Category Archives: Observations

sad things that you observe happening to other people

Crazy Pills Redux

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Yeah I know it’s cheating; posting an old myspace blog on sadsigh. But I haven’t posted a dern thing on here since it’s inception so I figure- post something now, get used to the idea, and eventually start posting new sorrowful soughs. (Oh yeah- that opening poem’s not mine but I forgot whose it is. Dickinson I think?) Enjoy.

And Something’s odd – within -

That person that I was –

And this One – do not feel the same –

Could it be Madness – this?

If you’ve ever known someone who has lost their mind, you’ll know that it’s a scary but fascinating thing to witness. I myself have never witnessed it outside of a few friends in drug-induced stupors, but what I’m saying is if you have seen it it must be both scary and fascinating. When you yourself are the one who is going crazy I imagine it is much more the former than the latter. The following is an account of my recent brush with temporary insanity, or whatever it was, told as accurately as I can remember it.

* * *

Before we begin it’s important to know a few things about me. I am currently 24 years old. There is a slight history of mental problems in my family (alzheimers.) I am generally of sound mind and health, although I do have a bit of a penchant for the ol’ alcomahol (more on that to come.) In my salad days I experimented with many different kinds of drugs but I never developed any kind of affinity for them for very long. I quit smoking weed when I was 18, and everything else has tapered from recreational moderation to near total disuse in the past six years. The only constant has been the booze, which seems to take the forefront of most of my weekend endeavors but never even enters the picture on the weekdays (I put the “fun” in “functional alcoholic”.) This weekend-warrior syndrome has been my routine since around age 15, meaning for almost a decade I have been binge drinking to get my kicks.

Strangely enough, when I look around me at any given time or place (except work) I find I am surrounded by like-minded individuals. Almost everyone I hang out with does the exact same thing, meaning either that this is a widespread and acceptable practice or that I have selected my associates over the years based on their function as enablers and drinkin’ buddies.

I think we all know which is the case.

Now don’t get me wrong- I have a great network of friends both in Los Angeles and back in the bay area. We travel together, go on adventures, laugh, fight, cuss, and always drink. I’m not complaining about my friends- I love them. I am merely contemplating the state of my life and wondering why I went insane last Thursday. So here it is:

* * *

I took last Friday off of work because my good friend Nick was coming down from San Luis Obispo on Thursday afternoon for a weekend L.A. visit. I hadn’t seen the dude in a while due to conflicting schedules and I was obviously stoked to see him.

I got off work and met Nick at my apartment at around 3. It had been a stressful week at work (the stress arising from the fact that I went to work all week) and so I relaxed on my back patio with a Coors Lite and a cig. Two beers down we decided it was too early to start getting drunk, so we went out to eat at Baja Cantina and saw no reason not to get 24oz margaritas while we were at it. We got back from dinner a little tipsy. The sky was kinda creeping towards sunset meaning drinking more was totally acceptable. We sank a few more Coor’s Lites before hopping in a cab and going down to Hinano’s by the pier. We had a couple beers each there before deciding that the locals were a little restless so we headed over to the Whaler where we briefly crashed a karaoke birthday party before deciding that no bar could satisfy us. We drank a tall boy each on the beach, I tried to convince Nick to break into the pier with me and failed, and we hailed a cab for home. The beer count at this point, roughly, was 10 apiece.

So I was drunk when I got in the cab. Admittedly. I mean, that was the point. We don’t drink ‘em for the beerguts. But I wasn’t unusually so. As Nick himself pointed out after we got home that night, he had seen me twice as drunk and still coherent numerous times. It was an average night of celebration with an old friend. Nothing spectacular. Kind of boring. Until, about five minutes away from my apartment, I looked over at my good friend Nick sitting next to me and breifly lost my mind.

I have known Nick since I was in 3rd grade. We were inseperable in high school and continued our friendship through college and beyond. I fuckin’ know this kid. But that night in the taxi, I looked over at him suddenly, aghast, and asked

“How the fuck did you get in this cab?”

He stared back at me, speechless. Was I fucking with him? I was staring at him wide-eyed as though I had never seen him before in my life. He actually looked like a stranger to me, and I thought he had randomly jumped in my cab.

“Oh shit! My friend Nick’s back there at the bar! We have to turn around! Dude. My friend’s here from out of town and he has no idea where he is. We have to go back and get him.”

Nick had no idea what to say. It was obvious now that I wasn’t joking. I was looking at him coherently, I was apparently in full control of my faculties, and yet I did not recognize him.

“Dude, I’m Nick.” he said. But I wasn’t paying attention.

“I gotta call him.” I said. Ignoring the stranger next to me I frantically scrolled through the “n” section of my call list and dialed “Nicky B.”

“It’s ringing.”

As I waited for Nick to pick up, the stranger in the seat next to me reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, which was ringing. He flipped it open so that I could see the source of the call. “Mikey Dub.”

“Dude. I’m Nick.”

And suddenly he was. He had proven it. He literally materialized from stranger to Nick in that instant. I was scared shitless.

“Oh shit dude. That was fuckin’ weird.”

* * *

We both agreed it was the strangest thing that had happened to either of us. Of course Nick asked me if I was on acid or shrooms or some other hallucinogen. He even asked me if it was possible it was an acid flashback. I told him there was no way I’d done enough acid in my youth to trigger a flashback now.

