It's the ultimate Warholian dream come true: to have an assemblage of anonymous agents who do my bidding in the same manner as I would do it, and then sign my name to it, without my ever having to know it or approve it.

I


  discovered today that someone has been impersonating me, leaving guestbook messages in my slightly mispelled name, with references to my URLs. The messages express the same wryly sardonic or sarcastic sentiments that I normally would, but using words that I never use. It's kind of eerie, but I'm more flattered than anything else. It's the ultimate Warholian dream come true: to have an assemblage of anonymous agents who do my bidding in the same manner as I would do it, and then sign my name to it, without my ever having to know it or approve it. It multiplies my power.

My replacement at the end of my Comet shift was none other than Jamie Dyer, the guy who pulled the strings to get me this job in the first place. I find myself continually paying my everlasting debt to him; today he was an hour and fifteen minutes late after an altercation with a cop who'd noticed his car's expired inspection sticker.

B


ack at Kappa Mutha Fucka, a large happy crowd was gathered: Raphæl, Ana, Nemo, Zach, Peggy, the Baboose, Matthew Hart, Angela, Sara, Jessika, and Monster Boy. A couple pizzas had been ordered, but when they came, there wasn't nearly enough.

To prevent any such sad future, I continue to do reckless, controversial things in the same manner as before.

The assembled were excited to tell me that one of my avid readers had dropped by and left me a package of expensive cough drops after reading me expressing concerns about an impending cold. I could see myself becoming spoiled with the power of my pen: expecting to be able to call up early Christmases with every trivial complaint. I wonder what my housemates really think of this bizarre position I have created for myself. I hope the package of benefits from having one of the most read online journals doesn't distort my life into a useless fantasy that resonates with no one. To prevent any such sad future, I continue to do reckless, controversial things in the same manner as before.

T


his evening I intended to eat powdered Dextromethorphan with Sara, Jessika and Deya. In the context of my online journal, this was of course intended to be a message to the youth of today: ignore the boring hum-drum of your parents and normal consciousness and short circuit to the wizard within. Drugs may or may not be cool, but they sure are fun.

This was to be Dextromethorphan day number two for several of us: Jessika, Sara, Angela and Matthew Hart had all taken it yesterday, one of them doing so intravenously. I'd unwisely entrusted half of my remaining DXM powder to Sara Poiron, and she'd passed it on to Matthew Hart, who'd measured yesterday's doses in complete ignorance of what he'd been doing. When we compared notes today, it turns out that he'd given everyone twice the doses he'd thought he had. Needless to say, those taking the inflated doses were a little overwhelmed by the intensity.

I don't find myself hating the immaturity of my friends very often, but today that's exactly what I was doing.

Worst of all, after everyone had taken their doses, Theresa Venesian had shown up and wanted to take some too. Knowing absolutely nothing about what she was doing, she took what DXM remained and rudely mixed it into water. But when Jessika told her that it was going to be bitter, she suddenly didn't want any. So, in the aftermath of half of the DXM being overconsumed or squandered, I was left with a bottle of dissolved DXM-HBr of completely unknown dosage. It was absolutely useless in this form, so I set it aside so it could begin, over the next couple of weeks, to dry out.

The news of yesterday's ignorant, wasteful Dextromethorphan drug orgy left me in a foul mood. I was disgusted with my friends. Why couldn't they defer to someone who actually knew what he was doing before bumbling over an abyss of ignorance? I don't find myself hating the immaturity of my friends very often, but today that's exactly what I was doing.

Jessika followed me around as I made the best of the situation, apologizing for everything. Sara showed up too, eager for DXM day 2 to begin. I could tell she was feeling very positive about her visit. She always invites me to visit her in Philadelphia whenever she feels good about my value to her life.

Deya had brought home some empty drug capsules from work (Rebecca's Natural Foods). Sara, Jessika and I took turns packing them with semi-measured doses of DXM. One of the pills turned out rather large, and I named it "the mondo pill." Up until we finally ate them, Sara kept pleading, "I want the mondo pill!"

So, intrepidly giggling, we ate the pills. In addition to Sara, Jessika, Deya and me, Angela had one too.

Our house is slowly turning into a zoo, a process that seems to be out of everyone's control.

