trustafarian-theserialfiction

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Reblog if you've seen a White person before but did not have a camera to document the encounter.

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I’m new to the movement and finding lots of hope in solarpunk. I hope this is okay to post here! via solarpunk

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Dan's ex's vibe:

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“trustafarian” part 20: the arrival [the end] Dec 17, 2016 2:53 pm

It was the unexpected appearance of a long-since unfamiliar face that kicked off the day: Andreah was cackling over chai with Bruce in the kitchen. "Oh sure, in the spring," she nodded to whatever he was saying. Probably about how he and Andre were planning on a bike tour all the way up Yonge street and back. They'd been conspiring about the plan for a few days, also over chai. He wondered if Andreah here looking for her, neither of them came over much anymore and now they'd both been over. "Dan, dan, hello young man, are you excited?" "About what?" Her teeth flashed in a long smile and she nudged her little sunglasses up. "Oh, a surprise I guess," she chortled. "It's--" Bruce was overruled by Andreah's arm outstreched lightening fast. "Don't ruin the moment!" "Dan's been shy about this whole change of hands with the building It's not fair to keep him in the dark like this," Bruce let it drop with that. "I'm going to check on Mouse and Pete, we might all be here," he announced his exit. Dan felt a sludgy dread curdling his insides and found the chai smell suddenly wretched. Why was Andreah so cheerful, schadenfreude? She and Andre had been scarce since reconciling in the fall. She'd run away from being another door fee at his show into the arms of a gratified girlfriend, who liked being more fun than watching Jean-Paul drink and Bruce's friends having a dance party for the nth time. "I heard your dear friend Monsieur Devereaux is phoning it in, good riddance," she was kidding but he took it personally. "That's what you'll say about me," he pouted. "It is." Dan harumphed through her laughing and grabbed some old bagels to eat. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Later there was a banging and a crashing on the stairs and then landing outside his door, which was being rattled. While he listened quizzically there was a key sound, and the door bombed open into the room, tearing all the graffiti labels Dan had come to see as warding stickers. The person lowered the combat booted foot they'd kicked the door in with and grinned impishly at Dan. Big hair, narrow glasses, scene girl makeup, girls school uniform? "Hi roomie," was all he got before the doorcrasher ran off up the stairs to the third floor, crashing their way up. "Toichiro's home!" Rang out as the bang of the door slamming open rang out. He was on the ladder already. Popping his head out of the floor he caught Andreah appreciatingly say "ohh, sexy girlfriend," to Bruce. "You got bouncy-bouncies," Bruce shouted in surprise, taking in what Dan now understood to be the new figure of who he now understood to be Toi. Toichiro spun in a circle, black skirt arcing around black knee highs. "They're still numb. Get grabby. What do you think of my thrifting skills." "You look like an evil cheerleader, it's great, you're great," oh great, they were all over each other, it was ten times worse than when Andre was clinging around, Dan realized. "Surprise, I secretly had funds as of months ago, the inheritance went through faster than I implied." "Dead dad gift to yourself?" Andreah sounded bored. "Andreah is tactless," Bruce rubbed noses with Toichiro. "So Pete and Mouse aren't home?" Dan asked to say something, arms crossed on the floor, torso halfway out of the hole. "We're taking Jean-Paul's suite," Toichiro told him, "You're moving in next to Pete and Mouse--if you want Bruce's old room and you get Alice's okay about it because of the door. The boys already said it's fine to shove you in the bachelor ghetto. The second floor is now the place we have shows and do the podcast." "Oh," Dan said. "I thought we were all moving out, aren't you here to get your old stuff out or something?" "No! Weren't you listening? I just got my inheritance. I'm buying my mom out. We had a rent-to-own sweetheart deal in place. It's been a long time we've paid rent. Now we can breathe." Dan had finally gotten on OW back in November. It wasn't enough to move on, particularly with short notice. He’d kept hoping no news was good news. This time, it

was. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "So we're out of the frying pan and back in the pen," Alice crowed in delight. Dan had had a nap in his desanctified cave and then gone up the back ladder to find Alice, after a jaunt to the a&w for an all day breakfast. It was an unconscious issue with heights, he'd realized at the lip of the roof. He was in a little corridor beside the one sloping gable, the front part of which had been gutted for Alice's greenhouse. The two of them sat in the big rain catchment and diversion area around it, smoking joints. The lip was to prevent monsoonal rain from pummeling off the formerly uninterrupted slope onto the awning or street below. From a sitting position the road wasn't visible below them, and Dan liked it better that way. "It's ok for me to go back in through the greenhouse?" "Did you want to walk in on the reunion special? It's not your room, yet." Yet. "You're going to miss Jean-Paul right?" He asked her because he felt like the only one who would. "Some people have a way of not being gone, it's called a phone. Don't get survivors guilt. You haven't been here long enough to burn out young, yet." She paused, assessed him shivering from her cocoon of adequate winter coat. "You know that curse, may you live in interesting times? These are the interesting times. I'm glad you're staying. I've paid in on the rent on this place, Toi has to pay us out of the windfall money or in free rent. I kind of want to keep the ball rolling here, you know?" She was a lot calmer up here than behind a wheel. He found her reassuring. "I am too, actually. Here to keep it rolling." He'd avoided the curse of the early bloomer. Now he saw Jean-Paul fading, and thought what a shame. It wasn't going to be the same, but nothing ever stayed the same. He had enough for a bus fare back the BC. It was time to make a run of it in Toronto. Booking and banking whatever he could. Making good on the collab house. [the end]

