Ok, first post, this is what I have to offer

The most awful part about working/owning a photo hut, besides the fact that it’s 2002 and no one owns a film camera anymore, is that the constant fumes of fresh photo paper and chemicals completely kill your taste buds.  I haven’t tasted a meal since 1997. 

I own, or was given a photo hut when my dad died in 1994 he bought it in the 70’s until he left in 1980 something.  He was not an “around kind of guy”, as in he was not around at all, but I have more that I want to say about that later.  Boy this is the worst first journal entry in history I think.  I'm calling Dana and getting out of here.

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Currently sitting in this coffee shop using an embarrassingly outdated laptop to write this, I’m sure that someday hipster youths will mod their computers to look ironically clunky but until then I just look like a dude with a busted ass laptop.  The worst part is that there is no charge to the battery and the cable is about one foot long, so it has to be attached with a blaze orange extension cord.  Like the one in everyone’s garage.

So I am sitting here looking like an idiot while I wait for Dana to show up, I need to get a new computer, it just adds so much to my anxiety.  A new vicious kind of feeling builds in my head when I see a girl come out of the back room, Toby, there’s a story behind that name but I don’t remember it.  We had a thing for about 6 months. God I hope she doesn’t see me.  It was a situation where she was well out of my league and I got really commitment minded, FUCK.  Here she comes! Dana get the fuck here!  At least I won’t look so pathetic if I am with a girl.  “Oh, hi Toby, still work here?”  “Sure do Dave, how’ve you been?”  “Oh pretty good just meeting a friend here, were going shopping for a, think of something! car parts. Well done sir.”  “Great that sounds really good, look if you wanna hang out sometime we really should, you still got the hut?”  Is there anything else worse than being talked to by an ex?  Especially when you know she's just being nice? Fuck I wish I was on fire! Or anything! Goddamn Dana get the fuck here!

Ok, cool Toby thanks, yeah I’ll let you know, but I am wondering where my friend is now, I think maybe she thought I was going to meet her at the car part store, ok I’ll see you later.  Ok I have to get up and out of here!

Ok, well that was awful! Jesus why did I not remember she worked there! Gathering my extension cord was quite a sight to see, I just tugged it and hoped to god it would come out.  Instead it separated from the computers power cable.  I leapt from my table and left the cord, an orange serpent trying to find its next victim.  I’ll consider it a donation to open mic night.  The worst part was when I left I could almost hear Toby and her cronies thinking, oh that poor guy. So I am sitting in my car waiting for Dana, I am sure I have about 4 seconds of battery left.

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Ok, I am not sure if this medication is helping me sleep but I know I am way more anxious than I was.  Anxiety level red! Dana showed up ten minutes later to me trying to make a new cigarette out of some old butts from my ash tray and a zigzag from my glove box.  I looked appropriately pathetic.  Dana gave me shit for flipping out about Toby while we looked for a new shower curtain to match her new bathroom.  Dana is meticulous about bathrooms and she remodels hers about once every three months, new towels, new unused decorative hand soap bars, she even buys all new shelving and about once every six months installs a new lighting fixture.  She has a problem, but don’t we all.  She grilled me about the Toby thing some more, told me I could at least get some pity sex out of the meet.  I politely told her that my recent anxiety has rendered my parts useless, she sighed told me I was a pussy, out of bed bath and beyond and on to the package store!

Off to sleep for the night, got some good scotch to send me to sleeps.  Hopefully this stuff will kick in and in about ten minutes I’ll be “voyaging beyond the imagination”? As some would say?

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Beautiful shitty sleep, she evades me, maybe I should stop trying to commit to her that might make her a bit more interested in me.  Ah hahaha!

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Well this morning so far has held the normal amount of self loathing that I find normal.  Thank god.

A shitty sleep, drank too much, and laid in bed thinking about how shitty I am and how I am lucky to have Dana for a friend.  Fun thing to do, when I can’t sleep at night I like to write eulogies for people I love, it is just so depressing that I can actually feel things, I go through the whole situation, the funeral and everything me flipping out standing in front of the church.  It’s great.  And you can really discover how you actually feel about a person, that’s how I discovered that I hated my mother, I would always imagine me standing up there and yelling at the people at the church.  Telling them if my mom would have loved me nearly as much as this shitty church and you shitty liars that she might be alive today instead of in this coffin etc.  I think I loved my dad, hardly knew him but I would go through it and just discover that he was a man who was never taught to love, and how would spend his whole life trying to learn, never knowing if he succeeded, I don’t think he had any other family but me in the end, and he didn’t even have a service.  Just died, in the end he was just a letter sent from a lawyer.

I stayed up last night trying to think of Toby’s eulogy.  I figured out that despite six months of being with her I really had no knowledge of who she was as a person, I think I just used her as an emotional proxy, making her look at me the way I already did, I think I got off on the pity and the way she was viciously mean to me while the whole time just trying to tell me what I knew she was thinking.  She wasn’t mean in the sense that she said hurtful things about me, as far as emotionally vicious and abusing people she was definitely low on the list, she couldn't be abusive to anyone let alone a pathetic proto-baby like me.  It just always hurts when someone tells you they don’t love you. But I let it go on for another three months, just for fucking sport.  She pretended that she still really was in love with me and I slowly drifted away.  Why would i do that to someone?  So seeing Toby just made me incredibly embarrassed at how I acted, I didn't man up and, I didn't end the party before it got shitty like I should have.

