TIMESICK

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                               TIMESICK                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                               
                               another work in progress                                                                                                                        
                               by graham52sinclair                                                                                                                                  
                               begun 15th October 2011 ` Hold on a minute.....I'm not ready yet. This is fun isn't it? We're communicating and I haven't even started yet. I feel as though I know you already. You're very friendly. Oh, shit, I feel as if I have to watch what I say now.                                                                                             I start to wake up. I'm walking along K'Rd and I can feel the mattress pushing into my back. I try to turn around but something stops me. I'm lying down and I can't open my eyes. I go straight from being asleep to wide awake without the half-awake/half asleep bit inbetween. I know I dreamt about swimming through trees with hippos and penguins but I can't remember how it fits with K'Rd in Auckland. I listen down into myself to see what my body is saying today.                                  
                                                                                                                                                                           I feel as though I haven't slept. I've had a hectic night of swimming through the air and water, jungle and rainforest. Another hippo floats through my mind, little nubby tail like a propellor on a motorboat spreading half-digested khaki coloured grass fibre as it goes. The room is filled with a yellow light and the sounds of the afternoon filter in through my preoccupations.                                                
                                                                                                                                                                    I think I'll take it easy today. I'm looking for my inner boredom. I'm at my most creative when I'm tolerably bored. It's an indicator of my level of confidence and security. Anxiety is mostly anathema to boredom. In many people anxiety and depression can be  hard to even notice. Everybody feels differently about comfort. Some appear to be naturally at ease. Others only seem to be at ease when they are un-comfortable.  My anxiety seems custom designed especially for me personally. Not being able to find comfort in anything - even powerfully comforting narcotics - is what you might call the long pain. It builds and builds without letting up. Even the slightest change in temperature can leave you sweating and freezing. Too hot and too cold all at once. It's like suddenly cold turkey but nothing will touch it. Dreaming the junky's dream night after night when you have all the smack you can use. "Do you want to hear my list of famous junkies? People are seldom aware of the truth in these matters. JFK was a champion. There went one heroic junky. Was there a major narcotic group that he didn't sample from on a daily basis? Methadone, demerol, ritalin, various barbiturates and steroids and when he could manage to get in touch with the famous Doctor Feelgood - benzedrine......"                                                                                                                                                                                                                     I must admit to a certain curiosity over the effect of combining stimulants with hypnotics or sedatives. I wonder whether the combination would produce a kind of stimulation without anxiety or if one or the other would pravail to produce a partially cancelled out response. Either a weak stimulant or a weak sedative effect depending   on which was the more active. In my pleasure seeking mind I imagine them both working at once. Like a cheap speedball. How about codeine valium and ritalin? Oh God the thought of it makes me feel queasy. It's kind of what JFK was doing though. Except that all of his ingredients were top drawer for their day. I've had proper speedballs but they can be a bit dangerous. The coke wears off and suddenly you're going blue. Fuck I hate coke.                                                                                                                               Society seems to have the attitude that if you have a job to do then by all means take whatever you need to enable you to get it done. Like in sports matches and long-haul trucking. "Drugs are bad" and you should "Just say no" but the stands are full of paying customers and goods don't deliver themselves so if a little taste of something is going to get the job done then by all means go ahead and get on with it. And they talk about mixed messages!                                                                                
                                                                                                                                                                  Actually, I seem to remember experimenting along similar lines with tenuate dospan and valium (retch). It was in the early 80's. I ended up vomiting on Bruce MacIntosh's lawn at 555 New North Rd.  I think from memory it was too many levels to get right at the same time. Methadone, valium, cannabis and tenuate dospan.                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                  In fact I have long since kept my resolve to not use stimulant narcotics. I think drugs like cocaine and the benzedrine derivatives like dexamphetamine fit much better into the model Burroughs talks about in "The Naked Lunch". There is a strong law of diminishing return at work. Some people may remember the old song and poster that proclaimed "Speed Kills".                                                            
                                                                                                                                                                Tubular hips and a mouth from ear to ear. If she lay down on a hillside and opened up she'd slide right out, extra naked, all pinky white and lying on the wet grass with her hair stuck to her face. Whenever he imagines his feet dangling metres above the ground he gets the shivers. He always thought sneakers hanging from the phone lines were either an esoteric joke or something to do with UFO abduction. Perhaps it was a joke about UFO abduction. Which would just show how sick some people can be.                                                                                                                                            
Everything has that 80's Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet look to it. The black is really black and the colours are all really saturated. Where are my black 501's. God, they feel so tight after twenty years of dressing "dude" style. If you can call that a style.  I wonder if people realise how loudly they're thinking? Can't they shut up? Lookout! It's the Enterprise... Captain slog... Start... Rec... arrow, two arrows, dot, square. This is heavy going...mmmm...interesting. Why isn't anything happening? It's been twenty minutes at least!                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                                 My old Aunty May used to live in Clovelly. She had a whole room I was sometimes allowed to explore that was packed full of seashells, fossils, rocks and minerals. Aunty May  used to tell me stories about Uncle Wilf and the old days. How he would go out in a little dinghy and bring home a lovely big trevally. How the fish in the shops was all shark but that was okay so long as it was fresh but it never was. I couldn't understand her hatred of even toy guns until she told me about her brothers showing off and fighting over an air rifle when they were kids.  One of them permanently lost the sight of an eye in the accident that followed.   Aunty may used to know who was walking past outside her house from the sound of their feet on the footpath. She wasn't blind or anything. She'd just been living in the same house for most of her long life. In a Sydney where people and architecture could stay the same for as long as they wanted to, was change any less likely? Was it less desirable? Apparently not.  
