by Megan Boyle
• continued feeling minimal morphine effects but wanted to feel something else. tweeted that my tolerance for all drugs i currently have other than weed seems too high for anything to be ‘worth it,’ asked if i should buy beer or smoke weed. ‘weed’ won. smoked in kitchen.
• remember thinking it’d be funny if someone did a wailing heavy metal guitar solo of ‘the happy birthday song,’ like really wailing, wailing hard…winning pulitzer prize for wailing.
• walking from the kitchen to the bed, i felt a strong wave of paranoia/anxiety. stopped walking and grabbed counter. face felt hot. tried to discern what i was anxious about, which in itself caused anxiety. seemed like i was mostly anxious about ‘what is happening to my body.’ vision started blacking out in patches that looked sparkly at first, then became dark, then i couldn’t see the room at all, it looked like my eyes were closed. thought ‘this is it, you did it, morphine and weed and nootropics, this is what finally does you in.’ probably fully blacked out mid-walk back to the bed. i had walked from the bed to the kitchen to get my phone ‘just in case’ i needed to call 911 (didn’t factor in phone is broken or that i probably wouldn’t know if i should call until after i woke, which might not happen) before laying down. found bed by slowly walking a distance and ‘pawing’/lightly kicking the air. felt completely blind as i walked. laid down. thought ‘do not go to sleep, you will not wake from this sleep.’ unsure how i stayed awake. vision slowly returned and i felt sober.
• first thing i wanted to do when i became more awake was have sex/look at porn. looked for a while but it kept seeming gross or…i don’t know. something about seeing the bodies while touching my body. couldn’t do it, but not in a ‘damn i missed out on something good’ way. it more like, ‘no onions on mine, thanks.’
• smoked a little more and watched netfilx movie, ‘the bachelorette.’ it was horrible but comforting, like ‘here is your outlet to the world, this is what the rest of the world does, maybe.’ sometimes thought what i didn’t like about kirsten dunst and her friends were because i was stoned. smoked while watching too, i think, due to not thinking i was stoned enough to think the movie was funny or interesting. still did not seem funny or interesting. got obsessed with picturing the ‘making of’ documentary of the movie, how it felt like a dollar store or something. walking around in a dollar store. all the cast members going to their trailers quietly and it’s never sunny enough to look sunny but it’s not cloudy either, it always looks like 3PM on a sunday. just. walking in and out of trailers. dollar store. seemed extremely bleak to think about this as i watched the movie, like how porn was unappealing when i thought about my body, but the movie was still comforting to watch and almost…like…idly concerned with its own bleakness…in a way that seemed uplifting…like a forgotten documentary about some man four people knew…laughing right now, at ellipsisesessess.
• ate four tortillas heated on the stove with hummus spread on all of them: two plain hummus, one hummus + raw red cabbage, one hummus + avocado. ate entire avocado with lime and salt and most of a ‘personal-sized’ watermelon i didn’t use in smoothie.
• don’t remember falling asleep (around 3AM according to web history, i think)
• woke around 12PM. remembered this was ‘willis beach day,’ i had told him to come around 2 or 3PM. didn’t feel like doing anything. felt overwhelmed with mental and physical sensation of depression, body/thoughts both heavy and hard to move around. thought ‘no more weed ever again. it’s always like this.’ the lights were off in my apartment. discovered all the power was off.
• texted mark about the power being out.
• discovered, via twitter, that tao had eaten a large dose of mushrooms last night, deleted his twitter, facebook, tumblr accounts, and threw out his macbook due to being ‘posessed by aliens.’ thought ‘sounds about right.’
• willis texted that it wouldn’t be a good day for the beach and i agreed. made tentative plans to hang out with his roommate at their new apartment tonight. said i wanted to ‘get stuff done’ before that.
• mark texted he’d come see about the power around 4-4:30PM.
• willis texted that i should come over because they were making a chicken thing.
• read large chunk near the end of ‘the remainder’ by tom mccarthy. recommend this book. i feel like the guy in it, kind of. he’s awarded 8.5 million pounds from this car accident settlement, doesn’t want anything with the money, then at a party he’s bored and goes to the bathroom and sees a piece of plaster on the wall and all of a sudden has this sudden unplaceable eidetic memory/image of himself in an apartment he spends his money physically reconstructing. he just recreates his memory of this thing he’s not sure why he remembers…highly recommended.
