finally, the details of it all

please send what clothes and other paraphernalia you have to pakistan

my sincere apologies for having taken so long to update this site with concrete information, but...

...finally, i have concrete information about where to send your warm clothes and other material to help the earthquake-displaced pakistanis who are shivering in the their temporary hovels as the brutal winter descends...

anything you send will be received at the home of my friend, habib, who will then transfer it to his father, a member of the main opposition political party to president musharraf, jamaat-e-islami. they will distribute it to the awaiting survivors of the earthquake. by including your return address, habib, will then mail you a receipt of his having received your donations. you may not be able to use it for any capitalistic type of gains, such as tax breaks, but you can rest assured knowing that your donation has been treated honestly and will reach those in need. it's important in this day and age that you know this--both from me and from habib. too many aid organisations in recent years have defrauded their donors and i want you to know you have my word this isn't going to happen with your donations to this cause.

any packages or boxes you have should be sent to the following address in pakistan:

habib abbasi
NB-40, nazimabad, 7th road
rawalpindi
pakistan 44000
ph#92.51.484.7186

i have already sent four big boxes to habib, all received within a week's time from here in korea, and i have coded each box, on the bottom, with something like the following:

mha-kr-1-1 women's clothes (meaning: mha--my and my wife's initials; kr-from korea; 1-1: shipment 1 box 1, women's clothes). it is not imperative to do anything like this, but i would ask that you put some sort of acknowledgment somewhere visible on the box to designate to the handler in pakistan what sort of clothes are inside. neither habib nor his father will open the boxes; each box will be opened by the aid organisation in pakistan and a designation on each box as to whether the clothes are earmarked for women, children, or men would be most helpful.

many thanks to those of you who are going to fulfill your pledge to mail something to pakistan. it's not going to be inexpensive to mail even the smallest bit of clothes, but i assure you that the little that you sacrifice is going to go a long way to help someone somewhere in a desolate and destroyed area of northern pakistan.

you may never hear any thanks from anyone other than me or habib--and please understand the plight of those who can't email their gratitude--but both habib and i thank you from the bottoms of our souls.

any questions about anything, please don't hesitate to email me: worldwaveofhelp@gmail.com (or, if you know any of my other email addresses, don't hesitate to email there, either...)

cheers and a toast to you all...

p.s.--to those of you in gangeung, mr. lee at bar bumpin' has a couple of boxes for you to leave stuff in; i will go by there weekly and check what's there and then send out as necessary. to those of you in korea, but not gangneung, if you don't want to mail stuff yourself, just email me and we'll work it out.

p.p.s.--please, PLEASE, pass this on to anyone i forgot to email--and i know i did (jay b and jay j, i think you guys forwarded that first email on to people; please update them with this update)

thanks, dave

heed the call (pt 2 of the pakistan plea...)

my apologies for having taken so long to update this site with information regarding the pakistan quake relief effort. my friend, habib, in Rawalpindi, a suburb of the capital, Islamabad, is busy with his own things there and i wait to hear from him when i have questions or would like some information.

please keep collecting and standing by, as i should have some information by the end of this week.

thanks for everyone who's gotten in touch with me about this in the past week or so. let's hope some people will be more comfortable through the upcoming and unforgiving pakistani himalayan winter.

back soon...

a serious call for help

imagine your life shattered by a natural disaster...

