by Megan Boyle
10AM: alarm went off, hit snooze a lot
1PM: woke, thinking about the dream. remembered the orange from last night. it’s good that i’ve only bought fruits and vegetables, when you only buy healthy things you’re forced to just eat them. text from joey buzz about BBQ today at 3PM. texts from zachery w asking if i felt okay to hang out today.
1:11–1:38PM: made spinach/banana/orange smoothie, cleaned cat box, swept floor, did dishes, made makeshift obstruction thing in front of the door alvie likes to bang so he can hide in…the door under the sink…the banging is so loud. started to write ‘things to do this week’ in dad’s ‘action day 2013’ calendar he bought for me, then thought it would be better to write in this. feel sick, facially sick. like throat/nose sick.
1:46PM: filling in ‘gaps’ of this from last night until now. drinking smoothie. it’s good with the orange in it.
2:00PM: shirley purring and laying a few inches from my head. experiencing facial sickness. smoothie will help, i feel. have been taking an extra lot of vitamins/zeolite/noopept past few days. coaxed alvie and shirley onto bed with me.
2:11PM: looking at the rockaway newspaper colin gave me, ‘the wave.’ the good-natured efforts of ‘the wave.’ what they write about. someone quoted the ramones. remembered something about a punk house being on rockaway beach somewhere. thought ‘yeah…80’s punks, they did it here, they…somehow i can do this, if people who felt…maybe they didn’t feel as bad as me though.’ thought ‘people don’t believe i feel bad because i laugh and make jokes,’ then ‘joey buzz feels as bad as me maybe,’ then ‘i’m just thinking that because of joey ramone and the other interactions with joey buzz.’ wonder how his ketamine study thing went.
on the second page i saw something called ‘Boyleing Points’ by kevin boyle. the first sentence is ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’ seems…damn. then he says ‘Unlike most weeks, I’m not wasting 500 words saying nothing. Nobody swerved a car at me (so it’s your fault).’
2:17PM: shit i missed a ‘beach clean-up’ event yesterday. i would’ve liked that, helped someone. done that instead of what i did.
2:44PM: a $12.50/hour secretary position is available. ad says ‘visit your new company at callahead.com.’ it’s a port-a-potty company. you bet your ass i am applying.
2:55–4:47PM: looked at internet on phone, re-scheduled plans w/zachery to film video and do mushrooms thing today, showered, dressed, debated taking xanax, ate 15mg adderall while walking to dunkin donuts and huffing on e-cigarette. felt ‘better than’ people who i thought looked heavier than me (like i was beating them in a game or something, not like, morally/otherwise ‘better,’ i don’t like thoughts like this but i still have them).
4:57PM: heard/peripherally saw a figure behind me say ‘dodomeedledododo’ really fast and i jumped. i said ‘i’m sorry, you startled me’ and looked, thinking it would be zachery, but it was a short grinning man holding open a bookbag, offering me CDs.
5:12PM: at dunkin donuts, waiting for zachery. table of three high school-aged girls in front of me at dunkin donuts. one said ‘so we were in…the bronx.’ they are eating rainbow sherbet. (this is also a baskin robbins).
5:30PM: surprised all of this updating/uploading of things is going so smoothly and zachery w isn’t here yet (he said something reassuring in his last text about how he would prepare for if i wasn’t ready when he arrived/would bring a ‘get-out-of-hell-free card’ and look at things, still would rather not inconvenience). usually if i flake on things people seem upset or feign ‘being mad’ or are actually a little mad/disappointed. filed/neutrally processed zachery w as ‘favorable: does not express disappointment at flaking, seems understanding of ‘personal hell’ things’ yesterday, which i think made me more likely to follow through with hanging out today.
5:49PM: zachery w texted ‘will you bring me a donut.’
7:28pm: ate/halved mushrooms, saw mayonnaise thing out the window, said ‘I’m going to take notes in iPhone’ on walk to tree, asked zachery when the halving of mushrooms happened he said ‘7:30, no 7:28’
7:39pm: walking to riis tree, using cr instead, mushroms
7:59: mushrooms bigtime, watching z on tree, seems extreme meh misguided
8:12: how is he not feeling them at all
I feel like notw
11:20pm: looked at phone for first time
here is what i remember:
decided to chop zachery’s mushroom chocolate thing in crumbles to divide it more equally, then walk around outside to find a tree to fall out of
trees seemed hard to find, we saw my car, i said ‘let’s go to jacob riis park’ and drove us there
i started to feel effected by mushrooms while driving, like, being confused about where to park and, like, saying free-associating things and mostly ‘i feel mushrooms’
i parked on a residential street near a marshy-like area with trees that seemed insane to me…there was a sign that said ‘we know how to do it’ or something that we passed, walking to the trees
i said ‘i feel more concentrated on finding trees for you to fall out of than you’ and kept telling zachery to try to fall out of non-tree things like grass, bushes, sticks, etc. and thought it would be really funny. i said ‘it feels like the trees you could jump out of are almost in vision but they keep running away.’
