magni

Okay...I have to confess. Secretly I was obsessed about this trip to CA from which I have just returned. I was a different person this year, for the better, for the 1st time in life, immune to the illness of my ma, responsible for my own shit, connectible and not dis-connected like an astronaut, and I wanted to hit my family with this new me and see what i learn from them. I don't mind being a freak but I don't want to be an ill one.

I was raised by my father and my mother had her own family that I visited as an outsider every other week.

So...

I got high with me .5 bro (mum-side), as I was figuratively meeting him for the first time. I was a bit shocked. He had gaudy corn rows and was training to be a WWF wrestler.

Then next day I got high with me .5 sis (pop-side) and walked all over Berkeley. Got to know her as a fellow human being. Treasurable day.

Then next day I got high with me gf and again walked around Berkeley. Creating new memories.

Then next day, the big event.

I walked around SF sober with me ma, gf, and .5 bro (mum-side).

Yeah...we started with Ghirardelli chocolate ice cream. Lunch at Hooters, where my mother briefly did one of her new neurologically malfunctioning space outs I had heard about.

Bussed to The Shooting Gallery where they show the likes of Shag, Yumiko, Almera, and other low brow artists that you'd find in Juxtapoz Magazine among other places. The were having a Tiki show which is not my thing so I was a little dissappointed.

Then went to Japan town and ate hybrid Japanese-American dishes at an anime cafe.

The night was late & my mother was tired. But it was the last night of my vacation and it was unfinished. Gf, J my bro, and I made a plan to stay up all night but we were going to drive my mother home first. Thats where I got it all.

First of all my mother is cool with dope now, I had learned. So J, gf, and I got high with my mother there and watched J's wrestling DVD, where is only a ref but has to take a hit from a wrestler in one match as part of the plot. It dawned on me...that this wrestling is a performance of masculinity, a dance performance with a different type of appeal similar to the appeal of martial arts performances, such as by Jackie Chan's movies for instance. Suddenly it was art and J was an artist. All disguised as the whitest trashiest white trash.

Just then my mother grabbed my shoulders and told me she had been meaning to give something to me since we had lost contact. Apperantly X-mas and my birthdays had been very hard for her. She handed me "The Art of Living", by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

I was speechless and stoned. I finally managed to say, "Thank you for the time you spent with me". Because, though I felt sore all my life for the time she didn't spend, I was looking only at the good this time.

Didn't end up staying up all night. But had an all around "real" vacation.

Sometimes the truth is the new hipness. I hope it'll help me get laid.