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“trustafarian” part 19: superstar dj, here we go Sept 21, 2016 11:18pm

There was a backdoor to the venue and Dan was glad after all that they'd had it somewhere else. Nouveaux Deux, Bruce was excited because the first one had been a big deal back in the day, when he and Toichiro had been . The event had been filled with podcast listeners and Dan had gotten them moving, which had been his only goal. He was sweaty and happy, standing on the small porch staircase and nursing a joint Bruce had left him with. Earlier in the night he and Jean-Paul had found Andre having a panic attack about going in, something about the claustrophobic atmosphere and too many wasted people. She'd gone home, but Jean-Paul had stayed through his set and Dan was looking forward to a good review. He knew his friend hadn't moved from the bar but he'd watched everyone who was dancing have a good time. "It's you," he spotted Jean-Paul surface from the depths. "Air," Jean-Paul gasped to the night sky. He looked wan, probably dehydrated without even moving. "So what did you think, it went well huh?" "That was a nightmare, I'm sorry." Dan shrugged, at a loss for concern. "Hey no problem. Was it just hangover blues or?" They were interrupted by Bruce and the venue manager wanting to pick up the gear that wasn't staying, which meant that he had to skedaddle with his laptop before the next guy showed up later. There wasn't much to be said in complaint about his lowtech operation when he was bringing in audience. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ They stopped at Jean-Paul's place later, after a coffee in the market from Roscoe, over which Jean-Paul had explained his falling out with Toronto, which had happened in layers and was almost complete now. Somehow seeing his friend take a stage had brought him back to being a band manager and he'd spent all night hating the mixing, the musical choices (floorfiller over stoner doom with occasional crescendos of moshable hardcore, it wasn't very coherent to anyone except Dan and the people who were there to move), and the concept of it happening again and again had him drained. Of anything. He had made the decision to leave Toronto a while ago, he said, but now he knew he was no fun and had to make good on his escape to solitude. He had saved up a lot of thousands, over his years of entrepreneurship, and had been combing real estate listings the entire time. As they transitted back to the maison Dan found himself embittered at Jean-Paul for having a foot out the door and not telling him. He was also mentally skirting the sense that there was some set he could've delivered that would've made Jean-Paul as happy as the people whose goal had been a good time. Some set that would've made him feel the way he had back in the shopping cart or at the banner drop picnic. Jean-Paul said that what made him happy was thinking about moving out to the sunshine coast. Now he was drinking tea at Jean-Paul's little kitchen table and hearing about Savary Island and yurt building companies and Jean-Paul's dreams of stacks of books and two cats named bongo and poko. It sounded lonely to Dan but he wasn't sick of company. It felt lousy to not be comoany worth keeping. "You're stranding me here for the Maison tanking in this sale thing thats supposed to happen in a few months," he reproached Jean-Paul, hearing himself sounding whiny and knowing it wasn't going to change a mind or win a heart. "You're always welcome at my place, when it's done. I have to have it to move there. It's a lot of money to launder through a real estate buy. I'm banking on crossing my fingers and praying they don't notice when I file my taxes as a lying artist again. There's a lot of cash gifts unaccounted for there. I haven't been willing to take the plunge yet. I should have in the summer but I thought, maybe one more year. That's more or less what I'm committed to now. Worst case scenario I'm living in Lavender in Rose-Marie's driveway for a few months. You could always move back to BC and live with someone in your family until you had income, roommate options, that kind of thing." "Fuck," was

all he could say.

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“trustafarian” part 18: the big rockabilly wedding in the woods June 28, 2016 4:22pm

