these are, of course, the types of questions you ask yourself when you don't have to worry about meeting your daily quota of blood diamonds or picking the maggots out of your sister's wounds. they're the type of questions that i would chalk up to Catholic guilt if i was raised Catholic; they're the type of questions that would be appropriate if i was 50 years older and named Woody Allen, vanguarding an age of introspection from an era of third-person media.
but it's not appropriate. i'm sitting at a computer using bunk words like "vanguarding" and to describe a condition that is probably as significant as cuttlefish farts. but if i feel so self-deprecating about the whole affair, then why do it? why bother the world with my brain's bellybutton lint?
i don't know. maybe one day they'll put up a museum across from the Anne Frank House for the Most Insignificant Event of All Time, and within that museum will be this blog transcribed upon a roll of toilet paper in a glass case. maybe one day, hundreds of years after that, some half-kid/half-dolphin hybrid will break in with his raygun or whatever, pluck up that precious roll, wipe his soggy ass with it, and then catch a glimpse of just one paragraph, just one sentence, and go, "wow. in 2010, people fucking sucked." he'll then tweet about it using telepathy.
i spent a lot of time today telling myself, "i don't feel so bad." was it the materiality of the records i snatched up in North Baton Rouge? was it the weed? was it the way the sun set, the retarded grumble of DJ Screw, or just the afterglow of illicit drugs? who knows. i've always told myself i'm the only person on Earth that gets unhappy when he's happy. i've also always told myself that this'll be my last cigarette, so we know how that happens. i suppose sometimes it just sneaks up on me, like a child molester who showed up to the park one day just to hand out candy and watch. it's not expected, and when it does show up, it feels weird, wrong, but only because it's something so strong that isn't the sensation of cringing.
i'm not used to having my skin tingle just because i'm happy.
for the past few years everything has kind of looked like a photograph. i can't really remember how i felt before i ever chewed mushrooms, so i can't say that was the cause, but it all kind of started around that same time. did i chew shrooms because of that, or was that the cause? who knows. does it even matter? but things, every now and then, just feel flat, two-dimensional, and whenever this emotion occurs, i think to myself:
"there are women out there right now being raped."
someone is out there, right now, raping women, giving them STDs and creating broken households. someone in this very city is nothing more than a catalyst for PTSD; someone a few blocks away is painting walls red. and the victims of all this will go home, cry for sixteen hours, take five pregnancy tests a day, and i'll see them in the store a month later buying Oreo Cakesters by the deuce and cheap makeup to cover their puffy eyes.
all the while, i'll have been cocooned in Christmas lights and marijuana smoke, wondering for hours why i still get nervous when i meet strange women.
someone across Florida just fired a gun. someone's on a gurney bleeding, screaming for their mother.
this, however, is good milk.
