loopinfinite

The third and last time I got high was on July 4th, 2007. I’d gone to a park with some friends that night. We had arrived just as the sun was in the final stages of its descent. We were there to see fireworks.

The park, just off Gillham Road, was a bland field of grass with a playground at the far end. It was nice, I guess; I never went back or anything. I’ve probably driven past the place hundreds of times in the two years since. Sometimes I glance in its direction. I usually don’t.

The fireworks were a little boring. For a while I watched them anyway, leaning against the side of my friend’s car. Eventually I broke away from the group and wandered into the night.

I saw plenty of fireflies. People, too, with fingers wrapped around cans of Coke or Bud Light. Motionless cars in the grass all along the park’s perimeter. It was warm and humid – your stereotypical July weather. I contemplated taking off my jacket. (I’m always wearing a jacket or hoodie or something, even when it’s summer. I’m all too aware of my skinny, spindly arms.)

Something was there that night. Some presence; some indefinite nostalgic force. And indefinite nostalgia is the worst kind: nothing’s more confusing than vague longing for a past you can’t quite remember for reasons you don’t quite understand.

Maybe I was thinking about all those bygone summers of my youth and shit: all the swimming lessons, “science” “experiments,” family trips.

Maybe I was thinking about July 4th, 1994, the only other time I’d seen fireworks. Mom and Dad had taken me to a place rife with hills and lawn chairs. I don’t think we saw much.

My parents are immigrants; Independence Day isn’t in their blood. I think they were trying the holiday out that year. They gave it a whirl and decided it wasn’t for them. It’s not for me, either. I have – unfairly – come to associate the Fourth of July with asshole Republicans. Growing up in the Midwest can do that to you.

July 4th, 2007: there, in that park, clad in unnecessary jacket and cardboardy jeans and toe-pinching Converse, I stood watching the fucking explosions in progress overhead; I watched and I wondered, why did shit happen the way it did? And what’s next? Is anything next?

Man, I was depressed. And yet I heard a wry voice in the back of my mind. “Your nostalgia,” it told me, “is hilarious. You do realize: someday you’ll probably be nostalgic for this very moment.”

“The hell do you mean?” I said in my head.

“You think this is as bad as it gets? Someday you’ll pine for all this. This park. These fireworks. You’ll think, ‘July 4th, 2007? That was a night to remember.’”

“You’re full of shit,” I told the voice. I went back to the others. They wanted to know where I’d been.

“Oh, I just . . . took a walk,” I said.

. . . Much later that night, I got high for the last time. It had never been something I was entirely comfortable with, because my manner of smoking weed was both tentative and sissified. I had no finesse, no confidence. I was afraid of lighters. I was, above all, afraid of wrecking my respiratory tract.

I mean, you can’t get high unless you breathe in a lot of smoke and hold it in, and that holding-it-in is crucial. But every time I took a puff, the back of my throat would burn. That’s what it felt like: real, actual burning.

A bizarre image would then appear before me: the inside of my mouth on fire. I’d suddenly smell melting flesh. I’d have no idea whether I was really, actually smelling that or whether it was just my anxiety. It is (in part) because of this anxiety that I never became a legitimate pothead.

But that night I pushed, hard, through my terror. I broke the wall my fear had built. On the other side, in rainbow-world, I gave myself over to the power of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. It was great. I was really feeling it. It started with the sensory changes: colors seemed brighter and sounds seemed sharper. My body felt weightless.

Then the whole world flattened into two dimensions. I became convinced I was a character in a comic strip. Everyone was a character in a comic strip, because that was what this planet was: a comic strip. This was (in part) the meaning of life.

“I’m a genius,” I remember saying. “I’m seriously a genius. I have all this shit figured out.”

My friend, whose weed I had been smoking, and who was, at the time, not nearly as high as I, laughed.  “You may not feel that way tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Let me see your computer, dude.”

I opened up Microsoft Word and started to type. I wanted to get my insights down for tomorrow morning, if not posterity. It was hard to put my thoughts into writing; eventually I had a whole paragraph of stuff. By then, I was tired.

I slept on my friend’s floor and awoke the following morning when I heard him leave for class. I groaned, put in my contact lenses, staggered to his computer, and jiggled the mouse. Right there, on the screen, was a paragraph of the most incomprehensible garbage.

Brain broke/burnt. Can’t get it working. English feels like a foreign language. July sure is off to an auspicious start.

There’s all this delicate metaphorical machinery in my brain, a lot of complex equipment that apparently does something. What that something might be, I don’t really understand.

All I know is that the machines must work. They’ve got to be calibrated. If just one of them isn’t, then the collective system my thought processes comprise malfunctions in a way that’s noticeable but not easily fixable: I might know something’s wrong but I won’t know what or why.

Breakdowns are always happening, some on a large scale, some on a small one. I might be sitting somewhere trying to read some notes. I might even be getting stuff done. When some tiny factor changes, though, that’s it. My concentration shatters. The brief period of productivity ends; a lengthy period of confusion takes its place.

I tend to put off doing laundry until it becomes absolutely necessary. This happens every three weeks or so. The moment of recognition typically comes when one morning I wake up, go through the typical ritual of rooting around in the laundry basket for a clean pair of underwear in amongst the countless socks and wrinkled t-shirts, and find one but only after like five solid minutes of searching.

With a sinking heart I then realize this is the last pair of clean underwear. There is no more clean underwear here. There is no more clean underwear anywhere. And the thing is, I can wear dirty socks, if need be. I don’t give a shit. And I can handle an unwashed t-shirt. Underwear, though? Even I have my limits.

By the time I’ve run out of underwear, of course, the sheer mass of dirty clothing – both the underwear and everything else that could stand to be cleaner – is staggering and absurd. Doing my laundry therefore becomes a drawn-out day-long process of dread alternating with boredom. And it’s some serious bullshit.

I wish I could just sit down and type, without even pausing until I’m done with whatever it is I’m trying to write.

I gather that’s the way inspiration is supposed to work.

When an idea comes to you, it’s supposed to grab you by the hand and pull you, hard, in a specific direction, and if you want to keep up with it you need to run.

Follow that idea and if you’re lucky it takes you somewhere crazy, to a place like nowhere you’ve ever been. And you can relax once you’re there. You can do what you need to do. Your words are guaranteed to come slick and easy.

I can’t get any of this to happen. Ideas show up, drag me along for a few feet, then vanish. I may get flashes of insight; they short out before they can illuminate a goddamn thing. I can’t count on inspiration.

Without it, I have to consciously think. That’s hard. My brain is a garden choked with thick, sick vines. My thoughts are bees. My neurons are flowers. My thoughts/bees have trouble flying between my neurons/flowers. It’s a pain in the ass with all this thick overgrowth in the way.

And so everything that comes out of me feels wrong, the stilted product of violent and belabored thrashing. My brain is an engine that doesn’t even work. Everything I write consists of deformed and broken semi-ideas I had to superglue together.

I could be a fraud. I might not have the mental fortitude to ever write anything that isn’t bullshit. There may be a cold, hard truth here I need to face: I just might not be very good at this.