“And—oh, OH!  This REMINDS ME,” Bruce looked epiphany-struck and Dan waited in anticipation, heading to his room down the ladder. Mouse looked sleepy and annoyed from the couch. After sleeping off the big stonerfest around the start of what felt like summer, there'd been a blur of parties around town and smoking on the back balcony with Bruce if they were both up. Mouse had just woken up and was annoyed by the noise but Dan was well inured from the afternoon he'd spent being cohost in Mouse's place. Mouse had other parties to go to and was off schedule with Bruce for once.  “Dude, DUDES,” Bruce shouted out from the kitchen to the audience he'd gathered, “my sister’s getting married!  DAN, you’ve gotta come to my fam’s place for this, my parents’ parties are balls-out amazing, and weddings are when the funfetti hits the motherfreakin’ FAN. Hey for real, Mom and Dad said I should bring the entire Maison fam to meet the bio-fam—the whole kit, caboodle, fuckin’ everyone.”  Dan shot a look at Mouse. “I have already R-S-V-P’d,” Mouse said, enunciating. “Oh-my-what dude, it’ll be so fun.  You’ve gotta come, I’d invite all the loyals if I could but it's her circus.  I’d’ve given you more of a head’s-up and asked for a track or something but it’s like, they’re kinda ultra rockabilly.  It’s a rockabilly wedding,” he laughed. “Should be a hoot.”  Dan felt himself smiling.  A great big rockabilly wedding in the middle of Manitoba.  The heat from the airless second floor was oppressive and he resolved with himself to do some mixing while he waited for mouse to vacate the nap station. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dan made some pants he’d found in an alley last week into an extra pair of cut-offs, and stuffed them along with some t-shirts and found tank tops into an old featureless backpack he’d found in the perverse cellar.  They’d leave this evening, arrive in two or three days, and the wedding was in five days. It was a warm, sultry night of a striking kind that he'd never encountered in Vic. There was a haze of Bruce's pre-leaving weed vape saturating the air above him like a fog, and jungle playing. Outside traffic echoed through the cracked window and he decided against worrying about shutting it. There was no rain upcoming according to the weather for Ontario and Manitoba both, and if it did and any got in probably it would stop and dry immediately, he predicted. He didn't know the leaving plan, just the leaving when and who.  Dan wasn’t sure of the reason for the night-time departure, but Bruce’d asked everyone to assemble in the common space at 2 a.m.   With ten minutes to spare, Dan climbed into the living room and was greeted by the populace of Maison Rockkoku. “The bus is out front, it’s all tuned up and running.” That answered how.  Bruce was texting quickly, friscolating with pleased excitement—understandably, with everyone in the house agreed and assembled to attend a blow-out wedding at his family’s weed farm.  Andre hadn’t been willing to take work off to be Bruce's plus one and Andreah had told Dan off for asking her, and their absences felt not-uncomfortable, but this occurred only vaguely to Dan, who had been staring at Pete since emerging from the second floor. There was some phenomenally mole-like air about Pete today, which Dan would’ve expected if he’d thought about it.  He had thick Buddy Holly glasses, he was completely washed out like he'd been inside since the spit party, and his black hair was hanging in filthy clumps in the most extreme gravity-defying reverse mullet Dan had seen him with.  He looked as ghastly and haunted as a cartoon of a guy working on his PhD alone in his room for over a year, might.  Dan decided against prying about it when Pete glared his way. “Whose place did you have it at, again?” Jean-Paul studied his nails after asking, his summerwear impeccable and inasmuch very funny to Dan; he was wearing transparently-expensive black jeans he’d made into cut-offs, with thin-strapped flip-flops and a very fine cotton tee, hanging from the plunging v-neck of which were some

fancy-looking shades. It was too much. He looked like a billboard ad of a sporty beachgoth. Dan took it for his lakeshore look.  Next to him, where he leaned against the couch, was a perfectly plain black canvas duffle; what an accessorizer.  Bruce was perched atop the half-pipe, vaporizing gleefully in an ancient hyper-colour shirt, hair pompadouring under his wraparounds. “Oh, Rose-Marie’s, she’s got that little side-alley off the driveway that she doesn’t use, right?” Dan wondered if Jean-Paul had met Rose-Marie, or whether he’d already known the Maison had a tour bus. It was probably a burning man transport or something. Probably whoever Rose-Marie was she'd been using it as a guesthouse.  He was still watching Pete, who occasionally glanced back impassively from where he was leaning at the kitchen island, eating a cucumber as if he did things like eating where people could see him every day as opposed to twice a year. Occasionally he’d swipe the cucumber through a small dish of something dark and clear.  Mouse sat in the little white chair next to the couch, reading with his usual faux-bland air of contained intensity.  “Well, everyone’s here and so is our transportation,” said Jean-Paul, crossing his arms loosely.  He peered up at Bruce expectantly. “Hey, whoa, I’ve got like, six whole minutes here,” Bruce jumped down from the half-pipe though, and cleaned the volcano’s mouthpiece. He then disappeared down the hall and emerged moments later with a sand-coloured rucksack into which he was stuffing a shirt and a bag of weed approximate in dimensions to a throw-pillow.  Dan saw Pete roll his eyes and smile.  It seemed like a lot and his thought was it was backup weed in case they got stuck or needed to trade for a ride to a gas station or something. Bruce looked jubilantly over at Dan and then Pete and said “dudes you’re gonna fuckin’ looove the shit my Dad grows—but I figure like, roadtrip, right?  Plus he’d wanna try this, it’s completely bombass and he’s super down on hydro so it’s like a, a…’dude you’re gonna looove this shit’ teachable moment thing.” Dan was somewhat relieved that it wouldn’t be an issue of smoking just with Bruce while Jean-Paul was around being sniffy.  Jean-Paul was giving off an air of total nonchalance though, utterly lacking in judgemental vibes as he waited, now standing upright with duffle in hand, expectantly. Dan was glad he wasn't so wound up, himself.  Mouse put his book down spine-up on the couch and stood up, apparently bringing nothing. Dan guessed he got carsick. They all trooped downstairs and were greeted on the street immediately in front of the building by an ancient-looking school bus, painted bright pink.  To Dan’s surprise, although he realized he might have assumed someone needed to drive it over, there was someone hanging out of the window; someone with stringy bleached hair, beetle shades, and a purple straw cowboy hat on. “G’day SLOWPOKES,” said the person hanging out of the window.  The bus was parked on the wrong side, facing incoming traffic. The street was deserted. No wonder Jean-Paul had been a stress case, no wonder they were driving at this hour. “Have you met Alice?” asked Jean-Paul from Dan’s side. “No…I don’t think so…” he hadn't. “Alice lives on the roof.”  Jean-Paul sounded amused. “Where’s ‘the roof,’” Dan asked, feeling odd, like he knew this. That sounded like a punk house name for somewhere above Eglinton. “Our roof.  She’s a housemate of yours. I knew you didn't know," Jean-Paul sounded pleased to be right and somehow also like he was indicting someone. Bruce bounced around, bopping parts of the bus that didn't appear to be gauged by bopping. “I totally mentioned Alice! I think!”  He shrugged. “My bad!”  Mouse sighed and took Jean-Paul and Pete’s duffels, carrying them around the front of the bus to the open door. Dan looked up at Alice and Pete followed Mouse. Jean-Paul said “hello gorgeous,” to Alice.  Alice tipped her purple cowboy hat and grinned, Cheshire. “Have you met the bus yet?” Jean-Paul asked Dan.

