PhenethylTrypta
Bluelighter
Though finished, I never achieved what I sought to achieve with this one. I'm obsessed (as anyone whose read anything I've written) with cycles, and the symbol of the ouroboros in particular. This was a messy attempt at creating a hallucination/reality loop in a non-linear narrative, though nothing too choppy. It's actually fairly linear, minus the flashbacks, which I guess is what would make it non-linear. But in the end is where I make my attempt at the ouroboric reality/delusion loop.
Thoughts of gallivanting across America at great speed, jammed into a car shoulder against shoulder and up against a bulging heap of things we‘ve brought along--driven by the same impulse as Kerouac in the forties, as Kesey and the pranksters in the sixties, as the pioneers of the early nineteenth century even, whose tracks in the sandy desert and winding path through the valleys of the Rockies we follow today through Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California to the Pacific--whirl through my imagination kicking up layers of old dust, clatter and cobwebs and houses even like a mighty storm devastating the old habitual forms of my imagination. The vision has awakened me from my stale existence and shown me a childlike exuberance I‘d long forgotten, and lit me from deep within where I realize only now it has been so dark for so long.
It is the last time all of us will ever get together in that Chicago apartment and if I knew then what I know now then I’d have known that it was the last time we‘d all be together at all. Toby and Annie had lived in that second floor apartment above the Sprint store on Belmont for a year and they’d just broken the news to all of us not long ago that they were packing up and leaving for San Diego. In all honesty I wasn’t too excited for them at first. Toby and I were old friends, known each other since high school. We lived fast and with no regard or respect for the fragility of life in those early days. Some of those experiences took on a traumatic tone, which I can see now in hindsight has bonded him and I awfully close in ways unspeakable even between the two of us. We weren’t like the beat generation or the hippies or the punks. There was a suicidal note to our melody that rang dissonantly in the ears of most who heard it. But that era is long gone and we never wrote any famous book or invented a popular style of music. Our saga lives and dies with us.
Though as I was getting to about my feelings on the big move, I wasn’t quite thrilled. In fact, Toby and I had a falling out of sorts quite some years back, an event which neither of us to this day are able to quite understand. Despite our lack of understanding however, history is history and there was a period where we hadn’t spoke. It’s a funny story actually how we started talking again.
Toby, the last I heard, had been living with his parents in a town in western Illinois, closer to Davenport than Chicago, called Hampshire. Annie on the other hand, having broken it off with Toby, moved by herself downtown, and even had a roommate for a time, a male roommate as I recall. I was still in our hometown of Palatine living with my mother and my younger brother, Ryan. One night my girlfriend and I walked up the street to the grocery store as we often did and lo and behold there stood Toby and Annie who were actually approaching us at first unknowingly. I shouted something and they noticed me. Annie was receptive with her big eyes and cordial as usual (unless she had a problem with you), but Toby was acting stranger than ever. Instead of just being quiet or terse with words, he actually fled! He ran off into the store. I mean he literally ran away from me. So what did I do, I chased after him. I followed him as he ducked in and out of aisles trying to lose me, but come on, lose me in a grocery store? Though he couldn’t lose me as I’d found him quite quickly, he continued the awkward act of walking away. I cried after him, “Toby, what on earth are you doing? Why are you running away?” No response, he just continued to walk briskly away. I finally gave up and went back out to see Nancy talking to Annie. “What’s his deal?”
“I don’t know! He’s acting so strange.”
“I know. I don’t get it. Is he mad at me?”
“He hasn’t said anything. I don’t know either.”
He must’ve been watching from somewhere sneaky like, because he didn’t come back out any time soon. The three of us, Nancy, Annie and I continued speaking the type of small talk you might speak outside of a grocery store at night on a weekday while one of your friends is eluding you in plain sight awkwardly until finally--
“Here, let me give you his number.”
“What? Why? He’s running away from me. He obviously won’t take a call.”
“Oh no he will. Let me talk to him. I don’t know why he’s acting so silly. But just give him a call.”
“Alright, if you say so. So strange.” So I took the number and a couple days later I gave him a call. I don’t remember how the call went, but he picked up and we talked and he invited me to come down and hang out with him and Annie at their apartment downtown, which he’d moved into. The rest is history. After that it was like nothing had ever happened, we were buddies again who both shared the memories of two lost souls who were to each other beacons in the deadly night. It was good to see his light again.
And finally you see why I was so upset. We’d only been back in touch for the better part of a year when the news broke that they were moving two thousand cornfield, desert, mountain, mesa miles away from Chicago.