there were airplanes flying near JFK and i remember saying…something…about the planes, like i didn’t understand how they were flying like that. zachery said a kind of long sentence about how he thought i was going to say something else about the airplanes, like the depth of the airplanes in the sky. i felt ‘dread’ like ‘oh no, i’m going to have to explain things.’ think we were both saying ‘i feel mushrooms.’
filmed zachery falling out of maybe two trees. with each fall he said he felt mushrooms effects less, the fall was throwing mushrooms out of his head.
i tried falling out of a tree to see if this would lessen the effects of mushrooms. it did. uploaded video of this to vimeo account.
zachery said he didn’t feel things anymore and i was starting to feel like things were harder to put into language, like it was suddenly coming on very strong to me. we stood by a marshy area by the planes. i said ‘look it’s the sign again, it feels different this time,’ pointing at the ‘we know how to do it’ sign.’ a flock of birds passed really low and i thought something dumb like ‘birds. huh-huh.’ zachery said ‘i wish they’d do it again.’ we were saying things about how the birds were police, i think. i asked if zachery could drive us to my apartment.
when we got to the car i said ‘i just felt an extreme bleakness that we wouldn’t be able to talk about anything but [something i now forget, it was a normal/‘non-mushrooms’ thing, about locating the car].’
in the car zachery said ‘how are you going to write all of this down?’ i typed the 8:12 update on my phone and felt suddenly struck by ‘when i type i am addressing a different kind of audience, there are other people out there who read things, it’s a different ‘me’ who types than the ‘me’ sort of talking in the car right now’ and like, afraid of that ‘me,’ the ‘typing me,’ like it was my enemy or something, or just something i had no idea how to interact with and didn’t expect. then i felt afraid of the ‘me talking’ me, and the apartment we were going to, and that i had no idea what we were going to do for the next however many hours, and that this person wasn’t feeling the same things i was.
zachery asked me to try to explain why it felt weird to type. i think i was saying things like ‘i can’t explain it’ or ‘it’s just…i can’t…there’s no way to say it right now’ and ‘i think i need to lie down.’ zachery said things like ‘i’m disappointed i’m not feeling it as much as you’ and i didn’t know how to respond. he asked why i wanted to lie down. i felt unable to talk, and like there was maybe something socially inappropriate about my desire to lie down. as we walked to my apartment i said ‘how the hell did i end up here, i was just at my mom’s house, that was earlier, now i
’m here’ and felt nonspecific terror about what i was walking into. zachery kind of chuckled i think, and repeated what i said in a way i interpreted as ‘friendly,’ but i felt very ‘alien.’ zachery said things about how he liked it when we were walking towards the trees and how he wished he had eaten more mushrooms. i said ‘you should eat more mushrooms.’
in memory there is a maybe inaccurately exaggerated extended period of zachery asking what i was feeling and me trying to articulate ‘i forgot how to type, writing feels scary,’ combined with all of the other background factors adding to the strangeness i felt about my current predicament (like ‘what is my life, is this my apartment, what is an apartment for, what is the goal of writing, how can i make sense of any of this, is anything i think related to anything i do, how can i increase the relevance, where am i in general, where was i before this moment, was anything before this, do i have a choice about any of this’), and like there was nothing i could say but that, but zachery seemed to want me to say more. i felt afraid i would be stuck in this feeling of not being able to communicate myself around someone who wanted to know what was going on with me, and that this would continue for hours, maybe indefinitely.
when we entered my apartment all my lights were off. the sun was almost gone. my room looked how it normally looks, but i was seeing this neon 3-D visual overlay of tiny, colorless, perfectly-sized, uniformly-oriented ‘grid dots’ (a little smaller than the dots on an intercom speaker, both stationary and synchronized with my vision in a way that produced a not-unpleasant, silently/languagelessly ‘giggly’ effect of feeling ‘trapped’ in my visual field) behind everything. have experienced this once before on mushrooms, in 2011, for maybe only a few seconds or minutes. felt momentarily distracted from ‘pressure to explain how i was feeling’ by the extreme visuals. i think i said ‘i’m experiencing visual things, i don’t usually experience visual things.’ i tried to explain the visual thing and zachery said ‘i just see shadowy shapes’ or something (later i think i said, maybe insensitively, ‘you were just seeing normal stuff’).
