One more week

One more week and I've yet to clean up the heroin stains in my sink from all the tar I smoked and shot.

Wonder if those stains would get me high.

Bollywood to Battersea

It's a long long way from Bollywood to Battersea

and Hollywood to Brattleboro

300 in 6 + 18 or 9 + 15.

LA Brewery Raw Jeans Art Exhibit idea

Well since all of our raw denim jeans have different looks after a while, I think they reflect pretty well what we ourselves went through during the time. My pair of New Cures, for example, after a year and half, have blood stains, broken stitches, holes, and all that shit. Im sure some of you guys can do better. In any case, I want to do an art show at a space we have at the Brewery in LA - an art colony - since I know a bunch of kids living there. But I only have three pairs of raw denim and that aint gonna fly. I do, know, however, that you guys are probably the people I am looking for to borrow some gnarly, fucked up jeans for a weekend for display.

Im not going to have too much text explaining the thing. They will be hung on a clothline, lit, in a large room, with tags saying location of where they are from, time they were worn, brand/fit, and owners name. They wont be for sale (unless you want to, I guess), its sort of an experiment to see if jeans themselves en masse could be art.

This might take more planning than I can handle before November 1st (art walk time) here in LA. We might have to do this in the spring, but Im just doing an interest check to see who is down for this. I need maybe 15 - 20 pairs, the more worn the better. Im gonna throw my New Cures into the mix because theyve been in Boston, China, Vermont, LA, Chicago, Montreal, and a bloody incident in Hollywood (long story). If you guys have comments or suggestions, it would be great. It might look a bit boutiquey, but I will try to let the jeans make their own statements. Tell their own stories, that kind of stuff. I cant imagine too many people doing something like this (dont steal my idea please haha).

Oh yeah and Im borrowing the jeans, so you ship them to me and Ill ship them back. I dont want to wear your jeans anyway. Interest check? Comments? Suggestions? I dont have a picture of the place (left my camera at work) but it is a very large space and we can get some very decent lights Im sure. We might even do some photography of the jeans to sell them to make some money back since all this would be free.

Art Walk link: http://www.breweryartwalk.com/index.html

Spring one is in April.

What do you guys think?

There comes to a point

There comes to a point where at 5 in the morning, after two consecutive attempts at defeating the night-terrors that consumed much of your limbs and left you paralyzed, that you seek out for the bottles of prescriptions laying perilously close yet agonizingly far from your cot on which you have set up in the room for the express purpose of convenience. This, of course, also comes about 20 minutes before Jamba Juice opens.

Then you realize that both your Lorazepam and Alprazolam bottles are empty and your Alprazolam refill is nowhere to be found - another room, perhaps, but this is no time for an expedition. You search for the last known resort - Diazepam powder.

The problem with Diazepam powder comes in two forms: A) it tastes like crystals. I have tasted Valiums, of course, any self-respecting benzohead (as this blog in the past two years can attest to) have tasted their elixir of choice in that manner, but the powder is different. It also does not resemble Alprazolam powder, which is far more fluffy and, well, if you need to eat enough to KNOW the texture of it, you would be gone for weeks and I am not kidding because I have personal experience (ever wake up in China working for the Chinese government when your last entirely coherent memory involved you sitting in a cabin in Vermont? Yeah) Fucking Hell, huh? Since you need a tenner of Diaz and not a .5er of Alpraz, it becomes a lot easier to, well, figure shit out, so to speak. Dab your finger in the bottle and just get a bit, which comes to the second problem:

B) No scale, and shit, I started with 630mg at some point, at some point 24 hours ago when the package arrived. Now, fuck knows. White powder in white bottle I mustve been the president of fucking MENSA when I decided that. Shit. So now I have no idea what I dosed, and my mouth tastes like shit, and if I survive these four hours, I can find a way to maybe even find my real prescription of Alprazolam and figure. shit. out.

Every year this time I break down it seems. I am taking Roz to Daves birthday party but I should have asked Roz whether she does drugs or not because it might be problematic if she doesnt, but she seems like the type whod do a line without too much fuss (oh god if you read this and this is wrong I am fucked and not literally, am I?)

Although the influx of cute British girls into my work is a pleasant change, although they really need to leave numbers on notes they leave me so I can, you know, contact them.

Los Angeles Metro Day Pass fucks over part-type graveyard types

And yes, I am a part-time graveyard type.

Today I was rudely awakened on the Blue Line and asked to show my ticket, for the first time. I showed the Day Pass I bought at 11:30pm the night before, out of good faith. Graveyard makes me live on an inverted schedule, so I pretended like 11:30pm was 11:30am and when I got off work at 6, it was like 6pm, like everyone else.

The Metro Policing lady didn't quite think so. I was left with a yellow, not unlike a traffic-ticket, sheet telling me to go to the courthouse in Compton. She even told me to go today, but of course, it wasn't on record yet. My deadline is September 22, by then I would be in Vermont for sure and I was also threatened with a arrest warrant.

