The Incompetent Drug Dealer

This has nothing to do with the post... I'm just really proud of this picture.

Under most circumstances living with a drug dealer is probably a stupid idea. When said drug dealer is the single most unqualified, inconceivably incompetent person on the face of Earth, however, the whole situation changes from idiotic to downright hilarious. I know this because when I first moved to London, before discovering the joys of squatting, I couch-surfed my way into spending a brief stint sharing a flat with the most horrible excuse for a peddler of narcotics this side of the sky. Her name was Katie. If drug dealers were types of facial hair, Katie would be a goatee. If they were crimes against humanity, she would be a child killer. It was that bad.

For starters, Katie was rarely in possession of any drugs. On the off chance she did manage to score, she would get so fucked that she would either lose everything she bought, or give it away to strangers in an MDMA-infused generosity seizure. Secondly, all of Katie's drugs smelt like vagina. This is because she insisted on storing them in her underwear. Once, on her way to a club, she squatted to pee in an alleyway, forgetting that her drugs were hidden in her underwear. As she began to pee the drugs fell out onto the pavement and she pissed all over them. This, in itself, is pretty gross. Not as gross, however, as the fact that she dried them out on the living room radiator the following day. Good as new.

Paranoia was a massive side effect of Katie's drug dealing, and as a result she was constantly on the brink of a complete freakout brain-explosion. Her eyes possessed an incessant flicker of the criminally insane. Convinced both the house and her phone were bugged, she installed a system of codes that allowed all of her friends and clients to refer to drugs freely without putting her in danger of being locked away for life. You know, 'Kevin' for ketamine, 'mom and dad,' for MDMA- that sort of thing. The problem was, her eternal airheadness prevented the code from ever functioning properly. For example, once when I called her to ask for some ketamine (for a friend, obviously) I made a fleeting attempt to use the code.

"Is Kevin still in your room?" I inquired.

"Who's Kevin?" she asked?

"You know, Kevin."

"No, I don't know," she answered worriedly. "And if there is some random guy in my room can you please tell him to get out?"

"No, you're not getting me," I said, grinding my teeth. "I'm talking about the Kevin that you sometimes keep in the green box."

"Ooh! You mean white powder Kevin?" she said excitedly. "Yeah, there are two grams of him left." Nice. Why don't just tell me your full name, address, and date of birth while you're at it? I have since given up speaking in code.

This sort of thing happened all the time. There was Secret Garden Festival, where instead of taking advantage of all the drug-hungry creeps she spent the entire three days crawling about in the mud, trying to figure out what a tree was. I only saw her even attempt to sell drugs once. Unfortunately, she got a bit confused in the middle of it and instead of handing the girl MDMA, Katie reached into her bag and produced a handful of crushed-up leaves. Then there was the time she sent out a mass text-message to everyone in her phone telling them about the new stock of drugs she got in, conveniently forgetting that she had the numbers of family members and previous employers in her phone as well. Not that her mother would mind. I met the woman twice and on both occasions she was wearing fairy wings. Still high from that bathtub full of acid she drank back in '78, I presume. And he list goes on and on...

Sadly, though I love her, I have to admit I'm glad my time living with Katie has come to an end. She made for good TV, but the novelty of having massive tribes of assholes show up at your door at one in the morning asking for smack wears off after a while, and you just want to be able to sit back, relax, and shout 'crack-whore heroin-faced acid casualty' without worrying about speaking in code.

The Shamanic Journey

Matthew Stone performance- Conduit Gallery, Milan

"You wanna come to Milan with me and be part of a dance piece I'm performing at an art gallery?" asked my friend Matthew Stone. "It's going to involve lots of roaring, you and me wresting, and about thirty ballerinas."

"Yeah sure. Why not?" I said, suddenly registering the severity of the word 'dance.' "I love roaring."

Matthew is an artist. I know this because he always has lots of weird dangly things hanging from his clothes, and the majority of the time when he speaks I don't have a clue what he's talking about. He's like the sphinx—he speaks in riddles.