                                                                                                                                                                    I hate Chief O'Brien!!! Colm Meany. Is that his real name or did he make it up to annoy me? It's as though his character was specifically designed to get up my nose. Compared to chief O'brien I don't even mind Riker's gay walk or that look that Data gets that's supposed to say "I'm superior" in a similar vein to Hal in 2001. He's going for a kind of machine cool but instead it looks more like he can smell something unpleasantly human in the air. Why do they walk all the way down to the transporter room when they could so easily be beamed to their destination straight from where they are?  

                                                                                                                                                    Aaaaaah....finally. God's own medicine kicks in and I feel as if I've done a hard day's work, had a shower and a good meal and I'm in my pyjamas ready for TV and bed. It's disgusting that people get to feel this good on excercise or hard work. Fucking endorphine junkies make me want to puke." He remembers so many faces and not as many names. The seventies were strange. Most of the time he spent trying to work out what was happening to him. There were so many strong elements at work at the same time. Allergic reactions partially obscured by opiates of various types and strengths, anxiety, lust, love, depression and a kind of lysergic optimism. He remembers a string of Christmas days in a string of houses. Beautiful houses full of beautiful food. Mothers and young daughters with absent fathers. In the days of late summer his allergic reactions abated as the pollen subsided and his mood improved with the change. Clouds of various exotic cannabis floated past in those days before home grown and hydraponics. It was Guy Fawkes 1972 and he had nearly everything ready for the coming night's party. The trip to Wah Lee's yielded a big cardboard carton half-full of coloured paper and gunpowder. There was plenty of acid but nothing to smoke. People were phoned and people were visited but nothing had come to hand. It was getting dark. Smudged looking kids were throwing double-happys at passing cars. Anxiety moved around in his stomach. The acid was called "ice nine" and came in the form of little soft gelatine squares strung with a sewing needle onto a length of nylon fishing line. It was after six and there was still no sign of any pot. He felt as though he were climbing out on to a bit of a bio-chemical limb but he sometimes did this if there was a concert or a party or something. Unless he had opium. Opium was like certainty you could measure out into doses. It was so discrete. He preferred to take it orally. It relieved his allergies dried out his sinuses and gave him the feeling of well-being he so sorely lacked without it. Who was it that saved the party for them that night? Was it Alan Murray? It might have been. Was it Michael Stephenson? Whoever it was, at about the time they'd all given up on ever seeing another joint again, parties were summoned quietly to Sarah's room and before the very eyes of the small circle there gathered, a joint was revealed. It was of the usual length but very, very thin. The moment was tense. Lips were licked and then put away. There were seven people in the room. A match. The room fell silent. They had all eaten trips that were starting to tickle but after just one lungful it was as though, if they'd eaten a handful of acid, it would only have been barely noticeable next to that pot stone. The party seemed to erupt from that moment. Suddenly it got dark and they were letting off handfuls of fireworks at a time. Picking up "the pretty ones" and waving them quickly from side to side so that they looked like peacock tails of fire. Their eyes filled up with coloured light. Swirling scribbles burnt into their retinas like the filament in a light bulb. Deep magenta and emerald green or pale pink and blue. Inside on the walls of Sarah's room were the faces that had looked back at them as they lay and talked that summer. Drawings in brush and ink by Dean Buchanan. Faces that launched whole clouds of thought in his still impressionable mind. The sun shone through the big poplars and plane trees that surrounded the house outside. The summer breeze made soft soughing frou frou against their leaves as it passed. They were still in bed. It was late morning or early afternoon. It was warm and Sarah looked like one of Modigliani's reclining nudes. Her breasts looked perfect when she slept on her back like that. "Picasso was a pot smoker and an arsehole. Ask John Cale. All someone has to do in court to discredit a witness is to suggest they have a history of drug addiction and yet it must be that at least half of the world's rich, famous and powerful have used illicit drugs. From JFK to Coco Chanel. From Errol Flynn to Bob Mitchum. Some of the biggest surprises