I found a likeable little Canadian through his journal here at diaryland yesterday. I added his journal as my first favorite and listed him as a cross between the movies "SLC PUNK" and "Trainspotting," dark overtones and all. The incidents that I liken him most to are as follows:

In SLC Punk, there is a scene where the blue-haired protagonist, Stevo, and his grunge girlfriend Sandi are dropping acid in a park. What follows is a clippy little montage of strange perspective shots, the final one is from Stevo's view. Sandi is standing on the top of a hill overlooking Salt Lake City and she says something about beauty. Then she looks back at Stevo maniacally and the sky changes color behind her.

In another scene from the same movie, Stevo, his best friend Bob and Bob's girlfriend, Trish, are all standing out on a barren salt flat in front of Stevo's VW van. Stevo has been battling with depression and anxiety brought on by inactivity and the dialogue is on that subject, and the size of Stevo's heart. At the end of the scene, the usually pendantic Trish says something that could almost be profound and the sweeping view of the flats that follows really drives home a feeling of the desolate and the eternal.

"Trainspotting," follows a group of Scottish drug-addicts. One day, a female user in the group discovers her baby dead in its cradle, either from SIDS or neglect. Later, another addict, the protagonist, is locked in his room by his parents to break his drug cycle. He hallucintes that the dead baby is crawling towards him on the ceiling, and mixed in is another choppy montage of various memories that sum up his drug experience.

So, these three scenes summed up my initial opinion of my new friend, based largely on tales of his own drug or alcohol based binges that he put down in his journal. The relevance of the darker elements of the hallucinations were about to fall into place as well.

He subsequently tracked me down, and today I had the pleasure of reading some of the non-expository pieces he has written. And...

The "dark overtones" part was a serious understatement. He sent me a thirty four page story called "On Coming Forth by Night : A True Hallucination." Inspired, appropriate to my analogies, by a hallucinogenic experience he once had. Stories like these are my anti-drug, that's for damn sure. He says that he was looking at the moon during a trip once, and he wondered if he stopped looking at it and stopped believing in it if it would fall out of the sky and come crashing to earth. His lengthy piece was not science-fiction. It followed the abstracted pattern of a dream or a hallucination, and had some very dark implications. He hasn't posted it yet, and I won't do so without his permission. As soon as it is available, however, I would recommend it to anyone who isn't easily disturbed by bored, pupil-less, gunslinging gods who make worlds out of gears because they are bored.