I guess it would bring some excitement into the sleepy little Brattleboro apartment building to see me get taken down for a Metro ticket violation, but really, the policies are pretty retarded, and while on the outset it seems to work for most normal, 9 - 5 folks or even daytrippers, consider that I start work before midnight and end work at 6, with two transfers (3 single tickets) one way, it would mean that I either have to purchase two day passes for $10 or six single tickets for $7.50, while most day laborers get to enjoy the five dollar unlimited transfers. Oh, and I still need to drive from Norwalk back home, a 10 - 15 minute drive sometimes. At least showing up at 10:30pm means you get the primo parking spots.

But really, the question is, why the fuck don't we have a system like Boston's or New York's. We barely have a subway, but at least it's new, so get it right. CharlieCards and CharlieTickets shouldn't be hard to implement. I pay. Card goes into machine. Go. That's it. The current system undoubtedly encourages people skipping out on fares, and I am certainly guilty, but not because I don't want to pay for it, but I consider that my 'day pass' is good for my workday, so fuck paying double.

Another solution is the time limit set on each purchased pass, kind of like the single-ride limit. From the moment I buy the ticket, I get 24 hours of use out of it, no matter when. 3AM to 3AM? Noon to noon? Fuck yeah. That can't be hard to implement, since it's already half implemented. Does anyone really use all 24 hours of a day pass, straight from 12:00AM to 12:00AM? It's ridiculous that such a scheme would lock the mass-transit users of LA into a situation like this. LA doesn't flip a page at midnight and everything starts anew, why bother?

And the funny thing is, if I'm working three days in a row, I would just buy the day pass for the middle day and hope they don't check, but since now gas is like 4.29 and my car gets 23 - 25mpg, it cost roughly the same for me to drive to work. Parking could be a bitch, but if I go early, it wouldn't, and no matter what, it is a lot more convenient than the metro. The Green -> Blue -> Red transfer is pretty shitty, sometimes the trains take fucking forever to come anyway. Sure, LA traffic sucks, but know the right surface streets and a channel with traffic reports and it normally works out okay. The only problem for me is that if I drive, I can't be drunk at 6AM, like I could with the metro, but shit, 45 minute drive home or an hour and half of transfers and gruff ladycops who doesn't understand good faith? Gimme some credit for buying a day pass at 11:30pm, I could just wait 30 minutes and get a whole extra day.

A test

Im reading Thomas de Quincey and decided that laudanum and junkies have been written to death in the past 200 years but nobody ever writes about benzos.

I was once told that a good relationship depended on desire, not need, lest it becomes too needy, clingy, and ultimately co-dependent. This applies certainly to interpersonal relationships - and I, myself, have of course been involved in quite a few tortured ones teetering on the edge of mutual-consumptions - but relationships eventually fade, as I believe it. The women I have loved, though we remain friends or acquaintances, would fade out of my daily, constant desires and wants in due time. The memories, or in some cases, daydreams masquerading as memories - of tenderness, ecstasy, and the highs of love and being loved in return would avail itself to a grey sheath of apathy. Yet, while the depths of human emotion could easily be placated with the withering of time and the passing pleasures of new experiences, friends, partners, and raucous party-rooms of keg beer and libidous glances, an addiction to something completely of another sort, at least to me, have proven to be far more difficult to throw off and place within the realm of ex-lovers that one keeps in the back of his or her head until the discovery of a box of love letters on a rainy day in a wet attic or other such mementos when one becomes of an age to appreciate such with a sigh of sentimental joviality instead of sentimental maudlin.

In truth, my addiction is tranquility, but not the usual kind. Not the Waldenesque solitude that one would imagine, although by all accounts, his hermit-esque existence was one of misinterpretation anyway - only his thoughts and writings were in solitude, and no more. Having spent much of my past three years in the great New England wilderness, far more isolated than Walden Pond, might I add, I had grained no love for the solitude and the seven-month-winter a Vermont hilltop afforded me. The grand pre-Victorian house that I occupied with three of my close associates - friends seem too generic of a word, as we associated freely in words and ideas - became sometimes a prison, other times a refuge, from the cold, shrill winds of a February blizzard or the mere notion that an outside world existed. I sought tranquility, but not away from people or thoughts. I reveled, as anyone close to me would know, in the company of all, but especially the personages of the more voracious, tireless partysome types. We challenged deadlines with wine, cheered achievements with song and more wine, and drowned our sorrows in the best pleasures a White Powder Society outside of the mountains could offer, courtesy of the modern highways and a few intrepid souls willing to take the risk. We were all cosmopolitan people, smart certainly, and perhaps too clever yet too unwise for our own good. In short, we had a good time, as simple as that, but that soon became dependent, as the second semester of my college career started, on my quest for this mystical tranquility, the gathering of which quickly became an obsession and remains one to this day.