felt better after turning on a light. i felt extremely disoriented and like my fixation on the pattern might be boring at best, or a marker of the start of my permanent future lifelong descent into insanity at worst. i said ‘i need to lie down,’ and laid on my bed, wearing my coat. felt afraid to take off my coat. sometimes opened my eyes to see zachery cutting up more mushrooms on the cutting board.
when my eyes were closed i saw an intricate, bright geometric DMT-like pattern of mostly neon pink, defined shapes that seemed to be ‘intelligently swirling.’ when i opened my eyes the pillows around me looked just as ‘unreal’ as the thing behind my eyes. i said ‘i think i want it to be over.’ think no one said anything for a while, then zachery said something about how he hesitated eating the mushrooms he had just cut. i felt suddenly aware of zachery again, aware of my foreign ability to comprehend the phenomenon of ‘zachery,’ and bizarrely aware of how there weren’t many places to sit in my apartment. felt like i had no…there was no ‘me’ to…this seems hard to describe. i just felt extremely dissociated from everything i was telling myself i should be experiencing in a normal social context. i said ‘i’m not being a good host’ or something. zachery said ‘do you think if you could just stop thinking ‘i’m not being a good host’ and enjoy what you’re feeling it would be okay.’ i reacted with irritation, then felt irritated at myself for being irritated. i said ‘yes of course, yeah, i’m enjoying it,’ because he couldn’t know the thing going on with me that was…it was an autopilot thing i didn’t even feel when i said it. this seemed to ‘equalize’ our levels, or something, to me, and i began to enjoy myself and enjoy zachery’s presence.
after that the experience was much funnier and lighthearted, but i’m tired of typing, for now. we tried to do a yoga dvd and invented an elaborate origin story about the universe, using an analogy of the dvd, objects surrounding where we stood in my apartment, and what we could see of the rooms behind windows of the building next door.
MAY 6, 2013
2:12am: looked at phone again, 2mg Xanax for sleep
7am: woke peed ate 1mg Xanax for sleep
1–2:00pm: woke and wanted to continue sleeping. zachery couldn’t find wallet, asked if I wanted to go to dunkin donuts, said I wanted to sleep and offered him red bull, ate ‘sugar donut’ from yesterday in bed, he fed me spoon thing of kratom (have tried once/am curious, he eats daily), he found wallet, walked to dunkin donuts, large coffee, talked about tryotophobia and funny things, made plans to film him falling out of more trees in central park tomorrow.
3:09pm: at post office, cop behind me in line excitedly described seeing a man in women’s clothes to an unclear audience. held door for him as we exited. i told him about a man in a clown outfit laying on the ground in union square. he said ‘that’s what life is today, there’s nothing else to do.’
3:47pm: walking to head shop that sells kratom, I think. Stopped to pet a cat almost identical to Brad the cat for some time. Fatter than brad and less sick-looking eyes.
3:55pm: queens smoke shop employee asked what kratom was and I said ‘an herbal…thing.’ he said ‘like medicine?’ I said ‘like, um. An herbal thing.’
4:03pm: driving to other head shop thing on long beach…seems…mistake, to be doing this maybe, but I’m already committed. 26mins away.
4:21pm: at bridge toll I went in the…it didn’t say ‘all passes,’ thought that would include ezpass but no. Backed out of lane, no honks, people seemed understanding. Said ‘I thought it included ezpass’ and toll booth lady seemed understanding. Gave her $2. She told me to have a good day.
4:33pm: Zachery texted that he got hit by a car but it didn’t hurt. I’m in long beach, searching for kratom. Feeling a crushing empty thing, re the choices presented to me, endless possibilities for what I could be doing right now and it’s this. Listening to young family. Skimmed Zachary’s (ex-boyfriend, not mushrooms friend Zachery) interview with Jamie. Saw no gchats from him.
4:59pm: kratom place doesn’t seem there, like, the building is not there. Talked with dad on phone. I am pulled over on some residential street next to a house where a boy is shooting baskets alone.
5:05pm: called macmedics. my computer will be ready tomorrow. tried to take a picture of boy playing basketball.
5:11pm: went to ‘jack’s pizza’ place, then deli. both no restrooms. felt ‘looked at.’ now peeing at ‘mar di tierra’ restaurant. feel like vincent gallo in ‘buffalo 66’ when he couldn’t pee.
