I did not sleep last night. It is 8am and I am running on coffee & ham & biscuits. My hands tremble, I am hallucinating, sort of—and the craziest part is I sat down & talkt to that girl just now, at breakfast. She was reading in the cafeteria, and so I askt her what she was reading. Made an ass of myself, I’m sure. Whatever. Responding politely enough tho keeping a cautious composure across the table, she said it was an alternate history book, a kind of fantasy/sci-fi subgenre. Like what if certain people in history had done things differently type of thing. In this novel, by someone named Turtledove (seriously), Abraham Lincoln lost his re-election & the Union was never restored; so presently in the story (set in the equivalent of the WW2 era) thanks to the butterfly effect, there’s a President Smith instead, and the Confederates have eleven states plus Cuba. Or something like that. Weirdly I can recall that much detail, but I can’t remember the title of the book—and only now do I realize I didn’t even get her name.
Yesterday was normal until I took a long nap in the afternoon. Woke up, then Sean & I went to dinner where we gooft around with Caleb, mixing all the condiments (mostly yellow mustard & black pepper) into muck on his tray. Then we went & watched Keith Nicholas play the cello at 7:30. This guy Gabe that I’d seen wearing a Frusciante shirt sat behind us & we got to talking. He offerd to burn me copies of Niandra Lades and Smile From the Streets—John’s first two out-of-print albums, recorded while he was still on drugs—that I’ve only heard snippets of before. (Like in this video here, for instance.) After the recital we went over to his dorm in the honors quad, which is a lot smaller than ours in Killebrew, but it has an enclosed hallway, and carpet. Met his roommate, Speedo Josh, who sports a faux-hawk & sleeps on the top bunk. Honest Gabe refused payment for his trouble, and when I mentiond Nick Drake he also threw in a copy of Five Leaves Left, so I got 3 free CDs and made a new friend. Sweet deal.
Sean & I decided to go to Kroger: he needed supplies for a bake sale (?) and I needed a nailfile & some Robitussin for this lingering post–sinus infection cough. Downd the 4 oz. bottle at around 10:30pm in one guzzle. Felt hot & slightly nauseous for the first hour, then it shifted to euphoria (esp. motion-induced). Music caused closed-eye visuals. I had a mild sense of bodily detachment as well; at one point I lay on the bed & my body felt unusually small, again by sensing various physical reference points such as my head, hands, feet & butt. They all seemed closer together than normal. Believe I only reached the first plateau tho, mainly because I didn’t take the stuff on an empty stomach. I also couldn’t get to sleep whatsoever. So I stayed awake & listend to these new CDs I have plus a lot more. The music sank deep into my psyche, soakt down to subliminal levels. I was able to develop some lyrics for “Forevery B”—Young people convene at night/ Underneath aquagreen street lights. They came super easily & the rhymes work out nicely. Don’t think I disturbed Sean’s sleep at all, either. It was strangely easy despite the insomnia to keep quiet & still on my bed, as the headphones seald all sound between my ears & inside my skull. I figure this is because of DXM’s dissociative effects.
John Frusciante has always stuck around in the soundtrack of my life, even before I started listening to his solo stuff. From early childhood memories of singing along to the chorus of “Under the Bridge” while watching the music video on MTV (in 1991 or 1992 when my sister would be home from college) to hearing the Californication singles on 102.9 The Buzz at night while falling asleep thru-out middle & high school—and even when I didn’t realize he was there, like in Crazy Town’s “Butterfly”—at this point his guitar sounds like an old friend to me. I bought By the Way when it came out, and thought some of the songs were kinda corny but overall it was pretty good. The next summer, 2003, between sophomore & junior year while dating my one & only girlfriend so far (the relationship lasted mere months) and spending a day making out in the hammocks of the magnolia “hippie tree” of Centennial Park, we walkt across West End to the Borders Books & Music at Vandy & rode the escalators up to the music section, where you could scan the barcode of any CD to preview the music before buying. I spotted Frusciante’s To Record Only Water for Ten Days, decided to give it a listen, expecting to hear some funky Peppers-esque guitar playing, and was mildly disappointed to find it was a bunch of eerie lo-fi acoustic songs—and he was singing, too, which totally threw me off. I concluded I didn’t like it & promptly forgot about it, until one day a few months later, at Grimey’s on Bransford, it was sitting at the top of a pile of $1 CDs next to the cash register, and on impulse I added it to the rest of my haul. It was a promotional copy lacking any art or packaging: just the names of the tracks, album, & artist printed on a plain white paper sleeve.
I’m not sure what specific change occurd in me to allow me to connect to those 15 eerie songs this time around—whether it was the break-up, or the endless studying for the three AP classes I was taking on top of the 20 hours I was working per week at the Malvern Piggly Wiggly, or that the absence of any visual artwork created an aural tabula rasa in my synesthetic mind—but connect I did.
G2G we are in the library to learn how to research (Music Lit) so now I have to log off & do actual classwork. Will try to write more later.