i satirise i lot of shit here, i criticise a lot of countries and their people here, i make jokes and write stories about funny things here, i talk a lot about drugs or drinking and getting high or getting drunk, but this is one time when i'm as serious as an earthquake rumbling through your town or village or county or state or province or country and rendering all you or your family or your friends know obsolete, destroyed, fucked up beyond all belief, extinct, irretrievable, extinguished, consumed, or swallowed up...
-
i am humbly spearheading an effort to collect things to send to the needy citizens in northern pakistan who so unfortunately lost everything known to them in last month's huge earthquake.
-
i do this on behalf of no organization, no relief agency, no human rights or human aid group; i do this of my own volition, in partnership with only a single contact in pakistan, a man who lives in rawalpindi, not too far south of the tragic zone of annihilation.
-
i urge you to collect and save all that you can that can help the desperate people left languishing in the pakistani highlands without homes, clothes, jobs, families, shelter, or other minimum amenities as the harsh himalayan winter begins to set in. clothes of all kind--and for all sorts of people, women, men, and children--are welcome: shirts, pants, socks, shoes, sweaters, blankets, hats, scarves, vests, coats, jackets, gloves, boots, whatever you can buy or spare or don't want anymore, it doesn't matter, as long as it's something to keep someone warm in the onsetting harsh cold climate.
-
i've joked in the past about how many or how few people read this aetherspace; if you do read it, or you know people who have at least once in the past, pass this info on, pass this web site on to others to as many people as you can. urge them to pay heed to this call, that i'm as serious as you know i can be about things. it's important that you pay attention to this and commit something, ANYTHING, to this...
-
if you are willing to commit something, or to at least pass this message on, please click on the "comments" section and let me know. i won't hold you to any promises you do or don't make, but i'll at least know you're reading this and passing it along.
-
i'll be back again on this site with relevant information on where, when, and how to send anything to me so i can send to pakistan, whether you live in the u.s., hungary, russia, sudan, argentina, japan, or here in korea--or, more specifically, here in gangneung: there will be places to which the generous people i know can send the things that these unfortunate people can use.
-
and, those of you in america or who are americans, please don't use "disaster fatigue", brought on upon by the horrible damage wrought by hurricane katrina two months ago on new orleans, prevent you from doing SOMETHING to help. as bad off as the people of southern and coastal louisiana and mississippi are who were affected by hurricane katrina, i can't even begin to describe not only how devastated this region of pakistan is, but how much poorer they were, to begin with, than were (are) the people of the gulf region. now, THAT'S a scary proposition, isn't it? and only a small contribution will help...
-
i'll be back again soon with information on donating...
-
thanks for at least listening or reading this....

MIA and post-ramadhan

fasting during ramadhan really took its toll on me...
-

well, as any regular reader of this aetherspace knows (and judging by the amount of non-spam "reader comments" there aren't, i don't gather that there are any of you still around), this space was hijacked during the last week of ramadhan or so, taken over by rogue bandits with no torsos to speak of, but with an amazing ability to type on a computer keyboard using only the 4th and 5th toes of their non-dominant foot.

the one of the group who had any sort of torso upon which a mangled head perched was able to overpower me--at the time, in an absinthe-induced torpor--and tied me up and left me in a dark dungeon full of rats, bats, and vats of wine from which the rats, whom i taught, through mutual squeaks and bites to one another's noses and haunches, to bring me cups of the wine on a regular basis throughout each day. admittedly, this wine was not the best to have ever passed through my lips--coagulated piles of porcine piss, shimmering bits of bovine bile, and festering floats of feline fecal fettucini wandering about each cupful did not add much in the way of quality but more than made up for it in egregious putrescence--but it did get me through the horrible days of wasting away underground and trading bits and nips with creatures scurrying and fluttering.

when i finally was able to escape, lo and behold, did i discover that those rotten foot-typing monsters had overtaken this space and filled it with some short story about drugs--and drawn out in serial fashion, even!! how cliche, don't you think?

however, it is a story about ganja-smuggling, so i'll keep it here because any time you get one over on Uncle Sam, can afterward flip him the finger and dance deliriously just beyond the reach of his evil and perilous phalanges, spitting all the while on his filthy, hypocritical feet, you take it and display the evidence, even if it was written by a bunch of torso-less bandits who held me hostage and typed with their disgusting, pus-filled, ringworm-laden, non-dominant feet.

because, obviously, such a story could not have really happened, right? not under the watchful eye of freedom-hating Bushco, not at a time when the american government is engaged in a multi-fronted war against drugs, free speech, homosexuality, necrophilia, terror, alcohol, fellatio, immigrants, religions that aren't christian or jewish, cunninglingus, tolerance, communism, farmers, small business, forests, local government, arctic wildlife, newcastle football, fishermen, cuba, anti-imperialism, having fun, and human rights?

no, never.

impossible, right?

serial times, pt 13

The Pkg

(continued from before, the final installment...)