(dream sequence)
My field of vision is supplanted with a television screen. There are no knobs or dials or buttons; it is only a glass screen. I notice I don’t have arms or fingers to adjust a dial anyhow. I doubt I even have a body, but it seems inconsequential at the moment. At first there is only blackness on the screen; the screen is all that there is, and it remains so for quite a period of time--
--seems an eternity--
--at once patches of white break through in islands of light contrasting with the monoblack bleakness. It is to be seen soon enough that the dichotomy of absolute tones are the rolling, smooth sands of a desert. A young Ansel is trekking ‘cross the panorama raising a machine to his face every now and then. I think at first that perhaps I may be in a world of his work, but it isn’t confined to that. I see him shrink toward the horizon then suddenly extinguish like watching a ship set sail and disappear as it drops beneath the curvature of earth. A gray tone suddenly materializes in the midst of the grainy expanse upsetting the polarity in the world of absolute values; a highway is constructed and snakes through the lower lying valleys. Gradually the whites and blacks become less and less absolute and give way to various shades of gray, which elucidate hidden depths in the receding hills as subtle shadows become perceptible. A clunky automobile or two will zip by on occasion. Look, there’s Kerouac! A swath of color, like pastel, is brushed over the scene beautifully. It makes me wince and tears stream down my cheeks though I have none. It is dreamlike and ephemeral. Wizard of Oz. The ethereal magic of it is drained and replaced by colors less lively, somehow more natural, but stale. I think of evolution. The clunky cars become sleeker and more prevalent. They are joined by enormous geometric monsters, enormous boxes like houses on wheels, moving cargo across the barren desert. They tunnel down the snaking highway in droves now. The road is unearthed, pummeled to crumbly rock and then rebuilt and painted. The stale colors seem to brighten slowly. The sleek cars acquire a sharp edged look and then soon soften as the colors still become more vibrant, more real. Large winged vessels crawl across the sky, smaller ones stream by leaving traces of white clouds slashing the sky. The road is destroyed permanently and an interstate is constructed over it. It is wider and strange. The view of the desert becomes clearer, the colors more rich even still, more and more until finally I reach out with arms I didn’t know I had, maybe I hadn’t until then, and touch what I though was a glass screen, which I think maybe it was until then, and stumble forward as there is no screen and fall to my knees. I submerge my hands into the sand and it is hot to the touch and I can’t believe it. Is this a dream? It must be a dream.
“You need some help over there or can you manage to take a leak on your own?” japes a voice from behind me. I turn to see who it is. It is Toby and Hardy in a gray Dodge Neon looking at me smiling, but their smiles turn to looks of concern.
“What?” I plead honestly not understanding anything.
“Well you fell down just now. I was joking. Are you okay though? Is it the heat?” Toby’s face becomes grave then when I don‘t respond and just stare at him. “Do you want some water? Hardy will you grab the bottle?” He turns to the backseat as Hardy fumbles about the floor of the car.
“No, no I’m fine. I’m all finished.” I say as I walk back to the car as naturally as possible. I figure the only way out of this is to go with it, or maybe this is reality and I’ve just suffered some sort of mental collapse. Either way, I go along for the ride. I step in and we tear off into the Mojave.
I try to act as normal as possible, because there is funny tension in the air as if the very fabric of existence, our atoms and skin and language, are as fragile as the membrane of a soap bubble, and one wrong move, one deviation from the strict word of God and the whole thing will POP! But don’t I want that? If this is a dream, maybe I should try to wake up. But it’s all so convincing.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to Toby who’s driving. Hardy is asleep now in the back of the car; I can see him with his eyes closed, mouth open and beginning to drool, crushed between the car door and a large stack of cardboard boxes over flowing with clothes, a stack of books and a television set. A television set. A goddamn television set.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Jonah?” His voice sounds distant and metallic. I’m caught in a trance staring at the television set, putting together this madness or at least trying to which traps me in a hypnotic state which feels like the way it feels right before you faint, though I don’t faint. “Jonah.” A far away voice shouts to me through a ten-mile-long metal tube. “Jonah!” He yells it this time, which startles me out of my pre-fainting condition. It feels like being awoken from a dream by murderous screams.
“Whoa! What the hell? What?” I scream.
“I asked if you were okay and you wouldn’t answer. You’ve been acting weird ever since we smoked that joint.”
“Joint?”
“Yeah. Remember we smoked that joint like half an hour ago?”
“Pull over the car.”
“Are you okay? Are you going to puke?”
