well. where to start. like i said, i'm up and down, a helluva lot. up on this hill things sort of happen a lot. you see every person anywhere from five to twenty-seven separate times a day, and everything feels like one great viscous whirlpool of faces and words.

so. for about two and a half weeks i think (i lost count after the first) i smoked a goodly deal of weed with my roommate/saviour katherine dore alexandria ballentine zaragoza (yes, all those names are hers. she's the daughter of a former spanish-american diplomat and a buyer for the house of gucci. she's from san francisco. but she's sane, and even perspicacious, if you can believe it.) we smoked because we had very little homework to do and much leisure time during intro classes and my three day weekend, that only ends at 11:30 monday morning. and we smoked because we have sizable depression issues. or, perhaps "reasons" is a more pertinent term. my mom died, my best friend who told me it'd be okay is probably dying but won't let me call him because he detests how we interact over the telephone, and speaking of long distance, my soulmate ditched me for a stupid girl with stupid hair and a stupid voice and stupid clothes with stupid aspirations (came to marlboro for the outlet to design furniture without the hardcore work ethic of an art school)... and this occurred simultaneously with my mom's death.

katherine's very far from home. her parents ought to be divorced, but they've run out of money to feed a comfortable life. her mom's physically not too hot, having broken a hip a few years back. the prosthetic implant (not quite sure what it is) from the operation is beginning to jut out of her skin. she's also been on and off valium for quite some time. katherine's boyfriend, who moved to wooster, mass for an internship program when katherine came to vermont, so that they could still be together, is rather sick now.... just got pulled out of the internship thing by his mom, without his own knowledge.. is now back in san francisco living with his dad and stepmom on some secluded estate without his car, because his mom took away his registration. this is all because he came to visit katherine one weekend when he was sick and his mom didn't want him to. jesus fucking christ.

okay, so i'm whining. i don't do enough of it. everything here passes by so fucking fast and without my concrete knowledge of it, that its actually a relief to me when i can spit it out in a linear fashion.

ergh. okay, so, katherine had a lot of weed those first few weeks. i let down my guard. after my mom's death i dropped my "veganism" (though not my vegan habits; i found i really didn't like non-vegan food as much as i thought i might) and my dislike of marijuana. i was ready to try a few things in order to ameliorate some of the acutely deadening depression i felt.

hmmmm... so during that period of happy weed-smoking i began to become good friends with mark, mike's roommate. mark is this guy who's very nice and very cool and very quiet and very tall. people he likes like him a lot. probably a lot of people haven't talked to him. he's not a socialite. he's an all the way guy.. all the way being his dorm and the home of a common room very fond to me. all the way and halfway, my dorm, are smoking dorms, and a lot of different things are smoked around here, and openly, too.

the thing you have to know about marlboro is that the only way you can get in trouble for underage drinking or usage of illegal substances is if a faculty member or a student life advisor (and there are only two on campus, who remain out of sight according to the students' afterhours interest) catches you. the RAs are your friends. (who isn't, in a sense, on a campus of perhaps 225?) they'll smoke you out, they'll give the freshmen their liquor. it's a happy deal. (there's actually a dorm called happy valley. enough said.)

so anyway. the all the way common room, almost every night, and many days too, is host to very casual, relaxed, and chronic pot-smoking (i said chronic! hahaha!) and mark is usually there, right in the middle. mark smokes a whole fucking lot of weed. he's a terrific drummer, an eloquent speaker, one of the most subtly intellectual and polite guys around, a gifted and decent writer, and those are the reasons i don't call him a pothead. he and i actually discussed this a couple of weeks ago.

a couple of weeks ago. that bothers me. or was it only a week and a half ago, or a week ago, or what? jesus fucking christ, i'm losing it. but, yes, so we haven't talked in a matter, more or less, of days. this is because room five, across the way from me, ran out of the funds necessary to host a 24/7 drug party. oh, and they also started doing homework, i do believe. they still have five to six people living in there regularly, but they've definitely been cutting their drug intake.

so for a happy while there, mark was in my dorm quite a lot. in and out. and i have this thing. i have a really small bladder. a "cherry" bladder, as an old friend lovingly put it. i also have an insatiable thirst for water. these two things lead me down and up my hallway at least nine times a day, and you run into the same people in the bathroom all the time. ALL THE FUCKING TIME. you begin to avert your eyes at the sound of a twisting faucet or a pull of toilet tissue, in order not to have to visually and politely acknowledge these persons' existence.

anyway, it came to be that if mark came in and saw me coming in as well, he'd wait for me to finish doing my shit and we'd hang out. it was actually a nice surprise for the both of us. even though i was in his room perhaps half of the nights i spent on campus last semester, i rarely conversed with him. he's not a big talker. he's a big listener to music, and we do share an uncannily similar taste in music. so that was always there. we both appreciate each others' vocabularies. and each others' remote cynicism, i guess you could put it, although i do believe he's far more remote about it than i am. (i've been growing increasingly aware, in a conscious way, of my perception of myself and how it must conflict greatly with others' of myself.. .but that's probably another story, as this one's growing rather long.)

anyway, as i said, by the end of last semester, we hadn't talked much. although, we had always had some mutual respect sprouting mainly from pure observation, i believe. and we sort of finally hung out due to my comfort with him and our mutual, deeply-rooted hate and disgust of mike jensen. augh. anyways. and mark kind of got me smoking weed, and that's when i decided it was okay when things really, really sucked. i mean, maybe not decided, but chose that to be.

sooo... over christmas break, when my mind would occasionally turn on a conscious note toward the impending doom of marlboro's spring semester, the clearest thing i could conceptualize was basically a dark spot with blurry edges upon the timeline of my life, which i just dreadfully wanted to stop moving. ugh. but there was this dark spot, and then there was katherine sort of, and then there was mark and some good comfortable images.

so when i got back to school i was very very happy to see mark.

ummm okay this is ridiculous, this is really like some kind of fucked diary entry-turned-trailer to a young adult novel-turned-feature film. fuck. ummm i do have more homework, though. always. always more fucking homework that requires more fucking mental gymnastics. and that's why i can't smoke weed anymore. my mind has to stay in shape. so i'm depressed and empty as hell, but HEY! i'm keeping up with class!

fuck.

blah.... okay, goodnight. it's okay, i still got some love.