Now

-
Ahhh, the smoke from one of the now-glowing thermal buds I received wanders lazily up to the ceiling as my thoughts waft nonlinearly up toward the clouds in the sky outside my small, one-room flat in a country far, far away. The pkg was delivered safe and sound and, back at my flat, opened like the belly of a fallen water buffalo on the Serengeti at the paws and jaws of a half-starved pride of lions.

-

However, since that time, an effervescent tranquility has settled over me, much as the morning mist would normally settle over that same Serengeti and, as these final words find themselves being written, dear reader, I sit stoned and listening to the Grateful Dead. Bliss is a state much unappreciated by so-called "civil" Western society, intent on impregnating the rest of the world with its capitalist and neo-conservative Christian imperialistic indoctrination because toking on ganja has been deemed by the ignorant governments and the militant Bible-thumpers as "evil"; it is also unknown to those east Asian societies so at the forefront of the rapidly developing technological societies because achieving such bliss would mean slowing down and actually enjoying life on a much more genuine level at a much slower pace; it is a state unfathomable to places in existence on this planet where people's rights and freedoms have been curtailed in the name of the Party, the Leader, the PATRIOT Act, xenophobia, patriotism, where the freedom to expand one's minds, thighs, opinions, lungs, and thoughts is disallowed by those with unexpressed and frighteningly high levels of fear who reside in power...

-

Anyway, I sit and listen to the wisdom of the Dead, hoping the rest of the world can catch up to what those of us already know about altered states:

“We can share the women, we can share the wine, we can share what we’ve got of yours ‘cause we done shared all of mine...”

serial times, pt 12

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

Earlier today
-
This morning, when I woke up, I felt the dull hammer of jet lag and a soju headache tapping with an alarming lack of gentleness on my temples. My stomach was doing flips and there was an acrid taste in my throat. Soju hangovers are, in my professionally humble opinion, the worst of all hangovers. I’ve had every type of hangover (the elimination of these being the main reason for my urgency to have this ganja while abroad) known to humankind (and even some not known to humankind) and I can assure you that a soju one is the worst.
-

This is the only hangover that isn’t predictable; it schemes, it roils, it taunts and teases like the surf; it has you believing one minute that you’re fine and ready to confront the world and then the next minute praying for asphyxiation, crucifixion, or being burnt alive.
-

Soju is the sole reason that beer was invented.
-

I lay in my bed praying for unconsciousness, but it was useless. My stomach wouldn’t relax enough for me to let sleep steal off with me. The furthest thing from my mind was the pkg; what did occupy my mind was the usual self-flagellation that I took upon myself during each soju hangover: I came from the belief that if you dance to the music, you have to pay the band, so grinning and bearing it was what I believed was the right thing to do.

-
(However, soju hangovers have begun to tilt my machismo toward something that I abhor to do with all of my will, although it’s good for helping speed up hangover’s departure, and that is vomiting. I hate it and refuse to vomit if I have any control at all over it, though I know vomiting to be effective in easing the hangover because it jettisons from the body all of the poisons that are causing one to have said hangover).

-
So, I lay there, vacillating between vomiting and my own macho pride. No one would know it if I threw up and then didn't speak of it to anyone, but that wasn’t the point: I would know and I had trouble accepting that.

-
I was just going to have to deal with it unless I was no longer unable to control the convulsive and sickening urge. This had just crossed my mind when my cell phone rang. It was my first morning back from the States, so even through my agony, I was curious as to who was calling me before noon on a Saturday. I reached for where my phone was sitting next to my bed and saw that the caller ID read the name and number of my boss. I decided I’d better answer, though I wasn’t in the mood for talking.

-
After a moment or two in which I answered a question and provided an explanation, I hung up, my heart was beating excitedly.

