Repulsion

Well, that was a mistake. I had no idea Repulsion was a horror film. Incidentally, one that takes place almost entirely inside an apartment. It's actually the first film in a series of Polanski films dubbed, "The Apartment Trilogy." Nothing like a good ole solitary descent into insanity to lift the spirits. Fuck. Everything about the movie was unsettling; the phantasmagoric floating of the camera as it slowly zooms or pulls away; the vertiginous warping of perspective as Catherine Deneuve's character, Carol, loses more and more of her mind to frightful dreams of home intrusion and rape; the apartment's disorienting stretching of dimensions and the way it repeatedly unseams itself. Then there are the camera angles. Always appearing too short, or too tall, the camera stalks Deneuve in a way that is deliciously voyeuristic. Shots smother her. The cinematography feels close and confined, almost claustrophobic. Deneuve's unaffected, stolid eyes and docile facial expressions belie an impressive richness of emotional depth, helplessness and terror. The sustained stillness of her stare, over the course of the film, has the affect on the viewer of steadily increasing agitation. Her alluring looks and her phlegmatic disassociation from the happenings around her make her curiously charming.

A clever use of sound, always shrill and ringing and cyclical, helps propel the film into looping vignettes of fear and lunacy. A machine-gun drum and some fierce flashes of a blade lay waste to an attempted sexual assault. Later, the ticking of a clock is the only sound we hear at the first of several rape sequences. It replaces even the sound of her screams. During a different sequence, the quick ringing of church-bells amplify the discord onscreen as an intruder tries to force himself on Deneuve. Ringing phones, doorbells and a cacophony of other jarring, repetitive sounds create a mechanical milieu of clockwork madness. The only scenes with overlaid music (and there are only two) are those where Deneuve's character is walking through town, being ogled and verbally harassed by men as upbeat jazz plays.

The viewer spends a lot of time looking with Carol at inanimate objects; a dresser or a lamp, a chair, peeling wallpaper, a rotting rabbit. At times, Carol mirrors these objects, seeming as lifeless, inert and hollow as a pillowcase. Special attention is paid to cracks in the wall, on the sidewalk, or the shape of a hair inside a man's ear. Oddly, all of the cracks bear resemblance to the Y-shape made by a woman standing nude with her legs together. Carol's sleepy, blank eyes always appear to be somewhere other than where she currently is, signifying a profound emotional crisis or a pending psychotic break. The worsening of her condition is such that, as the camera gets closer, the viewer feels ever further away. A beautiful inversion. Visually, there is much emphasis placed on walls, both figuratively and metaphorically. Sometimes they are hard and cracked, other times, as soft and impressionable as clay. The walls, as they show tears, literally tear at her. There is something sexually allegorical about Colin, her suitor, pounding down the door and physically penetrating the space of her apartment. An act, deeply suggestive on its own, ends in a splatter of blood and then the wiping with paper of the blood from the door. It is not surprising that he is placed in the bath after his murder.

Throughout the film, both subtly and overtly, there is a theme of male aggression directed at women. Early on in the film we see male characters grasp at control by grabbing a woman's face or arm or ass and, later, Carol's sister is slapped in the face by her lover as he tries to help her "get a hold of herself." Grubby hands routinely burst through the walls to grope at Deneuve's legs and breasts as she tries to walk down a corridor or leave the bathroom. The multiple rape nightmares/fantasies say all they need to about male sexual aggression. Another recurring motif in the film is the dichotomy between Carol's meekness and her strength; she does only what she wants to, ignores pleas and imperatives, cannot be controlled by any man, and kills the ones who make her feel at all threatened...all while being conspicuously disinterested and quietly aloof. It is a fierce depiction of femininity. Her romantic interest, after he expresses concern for her in the hallway, gets the Clue treatment when she bashes his head in with a candlestick and then disposes of him in the bathtub.

It was a disturbing movie, and now I have to go to bed.

Post Christmas Blues

The day after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. It's cold and my bed looks especially empty. The blankets lay wrapped in a knot of wrinkled twirls, the same way I'd left them days ago. I'm greeted by the sudden onset of post-nasal drip, which must surely be the symptom of a mild allergic reaction to my girlfriend's parents' dog, Toby. Christmas was good. Nothing ended in disaster. No trees or houses were burned. The house's burglary alarm did go off, though. All gifts given and received were a hit. There was beer, wine, and far too much food; all of it excellently cooked.

The day after a few days of plenty always takes some recalibration. The emptiness of the apartment you return to feels fuller, heavier, as though the entire vastness of space exists between the foot of your couch and the head of your bed. And you never feel quite alone with your loneliness. It takes on a personality of its own and coughs and sneezes in uneven fits, continually reminding you of its existence. Soon you feel contaminated by it, and quarantined with it.

Alone, and in such bad company.

For this, there's always distraction; some movie or book to get lost in. But perhaps it's better to meditate. To sit alone with these unlocalized feelings of ennui. More and more they seem to accumulate as we age. So then it's probably best to understand it, to discover its weakness, to integrate or extricate it. It is all we can do.

What else? I can't wait for the New Year. I'm eager to eat right and get my pudgy, scrawny ass back in the gym. Holly got me a Vitamix blender. I can use it to juice vegetables and make smoothies. It can even make soups! Yes, I can see us now, going down to the Sunday farmer's market and stocking up on local fruits and vegetables, preparing our own wholesome, hearty meals that we can eat during the week. A return to simpler times. Times before technology and electricity...but with the added conveniences of a high horse-power blender. Ah, modernity.

Well, fuck it - I'm going to watch a Roman Polanski movie called  Repulsion. I've only a few days to enjoy my time at home before I pack everything back into my red duffel bag and head to Vancouver to visit friends.

I predict there will be beer, wine, and far too much food.

Wait a Minute

It was raining. Hard at first. Then slow. Mildly, at irregular intervals the sky opened up and bled down onto the street. The air was cold. Gusty. Everyone walked with quickened purpose and direction. Each step on the sidewalk, if one wasn't careful, could be drenched in disaster. So long, new suede shoes. Puddles gathered as water fell in splashes and sprinkles and torrents. It was just after sunset so the rain was semi-camouflaged in darkness and could only be accurately measured when seen in a cone of street light, or the headlights of a car. My feet, after a while of walking, had become so wet that the tips of my toes were cold. A little longer and they'd be totally numb. Waiting for the bus I noticed that my stomach was swollen and warm. Compared to the rest of my body, my belly seemed immune to the damp cold. Earlier I'd eaten a large bowl of spicy ramen inside a restaurant owned and operated by a bunch of young Japanese people. They were attentive, friendly, and fast. The ramen was deliciously spicy and flavorful. My favorite part was the egg. Existing somewhere on the spectrum between hard-boiled and perfectly poached, it melted in my mouth something sweet. Like honey the yolk drooped slowly out from its soft, white casing, and seeped into the stew. Sometime during dinner my nose started running and I had to use two napkins - each soaked all the way through - to stop the leak. Now that my nose had opened, the broth smelled wonderfully of garlic and pork fat and it had an almost sinful minerality to it. My entire mouth and throat were awash in a rich, salty, seaweed and mushroom and egg noodle ocean. The soup's temperature, combined with the heat of the added chilis and spices, made my mouth so hot that I would have stopped eating, were it not for the irresistibility of the taste. I brought my greedy lips to the spoon once more and bowed before the broth's small, silver altar. I drank it in. Over and over I repeated this ritual until the soup was gone. Its beauty bathed me; sanctified my tongue and teeth. It was a meal so hearty it comforted me even as I stood under the meager shelter of the bus stop in the rain and wind.

Beside me appeared a homeless man with an old shopping cart. The cart was blackened with grime and covered in filthy blankets and plastic bags. It was wet and it stunk badly. Entranced by a metal newspaper dispenser next to a street pole at the bus stop, the man bent over and began pounding on it and muttering something unintelligible. Much to his dismay, it seemed the newspaper tin didn’t understand his message. He began flailing spasmodically and speaking in tongues as he drove his point home in fanciful expository to the box. But the box didn’t budge. Still undeterred and ever resilient, the man began yanking on the dispenser door, opening and closing it forcefully while he laughed and shouted, so that the box appeared to be chewing on the wet air. Suddenly he jerked his head up at me. I feared the box had finally told him something. Something about me. Suspicion spread over his face and he snapped upright. He cocked his head and pushed out his lower jaw as he eyed me like Popeye. The sign next to me said the bus wasn’t coming for another 7 minutes. As if realizing only now that I was able to see him, he recognized that perhaps he had been staring at me a bit too long; that I might be onto him. His eyes jumped away and he twisted his body 90 degrees to the left, away from me. It was at this time he began consulting with the tin again. In an attempt to lubricate the conversation which had dwindled between the two of them, he began slamming the door more frantically than before and making sounds with his mouth that an ape would make while on methamphetamines. The sign said the bus wasn’t coming for 7 minutes. I shifted my weight uneasily and briefly broke eye contact in an attempt to make him more at ease. I took out my phone to check the time and noticed I had no service.

6 minutes. To pass the time I scratched my head, coughed loudly to prove I was capable of making sounds, and did a couple of quick twists at the waist to show that I was spry and could whip his fucking ass if he were to try something. When I looked up the sign still said 6 minutes. The rain had picked up again or I would have waited under the awning of the adjacent building. He was looking at me and riffling through his shopping cart for something as inconspicuously as he possibly could. He even smiled as he did it. Never before had I wanted a bus to come so badly. Sure, there were times I’d needed a bus when diarrhea was knocking at my back door, or when I needed to be at a store before they closed, but this was different. This was life or death. I couldn’t believe I was going to die like this. 6 minutes. C’mon, was the fucking clock broken? Dark, nightmarish thoughts began to dance around my head. I remembered recently, maybe 4 months back, when a homeless man had been found standing at the corner of Market Street with a suitcase full of body parts. Had anyone ever been convicted? Fuck.