• the lights came on around 5PM. texted mark ‘woohoo! you did it, thank you!’
• mark came up to check my electricity. someone was doing repairs in the building earlier and remembered to turn everyone’s electricity back on but mine and another person’s. mark did things to the stove. then the stove worked. we talked about cats mostly, i think. when he was by the stove, i saw that there was no way he could not see the things in the sink, so i said ‘oh that stuff in the sink is my pre-laundry soak pile’ and told him shirley peed. his cats pee too. he said they recently got a kitten. i said i wanted it if he didn’t. meant it at the time. felt easy to talk with mark, he’s a real…he’s got a real ‘gift of the gab.’ a lot of…shit. i don’t pay enough attention to remember. they’re kind of like wisecracks. have thought for a while that mark is ‘onto me’ but now…seems okay. not sure what he’d be ‘onto,’ other than shitty embarrassing life i seem to be ‘hiding from’ more than ‘living,’ how would he be ‘onto’ that. he left.
• mark brought up his daughter and the kitten. the kitten was named ‘gary.’ i asked why that was his name. he said ‘i don’t know, we left it at [relative]’s house and when we picked it up it was ‘gary.” i said ‘that’s good.’ his daughter said something negative about spongebob. gary walked around the apartment cautiously, which seemed to surprise mark. he said ‘where’s your other kitty?’ i said ‘oh alvie? you’ve never seen him i don’t think, he hides from people.’ mark always seems surprised when cats act like cats. it’s funny. i gave gary treats. gary is a maine coone. he is six months old. mark and [forget daughter’s name, will just call her ‘mark jr.’] and gary partied with shirley and me for probably 20 minutes. alvie hid. at some point i felt comfortable ‘pulling out the big guns’ and said, ‘you know ernest hemingway? this was his favorite cat, maine coone cats. he called cats ‘love sponges.’ does gary have a fifth toe? alvie does.’ mark jr. held gary and the three of us looked for his toe. mark jr. said ‘i can’t t-ee-ll…’ i felt the back of his foot in the toe spot and said ‘yup, he’s got it. fifth toe.’ mark said he went to ernest hemingway’s house and saw the cats. i said ‘oh cool,’ and tried to remember where in illinois the house i walked by was, that i thought was ernest hemingway’s. he said ‘yup, key west. saw some of the cats.’ he was kneeling by the door. i said ‘florida. nice.’ he said something about seeing the house while ‘on tour.’ i said ‘you were on tour?’ he said ‘yeah, yeah, you can take ‘em, we toured the house.’ i said ‘oh, i thought you meant on tour like, you know, ‘on tour” and made ‘rock n roll face/hand gesture.’ mark said ‘well yeah, i mean it was a tour of the house.’
• forget how i fell asleep or if/what i used to help me do that.
AUGUST 6, 2013
3:30PM: woke.
7:52pm: loaded laundry and coins into dryer. Have been thinking ‘you live on the beach, walk on the beach, do stuff there, soon it’ll be winter.’ Got e-cigarette and phone from room and walked along the shore, at first trying to not get wet, then standing in place calf-height in the water, letting it flush in and out with me in the middle. Not many people on the beach. A few men were fishing, they had put a pole in the ground. Two or three were sometimes lifted off the ground by parasail-
style kites. An oyster shell bumped my foot in the water. Tried to hold onto it with my toes. The tide pushed something that looked like a turtle back and forth. It was upsidedown the next time I saw it. Definitely a turtle. The waves washed it on the sand for a moment and it walked confusedly. I walked away. A fishermen said ‘is that a turtle? You should’ve picked it up.’ I said ‘oh I didn’t know if it was supposed to be there, you know, like ‘sea turtles?” He said ‘we got two of them already.’ I thought something negative about turtle fishing. Waded into the water with him. He said ‘that’s a fresh water turtle, fresh water. There’s probably a lot more, we keep finding them.’ He picked it up and ‘presented’ it to me. Its head and limbs were retracted into its shell. He said ‘look, there it is.’ I put my face close to it and pointed almost close enough to be touching it and said ‘aw look it, turtle.’ The man’s friend said ‘we should give it to those ladies, they took the other two, giving ‘em to a pet shop or something.’ The men yelled ‘hey!’ and ‘hey ladies!’ to a small group of women. I pointed and yelled ‘turtle!’ Felt like the three of us were ‘in this’ together. Turtle alert squad. Look out, pet stores. The women were almost where the sand meets the road. They stopped walking and turned around. The first man said ‘whaddya wanna name it, you wanna name it?’ He was smiling incredulously. Felt like I had just been ‘tagged.’ I looked at the retracted turtle head and said ‘uh. Kenny.’ The man laughed and said ‘Kenny?’ He looked at me like I had just said a maybe inappropriate inside joke, a ‘too soon to make this joke’ joke. I said ‘yeah, Kenny, see ya later Kenny.’ The man laughed and jogged to the women, now walking towards the water. I looked at the other man by the fishing pole stuck in the ground. I said ‘you don’t think it’s a sea turtle though, do you?’ He said ‘nah, no way. There’s probably a lot more where that one came from.’ I said ‘why is it there?’ He said ‘I don’t know,’ looking in the distance, ‘they just keep showing up.’ My body was turning away. Could feel myself looking for an ‘out’ to the conversation. I said ‘well, good luck, hope you find more,’ unsure if more turtles were what he wanted to find.
