End to 2016
I woke up in a room full of strangers with dancing jaws and throbbing genitals and frantic, empty eyes. I was alone. My mind was a goddamned inferno, my perception fluid, the assumptions I made and the truths I learned in my 23 and a half years of life were suddenly fallible. And the lights, the fucking lights.
There was a little ring through my left ear and a tattoo of a Keith Haring on my chest and a silk shirt decorated with clocks and old-timey record players and violins dangling from my torso and my hair was long on top and buzzed on the sides and my brain was being mercilessly bludgeoned by that little piece of cardboard I ingested a few hours before and everyone I knew was a complete stranger.
It was a real awakening.
South Berkeley, CA - the final minutes of 2016
Complete clarity—the kind that only the deep recesses of an acid trip can provide—was forced upon me. Objectivity grabs you by the tits and hurls you to the ceiling. Everything you are and all the things you're doing and all the people and ideas around you are revealed to be nothing more than pieces of the whole that is this specific time and place.
It was a mid-century apartment on the corner of MLK and Carleton a block away from the huge building on the outskirts of downtown that used to be an ice-skating rink and we were crammed upstairs overlooking the strobing lights from the steady stream of DUI busts—a bunch of synthetically addled Berkeley hipsters rubbing one another as a Huey Lewis vinyl ironically blared through the smoke.
We would gather here often to inhale hand-rolled cigarettes and spliffs and fine spirits and wines with painkillers and anti-anxiety medication and talk of structures of oppression and inequality of opportunity and to pretend we were part of the solution and actually care outside of these conversations' assurances of importance and morality. The whole culture was like this, everyone I knew and everyone I judged did and said the same things, all blindly strolling into the oblivion of lost purpose and compromised aspirations.
2016 was leaving, my friends already left. Molly, Mary, Lucy and a few of their other friends and relatives were the only one's here and their hosts were coming apart in front of me. My ass was falling off, I was sure of it.
People were crammed onto the sparse furniture and it looked like it had snowed but only above the mirror face up on the coffee table and the walls were littered with tapestries and framed butterflies and quotes or sayings or proverbs about petty truth and shallow happiness. Beneath those shackles the walls were weeping and there were Christmas lights pinned to the ceiling doing their own wild thing.
They were talking, they must have been—the lights. No, it was the body-snatchers. The drugs in my friends were talking. The stuff inside of me was mostly silent. The people would check on me periodically because I'm sure I must have looked like a child that had been placed in front of a TV showing something it really didn't enjoy or at least couldn’t comprehend and didn't want to. But I did not need their sympathy or affection. There were fourteen minutes left in this year and in my universe it was universally accepted to be the shittiest year of the universe. I was not going to see it out surrounded by rabid hounds. I needed to be alone and I needed that zombie rodent in my ears.
The woman with the high-cheekbones and a great ass had only faced three grams of weed which meant she was the de-facto babysitter which meant she was the one to provide me the premium noise-cancelling headphones that would be my magic carpet into 2017.
Strobe by Deadmau5
I woke up cold and naked—metaphysically; the floppy shirt was still adhered to my cold, sweaty body—and afraid that my friends weren’t my friends anymore on account of the excessive staring and lacking sociability. They were, they are, and 2017 happened, it was happening. I have not felt that alone since and it is lonely.