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Those were pretty good years, if you didn’t dwell on the hard bits.
“Johnny and Star – Uber Alles!”,
he would shout to the universe, when things got difficult or when things got good – between them – either end of the emotional spectrum.
“Over All! – Babe! – Over all! -We got each other!”
That wasn’t always much comfort to her.
Back in the day, when they were younger – a dream or two, still keeping pace with time, those words could bouy her up, keep her from drowning in the ugliness around them.
They were often like spokes on a wheel – now.
Going round.
Going round.
Going round.
A never breaking circle, cycling itself, an ouroboros – tail in mouth – longing for – a fabled past – a new beginning – anything, anything other.
The couple that was them – then, was strictly survival – now.
Hustle up enough for a few blasts – between them.
Momentary.
Mind always reaching.
Seeking.
Blast away the memories, of who or what he thought this was going to be.
Blast away the residue – which leads to paths that had only wanted to be avoided.
Been working so far, eh?
Been keepin’ them on an,
unmerry-go-round.
Trying not to choke on the bitterness of so much emptiness – all those…… years exhaled into…………………….this?
Claiming this doorway as their own. For this moment, this night,
this never permanency.
tbc.
Under street lights, we got us – outside – outside alright.
Something final, in that – that’s for sure.
Every day – another indignity – another minor trauma. They have been in these streets together for the past couple years. Initially it was summer and it didn’t matter and the drum and the bass would drop all over this provincial town. Providing places to see, people to be.
Derelict warehouses.
Empty slaughterhouses.
Rented sound stages.
Abandoned storefronts.
The city then, was rife with spaces no one cared enough about, where for a few hours it could transform – its own language – customs – rituals.
Most nights there was somewhere to offload a bit of gear, get right fucked up and dance – and dance – and dance – just fucking dance.
Both natural and pharmaceutical chemicals released – indifferently – efficiently – pulsing the body – moving through the music – through time.
Another lifetime ago, another thought of who or what they were then – they are now.
Lights flashed – yellow
Lights flashed – blue
Lights flashed – red
A body undulating
- a techno beat –
a space in time - a pulsing vibration –
a symmetry
-a breakbeat –
a dance floor
-a drum coded –
Those days felt more real in ways, more connected to each moment – each other – an immediacy – which overflowed into everything else.
“We Are One,” she whispered –
her hot breath unfolding each syllable in his ear. And he got it – but he didn’t get it – and that left him feeling vulnerable -awash in new realities.
The peak hit a new high
and he saw his punk rock facade,
fade to dayglo, as the shimmer of ergot – gone wild – went wild, he saw for the first time – that it was all a dream – outcome uncertain – not of concern.
Parts not wanting to be remembered – recalled, not wanting to regurgitate or recreate the feelings locked in
let out,
nightmare just beneath the surface
all part of the inner landscape
hellscape.
This is escape.
Another blast.
Flame, tension burnt.
Last blast for each of them – tonight.
Eyes wide, flickering along the flame line – feels like the best thing ever – feels like it’s all gonna be okay – last blast – tonight – under street lights.
tbc
tbc
The work it takes to maintain all this distance – from self.
Distract – change emotion – distract – ignore – keep going – find ways to dull the continuous ache.
He felt lost – so much effort – so much distract – tweaking his neurons – seeking release – seeking…….solace.
The balm of a hit, the false narrative propped up, the sound of untruths, become normalized, become true.
There was no hindsight. No “It should have been another way.” It was step up and run screaming – from the pain – from the…fear.
Unfounded – not tested – tried – tired.
Still in his twenties, still just a kid seeking ease, bumping into this shit. It’s a deep bath in melancholy – a sadness born from generations of struggle – addiction – mental health issues – poverty – homelessness – trauma.
So many late nights – staring down the abyss – a love found – a deep well.
“….and then I was pregnant, strung out on rock, crack babies were in the news back then, CAS took him right out of the hospital room, handed “the boy” over to his grandmother – left Johnny and I to sort out ourselves – by ourselves.”
“We weren’t even juggling for the money, really, we were just, you know, surviving. We turned people on. We were doing the good work, all that trip.”
