02.19.03 - 1:24 p.m.

I have the flu. My head is floating. There's a guy in this cafe next to me acting like he's on speed. He's talking a mile a minute and keeps trying to bum a quarter for tetris. NO QUARTER FOR YOU, HIPPIE! He has dreadlocks and he's sagging. Prison fashion is yesterday's news, grow up kid. (it comes from how you can't wear a belt in lockdown)

I have the flu. Imagine you could deconstruct the 3d construction of your visual world back into the 2d array of pixels it comes from. Take that 2d image and separate it into 50 photoshop layers corresponding to depth. Now pick a random layer and examine its stark beauty. The one I picked is a cafe shelf holding white pots. You can put anything in a frame on a white wall and it looks like art. Even a turd. I'm sure someone has done that; I don't know it through experience but I know it through deduction.

I have the flu, do you?

The sickest I've ever been is when I ate some bad noodle soup in India. I must have been 12 or 13. I was full-on hallucinating. I thought a marching band was moving through the bedroom.

It's simplistic to dismiss drugs as escapism. Vacations are escapism, movies are escapism. Escape != retreat != growing up != moving on.

Anti-malaria pills give you intense, vivid dreams.

Sleep deprivation is of course another way to see things. Little pink elephants.

I've almost never had full on visuals that I couldn't distinguish from reality. Usually it's more a case of my imagination becoming extra-fertile.

The first time I ever did acid I wandered around Rice looking at buildings. I saw faces in the brickwork. Later I walked away from campus, through a field, and a pile of garbage became an army of owls, wings flapping in the wind.

In the desert heat shimmers. In Baja we saw water where there was none.

Az. tells me scuba diving is another way. I'm mildly claustrophobic but I believe in the innate virtue of overcoming fear. Every victory makes you stronger. Someday I'm gonna swim with the fishies.