acid birdmad the hydrochloric cocktail of the digestive process if i concentrate hard enough, i can consume myself from the inside out now there's an idea 010406 ... belly fire his smell in my sheets. the rain in his hair. his desperate lovemaking. the way he whispered my name. the sound in his voice drifting into my dreams. his fingers on all the wrong keys. burned pizza. knowing when NOT to stop. smelling my hair. stroking my throat. deep, dark secrets. force feeding dessert. writing letters we never sent. licking my tears. enya. holding me down. arguing. letting me win. resenting me. too many I love you's. singing me to sleep. long letters...that I threw away. pictures falling. hiding in bed. cold skin. saliva. the subway. black jeans. wrestling. you're so cool. the shower. hairy nipples. sleepy eyes. rubbing my wrists. uniform. hidden poetry. guns. pride. passion. fireman. angry sister. phone calls. phone CALL. lampshade. butterflies. train station. aggressive. strong. shaved. bruises. bite marks. water bottles...smell of oil. feet over the fence. mom like mine. arms wrapped around me twice. thongs. homeless man. first hug. cologne. stars. phone company. saying no. no choice. scaring Kat. $110 ticket. being sick. movie store. sex. birth control. fear. love. talking in his sleep. dragon shirt. candles. dancing to no music. Brunny. my letter. sabotage. stories. ex-girlfriends. but I love YOU. this isn't going to work. show up on my doorstep?! how dare you compare? belly rumbles. bird on a swing. sister on the phone. sweet fruit lips. skipping work. falling asleep in class. bagel. eating together. $20. shaving cream. clothes everywhere. kiss in mid-sentence. eye contact. virgin. clinic. getting fired...well, not quite. noise. handprints. plaid boxers. housecoat. no soap. condoms. smell of sex. philosophy. dog tags. carrying me. squeezing me. cycle. his picture...gone. the letter I kept. indifference. emptiness. coldness. denial. more fear. desperate crying. letting my guard down. lying. being lied to. forgiveness. touching my neck. standoffs. the beach. glowing water. only ONE meaning. disappointed father. seneca. frat. reserves. eggs. ears. laughing. walking in the snow. holding hands. rough. the shining. no valentine's day. angel picture. mattress. tramp! I'm just a good kisser. throwing my honesty in my face. missing him. plato. religion. knife. dares. jealousy. public affection. finding me. leaning on the doors. toronto on my own. first times. getting lost. waiting. creaky stairs. naked sleep. desire. insatiable. lights out. winter. snow storm. can't hang up. moving on but not moving on. swingers. hungry. privacy. brown boots. BIG. soft arms. baby blue towel. taking longer to get ready than me. missed bus. sour sweat. beads falling to my face. not accepting no for an answer. ending things. shocked faces. giving up. eating my words. and ALWAYS these things. Always sex. Always Enya. Always his smell on my sheets. No. More. Dreams. 020729 ... jane hydrochloric 070809 ... . BOO! 070809 ... gja Something is wrong here - words are dissapearing. But read Belly Fire up there - them be evocative words. 070809 ... gja I have - in my life - had some funny times with acid. Funny = someitmes ha ha; funny = sometimes strange; and funny = just funny - with loved ones - good times. Less than the best: New house - with pnew partner that I had decided I loved. Her away on work assignment for a few days. Me - decide to polish the floor boards to "impress" her. A silly idea, made even sillier by the fact that I thought that the way to make it more enjoyable for me was to score some acid at the local pub before starting. Acid procured and consumed - glows coming on. Off to the hire shop - tripping hard by the time I got there. Hire man just looking at me strange, I mean, I was talking about the relative aesthetic quality of fine polished timber as compared with the newly hewn rough stuff - what did I expect - I was lucky he let me take the machine really - he probabley thought I wouldnt know how to turn it on! Back home - the new place - freshly painted by friends - politely, deciding it was a fair thing to warn my neighbours of my impending industry - wandering up and down the stairs deciding which door to knock on - they just looked at me, as a general rule, like I was starting to feel - puffy. Back inside - polishing machine running fast - noisy it was - very fuckin noisy - me trying to do 12 things at once - 1) perv at girl downstairs out window 2) attach sand paper to spinning disk 3) laughing 4) thinking about timber 5) wondering if at some point loud noise can become music 6) remembering the sound of my fathers mine machine sales vidwotape 7) catching shirt on polishing machine handle bars - thinking - oh thats dangerous 8) deciding that hanging on was a good idea - that way that machine couldnt get away 9) trying to plug in CD player 10) looking though new loves personal effects with machine (purring) just behind me 11) getting really really really really really should really have really some really sort really of really calming really drug really bad really idea really 12) more to go - phone call with friends - numerous and un-named - laughing at people in wheel chairs (ashamed later) 13) bad bad bad - call step mother and cut loose - about - 10 years of emotion. 