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Dana is so right! I whine way too much!  I get this laser focus on being a total bummer and I really have a hard time snapping out of it.  So what, a girl who used to date me said hello to me, it’s not the end of the fucking world right?  I also may have had a huge mood turn around because while Dana and I were browsing wall sconces she just happened to slip in that she got her monthly mushroom package from her weirdo ex-lover, Dale, who lives in Australia now. I say lover because Dale was one of those dumbass poet types who insists on calling people his lover, a disgusting affectation.  He was roughly twenty years Dana’s senior and a townie in the Northampton/Amherst area, he loved to talk about how he knew the Pixies and that once he spent a night doing triple dip acid with Kim Deal, what the fuck is triple dip acid?  Regardless Dana spent some time with him in the late 90’s and he really took a shine to her, so where ever he is he sends her a pharmacopeia of drugs.  His most bizarre package was a THC enema that ended up getting stolen by Dana’s landlord after he had to rewire most of the first floor of her apartment complex due to a botched antique lighting fixture installation.  We assume he must have taken it not knowing what it was and used it, he’s been super mellow since that happened, but what grown ass man steals a single 23 year old woman’s enema? My point was that Dana thinks that I need to clear my mental palette and take some mushrooms with her, and I think she may be right.  I have taken mushrooms probably a total of 8 times in my life and the experience was never that explosive for me, I am not sure how it works, I think it has something to do with serotonin levels but I am not positive about this, but Dana promises that it was because I was eating “cowshit” mushrooms and that these ones will certainly do the trick, she also says a trip is way different when you have an experienced guide like her and that she will make sure that this will be a great experience.  I trust her on this one; she has done more psychotropic than anyone else I know so it should be great. 7pm tonight!

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At about 6 Dana called me to tell me that she invited shitty Andrew!  Goddamn that guy is a fucking goob!  If he turns this into a fucking goobfest I swear I am not liable if I murder him during my trip, that’s all on Dana.  Ok, I need to readjust here, it’s important that I go into this in a relaxed state the drug is supposed to work better.  The first time I tried them a girl told me that and then she told me we should have sex before and during to “enhance” the experience.  I was such a fucking ball of nerves after we had sex that the mushrooms had no effect on me whatsoever and I ended up eating three burritos to get the taste of cow shit out of my mouth, three burritos is to many fucking burritos apparently because when I got back to her apartment she was blessed out and started going down on me, and I threw up in her hair.  I have had a very spotty history with drugs and a spottier history with sex.

Dana also gave me a heads up to prepare a story to tell ala Doug Coupland style, she’s been rereading “Generation X” and she said we have to tell a story while we trip, could be made up, could be real, whatever works for me.  This shouldn’t stress me out as much as it does but I am seriously worried that that goob Andrew might have an amazing story.  Why am I so worried that Andrew will show me up?  My romantic feelings for Dana have been on the low end of my crush bell curve lately so I have no idea.  Going to get my head right now, I think I’ll prepare by listening to one of my Bill Hicks albums. 

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Last night was very strange.  I’ll reassemble what I can while I drink my coffee.  The mushrooms did little to nothing for me and I’ll get to that later.  But first I’m going to tell you my mushroom story, note come up with a cleverer name than “mushroom story”

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Geoffrey woke up to the squelch of the vidscreen turning on in the other room, “Lights dim” he shouted and his bedroom slowly lit to a pale blue.  Looking around he could see the dozens of message tubes that were littering his floor, he couldn’t find his slippers in the mess.  “Slippers!” shouted Geoff, he hated using his auxiliaries but he didn’t have the where-with-all to go rummaging around his room looking for his cozy slippers while the vidscreen was going bananas in the main room.

Officer Brundt was on the screen, he always buttoned his top button of his coveralls and his bright red angry face he had today made him look more like a radish than an officer, but Geoffrey was too tired to comment. 

“Mr. Klemmer!” Brundt’s voice boomed from the speakers, “why are you asleep? We have been tubing you all morning!”  “Hi sir, yeah I disconnected the incoming message sound in my sleeping quarters, it goes off too frequently when I am trying to sleep.” “Well we have had an interesting development near your sector and as I may hate to say it we are going to need you to investigate the matter.”  “Sir, as you may remember I was transferred to this sector precisely because I am useless, transferred by yourself if I remember correctly.”  Just as he finished saying this a muffled meow came from the mess area, Officer Brundt’s eyebrows popped up.  “Klemmer! Am I to understand that you have cloned another feline?  You are aware that misuse of company cloning materials is strictly against policy, correct?”  “Yes sir, but seeing that I have been out here without any companionship for the last 8 years, a roommate is the least you can allow me to have.” Geoff said while casually preparing a saucer of milk after pouring some into his coffee.  “This is off topic, what is it that you want me to investigate?”  “I’m uploading the map to your PDA now, we can’t say too much about it until you can give us a visual.  Report back once you are suited up and ready, Brundt out.”

more next time.