Dan shook his head no, slowly. He guessed Jean-Paul thought that he might've gone to a festival up north with Bruce and Alice recently but he'd stayed home and pouted about a call from his sisters instead. They didn't think what he was doing counted as meaningful work. “HER NAME’S LA-VENDAH,” shout-talked Alice, slapping the side of the pink bus below her window. Alice looked like Jean-Paul’s sister might, if Jean-Paul had a  stubbly sister who did a lot of speed, but also lifted weights and hit the lakeshore to tan more regularly. “So…have you been living on the roof…” “SINCE 2010!” “Alice usually over-winters in the metal…construction on the third floor,” supplied Jean-Paul, still sounding amused.  Dan suddenly remembered the winter, and the 2nd floor cellar door to the garden being jammed, and even something about, there was a door in Bruce’s room. And about the little nap shack thing. “You—" don't look very transitioned he almost heard himself say out loud. Then he realized he had heard it out loud. Jean-Paul had clapped a hand to his forehead and looked pinched. "Sorry, it's 2 in the morning, my brain isn't in gear," he sincerely apologized. This was the kind of thing Bruce and Jean-Paul had specifically been worried about, he realized. "Get in the damn bus and I'll explain black market estrogen availability to you," she told him. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A few hours later he was still talking to Alice. She drove like a maniac and claimed that was the only way to drive the bus. On the highway it didn't matter much how unwieldy it was, but it handled like a bathtub and even as nondriver he could tell Alice was basically qualified to make the claims about it that she had. After Dan'd learned more about prescriptions and what got provincial coverage and how to get it covered and why that was difficult, they had been talking about her client pool and how one of them were funding breast augmentation when she was relying on hormone-based naturals growing in, which she was actually delaying in order to keep being marketable to the ones who liked her to look like she did now and dress girly for them in private. She insisted that augmentation was a matter of semantics and there was nothing to worry about, when he'd asked about her business model and long term plans from the perspective of, are your clients safe to string along. None of them were particularly lucrative or hospitable from the sounds of it but she seemed determined to make light of everything and insisted that at the rate they were paying expenses including hormone pickups, she was the one being strung along. "Were you stuck on the roof all winter?" He felt he'd been lead to believe she had options. Like sleeping inside in the living room.  "What the fuck?”  Alice laughed, half giggle. “I’ve got a house there.  It was so freaking WARM this year!” “Alice decided to spend a year in hermitage after that eighteen degree day last December,” said Jean-Paul.  “I go up to visit a few times a week, make sure she’s eating and alive.” “Brucey an’ Andre like to check in on me too, bring up soup, blah blah.” Alice was staring at the road through her tinted sunglasses. She seemed to think more explanation was required.  “It's honestly fine with a space heater. The stairs go down to the back garden, right, so when I need food I come out at three a.m. and take on the gritty city’s dumpsters at my leisure. It fucking ROCKS dude, I totally Dick Perneikkie it," she held a hand out, indicating wide open space, "alooone in the ashphalt wilderness, minus fly-ins from my friends.” “If Dick Poernickie also happened to wash up at the occasional party,” Jean-Paul added. Alice pursed her lips, looking sort of impish and smug in the rearview. Pete and Mouse were asleep on a bench seat apiece behind them closer to the back of the bus and Bruce had headphones on, playing some game on his new smartphone, probably something turnbased that Toichiro was also playing, far away.  “So you’re taking a break from being a mostly-hermit to drive a giant

pink bus named--"

"Lavender," Jean-Paul interrupted. "You're not Australian," he mentioned to Alice. She looked outraged.

"It's the line!" He had some sense that he should know what the line was from because they both did.

