WAMPOHOLIC

It’s one of those scenarios you feel will never happen to you. Nobody thinks they’re going to be the one, whatever, to get in a car wreck to have their, you know, their kids killed in a plane crash, whatever, you don’t think those things are going to happen to you. And I didn’t think that I’d be traded. So.

I quit doing drugs. I used to take drugs and I quit. But I’ll tell you something honestly about drugs, and I don’t think this is said enough anymore- I mean, it’s the truth: I had a great time doing drugs. Hahahahaha! Sorry. Never murdered anybody, never robbed anybody, never raped anybody, never beat anybody, never lost a job, a car, a house, a wife, or kids, laughed my ass off, and went about my day. Sorry.
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I have never heard one reason that rang true why marijuana is against the law. Never heard one reason that rang true why marijuana is against the law. Marijuana grows all over the world, serves a thousand different functions, ALL of them positive. To make marijuana against the law is like saying God made a mistake. You know what I mean? It’s like God on the seventh day looked down on his creation, and he said, ‘There it is, my creation. Perfect and holy in all ways. Now I can rest… Oh my Me! I left fucking pot everywhere. I should never have smoked that joint on the third day, shit. Boy, if I leave pot everywhere, it’s gonna give people the impression they’re supposed to use it. Shit! Now I have to create Republicans.’
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I am not promoting the use of drugs, I’m just saying if you’re gonna have a war against drugs, have ‘em against all drugs including alcohol, the number one offender, or shut the fuck up. And oh, by the way, my simple pleasurable advice would be: shut the fuck up. Ha ha ha ha ha. Just shut up. Your ways are tired, your point of view is meaningless, and you live hollow fucking lives.

I don’t smoke pot, and I’m glad because then I can champion it without special pleading. The reason I don’t smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations—and I’ve got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.
At this time, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the State will present its closing argument in the case against marijuana: It leads to the use of heroin and other dangerous, addictive drugs.
If this syllogism holds true, the bust-out junkie will say to his cellmate: ‘I am a heroin addict. I started smoking marijuana and then naturally I graduated to heroin. By the way, my cellmate, what happened to you? How did you come to murder three guys in a crap game? You’ve got blood on your hands. How did you first get obsessed with this terrible disease of gambling? Where did it all start?’
‘Oh, I started gambling with Bingo in the Catholic Church.’

If one has occasion as a doctor to make the acquaintance of one of those people who, though not remarkable in other ways, are well known in their circle as jokers and the originators of many viable jokes, one may be surprised to discover that the joker is a disunited personality, disposed to neurotic disorders.

Daniel: When you say you were there with a friend, was it your friend Brian?

Aziz: Oh — no. Brian’s a fake name. For some reason in my stand-up, I always go to Brian. It’s weird. There’s a weird thing in stand-up when you go to certain sounds. They just sound funnier. Like “k” sounds, you know. Like there’s this Chris Rock joke, where he says the only two black guys in Minnesota are Prince and Kirby Puckett. And I was like, “Shit, Kirby Puckett — that’s the funniest name ever!” But for some reason, Brian’s just a funny sounding name to me.

On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death,” was electrocuted … Worth had been about to lead them through the first verse, had just leaned forward to sing the opening lines—”Is it all over? I’m scanning the paper / For someone to replace her”—when a surge of electricity arced through his body, magnetizing the mike to his chest like a tiny but obstinate missile, searing the first string and fret into his palm, and stopping his heart. He fell backward and crashed, already dying.

After she let him out the back gate, she stood there for a moment, under the splashing ivy. She was thinking about that French class. It was months ago, but now she thought about it, she found she remembered nearly everything – the cream sweater Mr Scott wore, his hair just beginning to need to be cut, the taste of chewing gum in her mouth, fluffy clouds chasing through the trees, the hairs on Dora Lafferty’s neck in front of her, the classroom smell of lipstick and old runners. She remembered telling herself to remember what Paul Éluard said, because it seemed important. But things like the world-inside-this-one are too big to hold in your head by yourself. You need someone to remind you, or else, you need someone you can tell, and you have to keep telling each other, over and over, throughout your whole life. And as you tell them, the things are slowly binding you together, like tiny invisible strings, or like a frisbee that’s thrown back and forth, or like words written on the floor in syrup. TELL LORI. TELL RUPRECHT.
Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word…

He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely – from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.