-
I closed my eyes briefly, smiled, and thought about karma.
-

-
A few minutes later, I found myself lurching toward my office. The sun was bright and warm, though it was early spring and not time for the torpid heat and humidity that will be here soon enough. I was thankful for the invention of sunglasses as I slowly made it down the street.
-

Only one thing could have gotten me out of bed in the condition I was in and remembering this kept me upright, though not necessarily steady.
-

I stopped at a convenience store and bought a liter of water. It tasted so delicious as I gulped it down. I could feel my dehydrated cells and tissues graciously soaking the water up, as if I were a six-foot sponge. Though the water was like ambrosia to my lips and body, it was like sewage to my still-churning stomach. The water made me feel better and worse at the same time and I drank no more.
-

I walked along the street, not more than a couple of moments from my office, amidst the clamor of a foreign land that I was beginning to feel as if were home.
-

I thought about what it took for expatriates to live abroad and about some of the comforts from one’s homeland without which one lived while overseas.
-

I thought about government propaganda, scare tactics, and miseducation of certain harmless issues in the world.
-

I thought about the suckers that governments often took the citizens of their countries to be and about how those same citizens had allowed themselves to become suckers.
-

I thought of the ways that one can protest one’s government and about which ways were the most effective.

-
I thought about circumvention.
-

I also thought about success.
-

-
Less than five minutes later, I departed the elevator that had taken me to the floor where my office was.

-
I walked into the office and there it was, sitting on the front desk counter. It was a familiar sight, one my hands and arms knew well. I looked the same as it had when I last saw it.
-

My pkg.
Immediately, many thoughts shot through my head.
Had it been compromised?
Was everything that had been in there still there?
Was this too good to be true?
Had all that I went through less than seventy-two hours earlier finally become worth it?
-

I hardly heard my boss as he spoke to me. I was busy calculating how much I was going to pat myself on the back for the next month.
-

I inspected the box and saw that there were no signs of compromise to the taping job, so my excitement and anticipation level jumped tenfold. I could smell the incense that I’d bought on some of my travels and how little they had been used since I’d had them. Some Grateful Dead melodies began prowling my happy head, its obsession with being hung over a distant memory.
-

I stood at that counter, a dazed and grand smile on my face with tipsy thoughts running through my head, the muted cacophony of my boss’s voice a fringed concert that had no audience.

-

(to be continued...)

serial times, pt 11

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

The light changed and I crossed the street and went into the private mail center.

-
I had just gone inside when paranoia hit me. I was going to be dealing with real people again and I was sending a pkg of illegal substances. Were people in this line of business paranoid and cautious about what people sent in the mail nowadays, especially in light of the "accidents" in New York City, Washington, D.C., and that Pennsylvania hayfield and the ensuing anthrax mail threats of several months earlier?

-
I had completely forgotten about the aftermath of those incidents and to what condition they had led this county to be. I had been more focused on circumventing airport security and air travel than worrying about beating the mail system; I’d only a day earlier thought I should mail the ganja instead of sneaking it into my luggage or on my person. My heart really began to beat at a rapid rate and I contemplated how I was going to act or handle things should I get busted. Well, I still had on the label return address of the CEO of the former dot.com for which I had worked, so I decided to go in that direction of blame.

-
I approached the counter to get the pkg weighed and priced. From a side door that led to a supply room came a young woman of no more than twenty years of age, an exposed navel and a look of mirth in her eyes that said she was more worried about what her boyfriend thought of her new body piercing, which made me wish either to be her lover or that piece of jewelry piercing said mysterious body part.

-
When she spoke, I knew my worries were over. All I was going to have to do was sign and pay.

-
“Hi, can I help you?” she said in a genuine Southern drawl that isn’t easy to find in a Los Angeles girl.

-
This, I thought, has to be an omen of my impending good and stoned fortune.
-

I fairly beamed at her, no doubt leading her to think of herself as the main reason for my huge smile and consciously slid myself into that familiar drawl from my childhood. “Please. I need to send this on an urgent basis to another country.”

Until that point in time, I had never felt so simultaneously high and lucid.
“Where to?” she asked.
I told her and she took the pkg, weighed it, and looked up the pricing.
“FEDEX only has Priority International shipping.”
I didn't know what that meant.
“What it means is that they don’t have an economy shipping choice for the country you’re sending this to. All packages going there are shipped only by Priority.”
-

I couldn’t argue with that and asked how long it this type of service would take to deliver the pkg.
“It says here three business days.”