"Whatever--Lavender--a break from being a hermitess," she looked consoled "to partybus driver out to a rockabilly wedding at Bruce’s parent’s pot farm in Manitoba,” Dan asked and stated, wanting just to say it. “SHOULD BE A HOOT!” Alice hollered, throwing up her wiry arms. They were back down with her hands on the wheel before any swerve of the bus. She was wearing a tie-dye crushed velvet t-shirt, it gleamed iridescent pastel aqua and purple in the dim light from the road.  Dan guessed Alice was echoing him from days back because Bruce had quoted him to her. Maybe he'd used that expression some afternoon on the podcast, he mused it over. Her outfit almost seemed thematic. Mostly Bruce and he talked about parties they'd gone to together and Dan found himself a defacto live music reviewer from being dragged places and then asked followup questions about the time he'd had. But the trip had been obliquely mentioned. Had he said hoot again? He suddenly wished he’d known-known Alice lived on the roof—in retrospect, having ignored her and now relying on her driving, he’d really have liked to visit, see what was new, catch the view from the roof.  Figure out if she had a license and whether he trusted it to meaningfully gauge her fitness to drive. Not to mention the general sense he now had of the weird charm of knowing this hyperactive alien was rattling around up there. “Should be,” he nodded slowly. "Nice work getting out of the junction, by the way," he meant her parking spot had been a hoot. Alice grinned again and said “fuck the pigs,’” The interior of the bus was decorated with various hangings, a couple strings of prayer flags, and at the front, a disco ball. On Alice drove.  Dan was basically relieved about their success so far; in spite of Alice's good cheer, dealing with cops was stressful even if he hadn’t technically been the one to break the law and wouldn’t feel particularly at a loss if he missed this wedding.  He really didn't want to see police clashing with anyone, let alone their driver, who seemed determined to clash with anything that presented itself. Dan could tell she was having lots of fun with alarming him. He wondered if she was as cavalier about her wellbeing as it seemed and prayed quickly to the stars that they made it there and back safe. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hours later he'd gotten somehow deeply into the topic of Alice's philosophy about living on a roof and hustling fetishists. "So a chaos mage does what, create chaos?" "Nooo, I mean maybe sometimes, but anything does, in its own way. A chaos mage calls on a vast sort of material and immeasurable continuum of like, quantum theory's strings or something--god mindstuff--to like, grant wishes and stuff. Normal things mostly, like a spell to find a book or whatever. To not have leaks. You have to balance asking and giving and expect balance to come regardless, if you don't expect it that's when you shouldn't mess with chaos." "Okay so its praying? And the god you ask for help is like, a nebula or something," Dan knew he sounded facetious and was trying not to but he liked Alice better when she was driving, and not taking a break (doing ketamine with Bruce at a truck stop). "So if I pray to chaos to bring us less chaos," he started his brain teaser but Alice smiled triumphantly. "Exactly, go ahead. But you might find yourself agonizingly bored, as agonizing as the stress of engine trouble. But yeah, ask for less chaos, except its more like, you do rituals to petition different forces within chaos or you pray to some signifyer or aspect of it--if you're going to pray. So pick your name I guess. I pray to different aspects of The Goddess because I personify the whole system that way. And I think she likes it." ~~~~~~~~~ The addition of a new person to his Maisoniverse wasn’t unpleasant per se, but it was throwing him off. He wasn’t now able to picture the same dynamics that were his best case and then likely case scenario, for the trip (neither of which had been objectionable, so he’d been

tentatively excited).  He had no idea how this was going to go overall. They were back on the road and Alice seemed to be driving the same and the bus seemed to be running smoothly. He'd seen it and imagined a series of breakdowns, no longer wondering why they'd planned to take days when the map he'd checked said it was a 23 hour drive. Bruce handed him a menthol-flavoured joint over the seatback. “Yo it’s from one of the casties, mango-somethinorother.  It’s totally a hashplant haze derivative, dude, so head-high.  He sent it to Andre but she’s all weed-abstinent right now.  Anydoodle, you like, can’t really hit a fruity tasting note or whatever—or I can’t—but it’s furry and yellow as fuck,” he concluded.  “I rolled with mentholatamated papes in honour of Jeeper-Peeper, the smokeless smoker,” Bruce nodded to Jean-Paul, who as-cued hoisted his toned-yet-near-tanlessly-white arm to show off several nicotine patches. “For the kids,” he said. “So you don’t get can-sker stuck in my coolboy fumebox.” “But Alice is smoking,” Dan notified him.  Alice had lit up and was hauling away at a Belmont with both hands on the wheel, taking a corner wide. “I’M THE DRIVER, MOTHERFUCKER. I DO WHAT I WANT,” shouted back Alice. "I was more trying to tell him to go for it than wondering why you were giving me can-sker," he repeated the idiomatic pronunciation memetically, thinking about diabeetus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Through the sunrise they drove, the view of them ‘boxing the bus obscured by trippy batiks and one cloth Iron Maiden hanging.  Dan felt remarkably buzzed and realized after some time that it must be that the sativa didn't interfere with his natural adrenaline high.  He’d always suspected that strain-talk was pretty much bullshit but the more he internalized by osmosis the more he thought in the same pattern. It seemed to matter more what state he’d been in before smoking, but he could still play the strain game and explain it that way to himself. He’d been feeling caught-off-guard and was now totally engaged and talkative. Alice wanted to talk about his ex so he coughed up whatever answered her questions about the relationship. Jean-Paul curled up and fell asleep, around the time Pete and Mouse wake-and-baked and--after hearing Dan and Alice--joined Bruce singing along to the radio (Alice insisted on radio rather than the tapes in the milk-crate behind his seat). Hearing the three of them sing along to the Cranberries was eerie. It was beautiful outside, sunny as a memory.  After Alice got bored of quizzing him, Dan moved to an unobscured window nearer to the back, and watched the summery world pass by.  He listened to some Beach Boys, and thought about chillwave, and surf rock, and how to build a dubstep-inflected centre with cooling tropicalia, and how to capture summer, and how to make people feel good, and how to make people feel like moving.  How to distil the desired action from a sound; how to lead a dancer to dance.  How to lead a crowd to move together, how to dismantle inertia.  After a while he went up to hang out behind Alice and pick through the tapes. Bruce dolled him out his ninth joint, they were keeping score (Bruce had been smoking three joints at a time the entire day, like he was determined to arrive weed-light. There were some Alice in Chains tapes, and it got Dan thinking about Alice’s name, after he thought vaguely about whose bus the bus was and who had decorated it and what, in all, it had been used for. “She was dating this girl,” interrupted Bruce with storytellers gravity, after Dan tried to re-engage her by asking if Alice was her legal name already. “I was dating this warrior,” corrected Alice, and Bruce ceded the story.  “for like ten years,” Dan saw her look back at him in the rearview.  “I’m like, 33.”  Dan could sort of see it. Alice acted roughly seventeen-going-on-ageless-going-on-eight-going-on-too-old.  “And we were y’know, always at war.  She was super at-war.  Anyway