The man started to giggle. Now he had something in his arms. Because of the angle, and the way his shopping cart stood between us, I couldn’t tell what it was. The way he was eyeing it though, it bothered me. He was craning his neck and looking quickly at it and then me. He’d whisper something and then shhh himself. 5 minutes. God, had only two minutes passed since I’d been here? I began inventorying my defenses; keys in my pocket, and a scarf - surely I could make a weapon out of those, right? Desperation. I’d reached it. Keys and a scarf. Holy fuck, buddy, I’m gonna die. I remembered how when I was a kid, to protect myself from thugs in my neighborhood I would carry around a dog chain, to which I’d fastened a big combination lock, so that I had a modern equivalent of a medieval mace. Later, when I was in highs cool, I considered myself more sophisticated and upgraded my weapon of choice to a fashionably concealed, 5-inch pocket knife. How had my youthful resourcefulness rendered me so unprepared? I was utterly defenseless. Did he have a knife? A sword? A bayonet? A gun? A machine gun? Assault rifle? Grenade? Bomb? Weapons of mass destruction? 4 minutes.

Rain continued to fall in sheets. The bum now sat nearer, on one of the bus stop seats. Whatever he had, he had under his coat, talking to it and petting it as though it were a infant. I shuffled my feet and stretched my neck a few times like Rocky Balboa’s anorexic, malnourished cousin, Cocky Ballblowah. Then the unthinkable happened. I pulled a muscle in my neck. Searing pain spread out all through my neck as I felt the muscle strain and cramp up all the way down into my shoulder blade. I couldn’t move my head to the left. Instead I had to turn my entire body to see the bum. I must have hissed out in pain because the bum stopped his baby talk. When I turned to face him he was staring dead at me. I didn’t look at the sign. I knew it was 3 minutes, or that maybe it had gone all the way back up to 5.

All of the times I’d had sex lasting longer than 7 minutes now seemed an eternity. I marveled at my endurance and briefly contemplated the mysteries of my sexual prowess. In the bedroom I was an Adonis. Now, I was a dead man. 3 minutes. Well, there we were. It had all come down to this. Thirty years, for this. I waited to see what he would do. I meant him no harm, surely I wasn’t going to be the first one to attack. The toothless old man, with his nicotine colored hair and beard, reached down into his dingy, wet, navy wind jacket. I backed up, slightly, to put a little distance between us in case it was a sword or a crossbow full of hypodermic AIDS needles, and I heard a noise. It sounded like a cat meowing. Jesus. That’s what the name on its red collar said. He smiled and reached toward his cart and pulled out a can of cat food.

Wow. I thought...

Wait a god-damned minute! But, then, I couldn’t; the bus had arrived.

In Defense of Zoos

Thanksgiving dinner got me thinking about zoos, among other things. The topic came up as we gorged ourselves on the breast of a mass produced turkey. My friends were talking about places to take a couple 10-year-old kids during their Christmas vacation in San Francisco and I mentioned a hidden safari tucked away deep in the remote regions of Santa Rosa. "Is it like a nature preserve, or a zoo?" they asked. I didn't know. I've never been to the place. "I didn't think you were the kind of person that would condone the zoo." And then I knew it was too late. All of the pent up liberal scorn and seething upset that had been bubbling up without an outlet had suddenly found one. It no longer mattered that I was anti-Trump, or that I consider myself a left-leaning progressive. The only thing that mattered was that I believed in the inhumane incarceration of animals. Animal abuse. 

My comrades informed me that I was a monster for defending the existence of such a cruel and unusual institution. I was told that the zoo, or as they liked to call it - animal jail - was a barbaric and disgusting practice that I was subsequently shamed and shunned for supporting. I use the term "support" loosely, because it's been perhaps 20 years since I've visited a zoo. I told them that the last time I was there the animals seemed well-fed, exercised, protected, that it needn't be viewed as a terrible experience from the animal's perspective, necessarily. Zoos give kids the chance to see an animal that they would otherwise never see, it's educational. Isn't that a liberal value? But they would hear none of it. One person suddenly screamed, "you probably support SeaWorld, too, don't you?!" I didn't, I said. "Well, you support zoos, so you support Shamu, too." Again, I said I didn't. But it didn't matter. To them there was no difference between feeding, protecting and preserving animals and forcing an animal to perform humiliating party tricks on command. They told me it's cruel to limit an animal that would otherwise roam free to the meager confines of a cell inside a zoo. But you guys have two cats, and just recently had a dog, I said. "That was different," they explained. Then, a woman who'd had enough of my shit smashed a cup of nog onto the floor and yelled out, "you believe in enslaving animals; do you support slavery, too?!" Emboldened by the woman's cry, a man stood up and, pointing, said "I heard his family owned a plantation!" I looked toward my mother to dispel these false allegations but she turned away from me in disgust. Things were getting out of control, fast. Caught off guard, I stuttered, and fought back a little chuckle at the absurdity of the claim. "Look, he's laughing! So now you think slavery is funny!" No, I said, I think...

"Shut your racist mouth, faggot," another friend said to me, interrupting.

That's when my first amendment rights were revoked. And on Thanksgiving, of all days! I stood up to excuse myself, thinking that a bathroom break might ease some of the tension, but as soon as I stood up, the back of my leg bumped the chair and sent it crashing to the ground with a loud smack. A teething baby, uttering his first words, said, "mamma, he's got a gun!" Women were shrieking, the men had bashed their beer bottles off the edge of the table, turning them into sharp rings of glass shark teeth. Whoa, everybody, let's just be calm. The turkey had gotten up and used its half devoured body to shield the wailing baby. Stuffing fell in wet clumps out from its anus as it trembled. Listen, I said, please, let's be civil about this. "This is America," my friends told me, "we don't tolerate your godless hatred here, you goddamned terrorist!" I knew I should have shaved my beard. What do you guys want, I asked. "We want your guns," they demanded. 

First they came for my first amendment rights, and I did not speak out.

Once more I told them I didn't have a weapon. They told me they didn't believe me, that they needed to make sure. Someone blindsided me and mashed a pumpkin pie into my face while the others grabbed me and held me down. They riffled through my pockets and pants and underwear as they fondled my limp wattle.

When they came for my fourth amendment rights...

Some of them had a bright future with the TSA, for sure. Slowly suffocating from the pumpkin pie caked into my nostrils and mouth, I began to lose consciousness. The last thing I remember was someone aggressively stroking my snood while they continued to search for weapons exclusively around my groin and anus region. 

...and I was thankful for that.

November 24th

Predawn footsteps make creaky music over wooden floors. A door closes, and then locks. Silence. The distinctive sound of female urination. From a small metal vent, warm air sighs and spills out into the apartment. A brief splash of running water. The bathroom door unlocks, and then opens. More footsteps. More creaking. The couch groans as she sits down. The heat suddenly stops its breathing. She rubs her hands together to warm them up. A faint blue light glows from the screen of her cellphone. Outside, a garbage truck lumbers down the street in the dark. As the driver pumps the pedal the brakes emit a high pitched squeal and the truck halts just below the window. Like a dog the idling engine seems to sniff loudly at the night, searching for a scrap of silence. Time passes slowly. The truck appears to vanish and quiet emerges once more. There is gentle wind. The sound of leaves rustling. A croaking crow sings a staccato solo to no one. The suspension of a passing car lurches, mouselike and furtive, and then it is gone. In the freezer a frozen, fleshy bird hears no sound. A baster waits, patient and plotting in a darkened drawer. Within a few hours the apartment will be alive and bustling with family and friends, perfumed by the smell of roasting turkey and sweet stuffing. Liberal libations will bring about much laughter and many smiles, followed later by a few red-faced arguments and frowns. For now though, everything feasts on sleep.

Lestworld

My lady love is away and I've been binge-watching Westworld. Everyone keeps talking about how good it is, how the writing is so cerebral. Multiple people urged me to watch it, and kept nagging me to do so. So I did. Honestly, after finishing the first episode I doubted whether the series would rise to meet its heavy praise. Nothing about the pilot drew me in in a way that was meaningful, except maybe for its appeal to my love of westerns. The premise is simple enough: escapism. Wealthy vacationers frequent the park, which is essentially a microcosm of chance impossibility - a trip back in time, to the wild west - where visitors can forget about their real world responsibilities for a while and indulgence themselves in unfettered fantasy. In that way, the show offers the viewer something with the potential to be self aware; the parallel between the viewer and the guests of Westworld is not one that should go unnoticed. Because of this I kept watching, half hoping to see something inventive happen. All seemed rife for a modern commentary on voyeurism, distraction, the willingness to pay exorbitant sums of money for the illusion of satisfaction; the tendency for the modern man to seek satiety in the virtual instead of the real. The recent emergence of viable VR, artificial intelligence, and the ever increasing immersiveness of gaming seemed to set the stage for thoughtful observation. But alas.

Last night I finished episode seven. After seven hours of watching, the show still seems to fall short of being truly engaging. It takes big, weighty questions like the nature of reality, identity, the real vs the unreal, and it uses a unique genre fusion to examine them, but it does so lazily. It's philosophically superficial, yet it postures itself as something somehow more prescient. The whole season has been a repetition of the same theme, running itself in circles. Almost nothing happens until the 7th episode, where the viewer is greeted by an all too familiar twist. None of the characters are particularly compelling, save for Dolores and Maeve, and the story relies on tropes and predictable arcs; the robots are more human than the humans; one of the characters thought to be human is a robot. Surprise! I think what bothers me most is that they started with something too fresh and fertile for the to viewer to be left with something so uninventive.

