Dear Bum Diary,
LAST UPDATED:
04.06.2025
By Christopher Buchanan
Dear Bum Diary,
It's been a loooong, long time… Haven’t felt like this, my dear, since I can’t remember when…
Whoooooo!!! It almost feels like I have to stretch. This site has been a wasteland, hasn’t it? While I do apologize for our absence, I can not in good faith tell you that I regretted taking a small leave for even a second. A trip out east for the Goodbye, Horses release was a much-needed break from the morbid regularness of this thing we call life: Waking up before my alarm to pressing emails, reading the rueful papers end-to-end, bearing the worst of the news, doing my own interviews on some despairing subject, going to school, work, and returning home with a blasphemous drive through order that leaves me internally disturbed as I drift off into a weed-induced, paranoid half-coma—It was a pitiful, longlasting schedule...
New York welcomed me with a refreshing embrace, like a friend who doesn’t usually express physical affection, but is so extremely glad to see you that their inhibitions slip off like an old towel does from the waist. I saw the city completely in the nude, as Adam did Eve: Trees still shed from winter with small hints of a spring comeback, birds teasing their melodies hidden from view, people wearing suffocating coats over lightweight clothing to properly fight the oscillating mood of the sun and clouds, insects trying to get a headstart on flowery goods before expiration—a horrible time for a weeklong lifespan, but one you can get sentimental about if you’ve got seventy good years under your belt.
The Goodbye, Horses release party itself went resoundingly well… However, this will be discussed at better lengths in a reflection later this week on the site. This task requires more time and professionalism—professionalism and time I do not yet have, for reasons I will go into later. Therefore, I shan’t rave about it just yet. Instead, I will discuss the psychedelic ongoings following the revelries:
Sunday had begun to wane when we (most of The Bum Diary) exited Yankee stadium right after watching Chiz Jizzum—or Jazz Chilholm for readers far off the diamond—blast a ball down first base line with a spangled new-generation alien bat with body dysmorphia. We were due to go on a WNYU radio show near Washington Square Park—hosted by our own New Jersey hunk, Yio Sotomayor—to talk magazines.
There was a significant roadblock: My goddamned coldblooded California lizard genealogical makeup. I couldn’t even focus on the bulbous, radioactive Yankee bats during the game as the temperature dropped dramatically into the high thirties. I could see now why the pioneers made their journey west to great nothingness—I had a full thick sweatsuit under a more visibly appealing corduroy suit, which didn’t do jackshit but give me miserable, cold wedgies in every conceivable crevice there was.
When we finally made it back to Park Slope from the Queens jungle, I laid my eyes on them: The tabs of acid I had begged our friend Woody to get me from the hippy flower child he bummed with during our stay in the city. If I was gonna take a break, I thought I might as well get freaky with it. I never met the gal who supplied us, but the way she took care of Woody seemed sympathetic enough—there was his Andy!—so I trusted that she wouldn’t give me something that would have me laid out on the train tracks looking to kiss a caboose. As long as he kept up the cuddling—which he indeed did—I knew I was in for an easy trip.
I didn’t feel much of anything until we landed at Washington Square Park, where I noticed the colonial glamor of New York looked eerily medieval in its agedness: There was a man doing sword work against a tree like a peasant Knight, mages of all natural creeds wandering around aimlessly with wild colors in their hair, old sages discussing political strategy over chess boards, sluggish kings begging for execution and hardly sustaining the borderless chaos of things. Something funny had been kicked into full gear…
The WNYU H.Q. was the place to be on any substance! The room has posters on top of posters and semi-political, mostly impassioned quotes on top of those posters written by some rebellious teenaged east coast spirits. In my disturbed state, I could tell which of these had come first as they popped out in chronological layers—I saw generations of the artsy-fartsy NYU student body documenting their temporary truths on the wall in hopes of one day coming back to give a thirsty journalist a small scoop on their nascent political views. Although, it is more likely they’ll find their blind advocacy slightly embarrassing when they’ve been fully assimilated to the American Whole in adulthood, much like the hippies our parents and grandparents once were.
Much to my surprise, we performed our duty to the radio quite well. We had some FCC missteps, but otherwise, we rode an easy wave: I was even able to read an excerpt from A Day at the Races while the letters clumsily danced and stretched into one another. There were larvae in each word that slithered and shook around to escape the page. Every “S” had its tips blown on each side and bled over and under words and almost came off the page completely to start slowly scaling my arms while I tried to keep my composure and read to live! The way I have since before kindergarten! Luckily, I was able to sort out the infestation and read at the level of a legitimate literature graduate, even if that program seemed to be night-school level.