people-were-always-asking-if-her-name-was-Alice-cause-they’d-mishear-her-say-‘Alex’-which-is-also-MY-name-so-I’d-be-like-no-I’M-Alice-she’s-ALEX” she recited.  Alex, both the name and the warrior, had come unstuck from Alice, and she’d gone to live on Maison Rokkoku’s roof.  Made sense. They stopped late afternoon at a rest stop outside Thunder Bay and Alice slept until well after sundown. Dan woke up with the Lavender mystery tour underway again, and watched the sunrise spread out from behind them over the highway. By noon that day, they were there.  A house on a hill with a big yellow field belonging to someone else on one side, a big yellow field belonging to some other someone else on the other side, and a field of corn and slightly-shorter weed stretching out behind it in an emerald cape spilling down the slope of the hill behind the house. They were somewhere in the middle of a vast lake-filled rural nowhereland. The big bungalow didn't have any kind of hippie commune Villa Villacoola vibe and Dan was disappointed. A covert house of all sorts, he realized. There was a bleached and gnarled rootball at the foot of the driveway, with address numbers bolted in.  Dan looked down at it through the window of the bus as they passed it, and was amused by the incongruity of driftwood in landlocked farmcountry. It was the only thing in sight that was artificially decorative in any way. Bruce’s family had a contingent assembled out front on some porch furniture, under windchimes and a wisteria vine. The voyagers piled out onto the gravel lack of lawn obligingly when the bus door opened, with a woman who turned out to be Bruce’s mother coming out of the house drying her hands on her utilikilt.  It was only obvious that she might not be a very mountain-climbing-weathered thirty-something by the abundance of surrounding twenty-and-thirty somethings.  She looked like she should be heading a militia, although she was quite short; sort of like a leathery Twiggy going through a Bruce Lee phase.  She gave them all painfully tight hugs and rustled Bruce’s hair with both hands, hauling his head back and forth through the air between them.  “MY LITTLE CITYBOY” she yelled.  Dan looked at her and at Alice, who was grinning and looked delighted and hyper, and wondered if Bruce hooked up with Alice, and thought how Freudian.  Then he wondered, not for the first time since the start of the trip, and sort of by force of habit by now, whether Andre or Jean-Paul hooked up with Alice. She had more history with them than the others, it seemed. She and Mouse had been living together a long time and seemed tacitly avoidant of one another, but he wasn't sure why. There were various introductions and reunions, with Alice appearing to be a treasured prodigal. She called Bruce's mom "mom." There were too many regular siblings on the home team to keep track of; Dan couldn’t remember all the names, and Bruce started handing out trees from his bag even before they encountered his father. Dan was swerved a bit by the biker vibe of Bruce's dad when he did appear, looking sort of like a tougher, leatherier Oliver Platt.  There was tremendous activity everywhere—people engaged in various tasks and projects, conversations ranging in liveliness filling most every corner of the house.  At night there was an abundance of food available in the kitchen, including a huge pot of boiled corncobs.   Bruce looked deliriously happy and satisfied all the time, around his family.  It was a little bit annoying but Dan got over it easily, battered with rounds of mom-food and the last of the big city kush. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The day before the wedding Dan and Pete were standing on the back porch watching the little lawn transform as siblings and motivated out-of-towners organized tables and string lights and chairs, dry running the change over from rows to dining arrangements. They had been mubbling back and forth about the luck they'd had with the bus not breaking down since Pete had posted up with him with the aside that it was an overwhelming number of