-
It was early Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles, which meant that with the time difference between the two locales, I might expect arrival on Monday or Tuesday of the following week. I could deal with that.

-
I certainly could.
“How much?”
She jabbed a few times at her computer screen and answered, “$52.00 even.”
-

I didn't even blink, though it was more than I thought I’d have to spend, as I handed her the correct change.
She gave me a receipt and bid me adieu.
I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded.
After a moment, she asked, “Can I help you with something else?”
“You mean, that’s it?”
-

I knew that was it, that it was that simple, but it had been such an ordeal in getting to that point that the end had come so quickly and successfully (pending successful arrival, of course) and I was feeling a bit let down at the whole suddenness of the finish.

-
“Yes, it is. FEDEX has made it pretty easy for us to send things internationally.” She gave me a look that I originally thought was condescension, but later came to realize was sympathy because of my seeming naïveté.

-
I shook myself out of my daze, thanked her, and walked out of the mail center.

-

(to be continued...)

serial times, pt 10

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

I came to suddenly, and the world faded into clarity with all the rapidity of melting Arctic ice.

-
I blinked and tried to remember what the hell it was looking back at me. It wasn’t sudden, but I finally remembered it to be called a ceiling.
-

Strangely enough, just after remembering a word that was in the first top twenty of words I learned as a kid, a thought that would have inspired Einstein himself crossed my mind (however, I can’t recall it at the moment, so the actuality isn’t going to live up to the hype).

-
Nevertheless, a certain sense of urgency prevailed over my body. At first, I thought the urgency had to do with my packing for my flight set to leave in several hours. Then I realized that I had finished the night before, as experience had taught me that whenever I had some ganja to smoke, the rank in priority of my actually getting other things done often plummeted to heights among double-digit ordinals.

-
My second thought about what the urgency could be was that there was no way I was going to be able to smoke an entire half-pound in such a short period of time (this was followed by a related thought that if I actually smoked it all, my short period of time would be extended unintentionally but predictably, thereby no longer being in the realm of “short” period of time). I realized that I could give the stuff away, but that wasn’t going to get me stoned when I was abroad.
-

My third thought was the one that put the biggest jolt in me and it was an about-face from what I’d been thinking for the past hour or two. It suddenly had become a must-do that I go to private mailing center and mail the pkg. I couldn’t believe how selfish I’d been acting toward the present, forsaking the future because of a little lethargy and a long day ahead of me.
-

How long was it going to have to be before I got to taste my next ganja? Four months? Eight? Vishnu help me, but Twelve?
-

Well, if all went right and I avoided Big Brother and his buddy, Gluttony, I could be enjoying it the following week.

-
It was this last thought, this thought of positivity, this thought of the possible great outcome of the endeavor, this actual glimpse of success, this thought of its actually working, this thought that I might be smoking ganja in a week or so, that got me off of the floor, and out the door toward MBE, pkg tucked under my arm.
-

-
When I had left earlier that morning to start my trek to mail the pkg, the weather had been cool and sunny followed by cool and rainy. I was wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt, as a result, something out of which I’d not changed before I went traipsing up to the mailbox center.
-

By the time I left on that very early afternoon, however, for the unplanned second half of the trek, the weather had warmed considerably and the sun was out, though surrounded by clouds and a bit of unusual Los Angeles humidity.

-
I got less than fifty meters up the moderate hill that led to the mailbox place from my friend’s apartment and almost turned around. I was sweating profusely and my breathing was like the collective heaving at an N’Sync concert (though my heaving at that time would have been of a different nature had I ever had the misfortune to hit one of those concerts).

-
I am averse to being hot and to sweating profusely, except while making wild love or playing sports, especially if I’m overdressed for what the temperature is dictating. The knowledge of the potential success of mailing the pkg was the self-motivation tool I used to keep myself going, and I welcomed the challenge of fighting through the heat spell.

-
Fortunately, the majority of the way from my friend’s apartment to the mailbox center isn’t uphill, and soon I was on the downward slope of the grade toward my destination. The negative thought that I was going to be walking that majority in reverse on my way back tried to creep into my mind, but I thought of baseball and immediately was able to continue without losing it.