Walked to apartment building. Approached one of the parasailing men. The kite lifted him maybe three feet off the ground. Felt ‘on a roll’ from the turtle interaction and said ‘that looks like fun.’ He said ‘it is, you pull this lever here, see? When you want to release, see?’ I extended my arm noncommittally, feeling ‘expected to’ do this. He said ‘wanna try?’ I said ‘yeah’ and grazed the main handle-stick, which he pulled away fast. He said ‘oh no no, no, no. Very dangerous. You need harness [patted his harness]. A man, he try? It lift him up over traffic and drop him, eh?’ I said ‘oh no.’ He said ‘no, no. No, you need lessons. I’m professional, see. You need harness like me. You learn how to do it, see? You don’t just do it.’ I said ‘can I take lessons from you?’ He said something about a service called ‘guide tours’ or ‘kite tours’ and pointed to the other two men with parasail kites. He said something about Brooklyn. I asked if I could take lessons from him. He said ‘from me? No, Brooklyn? There is a female, female teacher in Brooklyn.’ I said ‘and it’s called ‘guide tours?” He said ‘yeah, just look up, you know? The guy over there, he knows. Ask him, over there, he knows.’ I pointed and said ‘I should ask him?’ He said ‘yeah he teach. But I give discounts, I give cheaper deals to you’ and smiled. I smiled and didn’t know what to say. He said ‘ask that guy over there, he knows.’ I said ‘okay, I’ll just ask him, thanks’ and I walked to the other two men. Both wore harnesess, one held a parasail kite that sometimes lifted him a few feet off the ground. Couldn’t discern which man I was supposed to ask. Stood and watched them from at distance close enough to make me feel like I was stalking them deviously. Stalking with ill-intentions, perpetrator, ‘getting off on this’ somehow. It was like if they were sitting behind me at a café and I knew they could see me not-so-subtley playing their YouTube channels full-screen at full volume, from a chair where I sometimes turned to grin ‘non-threateningly’ at them. The man in red didn’t react. The parasail took the other man away. I said ‘excuse me, do you give lessons for that?’ The man in red looked at me then looked away as he mumbled something like ‘no, no lessons, this is just my friend.’ I said ‘oh, he told me to ask you’ and pointed vaguely in the direction I came. The man in red said something I didn’t understand, looking left and right, mostly at the ground. I said ‘sorry, I’m sorry,’ as I walked towards the road. I don’t know where I was looking when I said that but it wasn’t at him.
8:17pm: in waldbaum’s now, buying laundry detergent. It’s going to take more than one wash to get this smell out of towels and comforter. The Shirley pee smell is gone but bedclothes have been soaking in the sink for three days and there is this moldy smell.
8:24pm: smelled two versions of a Downy product you can add to your washing machine to make things smell nice. My current stinky things ‘need it.’ Have been trying to decide between the two scents via imagining how they’ll smell combined with the detergent I usually buy, how the smell of ‘just washed’ things combines with my sweat or cats or dust or time or whatever and makes ‘new smell.’ Seems like either Downy product will create an odd smell. Odd but not bad. Better than moldy. Withdrew $40 from ATM so I can get change for a $20/more quarters for laundry.
8:28pm: in line. Cashier said ‘who’s the cookie monster in the house’ to man in front of me. He said ‘nah, no one, just three for six bucks.’ She looked at him funny. She said ‘who’s gonna eat all that?’ He said ‘it’ll get eaten.’ He has a black cloth urban outfitters bag. He is definitely over 50 years old.
