12:45 pm | 29 November 2004 | crack crack, crackity jones

I don't know why after all this time it persists, but I have a reading tonight (to which, LA people: come) and I'm already cracklingly amped over the prospect, one knee jogging uncontrollably, like I lost my left calf to gangrene and had Flo-Jo grafted in its place. It could be the thirty ounces of gas-station crappucino that's currently aspartaming my throat with vanilliac nausea; it could be the Rite-Aid cracktussin that's spasming my cold-ish symptoms into an acid-tripping oblivion; it could even be the shock-therapy heating/cooling in this building, which does just that: heats cools heats cools, all day long. But whatever it is, I can hardly type. My paws are chattering and my teeth are clenching. Once in college (#2), at 18, on a mission to get fucked up, I drank a bottle of Robitussin and waited for the Dextromethorphan to set in, something colloquially called Robo-Tripping (how hilarious, BTW, that the link is from MSU, wherein this anecdote takes place), and but anyhow I spiraled into a hell-world where I was stuck tripping for two days straight, unable to drive or unclench my jaw, but making it to my prep-cook job nonetheless, my eyes spiralled out to Little-Orphan-Annie O's devoid of anything, incapable of real vision; planes of the world came forward and moved back, like a View-Master or 3-D movie. In other words, arguably one of the worst choices of my adult life, this. And now I think that any cold medicine I take for legit reasons, and at half-dosage, gives me a robo-flashback and I feel like a total fucking tool, eyeballs zeroed out. I'm over that decision, clearly. I'll not robo-trip again. But before this reading, folks, I will most-so-very-definitely be needing a drink. clm.