-
I passed a filling station and a drug store and, as I stood on a corner across from the mailbox center, awaiting a streetlight to change, I was overcome with elation at my impending success. I had done it! I had overcome Sloth and Thai Chicken pizza and was going to be so happy (literally, figuratively, and pipingly, so to speak) and appreciative the following week.

-
I was going to look back in deep appreciation.
-

If not, it would only be as a result of my being too stoned to do anything but look for the nearest place of repose.

-

(to be continued...)

serial times, pt 9

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

I looked longingly at the pkg sitting on my friend’s kitchen table and decided I was too tired to get up, walk over, slice open the taped-up box with a knife, and pack a bowl to smoke. I was that tired and lazy—I didn't even want to walk ten feet, so how the hell was I going to get the pkg sent overseas?

-
At that point, I didn't care. I began to hallucinate horrible thoughts, like ganja was overrated and that I could go without smoking it while I was overseas, or that I’d never regret being lazy on that day, or that I felt on the floor at that moment to be the most comfortable I’d been in years. I was already thinking of absurd lies to tell my friends as explanation for why my attempts to send myself the pkg had gone unsuccessful.

-
I wasn’t looking forward to the oven’s alarm that would go off momentarily, either; I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to overcome my lethargy enough even to save the pizza from being burnt. My eyelids started to droop and I began to see the baseball game on television in fuzzy and multichromatic images that resembled those images on the microscope slides at which I’d peered as a youngster in sixth grade science lab. The dawning somnolence that ensconced me was something I welcomed with every fiber of my semi-consciousness.

-
Images of long-forgotten dreams from days, months, and years before me danced across the blank screen that was my mind behind closed eyes. I felt myself giving in to the urge to sleep, to rest, to have not a care in the world. It was euphoric and I wanted more of it. I couldn’t believe that I already walked so much that morning and still had such a long day (and night, and next day, for that matter) ahead of me. What would possess me to want to walk anymore that day?
-

What would possess me to do something that wasn’t involuntary? More than a year previous to that point, I had smoked grass on a daily basis and built up a modicum of tolerance so that I had the ability while stoned to function at a point above recline; however, on that morning, I had been at a point where I’d not smoked much pot in over a year. This meant that I had lost my capacity to be or do more than anything while in something other than a supine position. I was blissfully immobile and wanted that condition to end not anytime in the future.

-
Strange and pleasantly bizarre images flashed in and out of my brain, leaving light traces not unlike those on the movie screen when the Millennium Falcon or USS Enterprise entered warp drive. Then I imagined those light traces to be results of the less-than-dangerously-thought explosive collisions between matter and anti-matter. A girl I had seen in Ralph's flashed by me in a tie-dyed shirt that she hadn’t been wearing in the supermarket, a winged tadpole fluttering on her shoulder. I saw a frolicking six-dimensional alligator, in slow motion, amidst a field of wild mushrooms, as it dreamily resorted to vegetarian ways. I thought of Emile Sinclair, from Hesse's novel, and his chats with Pistorius in front of the fire; I thought of how they looked at the images in those flames, how they discussed Abraxas, German philosophy, realized their self-discoveries, and pledged their souls to transcendence.
-

I thought of my Thai Chicken pizza from California Pizza Kitchen and that it must be burnt by that time.

-
My eyes cracked open like an eggshell against the edge of a kitchen counter. I involuntarily took a sniff, but detected no smoke.
-

Relief overwhelmed me, but, still, I fairly leaped--relatively speaking, of course--to the oven to check my pizza. I was just in time, too, for some of the edges of the pizza crust were just beginning to blacken into a crisp.
-

-
Twenty minutes later, I think (who knows, you know? I wasn’t too interested in keeping an accurate barometer of time), I lay on the floor like a beached manatee. I had destroyed that pizza and annihilated those chips and now I felt as if a thermonuclear bomb had detonated inside my abdomen.
-

Much like a helpless and lolling jellyfish in the surf, I turned my head to the right and looked over at the pkg on the table. It looked like it was too far to be seen even with a telescope, but I was stoned, which meant I could see things that normally were unable to be seen without binoculars or a telescope.