“I’m going to piss my pants, pull it over!” He pulls over the car into the wide desert shoulder. I run out toward the seething, arid nothingness and the sound of my footsteps resound in my ears like far away steel drums pounding in South Africa which I hear through an invisible tube. I come to a sudden stop, staring into the distance, I’m over come with that dizzying sensation and finally I faint.
And then, a television screen...
Mad Pioneers
Thoughts of gallivanting across America at great speed, jammed into a car shoulder against shoulder and up against a bulging heap of things we‘ve brought along--driven by the same impulse as Kerouac in the forties, as Kesey and the pranksters in the sixties, as the pioneers of the early nineteenth century even, whose tracks in the sandy desert and winding path through the valleys of the Rockies we follow today through Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California to the Pacific--whirl through my imagination kicking up layers of old dust, clatter and cobwebs and houses even like a mighty storm devastating the old habitual forms of my imagination. The vision has awakened me from my stale existence and shown me a childlike exuberance I‘d long forgotten, and lit me from deep within where I realize only now it has been so dark for so long.
It is the last time all of us will ever get together in that Chicago apartment and if I knew then what I know now then I’d have known that it was the last time we‘d all be together at all. Toby and Annie had lived in that second floor apartment above the Sprint store on Belmont for a year and they’d just broken the news to all of us not long ago that they were packing up and leaving for San Diego. In all honesty I wasn’t too excited for them at first. Toby and I were old friends, known each other since high school. We lived fast and with no regard or respect for the fragility of life in those early days. Some of those experiences took on a traumatic tone, which I can see now in hindsight has bonded him and I awfully close in ways unspeakable even between the two of us. We weren’t like the beat generation or the hippies or the punks. There was a suicidal note to our melody that rang dissonantly in the ears of most who heard it. But that era is long gone and we never wrote any famous book or invented a popular style of music. Our saga lives and dies with us.
Though as I was getting to about my feelings on the big move, I wasn’t quite thrilled. In fact, Toby and I had a falling out of sorts quite some years back, an event which neither of us to this day are able to quite understand. Despite our lack of understanding however, history is history and there was a period where we hadn’t spoke. It’s a funny story actually how we started talking again.
Toby, the last I heard, had been living with his parents in a town in western Illinois, closer to Davenport than Chicago, called Hampshire. Annie on the other hand, having broken it off with Toby, moved by herself downtown, and even had a roommate for a time, a male roommate as I recall. I was still in our hometown of Palatine living with my mother and my younger brother, Ryan. One night my girlfriend and I walked up the street to the grocery store as we often did and lo and behold there stood Toby and Annie who were actually approaching us at first unknowingly. I shouted something and they noticed me. Annie was receptive with her big eyes and cordial as usual (unless she had a problem with you), but Toby was acting stranger than ever. Instead of just being quiet or terse with words, he actually fled! He ran off into the store. I mean he literally ran away from me. So what did I do, I chased after him. I followed him as he ducked in and out of aisles trying to lose me, but come on, lose me in a grocery store? Though he couldn’t lose me as I’d found him quite quickly, he continued the awkward act of walking away. I cried after him, “Toby, what on earth are you doing? Why are you running away?” No response, he just continued to walk briskly away. I finally gave up and went back out to see Nancy talking to Annie. “What’s his deal?”
“I don’t know! He’s acting so strange.”
“I know. I don’t get it. Is he mad at me?”
“He hasn’t said anything. I don’t know either.”
He must’ve been watching from somewhere sneaky like, because he didn’t come back out any time soon. The three of us, Nancy, Annie and I continued speaking the type of small talk you might speak outside of a grocery store at night on a weekday while one of your friends is eluding you in plain sight awkwardly until finally--
“Here, let me give you his number.”
“What? Why? He’s running away from me. He obviously won’t take a call.”
“Oh no he will. Let me talk to him. I don’t know why he’s acting so silly. But just give him a call.”
“Alright, if you say so. So strange.” So I took the number and a couple days later I gave him a call. I don’t remember how the call went, but he picked up and we talked and he invited me to come down and hang out with him and Annie at their apartment downtown, which he’d moved into. The rest is history. After that it was like nothing had ever happened, we were buddies again who both shared the memories of two lost souls who were to each other beacons in the deadly night. It was good to see his light again.
And finally you see why I was so upset. We’d only been back in touch for the better part of a year when the news broke that they were moving two thousand cornfield, desert, mountain, mesa miles away from Chicago.