“Saw so many people, become ONE with the universe, with themselves, make positive change, switch their shit up. But we were out here, just surviving on the love and the drugs and the working it out tomorrow. That was the part where we got lost. We got to feelin’ so good, that we thought we were, so good and could stick with one more pill, one more line, one more tab. It gave release and relief, whole new meaning.”
“And like that, spat out the narrow opening, from a scene we helped to build, create community, heal, fucking heal.”
“Those with the means, just disappeared, maybe suburban lawns, maybe a pricey rehab, someone had been awaiting their return. We had nobody.”
They just had each other, need, love – open wounds oozing all kinds of toxin. All beliefs are true, until proven otherwise.
The come downs, hit harder, more difficult to find a self that wasn’t so goddamned broken, so held together by string and wire, tied up.
tbc
…and it would take years to come back from that disconnection – from everything they thought they were moving towards, everything that was lost, everything that never happened. Shifts in the fabric, twists in the plot, changes in the pace and different outcomes. New realities engaged, but soon retreated from in the face of what was seen, experienced and juxtaposed by their day to day reality.
A few utopian years of new beliefs, what felt like true understanding, feeling that they had found a tribe of the also wounded and that would help to propel and uplift them all – and everyone – everywhere. Seeking a tipping point that never quite materialized – there was no – Timewave Zero.
Psychedelic techno pioneers before the internet became commonplace – before cellphones became ubiquitous. These were the days of phoning the flyer number at 10pm – from a landline or a pay phone – to find out where the meeting place or the party was and getting there, somehow before midnight, before the price went up. It was really living on the fringe, of a culture lost in its own lack of cohesion – lack of connection. So they found their own on the outskirts – with other lost dreamers – others dying for change.
Jungle
dnb
trance
Hardcore of a different kind
The world was backing grunge at a time but they just moved from:
- punk
- to industrial
- to new beat
- to acid house
- to techno.
Downtown kids – feral, it was the end of the eighties after all. Started underage at The Twilight Zone, Nuts & Bolts, Catch-22, The Comfort Zone.
They both played the game of supplier – received the spoils – the access – the street cred – the ability to quit the seven am to four pm for him and the eight pm to four am for her. From hash to pills to blotters to powder to rock – there were always customers in the clubs – a few years in and it was the raves – the parties.
And that was alright – until it wasn’t.
tbc
Then the rock started to rule. They couldn’t shift them fast enough to catch up to the deficit that disappeared in the glass stem. That feeling of disconnection had faded, for the first time – that feeling good – with self – with life – there were many happy and some truly ecstatic moments.
It was really the switch from the drugs that had opened them up – to the ones that now closed them off – that made them believe, for a while anyway, that they were still – open.
Not all white powders are equal, not all drugs lead to the same outcomes. It was the moments when this truth was forgotten – that things spiralled away from what they thought they were doing, who they knew they had become.
Their love grew – for the other – for the collective, but the love for self – got lost in the brief vapour trail – from the next hit on the stem pipe – created in front of a corner store – made from a small brown glass – bottom broken off – ginseng bottle and a piece of Brillo crammed in the end with a dirty chopstick.
Despite the love they had, they each craved more than the other was capable of giving. The lack that each brought to the scene – grew between them – overwhelmed each, in a dis-understanding – a dis-ease – a longing for that – which was not there and losing sight of that which was.
Having been a team
- accomplices in love
- partners in hurt
- co-conspirators trying desperately to heal from their traumatic beginnings.
They couldn’t keep a grasp on how much they meant to each other, each of them lost sight of how to hold the other.
tbc
One With Everything
They couldn’t keep a grasp on how much they meant to each other, each of them lost sight of how to hold the other.
And they didn’t know where to go with it. A divide had shown up between them – that in some ways was an impenetrable wall – though to others it appeared to be the glue that kept them together.
Having met in high school, all those years ago – two kids – both thinking and acting from places that certainly didn’t adhere to the culture of the time – they clicked, and kept clicking for all the years since. They had been through so many underground scenes together – music – drugs – fetish – body art – but like window shoppers – they took it all in but never committed to anything – but change.