14) Meltdown. Took a long time to recover + no floor boards polished. Better times that immediately come to mind: A) Seeing the Cure at the subterranea club on Portobello Road. B) Easter Sunday - Darling Harbour, Sydney - warm and free. C) Ben Watts - lazy Dog afternoon - west london somewhere. D) Norman Jay - two times - Vibes on a Summers Day circa around 1999 - he let me try on his safari hat + Notting Hill Carnvival before Henrietta took one in the neck. And on And on And on. Best Times for Acid: Lovely school friend crowd - MANY times. They never new I was tripping. They thought it was just the way that gja was. They loved me. Being loved is a good thing. Being loved when your tripping blows your mind. It wont matter how old I get - how far away from those years I get - I'll remember - I could *feel* that love. Reach out and touch it. It was physical, emotional, blanket like, womb like, protective, inspiring, clarity giving, challenging, lovely love. And now my challenge - What do I say to my kids about drugs? I mean - I enjoy them - I know they can be great - BUT - I know they can be a pathetically demeaning, misleading, detructive, dis-illusioning poor chemical stimulation of brain chemical reaction inducing life sapping shit tomorrow thing. So what will I say - Listen boys - I love you - youre gonna do it - tell me about it - and keep your friends close. Not particularly visionary - but at least they'll know theyre loved - its a good thing to know. 070810 ... raze someone's eyes can introduce you to a drug. lauren's eyes did that. i got paired up with her for an assignment in grade nine french class. i knew something was different about her even before she told me she was high on acid. it was her eyes. they were more alive than anything i'd ever seen. she couldn't stop smiling. everything was a miracle to her. she told me she was a lioness. she told me she was fierce. every time i said something, she said, "that's so fucking cool." by the time i started thinking about trying it myself, i wasn't in school anymore. tyson said it was his favourite drug. i asked him what it was like. "it's the coolest high," he said. "you see the coolest shit. sometimes, if one person starts hallucinating before anyone else does, everyone starts seeing the same things they are. but if one of your friends is having a bad trip, you're instantly sober." i heard about other people's trips. gord had some heavy ones. one trip reached its summit when he was standing at the top of a staircase in a friend's house. he turned into a blob. he rolled down the stairs in slow motion. somehow he made it to the bottom. then his blob powers wore off and he was gord again. my dad dropped acid once in high school. he told me about seeing faces melt. seeing a beautiful crystal city in the snow. every house looking the same when he was walking home. seeing his mother's face go right through him when he was lying in bed and trying to make it all stop. seeing himself on the wall when he had a flashback in phys ed. class a week or two later. tyson told me about the night he was hanging out with gord and a few other people and they watched "a clockwork orange". they got really fired up and started talking about killing people. so it could go that way too. no one i knew ever had it. i could get my hands on almost anything, but not acid. i got one chance to try it. mark called me at the end of the summer. he told me josh got his hands on some stuff. it was just the two of them at the townhouse. he asked if i wanted to come over. i wanted my first time to be with gord, but gord wasn't around. he was hitchhiking to calgary with julie just for something to do. i brought a few cds with me. mark took a look at one of them. "my bloody valentine. i've heard of that band. i've never heard their music. what are they like?" "the only way i can think of to describe them is beautiful noise," i said. "i like that," josh said. josh was already pretty geeked. he said he'd done twelve hits in the last two days. maybe thirteen. he couldn't remember. he said he watched a woman help a handicapped man put on a tie at the drug store and he got locked into a trance he had to fight to get out of. "you sure you should be doing more?" i asked. "i mean, that's a lot." "it's cool. i've done so much of it now, i think i've got a pretty high tolerance. it shouldn't even have much of an effect on me anymore." he handed me a sugar cube. "this is it," he said. "all you do is hold it under your tongue and let it dissolve." he said it was some of the weaker acid he'd tried. he said it should be a pretty laid-back trip. i stuck the square in my mouth and waited for the sweetness to leave me. mark took me upstairs. he showed me his new acoustic twelve-string guitar. it was some cheap piece of nothing, but it had a nice fake mahogany finish. "you mind if i try it?" i asked. he gave me a funny look. "i'm not sure i want to let anyone play it. i don't want it to get all beat up. you saw what happened to gord's twelve-string." then he changed his mind. "it'd be pretty stupid not to let you play it. i mean, who's gonna take better care of a guitar than you?" he handed it over. i left it in standard tuning. it felt good in my hands. the action was low. there wasn't much bite to the sound, but there was something special about it. we went outside and sat in the little patio area. i started getting ideas. i started to feel something. i played a riff that