-
I did not care, at that moment, about whether or not I’d be smoking in the future, about possibly not having any ganja in the future, about even making it into the future.
-

It was going to take a monumental effort just to blink.
-

Suddenly, I was jolted by a minion I know had to have been sent from the future. It told me that I was really going to regret not having any ganja the following week and that I was also going to regret how my friends and fellow tokers were going to perceive me.

-
I couldn’t have that.
It was an inconceivable thought and I bludgeoned it into retreat.
A better one replaced it.
A thought that made me smile.
A thought that would spawn stories and urban legends about me.
A thought that would earn me special treatment.

-
There was no possible way that I was going to be able to make it; I was never going to mail the pkg to where I was going.
So, I was left with only one choice:
I had to smoke the entire half-pound right then and there.

-
It was genius. Why had it taken me so long to figure it out? Why had I agonized so much? Why I had gone to so much trouble walking around a few hours earlier instead of having stayed in the apartment and smoking myself paralyzed?
-

In some instances in any person's life, I guess there are moments of delayed genius.
-

It took me a while, but I finally managed to swivel my head from the sight of the pkg on the table to that of something above me and of the television in front of me.
-

I could feel the smile spread on my lips, like spring pollen on grass in a windstorm.

-

(to be continued...)

(27 ramadhan 1426), serial times, pt 8

The Pkg

(continued from before...)

A few minutes later, I was in the checkout line. I had a pizza, a box of ice cream bars, a can of Pringle's potato chips, and two bottles of Sunkist orange soda. I didn't have the nail clippers, but it wasn’t my fault. After I’d gotten over the shock of exerting so much energy to bend down, I saw that the two empty spaces that had been the object of my curiosity were labeled as being where toenail and fingernail clippers normally resided—when they were in stock. For the spaces to be empty meant two things—they were all sold out and I wasn’t as crazy as I’d thought I was.
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I avoided the strange looks from the cashier at my pkg, paid for my munchies, and walked outside into a phenomenon that had obviously started while I’d been inside Ralph's—rain.
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Rain. At one of the worst times I could remember.
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In one hand, I had a bag of food and, in the other, a box of something illegal and valuable, neither of which contained contents conducive to being drenched by a 10-minute walk in the rain.
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However, I didn't have JUST a bag of food or JUST something valuable and illegal, I had meltable food in one hand (and a mighty large case of the munchies) and a half pound of ganja that I wanted to mail overseas to my future self in the other hand (I was beginning to think, though, that it wasn’t my destiny to smoke overseas and that I was going to have to leave it for my friend for her to enjoy after I left).

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I had a dilemma to solve, a choice to make: immediate hunger and future tokin’ vs. laziness and apathy.

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As the reader can no doubt surmise, since the entire object of this tale is the pkg of ganja, hunger and tokin’ won out, so I stepped out into the rain and hurried to my friend’s apartment as quickly as I could.
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Amazingly, fortunately, unbelievably, about halfway to the apartment, the rain rescinded into a light rain, which meant that I wasn’t going to be soaking wet and all the contents in my hands were still going to be dry and in the running for potential enjoyment when i reached the friendly confines of the flat.
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A few moments later, I walked into the apartment and put the pkg on the table for later dealing with. I preheated the oven, put the ice cream bars and one bottle of Sunkist in the freezer, washed my hands and face, put the pizza in the oven, then grabbed the other bottle of Sunkist and the can of Pringle's before walking over to the television and sitting down to watch some late morning baseball of an afternoon game on the East Coast and wait for my pizza to cook.

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I lay on my stomach in front of the television, munching my potato chips and watching baseball when it dawned on me how impossible my endeavor to get my pkg abroad really was. My munchies had led me to a state of serious rumination for more smoke while just as seriously contemplating that the task before me was a futile one.

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There was no way I was ever going to be able to eat and then walk to the private postal box center that a quick check of the business section of the local phone book revealed to be nearby. I was too damned tired and wanted nothing more than to bake myself into oblivion. Again, I was thinking of my present state instead of thinking what my future euphoria could be like.

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At that point, however, I didn't give a red damn about the future because I thought I was too tired even to make it to the future.

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(to be continued...)