Now the change was between them – uncertain how to navigate as individuals – they kept moving together while falling apart.
It was as if their falling apart – kept them working as one – not the same as it had been before – they had really integrated a new understanding of – we are all one.
tbc
The moments between the pain – are the ones to savour – hold on to – then let go of, for impermanence is the only constant. Like the ebb and flow of an ocean, life bore down on them – continuously tearing at the emotional fabric of individual self – forcing each moment to become a choice – a challenge – an opportunity – to grow or devolve.
History was in front of them – experience strictly in the now.
All the yesterdays – compiled – assimilated – not always brought into the moment – not always – a starting point, as the past, somehow forced them into the future.
Still getting high off their own supply, the daily grind kept interfering with momentum. Stasis crept and wailed – often shadowing and preventing real growth. In this directionless void – they replayed and reran – all the hurt and sorrow of their accumulated years.
Fortunately the connection and love for the friendship, helped the coiled spring of terror and dissociation, bind them in mutual survival.
The party scene had now become dark and paranoid – as Ecstasy was replaced with Crystal and long nights turned into long days and days and daze. The Chill Out Room replaced with a cash bar – after the good City of Toronto decided that kids couldn’t have unsupervised underground experiences – in unlicensed and unsanctioned facilities. No more – warehouses – under bridges – abandoned factories or parking garages.
This mainstreaming turned the music – that originally drew them in, once fresh and innovative – into just more of the same – inauthentic overly commodified and safe from the unnamed harm for the youth, that had originally come together seeking connection – fun – spiritual and emotional elevation -a place to call their own.
The upside to losing that which they loved – was a new market of second wave shopping mall ravers, willing to drop their allowance on any drug that was put before them – it was this byproduct of reactionary over regulation that brought more customers and kept the couples hustle going and lucrative enough to keep them high and mighty on the streets.
tbc
tbc
Queen and king of the night. Doing the only thing they knew how to do – getting through. And you know they sampled all the wares – most nights, watching the scene change and the kids get younger – stupider. Gobbling chemicals – eyes like saucers – some past out in the dark corners of basement fire traps.
The scene had gone further underground – into dangerous spaces, the beat kept on.
kick drum – bass
hi-hat – bass
snare on the backbeat
pulsing keys up front
repeat
repeat
repeat
bodies moved
lights flashed
sweat oozed from the walls
just as the M hit
they each jacked a tab
smiles for miles
riding a wave of warmth
radiating from their cores
merging with the sound
until the body became
indiscernible from space
open
open
open
for self
for the other
for everyone in the room
eyes closed
soaring into the beat
primordial
intrinsic
heart filling
receiving
flowing outward
one with everything
one
one
one
bump of K
the top flew off
this is what it feels like
this
is
it
The music stopped – suddenly
Bodies kept moving
confusion
Head spinning, smiling, standing in a corner while a uniform went through his pockets.
“Fuck? What the fuck is going on?”
“Rahwahrahhaw bblurpering”
came the reply .
He was lost in a different sea, bearings way off course.
“Um….Fuck…s…going on??”
Blurred out his mouth
eyes slurring in the scene.
Shivering in a cold sweat – heart pounding – confused – scarred – eyes searching for understanding.
He was led out in handcuffs and floated towards flashing blue lights – cold air chilling his sweat drenched t-shirt – a full spectrum of colours turning the air in front of him into a geometric matrix – which described all of creation.
Laying on the cold vinyl seat – disembodied voices crackling from an unseen radio – he stared up at the interior dome and knew that none of of it really mattered – he had felt something tonight – more real, than every feeling he ever had combined – more fulfilling than any amount of time in his past – he felt alive for the first time – he saw the whole of everything – the whole fucking ride – he saw who he was – saw who he could be – wasn’t sure how to get there – wasn’t sure where he was or what happened to Star.
tbc
Sensation roused him, crusted eyes aching into a dark tunnel of vision. Blurring in a brightness – feeling the coldness of hard surface.
He became aware of being splayed across a concrete floor – uncertain – confused. There were about half a dozen others scattered around the holding cell, lost in their own decrepitude.
