Minor Triad: April 2011

As promised, a recollection submitted to the collective memory, albeit with some cringe-worthy sentimental BS abruptly edited out (and a little abruptly left in). Petros and I were just discussing the lawn mowing in the dark, but I did not remember it being on this day. Is this true, or have I completely conflated several different occasions? You know I rely on you guys to keep my past and childhood in order, so I will defer to the rest of the Triad on this point. Regardless, I give you a mostly accurate and true except for where I probably made shit up if I felt like it account of the trip heard round Leland:

“Naaawat?” Tyler asked, as a stream of saliva overflowed his bottom lip.
“Kee ih on yo tongue,” Peter said. The three of us were sitting in Peter’s living room, relaxing with our feet up in reclining chairs as if we were enjoying an ABC family movie, rather than holding small squares of paper on our tongues, trying to make sure we absorbed all the acid from them before swallowing.
Several factors had contributed to us finding ourselves in this situation. One was that Peter lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest neighbors being miles away. Another was that my parents and Peter’s parents had driven to Wisconsin for the weekend to watch Shakespearean plays. We had been invited to go along, but the third factor was that we had reasoned that, while Shakespeare was great, we could watch plays when we were 92, while taking acid and running around in cornfields was an activity that would get less feasible with each passing year.
And so began what our “hallucinogenic farm party.” We were dressed for the occasion. Tyler wore tight blue jeans, brown cowboy boots, and a child’s sized tie-dyed t-shirt. Peter was dressed in a pink button-up shirt and gray Goodwill sports jacket, ripped jeans, and a cowboy hat pushed down over his long blond hair. I wore shorts and a used youth soccer jersey with the words, “I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock n’ rollin’ bitch for you,” stenciled on with black paint. I had a a plaid Scottish cap with a fuzzy blue ball on top, and aviators as accessories.
We swallowed the squares of paper and decided to have art time while we waited for something to happen. We sat around the dining room table and scribbled with colorful ink pens on a huge roll of white butcher paper, something I hadn’t done since elementary school. I began doodling and drawing terrible stick figures, which was all that my artistic ability generally allowed for. The three of us drew uneventfully for 15 minutes or so, until I suddenly started grasping at the pens frantically.
I knew exactly what I had to draw and I started sketching in quick, purposeful strokes. I drew an elaborate blue and orange monster with swirly eyes and a square face in the upper right hand corner. Next I drew a series of very simple, yet elegant, triangular trees, and finally a small purple bird on one of the branches. I drew a caption bubble for my bird, and began writing him some dialog. Finally, I looked up and found Peter and Tyler staring at me with their jaws hanging open. They looked like wooden puppets, and I could almost see the metal hinges at the corners of their mouths.
“I think it might have started,” Tyler said.
“Why?” I asked. Peter pulled my edge of the paper towards him and studied it.
“You, my friend,” he said, “are officially tripping balls.” He grinned like a Disney character, reached across the table and shook my hand, while tipping his hat to me.
“What is the bird saying?” Tyler asked. Peter picked up my drawing and cleared his throat dramatically, then began reading from my caption bubble.
“I have lived in many places,” he said, “but never in a shoe.”
We walked back to the living room to begin our adventure. We gathered around the table where we had assembled our supplies, and tried to decide what to do next. The table was covered in a ridiculous assortment of items. We had made several lists the day before, in preparation for this event, one of them being a shopping list.
It had been nice to pick up our shopping list and find, instead of things like eggs and milk, items such as silly string, Laffy Taffy, and small American flags (for burning). Our shopping expedition had taken us back to our youth, when our mothers would take us to the store and we would toss Oreos into the cart whenever we thought she wasn’t looking, only to have her discover them and put them back on the shelf. This time we were three orphan children, tossing in anything and everything that caught our eye, with nobody there to veto it.
The result was that we now had balloons and Munchies Kids Mix and assorted party favors at our disposal. I ripped open the Laffy Taffy and stuffed as many pieces into my pockets as I could. I picked one up and read the joke. It was embarrassingly awful. We decided that it might be more fun to read the punch lines and try to guess what the jokes were supposed to be.
“Beef jerky,” I said.
“Umm, what do you call a cow that masturbates a lot,” Tyler blurted out.
“He didn’t say beef jerkoff, dumbass,” Peter pointed out.
“It’s ‘what do you call a twitchy cow,’” I explained. “What should we do now?”
“Let’s consult the list,” Peter said. He opened his little notebook and looked at the list of activities we had compiled. “We could play croquet,” he said. “Or cut green island in half with a metal heavier, or set things on fire, or sit on our asses/look at shit.”
We walked outside for the first time, and it became immediately apparent that we hadn’t needed to make a list. We would clearly be spending most of our trip sitting on our asses and looking at shit. Outside was incredible. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard explores the phenomenon of seeing. She describes the documented experiences of the only generation of blind people to be given sight for the first time after cataract surgery was invented by Western surgeons, and I imagine what I saw must have been a little like that—like suddenly having sight after years of relying solely on your other senses.
There were colors I’d never seen before, and everything seemed to be shining brilliantly, so that the whole world was full of glint and glare. I lost my sense of depth, so that all was two dimensions, like very detailed and beautiful cardboard cutouts. Peter walked in front of me and he looked like a paper doll, sliding fast past a flat backdrop attached to a popsicle stick.