white people. Bruce had apparently assured him there would be native rockabilly girls there for him to flirt with but they weren't doing set-up and Pete was exhausted by the whole thing already. "Did Bruce tell you that the maison is selling?" Dan felt like a bomb had gone off in his brain. It was anxiety. "No," he felt almost mute. Pete must have detected his strangled tone and consoled "it's not a sure thing and it's not until the winter anyway. So I'm not worrying about it for now, myself. If he didn't tell you it's probably no big deal, right?" "I guess. That's... a surprise. No maison?" "I know, it's an institution." Dan didn't care about that. Watching Mouse up a ladder affixing a light, Dan felt out his implicit understanding of the Maison crew as Toichiro's brainchild, Toi's toys, collected by being brought in on the same wave Toi had been brought in on, the radioshow. Dan realized it was probably much more of a shared project and vision between Toi and Bruce, because it seemed to be based mainly on Bruce's collaboratively operational family. Having worked alongside Bruce so long, Mouse fit right in here. Where would Mouse live if the house broke up? Another investment property owned by the Sakamotos? Dan tried to think about the others instead of panicking for himself. He had no backup plan for staying in Toronto. "Maybe I could rent somewhere with Jean-Paul," he mused out loud. "Sure," Pete sniffed. "If you want to live with that." "What do you mean," is he a bad roommate, Dan started to ask, but realized that Pete probably knew as much about Jean-Paul as a roommate as Dan did, or less. "He uses his apartment for work. I hate these guys being around, they're always gross scumbags. Alice is smart, she doesn't like people knowing where she lives." Which didn't account for the times he'd heard Bruce had been up there with travelpunks. Dan had never seen anyone he thought was a client of Jean-Paul's around. The sun was dipping, and hitting them full on, now. He shielded his eyes because it was something to do with his hand, and surveyed where Bruce might be with a joint. At least Pete had taken his mind of the possible homelessness issue. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There were tree platforms at the four corners of the backyard field and from his perch next to Bruce in the one closest to the house, Dan could see the boundarywall of pure corn thin out closer to the middle of the field. The wedding party whirled below them under a spiral circle of yellow lights blinking in sequence. He was trying to avoid feeling too high to be up a tree in a diy crow's nest. Bruce had been prattling incessantly since dragging him up the tree. Dan had agreed because it was stressful to be a random spare at a wedding full of rockabilly friends of the couple. Seeing it from above he was still sure it was worth being up a tree. “I believe that we are all aspects to reality, each atom, each thought, each being, each element of the whole is itself a full reflection of the nature of reality.  When we vibrate together, this is reality seeing itself for itself.  We are sitting some distance apart, and you have a different way of behaving as an aspect of reality than I do.  But we’re the same—we vibrate.  And I…think I’ve realized the nature of reality,” Dan leaned toward Bruce, pulled. “Reality is invincible.” “You think people are invincible?” “Yes. When things happen to us, they are always good and bad.  You steal something, and you get ‘noid, but then you’ve got the thing and you also felt good.  Say you get caught, and that’s stressful—but then you’ve learned something, like that first-offense shoplifting is brushed off by the court system.  Maybe you never stop or never get good enough not to get caught sometimes and you go to jail—jail is horrible, jail is a torture-farm, yet you could read anything you were interested in, you could self-educate or get various diplomas. You could make great friends.  Say you live on the street, and you have to deal with hatred and dismissal and

prejudice and violence and unfairness every second—you’re a part of a worldwide culture of public, impoverished living, and a local culture that is based on mutual aid more than it is on competition and fear.  Say you’re born rich and you live an amazing life of pleasures and stimulation—this is at the expense of others, as the class system is unabated by your position, and say you don’t care, but maybe someone keys your BMW or someone hates you without knowing you. Thing happen to us, and they’re both good and bad. Yet we go on. Our bodies rot without our souls in them, and each part, the material and the immaterial, go on separately, changing but still, y’know, present. Even if we're ashes the ashes are us, being around still.” Dan wasn't sure about souls, although Bruce took it for granted. “About death, though, like what if I go to jail or live on the street and I get killed, or this thing breaks and I fall. DO I go on as a ghost? Really?” “Death is but the final frontier.” “So you…believe in what?  Reincarnation, heaven…?” Bruce’s face looked very kind. “Yes,” he paused.  “And I believe in science.  We are all star-stuff.  Our body dies.  Maybe our minds disassemble.  But reality existed before matter and exists regardless of what it’s made up of at any one time.  It is what it is.  I am part of reality and I am what I am and I will be what I will be.” “Invincible,” Dan tested the word. “Just like you.” Maybe it was the champage or the weed, or that ay summer has of making everything else far away and okay somehow, but Dan finally understood why Andreah had been trying to get him to care about Bruce's podcast back in February. He felt weirdly inspired. "Can you help book me a show at 8-11 in the fall? I need a venue," he said. He hadn't asked about the maison selling. For the moment, he was invincible.

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

“trustafarian”

