Flashback/Introspection

All of a sudden I find myself in the midst of heavy negotiations. Deep talk spoken in hushed whispers about the prices of eighths and o’s, who can and can’t score the good shit, medicinal grade, fresh out of Cali. This is the risk you run, associating with these kind of people. One minute you’re having pleasant conversation with friends and acquaintances, and the next you find yourself trapped in a scene out of The Godfather, wondering who might be concealing semi-automatic firearms on their person.

Everything seems fine and then turns fast, and the next thing you know you’re babbling, pretending not to speak English, answering only in the broken Spanish you remember from high school. You start looking for covertly installed security cameras monitoring your patio, your kitchen--hell, in today’s world a man’s own bedroom is probably riddled with more bugs than the defunct Soviet embassy. Your eyes divert rapidly, checking every car you don’t recognize, looking for strips of red and blue lights tucked away behind the top of the windshield, or the tell-tale spotlight. The yellow license plate is a dead giveaway, but by the time you’ve registered the color, you’re doomed. The police are not a force to be trusted, when you have friends like this. YOU, a law-abiding citizen, a tax-payer, a voter, have no rights when you willingly spend your time with these drug-addled vicious lunatics, these vultures that pick away at your bones bit by bit, forcing the occasional tab of acid down your throat along the way. It’s the spectrophysiological equivalent of marinade, a good dose of LSD; turns your brain into a soft gray mush the consistency of cold tomato soup. Your very soul becomes warped and twisted, bending in and out of dimensions whose existence would utterly destroy everything we assume about our universe and how it works. I have been told that the right kind of drugs add a layer of depth and richness to your consciousness, and I am certain that it was in the context of flavor.

It’s a hard life, being perpetually in Fear of a long-gone enemy. You can’t walk by a back alley without carefully scanning for the glint of a sniper scope. Every step is gentle, searching with the sole of the boot for concealed punji sticks. You take night courses in Vietnamese language and culture on a bogus credit card number, so you can discern the average citizen going about their business from a Victor Charlie assassin carefully trailing you, waiting for the right time to slit your throat with an empty soda can. You give the first sip of your whiskey to your dog, to check for the presence of arsenic or psychoactive drugs.

Then again, there’s something about getting drunk with your dog that adds an element of bonding to pet ownership that most don’t understand. As you sit there, staring at the news, trying to cram as much information past the thick moat of sweet stupidity you’ve poured recklessly down your own gullet, speaking out loud about the injustices of the world and the sheer fucking madness of it all, you can look down at your Doberman, licking its own ass in a blissful alcoholic stupor, and know that he understands you. He sees it too, in the same way that you do, and it doesn’t make any more sense to him than it does to your own advanced and evolved mass of thinking goo you keep in your headbones. Dogs don’t do acid, though. It doesn’t work for them. They exist best on their own plane, and have no need for artificially crafted chemicals to pull off the kind of sideways thinking that a good headful of acid can bring on. Dogs walk comfortably through that crystalline plane, and behave as such. I am convinced that all LSD comes from the glands of fully grown Great Danes, and that is why I no longer buy it. The dogs earned it, goddammit, they developed their own fucking brains in such a way that they Ride their way through life, and we were soul-crushingly dumb enough to live like goats, seeing only what was put in front of our thick, stupid eyes. We have to deal with that. So be it. Leave the dogs alone.

I have no issues with drugs, on the whole. Drug people have put me in a world of shit more times than I can count, but I’ve enjoyed it every single time and wouldn’t trade it for the world. Still, there’s an element of panicky paranoia that comes with being a Drug Person. No one is your friend except other Drug People, not even the drugs. The drugs are the worst, more evil than the most depraved backwater sheriff you can find. You know where you stand with crooked cops; their mindset is not difficult to understand, and if you can think quickly and properly, you can think like them, give the right answers, or at least avoid giving the wrong ones. The drugs have no mentality. They’re virii, blindly charging forth through the temple that is your body to play loud music and add unnecessary expansions where they want. They’re squatters, and they’ll turn on you whenever they damn well please. You think you’re picking apart the meaning of life hidden in a blade of grass, and then the next you hear intense whispering in a language you hope is Korean. You’re now scanning the bushes, back to the wall. Your soldier’s brain is trying to kick in, crafting fast tactical strategies,. coming up with off-the-cuff contingency plans. You try to remember how to say “I’m a journalist, don’t shoot!” and wind up making half-vocalized choking noises. You want to communicate, but you can’t. You try to sound more like a crow, to blend in while you make your escape. And just as you’re ready to make your move, you realize that you aren’t armed, you’re not wearing camouflage, you’re not even in the bushes.

You’re sitting at your own fucking coffee table with your friends, smoking cigarettes, pineal glands reduced to smoldering blobs of goo on the potent trip that you can only get by starving yourself of sleep, feeding yourself dangerous amounts of caffeine, and then spending an afternoon with your best friends, all fucked-up madmen just like you. It’s no life for a decent human being.

I love every single minute of it.

It’s only Wednesday, it’s off-season, and no one has anything to do. If there’s a good life, this might just be it.

Out of the Game

Good morning, sinners. I hope you've all enjoyed your breaks, been relaxing, keeping informed.

Lord knows I haven't.

I'll be entirely honest with you, this is the first time I've even been back to this dirty little corner of the Internet since the last time I wrote something on here. I've been getting caught up in the mundane, involving myself in the day-to-day to the extent that I completely lost sight of the Big Picture, and I have much catching up to do. I'm out of practice; rusty. I can feel it in my joints, in my mind. In my nostrils, for some weird reason, but that might just be the remnants of last night's thing. Trust nothing powdered and Thai in nature, for it is evil and must not be allowed to go unset-on-fire.

See? I'm already providing you with these valuable life lessons. Admit it, you missed me.

I do need to get Back In. I need to remember how to do all this. I can't let myself get so far out of practice that when something massive comes up, something of crucial importance, I'm just left staring dumbly at a computer screen, wondering what to do now. Good journalism, good writing, ought to be off-the-cuff. Polishing can come later, but if you're not shitting at least good hunks of carbon that can later become diamonds, you'll never stand a chance. There's an old saying about ribbons on fecal matter I'll let you look up, but it's the same principle.

In essence I'm making that tired old blogger's promise that I'm actually going to write more often, except I'm not. For all you know, I'm fleeing to Zimbabwe tomorrow, and this'll be the last you ever hear of me. I am the Wind, creeping through the sleeping town. My every word is made of gold. What are you talking about, you bastards? I'm not drunk. I WAS drunk, I am no longer drunk.

Keep your ears open, my little sperm-flunkies. I've missed you, and I might just start talking at you.

-Tambour