6

(Tuesday, 22JUN2010)
　
Since the high-and-not-high have been so seamless, it was hard to tell if I was high when I woke up.
I was awoken in the afternoon by the guy who makes all the beds. I had two roommates in this room, an old white-haired man and a business-man-looking Asian.
It’s hard to believe that they are or were soldiers. They don’t seem anything like the soldiers at ______ (where I’d met Joe, John, and Tank while deployed.)
The thing about these New York trips was when I planned them I had this idea that it would be like ______, all these solo travelers fresh off deployment, not knowing what they were going to do next.
After I showered and shaved I ran errands. I felt like a New Yorker doing such mundane tasks like going to Kmart and buying a pack of V-necks, a pack of boxers, and a pack of no-show socks.
I went to the Gap and stood in line for thirty minutes to get to the cashier, then went to Times Square to decide what I was going to do that night.
An attractive bald guy walked past me in the square, then turned and looked back at some billboard above my head. So they do exist.
Maybe I’m one of them.
I decided on the Addams Family, a musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuworth.
I walked back to the hotel and changed, carefully choosing what to take in the cargo pockets of my pants, and how. I rolled two joints, carefully put them in a zip lock bag and smoked one in an alcove outside the hotel, then smoked another while in the latrine of the theatre where the Addams Family was being performed.
It felt exhilarating to be so bold, to smoke something that obvious in a public restroom, then melt into the crowds of the theatre, undetected.
As I stood in the stall I didn’t finish the joint, because I had this feeling like I should go, so I did go. As I was passing the counter where they sold drinks I heard one employee mentioning to another how it smelled like someone was smoking pot in the men’s bathroom.
Good call leaving early, I thought to myself, proud of my instincts.
Again, or maybe as always, the world changed from being 2D to being 3D, the way I remember it before the age of twelve. I can see all the space between everything. The buildings outside in New York look like little painted boxes, even the skyscrapers, as miniscule as the buildings I built with Lincoln Logs as a kid.
Look how well you’re doing, I thought to myself, You’re keeping up and the highs aren’t wearing off in between, they’re just building on each other.
It’s like how I can will the Timelessness of the red pills at any time. You learn a high, then it does little for you, hence the red pills lost their allure after awhile.
It was like I was now permanently high off the red pills, so that I found their side effects an annoyance I didn’t have to put up with anymore.
Getting high is like a game, that’s why there has to be a space between each high, so the challenge of making the highs as seamless as possible with Life remains strong.
It was interesting to watch the musical while high. I couldn’t take my eyes off the shadows of the performers created by the stage lights and spot lights; like there was some secret in them, something more true than the physical; like the lights above the play Red, how they were what was mesmerizing about that play.
The physical world isn’t Real. See? Only the inside. Everything is opposite. You knew this during DeMob, going through the lines, reading Ralph Ellison, you saw that everyone was pretending to be Real. Manifesting themselves into the physical world.
It’s like when I was a kid and didn’t want to wear my glasses. I preferred the blurried version of the world. This is more true, I told myself.
R__ was always in the plays at church, hence seeing acting in real life always takes me there, the memories unfamiliar.
This play is a classic one: children’s humor full of sexual references. Timeless humor. I think about the ancients living this exact same moment, and I can see that the idea is true. I think more about the ancients, how incest is ancient, just read the Bible.
As far as evolution goes, the idea that you didn’t rape your daughters is new and radical. Many humans are still barbarians, still savages, still evil, still immature, Evolution takes so long it’s infuriating.
I noticed this about plays: they always seem to start out so simple, classic, even archaic, and as the show progresses it becomes more boastful, showing more and more amazing talent and skill.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that no matter how good the writing, directing, the planning, it’s the charm of the individual performer that pulls it off -- that performer’s How.
The pot is soaking in more and more. I didn’t know you decided your own destiny, your own fate. And you do so by reckoning with as difficult as possible, being as Good as you can, loving as much as you can, forcing the world astonishingly beautiful despite its horrific-ness. I didn’t know each soul was always truly free. This high was a good idea, b, if you can pull it off.
I wish I could find her, when I go back down South. She’s in the same town as J__ and Ms J__. Owns the same café, only in a different location.
I wish I could make love to her one last time, this time I would deserve her, be able to hold on to her.
I wish K__ had been good enough for me. I know the fact that I was in love with him for awhile was a fluke, a state of limbo that occurs when someone who knows no sexual boundaries makes a friend and naturally sees them in their most attractive light.
It felt like love feels; if I had already learned the boundary it would’ve been a platonic love. So I guess I have a sexual history that not only includes Trevor but also K__. If it wasn’t K__ it would’ve been someone else, someone had to teach me the boundary and how it works.
