drink to excess. You carry the horrific couch out into the yard, sit it in the snow. You are so crazy! Little do you know you are caught up in some kind of Star Trek time warp, where in a million universes exactly like this one, throughout every possible history of every such universe, a billion college dorks exactly like you are doing exactly the same thing and declaring to their exact same selves: We are so crazy! Who’d have thought to bring a couch outside in early spring?
(I think sometimes I felt it, Adam, and that’s why I behaved the way I did. I felt the weight of those million universes, those billion clichés. Wade: pothead music freak. Kyle: pothead Future Leader, offhand alpha male, even with me around. You: geek; me: jock. All we wanna do is drink and get high and listen to guitar rock and talk about some interesting shit we might have read or heard, god forbid, in class, and have sex with girls, all the time, in all sorts of horrifying ways. And we talk about those ways. And we listen to Van Morrison. And suddenly I can’t stand it, I am suffocating under the weight of the billion college dorks who came before me — who exist on every side, in all the invisible universes — and I eat the by-now grievously abused poster of Van Morrison off the wall. I don’t even take it down first, decently ripping it into bite-sized morsels with my hands. I just lean into the wall and tear off chunks with my teeth and tongue and lips; chew and swallow — ahm, num, num like the Cookie Monster. Ahm, num, num as Wade gazes from behind his peevish cloud and mutters: Hey, man.)
Adam was afraid of rare meat. His big, popular, handsome friend unearthed this bit of information during the springtime barbecue. The big popular handsome friend had guzzled a jug of alcool like it was Mountain Dew and he was feeling the massive weight of the innumerable universes of college dorks who had guzzled innumerable jugs of alcool before him, so he blundered over to the barbecue, grabbing the still-semi-frozen steak off the rack (none of them knew how to cook in those days, no one thought to defrost it) and started tearing into the semi-frozen, mostly raw cowflesh with his teeth. He just stood there growling with the steak in his hands as his good friends — his band of brothers — gaped. He looked like some kind of upright animal, a monster, the Wolfman maybe, tearing off chunks of flesh like they were chunks of a Van Morrison poster and going ahm, num, num, blood trickling down his charismatic chin.
And that’s when Adam lurched to his feet about to run, but threw up instead.
Ha, ha, ha! declared the friend before throwing up himself.
06/06/09, 1:14 p.m.
Good times, Adam. Like Paris in the twenties. Do you remember Kyle saying that — that was his line: It’s like Paris in the twenties in this place! Whenever our interactions with one another grew particularly squalid. Like the time in second year we both ended up having sex with that one girl because she was so drunk she came back from the bathroom and forgot which one of us she’d been with previously, so went to you after having been with me, and then when I showed up wondering what the hell was going on everybody just kind of shrugged it off like — Oh . . . Sorry. And then I passed out on the floor beside you guys and I can only assume you just kept at it, because neither of you seemed particularly happy to be interrupted. Or the time Kyle slapped a girl he had in his bedroom (I still believe he did this, Adam) and we all heard it and stared at one another for a minute and then went back to our beers and conversation. Or the time Wade came back from Goldfinger’s clutching his stash and terrified for his life.
Or that time I made someone die. Again. Remember that?
Well let me remind you. It was like Paris in the twenties.
06/06/09, 2:59 p.m.
Do I feel real to you? Do you feel that I actually exist, pounding keys two-fingered here at my kitchen table, or is it more like receiving email from a figment of your imagination? Is it like I’m a ghost coming back to haunt you? It sounds stupid, but that’s what