W


hile we waited for the drugs to kick in, we drank beers and socialized with various people who turned up, including Ray Roebuck and his friend, the blond, sideburned, rockabilly-loving duck-haired Doug. They went on a beer run and returned with a white and tan ferret they'd saved from battle with a cat down on spooky, isolated Stribling Avenue. It was an old ferret, with chipped teeth and balding shoulders. But she (it was a girl) was friendly enough, and set about immediately to explore the house. Her fluid, sinous gate was adorable as she climbed the stairs, even if her musky fragrance met mostly with disgust. But no one made any real objections to the little creature's moving in. Still, Matthew was gone at the time and we wondered what he would think. Our house is slowly turning into a zoo, a process that seems to be out of everyone's control.

Ray was being an unusually obnoxious drunk, actually jumping on me at one point and playing around entirely too much with a squirt gun. I even found myself promising I'd kick his ass when he threatened to squirt some of my computer equipment. As the DXM began to kick in, I found the sound of the squirt gun (now being fired rapidly and compulsively by such luminaries as Monster Boy) extremely irritating. It had an earnest sound to it, like the dorky kid in fourth grade who would march up to the teacher to report the actions of a naughty classmate. I pleaded for Monster Boy and Ray to stop, but they were grinning idiots without anything better to do.

There was something equally horrifying about the bewildered unfocused anxiousness that never seems to leave the Baboose's eyes.

S


ara Poiron was not having a good time. At first she attempted to take a little nap in hopes that she'd be "tussing" by the time she woke up. But the nap never materialized and she found herself feeling nauseated. She went off to vomit on several occasions, eventually ending up in Matthew Hart's bed in the care of Angela. When she later came down the stairs, she said she felt as though she'd been poisoned. She directed angry feelings at the powder.

I looked over at the Baboose as he finished breast feeding, and the little monster suddenly puked. On DXM, the vision of a wave of clotted milk suddenly sent soaking into Peggy's sweater was horrifying. There was something equally horrifying about the bewildered unfocused anxiousness that never seems to leave the Baboose's eyes.

When the peak of my Dextromethorphan adventure came through, I was wonderfully disoriented by the subtle feelings of vertigo and calm. I found myself able to stick an arm out at uncomfortable angles and leave it there for long periods, as if I was a catatonic schizophrenic.

The other "tussers" and I climbed up on top of the steam radiator behind the couches and stood there for a rather long time, pressing the palms of our hands up against the roughly-textured ceiling. It seemed like an odd but inevitable thing to be doing. It was as if we were caught up in some sort of profound allegorical play, full of references to the movies we'd seen or past experiences. For example, the radiator was suicide, Jessika pointed out, as it had been in Eraser Head (according to a symbol interpretation she'd once found on the web).

"You're never satisfied," I said, "you complain about the kitten having too much fur and then you complain about the ferret having too little."

Matthew Hart came home from work to find us five merry tussers all standing in a line on the steam radiator. His reaction to the ferret was less than I expected it would be. He actually expressed a preference for the ferret over the kitten, though he didn't like the fact that the ferret is going bald on its shoulders. "You're never satisfied," I said, "you complain about the kitten having too much fur and then you complain about the ferret having too little." I joked that soon we'd be getting a turtle, and Matthew actually liked the idea, saying "let's get five turtles and get rid of that kitten!"

I put on a Wizard of Oz soundtrack record. It wasn't from the original movie, but was an ersatz remake by Walt Disney. The songs and their orchestration were familiar to me, since I'd listened to it a lot as an extremely small child. But to the others (and even, at this stage of my life, to me), it sounded like an unwelcomed imposter. So Jessika ran off to get her tape of the original movie sound track. When that played, it sounded like a comforting old friend; after all, it's been a familiar soundtrack for many tussin adventures.

Sara was feeling better now, and for some reason, Jessika was only just beginning to feel the DXM's effects. So it was time to take a walk. Walking around has tradionally been a necessary activity when tussing.

Back amid a dense bamboo forest, his living room seem like a brightly-lit clearing in the jungle.

W


e headed towards the university down JPA until we came to a shady little lane that seemed to lead off into an unknown and very different world. It was someone's driveway, so we didn't venture too far in. As we stood there, a man came up the driveway from JPA with a huge horselike dog on a leash. It was none other than Andy Roland, the guitarist/singer/sax player of the local white boy funk band, The Secret. In addition to his fame as a musician, he's well known around town as an artist and womanizer. Anyway, he knows all of us fairly well, so he invited us to see his house. Back amid a dense bamboo forest, his living room seem like a brightly-lit clearing in the jungle, as if on a page in Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Andy wanted to show us a painting he is working on, but when we climbed to the top of a creaky narrow stairway, there wasn't enough light for him to unlock the door to his attic studio. So we sat briefly in his living room, chit chatting. I told him we were on drugs, but it's doubtful he knew how completely fucked up we were.