After this, my trip only became much more absurd and Lynchian. All the while, a nasal drip began in the back of my throat that could only be mended with cigarettes, which made me swallow for dear life more often than I would’ve liked—I was as wide-eyed as Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown at an award show. I felt head-scratching pinpricks that were exacerbated by vicious winds, but somehow simultaneously experienced an incessant heat building up at the back of my skull… Was this the prelude to an inevitable stroke? Drugs like this can string you up this way, but I had to be sure I wasn’t ignoring some mightily serious dysfunction… I asked Alice for forgiveness, but I’m not sure she was around to listen—these symptoms were longlasting and clearly inherent to the chemical mess I had partaken in, so I rolled with the spectral punches as best I could.
We wandered around Greenwich Village for a while, during which my babysitters got themselves some food. Psychedelics are nauseating, no matter what they tell you, so I was square in that department. All I could focus on was the funky cartoon I found myself in: Brick fortresses bounced up and down to a beat I couldn’t hear; Everyone looked like the flirtatious blokes on the cover of Souvlaki Station, coming into my fisheye view and inspecting their reflection in the dark glass of my pupils; I saw truths written on the sides of walls that I had never heard before: TERMINA! Everything, and I mean everything, was on a high vibration. I ignored the sensitive cotton rains that fell on my face as I stared into the clouds and declared TERMINA! myself. I was ice skating through the most heavenly rink that man could fathom.
Eventually, we came upon the Stonewall Bar, where one of our party members had parked during our radio spot. Lord! If you had seen how far here history had come. I saw a queen spinning around in a chair to catch sight of me... Layers and endless layers of stairs lined with beads and colorful gemstomes that led toooo??? A fantastic bathroom with rainbow-stained glass that looked like a phonebooth with a line connected to heaven. There was a smokescreen everywhere and the whole place looked like a tequila sunrise; tranquil at the bottom and more pulpy and substantial on top. Misty Mountains, a drag queen, was doing some burlesque show where audience involvement was plentiful. I wouldn’t have blamed her for believing I might be in love, ready to take her away from all this, given I had my mouth widened into a permanent grin while I watched her channel Beyonce on the late evening of God’s special day.
The train stop home was where the inevitable stint of acid-based misery began and ended. Here, underground, the vibrations came to a standstill. I was exhausted from my prolonged standing and staring at the crying skies and had to sit, which made me look like a gas station junkie bent completely out of shape. This caused some horrible looks from a particular group of trenchcoated penguins who packed fearfully tight together around their belongings, as if I were a polar bear looking to capitalize off their vulnerable young. This threw me into a quiet, subdued rage: Your eggs don’t concern me! If I wanted them, goddamnit, I could have them! I restrained myself out of fear I might actually tear one of their beaks off in my daze.
The train saved those loathsome fowl before I could get to them. I got into a train car a long ways away from the group and rested my head on Johnathan’s shoulder as the glorious spins resumed. There was a full grown manchild with the most precious infant face sat across from me and another man who, without ever noticing, had grown a parasitic face out of his knee that spoke for his dark subconscious.
Things slowed down after this. It was a simple sobering process; no different from excess marijuana or alcohol—perhaps a tad more clear. I stayed up until five in the morning pondering what all that mess could’ve meant; the successful reading, the colonial knights, TERMINA!, the penguins and the parasitic knee. I concluded, after careful consideration, that it was run-of-the-mill psychedelic madness with no purpose or reason whatsoever. The illusion of meaning, with something like acid, is just what keeps burnouts on fire.
The worst thing about breaks is that they must inevitably end. A vacation on the sands wouldn’t be so special if you lived in Hawaii. And as if you are receiving a divine punishment from God for missing prayers during the fun, things are never simpler when you return.
Things got very messy in my final quarter (or semester, for you east coast slowmovers) of formal education, evidenced by the big, fat notation on my transcript that notes a retroactive grade change on a grotesque logic class that satisfied my quantitative analysis (funny math) requirement. Even worse, it was my second time taking the damn class, so getting on my knees with tears in my eyes through email to beg for a slight bump from a C- to a C, only a day after I got back, felt all the more pathetic.
To hell with all that now! I made it out of the labyrinth of liberal education alive… I withstood the endless stream of pedantic virtue-signalling bullshit about the socioeconomic state of this or that place—for a full presidential term! The moot points about the interplay of race, class and identity—or some random combination of these, depending on your professor’s preference—that clumsily stumbled over each other as they fell out of lazy jowls. I did it.
The work, though, doesn’t end there. I’ve embarked on a real job search, well past internship predictability. The Bum Diary is still of major concern too, since things are starting to heat up in that department. That goddamned schedule I bitched about at the beginning of this entry hasn’t just gone away, either, no matter how much I hoped it might happen upon my return.
Oh well. As the old adage says, “That’s just the way it goes.” Here's to hoping that one day, for all of us, life becomes a break in of itself.