Tragicomedy in Three Acts

This past weeked was the hurrah we have before really plunging into work and fatigue, a hangover from the last weeks of summer, a time to celebrate and avoid any and all responsiblity. For your humble narrator, this took the form of three days of madness and yearning in Kingston, Ontario.

I. The Determinant

Travelling some three hundred kilometers across the conveniently highwayed Canadian landscape is rarely worthy of mention. Every offramp is labelled; every shoulder is according to the transportation code; every lane is maked and the distance markings are sterile and efficient. Seeing as we were being characteristically countercultural, we stopped off and wanted to find a cornfield to explore. We ran afoul of a farmer who allowed us, after we had been kicked off, to explore the divide between urban and rural through the form of bitching about being kicked off. But this is not some sort of cloud-watching pastoral romp: we were on our way to friends' houses in the student ghetto with the determination to be intoxicated. It began almost immediately: my penchant for wine making itself apparent in attics and on the sidewalks and in some other person's shed, falling off of couches and shouting, making elaborate plans. Fairly early on, I had crossed the threshold of being able to encode anything that happened so everything I know of this evening I know second-hand. Apparently I ranted and raved at a neon-esque sign. I smashed my nose into a concrete post and collapsed on a lawn; I have a grass stain to prove that. I also gave up on making words. Apparently I had sex on my mind. No surprise there. That happens. But apparently it also happens that when you shake hands with the Abyss and your consciousness only comes in intermittenly and your optic nerve fails and your face muslces go slack you only remember it as noise. (If you remember it as anything, that is.)

II. The Life Rounded With Sleep At Both Ends

Discontinuity. I wake up in a strange bed and fret for an hour. Where am I? Where are my things? Where is my memory? My self-respect? My peace of mind? My people? My head pounds for the rest of the day and my tissues soak up water like a sponge. A brief discussion of Gatorade and its advantage in terms of osmalarity follows once I find my people, or they find me. I am not awake for an hour and we're hitting the sauce pretty hard again, standing on the gravel and the linoleum floors and the hardwoods of a bunch of houses and stores that in my mind have no spatial relation to each other. There was widom from the keg dispenser. I have been dumped into a world where everything has four walls and the occassional window, though that is not needed. I walk when everyone else walks and I give up any pretense of control of events. We eat and converse and play video games in a spacious loft-place. I nap and try to regain my internal monologue; I am awoken by a man screaming death threats at another man. Food shopping follows; more houses pass in and out; doors open and close; people are greeted and rings are kissed; anecdotes exchanged, and then the climax of the evening happens. I'm glad I shared it with a friend who was of much the same mind as me. The scene that followed that night can only be given in hurried, impressionistic sketches:

Floods of drunken human tissues compress the street. The cops can't stop it; there is a torrent of flesh; glass breaks everywhere every two seconds; men dance on women and vice versa and in other combinations as well. Vomit and shit and piss waft in huge invisible plumes across the blocks and backyards. Some hooligans overturn a car and jump it into pulp and constituent parts like mufflers and cam shafts. Fireworks fire sideways into the trees. The upper storeys of houses disgorge volleys of glass bottles. The crowd presses and flows: it is at equilibrium, the conscious deliberations of thousands come to little more than brownian motion. We find a dazed fellow lying in an alley. We bring him to a couch; he refuses to put his pants back on. And we carry on. We see old men rushing the barricades and their leather jackets stolen; we see the sidewalks are jagged with glass edges. The buzz of the crowd is consistent and ridiculous throughout. The birches waft in the vibrations of the screaming. Bodies press and people trip falling into bloody somethings. Men take their bows and feed the birches with their vomit. Windcatchers chime and aluminium siding is ripped off. TVs are smashed with cinderblocks. The paddy wagons sway under the weight of piles of drunks. I want to leave, but there is no place I'd rather be. Talking under Chinese lanterns in some anonymous basement staircase on what was hours ago an impossibly industrtial pile of booze. The sky is red under light pollution and the clouds are wisps under noise pollution.

I sleep on a floor that night. It is fitful, but remembered. My belt jangles the entire night and won't let my friends sleep.

III. The Long Arm Of The Goodbye

I woke up, had breakfast. We played video games and sat around. I won a few times. It was anticlimax; it was the beginning of a recovery. Sat on a bus and counted the cars passing the other way. I got to 1100 before I decided to do something else. I tried to play an album in my head all the way through. I coudn't remember what came after track 2. I will feel like an egg carton for a few days.

On a Shirt: "The world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."