If I had been a little more mature we would’ve been friends like me and Adam. If I had been a little less matured I would’ve been that classic gay guy in love with his straight best friend. Even though K__ found me Good and good looking he already knew the boundary.
It’s like that episode of the Simpsons, Homer 3D, it’s just like that. The highs build on each other so well and are so seamless I understand that at some point the 3D will be permanent, and the 2D lost forever. The safe numbness lost forever.
I feel like I have to remember how the numb me thinks so that in the end I can explain myself to him. Hence all the writing ..
I didn’t know that Apollo and Dionysius, the Tough one and the Raw one, were both men, both masculine beauty.
It seems like one would be better than the other, more beautiful somehow. So what connects them? What makes them seamless and the same? That Masculine Beauty, the How.
It’s like a switch in my head:
Experience/Articulate,
Dionysius/Apollo,
Masculine Beauty/Masculine Beauty.
The thing so scary about Horrific is that more was required -- more Apollo, more Dionysius -- more and more and more of both until the Beautiful was realized in the face of Horrific. Him self expressed. All that More could destroy a person, all that trying, all that passion, all that discipline.
It’s when I’m in the Dionysius place that the abstract thoughts flow. Weird how the farther into the Dionysius side I go, the easier the Apollo work is. I guess the difference is Confidence.
Dionysius will get lost in stories and films and musically enhanced radio documentaries. It’s like a long time ago he got so hurt he found this way to feel without feeling, to feel passionate without passion. And Apollo has to stop time until Dionysius got healed again.
I can feel Trevor. I can feel his touch down my back and against the top of my now tensed-forever buttocks.
Is it rationalization when you tell your story and then soul fight it True?
What’s true remains true whether anyone fights for it or not, and if you were lying you’d be feeling more and more anxious not more and more calm.
These are the rules I learned during the last high.
My Real life. I’m not the writer, I’m the character, I’m the Him. It’s flipped. It’s just that the Apollo side of me, the Tough one, had so much on him, so much work to do. I had to stop time to accomplish it, before I let the past flip over, change forever back to the truth.
It’s like everything has to be rewritten, as opposed to re-lived, because I already lived it, I just forgot, becoming numb on purpose, even though there’s no such thing as numbness, because all you’re doing is locking it up in your memory, which at some point will be unlocked, and time begins again, and the past flips over to the truth.
I felt such regret for the numbness afflicting, not realizing that not only was their a way to be free of it, but that nothing was lost because I did live all the way, there was no stopping that, I just forced myself to not remember.
The book UnDoing Depression taught that emotions were physical, that they were equal and the same as the sensations you feel when you stub you toe -- there’s no stopping the body from feeling.
I didn’t know I was that much of a goner, that much of a ghost, between life and death, still choosing my fate. I did all that work for those few forever moments.
There’s two lives: one that starts with horrific and ends with beauty, and the one that begins with beauty and crosses paths with horrific as an adult. Both are natural. Maybe it wasn’t right to call myself a goner.
I know the rules -- beginning with the heartbeat -- that’s how I know if I’m high, it’s how I remain high. It has little to do with the weed. If I follow the rules I can sustain the high forever: the tense relaxation of Jeet Kune Do, and Chi; the heartbeat of Tolle. I ask myself, Are the memories strong? Strong enough to color your perception vibrant? Yes. Then you’re still high.
_We do not choose death, Death chooses us!_ Nathan Lane suddenly said, and my mind suddenly went there. Am I going to die soon? Once the challenge is over? The Life? I forgot Death was coming, not just with age but at any time.
It’s like I appreciate the Horrific now, respect its place, its job, in the scheme of things, have love for it.
It’s like the horrific gave me a chance to reset everything, redefine life, wrench it back to the truth instead of just conforming with what was already going on when I was born.
I thought the high would take me away from the words and into the physical, out of the clouds and onto the ground. But actually, the high took me into the words, until they came physical, them having always alluded to the true world.
I get why I don’t talk the words. It’s because what I’m saying is more appropriate written. More universal, more exact. If I spoke the words in everyday conversation the stories would seem specific to me, when I know I’m not my story. I’m from Horrific, same as everybody else, one way of another. I’m communicating truly because I’m writing anonymously.
That night as I showered I noticed my body and the reality of my testicles and remembered the Statue of David, and its representation of the young masculine form, and I understood we had switched places.
When I was younger I saw the statue itself as important, awe-inspiring, now I see that it’s what it was alluding to that was what was important and awe inspiring all along -- the Real life of a young man.
I moved slower after that, with more presence, more How.

__________