Time To Smoke

David Foster Wallace

"We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we.

That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd." - David Foster Wallace

Time To Smoke Some Dope

I know I'm not in
Kansas anymore. Black skies,
but just before that
the skies were yellow
with a sick green tinge and my
neck puckered with it
and the sound of it
comes as if searching for me
and the papaya
in the back yard snaps
leaving only the bare trunk
while I've gone back in
to my air controlled
full blast cold inner sanctum
free of the monsoon.

October 24, 2011 6:43 PM

This poem is gratefully received from the muse, a memory from the summer of 1968 in the midst of the seasonal monsoon in East Pakistan. We just had the winds. The tornado touched down south of us and sent the corrugated tin roofs flying edgewise like giant knives. The cuts given at least had a pretty corrugated design to them. These roofs were held down by weights, bricks and other heavy objects, laid on them. The roofs were not fastened. The muse shook me by the neck as I was reading this blog post by Erin Tornado at Whiskey Lake

I smoked a great deal of dope, ganja, that I bought behind the main stores in the New Market from a government licensed ganja shop. I also occasionally smoked (and ate) hashish, illegal because smuggled in from West Pakistan but still easy to get. I sometimes smoked with others, but mostly I smoked alone. I did not usually smoke in my room. Instead, like cigarette smokers today, I would go outside in deference to the other people in the house. I would come back in high and write or draw or practice guitar.