hurts to think about how awful I felt.
When he had the blanket, he gave it to me. I realized that he had lied and I was so angry. Then I sat in a corner and watched the wool of his jacket grow into strange patterns. I watched the hair on my legs grow into the same patterns, grow and then shrink.
While inside, where people were talking, I ran into a serious problem. Irony and sarcasm were totally inexplicable to me. Someone would say one thing, and mean another, and everyone else would understand and I would not. It was torture. I could see feelings, but then the words would contradict them.
But gradually I accepted that there were things I didn't understand, but I remembered what it was like to understand and I decided that I could rebuild it all.
My friend had told me to try spinning while tripping. I took the fans out to the front lawn, where I felt like no one would see me and I could ride out whatever was happening.
I talked to myself, and spun fans. I learned my favorite move that day, tripping at the end of the dusk. I had felt like the move was possible for weeks, but my arms kept tangling. It just worked itself out though. I can't wait to spin while tripping again.
The silhouette of my fans against the orange night sky stuck with me. I still associate that image with my trip as strongly as all of the other shit. We coined the trip "Stereotrypical" because of all of the paiseley and purple and orange and jungle-feelings. But that part was me alone working with myself. Laughing after all of that crying, and putting things back together again. Telling myself to be patient with myself. Getting my legs back again.
When I went back to Chittick, wet and tired again, Em was back. She had gone to the Hotcake House. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Apparently her trip had not been over either. At the restaurant with some of our dormies, she'd also felt very in touch with people's feelings, but she saw them expressing other feelings than what she saw. She felt suppressed anger and resentment. Paranoia is certainly part of this, but I honestly believe that the feelings that we saw that confused our interpretation of things were there. I think they were real.
Anyways, we holed up with my best friend and talked about it more. I was still seeing the patterns, I saw them until I went to sleep. My face didn't look normal until the next morning, but my friend said that the morning after his face had turned into a goblin, so I considered myself lucky.
I left out a few things, like confusion with hierarchies and seeing some people looking older, or younger. But that's the jist of things.
Would try again, would recommend. Then again, I get off on shit like putting myself back together again.

Les Rimes

Comme j'ai trop de midterms pour fair la lecture aujourd'hui, je vais fair un petit blog sur les rimes dont j'ai parle l'autre fois. J'ai copie le suivant de Project Gutenberg, et je vais montrer quelques parties ou je vois les rimes.

Enfin, en continuant à suivre du dedans au dehors les états
simultanément juxtaposés dans ma conscience, et avant d'arriver
jusqu'à l'horizon réel qui les enveloppait, je trouve des plaisirs
d'un autre genre, celui d'être bien assis, de sentir la bonne odeur de
l'air, de ne pas être dérangé par une visite; et, quand une heure
sonnait au clocher de Saint-Hilaire, de voir tomber morceau par
morceau ce qui de l'après-midi était déjà consommé, jusqu'à ce que
j'entendisse le dernier coup qui me permettait de faire le total et
après lequel, le long silence qui le suivait, semblait faire
commencer, dans le ciel bleu, toute la partie qui m'était encore
concédée (les ait, er, e sons sont plus dificiles comes ils sont "ubicuitous" mais si je cherchait un rythm aussi, cela aidera, je crois.) pour lire jusqu'au bon dîner qu'apprêtait Françoise et qui me
réconforterait des fatigues prises, pendant la lecture du livre, à la
suite de son héros. Et à chaque heure il me semblait que c'était
quelques instants seulement auparavant que la précédente avait sonné;
la plus récente (cela je ne sais pas si c'est un partie des trois avants)venait s'inscrire tout près de l'autre dans le ciel et
je ne pouvais croire que soixante minutes eussent tenu dans ce petit
arc bleu qui était compris entre leurs deux marques d'or. Quelquefois
même cette heure prématurée sonnait deux coups de plus que la
dernière (je crois que prematuree est lie avec derniere a cause du rythm. Mais c'est plus un instinct que de vrais raison.); il y en avait donc une que je n'avais pas entendue, quelque
chose qui avait eu lieu n'avait pas eu lieu pour moi; l'intérêt de la
lecture, magique comme un profond sommeil, avait donné le change à mes
oreilles hallucinées (cette schema de rime est tres populaire en rap francais, ou bien ce que j'ecoute.) et effacé (je trouve qu'il a des fois un sort de "echo" avec quelques uns. Une rime tres uni, puis quelque chose hors du rythm mais lie au rime.) la cloche d'or sur la surface azurée (ici il me semble que le rime revient en force. Avec efface, c'est un peu hors du place.) du
silence. Beaux après-midi du dimanche sous le marronnier du jardin de
Combray, soigneusement vidés par moi des incidents médiocres de mon
existence personnelle que j'y avais remplacés par une vie d'aventures
et d'aspirations étranges au sein d'un pays arrosé d'eaux vives, vous
m'évoquez encore cette vie quand je pense à vous et vous la contenez
en effet pour l'avoir peu à peu contournée et enclose--tandis que je
progressais dans ma lecture et que tombait la chaleur du jour (Ici des rimes separee par des autres rimes)--dans le
cristal successif, lentement changeant et traversé de feuillages, de
vos heures silencieuses, sonores, odorantes et limpides.

Voila, un peu de cette theorie. 

Lire Ce Qu'on Est

L’écriture de Bergotte fait que le narrateur essaye de faire « table rase » (141) de toute sa propre philosophie. C Il parle de petites instances de similarité comme des validations de tout son être. Alors, pourquoi ce désire de s’effacer avec l’écriture ? Enfin, il se trouve avec l’écriture. Ce n’est pas une question de se créer ou de se démolir. Comme avec la madeleine, tout y est déjà. Le narrateur dit a propos d’une circonstance comparable a sa vie que le « langage de l’écrivain rendait encore plus ironique mais qui était la même. » Alors, c’est plutôt une amplification qu’un établissement.

Alors, quand il apprend que Bergotte est un ami à Swann, sa première question est « Est-ce que vous pourriez me dire quel est l’acteur qu’il préfère ? » C’est la même question qu’il pose pour juger tout le monde. Cela montre une séparation entre l’écrivain et l’écriture qui n’est pas fait explicite avant.

L’effort de connaitre et vivre avec  seulement les opinions de l’écrivain est  d‘un coté, anathème. C’est plutôt qu’il veut que ce soient venu de lui, comme les souvenirs.

Aussi, je me sens un peu come théoriser conspirative à l’ instant, mais je trouve que les grands passages longues et compliques ont une rythme sinon une rime. J’ai écouté un peu de rap français avant de lire, et je trouve des similarités. Peut-être que je suis folle.