I flopped down onto the ground out of confusion and exhaustion, and pressed my left cheek into the grass and dirt. I felt as if I stayed there for several hours, but I had lost all grasp of time by then, so there was no real way to know. The world started peeling away, layer by layer. I saw everything in my field of vision, and I watched it all intently—the base of a nearby tree, the grass, dandelions, a few fallen leaves and twigs. Then suddenly all I could see were a few blades of grass, as if there had been a zoom. They loomed up in my vision and I saw the tiny wedges where they had been nibbled, the different shades of green and yellow, and the individual grains. And then I was looking beyond the grass, and I saw an ant walking along the dirt beneath, navigating between the obstacles in his path. He began climbing up one blade, then paused halfway and seemed to think better of it, turning himself around and heading back to where he’d come from. I watched him, and wondered if he would turn into a man-eating sloth-toed cheetah, or grow spines, or turn yellow, but he just stayed an ant, walking around on grass. It was fucking fascinating.
When I eventually remembered that I wasn’t alone, I sat up to look around and my face was numb from the hard ground. I saw that my friends had been occupied the same way I had. Tyler was petting a tree branch and Peter was investigating a dandelion. We gathered our wits about us, grabbed a pair of binoculars and set off into the woods. I brought the binoculars up to my eyes as we walked, and let out a yelp.
“Look at that!” I shouted.
“What is it?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it is, just look at it!”
After looking through the binoculars they understood my comment. You couldn’t always tell what you were seeing, but anything you pointed the binoculars at was amazing. It became a kind of mantra for us over the course of the rest of the day. It never really mattered what the hell it was, as long as we always looked at it.
We spent the rest of the day checking a variety of things off the activity list we had made—we rode bikes around the yard, sprinted down the gravel lane, watched Fantasia, climbed into an old deer stand to watch cars pass by on the highway, and made jello. At about 10:00 that night, Peter suddenly remembered that he was supposed to mow the lawn before his parents returned. We quickly realized that the only solution was to mow the lawn. In the dark. On acid. We set up some small floodlights, which barely lit even a portion of the yard, and prepared for our most challenging adventure yet.
Peter gave me his Ipod and clamped his noise canceling headphones around my head. Some kind of dramatic, classical march to hell seeped into my ear canal and rampaged around inside my skull. There was thundering percussion and the brass sounded as if it was trying to win an argument with someone. It was the kind of music that you would hear at the opening of an epic battle scene in a movie like “Braveheart” or “The Lord of the Rings.”
My task was to use the little push mower to do some of the smaller areas, and Peter began to give me instructions as to where exactly I should mow, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. I could see his lips moving, and the music in my head made it seem like he should be explaining the importance of the upcoming battle—a fearless leader motivating his troops to victory—but instead he was grinning and making gestures that were supposed to indicate the act of pushing a mower. When I finally stopped laughing long enough to realize that I’d be able to hear him if I removed the headphones, I caught the tail end of his last sentence.
“. . . and try not to mow over those fucking flowers over there, or the extension cord for these lights, or your foot, or those cats,” he said. It was less inspiring than I’d hoped, but I nodded solemnly, slipped the headphones back on, and we walked out onto the porch to a soundtrack of war songs, as I glanced left, right, and left again, on the lookout for Orcs or Scottish warriors.
We accomplished the task without injury or property damage, although in the light of the next morning we would see that the yard looked as if drunken toddlers had romped through it with machetes, and we would have to do the entire job over again. But for then we were proud and satisfied, and we retreated to the basement to watch television and fall asleep as the effects of the acid wore off.
The next morning we engaged on a massive cleanup mission. We discovered Laffy Taffy wrappers everywhere we went. I had apparently left a trail—most every room in the house, the fields, the lawn, the woods, in the trees. We picked everything up, stashed the leftover supplies in Tyler’s car and plopped down in the recliners where it had all started a day before.
I remembered the sunset of the day before, and I thought about how we’d watched the clouds and talked for over an hour.
The three of us had laid down like parallel lines in an open field, flat on our backs. The clouds moved horizontally across the sky faster than planes, and it looked like time-lapse photography. But we tracked them as they moved, and found faces and mythical animals and construction equipment in them.
“That one looks like a really old woman eating a cupcake,” Peter said, tracing the outline of her cheekbone with his index finger.
“I can’t even believe that I could agree with you,” I said, “but it kind of does.”
“I haven’t seen images in the clouds since I was in elementary school,” Tyler said. “Do you think we’re hallucinating these things, or are we just remembering how to be creative, and reverting back to a younger age?”
“I kind of think that everything we’ve seen today was real,” I said. “Like it’s always there, and we just never look. Old women and cupcakes must always be in the clouds. Maybe we can do this whenever we want, without drugs.”
“Dude,” Peter said, “if you can ever manage to catch a frisbee one-handed while riding a bike and looking through binoculars again without drugs, I will be impressed, but predominantly frightened.”
“We should not do this often,” Tyler said.
“But we should do this again,” Peter said.
The front door opened, snapping me out of my daydream, and bringing me back to my position in the recliner. Peter’s parents were home. They told us that the lawn looked nice, and all about Shakespeare, and that we really should have come with.
“You have to come next year,” they said.
“Maybe when I’m older,” Peter told them.

Minor Triad

Monday, April 25, 2011

Bibliography

I don't know what it is, just look at it

Friday, April 22, 2011

Gentlemen: The Future

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