The night before slowly resequenced itself to him – he remembered receiving a download of the ultimate understanding of existence – recalled feeling at one with the universe and then the recollection of how the night ended and of how much gear he had on him. The last point – stood out sharpest in his mind.
“Fuck.”
He had a full sheet of A, a baggie of M, several half g vials of K, a ball of Crystal, a fistful of rocks and a wad of damp cash.
“Fuck.”
He laid his head – back on the dirty concrete floor and lost himself in the bare flickering florescent tube hanging directly above him.
An undistinguishable blur of time later. He lifted his head upon hearing – “O’Brien” – “Johnny O’Brien” – shouted impatiently. He struggled up and leaned himself across the room, meeting the voice at the steel bars.
A jangle of keys, a click of a lock, the creak of a door, his laceless shoes clapping his movements, beyond the confines of the bars – followed by the same sounds in reverse. He swayed in the uncertainty and followed the officer down the featureless, narrow hallway.
“Here’s your belongings, sign here,” a bag of familiar items – plasticized and proffered at eye level- a paper on the desk in front of him – a finger pointing to a line.
He scratched blurry black ink across the line.
“This is your Promise To Appear.
You are charged with Trespassing, Resisting Arrest and Possession of Cannabis, Contrary to the Canadian Criminal Code.”
Johnny just smiled, took bag and the paper – turned and walked towards the desolate sun in Regent Park, exiting – 51 Division.
tbc
“Park it……just fucking park it”.
Samantha yelled at Tobias after he circled the block for the fifth time.
“I really don’t want to pay twenty-five bucks to park” he countered.
Attempting to inject a calm perspective into the uneasy situation.
“I get that, but I also want to get out of the fucking car, before the show is over”.
It was fast approaching the 9pm show time at Massey Hall, and Samantha really did not want to not miss the Misfits. She had been waiting over 30 years to see her favourite band. Danzig had finally gotten over himself and Jerry Only had needed a better paycheque than he had been getting without him. So the love of two minute songs and large retirement accounts had won over their former animosity.
The two founding members of the influential 80’s hardcore act had hugged it out at a lawyers office in New Jersey and agreed to cash in on the rising interest in their back catalogue. Being senior citizens now, it felt to the both of them, that it would have to be now or never.
During the 80’s, Tobias had been more Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls than Samantha’s Dead Kennedys and MDC. He didn’t really get the allure of punk rock, but he had also missed his youthful rebellious period, due to a rare illness that kept him bed ridden through his early teens. When he and Samantha met at the 7-eleven, that used to be at Donlands and Danforth, he didn’t know his Jello from his Cretin. He can now tell by ear whether a Black Flag song was sung by Dez, Keith, Henry or Ron.
Tobias, sensing it would be a long time before he would hear the end of this, reluctantly parked in the old Sears lot on Mutual and paid the $25 with his phone app. Samantha, stretched her legs as she got out of the car threateningly pointing her well worn Docs toward Tobias’s ass, which to great effect hurried him along. She would be pissed if she missed the band playing Bullet, Skulls or Angel Fuck. She definitely loved the Misfits more than she loved Tobias.
Sonja immigrated to Canada from Yugoslavia with her family, in August of 1965, she had just turned fourteen years old. In October the previous year, an unseasonal rainfall caused the Sava River to flood, washing away much of Zagreb and leaving Sonja’s family home, uninhabitable. As both of her parents were academics who worked at the University of Zagreb, lecturing on Eastern European History and Folklore, they were provided with a small space in a cramped, over capacity dormitory on the University campus. The crowded conditions and the pause of their teaching positions due to the flood damage to the lecture halls, pushed the need for the family of six to seek out better living conditions and opportunity. Her parents applied for and were offered positions at the recently expanded York University, in the northwest corner of Toronto. It was during the summer after the flood that the family, which included Sonja’s three younger siblings, arrived in Canada, so that her parents Dragana and Bogdan could begin their new positions when the Fall semester started at York.
