The Hump

I hope to add more partially digested ruminations from my wilderness experience in the future, but I must confess, I am still grappling with what happened. At the moment, my recollections and scrawls are fragmentary at best and terrifying at worst (for example, I am reluctant to write it here, dear, dead Henry Miller, thou who taught me that self-censorship is a killer of art, but according to my log (oh pun scatological!), I, at one desperate point in my wilderness wildness, attempted the trick of coprophagia in imitation of the hyrax, cur, and gimmicky whore). Oh YHWH, oh Yoda, Thou who gives me life, let these dark memories be more fantasy than reality, and, like my carefully crafted personalty, lie more within the realm of the mythological than the physical.

Ah! But like the life of that bitch Elizabeth Taylor, I digress. You see the reason I write today, Dear Fanatics and Admirers (not to mention the more common, more pidily, Naysayers), is to tell you the story of my Wednesday, of my Woden's Day.

Hwæt! Now listen to my tale.

I was visiting a prestigious university (I shall not name it here) for the purpose of seducing a slut who frequents the campus café. Her eyes like emeralds, her skin like milk, her tits magnificent, I approached her like a tiger on the prowl. Wearing my blue and white seersucker suit and carrying my vintage WWII Triumph motorcycle helmet, I slipped down beside her and said,

"I would like to fuck you, when you are through with that coffee drink."

I then rubbed my snake-like hand up her inner thigh and inquired, "Vanilla?"

It was indeed vanilla, and with that she threw her bullshit drink on the floor and we headed to the campus bar to get tight. But as it was only 10:30 in the morning, we had to wait a half hour before alcohol was served, so we had a glorious make out session in the grass beside the bicycle rack and dumpster. Things worked out wonderfully because by 11:00 I was sufficiently bored with my exploration of her body and quite ready to get extraordinarily drunk.

For a bar the place was rather bright, and the light served only to accentuate the horror inside: a multitude of fat, balding graduate students getting drunk in their nerdy little sanctuary, the campus Grad Pub. Ah! It was awful to see all these cases of arrested development in one crowded place. Their socks and sandals! Their backpacks! (Reginald always said: "To avoid looking a fool, one must never wear a backpack past the age of 25"). On my way to the communal washroom I glanced at a paper being written by one particularly egregious member of the species (I turned a little pink with anger and embarrassment to see he had the same model of Dell as I) and was shocked by the terrible prose. Long, ambiguous sentences; sentences never using anything but a simple structure (please don't point out my fragments, Naysayers, I am quite aware of them). Such sentences would only pass as high prose to one unable to focus due to severe astigmatism, and yet, everything about these people was an attempt at screaming, "HELLO! I AM SMART! LOOK AT ME!"

GAH! Damned fakers!

Oh YHWH, oh Yoda, I ask you on my knees in prayer, in supplication: What ever happened to Dignity? Are these the modern Intelligentsia? Say it ain't so!

And yet the females were rather, well, hot with their glasses and their books. But I decided not to speak to any of them fearing my lofty illusions of studious seductresses--girls who would explore my gonads as though they were metaphorical meteorites and then calculate the optimal angle of trajectory with which to direct their cattish tongues--would only be destroyed. I returned to my slut and my alcohol, but my slut was gone. I do have such rotten luck.

I sat there and drank. Alone. And I mused. There certainly seems to be a hump that one hits around the age of 25. Now that growing up is done, what does one do to progress? Damn these cases of arrested development. But am I really so different? I still have a childish heart.

These are the thoughts that are dissolved in a bottle of gin. Fear not change; fear not darkness. This drink shall be my last.

Ah Nigel, you are a fucking riot.

Wilderness Journal

Notes for Day 1:

- I am extraordinarily drunk on the comically-named "Balantine's Finest." I have six bottles in my rations. The bottles have doubled as toilets--I still find the notion of pissing in the bushes rather vulgar. Frankly at this point I am unsure which is scotch and which is excrement.
- Yesterday I attempted to build a cabin out of twigs. It was rather small and immediately reminded me of my deceased ferret as only he could fit into it. I am an aesthete, not a contortionist. I then remembered that ferrets do not live in huts but rather burrow into foliage. I shall do the same.
- I burrowed my lithe, hairless body into the brush. At first the prickling was unpleasant--unbearable even--but then I realized it was a form of corporal mortification. For a moment I thought I felt the wind of the Holy Spirit pass over me in my suffering. I look forward to telling my Emo friends on MySpace.
- There is no MySpace in the forest. My feelings are ambiguous.
- I began reading Inferno in the original tongue. I then realized I do not speak Italian but have been lying about it all my life.
- I am growing bored. I will drink more scotch or excrement and pass out. The forest is more tiresome than Avery Mann's house. No, that is not true... Here there are foxes and deer, though they are neither as social nor as beautiful as I imagined. Indeed they are quite filthy.
- Grass does not taste very good at all though reindeer moss is not half bad.
- I cried.

A Dream

I am lost in a forest. A silver stream runs along a beaten path. I look into the darkness of the trees--the unexplored world. Eyes twinkle like stars. I find a clay cup beside the water--I am not the first traveler to awaken here. I look in the river expecting to see my reflection. I see no one.

I do not miss the whores and the drugs. My mask has been removed. Once again I am a child, though I am a little old and wrinkled... Why is it that we look forward to the weekends but fear the future?

No matter... I will trudge on despite the sprouting grey hairs... I will metamorphose. I will become something new. I am the wily Odysseus--fate be damned. Poseidon do your best.

I am back

I am back from the wilderness. After a series of green-tinged dreams I ran away to live in the forest. I realized that all my life the forest had been calling me but I did not have the ears to hear its wind-whispered words. So in the middle of the night, four and twenty days ago, I undressed and hopped in my roadster but not before removing all the maps from the glove box and putting them in the fiery furnace of my Westinghouse stove. I put it in self-cleaning mode and watched the roads of Great Britain crumble to ashes, all while cautiously keeping my distance from the hellish heat so that my dangling genitalia would not get burned.

Let me describe to you my dream, Dear Reader, Dear Daniel of the Blogsphere. I awoke in a petrified forest but in the distance was a burning flame housed within a ghoulish cave. I crept nearer and nearer the strange and humming glow, and my body grew more and more feverish, my glorious cock more and more erect, as I stepped ever closer. The hum grew more intense, like Mariah Carey exploring her upper range, and I had to cover my pulsating ears. Eventually my senses were overwhelmed with heat and noise and I collapsed on the ground, but not before I saw a wraith signaling me with a slow and flexing finger. I nodded my head in profound obedience and the world turned an absinthe green. It was then I knew I was to escape to the forest.

With neither maps nor my custom GPS I hopped into my roadster and let it purr. I revved the engine and felt the beast beneath the hood. Using the customized paddle shifters and Momo steering wheel, we wound down the treacherous corners of Snake Hill, hitting the apex of every corner with microscopic precision. Ah, how I will miss thee, rubber on road, growl of engine, but it is the forest that calls your master. I left her on the side of the road for a lucky thief, but not before urinating on each of the leather buckets.

It was then that I got drunk. Instinctively I knew that drunkenness would be an integral part of living in the forest as I would need to abandon my fears and inhibitions (and there are many). I wanted never to see sobriety again, not even at sunrise.

I lived for three weeks in the woods. Like Nebuchadnezzar and Timothy Treadwell before me, I ate nothing but grass and berries. Currently I am coming to terms with my experiences. I hope to blog about them soon.

Yours,

Nigel Supertramp