2:34 pm | 11 September 2003 | wherein i am, like, totally sick, brah. also megalomaniacal.

PART WHERE I EXPLAIN MY INCOHERENCY BY DESCRIBING MY ILLNESS, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE, NO

Snork. I am sick, totally sick, and I am not using "sick" in the lametarded SoCal "Dude, brah, that kickflip was totally sick, man, but check out this wicked ollie" way; no: I am a veritable Plague-Doh Phlegm Factory. Gross? Yes. Imagine how much grosser it is when removed from the distant sanctity of the page, and is presented to you in the form of my snorkel-breathing, Kleenex-emitting, whooping-coughing self. I am GROSS. I was reading "The Theater and Its Double," one of the more coherent works of Artaud (who went totally apeshit batty later one, devoting the remainder of his life to gnostic ramblings about semen, etc), and there's this whole elaborate and slightly-unfitting analogy in the beginning where he likens theatre to the plague, & but anyway I'm not here to paraphrase that for you, but rather to say that his thoroughly interesting and somewhat livid descriptions* of plague victims are approximating my current state, except they (the victims) probably did not have bosses shoving Allegra into their blackened, dying faces to wring just one more day's worth of work from them, and so they (victims) were nowhere near as loooopy as I am right now. LOOPY! LOOOOOOOOPY

PART I STOLE FROM COMMENT I LEFT ELSWHERE

For some insane reason i forgot, in my miasma of remembered-misery and post-traumatic-stress disorder, that i felt like a MENTAL GIANT in LA (or maybe like a Mental Leviathan, or Braindingnagian, or Titan of Intellect*, or something similarly giant-er, because i'm already a mental giant). No, seriously: if i could have, for five minutes, stopped freaking out about the non-standard-ness of my exterior, i would've ruled school there 100% of the time. Beauty fades, mofos, but if my brain can stand the test of (lifetime accumulation) roughly 2500 gallons of alcohol, I think it's around for the long haul. Not that there aren't a few other lost smartypantses wandering the hinterlands of Silverlake and the like; but they sure as hell don't advertise it. SO, since I am returning, and feel the need to totally whomp California's ass, I need to find situation-generic codephrases that will both lure them out of hiding, and confound annoying poseur-types into leaving me out of their inane psychodramas. Such as:

"So, what do you do for a living?"
"Oh, i de-Bowdlerize."

*THE PART WHERE I REPRINT SOME OF THE PLAGUE STUFF, WHICH IS TOTALLY FASCINATING AND ALSO DISGUSTING, BECAUSE YOU KNOW YOU WERE TOTALLY CURIOUS, SICKOS

"Before the onset of any very marked physical or psychological discomfort, the body is covered with red spots, which the victim suddenly notices only when they turn blackish. The victim scarcely hesitates to become alarmed before his head begins to boil and to grow overpoweringly heavy, and he collapses. Then he is seized by a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of a centralized magnetic suction, of his molecules divided and drawn toward their annihilation. His crazed body fluids, unsettled and commingled, seem to be flooding through his flesh. His gorge rises, the inside of his stomach seems as if it were trying to gush out between his teeth. His pulse, which at times slows down to a shadow of itself, a mere virtuality of a pulse, at others races after the boiling of the fever within, consonant with the streaming aberration of his mind, beating in hurried strokes like his heart, which grows intense, heavy, loud; his eyes, first inflamed, then glazed; his swollen gasping tongue, first white, then red, then black, as if charred and split -- everything proclaims an unprecedented organic upheaval. Soon the body fluids, furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava kneaded by the subterranean forces, search for an outlet. The fieriest point is formed at the center of each spot; around these points the skin rises in blisters like air bubbles under the surface of lava, and these blisters are surrounded by circles, of which the outermost, like Saturn's ring around the incandescent planet, indicates the extreme limit of a bubo.
�����"The body is furrowed with them. But just as volcanoes have their elected spots upon the earth, so bubos make their preferred appearances on the surface of the human body. Around the anus, in the armpits, in the precious places where the active glands faithfully perform their functions, the bubos appear, wherever the organism discharges either its internal rottenness or, according to the case, its life. In most cases a violent burning sensation, localized in one spot, indicates that the organism's life has lost nothing of its force and that a remission of the disease or even its cure is possible. Like silent rage, the most terrible plague is the one that does not reveal its symptoms.
�����"The corpse of a plague victim shows no lesions when opened. The gall bladder, which must filter the heavy and inert wastes of the organism, is full, swollen to bursting with a black, viscous fluid so dense as to suggest a new form of matter altogether. The blood in the arteries and the veins is also black and viscous. The flesh is hard as stone. On the inner surfaces of the stomach membrane, innumerable spurts of blood seem to have appeared. Everything indicates a fundamental disorder in the secretions. But there is neither loss nor destruction of matter, as in leprosy or syphilis. The intestines themselves, which are the site of the bloodiest disorders of all, and in which substances attain an unheard-of degree of putrefaction and petrifaction, are not organically affected. The gall bladder, from which the hardened pus must be virtually torn, as in certain human sacrifices, with a sharp knife, a hard, vitreous instrument of obsidian -- the gall bladder is hypertrophied and cracking in places but intact, without any parts missing, without visible lesion, without loss of substance.
�����"In certain cases, however, the injured lungs and brain blacken and grow gangrenous. The softened and pitted lungs fall into chips of some unknown black substance -- the brain melts, shrinks, granulates to a sort of coal-black dust."