Cactus Alley

And every time that I look on the first day of summer
Takes me back to the place where they gave ECT
And the drugged up psychos with death in their eyes
And all of this really means nothing to me
– The Pogues, Dark Streets of London

I use that quote in a zine I made back in art school. The class was a
capstone class or something ran by a professor in the Film/New Media
department who also did a class on the history of punk. The zine was a
cool project. We learned how to separate the color channels and submit
the resulting file to a risograph printer. I should try finding a
printer here in Tucson.

My zine was a two tone print, using the red and green channels to get
some color contrast. Surprisingly to me, this worked pretty good at
getting some rich dark colors. The zine has a bunch of images of my
watercolors along side some written passages and screenshots of web
pages.

Inside the first page is a warning about a swimming pool being deeper
than it appears and swimmers accidentally drowning. In hindsight, I
shouldn't have started the zine, claiming it would be deeper than it
appears. When making the zine, I thought about how that might come off
and wasn't sure this was a good idea then. I went with the idea
anyways. Even though no one else would know from just reading the
zine, that passage was an excerpt from a previous story I wrote.

Although my description had nothing to do with the actual pool, I
wrote that passage thinking about the Gaffey Street Pool in San
Pedro. I went there once with a 'friend' and a girl he met at a job
fair. The pool was abandoned and filled with graffiti. The spot was
cool. We had to go through some cut wire fence to get to it. The pool
itself was pretty dark. Think I used my cell phone's light to look at
the graffiti. The bottom of the pool was littered with beer cans. The
deep end of the pool still had some water in it, probably rain water
or something.

The fact that the passage was an excerpt, or that the pool was a real
place, or the other context of that visit to the abandoned pool had
no real added value to the zine. No one else reading the zine would
know that visit was during an approximately 4-month long acid binge,
that ended in a nervous breakdown. Or the other weird that happened
with those 'friends'. I knew that but included it anyways.

The second bit of writing in the zine is a copy pasta of the
annoucement flight attendants make. The passage focuses mainly on the
part about putting on the oxygen mask. Make sure to put on your own
before helping others. Don't take it off until a uniformed flight
attendant instructs you to do so.

Then there's a screenshot of a Stacked article from 2015 about data
brokers. The article talks about all the information they can infer
based on the likes people make on social media. The article title is
'Data Brokers know about your drug use, your personality, and your
pregnancy'.

My next written passage is a story about starting to drink at an early
age. I start with saying that I remember drinking as early as 8. But
the story is really about drinking in high school using peppermint
extract. Peppermint extract is meant for cooking, sold in 1 oz
bottles, and is roughly 90% alcohol. They didn't card for it either. I
learned about this on the internet. Health teacher told us that a
binge is 5 drinks. I do maths. A shot is 2 oz of hard liquor at 40%. 1
oz of 90% is more alcohol than a 2 oz shot of 40%. And 5 peppermint
extracts was like $20 dollars or so if I remember correctly.

Next passage is about feeling guilty for how I treated people in high
school. I wasn't sure how they may have seen that. Within the 'friend'
group, maybe that was just viewed as just typical messing around with
each other. But then there was the collateral damage outside of that
group. The stuff that we encouraged each other to do for the lulz that
was probably not seen that way by anyone else. My writing has a lot of
questions about whether that group was genuinely friends. Or if those
relationships were healthy.

Opposite the page where I put the Pogues/Shane MacGowan quote is a
screenshot of a study published on medscape. The webpage is (or was)
titled '1 in 10 Preschoolers Have Suicidal Thoughts, Behaviors'. The
study didn't evaluate what the concept of death meant to the
participants. However, of the participants that reported suicidal
ideation, there was a strong correlation with the diagnosis of
psychological disorders in the next 4 years before the follow-up.

I didn't explicitly state in the zine anything regarding my own
suicidality. I am not totally sure of the accuracy of this memory. I
concede that the memory could have been distorted over
time. Regardless, I am pretty sure that one of my earliest memories is
a suicidal thought. The memory goes back to when I was being potty
trained. I was sitting on the little training potty thing my parents
got for me. Based on that detail, I would guess I was around 3. The
study referenced above said they found suicidal ideation in
participants as young as 3. The memory is kinda weird. I remember
thinking about an earlier memory of a party at a cousins house. I am
not sure how or if that was connected to the suicidal part.

I am not exactly sure how I worded it myself at the time. But I
remember having this weird, sick, empty feeling. And feeling like I
don't belong 'here'. 'Here' was everywhere. I wanted to go back
'there'. 'There' was before 'here'. 'There' was just somewhere that
isn't 'here'.

The last bit of writing in the zine goes back to the theme of feeling
guilty for how I treated other people. I state that I probably got
what I deserved. That the worst bullies are those that were
bullied. But also state that I didn't remember who threw the first
punch. And even so, that wasn't a good justification, because there
were innocents who got hurt too.

For the capstone class, we had a gallery show to display some of the
stuff we were working on. As a class, we included a display to sell
the zines and other merch. None of mine sold. Well, not exactly
none. The professor did buy one after the show. Thank you.