To get my fill of westerns, I’ve started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Initially I found myself unable to put the book down, engrossed completely in the macabre foreboding and his distinctive writing style. At this point I’m half way through it and the story has plateaued somewhat. The pacing, which was at the beginning quite pleasant and steady, has slowed to the point that my attention is waning. This won’t deter me though, because this is often how westerns are - mainly slow and sprawling, punctuated by moments of perforation and tension that can only be resolved with spilled blood and gun smoke. His descriptions of the desert topographies are alive and inspired, breathing life into an otherwise barren and uninhabited dustbed. McCarthy has a knack for depicting grizzly scenes in gratuitous, gory detail. At times it’s as though he’s reached between the pages and clapped together a pair of chalkboard-erasers, and through the plume of white dust a savage band of Apaches emerge, menacing, wild and merciless, descending on the reader like a plague. The native American tribes are truly terrifying, but not as terrifying as the band of American mercenaries the story follows. They commit heinous acts of unspeakable evil and insensate destruction, and they do so unrepentantly, with cold impunity. Death’s horsemen. It all gets fairly dark fairly quickly. But with a title like Blood Meridian, what do you expect?

Ram Jam at Glacier National Park

For the last few days I've been in Montana, at Glacier National Park, and the areas around it. The first thing you need to know about Glacier National Park is that the weather conditions are fickle and always in flux. And that there are rainbows everywhere. On a given day it can be clear, then overcast, then raining - in the total absence of clouds - snowing, gusting, warm (and then blustery), sunny, hailing. You get the idea. Never before have I seen such a dynamic environment. There was one evening, in the middle of the trip, when I walked outside after having had dinner with the founder of MySpace, and I looked up into the darkened sky and saw a rainbow. Seeing a rainbow in the night sky does an interesting thing to the observer. First, it demands denial, because, of course a rainbow couldn't exist without light; it must be a spotlight. Next, it ignites critical curiosity; a spotlight that bends over the curvature of the earth? What if it IS a rainbow? Then denial again; two spotlights, one on each side? Bafflement follows; it must be a rainbow; but how? And, finally, an explosion of expletive-fueled affirmation - holy goddamned motherfucking fuck, it IS a rainbow. Incredulously, I looked up into the sky and watched the luminous, glowing ghost of a rainbow floating over the horizon. I'd never seen something so simultaneously unbelievable and haunting. Naturally I took a picture, only to discover that it was in fact, a double moonbow. It only occurred to me after, that there was a just-risen, full moon in the sky behind me, kicking off light into the damp, misting night and creating the bow. I wondered how rare of a phenomena it must be, and I googled it - nothing even came up (except for a song by Devo, which I definitely wasn't looking for). But maybe I was. Maybe it was a sign from god that I should be listening to more Devo. Maybe.

Another thing to note about Glacier is the completely unconcerned, almost attention-seeking way which the wildlife move through the park. We saw a grizzly, brown bears, big-horned rams, elk, and moose. All of them appeared to move fearlessly, showing stoic apathy to the humans around them. On the first day, as we drive on a narrow, two-lane road overlooking a beautifully deadly, 2000ft precipice, a ram fell out of the sky onto the road and slowly sauntered along from hoof to hoof. He walked with a confident swagger down the double yellow line, blocking both lanes as we watched him on his parade. His ten-minute journey ended as he moved to the right of our car and took a stinking piss off the edge of a cliff. From the car window I slapped his ass as we passed and knocked loose a stale dingleberry. He winked graciously and slowly nodded his head, as if to say thank you and goodbye.

Throughout the week we shot in the rain, snow, in lakes, against splashing waves and all sorts of other perils. When the weather was permitting, we got some incredibly beautiful shots, some of the best I've ever captured. Last night, I followed our trip leader, Marc, up the side of a steep hill which was flanked on the left side by a series of newly formed waterfalls from the tempestuous rains the day before. The trail was wet, thin, even non-existent at times. It became more and more dangerous the higher we climbed. With 20lbs of camera gear on my back I clawed my way over slippery rocks and running water, mud, through 10 ft tall grass and dripping wet foliage. Briefly, I considered how much more difficult getting down was going to be. Most others in the group didn't even make the attempt at getting up, and the ones who did quickly turned back. Marc moved up rock walls and ripped through brush with the dexterity and speed of a mountain goat. He was almost running. Repeatedly I lost him, only to hear him call out overhead, and then - seconds later - 20ft to my left, peeking through Christmas trees and fall-colored leaves, beckoning me toward him. When we got to the top, the hill opened into a small meadow full of untouched flowers and colorful shrubbery.

"Okay," he said, "you should be able to get a good shot up here. I'm going back to the others, don't get yourself killed on the way down now; the sun is setting soon."

I was afraid of this. But it was too late. I was looking at a puff of vapor where Marc had been. He turned into a drop of water and rode the stream all the way down. Something funny happens when you're completely alone at the peak of a very desolate, very inaccessible place. Your mind starts to notice things; dangerous things that you hadn't noticed before you were alone. Like how easy it would be for a bear to wander out into the open mountain meadow, and how defenseless you'd be. Or how one misstep during the descent could send you tumbling fatally downward over jagged rock. Suddenly you remember with vivid detail how much the grass glistened, how impossibly loose the rocks were. Did I even remember how to get back down ? - there was no trail. Crouched down, taking photos, I wondered how much it would cost to helicopter me out if I fell and broke my leg or ankle. It was a complete mystery to me how long it took us to get up there. If I left now, would the sun be down before I was? The trail would be untraversable in the dark.

A noise behind me. My head whips back, but nothing's there. After a few more photos I ran some more calculations and started to think it was time to go. Then, Something brushed against my shoulder. I leapt up in sheer electric terror and turned toward my guest. It was the ram who'd catwalked to take a piss earlier in the week.

"What the fuck are YOU doing up here," he asked, surprised. "Don't you know you could get killed up here? Didn't you see that grizzly less than an hour ago?"

I know. And I did.

"I saw that goatman you were with earlier. You're no goat, man."

I know.

"Look, you helped me out of an embarrassing jam, how about I return the favor? Climb on my back and we'll get you down in a jiffy; it'll be a great story."

So, I did what anyone would have done: I ignored all reason and logic and didn't ask how the ram was able to speak English, I didn't ask if it could handle the added load of my weight, and I didn't ask where the saddle in my hands had come from. I just packed up my camera gear and got on. We moved majestically down the mountain, to good old, low-altitude safety. Marc and the other photographers looked on in open-mouthed awe as I dismounted. No one said anything. The ram smiled and then strutted away into the sunset, spraying a warm, golden shower just before he disappeared in the mist.

That, is Glacier.

Go Grease Lightning

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Dusty Man

Burning Man was a success. Much fun was had, hugs were given, and surprisingly, most of the drugs were untaken. It was quieter than normal for me, I think because I was with my girlfriend. Women have a moderating effect on men. Men tend to behave better when women are around, especially if the woman is allowing the man to place his penis inside her various pleasure orifices and deposit into them several spoonfuls of milky manjuice. The week went by as fast as it did slow. For the first time ever, I got normal levels of rest and avoided partying every night. I'm not sure how I feel about my newfound sense of restraint and responsibility. For me, Burning Man has always been a place of frenzied indulgence, dancing, and sleepless nights. With this increased mindfulness and progressive forethought, I felt out of my element, soft, uncertain, susceptible to a sort of vulnerability I was not very comfortable with. In the hearts of all men there is the need to protect those we love. As a boy I felt it for my sister, my mother and my brother, even my father. This masculine quality - this aggression begotten by fear - begs us to fight against unseen evils and protect from harm those we hold dear. During my first night of sleep in the desert I woke up from an anxiety dream in which I had been deliberately drugged and rendered useless, conscious enough to recognize my helplessness, but completely immobilized as I watched two men drag away my unconscious girlfriend. I'll leave it to your imagination what they intended to do to her. Nightmarish thoughts like these swam around like sharks in my unconscious mind, and each time I gave them attention, each time I thought I saw the sharp protrusion of a fin cutting against the surface of the water, I was squeezing a drop of blood into the murky depths. Anxiety sometimes functions like quicksand. You'll find that the more you struggle against it, the more you become ensnared. One night, just before sundown, I'd taken a hit of pure MDMA and felt absolutely nothing. No euphoria, no happy buoyancy, no release. I couldn't relax. My worry had diminished somewhat, but that was all. I was reminded that the mind is an incredibly powerful thing. For it to be able to completely nullify the desired effects of the substance and literally suppress the chemical process I'd forced upon it was staggering to me. Could fire decide not to flare when gasoline is poured on it? I knew it would be an interesting Burn.

Sunday night, the first night Holly and I went out together, we came across a parade of brightly glowing art cars. I'd never seen so many of them in a straight line before. It seemed ALL of the cars were there. And they were. It was a DMV check-in. We circled around and marveled at the spectacle, picking out the cars we wanted to ride on later in the week and taking lots of bad photos to document the experience. We didn't know it yet, but we were on our way to becoming full-fledged photo journalists. From there we bounced from one art installation to the next until we happened upon an FDA-certified-organic, scented art installation that everyone is bound to explore at least once: the portapotties. For some reason, while standing outside the stinking sewage pods, I was struck by a great outpouring of love and affection for my lady. I kissed her and told her how happy I was to be here with her, how surreal it all felt. We hugged and then laughed before peddling off madly into the night. Soon, the first storm of many unleashed itself and spun out around us, blotting out the light, blocking all but 3-feet of visibility. Everything was imbued with a vast smallness; nothing could be seen anywhere, everywhere. The wind became so oppressive that it was hard to ride against it. We had to wait. Dust swirled around us, beating itself to pieces against our bikes and bodies. I'd wrapped a scarf around my mouth and secured my goggles over my eyes but somehow the sand still found me. Eventually, by leveraging my keen sense of direction, and 6 years of experience with these types of situations, I got us home.