Fourteen year old Sonja was devastated to leave her friends and her City of birth behind. The move was hard on her and she had a difficult time adjusting to her new life in Canada. She didn’t like the damp cold climate, nor the xenophobic stupidity of the locals as expressed by the treatment she received from the other kids at her new school. The locals constantly made fun of her last name, which was Dracul. They would sneak up behind her saying, “I vant to suck your blood”. They constantly mimicked her accent and they appeared to have no knowledge of Europe, outside of England, Scotland and Ireland where most of their families had originated from. They usually referred to her as “The Communist” or “The Russian” despite her home country being Yugoslavia. While this infuriated her, she still tried like any other teenager to ignore it and fit into her new environment.
Sonja’s relationship with her parents went downhill after she turned sixteen. It was during her high school years that she started acting more like her new western peers. She started staying out late, sneaking around with boys, skipping school, drinking alcohol, all the usual teenage activities. By 1969, she had discovered pot and started hanging out in Yorkville, which had become the hippie enclave in Toronto, making it the easiest place to score dope in the city.
It wasn’t long before Sonja was dropping acid and eating peyote as often as possible with her new bohemian friends. She even started having sex with the twenty one year old lead singer of a local band called the Mynah Birds, who took on the stage name Rick James. Rick had changed his last name from Johnson to James and was now able to hide in plain sight, singing in a rock band, while dodging military duty in America. This was two decades before he would blow up with his album Street Songs. Their relationship lasted a whole of three weeks.
Sonja loved the vibe in Yorkville. The small art galleries, cute boutique stores filled with the South Asian style clothing the hippies liked to wear and the head shops with all the pot smoking paraphernalia. The highlight of the neighbourhood though was its numerous coffee shops where she could find great music and poetry most times of the day. There were cool places to hang out, where you might find Joni Mitchell or Gordon Lightfoot playing an acoustic set. One time she wandered into a cafe to find Leonard Cohen, reading poems and hitting on all the girls. Despite being thirty-one at the time, Leonard liked the younger suburban girls that hung around the Yorkville scene.
It wasn’t too long before Sonja made friends that were hanging out at Rochdale College, not far away at Huron and Bloor Streets. Rochdale was initially created as a federally funded housing co/op for University of Toronto students, which then morphed itself into an unstructured free College. Initially it was run with intention, purpose and idealism. For a period of time it successfully pursued and seemed to achieve some of the ideals of a generation that were looking to break away from the confines of straight conservative Toronto and specifically the academic stuffiness and snobbery of the U of T. With University students and an assortment of poets, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians steering the direction, the College had the best of the possibilities of the sixties built into it. It was difficult to reach any consensus and as things slowly devolved into entropy and chaos. When the Toronto authorities took a hardline and bounced all the hippies out of Yorkville, under the guise of public safety. Freaks of all kinds, including bikers, criminals and non-idealists descended upon Rochdale from a sort of out of sight, out of mind move, where shit got weird and heavy fast. Sonja had been crashing with her friend Fiona, until their unit got taken over by speed dealers. Slowly the spirit of the sixties, was put to death by nervous straights and could coinciding with the change in drugs from Pot and Acid to Heroin, Cocaine and Speed, creating bummers and general bad vibes. The summer of love had now officially ended.
Growing up in a Socialist country, Sonja understood doing for the collective good. Her original political ideology, a mishmash of Tito, Mao, Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Tommy Douglas, seemed naive and out of place, against the backdrop of Canadian conservatism, capitalistic greed and the every motherfucker for themselves mentally being spewed from the five or six American TV channels that were available at the time. Slowly the dark reality that was now surrounding her, made her question her youthful idealism. The fascistic reaction of the state against the kids hanging in Yorkville really knocked the wind out of her. It seemed like the Peace, Love & Understanding of the era was dying with the cool winds of the season change. As the flower power wilted away, Sonja was under the pressure of her new boyfriend who was the antithesis of a hippie. Tiny was a biker, a big, scary biker and he didn’t like “Commies”. Still Sonja was smitten. She liked to walk with him and watch the crowd part to let them through, her insecurities fed off of this fear based respect, received when they were out together. She felt safe with Tiny. Under his tutelage, she learned about “the free market”. She quickly turned many degrees to the economic right, becoming a Milton Friedman, fangirl in the process, a tiny, Tiny. Tiny’s business model essentially consisted of stepping on his drugs so much that buyers of large fronts were reluctant to pay him because they couldn’t find buyers who wanted his sad shit. Then he would use his size and biker friends to intimidate and get paid. The spoils of the free market, became all the rage. He was Capitalism at its finest and Sonja was madly in love.
