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I must have thrown it away!
Saturday, September 25 1999
This morning after we'd done our usual Saturday morning sexual hangover cure, Kim went off to find her Ecstasy pills, thinking we could each do a half hit and see if they were any good before taking them to New Orleans with us a little over a week from now. But she looked and looked and couldn't find them anywhere. In a foggy corner of her marijuana-damaged memory she thinks she recalls throwing away a medicine bottle without first checking to see if anything was inside! Doh! One of her neurotic marijuana-fueled cleaning-spells (I usually miss these since they usually happen while I'm at work) had claimed another victim. It was an expensive one, too, $100 or so. We considered going through the dumpster out in back, but the thing was so full, so nasty, and the prospects of the pills even being in there so doubtful, that we simply gave up. Seeking to salvage something from the experience, Kim called her shadesville friend Carlo and arranged to maybe doodle doo instead. We'll be heading to Carlo's tonight after Kim gets home from work. Bear in mind that the last time Kim went to Carlo's place, he had his blond girlfriend give her head. So things should be pretty interesting.
Last night Kim rented The People vs. Larry Flynt and this morning I watched the bulk of it. I have no idea how much of an asskicker Larry Flynt is outside this Hollywood portrayal, but this movie made him out to be a sort of Mahatma Gandhi of personal expression, and as such definitely worthy of placement in my person pantheon. (I'm on an alliterative roll today!) Beyond this overall plot theme, though, I was moved by the attention to detail devoted to the development of the interpersonal relationships, especially between Flynt and his wife and Flynt and his Michæl Naceian lawyer. It's rare that a movie moves me as much as I was moved by the death of Flynt's wife; their love seemed so much deeper than all other movie romances precisely because it stood in such contrast to the superficial sexuality of Flynt's profession, in much the same way that distorted grunge guitar always seems so much nastier when juxtaposed with the gentle part before the pedal is stomped.
The only thing that wasn't really convincing was the moral outrage of the guy who played Jerry Falwell.
The neighborhood children were all over the lawn again today, playing with their scooters, skates, wagons, and acoustically-amplified plastic turbo cycles. It's nice to be old and see that (even in the post-Nutra-Sweetened world) children still loudly fight, play and enact complex fantasies precisely as I did back when my world was the sidewalks, grass, gutters, and accidentally undeveloped woodlots of suburban Lanham Maryland.
When you're a kid that age, there's always that perfect lawn can set the stage for any fantasy, from World War II-battlefield to Firestation. When I was a kid, it was Mr. Hopsher's yard. He had little plastic chicks and ducks and a hill you could actually roll a wagon down. Mr. Hopsher was very old, and he was always a little suspect, possibly because he once had to reprimand us for uprooting his plastic birds (though I don't actually recall such an incident). But he was no boogie man. John, our property manager here in Ocean Beach, is decidedly less child-friendly. Sometimes I get the feeling he would have gladly taken a job at a death camp in another life. Today when the kids were romping on the grass, he turned on the irrigations sprinklers and stood there with the expression of someone drunk with power as the kids filed away, heads hung low. Don't fuck with John _____'s lawn!
So I keep trying to get work done here in Randomly Ever After land, but I've made the mistake of having this Guided by Voices album Do the Collapse on what amounts to continuous post-modern replay, and it's so wickedly good that it's a distraction from my own creativity, especially my writing. At the same time, I must credit it for refilling all my depleted creative juices. Yesterday I bought a used Crate amp at The Loan Ranger (a pawn shop) on Newport Street and already my fingers are festooned with blisters from rocking that part of the free world over which I preside. Additionally, I've almost completed another painting, a creepy little crucifixion still life.
The GBV song that struck me today was "Mushroom Art." I've decided that it's probably the most sly, poignant ode to non-adolescent masturbation I've ever heard:
Living without you is difficult
But our dead dreams awake in my mushroom art
Do not observe her beauty
Rat-faced old man winking
(You see, he tests me!)
He wants I should join him in gratitude
For his craft
(He calls this love!)
But hardly so...
Happy this universe
Happy is the act
A bejewelled crow on a quilted ten
Yes, at the zenith
Our dead dreams awake!
Of course, like most GBV songs, it could be about anything, but it really speaks to me when "mushroom art" is taken as a singularly demented term for what Rory used to call "wanking" before he became a Jedi master.
There's this thing that needs satisfaction in my life, and it's looking for heroes, and those heroes today include Larry Flynt, Bob Pollard, Alex Guldbeck and Heather Bissel: the people who do their thing without regard to the way they are told they should.
In other news, I received the following Latin text from someone who may well be Bad Sex of Big Fun fame, another University of Michigan point of contact.
loquerisne mecum amice
nati matri virgini et geminus sum
ride sis poteris
frater alter methorphan morphine est
ludum cures iam
viam non habeas
semper ave et vale
tempus terminus sit
At almost midnight, after Kim got home from work, we drove up to Del Mar to visit one of Kim's shadier friends whom I'll refer to as Antonio. He's an Italian guy who runs a shoe store, though he's also an artist who works mainly in gouache, a kind of opague watercolour. Antonio is a direct man, not big on the small talk. His first inclination with girls is to get them to remove their clothes. With Kim, this desire is complicated whenever I'm around, so tonight he proposed that sometime we pose for an important painting to be done on a big canvas he's been saving. He said he needed three naked women and a naked man to serve as models, and of course he wanted two of his models to be us. I was pumped up, stimulated, and driven my an unusual feeling of artistic altruism, so of course I agreed.
After we returned home, Kim and I ended up staying up and partying until 4:00 in the morning. It was the latest we'd ever stayed up in our 14 months together.
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