I just can't face myself alone again...
Chemistry is a subject whose nature, purpose and methods elude me - much as those of its fantastical cousin, alchemy - but its name alone is enough to alert me to a few of its properties. It involves chemicals, for example. Chemicals are volatile (or in some cases, non-volatile) substances that often require each other's presence to remain stable.
People are like chemicals.
Separated from those you have depended on, you experience a period of volatility which can only be cured by associating yourself with a new, equally compatible set of chemicals. These are hard to find. They are kept in a mountain laboratory owned (indirectly) by the government, held in the name of the four year old child of a reclusive billionaire, and doled out with cruel discrimination.
One day soon all of these laboratories will be owned by BENCORP., and I will be able to wallow in them to my hearts content, and invite them to dinner with me at the Brasserie Montmartre in downtown P-Tizzle. We will speak in hushed tones. But until that time, I have spent far too much of my life in anguished separations from the chemicals I need. (That sounded like a drug reference. It was not.) Never was that more clear than this past weekend.
I was back with in my accustomed petri dish. With the chemicals that suit me. Best Fourth of July weekend ever. (The Fourth itself probably didn't top some of those awesome explosion-fests at Shay's house or out in Deary, but the weekend as a whole was record-breakingly good.) I ate ridiculously good food, all day every day, spent way more money than I should have, drank heavily (not too heavily), smoked a fantastic Dominican cigar, spent many hours on the deck with one eye on the grill and one on the amber halo at the horizon, the slow emergence of stars and planets from the deep blue, the occasional towering, soundless detonation of a firework somewhere far away.
Even the hovering, pitiless presence of Greg, Lord of Argument, Destroyer of Picnics, couldn't foil my good time. Nothing could've. A chemical solution, when properly mixed, cannot be undone. It makes it hard to come back to Olympia, still, after all this time, a foreign laboratory manned by clumsy, undertrained technicians, or perhaps simply deprived of a shipment of chemicals due in long ago, except for those few that slipped in for a while (idavanita, scion, jameson, etc.) and then slipped away again. Through a storm drain perhaps, or carried off by vermin.
Tomorrow: janitorial work, fiction workshop, daydreaming about boats on water (the warm metal of the helm in my hand, or huddled over the charts, the Coast Pilot open on the table, or a wave slopping over the deck, these are the settings that give me peace during the day while I'm hunched over a toilet or a food-encrusted dorm stove, and these are the things that shake me awake in the middle of the night).
People are like chemicals.
Separated from those you have depended on, you experience a period of volatility which can only be cured by associating yourself with a new, equally compatible set of chemicals. These are hard to find. They are kept in a mountain laboratory owned (indirectly) by the government, held in the name of the four year old child of a reclusive billionaire, and doled out with cruel discrimination.
One day soon all of these laboratories will be owned by BENCORP., and I will be able to wallow in them to my hearts content, and invite them to dinner with me at the Brasserie Montmartre in downtown P-Tizzle. We will speak in hushed tones. But until that time, I have spent far too much of my life in anguished separations from the chemicals I need. (That sounded like a drug reference. It was not.) Never was that more clear than this past weekend.
I was back with in my accustomed petri dish. With the chemicals that suit me. Best Fourth of July weekend ever. (The Fourth itself probably didn't top some of those awesome explosion-fests at Shay's house or out in Deary, but the weekend as a whole was record-breakingly good.) I ate ridiculously good food, all day every day, spent way more money than I should have, drank heavily (not too heavily), smoked a fantastic Dominican cigar, spent many hours on the deck with one eye on the grill and one on the amber halo at the horizon, the slow emergence of stars and planets from the deep blue, the occasional towering, soundless detonation of a firework somewhere far away.
Even the hovering, pitiless presence of Greg, Lord of Argument, Destroyer of Picnics, couldn't foil my good time. Nothing could've. A chemical solution, when properly mixed, cannot be undone. It makes it hard to come back to Olympia, still, after all this time, a foreign laboratory manned by clumsy, undertrained technicians, or perhaps simply deprived of a shipment of chemicals due in long ago, except for those few that slipped in for a while (idavanita, scion, jameson, etc.) and then slipped away again. Through a storm drain perhaps, or carried off by vermin.
Tomorrow: janitorial work, fiction workshop, daydreaming about boats on water (the warm metal of the helm in my hand, or huddled over the charts, the Coast Pilot open on the table, or a wave slopping over the deck, these are the settings that give me peace during the day while I'm hunched over a toilet or a food-encrusted dorm stove, and these are the things that shake me awake in the middle of the night).