(dream sequence)
My field of vision is supplanted with a television screen. There are no knobs or dials or buttons; it is only a glass screen. I notice I don’t have arms or fingers to adjust a dial anyhow. I doubt I even have a body, but it seems inconsequential at the moment. At first there is only blackness on the screen; the screen is all that there is, and it remains so for quite a period of time--
--seems an eternity--
--at once patches of white break through in islands of light contrasting with the monoblack bleakness. It is to be seen soon enough that the dichotomy of absolute tones are the rolling, smooth sands of a desert. A young Ansel is trekking ‘cross the panorama raising a machine to his face every now and then. I think at first that perhaps I may be in a world of his work, but it isn’t confined to that. I see him shrink toward the horizon then suddenly extinguish like watching a ship set sail and disappear as it drops beneath the curvature of earth. A gray tone suddenly materializes in the midst of the grainy expanse upsetting the polarity in the world of absolute values; a highway is constructed and snakes through the lower lying valleys. Gradually the whites and blacks become less and less absolute and give way to various shades of gray, which elucidate hidden depths in the receding hills as subtle shadows become perceptible. A clunky automobile or two will zip by on occasion. Look, there’s Kerouac! A swath of color, like pastel, is brushed over the scene beautifully. It makes me wince and tears stream down my cheeks though I have none. It is dreamlike and ephemeral. Wizard of Oz. The ethereal magic of it is drained and replaced by colors less lively, somehow more natural, but stale. I think of evolution. The clunky cars become sleeker and more prevalent. They are joined by enormous geometric monsters, enormous boxes like houses on wheels, moving cargo across the barren desert. They tunnel down the snaking highway in droves now. The road is unearthed, pummeled to crumbly rock and then rebuilt and painted. The stale colors seem to brighten slowly. The sleek cars acquire a sharp edged look and then soon soften as the colors still become more vibrant, more real. Large winged vessels crawl across the sky, smaller ones stream by leaving traces of white clouds slashing the sky. The road is destroyed permanently and an interstate is constructed over it. It is wider and strange. The view of the desert becomes clearer, the colors more rich even still, more and more until finally I reach out with arms I didn’t know I had, maybe I hadn’t until then, and touch what I though was a glass screen, which I think maybe it was until then, and stumble forward as there is no screen and fall to my knees. I submerge my hands into the sand and it is hot to the touch and I can’t believe it. Is this a dream? It must be a dream.
“You need some help over there or can you manage to take a leak on your own?” japes a voice from behind me. I turn to see who it is. It is Toby and Hardy in a gray Dodge Neon looking at me smiling, but their smiles turn to looks of concern.
“What?” I plead honestly not understanding anything.
“Well you fell down just now. I was joking. Are you okay though? Is it the heat?” Toby’s face becomes grave then when I don‘t respond and just stare at him. “Do you want some water? Hardy will you grab the bottle?” He turns to the backseat as Hardy fumbles about the floor of the car.
“No, no I’m fine. I’m all finished.” I say as I walk back to the car as naturally as possible. I figure the only way out of this is to go with it, or maybe this is reality and I’ve just suffered some sort of mental collapse. Either way, I go along for the ride. I step in and we tear off into the Mojave.
I try to act as normal as possible, because there is funny tension in the air as if the very fabric of existence, our atoms and skin and language, are as fragile as the membrane of a soap bubble, and one wrong move, one deviation from the strict word of God and the whole thing will POP! But don’t I want that? If this is a dream, maybe I should try to wake up. But it’s all so convincing.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat next to Toby who’s driving. Hardy is asleep now in the back of the car; I can see him with his eyes closed, mouth open and beginning to drool, crushed between the car door and a large stack of cardboard boxes over flowing with clothes, a stack of books and a television set. A television set. A goddamn television set.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Jonah?” His voice sounds distant and metallic. I’m caught in a trance staring at the television set, putting together this madness or at least trying to which traps me in a hypnotic state which feels like the way it feels right before you faint, though I don’t faint. “Jonah.” A far away voice shouts to me through a ten-mile-long metal tube. “Jonah!” He yells it this time, which startles me out of my pre-fainting condition. It feels like being awoken from a dream by murderous screams.
“Whoa! What the hell? What?” I scream.
“I asked if you were okay and you wouldn’t answer. You’ve been acting weird ever since we smoked that joint.”
“Joint?”
“Yeah. Remember we smoked that joint like half an hour ago?”
“Pull over the car.”
“Are you okay? Are you going to puke?”
“I’m going to piss my pants, pull it over!” He pulls over the car into the wide desert shoulder. I run out toward the seething, arid nothingness and the sound of my footsteps resound in my ears like far away steel drums pounding in South Africa which I hear through an invisible tube. I come to a sudden stop, staring into the distance, I’m over come with that dizzying sensation and finally I faint.
And then, a television screen...
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