The Prolific Spiders of Los Gatos
"This is my voice. I mean it's literally the same voice I've always had. I've... I haven't changed. At all." She was stoned. I could tell by the way she lolled to one side, bounced and sort of hung there in the air for a moment, and then toppled over. Only to drag herself up on the chair on one arm. "I'm... I'm not stoned. It's the chair. Honest. Jesus, where'd my coffee go?"
Actually, maybe it was the chair. The chair was one of those spongy things that seemed like a good idea in college, because they were easy to move and had no moving parts to delay you from diving into books or parties or computer games like all the good college did. They also were the furniture equivalent of invertebrates. Which was a word that always reminded me of ingrates, and both the word and the association fit with these chairs, because the damn things just defied sitting in. Unless you were stoned. So she had a good case for not being stoned, in fact. Just one more thing about the chairs, because they're the sort of thing that fascinates me. I once was part of an audience that caught perhaps the most difficult seating challenge ever. There was a guy in our dorm, I want to say his name was Ravi, and he may have even called himself that, but "Ravi" was more a projection of a name for him. If I were to look it up there's a strong likelihood his name was Trevor, but it sort of ruins his mystique, so I always think of him, when I do, as Ravi. He wore a turban, brightly colored robes, and a captivating lilt, even though he was from a nice Jewish family in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The lilt was captivating to those in the room who were not stoned because it seemed to lilt in and out from something approximating an Indian accent (proper Indian, mind you, not Native American Indian) and a nasally Jewish kid's accent from New Jersey. At any rate, in that lilt he talked and sat for an entire twenty four hour period in one of those chairs in the basement of someone's townhouse, surrounded by a haze from a few members in the audience and their accompanying pipes. The feat drew a crowd of tens, which was about ten more than the English Department's annual twenty four hour reading of Christopher Marlowe's works in the lecture hall in the English building. Ravi chatted for most of those hours about how lame it was that the English Department was just being sucked in on a temporary re-evaluation of Shakespeare's contemporaries at the expense of the Bard's work, and thus were poor English literature students subjected to all-nighter readings of plays two or three times over, in an attempt to fill out the hours properly.
He sat there for hours, occasionally someone would bring him water, and two pizza boxes on the floor beside him, which had started the event full, mysteriously wound up empty at the end of the sitting. It was an awe inspiring thing to behold.
The girl, on the other hand, though she had bobbed skillfully on the chair, was no match for Ravi, wherever Ravi might be these days, doing whatever it is he wound up doing. I'm almost positive he got out of the English Department shortly after the Great Sitting as we, and when I say 'we' I mean 'I', because I'm the only one I talked to for whom the occasion resonated at all, called it. I think it was all a ploy to piss off his father, who was a plastic surgeon or cosmetic dental surgeon or something.
The girl, woman, rather, waved one hand as if she were wielding a cigarette holder or were a deposed foreign leader returning to her country for the first time since the uprising had turned out to be a bad idea, after all. "I just don't want to lose this, all of this freedom."
And so hanging out in a coffee bar, reminiscing with someone who went to a college that, at least on paper, and the papers we both read, was similar to the one one went, came to be known as freedom. I got up to go to the toilet, because coffee just makes me need to pee.
Summary
disclaimer:
Oh, oh, oh! The delicious irony! We title an issue "Something something Los Gatos," and next thing you know we're being asked to leave by the town council.
That's right, kids, Sane Magazine's California operations, which have thus far avoided being inducted into proper Californian society (we haven't empathized with anyone by gazing soulfully into their eyes and saying, "I understand. I do. I really feel you," and held a self-esteem shower for them much the way other people throw baby or wedding showers), have been forced, by cruel circumstance, to move up the road to somewhere else.
Irony! Taste it!
Okay, so, anyway. We're off. See you next week, kids.
Oh, and kids, don't go getting stoned. It's not good for you, and we apologize for any harm our first mention of it, in a fictional effort, may have had on you or your loved ones, especially your tiny loved ones, who shouldn't be reading this without an adult around, anyway.
So. Consider yourself disclaimed.
Discuss this in the forums
Discuss the horoscopes in the forums
Forum hosting provided by forumthing.