There was one night when Paul got himself deep into a K-hole. What an A-hole! He'd been drinking in the sun all day and then decided to do a massive bump or two of ketamine. Quickly, he discovered this was a no-no. As I was walking toward the cooler for a cold beer, I saw him spill out from the doggydoor of his yurt. I mused at how he'd just exited through the anus of his desert dwelling. "I'm floored," he yelled/slurred as he rolled onto his back. Indeed, he was. Though he couldn't stand, he seemed happy enough. I sat with him for a time, with my hand on his heart, and we talked about the time-tested ways to survive a K-hole: wait. Soon, jealous of his position, I decided to join him, and asked for the K. One bump, two bumps, three bumps and no more. Unfortunately I never quite fell as deeply into the hole as he did, but I did achieve some pleasantly floaty dreaminess as I lay staring up at the stars. By the time things had worn off for me, Paul had clawed himself up out from the bottom of his psychedelic well.

Holly and I made several attempts at eating mushrooms, but each time we took them they seemed to sedate us to the point of exhaustion. One night, after a long day, once we tired of cycling, we crawled inertially toward an empty hammock somewhere on the 8:00 side and climbed into it with all the grace and poise of a pair of blind porpoises. Cradled and rocking calmly in the arms of the desert wind, we fell asleep to the sound of thumping base, clinking bike chains, and hissing swells of fire. Soon the temperature dropped and the cold claimed our tired toes. Slowly we escaped our frosty cocoon and staggered toward our bikes to travel back to camp.

After a long Friday of sightseeing and chance friend encounters, at night me and my baby partied. We danced to Random Rab in a desert storm that cleared just long enough to watch a beautiful pink, purple and orange sunset. As we opened our hearts to one another on the long ride home, we were accosted by a British man who begged us to join him for the last night of a psychedelic planetarium projection experience. We explained that we needed to return to our camp, which was just down the block, so that we could change into matching bunny outfits. He could tell by the size of our pupils that we'd be back. Hurriedly we changed and raced back to the giant geodesic dome. Once we were inside, we joined dozens of other psychonauts and got horizontal. The movie was a series of animated shorts that made use of dynamically changing perspectives, colors and sounds, all of which created the sensation of floating through space, or riding in the back of a flatbed track through the streets of San Francisco with only the silhouettes of skyscrapers as your guide. The whole sequence was very much like what I'd imagine a DMT trip to be like; fractals, geometric patterning, warping and bending of distances. After the movie ended we went back to camp and filled our pocket apothecaries with illicit delights. We exhausted all the art on the deep playa while cuddling on luminous mushrooms and giant gramophones. We made friends with a bunch of burners who joined us for a chat beneath a darkened graveyard trellis festooned with wine leaves and wrapped vines. We managed to catch a friend's DJ set at Robot Heart and then watch the sunrise at the trash fence. Requisitely we drifted in and out of sleep while we lay wrapped in one another on the cracked floor of the playa as the soft, gentle warmth of the sun washed over us from above the mountains. The whole night we only made one mistake: we stood in the longest soup line in the world, while our drugs were wearing off. It felt like hours...because it was. Holly had had enough. "I can't take this," she said as her face twisted and contorted through all forms of unveiled antipathy. I assured her we'd get through it, but her energy was powerfully fierce and I felt it cutting at my own. "Talk," she demanded. I tried to think of topics but my brain had become a knotted ball of melted asbestos. "I've got nothing, babe. I'm a zombie. Why don't you introduce a topic? My inquiry was met with baleful, glaring silence. For a moment, I thought she might slap my teeth off, or beat me with a sock full of batteries. It's hard, when you're on drugs, and someone in your company - the only one in your company - isn't having a good time. It's very easy to feel all their dissatisfaction and irritation and believe it's being directed at you. In fact, some of it probably is. Misdirected energies are sharp and subversive on comedowns. We got through it, though, and she even volunteered to pay for my dentist bill! The hot soup was enormously nourishing and necessary and it got us through the night.

Sunday night is a significant night at Burning Man. It's the night The Temple burns; the spiritual centerpiece of the experience. This event is in stark contrast to the event of the previous night, where wild ruckus, riotous dancing and scantily-clad screaming set the scene. Sunday the dust smells somehow more somber. Just before sunset people make a slow pilgrimage toward the wooden structure. There is a palpable sense of ending. Once the sun is down, the necessary preparations take place and the burn begins in silence. A faint kindling, subtle popping, signs of smoke. The inside of the building brightens and the flames leap up and out. Sounds of crackling continue, swirls of smoke create little dust devils, thin tornadoes that twist outward toward the crowd. The fire surges until you can feel it on your face. Briefly, the darkness is illuminated as the entire temple is consumed in fire. It roars as the flames devour it, licking the surface of the wood and turning it black. Sometimes prevailing winds may change direction and sweep up ashen cinders and glowing embers, raining them slowly down like burning snow. As the fire came down on us people started to panic and scatter, raising their hands to protect their faces and heads as they ran. I didn't move. I lost Holly. After a few minutes I turned to see if she'd inched back up, but there was no sign of her. I missed her. Once the burn ended I looked for her by our bikes but couldn't find her there. Circling a small perimeter didn't bring her any closer, so I went back to the bikes. I found her crying. She told me she was afraid and lost and alone. I wiped the tears from her eyes and kissed her. The fire had burned holes through her coat. But, luckily, she hadn't been burned. She looked beautiful; her tired, wet eyes, the way her body sought refuge as it collapsed into mine, the dusty, tangles of hair which hung from her head and framed her face, the soft, powdery sheen the wind and sand had painted on her cheeks. I didn't want to lose her again.

We left Monday morning at 8:00AM. I'd forgotten about the unpleasantness of departure from this place, and the sickening pace of it. Leaving Burning Man is the penultimate trial, one of the final rites of passage. It only takes driving into standstill traffic at 10mph, and then pulsing ahead at breakneck speeds of 0mph - once every hour - to remind one of the luxury and the liberty speed affords. It took us 6 hours to exit, which isn't bad, considering it took some more than 9 hours. Our total travel time home was around 14 hours, by the end of which I was completely zombified. I think a fistful of ketamine would have kept me more alert than my spent sobriety.

My nostrils are destroyed, cracked, eroded, and caked with clay. Each morning I'd perform my daily ritual of blowing chunks of stale booger paste and blood from my nose into a moist towelette before coughing up neon green and black mucus that had gotten into my throat and lungs via the process of post-nasal drip. These morning routines (and the boogers) were made harder and more painful if I'd taken any ketamine the night before. On the last night, after The Temple had burned, we stopped off at a little bar called Cirque Gitane. From the outside the camp looked like shit. It had a clownish, barnyard aesthetic that seemed as uninteresting as it did uninviting. Seamus had mentioned he'd gotten a glimpse of it earlier in the night and recommended we pop our heads in for a quick pint. I wondered if the place was full of midgets and monkeys wearing clown noses and performing lewd, bestial sex acts and I started getting excited. Naturally, we went in. As is often the case at Burning Man, the exterior betrayed the interior. It was ornate and finely decorated, with regal couches, Roman busts and bizarre statues, oil paintings and expensive-looking rustic tarps that resembled worn leather. The patrons of the place were warm and unpretentious despite their lavish surroundings, and suddenly I felt silly for the baseless and hasty judgement I made before entering. As we drank to our friends who couldn't join us this year, a woman came by and delivered us fresh ice cream. An invisible DJ played great downtempo classics by Etta James, Booker T, and some nameless, forgotten soul singers from times passed. Before we knew it, we were drunk; stoned, with bellies full of ice cream. I started farting and decided it was time to return to camp. Back at camp we found the rest of our friends and kept the drinks coming. We sat under glimmering stars, in cheap, dust-covered fold-up chairs placed halfway under the auspices of a fluttering EZ-Up. The sound of the wind as it rustled through the shade structure quieted us. Soft and distant music. Comfort. After a few group hugs, a bump of ketamine, a hit of salvia, and some nonsense conversation, I called it a night. I drifted away, blown on the breeze back toward my tent. There I found my lady, asleep, buried in her sleeping bag, a night light left on for me so that I could see. I kissed her when I got into bed, though she didn't wake. I fell asleep happy.