During the first couple of years of the new decade the huge housing building had devolved into a sort of flop house-drug den. Regular students moved out and everyday hippies, transients, criminals, people with mental health issues, all carved out space in the common areas, usually rent free. Paranoia was rampant due to a heightened police presence and all the speed being consumed and distributed out of the building. The drug scene that ran the place for a couple of years, was unpredictable, friends were hard to find and greed and self-preservation replaced cooperation and inclusion. Tiny was in and out of jail, mostly for petty crime and drug possession. His size and choice of dress, headband, leather jacket, torn bell bottoms, always brought the heat to him. Sonja became smacked out on skag and would turn tricks out of an apartment on the west wing, to pay his bail and feed her growing drug dependence.
As the Taurus moon of 1975, closed out the month, the RCMP, undercovers that had been squatting on the seventh floor, took down Tiny and his ragtag gang of unaffiliated roughnecks. The Toronto cops carried out the last residents roughly tossing them in paddy wagons and sealing the doors shut. The ideals and the hope for the experimentally open academic environment and cooperative housing, died in the middle of the Me generation.
After the building was cleared out of the rest of the students and assorted freaks the Feds took back the building, as the CMHC hadn’t been receiving its mortgage payments. “The Unknown Student” statue that had sat facing the front of the building was out turned away, towards Bloor St. as Rochdale was turned into Seniors Housing.
Walking away from him was one of the hardest things Sharona had ever done in her life. After so many years of going in circles and doing the same things, bailing him out, giving him money, setting him up-again, worrying about him, hoping for the best. She finally saw that she wasn’t really having an impact. There was no lasting change. He was still alive, yes, but it seemed like she was the only one still hoping for a better outcome. That reservoir of hope was mostly dried up now. She felt like the only one even trying. She could see that he no longer believed in himself, no longer believed in change, even as a possibility, he had completely given up. And she knew where that came from.
There were times years ago, when he wanted help, when he reached out for it even. Only to be left to free fall through the broken system, supports in place one day, gone the next. Another relapse, another bit of jail time, another period of time disappeared into the void. She understood his desire to numb himself, to forget his past, his pain, to stay away from his family of origin. But she was lost by her inability to help facilitate change. She understood that he was prescribed some serious antipsychotic medications, and that they only could do and actually did so much, even if and when he took them regularly. She also knew that the side effects from the meds could cause serious changes, both physical and mental and he told her time and time again that he didn’t like the lack of feelings he was left with, when on them. He said he felt dead, floating through a world of cotton batting, muffled, foggy, forgetful, dragged, hopeless. After all these years of trying, he still had no family doctor, no consistent psychiatrist, no access to actual therapy. It’s like he now felt about the system, how the system had always felt about him – indifferent, failed, incapable, useless.
She died a little with each parting. Watching her son walk away from her, clutching the twenty dollar bill she forced into his hand. Tears would leak from her eyes, her heart would break, each and every time.
He hobbled away from her, on the shaded sidewalk, unbelieving her loyalty, which he mistook for simple stubbornness, just attempts to assuage herself from the early turmoil of his life. She kept finding him, on the city streets, though he told her time and again that he was alright, that he didn’t need any help. Once he was out of her sight, he gave the twenty she forced on him to the next panhandler he saw. Getting rid of her energy, her dogmatic belief that he could still be fixed. He had jumped through more hoops than a circus dog and there still were no answers, no solutions, no changes to how he felt, to how he understood this life to be. Like an endless nightmare, that you can’t will yourself awake from.