"The performance is a representation of the shamanic journey, and the fact that the shaman can not exist without his community," said Matthew, readjusting his pirate hat. “I want to us evoke enough spiritual energy through the dance that we can actually make someone fly.”

To give you a little insight, ‘journeying’ is a method used by shamans to activate the imagination in order to explore the spiritual universe and experience expanded awareness. The most common way to journey is to lie down in a dark space, relax, and listen to a repetitive drum beat. Next you visualize the place that you would like to visit on your journey. Once you are there you, like, find your power animal and it helps you to solve all your problems by leading you on a magical spirit adventure... or something like that. I'm not explaining it very well, but you get the idea—that higher consciousness shit.

"Put this blindfold on and lie on the floor," Matthew whispered as he pressed play on the shamanic drumming track he downloaded off Limewire. "Let's journey."

My journey begins and the place I choose to visit is Long Beach Island—a small island off the coast of New Jersey. It's pretty lame as far as beach towns go and it stinks like garbage but my family went there every summer for the first sixteen years of my life, so I have somewhat of a connection with it.

So I arrive at the beach and the first thing that happens is I get attacked by a bunch of crabs. (Nice one imagination. This was supposed to be a pleasant, calming experience, remember? For fuck's sake). After the crab extravaganza is over, I go for a swim in the ocean. Next thing I know I'm swimming deeper and deeper, down a dark tunnel and into what looks like an underwater coliseum. This is where I meet Claudio, the rugged, handsome merman. This must be my power animal, I think. I feel a sudden pang of sadness when I realize that my power animal has a greasy ponytail and the sort of face that looks like he probably rapes animals, but I choose to ignore this and continue swimming.

Claudio then leads me to a throne from where I can view the entire stadium. What I see is a giant conveyor-belt lined with hundreds of mer-babies. At the end of the belt is a large stone hammer. As the babies travel along the belt, the hammer falls from the sky, crushing the infants one by one. Each time a baby dies the crowd goes into hysterics, cheering with delight as it's tiny mer-brain is violently spewed from its collapsing skull. What a bunch of twisted mermaid fucks, I think to myself, completely ignoring the fact that all of this exists solely in my own demented brain.

Post baby-crusher Claudio and I go back to his aquatic apartment where he covers me in glitter and we fuck for a while. Somewhere in the middle of all this he kills a bird with his bare hands. The whole experience was really deep. I learned a lot.

* * *

Fast forward two weeks and I am sitting in my bedroom, typing these words with one hand and furiously rubbing my clit with the other. Reminiscing about my adventures with Claudio has made me incredible horny. What a fucking babe.

The performance in Milan has come and gone. It was a success, if only in that it heavily confused a load of arty Italian people. Afterward everyone in the audience gave Matthew a collective blow-job, not because they wanted to, but because it just felt like the right thing to do. As we were leaving the gallery I overheard a conversation between two old women

"I thought it was pretty although I didn't really understand it," croaked woman number one. "They should have handed out a pamphlet to explain."

"I agree," added woman number two. "And that awful smoke machine made me cough."

"How dreadful."


The performance will be recreated in London tonight if you want to come.

And as they reached for God with their fingertips, their toes wrote stories in the sand -A performance by Matthew Stone

London Performance: 15th October, 10pm -1am
Performance will start at 11pm

Cordy House
Curtain Road 87-95
Shoreditch London
EC2A

My New Sex BFF

My parents

"Why is it that all gynecologists are men?" asks my mother, sounding concerned. "Doesn't that seem a bit weird to you? I mean, what's the incentive there?" My mother has an OBGYN appointment this afternoon. Her gynecologist is a small Chinese man whom she despises. As per normal, she’s called me up the hour before, attempting to psychoanalyze Dr. Cheng. "I don't want that creep looking at my you-know-what."

"Why don't you just change doctors if you hate Dr. Cheng so much?" I ask.

"I know,” she sighs, “I should. But there's just no point. They're all men and they're all messed up in the head."

