so let's start this stream on Monday night.. it's a new friends 21st birthday party (chanting, 'now you're legal everywhere! how does it feel?' 'meh.. overrated') and we're sitting on a freezing cold December beach trying to start a fire while my toes sweat inside my shoes and then begin to freeze oh so uncomfortable it's got to be an infected cut almost.. I've been chain-smoking all night for no particular reason save for perhaps that consistent headrush which pushes me into the kind of manic I like, rapping to an unlikely *****-funk instrumental in Pete's car on the way to the beach, it's the one thing I can do that everyone gives me kudos for, verbal versatility.. it's so cold, as in it's too cold to even be all that much fun, except in the dark when I think no one can really make out the details of my face (god I kno I'm not ugly, not that ugly, somewhat attractive I think actually depending but still) I begin opening up under the cover of some measure of anonymity, now endowed with a perceptive wit not quite felt so often.

There's some guy lounging around the fire that keeps saying he's thankful for drugs during 'gratitude circle' in which we each give our name and something we're thankful for and once we've all had a turn, we throw our hands up in unison and bellow, 'ahoy!' he finally admits that he's very high on acid but that it's too dark to trip out on anything all that interesting so he's enjoying the fire, and he goes off on some tangent about how all drugs should be legal, someone retorts back, 'I dunno if I could hand somebody a latte while high on acid.. work just wouldn't work' to which he replies (in all seriousness) 'really? I dunno, I think most things would be better if I was high all the time.. could just stick a blotter in my coffee every morning.' another fellow, one whom nobody knows, appears out of the darkness beyond the flame as we are blessing the air with a jam session.. he's too stereotypically hippy in my mind and I almost expect him to introduce himself by saying, 'hey man, consider the lilies' but instead he shakes my hand quite vigorously and begins telling everybody about how he is going out to a farm on the Sunshine Coast the following weekend to experience ayahuasca for the first time. I tell him I'm from the Sunshine Coast and am shocked ayahuasca is something that has ever existed anywhere near me.. I begin asking him how I'd go about organizing some such session for myself and he goes on some rant about 'it's all vibrations, man.. you put the intention out there, and people will come to you, you know? it'll just happen, you just have to be ready' seeming to be shutting my question down for confidentiality or sumthin so I respond with, 'well, you're sitting beside me right now, eh? vibrations, dude. all me.' he silently refuses to go much further.. probably ****** or too lazy to give any info, as confused as anyone would be in a situation like that.. he, too, later gives me kudos for a freestyle, calling me a 'real poet' and asking for 2 cigarettes in exchange for some ***, patting me on the back with 'I'm giving you more than 2 cigarettes worth but it's *** you deserve it.'

Eventually Pete and the rest of the friends I'd arrived with decide to venture home, probably the cold and frankly I can't blame them.. I consider following, but end up reckoning I might have a better time if I stay (despite the fact that I work at 12:30 the following afternoon and it's already close to midnight and my place is on the other side of town and oh well in the actual **** it's'all good that's why jesus invented taxis)

as fast as I may be able to carry my legs is never fast enough to escape myself.

I sit alone in my presence and cough a frozen lung back to life. glazed in phlegm.

95% percent of my friends have vacated the city for the winter holidays and seem to be having fantastic experiences wherever the **** and back again. I sit alone at my computer and whine to you in stream-of-conscious prose because I would otherwise be fighting sobs between coughing fits upon the floral patterning of my single-layer blanket draped across a queen-sized mattress planted straight upon the floor (as if I'm Japanese or something).

it feels like the antidepressant I'm on nullifies most highs to a point and I have just discovered a nullification of the runners high is included. Returning after a 20 minute lap, I hate myself even more than I did when I left in a narcissistic daze to look for an outcome as opposed to petting the parking lot with my eyes like a painting by a French renaissance artist I can't pronounce the name of. Everything I've done is a joke in trapped mind-states like this. Everything I've done haunts me like old sweaters I no longer wear but keep piled-- lonely nostalgia's-- like empty memories of ex-girlfriends and slow, lonely mornings in elementary school underneath that old oak tree where the only company you preferred was your own to the point that teachers began to call in your parents to address it as if it were anymore of an issue than the fact that others had to constantly surround themselves with friends and noise and dead-end conversation---

after pushing writing aside to skype my almost-girlfriend from her home in Florida (away for Christmas break like the rest of 'em) I am still vacillating between sadness-of-the-mind and happiness-of-the-absurd. I begin to doubt if there is anything that resembles sadness-of-the-absurd and happiness-of-the-mind. I was short on rent by $35 this month-- both because I am paid minimum wage and because I spent too much on beer to forget the fact that I may lose even this job that pays minimum wage, seeing as I was nothing but a tool to be employed for the season of Christs birth. Two other seasonal employees have already been informed that they're most definitely staying on after the seasonal contract expires, while the rest of us wait in a quagmire of corporate vanity and pistol whipping until Sunday for word on our own outcomes. As much as I love books, this is still a stronghold of the New York stock exchange, and nothing more. I am used insofar as I am useful.

I keep falling back into my solipsist anxiety of old, and it's usually via the catalyst of my own design: 3 to 5 cups of coffee and the resulting overdose on cortisol. It's like I depersonalize for a little while and fear I may very well lose my mind. Everything becomes a hazy game of 'holding it together' by a string of floss and I inhabit a dream world I know very well is the real world and yet I am still unsure as to where the line has been drawn. I try to let go and lose myself in it-- try to hark back into remembrance all those Buddhist proverbs about having to 'go out of my mind' to 'find it.' Often, my tinnitus lets off a signature trauma bleeeeeeeeepppppp as if I were a shell-shocked survivor in the first scene from Saving Private Ryan. I know I look tired.. I decide to keep the rings under my eyes quite visible so perhaps the world will finally notice that I am exhausted and sick of its ****. It never listens. It just passes me like homeless people and waits for me to die.

The *****, ugly truth is that, next week, I might be jobless.

The *****, ugly truth is that I am no good at playing a character in a TV show I don't even want to watch. I want to change the channel, but I can't find the ******* remote.

The Apple logo sticks to the screen as I reboot my iPhone. Everything costs far too much, as if money were no object. This brings me to a counter-cultural stream of thought, which is typical of me and my abhorrent ramblings.. money is nothing but an object, but we treat it as some self-imposed objective truth and forget that it is nothing more than an agreed and shared subjectivity.. like the rest of our 'objective' measurements and pursuits of knowledge. I hate money, and it's true that one reason is because I don't really have it, but I would (and have) hated it even when it is in my possession like some gift that's a curse and some curse that's a gift but it's mostly just a curse, because we're all too petty to stop keeping score. We can't trust our particular cups to the ocean for fear of losing a dime.

saying you’re anything
less than the love of my life
is like saying the world is
a mere grain of sand
the sun just a fireplace and
the universe only a pit stop
on the way to the big city