Best of 2015: Drugs/Reality

I am pretty much always confused about my body-- its contents, its boundaries.
Where should it go? Why is it clumsier in a winter coat and how do I compensate for that?

Language roots my reality, imposes order. Language allows me to organize and navigate more reliably, creating meaning, albeit slippery in the world around me.
This is why I largely avoid marijuana.
The significance of this decision was reinforced at the end of 2015, when I spent a terrifying night altered by a slim teaspoon of THC cheesecake.

The change happened gradually.
I was drawing with friends in a brightly lit kitchen, listening to music. There were snacks, probably good ones. Jokes were made.
But slowly everything took on a more sinister hue.
The record was scary and sounded very big. My friends looked outlandish.
I no longer had the ability to engage with them in the ways I relied on. My words were shutting down, overwhelmed by other senses--unreliable senses.
Terrifying senses.

With the remaining scraps of my verbal faculties, I asked to be led somewhere to lie down.
A friend took me to his bed then retreated from the room, where I was left to remember what Friend and Room meant.
I felt distress at a departing benevolent presence, but by that time I had largely dissolved into a series of unbounded chemical reactions. I recognized that my matter was bleeding into the molecules around me. My vision was darkening. Death would come soon.

I approached death without fear or sentiment, understanding at once that there was no god, just the gristle and chemistry inside me and a senseless, disordered series of words moving through it. Familiar terms cycled through my mind, rootless and unrelenting. Then everything feel silent.

The next morning I awoke. I asked myself if I still liked coffee, Now That I Was Different.
I decided I would try to.
I met with a Friend. We had a plan to draw, and it seemed important to keep this Plan, that we'd written together on our Calendars with Pens.
I don't indulge in psychedelic art. It is off brand, best left to the Alex Grays and Fred Tomasellis, but I allowed myself to make one drawing before putting this experience decisively behind me.
It is pictured below.
The drawing is stupid, pot is drugs, reality is fleeting and very frightening.
Trust nothing.
Happy New Year everyone.

Best Books of 2015

Reading Lynne Tillman at Jellystone

Justin and I eat dinner in the car in a downpour and he curses and bashes dishes around because we've aligned each other in two different camps:
Indoor Kid//Outdoor Kid
This Is A False Dichotomy, I think, as I plug in the pot of coffee (outside) the next morning and in a nylon chair I read a non-linear novel while tents unzip around me.
It's early.
An attendant rolls past in a golf cart festooned with a giant tinsel spider. It's Halloween weekend in July at Jellystone, and as I walk to the bathrooms I step over plastic fangs and packs of Sweet Tarts.
I watch a bee build something in the bathroom then I return to my book.
It's called "Haunted Houses!"
The air grows humid as the rain dries on the fiberglass sculpture of Yogi Bear.

Extreme Guest Appearances 2: Charles Fox

My good friend Charles Fox, linked to often throughout this blog, has become one of the internet's most thorough archivists of classic, often wonky American signage. He also might be the only person I know doing something ambitious with Instagram (username Charles_fox). Here are a few of his favorite signs he photographed in 2013.

Extreme Guest Appearances: Laura A. Warman

I read a lot of good stuff this year, but Pittsburgh-based poet Laura Warman's book is the only one I read TWICE!



How Much does It Cost? nestles in the murky terrain between Spam email and memoir, and has the alarming directness of address of some wrong number phone calls. (Is this for me??)
Laura generously listed some of her best things and moments of 2013 below.

SOME TOP THINGS OF 2013 BY LAURA A WARMAN

BEST ART

ZEE by Kurt Hentschlager

I have never felt all the cliches of Art Experience until I witnessed ZEE at the Wood Street Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA, an installation piece taking up a large room. Before entering the artwork I was warned multiple times that I shouldn’t enter if I was afraid, I shouldn’t enter if I had epilepsy, and I shouldn’t enter if I was pregnant. When I entered the piece, with a group of ten individuals, I was shocked. The piece was about 15 minutes long and for the entirety I wasn’t sure if I was dying/living, seeing/blinded, hearing/ deaf. It was a complete sensory experience. We were allowed to wander around the room but I was so afraid I could only hold onto a rope and go in circles around the perimeter of the piece. I saw light in new ways, I heard sound/ absence of sound. Each individual I talked to who saw the piece felt alone, like the experience was defined by how they alone processed light. Many felt like they were dying. It is hard for me to imagine how the piece was even created. There was heavy strobe, fog, and a soundtrack, but I couldn’t see anything. (It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.) Sadly, after three seizures occurred in the piece in three days, the City of Pittsburgh shut the artwork down. I hope ZEE can occur in other cities because it is something I will NEVER FORGET. It is every cliche.

BEST BOOK OF POETRY I READ

Rachel Zucker “Museum of Accidents”

It wasn’t published this year. But, this is the year I bought it. I remember sitting at a coffee shop in Squirrel Hill with the intention of chugging my coffee and continuing on with my day. I picked up this book and didn’t leave the coffee shop til the sun set and was faint with hunger. I cried and laughed at the same time, my nose filling with enough snot to drip down onto the page. Once I reached the middle of the book I found the poem Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group. It so perfectly mixes the trauma of a miscarriage with the dis/connectedness of internet message boards. IT’S A BOOK OF POETRY THAT’S A PAGE TURNER.


BEST PROFESSIONAL POETRY READING

I may think this because it happened recently. I may think this because it was snowing, lightly. I may think this because I was wearing my fur coat, sipping black tea, and eating cut fruit off a platter when I had ten dollars in my bank account. The best professional poetry reading I saw was not Anne Carson at AWP (but you need to know I was there) the best poetry reading I saw was Patricia Smith!!!!!! She instantly warmed up the room. She read many poems from memory and read one of my favorite poems from her beautiful book, “Blood Dazzler”, titled ETHEL’S SESTINA. As she read the last lines, “I can't wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can't wait. /Don't cry, boy, I ain't in that chair no more.” I felt my emotions leave my body and float a little towards Ethel. (I’m trying to say I cried.)

BEST POETRY DRAMA

“KILL LIST” by Josef Kaplan. Did you make the list? Did you feel threatened? Were you part of a joke? Was this a hoax? Did Kaplan make money? WHO REALLY KNOWS?


BEST JOLLY RANCHER FLAVOR

STILL CHERRY.