An Interesting Discovery

[mallorys_camera]

Real reason I like gardening?

I like playing in dirt.

But it did dawn on me yesterday while I was driving past the gas station where I've been fueling up regularly for the past two years that now there's an even more compelling reason to garden. Namely, I like to eat.

Prices at this gas station, which have hovered at the $2.99/gallon mark plus or minus 20¢ for the entire time I've been using it, were up to $4.50/gallon yesterday. That's a 50% increase in six weeks. And naturally, those transportation costs are baked into every single thing you purchase.

You can defer purchasing most things, but you can't defer purchasing food.

It's fuckin' infuriating.

These people who voted for that addled clown in the White House are still not willing to admit they made a bad call. Their lives are collapsing around them, but hey! it was worth it to keep all those guys who want to be girls and girls who want to be guys from messing with the genitalia God gave them.

###

In other news, I managed to incorporate the comic bit with oversharing metamour into Section 1, though I have no idea whether it reads funny.

Also when I went down to the kitchen to make coffee this morning at 5 am—like I say, I'm an inveterate early riser—I saw a small University of Utah notebook on the kitchen island, and I opened it.

Editorial aside: You never want to leave a confidential document around me. I am Harriet the Spy, and I will read it!

I figured the notebook belonged to the oldest Spawn who left the University of Utah under mysterious circumstances.

Instead, it turned out to belong to Icky who has been using it as a kind of sporadic diary.

I do not care about clothes, Icky wrote. His handwriting is very spiky. Calligraphy on acid. I care about chemistry, connections, intellect.

I was shocked to see my own name: Patrizia oil story right over Scoring story.

Scoring?

And what possible Patrizia oil story could there be? I made Patrizia freeze for two weeks because I neglected to order heating oil?

The diary entries only occupied a handful of pages at the beginning of the notebook, but one of the last things he'd scribbled: Don't use when kids are in the house—

Oh.

OF COURSE.

Duh.

Icky has a cocaine habit.

Figures. Cocaine is the only drug he's ever admitted to enjoying—he doesn't do pot, he doesn't do alcohol—and he's signaled his enjoyment of it on several occasions by making non-sequitur eightball quips that were peculiar in context, to say the least.

As an alumnus of The Rolling Stone glam squad, he certainly has access. And he has the income to afford it.

Well, well, well.

Cocaine is only a fun drug for the first couple of snorts. It produces a very benificent high that turns you into the omniscient narrator.

That third snort—well. You do it hoping to regain that spectral perspective of that first snort. Only you get jumpy, and it doesn't.

I know! I'll do more, you think. Only those fouth, fifth, and sixth snorts don't work either, and pretty soon, you're desperate to crawl out of your skin—

I loathe cocaine.

Last time I was offered some, I rolled my eyes: "No fuckin' way."

Anyway, if Icky is a cokehead, that explains a lot.

Comments

[michaelboy]

I tried cocaine a few times in the 70's and didn't really care for it. I'm already a naturally wired person where even coffee was eventually too strong of a stimulant for me.

[mallorys_camera]

I went through a brief cocaine period. The high you get from those first four lines is quite nice. But thereafter, you just get insanely wired, & of course, the stuff is expensive.

[fuzzilla]

I was always kind of a goody goody (other than weed gummies, and that’s a fairly recent thing). Somehow I just knew, “I would like this WAY too much and that would be a problem.”

[mallorys_camera]

Good for you for recognizing your own limitations! 😀

[smokingboot]

Long ago tried it twice, it bored me twice, plus it's a willy-shrinker.
But it makes sense of Icky.

[mallorys_camera]

Willy-shrinker!!! Ha, ha, ha! 😀

[asakiyume]

I want to crawl out of my skin at the thought of your name in Icky's diary, yuck. Because even if he regrets making you freeze, THAT'S NOT RESTITUTION ENOUGH.

Cocaine habit, huh.

It makes me very uneasy these days how unequipped I am to deal with things like people being cokeheads.

[mallorys_camera]

Honestly, I was a bit shocked. People are still doing cocaine? That's so... 80s!!! But my kids tell me cocaine is having a resurgence.

Honestly, I was shocked seeing my name in his diary, too. I didn't think I registered in Icky's private thoughts at all.