I'm in no place to criticize. I’m twenty-two and have never been to a gynecologist. I'm far too skeptical of the entire situation. All those strange metal tools resembling ancient torture devices have no place in my vaginal canal. I shove enough weird stuff up there as it is. I don’t need some evil bastard in a lab coat pulling my labia apart with an eggbeater. Fortunately, however, I have managed to muster up the courage to attend a sex health clinic on multiple occasions. I have a paralyzing fear of STDs…

"You're going to have to go someday," my mother would say whenever I refused to schedule a vag check-up. Up until recently I avoided the situation by telling her I was still a virgin. She believed this because she wanted to. Dumb bitch.

See, for my entire life my mother has been an avid preacher of abstinence. For real, sometimes I feel like she gets more enjoyment out of teaching me the evils of sex than she does actually having it. When I was younger, her favorite thing to do was to tape programs about chastity off The Eternal Word Network (aka The God Channel), then force me to watch them while she sat down next to me nodding her head a lot. They all had names like Why I'm Prepared to Wait and Just Say No For Jesus. I can’t remember much about them, except that once she taped a two hour documentary about the Virgin birth over Buffy The Musical. I cried for two days.

High school was even worse. Being the devout Catholics that they are, my parents refused to allow me into any situation where I could potentially kiss a boy, let alone have sex with one. If I invited a boy over to the house, we were allowed to spend time in communal rooms, but never with the door closed, and never under any circumstances were we allowed in my bedroom. If we wanted to watch TV, it was okay to sit on the couch next to each other, but not to lie down because, "lying down is what you do when you have sex." It was like growing up in a Thai prison. And it didn’t end there. My grandparents were just as bad. On one occasion I can remember my grandmother actually saying the words, “You don’t need to know about sex darling. Your husband will teach you all about it on your wedding night.” Nightmare.

Little good all these ridiculous rules did. All it meant was that I had lots of sex in the back seat my car and in the bathrooms of my high school. To this day my boyfriend still isn’t allowed in my bedroom. Last Christmas Blaine slept on the sofa.

Having said all this, however, over the years I have gotten used to my mother's frigid ways. Sex just isn't something we talk about, and you know what, I'm ok with that. I don’t want to know about the love her and my father make (if any), and she doesn’t want to be informed about the details of my first foursome. It’s cool. I get it. This is why, a few days ago, when I received a package in the mail from my mother stuffed full of extra-large, ribbed condoms and an instructional pamphlet entitled Five Things You Should Know About The Female Orgasm, I was slightly taken aback.

Now, let me get this straight. My mother DOES NOT do this sort of thing. It’s just not in her nature. She also doesn’t have a sense of humor beyond that of Everybody Loves Raymond, so I knew this wasn’t some bizarre excuse for a joke on her part. I was left with no other option than to assume she was on drugs.

Rather than freaking out about it, however, I decided to ignore this massive laps in character, and was prepared to pretend it never happened. Let sleeping dogs lie, eh? (Lie? Ly? Lay? Fuck sleeping dogs.) That was until I got the phone call.

“Did you get the condoms I sent you?” she chirped down the phone.

"Uh... yeah. Thanks mom, I guess,” I muttered. “Although you do know they sell condoms in England too, right?"

"I know,” she said, “I just had some lying around and thought you might need them.” Had some lying around? What does that even mean? Had some lying around where? In the kitchen drawer stuffed between the sandwich bags and all the old Christmas cards you refuse to throw away? I just don’t understand.

“So,” she continued, “how’s your sex life?” This was too much.

“Oh my GOD mom, I don’t have sex, ok? I think it’s disgusting. Is that what you want me to say? Is this making you happy? IS IT?” This must have been some sort of fucked-up attempt to get on my level, but I just wasn’t into it.

“Well, I just want you to know that you can talk to me about things if you need to,” she pressed. “You know, like if you’re having any problems, or if you’re suffering with any moral issues.”

Please bitch! The only moral issues I’m suffering from is whether SOMETHING. Ugh… I assume my mother has some excellent, long stewing reason for committing this cheap Jesus-crippled paranoid fuckaround, but you know what? I have enough stress in my life without my mother trying to be my sex BFF, or fuck with my head or whatever it is she’s trying to do. This is like a bad episode of Six Feet Under.