January 11, 1992: A Romantic Evening

What a crazy rollercoaster these days have been. Slippin' on the ice. Tonite I smoked a bowl of the hefty sandwich dope I got from J__. Except I shouldn't call it dope, cuz that's demeaning. Sometimes these past couple weeks I thought it was bad for me. But then I found out these cold January blues were chilling me even thru my sobriety. The herb would be my friend if I just got romantic with it.

So I cleaned the thirteen carefully salvaged tea-candles of all the little shards of glass clinging to them and stuck in their white wax. I scraped the beard of snow from the roof of my freezer cabinet into the plastic tub of my homemade bong. [made from plastic "touch of butter" tub with a musky brown ring inside, 2 plastic tubes, funtak, and some brass plumbing parts]

I got the stash out from its hiding place, turned out the lights and lit the tea-candles which I had arranged in a pattern at the end of the table.

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Led Zeppelin I in the background: by the time "Dazed and Confused" comes on I'm high enough that the song is both scary and exhilirating. Everything else drops away and I'm floating in the rush of it. Heavily romantic, occult imagery, knives with gleaming blades and ornate handles. I long to wear a silk robe and burn incense and listen to electric guitars all my life. But dazed? Confused? Can that be good? When the song is over I hunt for something a little morer positive... Eventually I come upon Handel's Messiah, Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Whatever the fuck that means. I stole this from my parents, who listen to CDs mostly, these days. I feel very Lutheran as the bass aria makes its stately statements: "Why do the nations so furiously rage together?" Sometimes it seems annoyingly officious; a lot of times it's just so beautiful that my heart speeds up just sitting there. By the time we get to the tenor aria...

XXV. Air (Tenor): Thou shalt break them
With a rod of iron; thou shalt dash
them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

...I'm wondering how this would work as hip-hop. After the Hallelujah and all the glory to be garnered there, I segued into Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus." There was no longer any room for an imaginary guest to stand upright -- I would have knocked him down. I was bouncing off the walls. K___ came home just as I was sitting down and resting, catching my breath at the end of a row of thirteen candles, only twelve of them lit. It's luckier that way.

K___ and I sat at the table and talked for how long? Forever, just delighting in each other's presence. Then to bed together, and I lie awake just digging the cerebration. Eventually the spirit moves me into the other room and I scribble for a while in my notebook.

That was last night. Today it's Plough Monday, even though it's a Saturday. Tonite featured candles again, and Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park. The dude's as beat as any 50s 'nik. Then I listen to J__'s hockey interviews, and an old tape from high school. But more on how times have changed later. I've got to get ovet to J-House and hobnob.


Earlier the same day I made another entry in a different journal.