Through the Grinder

I'm really going through bad stuff lately. Everything I do is just joyless, soulless. I'm starting to believe this is hell and that I'm stuck here for good. I've been exploited too many times to trust anyone. I've been betrayed and misled and I wallow in seemingly permanent ignorance. Nothing makes any sort of sense to me anymore.

Tonight I'm nursing a sick rabbit. I don't know how he got sick but I know I'm doing a bad job of taking care of him. He didn't do anything to deserve the pain he is in, and part of me knows it's my fault. I have these disturbing visions of hurting him in terrible ways. I don't know where these thoughts are coming from, but now I see that they are manifesting in physical reality. I have been struggling with these kinds of thoughts for a long time but now they are coming to a peak and I feel like they are going to destroy my soul. I don't know what to do. It's just a general aesthetic of uncontrollably violating something innocent and beautiful, killing the only thing in this world that I really love. It's devastating. (edit: in the time that it took me to write this, he seems to have recovered. He had been shifting around as if he had abdominal pain, a sign of a fatal illness in rabbits called gastrointestinal stasis. He has returned to eating and drinking his water and lying comfortably. I am focusing my thoughts towards him on being healing as if it were a life and death situation.)



The last time I was in Georgia, I witnessed a collapse of my entire life. I was living in a house with 3 friends in Marietta. While I was there, one of my friends was given too much acid and he went nuts. His family put him in a mental institution for a couple of weeks. I needed my friends to drive me to and from work which was 15 miles away so they became annoyed with me. My friend who had been committed decided to not renew the lease and move in with his mom which left the rest of us with a month to find a new place. I had been interested in working on a farm for a while and thought this was a good opportunity to do it. But at the same time I was incredibly nervous about it. As in, mortally terrified. It was a huge difference from everything I was used to. My 2 housemates had found a place on their own without asking me if I wanted to move in. They had become fed up with me needing them to drive me around so they left me to fend for myself with no resources, no money, no car, and no more friends to depend on. Two nights after the water had been turned off in our house, I managed to contact my best friend from elementary school who is in college as an art student. He let me spend the night at his house. But we spent that night taking the longest walk I've ever taken, never getting tired, and we talked about everything in the world. I had left a voicemail on the phone of the owner of the only farm that wasn't 100 miles away. By slim chance, he had called me back at 8 in the morning the next day. I had negotiated with him to let me move in that day.

I had moved in later that day. The program involved working on a farm, and they provide shelter and food. There was only one other volunteer there when I had moved in. His name was Victor. He was a middle-aged gay alcoholic with HIV and his mother was dying of cancer. He was incredibly depressed and chose to live in a sweltering room in the barn. I chose to live in what was to become a house for the volunteer workers - an abandoned farm house, its hardwood floors torn out, the whole thing left in shambles from people coming in and taking things from it for the 4 years that it had been desolate and uninhabited. The third night I was there I was beginning to withdraw from cigarettes from the first time, and fully realized the shock of what had transpired in the past week. As I lie in my makeshift bed composed of blankets on a dirty floor, I felt invisible mosquitoes landing and biting, landing and biting. I had no fan and the heat was unbearable. I snapped and left the house and walked down the long, rocky driveway to the street. I had planned on finding an isolated place to slit my wrists. I had no idea where I was, it was a completely new area to me. I wanted to get lost. I just walked and walked until I realized what a coward I am. I found my way back to the farm. Somehow I slept that night. The next morning, I made no mention of my journey into utter darkness.

Life as a worker drone could have been worse. When Victor's mother died, his alcoholism possessed him completely. He refused to work and I lost whatever motivation I had to work. He eventually got into a fight with the owner of the farm, attacking him with an empty vodka bottle. He was immediately booted off of the farm and went to live on an illegal chicken farm. Earlier this year, that chicken farm exploded. Literally. The whole thing went up in a huge explosion. Completely unexplained.

I met some really nice people who were passing through America using the farming program to move around. Most significant to me were two swedish girls who were both a year younger than me. Two days before they had come to my farm, they had taken acid for the first time together in New Orleans. That aesthetic had stayed with them. They were deep, artistic and highly intelligent, like no one I had ever met before. One of them, I fell deeply in love with. She was tall, beautiful and had the most amazing eyes. The two of them were only set to stay for four days. I looked deeply into her eyes as she walked off into the night never to return, and I had never told her how I felt. So it goes. I will always remember them.

After they left, nothing was the same. Their arrival and stay was the peak of my experience there. Then began the downward spiral.

A Jehovah's Witness from california, a girl of 18 who was travelling across the world on a bicycle, came to our farm. She stayed for a month. The first night she was at the farm, she and I and another volunteer from Brazil slept in a frozen room with one electric heater. It was 12 degrees that night. There was frost on the inside of the windows. It was symbolic of the hell which was about to ensue. This frigid sleepytime continued for a week. Soon after she arrived (and soon after I realized she was insane, having caused several religious arguments with the owners of the farm, calling them "swine" and telling them they were going to hell) we received 5 more people - a couple from China and 3 friends from Texas. 8 in all in an abandoned house that I had fixed up on my own. She managed to convert the Chinese people to Jehovah's Witnesses after brainwashing them night after night. One of the people from Texas introduced me to Yerba Mate, for which I will always be grateful. The jehovah's witness drove me absolutely nuts. After the others had left, it was just her and I. And she was very, very annoying. She had the mind of a child and I did not see her off when she finally left.

