I recently transcribed a year's worth of journal writings created from my roost in the coat check last year. I realized that I have truly thrived when working in night life. Well I worked it again tonight for the first time in about a year and a half, and this is what I scribbled on the way home and once home..
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1.16.07
Return to coat check.
I wanna be sharp
a razor ina Borsalino hat.
I doff my cap to
those who make incendiary
statements.
if i can't create a fiction externally perhaps it's because i haven't yet found a way to create a fictional version of myself. this may sound ridiculous, but Neil Young has got me thinking that I need to drink tequila and start wearing a hat. i like the cartoon i've made of myself, and i'm comfortable acknowledging it. my hair, my clothes, permutations of a consistent theme...fluctuating myself slightly but leaving myself static enough to be a fixture in people's minds. this is certainly a conscious choice.
tonight's the night,
tonight's the night.
I want to wear a hat. I want to dress myself in alternate illusions.
Words linger on the horizon of my mind and I turn the cerebral world to my liking, letting the inner sun creep around the bend and illuminate those things that hide from me in dark places. I'm making strides. I'm taking down fear. I'm not running away from it, or sidestepping it. I'm facing it and moving, passing, right on through it. And when it is gone past, only I shall remain.
Funny. I just spent seven and a half hours coat checking for the who's who of the NYC fashion scene, riffing on them for being such superficial fucks and yet here I sit, admiring my reflection in a subway mirror with the Brooklyn skyline as a backdrop, contemplating how to construct a persona for myself, thinking that now that I have some money I'd like to spend it on new clothing to help recreate myself. But hey. It's a form of expression. It's the face you put out to the world, but also - it's a costume. And you can become what you make of yourself.
I exist in a state of narrative lunacy. If there's one thing that acid did to my mind, it was teach it that each point...and by point, I mean, really, everything. Kind of the mathematical definition of a point, which is really just an abstract an idea. You are a point. I am a point. Time is a point. Life is a point. Death is a point. Lobster is a point. You dig? So what it taught me is that each point, is a window to every other point. And that you can tap into various points and receive worlds of wild information from them. I think I've always done this though, and that's my narrative lunacy that I speak of. I think I've always touched into various points of the world and pulled stories out of them.
I say I have no fiction, I say I'm not making stories. Well maybe I'm not writing them. But I'm certainly creating them. You see, I struggle. Because my father and I used to walk the streets, and I'd listen to him talking about various people. People on the street, faces in the crowd, who he thought we were standing high above even though our feet tread the very same pavement as theirs. He used to talk about people like he knew them in and out. Psychiatrists, what else do you expect sometimes? He'd see a person and think he knew their life story. But it always came from an angle with a motive. For some reason, he had to find a reason to put everyone below him.
Me, I see people, and I write their life stories. It's happening every moment. Every single face is a point that I travel through. And I see their life, all of it, tiny details, moments as a toddler, favorite toys, a father slapping them across the face, a mother fucking a strange man with the bedroom door wide open, wide open Kansas skies while driving across the country, corduroy pants on tiny legs, L.A. Lights, the funeral they went to after their friend shot up too much heroin. I feel like I can see it all sometime. The good, the bad. The things that created every crease in their beautiful, terrible faces. LSD has a way of making you feel like you're god and I suppose I'm always straddling this divide between myself and my father, and what my experiences (LSD, and otherwise) have taught me, rushing like a river between my outstretched trembling legs.
I try not to let myself think I know these people for sure. But it seems like each tiny fragment, each moment, opens up into a fractal universe that communicates some sort of truth to me. I wouldn't speak it to them, because as soon as these thoughts are catalyzed into language they complicate endlessly, proliferate unbearably...So I don't let myself think I actually know who these people are or what they've done. I'm not God, I'm just a god, just like each of them is a god, all of us acting very ungodly towards one another.
But there's fiction there. And I create it.
There's a woman who seems to live in my subway stop. She's tall, thin, black, and obviously has her fair share of drug problems. She's a skeleton with her ashy skin pulled taut over her frame, dressed in rags, sitting on a suitcase. Always reeking of urine. When I first moved here I looked at her with scorn, why i thought, why must you stink up my subway stop perpetually with urine? There's a McDonald's nearby. Couldn't you just piss there?
Then one day it was raining terribly, a fierce torrential downpour. I'd been doing well, as I have been lately, and even though she never, ever asks anybody for money, I saw an empty cup near her and decided to put three dollars in and tell herself to get some soup when the rain cleared up. When I put the money in, she snapped towards me a little, her hood falling back. Her eyes, wild, straining, lost - god only knows where she was just then, not in the 7th Ave. stop with me, there, then - pierced into mine.
"I'll sit here if i want to! Don't you tell me what to do! I don't wanna go! I don't wanna do that! Don't tell me! I want to stay here!"
There was a child in her voice. And now I can't look at her in any way but as a child who never grew up because something simply terrible happened to her. I wonder if she even remembers exactly what it is. I wonder if she can even talk about it, or if she's just stuck there. Tonight, she wasn't wearing shoes. It was less than twenty degrees in that station. I wanted to tell her put her shoes on, lest she catch death of cold. But I felt that was her trip - rebellion against logic, against parental suggestions such as keeping oneself warm. I don't know. Do I know her? Do I understand her? At all? Or am I just creating a fiction for her that is the easiest for me to understand?
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The Drug Policy Alliance  Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
"The psychedelic experience - it has a tremendous force to revivify the spirit, particularly because it is not an ideology. It is not something someone 'figured out.' It is an EXPERIENCE. And this is important to bear in mind." - McKenna.
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