So I was just on the phone with my friend Chloe, who asked about the snow here in NYC. I looked out at the balcony from where I sat on the sofa and said that yeah, the storm was fun but it's pretty much all gone now. After all, I'ld gone out on said balcony for a few minutes earlier today to soak some antique metal in vinegar as well as mixing some soil and food waste later and I'ld noticed that all the snow on the balcony was gone.

In a wash of fever, muscle relaxants, and pain killers, I spent weeks in the grip of dreams and hallucinations. My first clear memories from after the accident date to twenty days after the fire. The days in between were like nothing else I had ever experienced.

The next weeks were an interminable dive into a vague and shifting territory of dreams and hallucinations.

It was every dream you've ever had about being trapped in a dream except that it was true. I was.

Every nightmare about being unable to move, strapped down, unable to talk or move or do anything about the constant intense pain. Except that was an accurate description of things.

It didn't take that long to get to the hospital. It all looks very different on your back. The lift and drop onto a hospital stretcher, wheeling through slamming doors and an emergency room barely glanced, watching the stains on the ceiling and the decaying cheap fluorescent fixtures rush past and some part of me realizing that I'm now in the hands of ghetto-level hospital care.

So this cartoon thing: what a lot of donkey shit. Awww, bummer, some guy in Denmark drew a cartoon. Clearly grounds for the end of the world. Get a fucking grip.

Hmm. writing these entries about the fire seems to be getting under my skin a bit.
In fact, as soon as I started typing in this window I felt my chest tighten and start to hurt.

Well, getting back to the living room, getting closer to the fire, which was already visible from both sides of the kitchen, I could see that the fire stood between me and the telephone. It also was between me and my big ol' office-sized fire extinguisher though I don't remember thinking of it even once that day.

So I ran out the door and over to the door of my next door neighbors, the Ruizes.

Whew! Been waiting to get that down on paper just right for quite a while now. And, yeah, I meant it; all those explosions you see in the movies are way too loud. I'd seen some littler ones before, been near plenty of summer grilling mishaps and the rest and now, having stood right in the middle of one of those fuckers I can definitively say, folks, it ain't like the movies.

Don't try this at home.

Rustin

Okay, so this is what's happened.

I was really tired. It was the middle of the Republican National Convention, and I headed back to my apartment to get some sleep. I got up and decided that even though I was already in the middle of doing runs of posters (which means tall piles of paper scrap as well as posters with varnish drying on them scattered everywhere)

This is my new stealth journal. I'm too busy to reactivate my "real" one. I'm too stressed to want to deal with people.

So I'm hiding out here. Getting a few things written that I've got rumbling around in my brain. Puttering away.

Maybe I'll reactivate my multigeek journal soon. Maybe not.

Oh, well.

Rustin