8:33pm: asked for eight quarters with my change. She did it without questioning. Surprised. She bagged my things. I said ‘thank you thank you’ in an accidendally breathy, distracted voice and she said ‘you’re welcome you’re welcome’ in the same voice. Felt nice. I passed Candy at the self-checkout station as I left. The day I stopped liveblogging something happened with Candy that I thought ‘shit wish I could’ve written about this.’ I’m walking back to my building now. Going to save typing the ‘Candy thing’ for inside. I heard Candy’s voice last night from the aisle across from me and felt endeared to him. Candy feels like my ‘buddy.’ He’s the only person here who…I can’t explain it, I don’t think. Candy walking to his van as I was sitting in my car typing about him the night I avoided the party. Candy’s van driving away playing traditional-sounding Mexican music. Candy scanning my things at the self-checkout.
8:39pm: passed an old woman in sunglasses and ‘nice clothes’ holding a plastic bag. She was just standing there. Motionless. She burped.
8:49pm: removed things from dryer and reloaded in washer. Used downy ‘no stink’ product. Walked to third floor by accident, typing previous sentences.
10:49pm: Shirley peed the bed again. Walking to deli to get baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide (doubt they will have this) and paper towels.
10:56pm: glanced at ‘cleaning stuff’ aisle. Walking back to waldbaum’s. Third time today I am a waldbaum’s-bound clown.
11:12pm: walking back to apartment. Bought hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, white vinegar, ‘oxy-clean’ product. Candy and the girl who gave me quarters (she’s also the girl who once stopped me from paying in the self-checkout so she could use the ‘store bonus card’ since I didn’t have one, then scanned my stuff on the fourth of July when I was with [omitted], I like her, she’s quiet and doesn’t move her face much, has an affect of ‘peaceful resignation to a life she’d rather not live but has long given up on changing’) were standing by the self-checkout area. They were saying things about other cashiers going home. Hope this shit rids Shirley and Alvie and me of the pee smell. Rides us out of the pee smell. One-way ticket out of the pee days. I think she peed because I was gone for something like four days. There was still food in the ‘extra food’ dishes I left but…I don’t know. Annie used to pee everywhere too. Why are cats always peeing on my stuff. It would be so nice i
f everyone just peed where we’re supposed to pee.
11:45PM: at apartment now. here is what happened with candy the night i stopped liveblogging:
i was the only customer, i think. it was almost midnight. they had closed down the self-checkouts. candy was scanning my things. in the produce section, i’ve noticed, before they mist the vegetables, they play a variety of audio samples. sometimes it’s ‘thunder,’ sometimes a few seconds of ‘singing in the rain,’ sometimes ‘rainforest.’ the rainforest sound happened. candy said ‘what is that, is that a bear? i always think it’s a bear.’ i said ‘i don’t know, do they make noise?’ he said ‘yeah they make noise! that’s the noise they make!’ i said ‘oh no.’ he said ‘i’m just afraid there’s a bear back there, you know, it’s gonna run out here and tear it all up! tear the place up, run out and eat me!’ i was smiling really big. couldn’t tell if he was serious. i said ‘you think it could eat you?’ he looked shocked. he said ‘yeah! have you seen those things? they’re huge, huge paws.’ he demonstrated the paw-size with his hands. i said ‘oh whoa, whoa.’ he said ‘i’m just worried it’s gonna come running out, when i hear that, you know?’ i said ‘yeah. yeah, you never know.’ he said ‘they’re huge, those things! grizz-el-y bears.’ it was quiet for a few moments while i paid. i picked up my bag and said ‘well, i think you’re in luck, i don’t think they like the beach.’ he smiled and we made eye contact and then i knew he had been joking. candy. love candy.
AUGUST 7, 2013
12:54AM: used old towel to blot vinegar/peroxide/bronner’s/baking soda ‘peeodorizer’ on bed. now i just have to wait for it to dry. staying up all night, i think, to work on this and maybe (let’s not kid ourselves: ‘definitely not,’ but cute idea, boyle, nice try with that ‘maybe,’) other things.
taped rainbow lights under kitchen counter. now kitchen look like a ‘hot spot’ in one of those ‘not for tourists’ guides. zagat-rated for sure. zagat kitchen. the zagat kitchen: simply unforgettable, rainbow lights will blow you away.