After she left, I was there alone. I had started talking with my ex-girlfriend again, having forgiven her for breaking my heart for the 3rd time. What a mistake. I began regularly playing music with the friends who had left me in the dust months before. I was feeling forgiving, refreshed from my experiences with interesting (if not crazy) strangers. Quitting cigarettes and only eating organic, homecooked meals made me feel better than I ever had after eating nothing but microwave dinners and fast food and guzzling caffeinated soda my entire life. I was reading books regularly, finally. The only thing I could complain about was that I was not being paid. I had no money whatsoever. But it really didn't matter, considering I was getting plenty of sunshine and waking up early to do fulfilling work in the fresh air. Things were getting to be great for me, something I had never experienced. Then I began finding psilocybin mushrooms in the large pile of horse bedding that I had cleaned out of the barn with the two swedish girls. I did enough research to find out that they were Panaeolus Cinctulus mushrooms. This was an odd opportunity. The people who owned the farm were religious and not drug-friendly. So I had to keep this on top-secret status. It became troubling to me that I had to hide something from them. The morning after a tornado had passed through, a day after the deadly tornadoes in Alabama that were all over the news, I found a good-sized flush of these mushrooms. I took them to my room, being as super secret as possible. That night I ate them. I didn't really feel anything at first, then I realized I felt like a cotton ball and was being sucked into the patterns in my straw hat. I gazed out into the sunset and watched Trees: The Movie.

Things changed after this experience. Victor returned to the farm, much to my surprise. He had nowhere else to go and had lessened his alcohol intake. But I was much less willing to judge him as I did before. We became friends. Around this time, my work was becoming harder with less return. I was used to wheelbarrowing 200+ pounds of soil uphill for 3 hours a a day every day for weeks on end. But then it became time to keep the overabundance of plants on the farm watered, which was my job. Our water was coming from a well, which frequently ran out due to the owner's wife doing 3 or 4 loads of laundry every day. She was obsessive compulsive, a nurse and a neat freak. She worked at a hospital and paid all the bills. The owner of the farm had worked as a CFO for a big electrical company for years but had quit his high-paying job to go into farming. He lost most of his money on a bad lease for a nicer looking farm up the road. They were hoarders, keeping every single thing they had ever owned. The barn was a terrible mess, it was their storage space and they lived in a tiny loft above it. Him, his wife, his mother, and their 2 sons. They had a maid from El Salvador, a very nice woman, clean their house, take care of the baby, brew a special drink they had created, do their ridiculous amount of laundry and cook 90% of the food that they and I ate.

The laundry thing was getting out of hand. I could only water plants for 5 minutes at a time before having to let the well re-fill (if it ever did). This was 5 minutes at a time every 30 minutes to water 280 beds of plants. Extremely tedious, to the point of insanity. They began blaming me for plants not getting watered. I became less and less willing to do it. I talked to Victor about the problems I had with the family and he was no stranger to their idiosyncracies. Having his support made me realize that I was not alone in my perceptions and I stopped working altogether. The plants I had raised to be big and strong died as no one took care of them and no one in the family communicated with me. They stopped bringing food to my house and I had to eat Victor's food that he bought from the grocery store. It was very unnerving to live in this house on their property and not have any contact with them. Victor left after about a month of my refusal to work. Around this time I cut off my ex as on her bi-annual vacation she had hooked up with her acid dealer "boyfriend" from 2007 in canada and had ignored me completely for the 3 weeks that she was gone, after months of us rebuilding our friendship and me falling in love with her again. It was really a far more traumatizing experience for me than I am willing to get into here but understand that it contributed to the dreadful atmosphere of the ensuing events.

Things got really uncomfortable. I was not talking to them, and they were not talking to me. My dad sent me about 100 dollars a month (this began at about 200 and moved down about 50 dollars each month) without knowing of my situation and I was able to walk to the grocery store every week to buy the cheapest food I could find. I can't really explain what this was like, to live unwanted in an abandoned house, in constant fear that they would kick me out any moment, having nowhere to go. This lasted for months. Months. It was my own personal hell. I had all the space I had ever wanted, but in completely nauseating circumstances. Near the end of each month I would start to run out of money to buy food. I would panic. I would starve myself to conserve what little food I had. I never knew when my dad was going to send more money. It was completely by chance (and completely unlike him) that he had decided to send me any money at all, much less on a regular basis. My formerly comfortable room became a strange, dissonant prison cell. My walks to the grocery store became silent trips through inner torture chambers as I spent my last few cents on a pack of ramen noodles that was supposed to last me longer than it ever could. I had to pretend everything was fine for my friends who I played music with on the weekends. I don't know why, I just had to keep my stupid, selfish pride. They couldn't have helped me anyway.

I realized true loneliness. True despair. True loss. It was terror. It was a slow, banal churning of gears of doom. It was almost christmas and my dad had mentioned something about flying me out to Michigan to stay with my family for a week. I called him about it and told him I was in bad shape. He drove down and picked me up and took me away.

It was very hard for me to recall these events. I had pushed a lot of these memories aside until tonight.