sounded like it belonged in a death metal song. just a simple scale-based thing. mark said it was the craziest riff he'd ever heard. "i'm telling you," he said, "if you put that in a metal song, you would be a god." we went back inside. i wasn't seeing anything yet, but there was this vague feeling of being lifted. josh put on a wooden stars seven-inch single he found at a used record store in the states. "this is off their first album," josh said. "it's weirder than their other stuff, but i like it. i can't find that fucking album anywhere." "i'm gonna find it someday," i said. "and then i'll make you a copy." "not if i find it first and make *you* a copy," he said. he smiled. he put on another record by a band called viva satellite. it was this sort of low-budget mock indie rock musical about leonardo da vinci. i'd heard it before on bravenewwaves. i liked it okay then. i didn't like it now. it wasn't the right music for this trip. it made me edgy. i could smell every bit of the grit and grime in the shitty basement i was convinced these songs were recorded in. it was all thin electric bass and squishy drums and boy-girl vocals. it needed more harmonic content. something was missing. something was wrong. part of what was wrong was the acid. i kept waiting for something more to happen. the waiting and not knowing what i was waiting for started to get to me. what first felt like being raised up now felt more like being weighed down. "i think you're a really cool guy," josh said. "i just want to tell you that. i hope you think i'm cool too." his voice was really quiet. i didn't say anything. i wasn't trying to leave him hanging. i saw insects crawling around under his skin. all around his chin and cheeks. i couldn't tell what they were. they were too big to be ants. they weren't big enough to be spiders. they were the visual manifestation of how bad his trip was going. they were all twelve or thirteen hits he'd done already and one more hit on top of that. they were what happened to all those sugar cubes when they died inside of him. "play josh that riff you played outside," mark said. i did. he looked at josh and said, "isn't that the craziest riff you've ever heard?" "fuck you!" josh screamed. "i don't like to compare myself to other people!" mark started talking about war. i saw warpaint work its way around his smile. it was red and brown. i was still waiting for more. i wanted it and i didn't want it and i didn't want to hear about people dying. i wanted to listen to beautiful noise. i wanted to feel something good. josh went upstairs. he didn't come back. mark asked me to show him that riff again. he figured out how to play it. he started playing it as fast as he could, until it wasn't music anymore. he stood up and stared at me and grimaced and played and played and played and i could see all the muscles in his neck. thick cords ready to snap. he looked like he was trying to scream. the warpaint was gone. i called my dad and asked him to come pick me up. mark checked on josh before i left. he came back and said josh was so fucked up he couldn't stand. he couldn't move. he was lying on the floor in his bedroom with this crazy look on his face. mark said josh looked up at him and said, "sometimes you have to walk through hell to get to heaven." he smiled at me and said, "that's pretty profound. don't you think?" i didn't want to tell him it was one of the oldest cliches in the book. i didn't want to see his warpaint again. i didn't say anything. on the drive home my dad played an andrea bocelli song and improvised his own lyrics about the end of a love affair. it was better than anything i heard at the townhouse. he didn't know i was high on anything. he was just being himself. at least at home i could listen to the music i wanted to hear. i turned on the tv in my bedroom and caught christina aguilera presenting the best video by a male artist at the mtv video music awards. i looked at her wearing almost nothing and thought, "you look scared. this isn't you. this isn't real. you know that. what are you doing?" i listened to tim buckley's "starsailor" and looked at the picture of him i had on my wall. i couldn't find any good pictures of tim online back then, so i found one i liked in a cd booklet and had a photo place scan it and blow it up and frame it. it was a black_and_white shot taken around the time of "lorca". tim was wearing his black peacoat and smiling just a little, his head tilted to the side. he looked beautiful and free. he looked like his music. i almost felt like i could step into the picture and stand with him in the past. but josh was right about the acid being weak. there wasn't enough of it left to take me anywhere. it didn't matter. the music took me places no drug could. it took a few weeks before i felt normal again. whatever normal was. i didn't see anything that wasn't there, but i could tell something was off. i got my strongest taste of it when i puked up some pills i took for what i thought was a throat infection. i walked to the clinic to get something else and sat on the exam table waiting to see the doctor. i thought i could hear voices coming from inside the walls. not from another room. from the drywall. the voices weren't telling me anything. they had nothing to say. they were just there until they weren't anymore. once was enough. 210915 what's it to you? who go blather from