We discussed it all weekend and could come to no rational conclusion. I had slipped from sanity for the first time in my life.

As I explained before, that night was nothing unusual. It wasn’t even a rough night by our standards. Some of you might be reading this thinking “well. that explains his delusions. he was dead drunk.” Not so. One man’s “drunk” is another man’s “pleasure.” Our definition of “drunk” entails whiskey shots with Jager backs all night long until the wee hours of the morn’. It means blurred vision and incoherence and stumbling. And even on the most blacked-out intoxicated shit-housed night, I have never forgotten who I was with or failed to recognize a face.

That Thursday night I had none of the normal symptoms of extreme intoxication. I simply got in a cab and moments later could no longer recognize my childhood friend sitting next to me. So I have to question… could this be the result of prolonged binge drinking changing the neural makeup of my brain? Could it be a remnant of some hallucinogenic drug I took in my teenage years, surfacing after all this time? Is it a foreshadowing of some dark disorder I am fated to inherit?

Or perhaps is it just a momentary lapse in cognizance; a wet slipping of gears that is to be expected from time to time in my otherwise functional mind.

I sure hope so.

Why Be A Hater On the Buckeye State?

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Today, I went to get my nose repierced.  I got it done last May, had to take it out in December, and missed it.  So I trotted over to the only piercer in town, down on South Street and weirdly named Angels.

The kid who did it was the usual pierced-everywhere-forked-tongue freak.  But he was a nice guy.  Except he seemed to have a slight prejudice.

I took my flatmate, Sarah, with me, who is from DC but went to Kenyon College in Gambier, OH.  The piercer asked her where she went to uni and she told him.

“Oh.  Ohio.  You shouldn’t be allowed in here,” he said darkly.  And then shaking himself he said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well,” she tried to explain, “I’m not actually from Ohio.  I just lived there.”

“Still….  No, it’s a long story.  No one from Ohio is allowed in the store.”  He declined to say more and the piercing was done then, with, ahem, some pain.  After the discussion we were left feeling rather awkward about the whole experience.  I forked over my money and we left to go get drinks.

Over wine, we discussed what possible prejudice people from Ohio could have inspired.  We came up with the following scenarios:

  • Buckeye massacre of some kind with peanut butter everywhere.  And I mean everywhere.
  • He had taken an ill-advised trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was bitter about the experience of having to pay $20 to, you know, be in a big building in Cleveland.
  • His whole family was killed in a freak roller coaster accident at Cedar Point.
  • The Erie Baby ate his first love on above ill-advised trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and he’d be stuck on 14 year olds for the rest of his life a la Humbert Humbert.
  • Co-workers nearly bored to death by tourists from Ohio.

That was all we could come up.  I wonder which it was.

L.A. Sexcapades

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One of the advantages to living in an apartment complex is getting to know the folks around you in a neighborly way. In Los Angeles, befriending your neighbors is not a reality. Instead you pass each other in the halls never quite sure if they live there or if they’re just visiting. You’ve all had that moment where you enter your building and someone quickly follows after you – and then you wonder if you’ve just let in a murderer and if your neighbor’s going to end up dead because of you. Then you go towards your place in a quickened pace because you know you could just as easily be killed by the shady man you’ve just welcomed to murder you.

Anyway last night I went to sleep around 1 am and there were plenty of people up and about. That’s another thing about living in a row of apartment complexes – the inability to mask out noise of neighbors from other buildings, or homeless people digging for recyclables in the alley. If people decide to be loud and your asshole neighbor doesn’t decide to yell obscenities out the window, you have to deal with it. So if people are blasting R&B and hip hop music, you have to train yourself to fall asleep even though it’s impossible. And if you’re trying to drown out the music and you start hearing moaning and screams of excitement, you start thinking, is that really happening? Then you’re left trying to drown out sex noises, but at the same time in between the bass of the really terrible R&B, you end up listening to your neighbors having sex. And this isn’t the first time. Apparently, somewhere near me is a very passionate woman and I hope to God it’s not the older one with frizzy hair because that would just be disturbing.
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Brokeback Department

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Now, I’m no expert, but let’s just say you’re a cowboy.  You’re a handsome, dashing cowboy of about 28.  You wear a cowboy hat and jeans and cowboy boots.  You also sport a giagantic belt buckle the size of my face.  Let’s talk about places I might see you.  Pretend this is a question on Family Feud.  Survey says:

1. Texas

2. The rodeo

3. Some American-themed restaurant of some kind.

4. A convention of People Who Like Dressing Like the Village People

5. A Village People concert.

Let’s talk about the places I should not see you:

1. Standing non-chalantly in my department in the middle of nowhere, Scotland.

See, again, I’m no expert, but when I come down the stairs in the Victorian-era building that houses the St Andrews English department, about to exit to a seascape punctuated by a castle and cathedral ruined in the sixteenth century, I do not expect a man to lock eyes with me, tip his hat, and ernestly say ‘Howdy’.  It throws me off.  Then I have to run away from you before I lose my shit and laugh in your face.

It makes me wonder, all this talk about gay cowboys, did the collective force of the female sexual frustration in this town conjure one out of thin air?  One who wants to do a higher degree in English literature?

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