I feel like I should have some sagely advice or worthwhile wisdom to impart. Burning Man, while it is a magical place, seems to lose that magic over time. There are strong parallels between the experience and MDMA. Both are transformative, allow you to see the world in a different way, fill you full of love and make even the cheapest copper seem beautifully gilded. But, like so many other things, its potency is diminished through repetition. The same dose starts to provide less. A subtle emptiness makes itself known as you realize the effect isn't quite what it used to be. I'm not saying Burning Man has changed, or that it's worse now, but I think I've changed - I've taken from it what I needed. That's not to say it isn't fun to go see friends and party or see cool art while having near-total freedom for a week. I'd still encourage anyone who expresses any interest in the experience to go. And I don't mean to say I don't love the place. I do. What I'm realizing is that you get what you put in. It isn't enough to simply go - you have to be ready to let the place go to you. To peer into it without allowing it to peer back is a failing of sorts. The place requires vulnerability. At its core, it is an open invitation to feel; love, pain, fear, acceptance, compassion, despair, exhaustion, confusion, comfort, communion. Sometimes the timing is wrong, or the circumstances aren't quite right and you can't let yourself go; can't surrender to the experience; can't feel the love, even though you may want to. Often wanting is not enough. Everyone wants to be smart, wealthy, in good shape, to feel loved, but few of us want to expend the energy to get there. Fear, doubt, and uncertainty motivate hesitation. Maybe I was resistant to the experience. Have you ever tried to do a headstand? Even a safe one, against a wall? Conceptually you recognize all you need to do is push forward, kick your legs up, and let gravity do the rest. But it isn't that easy. The pose is unfamiliar and scary. It FEELS like you'll fall and hurt yourself. And because you instinctively want to protect your neck, you struggle. Once you break through that initial fear, though, the exercise becomes easier and easier. The therapeutic qualities of the inversion are more fully realized and the headstand becomes pleasant. But does this happen as a result of accepting fear, or by rejecting fear? I've been thinking a lot about acceptance and rejection lately, and how they seem to be at odds. Acceptance, to me, lacks that progressive, change-oriented nature of rejection. Acceptance allows, even encourages stagnation. It seems to debase you, and allows hardship to walk all over you. Rejection, on the other hand, is to make a stand against that which you object to, those things that insult your soul, and to take actions which serve to eliminate them. While acceptance may do something to ameliorate your perspective about the thing, it doesn't address that which ails you. It is akin to accepting a poor grade on a paper instead of employing the self-discipline and perseverance required to study and achieve an A. What if athletes just accepted the fact that they will likely never be olympic medalists? What if someone accepted the feeling that they were undeserving of love? Neither of them would ever meet their potential. Acceptance does have its place, though. It is useful for dealing with things that cannot be corrected or controlled; incurable illness, or the death of a loved one. Here, acceptance, if you can find it, affords you relief from suffering. It doesn't treat them symptom, it treats your feelings about the thing. There is great power in this, for sure. But imagine there were a wasp which was repeatedly stinging you, every hour, every day. Would you rather reject the wasp or accept it? The energy expenditure for sustained acceptance of pain begins to seem torturous, while the one-time solution of crushing the wasp and disabling the mechanism for pain seems a clear cure. Maybe there is a counter argument here. Maybe the wasp is a symbol not of the wasp, but of pain itself. If you were to kill the wasp, another would rise up to take its place. Or a fire ant, a tick, bedbugs. If you accepted the fact that you are going to get bit, and that it will hurt, perhaps you'd be better equipped to deal with the myriad pains sent to plague you. Maybe then they wouldn't plague you. Major nuisances might become minor inconveniences.

They might.

Or you could just buy bug spray. Or an apiarist's jacket.

The Wonder Years

Ugh. My writing has suffered a considerable blow: it blows. I just deleted an entire paragraph of complete gibberish. It's as though I have nothing left to say, which seems improbable, yet, I'm unable to refute the fact. Surely I haven't already said everything I want to say. Surely there must be more. You'd think so. But surveying the barren landscape of my mind paints a very different picture. One without any happy little trees. Only smoldering desolation, nothingness, a vast expanse of absence. I look out for even the meekest sign of life, a mouse or a gnat, but I find nothing. Not even the smoke dances. The mountains are meager and unimpressive. The sky, colorless. Where did my creativity wander away to? It's odd. 

I'm hoping I'll find something to revitalize me, maybe at Burning Man. If I can't find it there, I doubt I'll find it anywhere. It is a place of possibility, if nothing else. Too often the tedium of everyday life strips away the magical, the marvelous, and leaves us instead with a gray, stale, shapeless lump of play-doh that doesn't even smell like play-doh anymore. It's important to remember that sameness is an illusion. As you age, it becomes increasingly more difficult to embrace - and to hold onto - wonder. It's claimed by the years. 

Earlier tonight I met a friend I haven't seen in years. We spoke of big ideas, asking questions we both knew there weren't any answers to, ruminating on the nature of fear and love, truth and beliefs. Life is a struggle for peace, which, once attained, we call happiness. Warmth, reflection, empathy - toward ourselves, as well as others - and the confrontation of fears all move us in this direction. They are developmental. These are things we must practice daily - and fail at - to maintain fitness and ensure a sort of spiritual agility. Once we become too sedentary, in our hearts or our minds, once we lose a sense of challenge, replacing it with complacency and idle comfort, we lose our place. We stop growing. We begin to wither and wilt and recede, defeated, desolated. On our faces we wear all the pained misery we'd hoped all our lives we might avoid. But there must be a way out, right? A way to overcome? And there is. 

Try.

La Cerveza Cosa Nostra

I ate a Mexican street burrito for lunch. It was from a reputable dealer, I was told, but my stomach tells a different story. It was a careless mistake. And although sickness never struck me, a general menacing has chased my gut all through the afternoon. So I just attempted to invent a cure; a rather strong cocktail, consisting of tequila, mezcal, several other assorted syrupy liqueurs, a splash of lime and some blueberry syrup. Somehow, my stomach is settled. It's magic. It might have been the bag of sweet potato tortilla chips I ate before and during the drinking. Who knows? It was only after I started feeling the warm buzz of intoxication that I realized I hadn't eaten since the bowel-busting burrito, that the drink contained upwards of three shots of alcohol, and I was naked. In science class I learned the rate of alcohol absorption, on an empty stomach, far exceeds a fed one. Feed your head. That's what I say. So does Jefferson Airplane.

Speaking of white rabbits, Holly recommends I eat only carrots this year while at Burning Man. She insists that I am a bunny incarnate, and that I am at my best when sticking to just vegetables and leafy greens. I can't entirely disagree with her; or that sweet, sweet beta carotene. It's worth noting that my vision has always been superb. I have a knack for spotting people way out in the distance, and for reading the small print of far away shampoo bottles while I shit in people's bathrooms. It's a gift, truly. What else? I'm about to leave my apartment, to head to a bar I know that carries a beer I like. Pliny the Elder. I want one. It has been some time since I've had one. I fear it may not play nicely with the cocktail. You see, Pliny is a very hoppy beer, which is fitting, based on my pre-established rabbit-hood, and hops don't play. Someone told me they're in the weed family.

Ha. Makes it sound like a mob syndicate. John Gotti and Vinny Hoppanini.

The Human Torch

I dreamt last night of a self-immolated man. It was late at night and I was walking home. When I happened upon him, he seemed slightly drunk, determined, perhaps too confident for a man about to light himself on fire. The sidewalk stank of kerosene. Only two other people watched from a distance. He was what appeared to be a street performer. The man's skin glistened in the street light. Then he mumbled something and lit a match. At once his feet were ablaze. He slid calmly forward, over a puddle of fire, yet was somehow he was unharmed. The fire remained contained to his feet, never leaping up his leg or calves. To do such a thing, and with such equanimity, the way he was doing it, disturbed me. He reminded me of a tightrope walker, but walking over burning coals. It was mesmerizing.

But, then, as you might imagine, something went wrong.

As he walked over his small lake of fire, his balance shifted too far to the side and he slipped, as though on ice. The flames jumped up his leg and wrestled him to the ground. He fell with such suddenness. A blanket of flames covered him. I rushed toward the man, pulling off my black fleece jacket to try and use it to beat the flames from his body. But it was too late. He was melting. Literally. The lower half off his body had already turned to liquid and was becoming one with the burning concrete. I watched, helplessly, as he sank and drowned in the flames. I was horrified. I'd never seen anything like it.

The Power of One

Dinner with a friend last night. We set the record for the longest dinner ever, I think. I knew it when I turned around and saw the restaurant had emptied out behind us, all the waiters stood staring impatiently, wondering when we'd ever leave. I could have sworn I saw one of them say, "just get the fuck out already." I use the word saw because he was out of earshot. I had to rely on lip-reading, a skill I learned from my time with Hellen Keller. The food was great and the drinks were even better. One drink, named after a person I didn't know and garnished with a leaf of cilantro over a giant block of ice, contained mezcal and lime flavored tequila, blackberry and something else I can't remember. It was lovely. My morning headache told me loudly I'd had too many. There isn't a good reason to have more than two drinks. After two drinks, the costs go up. You begin to barter tomorrow's time, today. We talked of humanitarian conquests, the value of helping others, maintaining vulnerability and openness in the face of insurmountable suffering. She's to spend three weeks helping refugees, in Greece.

"I don't know, I guess I'm afraid; of failure, of not making a difference," she said.

I asked her what she meant, how she could feel that way. To me, just to go somewhere with the express intention to help others, IS making a difference. Most people just sit on their asses, eating Doritos and drinking, thinking only of themselves, unwilling to lift a finger to help anyone - asking instead, "what does anyone ever do for me?"

"Even if you go and only really help one person, that's still one person's life that's been made better by your efforts. No matter what, you're making a difference," I said.

"But what if it's not enough?"

"It won't be, but that's the whole reason to go. At the end of the day you can only hope to do good and inspire others to do the same. And then, with enough people rallying behind a cause, you can effect true change."

I came up with a drunken hypothetical, of a collapsing wall that couldn't possibly be held up by one person, but that could probably be held up by a dozen. Once one person rushes to the wall, even though they know they can't possibly hold it up on their own, they rally others to action. Soon, with a dozen people rushing to push against it, it doesn't fall. The most important action is taken by the one who will try when there is no hope of success.

This morning I had to pick up James' car from the mechanic. When I arrived, no one was there and the phone was ringing off the hook. It was odd because the garage door was open. Finally a hobbled old man emerged from the back. He walked by me as though I were a ghost. I stood wondering whether I'd died. Maybe I WAS a ghost. To test my hypothesis, I pulled down my pants and, kneeling, began thrusting my flaccid sparkplug into a rusty muffler. I very badly wanted some WD-40. Just then an Asian mechanic walked in and stared directly at me for several long seconds. First I paused, thinking it discourteous to continue pumping away, but then I realized it was equally discourteous for him to stand there and ogle me, so I resumed.

