This was actually the opening to a Christmas party invitation, believe it or not…. Not sure what year.

I’m looking through a forest of poinsettias. Red leaves, yellow leaves, pink leaves. Some rusty salmony color too. Used to be all you could get was red. That’s what poinsettias were, red. Just red. The Aztecs used to make dye from those red leaves.

Wow…I forgot to send this. I started it–that’s what that bit about the red was–but decided nope it was too inane and then forgot all about it. I really was looking through a forest of poinsettias, though, a zillion of them on the coffee table. We’d gone to Trader Joes and Fyl went mad and bought a cart full of poinsettias. And there they were on the coffee table, all of them and I sat there staring at them, then into them, then through them and before you know it the antihistamine I’d taken had kicked in and the invite trundled off into nowheresville and hence none of you got the official invite. You got the semi-official preliminary invite a few weeks ago . But not this one. And since the anti-histamine is taking effect again (an allergy to a shampoo….kind of pathetic for a big gnarly dude to fall allergic to something as silly as a shampoo, I know) then this invite is looking into oblivion as well. But I can’t afford to put it off again…what with all the shopping and planning and cleaning and xmasificating going on round the abode it’d be a shame if no one showed up. It would be an easy clean, but a shame. This is really going nowhere, this invite. And I’m getting sleepier, kinda tingly round the extremities. I have no idea how anti-histamine works. I assume by magic.

I yawned just now and it was vaguely euphoric. Must have been that second pill. Just wait till I toss down the spazz meds. I wonder if I can score a quaalude for a chaser. Do they still make quaaludes? I had to spell-check the word. Couldn’t remember how it was spelled, two a’s or two u’s. It’s funny…when I typed quaalude the first thing that popped into my head was Rodney Bingenheimer. Though I doubt Rodney ever popped a quaalude, but still, those were the daze. Once at the Capital Record swap meet–must have been early 1980–we were hanging out with Darby Crash and some others and some chick came around with a big jar full of pills. All kinds of pills, every color of the rainbow. We each gobbled down a few–one of this and one of those and one of that–and washed them down with warm beer. We’d taken a bus and the ride back down Sunset was kind of twisted, all these pills pulling in opposite directions, up, down, in and way out. We got back to the pad and tho’ I don’t remember what happened after that I’m sure if I did it would be far too much information, so nevermind. Don’t think we ever did the pill cocktail thing again. But it was so seventies. TAQN and all that. Later I was listening to the Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s record and some artist is caught on mike fucked up out of his mind and trying to score some pills. Some downers. He can barely talk and he’s trying find some downers. But I connected with him. We grokked. A mind meld. There he was about 1970 trying to get as fucked up as possible and there I’d been a whole decade later doing the same thing. Ouch.