The name of it sounds absolutely chemical and esoteric to most: benzodiazepine. As a history instead of a chemistry student, I dare not explain the details of its workings, even though I have a pretty good idea how it creates and destroys the most lapses of sanity and insanity indiscriminantely and heavy-handedly at the best of times. There are large swarthes of my memory that remain blank or largely blank, from the period between February of 2006 to the present, during which I simply have no recollection besides second-hand tales told my friends and concerned on-lookers.

Part 1

My flight, a decidedly modern Airbus, landed roughly on the runway in Pudong International Airport after the 13 hour flight from Los Angeles. I gathered my things as the entire plane seemed to have stood up before we parked at the taxi gate. As I walked down the jetway, my first impression was the size of everything. The arrivals hall was huge, bright, and empty, on Chinese standards. All the signs were bilingual. All the fluorescent lights worked. The air didn’t smell like cigarette smoke or gasoline. It was the new face of China. The color scheme was white and silver and it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie for a second, and then we took a turn down an escalator into the deep underbelly of the airport and into customs. There were two lines: one for citizens, and one for foreigners. I took the line for citizens.

The customs officer asked for my passport. It was red. She pondered over it for a second, and asked for my Green Card.

Already, China was eager to have me leave.

The last time I was in China, it was 1999, a hot and muggy summer before the millennium, when Y2K was still the buzzword of the year and Rollercoaster Tycoon just arrived on the scene. My internet was a 56K modem that buzzed loudly and uncontrollably and somehow had an on-off switch. I was 12. I still spoke more Chinese than English. I’ve been in America for a mere two years and found myself spending the summer in a Spartan apartment my father obtained from his new job in Shenzhen, across the river from Hong Kong, half a country away from my hometown, Suzhou. I remember watching TV and not understanding a single word of Cantonese. We shopped for pirated software in the bazaar that frequently got raided for television purposes. There was a laughably strange Pizza Hut somewhere downtown amidst all the construction that didn’t use real cheese whose name translated to something like “the guest who must win”. I rode taxis and talked to strangers in the park who were amazed at my bilingual fluency in reading epic novels that weren’t fairy tales. I played catch with my father in the park with a baseball and two gloves while puzzled onlookers watched every morning. We visited the strange tourist attractions – a park full of miniaturized landmarks of the world and a park full of miniaturized landmarks of China next to each other. The air smelled of smog. Halfway through the summer, the Falun Gong was cracked down and the news broadcasted little else, and I rooted for the police, knowing that one of my uncles was a chief somewhere. In the end, though, the heat, the foreignness – being in another part of China was far less familiar and comforting to me than being in a whole other country – and the boredom got to me, and I remember getting on the plane in Guangzhou, in a crowded old terminal where the lines stretched out onto the sidewalk and the AC didn’t work, and thought “good riddance”.

And then, eight years later.

My uncle – my mother’s brother – picked me up at the airport. He drove a Buick and owns some sort of plastics plant, which seemed ubiquitous. We took the highway out of Pudong and around Shanghai en route to Suzhou. It was dusk and the city was lit up like a million stars all gathered for a closeup. The highway was new, or at least, new to me. There were three lanes and toll booths, chugging trucks and zippy Mercedes’. I tried to recognize things and couldn’t, save for the signs on the side of the road spelling out vaguely familiar towns that we used to drive through when we went to Shanghai, usually for the airport but also when my grandmother broke her hip in 1996 and received a titanium one in replacement. Back then, the drive took two hours down shoddy surface streets surrounded by fields of cotton and rice, and somewhere along the way, I saw a Volkswagen Santana wrapped around a tree in a terrifying yet comical manner, while on fire. The image was scarring. My cousins and I used to count the number of bridges and graves we could see off the side of the roads. I always counted the graves. I always lost count. But now, there weren’t anything except high rises, and then, darkness in the suburbs, but it took less than an hour to reach our exit, also in the middle of nowhere, save for the impossibly well-lit boulevard that seemingly stretched into nowhere.

Along the road, we passed one monolithic metal-and-glass gargantuan after another, flanked by young trees and odd metal sculptures. Everything had a metallic shine, from the stoplights to the median. Yet, at the same time, tricycles, called yellow-bull carts for some reason that never was explained to me, passed by, loaded with migrant workers in straw hats and plaid shirts. My uncle explained that they worked in the factories around here, virtually all jointly owned by Chinese and foreigners. They came from all over China and probably didn’t speak any of our local dialect. We suddenly started passing rows and rows of villas, then rows and rows of apartments, all identical, all reminiscent of Los Angeles or Orange County, except even bigger. We arrived on the outskirts of the city, and my uncle turned into a small gated community guarded by a man in a military uniform, who promptly saluted the car. He was security. This was home.