He didn't want her to know that I'd brought three girls with me.

Andy always has a girlfriend. Like Matthew, for him a girlfriend is a necessary accessory for social, æsthetic and personal reasons. He rarely keeps the same girlfriend for very long, but while he has one, he's rarely seen separated from her. As we sat there chatting, the phone rang. It was Andy's girlfriend. She wanted to know what he was doing. When he said some people were over, she demanded to know who the people where. So he said "The Gus.. and a whole bunch of... other people." He didn't want her to know that I'd brought three girls with me. I could feel that he was uncomfortable with the situation (DXM seems to heighten my awareness of social conventions and obligations), so I suggested we should go. He thanked us for coming and suggested we come see him and his band perform at the Outback some time.

Tussin experiences are best had in relatively unpopulated areas or among complete strangers on mostly deserted streets.

DXM or not, it was a strange experience to randomly run across and socialize with someone in this way. But this sort of thing definitely does seem to happen more during tussin adventures than at other times. As Jessika put it, it was all "very Pierce and Nelly." You see, back in the days of Big Fun, we randomly ran across Pierce and Nelly and their dog, the Dragon, while on a Wizard-of-Oz-esque tussin excursion in the far-flung fields of Fairview Farms.

We continued through UVA to the Corner, but as we approached the lights of the restaurant district, Jessika and Sara didn't want to go on. There was something threatening about all the familiar people we knew we'd run across there. Tussin experiences are best had in relatively unpopulated areas or among complete strangers on mostly deserted streets.

I said that unbeknownst to a lot of people, many of the local tunnel networks in the world are connected by a large network of long inter-regional tunnels.

Jessika repeated proclaimed a desire to explore "little tunnels." This was a reference, in her characteristically obscure nostalgic style, to some stories she'd read that I'd written in my childhood, back when I was obsessed with the idea of living underground. The tunnels she was referring to in the real world, however, were those of the University's substantial subterranean underground steam pipe network. She'd been in the tunnels on several drunken occasions in the past, and this time she wanted to be there while on Dextromethorphan.

But the only access I could find to the tunnels was through a narrow rectangular hole in the sidewalk which was covered with an iron grate. With the grate out of the way, it looked like an ominous abyss. As Jessika later said, "it looked like we'd never stop falling." We didn't have any flash lights, and it was incredibly hot down in there, so we didn't descend. We sat under a big wooden table on the sidewalk near Cocke Hall as rain leisurely fell from grey October skies. Later we moved to the narrow porch of a big Greco-Roman structure. Sara said, "I hate Jeffersonian architecture!" At least she was finally having some fun with the drug that earlier she was convinced had been taking her life.

I invented a new concept that that had a certain resonance for Jessika: "the intertunnel." I said that unbeknownst to a lot of people, many of the local tunnel networks in the world are connected by a large network of long inter-regional tunnels. When we later had a discussion of the tunnels caused by the mythical beast known as the "brain worm," Jessika naturally inferred that their networks of tiny tunnels were also connected to the intertunnel.

The brain is a wonderful machine as well as a terrible thing to waste. On drugs, it seemed considerably more magical than a frying egg.

B


ack at Kappa Mutha Fucka, we all lay on the couches and discussed the evening's adventures. I closed my eyes and vivid visual halucinations appeared on the black screen of my eyelids. They changed semi-predictably, but would completely reset to a new scenario every time I opened my eyes. In one scenario, diftwood fell from the sky and was filtered and sorted by a machine consisting of a line of vertical holes and clinky metal mechanisms. In another scenario, a cylinder rotated with constantly-morphing metallic objects protruding from its equator. The last vision I had was of an animated M.C. Escher pattern of earwhigs whose wriggling movements never revealed any negative space. To have done any of this with a computer would have surely required faster equipment than any that will ever be affordable by the likes of me. The brain is a wonderful machine as well as a terrible thing to waste. On drugs, it seemed considerably more magical and poetic than a frying egg.

Eventually we all fell asleep. Deya had gone off to her own bed. She later reported that the DXM hadn't had much of an effect on her at all.

Read some more tales of tussin.

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Get a sense of what I was like exactly one year ago today.

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