5:14pm: fighting urge to treat myself with pizza slice from ‘jack’s [seemingly restroom-less] pizza.’ Will feel worse if I eat it. Going to…Jesus…everywhere where there’s internet seems so far away. Feel far away from everything in general, things I felt yesterday. Keep thinking ‘I want to go home, I’ve made a mistake’ but I don’t know what ‘home’ I want.
5:19pm: surprised ‘Hollywood nights’ by Bon Seger is on my phone. Skipped seven songs that all sounded too painful to hear, via memories of listening. Stopped at a train track. Long beach or wherever I am looks like town in Ohio where Tao and I got tattoos in 2010.
5:23pm: damn I like the words to ‘hollywood nights,’ haha. I like how…it sounds parodic of itself but…I believe it, the intention before the parody, or…it was made to sound like this er…nevermind.
6:11pm: dreading the image of me in a library on ritalin (zachery gave me) and adderall, trying to remember details of mushrooms hangout to retroactively update with whatever you’ve just read. Confident I’ll remember ‘the good parts.’ Can already feel myself getting into a ‘writing hold,’ like it wants to take over me right now and have me write all the details, but I want to chill out, lay down, eat pizza, watch TV. Chill out so I can feel better in the future. Recharge things. Okay. It’s okay.
6:48PM: parked outside dunkin donuts to milk their internet from my car. zachery texted. ordered ‘grandma pizza’ and a caesar salad from a place called ‘plum tomatoes’
to celebrate not thinking about this anymore.
6:58PM: zachery texted he is interested in helping me not flake on ‘filming falling out of trees not on mushrooms’ hangout tomorrow. motivated to not flake.
6:59–11:59PM: did not update.
MAY 7, 2013
9:54am: meeting zachery in greenpoint at 11am. Have been hitting snooze. Think I ate 4-6mg Xanax, pint of hagen daz ‘white raspberry truffle,’ five valerian root capsules last night.
Drank 8.4oz sf red bull and a spinach/frozen banana/orange smoothie. Took b-vitamin, zeolite, ‘brain/memory’ tonic, zeolite, magnesium. Fed Alvie and Shirley. Now Alvie is snuggling in my ‘space left by fetal position,’ Shirley is snuggling at shins.
10:58am: on traffic on bridge. Still tired. Confusion with owner/landlord, meeting him tonight. Whatever I wish sam pink was next to me that’s all no homo I still whatever whatever yeah think about that homo a lot as if it’s not obvious oh well. Yet another passing desire!
11:33pm: depressed. Xanax carb sleep aid beer overload. Ate 20mg Ritalin. Traffic terrible.
11:38am: want to write ‘everything I remember about the KGB reading’
12:00pm: parked on kent st and manhattan.
12:02pm: feel like I’m walking alone in Spain, the day I wore the blue shorts and white top and Tao was promoting ‘Taipei’ and I think was upset with me. It was after we had decided we’d eat whatever we wanted for the rest of the trip. Resigned. I was on Xanax in a park, doing pushups on concrete fixtures.
12:49pm: zachery gave me kratom coffee mixture and kratom in bag. We gonna take the train to central park. He is filling water bottle. He works in a young person Brooklyn motivated people studio space thing. One step towards Lena Dunham land.
2:17pm: have been filming zachery falling out of low-to-the-ground trees.
2:30pm: zachery fixed my phone, it can take pictures again. Sitting on rock.
2:31–5:20pm: walked around central park, recorded videos, talked re relationships, went to whole foods, vague/confusing/funny conversation about identity, took crowded e then g trains to zachery’s office, peed, stood in office door. Alluded to omelette joke from mushrooms night, that I have been secretly resenting him for wanting to order an omelette, me covering up my omelette rage is responsible for every minor miscommunication we’ve had. Joke seemed to take on a new quality of ‘I’m not sure what the thing metaphorically in place of the omelette is, is lack of metaphor the new ‘omelette,’ that there is no thing?’ Asked if I could buy Ritalin, seemed hard to work out details. Zachery asked to kiss me. Felt my face immediately react. Said something like ‘oh, oh no, I don’t think so, I’m not, like, anything right now.’ maybe apologized. I think I apologized. I said ‘I like you’ and felt aware of this having maybe the opposite effect, as it’s understood that we like each other/have had fun together, saying ‘I like you’ in this context seemed to point out a new imbalance or something. Zachery reminded me of Niles Krane, Niles Krane reaction kind of. When it was quiet I said ‘I’ll have Verizon on Friday, then I’ll be around more, to hang out more, I’ll be more available’ not knowing if any of that would be true…why…uncontrollably. Walked out of building feeling a small sinking.