"Can I help you," he asked angrily.

"Yeah, I'm here to pick up my car," I said as slapped the rear bumper.

"Is that your car?"

"This car? No, this isn't my car."

"Then can you stop?"

I did.

"What's the make of the car?" he asked.

"A 2004 Nissan Pathfinder."

He brought the car around and handed me the keys.

"You can't pay right now; the system is down."

"So do I need to wait?" I asked, moving back toward the car I'd initially introduced myself to. "You wouldn't happen to have any WD-40 lying around, would you?"

"No, no, you can go. We'll call you."

Very well. I left. The car seems to be repaired, but I won't know for sure until I take it on the highway. What should have been a perfunctory parking job turned into a 45-minute ordeal. Parking in San Francisco will test your patience and foment anger in a way that very few things can. I found myself enraged, screaming at the top of my lungs and pounding on the steering wheel, leering out of the window and threatening to beat an old lady to death because she caused me to lose a spot. When she challenged me I got out of the car and hurled a pile of fresh dog shit at her white hair with my bare hands. Her face looked like the worn, leathery mud flap of a truck. Some valiant white knight came galloping by on a red Vespa and tried to come to her aide, but I got back in the car and rode right over his god damned scooter. I lobbed a ball-bearing at his helmet as I sped off, and I heard it bounce forcefully from his head into a car window, shattering it.

The whirring, car-alarm chaos left in my wake was discordant music to my ears.

Who Knows Where?

I wanted to write today, and I had a ton of time, at least ostensibly, to do so. But I didn't. I spoke to my mom for a bit, and then my sister, took James' car to the shop only to have them tell me to come back on Monday, grabbed some food, picked up my laundry from the cleaners, showered, did some last minute Burning Man shopping, listened to music, and probably jerked off. Yep, I did. Where does the time go? Ask Nina Simone. Most of it is spent waiting, walking, driving, moving irreversibly from point A to point B while trying to tie up the loose ends before the day is done. Then, before you know it, you're 55 years old and you ask yourself again where all the time has gone.

I don't know where the time goes.

One day, I will.

La Brea Beach House

Another Monday morning car parking party. I can't really complain about waking up early to move the car though, since we made it back from Santa Barbara alive and in good health. We'd driven down in James' car, which we affectionately dubbed The Deathmobile, and there were more than a few moments I'd seen my life flash before my eyes. There's a neat trick the car does, when you drive at the speed limit, at about 65 miles an hour, where it wobbles worryingly, as though it were drunk and about to fall over. It gives everyone in the vehicle the uneasy feeling that the car might irreversibly lose control and turn itself sideways. We all imagined cartoonish, calamitously grizzly death scenes involving all four tires shooting off in unison, rolling in all directions toward a wheeling catastrophe; the windshield wipers swinging madly and gushing fluid, and the car stereo shooting sparks before bursting into flames; the seatbelts spontaneously melting and fusing hopelessly into the locking mechanisms, trapping us all in a car fire; barrel rolling across the highway, the car breaking apart piece by piece, lane by lane, leaving me attached like Wile E. Coyote to only the steering wheel and engine block.

To nearby drivers, it likely appeared I was driving drunk. While that wasn't entirely the case, I did have a backpack full of illicit substances which I didn't wish to be discovered by the long, prying arm of the law. You know what they do to people who just want to have a good time! The drive should have been 5 hours long, but due to our reduced speed, traffic, and a stop at a strange Mexican gas station showcasing a very uninviting dining area and a seemingly abandoned massage parlor, the drive took 10 hours. And I know what you're wondering: did they all get massages, is that what took so long? The answer is yes. Maria was a wonderful masseuse, and she had the mustache to prove it.

By the time we arrived at the beach house we were beleaguered. At least I was, from driving all day. My fellow caravaners were all itching to escape the dusty confines of the car and kiss the unmoving earth before cracking a few hard-earned beers to give thanks to our safe - albeit slow - arrival. We opened the door to the house and found it to be less of a house and more of a mansion. Gone was the image I had a of quaint, quiet, cluttered little house on the beach, and in its place was poised the goliath that stood before me. It even had that new-house-smell, of luxury, fine linens, golf shorts, expensive cutlery and high-ply toilet paper. We'd arrived smack dab in the lap of leisure. There were so many rooms I couldn't count them all. We were to sleep in a different room every night, so that by the end of our trip we would have exhausted all the wings of the house; east, west, north, south, southeast, southwest, northwest, northeast, southnorth and westeast. In the living room was a beautiful blown-glass lamp, made by hand, with a lampshade that was gold-plated on the inside; we would have the golden hour, every hour! The television was huge, and it required seven remotes and a degree in electronic engineering just to watch a movie. The master bedroom featured a California king bed and a bathroom the size of my apartment. In the center of the bathroom was a bathtub big enough for an elephant to ladle itself in sprays of steamy, warm waterfalls. In fact, I think the tub was single-handedly responsible for the California water crisis. I wondered if the tub was sometimes used as a docking hub for the Navy's battleships. Each of the other rooms had its own private bathroom, and within each of the private bathrooms was another private bathroom. The kitchen was stocked with all of the necessary cookware and counter-space, dual dishwashers and top-notch appliances. Then there was the outside. An enormous back patio and grill, a thatched wooden shade structure with affixed heat lamps that worked on timers, a few plush lounge chairs for star gazing at the beach, and a bunch of orange trees all bearing fruit. The four of us marveled at the splendor as we melted into the couch. There were several, crisp, satisfying pops as the beer cans opened, and we drank to our imagined wealth. B and K arrived shortly after and joined us in our thirsty celebration.

In the morning we rose, after having successfully resisted the fiendish compulsion to consume copious quantities of psychedelic mushrooms well into the witching hour. Chef Terry, and his sous chef, K, cooked up a wicked breakfast of French toast, poached eggs, baked bacon, avocado, and pineapple mimosas. We sat outside, amongst the humming birds and the bees, and feasted like kings and queens.

"You've really outdone yourselves this time," I said.

"Yeah, incredible job guys, really," B added as gooey egg spilled out over a piece of syrup-covered French toast.

"Yeah, man, you guys should definitely open a restaurant," Chuck added.

"Yeah! What'll you call it?" Holly asked.

"You guys should call it KT's," Chuck said.

"Yeah," Holly said excitedly.

"No no," Terry said, "they'll think the place is called Katie's."

"TK's" I said, "the food's a technical knockout!"

A chuckle, a roll of the eyes, a groan. The wind was soft and lilting. Bougainvilleas climbed in swirls over the trellis, and the purple flowers fluttered gently above us. Forks clinked against ceramic plates. In the distance hummingbirds hummed as they took quick drinks from helpless honeysuckles.

"No no," Terry started again, "I could never do it, I wouldn't."

"Why not?" Chuck asked.

"I don't need that stress; it would take all the fun out of it," Terry told him.

"Yeah, I guess I could see that," Chuck said.

"So," K said, after a brief lull in conversation, "beach and drugs?"

"That sounds lovely," Terry replied. "Shall we clean up first?"

"Yeah," we decided.

Then, much packing happened. We packed the dishwashers and then packed our mouths full of mushrooms. After applying liberal amounts of sunscreen, we packed a cooler full of cold beers.

"Pack a pair of shoes you don't care about," Holly said, "it's a tar beach."

I wore a pair of shoes I'd ruined once in Mexico, and then again at a muddy hot springs in the dark. The trail to the beach meandered, snaking back behind the house from the entryway at the end of the cul de sac. At first the path was paved, full of gravel, and it crunched loudly underfoot. Tall stalks of golden straw flanked us on both sides, shimmering and swaying dreamily. Amongst the straw there were interspersed little black stalks with small cornlike bulbs at the tall end. They looked charred from the sun. The contrast of black and gold intensified as my eye moved toward the horizon, multiplying the stalks incalculably. Small sounds stirred in the tall blonde grass. Occasionally a small barn swallow would dart out from the thick of it and swoop overhead like a slung arrow. Any moment I half expected a prowling lion to pounce. The girls walked ahead while we lugged the bag in the back. After a few minutes the path had become cracked dirt. It was patterned, almost scaly, pale, resembling shed snake skin. Soon the path came to a bend and a steep slope led the way down to the beach. I was unfortunate enough to have just taken hold of the heavy bag of ice and beer and water. Carefully I carried it down, trying not to misplace my footing. Soon we were at the beach.

The sky was partly hazy, perhaps due to the nearby wildfires, and the sun shined overhead. The beach itself had a wet looking quality to it. The sand seemed slightly darker than usual and, out in front of us, in the middle of the ocean, was an oil rig. I'd never seen one in person before. It sat perched on top of the water like a giant mechanical mosquito, gluttonously drinking the black blood from the earth. As the waves crashed against the shore they seemed darker, too. We walked left along the sand to where there was less seaweed and we dropped our towels. Terry hung a portable speaker from a brach jutting out of the high rock wall behind us and the music perfumed the air. It was nice. We each opened a Corona. That was nice, too. Suddenly I noticed my body felt nice. Very nice. In fact, everything was nice; the place on the horizon where the water met the sky, the scalloped clouds perched over the carved jetty to the west of us and the little people that seemed to be jet-skiing there, the thin, flapless line of birds gliding over the ocean, the hot sand on my feet, the sweat melting from my pores.

"Here we are, aye big dawg?" Terry said proudly, sipping a drink. "What'ya reckon is all the way down there," he asked pointing toward the place with the jet-skiers.

"I think it's people jet skiing," I said.

"Probably. That's UC Santa Barbara down there," Holly told us.