At first he went to all the appointments, he tried so hard to help himself, to quiet the feelings of not rightness, his feelings of wrongness, of his reality not matching up with those around him. He never believed the lies they told, he knew intuitively that there would be no happy ending for him. Just an endless living hell, this life, and unfortunately it was the only certainty he knew. He still couldn’t figure out if his inability to accept things and have a job and kids and a family, all the “normal” things he was supposed to aspire to, he still wasn’t sure if his inability to do so was a curse or a blessing. He wasn’t sure and didn’t care, anymore. He just kept ambling alone in a world, cold with casual indifference. That hum you hear on a street corner, in between the sirens and the screaming, that is the sound of indifference, it is no sound, it is unsound, it is all pervasive. The stink of indifferent systems that loose people, that give up, that don’t fund the supports that will help, only the ones that sound good on the evening news. Ten year monetary commitments easily unfulfilled and forgotten after the next election cycle. He felt like a ball in the air, exuberant on its launch, gut punched on its decent.
As the setting sun burnt his iris, he still couldn’t turn away. Everyday he watched the sun leave the city behind, as it faded behind the silhouetted cardboard facade. As it sunk behind the life sized film set, he felt himself free falling through the earth. If he closed his eyes, he would pop out on the other side of the planet, and watch it rise again, against a land both foreign and unknowable. He felt uncertain about the axis from which the earth rotated, he felt that every time he looked around, he was in a different world. The voices he heard constantly provoked his feelings of isolation, constantly confirming all his negative self-beliefs. They explained to him, his place in the universe and confirmed reality as he understood it. While at the same time he knew that they were trying to get him, get what he knew, take away his autonomy, his knowledge, his truth, take away his life. These things he knew, these things were true, these things the voices confirmed.
Looking every which way, he paced the sidewalk in front of the agency several times before he walked up to the slide open take-away window. tThe young looking woman with green dreaded hair, septum piercing and light green eyes asked in a sing-song voice,
“Hi, how can I help you?”
He felt human for the first time all day, walking the alienating streets, talking to himself pulling a converted golf bag cart, with various electronic devices tied to it with bits of coloured wire, he rescued curb side along his travels. He was storing this gear, under a bridge by the river, knowing that eventually he would build a device that would finally take him home.
Smiling at the attention from the striking looking woman, he replied:
“ Can I have a bowl pipe?”
She handed him a glass meth pipe, wrapped in a thin white styrofoam sleeve. He put it to his ear, listening intently before, he frowned and tossed it into a yellow No Frills bag, hanging off the cart which was overflowing with his street haul and asked:
“ Can I have one more”.
She smilingly passed a second pipe, again he put it to his ear, this time releasing a sigh of relief, putting it in the torn front pocket, of his torn and stained, burnt orange puffer jacket.
“This one likes me”, he smiled back at the still engaged worker.
“Did you know, that my brother is looking for me? He wants to help me to work at our father’s company, but I know he is actually working for CSIS and they want to steal all my patents, cause I know how to stop all global suffering, but the government doesn’t want that to happen, as it would put them out of business, which is why they have been giving those vaccines”
He spit out the last word while making air quotes.
“You see every time they jab someone, a little piece of nano-technology goes into their body and the government’s central computer, because they are looking for me, so now every time someone who got the vaccine is near me, it beeps the location and a hit squad shows up trying to kill me”
“ Wow. I’m sorry that is happening to you. Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked earnestly.
He looked into her sincere eyes, the depth of green reminding him of the ocean when he went to Florida as a kid, then with his gaze to the sidewalk below him and sounding a little scared said , “ No. But I have to go, so you won’t get caught in the cross fire – cause they will be here any second now”.
“Okay, well, would you like a bottle of water and a granola bar?” Her hand extended through the window with those items in it. He paused for a moment, looking hard at the items and then back into her eyes. Reaching forward he took the granola bar, leaving the water bottle in her hand.
“That shit will kill you”, he said as he turned and made his way down the street, limping slightly and slyly watching the reflection in the storefront windows, waiting for the agents to appear, again.
that is all it fucking is
* thanks to Richard Grossinger for the title of this post.
3 digital photos shot with a canon 30D
bracketed at 3 different exposures
merged into photomatrix 4 creating an hdr image
slightly tweaked with adobe bridge cs5 for clarity
altered using topaz labs simplify 3 plug-in for painted effect
in photoshop cs5 on a macbook pro
Everything is Nothing but Everything 