part 17b: may the fourth be with you

May 4, 2016 3:18pm

Sometime before dawn, Dan queued up the premixed for-a-piss-jaunt four-track and creakily sidled out from the somehow-increasingly-dense tangle of stuff on and around the makeshift sitting-height booth, which was powering and playing and had a non-rotating led laser usb dongle. It seemed to also be a coatcheck and phone deposit but he didn't feel in charge of that and was leaving his own shit there too, anyway. Stumbling over uneven, rocky ground and scrub brush between boulders, he made his way away from the shoreline and its sparking fire and starry starry night and scattered merryfaced figures. The air was clear up on the dune and the city glowed metropolitanly just past the other edge of the spit, blooming light pollution. It was pretty, from back here, he felt. A class field trip to the Swan Lake Christmas Hill nature preserve blearily came to mind as he looked through daytime pictures of where he was on the map, scrolling while pissing. Waving his phone as a kind of beacon and hoping to not trip via some stroke of luck and glancing led, Dan shuffled back to shore, noting that it smelled like something chemically had gone on the fire either recently or without him noticing until he was out of the smoke's zone of inclusion. On the dusty road between his chosen patch of brush he looked out over the endless-seeming water at the first faint rimfrosting of dawn light on the horizon, then back at the city, its own predawn bubble of hazy chiaroscuro. In retrospect he wondered why he'd bothered walking so far or waiting two or three times longer than he might've otherwise; various people had been making less scenic and much shorter strolls to get to a desirable spot from their point of view. Were there snakes out east, he belatedly wondered. Someone had mentioned coyotes but he'd always filed coyotes alongside geese and skunks, urban wildlife-wise; possibly startling, somewhat annoying, basically too small to stress about. He was more concerned by venomous things. Trying not to be out-awol'd by his own set, he clambered around a bit climbing back into place, feeling like a hermit crab coming home after an open-house at another shell or something. He had ignored the few anonymous figures along the higher elevation lip above the party, but he caught himself glued--painfully socket-screwed--to his peripherals as he tried to decode whether it had been Andre and Andreah he had seen having what could really only have been furious half-clothed partydrug-sex against a large stand of cinderblocks. Later his line of vision came across the pair nearby on the shore, having an argument about something in strident yet somehow hushed voices. Andre looked truly high, her veins stood out and she was clenching her jaw like a nutcracker doll, like she could chew through wood. Dan noted with approval that Andreah, by contrast, had a much more mellow mood on, which seemed appropriate to the hour. Almost everyone was packed up and gone somewhere to camp or nearby, rolled up in a beer jacket to keep for later, cherubic smiles tucked into elbows and under hats and into the sides of dogs. Only a handful of partiers had planned on making rocks pillows by drinking enough to get to sleep country canada. He watched Andre deftly mountaingoat her way up the dropoff and take off on her bike, managing to cycle angrily, somehow, even in silhouette. It wasn't long before Andreah found him packing everything up, Bruce fluttering around over his shoulder playing preferred selections of recorded audio from his phone. Walking back toward the distant streetcar line, he nudged the topic of the fight and got a pretty unambiguous play-by-play, with Andreah sounding very bored for someone going on at length. Apparently Andre had demanded to be fucked, wanted nonetheless to be somewhat discreet in light of spectators, gotten mad about Andreah putting a hand over her mouth, and then snowballed over to being mad that Andreah had actually fucked her right there, as requested by a then-much-higher Andre. Andre, now rapidly coming down but not

sobering up per se, was haywire-angry about the whole thing, although Andreah seemed to attribute it mainly to the tidal-pull effect that Pete and his friends being in the crowd had on Andre. Dan hadn't seen who, of the constellations of people in attendance that a.m., was avoiding who, really. All the out-of-towners had seemed delirious with festive cheer, and that had set the tone until they weren't accounted for anymore, either individually or amassed as the largest group-within-a-group there. Weed smoke, at one point plumming all around their soiree as it remained stationary, now trailed along with them as Bruce heroically held aloft a blunt and proclaimed "shares," before sneezing once abruptly and concluding "for the honor of weedskull. I don't have a cold pee-ess, it's allergies." Andreah teased him about being city-adapted, concluding "I thought you couldnt take the country out of the boy." "Take my sinus out-of-the-boy, please!" Bruce was barely coherent and Dan thought he'd been doing whippets all night or something. He didn't seem to know about Andre being gone, because he didn't seem to care. Carefree even for Bruce, was the sort of unexpected not-even-my-final-form move he should probably just learn to expect, he figured, watching Bruce seemingly maneuvering to evade capture in the large invisible butterfly net zigzagging around the service road, chasing after the tousled nest of hair that denoted the broadcaster-and-apparently-bonafide-e-celeb, niche as that celebrity seemed to be. He abruptly wondered why Jean-Paul had missed out, he'd kept the party soundtracked right. Pete and Mouse had been there. Pete had even been DJ for a turn after shooing Dan off the laptop to lakepiss a beer he hadn't noticed he needed to until Pete was demanding the seat. He'd thrown on a thumbdrive with some of his friends tracks and they rapped along live, harmonizing with eachother and themselves while Pete filmed from the "booth". They'd done one and Pete couldn't get them to do more so he begrudgingly gave the night back over to some ambient trance mixed with indie rock and then old horror movie synth, low. In the light of day he didn't regret how he'd played it. Bruce had kept requesting beach dad stuff he didn't have, like Jimmy Buffet. Then he'd insist on hotspotting and emailing him files. "Hey, play some Buffet on your phone," he called to Bruce. Andreah groaned. "I've got something better, it'll take us to the gates," Bruce bounced back to them boing-a-boing-a-boing along the road. After some thumbing he bounced away again with his phone aloft, trailing a ribbon of synthwave "country roads." The sun wasn't quite up yet and Dan wondered why more of the people sleeping at the shore weren't crashing with Bruce or Andreah and figured it was just more romantic that way, and Bruce was there to see them both home because he'd had enough of that brand of romance already. He'd let Andreah wheel the bike cart with the battery and stuff, and so unfettered he fluttered by them on the road again, singing along, and changing West Virginia to Maison Rokkoku.

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

Trustafarian is a coherent AU within the wizardingandromance.tumblr.com timeline, which establishes a 100 year time skip from the trustafarian era

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

“I’m much happier at 53 than I was at 23.” (x)

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

i wonder if anyone ever bugs the guy who did scott pilgrim about impromanga.org

let’s ask. mailto:[email protected]

#the writer for slackjaw has a name to go with his manbun #jack fitzjacks

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

Pete:

Bruce: but you can use it in baking, it really depends on how sour. Its just yogurt reallyyyyy

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

When i, the writer, worked at london drugs in undergrad, there was a guy in an electropop two piece band called "bangs and curls" (after their hair). He had a hot hot heat lyrics tat because victoria

[trustafarian-theserialfiction]

If Bruce was more didactic or ideological i suppose this would be his ideology. This is sort of, authorial voice about Bruce's halfbaked personal ethos that doesnt make it onto the podcast.