We all stared for a while at the probable people in the distance. For all we knew they might have only been waves cresting.

"Want to go in the water," Holly asked me.

"Sure, but in a minute. Maybe when I'm done with this beer."

Soon Terry's shirt was off and he was into the water. He went far out, until I was unsure if it was Terry's head I was looking at or a sea lion's. We watched, mesmerized, wondering if the water was cold, if he'd emerge covered in tar, looking like the creature from the black lagoon. He came out of the water glistening, evoking a young Sean Connery.

"How's the water," Holly asked.

"Oh, the water's lovely; warm," he said.

"We should go," Holly said, looking at me.

"Soon," I said, readying myself for water that was certainly much colder than I thought.

"Keep an eye out for the rocks," Terry said, "there's sharp, secret ones in there. I'd go down the beach, where I just came from."

Before I could make a decision, K lured Holly away with the prospect of yoga and saved me, at least temporarily, from my watery fate. I wondered how it would feel to become an ice cube. Could I? Would a frozen corpse float? Was there a market for human whiskey stones?

"Look at that," Chuck said pointing toward the girls, "it looks trippy."

Down on the beach Holly and K were beautiful and young and happy and radiant. They were doing yoga together. Because they were far away, and because they were doing different poses at different times, all you could see was a tangle of arms and legs that made them appear to have one form. Shiva, I thought. We watched as they moved between poses, creating new shapes and illusions. A flurried, slow motion mirage. An oasis of playful femininity. The sun was hotter now and my stomach was starting to feel off; the beer and mushrooms were having a noisy quarrel.

"I'm gonna head over to the water with her," I said looking at Terry and Chuck.

I didn't wait for a reply.

I met Holly down by the water and she kissed me sweetly. We walked arm in arm toward a large grey rock with strange, symmetrical grooves cut into it. I intended to leave my hat resting on top of it because I didn't want to lose it in the water. But as we approached, a swarm of flies rushed out at us. It was biblical. I'd never seen so many flies in my entire life. Where did they all come from? I felt like I was in a cartoon. A wall of at least 500,000 flies hurling themselves at us, swatting us away in the shape of a giant hand. We did the only thing we could: we ran away screaming expletives and waving our arms. They followed us. Flies leapt onto our heads and feet and legs, covering us at either end, hoping to meet in the middle.

"The water," I yelled, "run for the water."

We dashed like a pair of albino Kenyan sprinters toward the sea. I could taste Olympic gold. Or maybe it was the flies. And with a splash, we were in the water; fly free. Surprisingly, the water wasn't too cold. Under the surface I felt caught in mesh netting, as though there were knots of hair around my feet. It was seaweed and it felt pretty fucking repulsive. But by the time we'd gotten out, after sitting on our knees in the dirty, inky water, watching giant, eel-sized strands of seaweed materialize menacingly in the murkiness around us, the mesh felt tickly and good. We left the water, but not before a black wave hit me with a squid-ink cum-shot in the mouth. I never liked tentacle porn, and I especially didn't like it now. There was a moment, before we'd gotten out of the water, when I looked down and saw psychedelic spirals on the surface of the water, radiating outward around us.

"Look," I said, "can you see them?"

"See what?"

"That pattern on the water, it's like oil."

"No. Where?"

"There," I said, pointing.

"Uh? Wait. Yeah. No. Maybe?"

It didn't matter. They were there. And it was pretty. But soon we were out of the water and walking on the sand back toward the towels and the music. B and K were there already, dancing. I tried for what felt like days to open K a cold Corona with a lighter. Eventually I did it, after mangling the cap and the lighter beyond what was immediately recognizable as either a cap or a lighter. We realized Terry had disappeared hours ago on what could have only been a spirit journey.

"Terry still isn't back," I said.

"Yeah, he's been gone a while," B added.

"He's gonna come back a changed man," Chuck said, "with all the secrets of the world."

We sat in momentary silence, watching for the wonder hidden in a rolling wave. It seemed a miracle that waves could even roll, how surface tension could cause water briefly to retain the shape of a step on a staircase.

"An aqueous escalator," I think I said. "The waves just come down from nowhere, sink, and come back again."

The music suddenly stopped. I could feel the ambient energy change like whiplash as our little bubble burst. It was silent, save for the waves, and if there's one thing I know about mushrooms, it's that silence can get scary. Even under normal circumstances people have difficulty sitting alone with their thoughts, so imagine what it must be like to keep it together after ingesting a substance known to encourage intense introspection. Things have a greater likelihood of getting strange, for sure; it's why you take them. Luckily, I never felt terribly alarmed, and instead I saw it the way a driver might see a dangerous and fast approaching pothole - we'd just need to use caution and drive around it.

"Ugh," I said, "isn't the sun amazing?"

"What?" Holly asked, laughing.

"Yeah, it's just up there, shining down on us, and it makes everything amazing and warm. Without it, when it's cloudy and grey for days, we get sad, cold. And when it sets, in the dark, we become uneasy; we can't see without it. We hate its absence so much that we invented candles and electric lights so we could trick ourselves into thinking it's there, even when it's not. It gave rise to life on this planet, and in that way it's godlike. I love you, sun!"

A few giggling agreements encouraged me to keep talking.

"And all it is is a star burning in space; it doesn't care about you. It doesn't know you. Yeah, you know what, it's a good reminder: it's not all about you. It's easy to feel otherwise, especially easy to feel that way on psychedelics, but really, it's not about you - it's about the sun!"

"Yeah, it's ego dissolving," B said.

"Yeah, it's just up there, chillin, giving warmth indiscriminately; free love," Holly said laughing.

"The sun is such a hippie," K may have said.

"Look," I said, "I see him, it's Terry, he's back!"

"Where," B said, "that couple in the distance?"

"Yeah, Terry cloned himself. No, behind them, the next person on the beach."

"I don't see anyone behind them," he said.

"He's there. It's him, I can feel it."

"I believe him. He has like a super power for picking people out in crowds," Holly said.

I could tell B and K weren't convinced, but in the distance, almost too far to make out, I saw Terry walking back to us. I was sure of it. I described his shorts with the orange stripe, but no one believed I could see the colors that far away. I told them I was on mushrooms, that my senses were even more alive, but they dismissed me. It didn't matter, my efforts at distraction had prevailed. When you trip, you must take special care to remember that you have all chosen to return to babyhood: like a child, if you don't keep your mind occupied, it begins to wander. When the mind begins to wander, anxiety can set in, and inner turmoil can take hold. But now we were all fixated on that slowly growing figure in the distance. Every second I became more confident it was Terry. I could feel it in my feet. And soon, he was close enough that it was undeniable: he was back.

"Terry," I said, "glad you made it! I thought we lost you."

"Oh, no," he said, "I'd just gone for a walk. It's lovely down there."

"Have any wisdom for us?" Chuck asked.

"Only, that I was over there," Terry replied.

"Deep," B said, "you know, you look different, you've got a Mad Hatter or Cheshire Cat vibe going on."

"I do," Terry said emphatically.

"I think I'm done here," I said, "getting out of the sun sounds nice."

Everyone agreed and so we hiked back to our secluded beach mansion. As we climbed up the steep sandy edge I'd struggled down with the bag earlier, I felt like we were rappelling up the side of a building. It was impossible to tell whether we were walking straight up or not.

"You know Whoopi Goldberg was a hyena?"
I asked.

"What," B and Chuck said, "you must really be feeling those mushrooms."

"She was; in The Lion King."

"I don't remember that."

Damnit. How high WAS I? Did I just completely manufacture a memory from my childhood? How could mushrooms give me such a strong sense of conviction? No way, THEY were wrong, not me. Yeah, sure, blame them; that's your problem, you can never admit when you're wrong. But I don't feel wrong. I think I'm right. You would. Let it go. Look it up later. Be here now. Just then I looked up and noticed how exquisitely beautiful the landscape was. Huge hazy mountains towered over the horizon. Green trees and golden hills sprawled all around us. Small clusters of Spanish houses with red, sunburnt roofs sat nestled in between. It felt like we'd traveled out of time and place, perhaps back 100 years, to Spain. Or that we were a group of nameless passerby's, trespassing in a priceless painting.

We arrived back at the house and the mushroom-madness, the fungus-frenzy, the old psilocybin-psychosis started.

"Okay, don't go anywhere. It'll ruin the carpets. Take your shoes off and wash it off your feet," someone said.

What? Wash what off my feet? I took off my shoes and looked at the bottom of my foot. Blotches of oily tar appeared. When did that happen? I was mystified. I stared down, looking deep into my pale, inky sole, wondering what these strange Rorschach blots were trying to tell me. Was the tar harmful? Had it already passed into my bloodstream? It was sticky and stuck on my skin. How would it come off? The thought crossed my mind that I should probably feel alarmed, but I felt calm. I peeked into an adjoining room and saw Holly and friends frantically scrubbing their feet. Their efforts were in vain though because the tar wouldn't budge. Thinking on my tarry feet, I tiptoed toward the kitchen. Something told me that the only thing that beats tar is more oil. I rummaged through the cabinets and soon found what I was looking for. Arriving back at the foot-washing room, I presented my findings.

"Crisco?" K asked, surprised.

"Yes, Hayzoos Crisco, your lord and savior. Only he could wash the sins from your feet."

Out of desperation, we started scrubbing with verve. It seemed to work well enough, dissolving the tar and loosening its hold on our skin. The only sound I could hear was the sound of paper towels scratching on feet. It sounded like we were each trying to make our own small friction fire. I started laughing and asked everyone to pause for a second and take a step back.

"Look at us. We're all huddled in here, our legs bent or stuck up into the sink, scrubbing our feet with a bottle of Crisco!"

