(stoner adventures)

 I was falling gracefully; I tripped across reality, and fell, again,
notwithstanding back onto the streets of burnt velvet and found myself
staggered amidst the stars of our comprehension, wandering slurwise among the
many things I'd saved from a repentant childhood.  My bong burnt bright,
electrifiying fractals dancing in the raging embers, smoke curling like a halo
around my bowed and fatal head.
	Park benches were too cold for my limbs, and the air was too free.  The
restlessness of a millenium's solitude soared through my rushing blood, the
roar of being alive skipping like a jumping spark through my brain.  New York,
January, 1992.
	Times Square, site of the festivities past, sung with the night, a
mirror for my unsettled soul.  Four cigarette lighthouses strung in the breeze,
windsoft snow curling my ankles and singing my nostrils.  Monks chant past in
their Christmas putrescence, the darkness swirling around their vibrant eyes,
full of delights and remebrances subsumed.  The wrapping and the children and
the brights lights of Norman Rockwell's screaming demise were far away, spun
upward and skittering through the ice like the waves of smokelike snow blasting
my face.
	Spike's battered apartment door yielded to my hand, crackling like
yellowed newspapers dying before a fire and swinging open as close to silently
as a door that thoroughly burnt an assortment of fetid browns could ever hope
to.  Newspapers snowdrifted the floor, rising above clothes and books and empty
bags once containing green bud.  Spike was in a corner, under the only lamp
in the world, his liver scarred by the yellow the light impregnated his face
with.  "Spike?" I said, and Spike turned, spat foam, and said, "Let's load this
bitch."
	Spike's bong had been a Macintosh computer in better days, but was now
a large potsucking hole to which we applied fellatio, liberally enticing the
jetting smoke into our voidsome lungs.  The traditional "toaster" shape of the
macintosh had been modified only by a large tube running out the back and a
bowl protruding from the front.  It delivered nicely large, well-cooled and
smooth hits, and Spike had named it Max.  Putting a Godflesh CD in the player,
Spike turned to me and pulled out a bag.  "Check out this schwag," he said.
	Soft, light.  Definitely not brick or antique; also moist, so probably
good.  Purplish tint, darker green.  Malthusian green bud!  "Is it malthusian?"
I asked.  Spike nodded, and then sung the last word: "scorpion," referring to
the highest potency grade of malthusian green bud.  I took the first bong hit,
sucking down an insane amount of smoke, and passed the bong over.  Spike took a
huge hit, filling what had once been a computer screen with pure white.
"Dead?" I asked the bowl, and Spike laughed, and filled another.  We smoked to
the pounding, crushing emotional haze of Godflesh to the point where I thought
I saw the smoke curling between the traces webbing together the guitar notes,
under a chorus of multicolored nuclear flatulence representing the drum
machine.  Reaganomics would have made sense at that moment.
	We staggered out of his battered apartment and into the coldest swing
of the mercenary wind, but we had our jackets and hats and sunglasses, so the
night was tolerable, slick, and empty.  Reality had become just another thing
below us, like memories made to be forgotten, and we were walking on reality
much like we gingerly toed our way along the ice.  I was still shaking
drumbeats and muffled chords out of my ears from the music, and Spike was
calmly drifting away in his uniquely contemplative manner.  Somewhere to our
right there was a demonstration, complete with rattrap cops swinging batons to
the beat of the ephemeral drum.  Skulls cracked, and exploded out bloodsauce
bearing hundreds of eyes, each one bobbing and twisting to keep its iris
focused where the empty sun would have been.  Does the sun ever fully burn up?
Maybe it does when we run out of words, thought Spike, and I was there with
him.
	Store windows were made of ice and cracked with that wonderful
coupdegrace sound of ice cubes being dropping into hot coffee, that creak of
defeat, that warping, fatal noise.  Gutsmoke of the city drifted in over the
roofs and submerged the buildings, placing a photofilter over the clouds as it
blurred in from above.  I walked past the entrance to a tattoo parlor and a
giant tentacle like the root of some ancient tree impeded my path, but I
stepped over it with an undiscovered grace, sailing past the darkened door next
to six closed orifices, each like the grave of Elvis, slatted thickly with
steel slabs and lubricated with mucuslike graffitti.  The city breathed,
coughing and hacking like a machine deranged, and we breathed, simple puffing,
gasping, and sighing beneath it.
	"We're ludicrously baked," said Spike, as we went into the third random
store in search of food.  The letters on the neon had begun to sing me
christmas carrols, and I was very much doubting my ability to remember if I had
cash or even how to make change at this point.  This time it was a grocery
store, but the only thing I could find to buy with my meagre supply of cash was
a large head of cabbage.  Spike bought a bunch of stuff; the clerk stared at us
and accepted my grimy funds, with Spike attempting to write a check, then
attempting to roll the check, but then paying with cash.  I was wearing my
trenchcoat of invincibility, which had purely huge pockets, so I tucked the
cabbage into one of them and some of Spike's food into others, leaving me able
to wander with my gloves in my pockets and my hands above them, a posture that
for some reason seemed cold.  We looked like aliens walking down the street,
identical fuzzy sockhats on our heads, carrying food and wearing Ray-Bans.
But this was New York at wintertime, where most people don't give a shit what
strange drugs you're using as long as you do so somewhat quietly and don't jump
the turnstiles.
	Speaking of which, we had encountered the subway and, as snow danced
repetitively ceaslessly uniquely, we descended the darkened staircase into the
land of singing fluorescent tubes and dark bathroom tunnels with more
fluorescence propelling them into eternity.  It was late and so the train we
picked didn't have many people on it; we could have sat, but we stood instead,
glorifying the night with our uselessness, glorifying that incredible
stretching ramble of thoughts spanning past the invisible horizon that we now
rode a steel worm through, oblivious to anything beyond our warm coats but
screaming with the ragged electric lights (spinning tracers like cotton candy)
flying past us in our hellbent journey.  Hell was there at the end of the
tunnel with no end, along with death and redemption and the visualization of
meaning, but hell was also six feet away, the stonewalls rushing past us and
the faces seen in the reflection through two panes of glass from each spectral
nebulous echoing light.  Spike mumbled something about us being really stoned,
but I knew that the continuation was forthcoming, and that there was nothing of
not being alive in our particular form of deadness.
	A sword blade into the night, we traveled on, although travel is a
deceptive word, as we weren't going somewhere but anywhere.  "Freedom is what
you take, what you create for yourself," I thought, and Spike nodded, as if
he'd heard it too.  Nothing stood in the way of the yellow light, and we rode
until dawn, transposing the bowels and boundaries of our final city.

[+!-=-!+]