can come from knowing who does and who doesn't. For instance, during the early Velvet Underground days Lou and John were experimenting with royal jelly and ginseng." Wouldn't he ever shut up!? They were often getting stuck in bed like this. As soon as the others knew they were awake someone would come in and sit on the bed and they'd talk. It would go on for hours if they weren't politely asked to leave the room while Sarah got dressed. At least they weren't as bad as Cass. He'd follow you to the toilet once he got talking to you. Girls had to tell him to rack off. He used to time himself when he took a shot with a big old Westclox alarm clock clattering away next to him. One day they found him sitting, immobilised in Vulcan Lane. "Guys, guys, can you shield me from the sun?" His body would lock up if he got too hot. One night they got home to find him trying to crawl away from the electric heater in the lounge. "Guys, guys can you switch it off, please?" If Cass was putting it on it would only make him more impressively fucked up because who would bother to spend every waking moment doing things to make himself look mad. Whenever he went anywhere he would have to walk one lampost, run one lampost. To keep fit. There was actually a kind of mad speedfreak logic behind the strange things Cass did. The clock was to keep him from talking too long after a shot without putting away his stash. This exposed him to unnecessary risk. He suffered from a form of paranoia common to afficianados of speed. Not out in the bushes screaming "I know you fucking pigs are in there somewhere and I'm going to fucking kill you"paranoid. More planned out than that. He thinks he's being cautious and discreet but it doesn't take long to see he's lost it. He was a blur of tics and twitches endlessly cleaning his glasses. Very tall with a slight limp, a tightly curled, greasy black mullet and thick-rimmed black spectacles. Nobody I know of looked more like a real live Don Martin cartoon except perhaps Sam Hunt. Actually there was something of John Clease about the way he moved. Sarah looked a bit like Betty-Boop. Big eyes and bow lips under a strong forehead. Numdah rugs and she wore ballet shoes on her Suzuki 50. She had her mother's laugh. It tinkled like a little bell he never grew tired of. She was a respected potter but pottery always made him think of field drains and road cuttings. When he and clay collided in her mother's studio one day it was a slowly unfolding disaster but when Sarah made a pot she did so with a delicacy and a strength that were plainly visible in her work. A fragility that defied and contradicted the medium. Her work was all around that house. So were the brush sketches Dean Buchanan made with the sculptural form of a Modigliani and the whimsical mood of Jean Cocteau. There were no frames. No plinths or pedestals. Just art in the raw. They lived in and out of old black and white movies except that they watched them on TV so they were more blue and white. The '30's and '40's would seap into their minds and they'd be transported back to those times before Anslinger and his new prohibition. Drugs still seemed so exotic to them in the global backwater that was 1971 New Zealand. Had they only known what they were doing they were probably surrounded by worthwhile substances. If only they'd been better educated. It always seemed a bit too sleazy even for them. Everybody has a line they won't cross. It was too "Nutmeg George". Like hitting up over-the-counter codeine or injecting alcohol. If it didn't come with a "reliable" street name they weren't interested. A "name" meant an approximately reliable word of mouth guarantee that you wouldn't be ripped off or poisoned. "What is it, mate?" "It's fucking dope mate. Are you stupid or what?" "Well yeeeeeeaah! Obviously, but what is it called?" "It's Turkish Gold", "Ahhh! Excellent, Turkish Gold. Just so long as it's not that Chocolate Fish hash. It tastes really nice but it does fuck all!" This stuff could keep hundreds of anthropologists in grants. The party had been a success in the end. Everyone was still asleep. It hadn't rained in the night so he took a cardboard carton and quietly slipped out into the back yard. There was still a lot of undetonated ordnance lying about. Chinese gunpowder and the smell of sulphur and wet cardboard. Blue Morning Glory really did cover the old outhouse. He finished picking up the remnant fireworks and took the carton inside. He boiled some water to clean his fit then took a cup and spoon out to the toilet and locked himself in. He carefully removed a small salmon coloured rock from his stash and dropped it into the spoon, added a little of the boiled water and filtered it with a small piece of tampon. He ritually tapped out any bubbles of air and slipped the needle into his eager vein. It was still quiet. The day had not yet begun. The dull familiar ache of worn out pleasure. The sweet mercy of relief mixed up with the solid certainty that such relief will always be fleeting and retreating.