Hysteria took us until it bordered on madness. How long would we have to scrub to rid ourselves of this gunky mess? Why hadn't anyone told me the beach was built on top of La Brea tar pit? And where were Terry and Chuck? Had they suffered the same fate as the dinosaurs? Were they turned into fossil fuel? Oh well, it was too late for them; I'd mourn later. Now was the time for a shower. And not just an ordinary shower. It was a damn near religious experience. The water washed over me in euphoric waves and I was born again. With a bar of soap I washed off all the greasy sunblock and sand and sweat and grime. I couldn't help but moan and then chuckle at the absurdity of it all. I opened my eyes and Holly was there on the other side of the glass. When I spoke to her my voice boomed and took up all the space in the bathroom. I tried to communicate how pleasurable the experience was, how I thought I might never leave the shower. Why should I have to? I could become an amphibian. The slipperiness of the water drew my hands over my head, my face, my chest and arms, just to feel the sensation of it over my body. Then I wanted to get out. I wanted to be nearer to her. I turned off the water and stepped out. We kissed and laughed and giggled madly as she helped me dry off. She was adorable and sweet and perfect and I just wanted to hold her there and not say a word. She broke the silence by mispronouncing the word mushrooms as mershrooms and we broke into a fit of ecstatic laughter. I loved her. We kissed and held each other for a moment before I put on my pair of purple paisley shorts and we returned to the others.

For the next several hours I remained trapped in the black-hole gravity of the couch. At one point I unwittingly smeared an entire tube of aloe vera over my face, forcing me to rub it in for a long, long while. Terry played an incredible album called Foxbase Alpha that I couldn't break free from, even after I could stand again. The music seemed made for the moment. It was soft and upbeat and heady, introverted and extroverted at the same time. From the couch I looked out through a pair of open doors that lead to a small courtyard with a fountain in the middle. The fountain had cobwebs on it that glistened in the sunlight. A beautiful breeze blew over my hot skin and it made the brick wall breathe like a blanket on a line. I watched in awe as the geometry of the corners of the room changed shape. My body felt amazing and I couldn't stop moving my muscles. I couldn't stop yawning either. While I lie on the couch I could have sworn I'd become a sloth. Towards the end of the album I managed to make it off the couch, but I didn't get far before the floor seemed a welcome destination. I lie down and stretched out for a while. Things went on like this a while longer until I went outside where Holly, B and K were all painting. Watercolors. Of psychedelic octopi. Fitting.

Holly and I watched two humming birds dance in the air between us as we picked a fresh orange from a tree in her backyard. It was delicious and juicy. I could feel the nutrients bombarding me. We all made our way inside and we spent the next hour trying to watch Almost Famous on her TV. Lucky for me the shrooms had worn off, or else the stress of it all would have been absolutely intolerable. Just as we were about to give up, I had an epiphany. I used the receiver remote, instead of the universal remote, to set the audio channels to match the two-speaker stereo output. Voila! At some point Chuck, Terry and I went to purchase some groceries for dinner. Terry outdid himself once more and cooked up a pasta dish in a cream sauce with leftover bacon and fresh scallops. After we ate we were all tired from the hike, the sun and the shrooms, so after a painfully long board game, we slept.

The next morning Chuck, Terry and I drove to brunch while the others went back to the beach. I swore I would never again endure the tar, and Chuck's legs and ankles were sunburned, so we didn't mind missing it. We cleaned up and set out for home mid afternoon. We stopped off at a gas station and refueled. Overhead the clouds were the color of peaches and cream and at their tips were highlights of soft green. The sun ducked below a silhouetted mountain range to the west and the sky reddened noticeably. The clouds had stretched out thinly and expanded by this time, so that they looked like one giant mass. An enormous moth-wing, stained by an overturned glass of rosé. Holly read a book aloud to me while Terry and Chuck watched a movie in the backseat. The car wobbled all the way home, but no one seemed to mind.

Drive Thru Damnation

Woke up early. James is away, back in the motherland, and so I've inherited his car. Where it was parked forced me to wake up at an ungodly hour and move it for early morning street cleaning. I'm not sure what street cleaning actually accomplishes though. A loud, slow moving truck comes by bearing huge spinning bristles that swirl around and scrape the gutter as the truck inches by. In its wake there is often garbage strewn about, blowing in the wind from its freshly disturbed place. The grime and general uncleanliness of the street still remains intact, however. I think a giant toothbrush with a big glob of oxyclean on it would be more effective. We'd just need to hire a team to scrub the gutters with it to get them all pearly white.

When I first woke up I thought I'd just go back to sleep after, that I'd still be tired from sitting in the car for an hour and twiddling my thumbs. I can see now that I was mistaken. I'm awake now. Maybe there's still time to tire myself out. I could do some erotic morning calisthenics. When the car is a rockin', don't come a knockin'. That sounds like a lot of work. On top of that, over the weekend I slept wrong on my shoulder, and now it's in quite a lot of pain. Any unnecessary exertion seems unappealing.

An unfortunate side effect of the injury I sustained while dreaming is that I can't go to the gym to lift weights. I might go anyway and just stick to cardio.

Oh, here's the street cleaner. Time to move the car. Be right back.

Ok, so I've moved the car, but now I wonder if I can leave the car here with risk of ticketing. The cleaning has occurred, but the sign says no parking between 6-7 for street cleaning. Since the cleaning has happened, and the cop cars have passed, is it safe to leave the vehicle even though it's only 6:20? I think I'll wait 5 minutes, and then if no wild traffic cops appear, I'll role the dice. This is a good case study on owning a car in San Francisco. Recently I'd been considering buying a car, a Jeep, but I hadn't considered the inconvenience of not having a garage. Cars on my street often get their windows broken by desperate crackheads looking for lint to smoke between the seats. Kids key the side doors. When I was younger we used to steal the caps off tires and deflate them slightly, for fun. Some nights for cheap thrills we'd drive around and smash the side mirrors off of parked cars. I'm owed a karmic return, you see, so I'm hesitant to put the car in a precarious parking position.

Saturday night, after a show, Holly and I got stoned and hungry. I floated an idea - a secret pastime of mine - of calling an Uber to take us to the McDonald's drive thru. She seemed giddy at the prospect, even though she wasn't particularly partial to fast food, especially McDonald's. But after a few kisses and a couple more hits of the bowl, she obliged. Carlos picked us up, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Uncle Fester. There would be two stops, I told him, the first would be McDonald's, and the second, back here. I asked him how he felt about circularity. When we got there I asked him if he wanted anything. I told him we'd pay but he insisted he could pay for his own. We're in this together, man, let me buy you a ten-piece. He laughed graciously but was firm about paying. Holly, sitting on the driver's side, had the responsibility of placing the order.

As she spoke to the voice coming through the speaker, she made a faux pas that outed us as two stoners. She asked for a Frosty. At McDonald's. No! How could you have been so foolish! They're onto us! She caught her mistake readily, and began laughing hysterically into the microphone, for what felt like eons. Don't do this to us, baby, please, stop laughing. Uncle Fester had grown older and more wrinkled by the time the voice replied. Is there anything else, he asked coldly. Yes, a ten piece chicken nuggets. Just then, Carlos blurted, "on a separate check." What!? A separate check!? At a McDonald's drive through? What the fuck do you think this is, Carlos? Have you done this before? When have you ever fucking gotten two checks at a fast food drive thru!? Holy fuck this was amateur hour. Not only did they know we were stoned and in over our heads, but they knew we had the nerve to drag a third party into this by hiring a driver to deliver us to our late night indecency. What kind of sauce, the voice asked. I want to pay, Carlos yelled back. Carlos, man, shut the fuck up. Put it separate, he screamed, put it separate! What kind of sauce? Just give him ketchup! Then there was silence. I heard a dog howl in the distance. Or maybe it was a wolf. Through the open window I could hear the judgement buzzing from the speaker. And then it came: you know, for a penny you could get 20 nuggets instead of 10. I was too high for this kind of math. For one cent we could double the number of nuggets!? We looked at each other. What were we supposed to do? Was he toying with us? What does one do when the offer is simply too good to refuse, and yet, too good to be true? I looked at Carlos, hoping to catch his eyes in the rear view mirror but all I saw was nervous sweat dappled across his bald head. JUST DO IT, I screamed. What was happening? Was I in a Nike commercial? Had they partnered with McDonald's? I knew one thing for sure, though, I wasn't lovin' it.

There was silence. Something was wrong.

What. Kind. Of. Sauce.

Goddamnit, got us again. Honey mustard.

Drive up.

We drove up, completely unprepared to meet the face of the voice of god. We were to be sentenced. The car crawled around the curve. Carlos had cut the turn too wide and the front of the car jutted out away from the window, putting as much distance between himself and the window as possible. He threw a crumpled up $5 bill at me and made the sign of the cross as he clutched the rosary beads that hung from the mirror. I could sense his shame. A pimply faced boy with long hair poked his head through the window at us in the back seat. His brontosaurus neck stretched into the car cartoonishly as his lips hovered just before my ear.

We might be out of apple pies.

Ay Dios mio, Carlos screamed. This was too much to handle. Out of apple pies? On a Saturday night? This was prime time! What did I come here for? We all know the nuggets aren't chicken, and the burgers are made of wax and perfume. Fuck. Fuck it all.

Just joshin' ya.

He dropped the bag into my lap. The smell was intoxicating. Once Holly handed him the cash, Carlos sped out of there like a bat out of hell. In the blink of an eye we were back at Holly's and Carlos was looking at his nuggets erotically, softly moaning under his breath as he tore open a ketchup packet. I wondered if there was a condom inside. As we exited the car I could have sworn I heard him whispering to the nuggets.

Cluck.

Cluck!

Cluck!