Tweak3nd: A Disaffected Look at How it is to be Young and Cool or Whatever

By ORN

Tweak3nd chronicles the literal and metaphysical highs and lows during a drug and alcohol-fueled long weekend of a group of privileged, disaffected, social-media and technology-obsessed college cool kids. While wittily dissecting the intricacies of the rare partying craft, the invisible protagonist, student identification number @02596194, narrates the exploits of her party animal friends who have mastered the art of getting high and staying there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ORN
• Release date: Jul 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301091843

ORN

O.R.N., aka Obscure Revolutionary Novelist, is a watercorn (water unicorn) who loves smoking seaweed. He/she (as unicorns are androgynous) surfaced from his/her underwater sea-cave in 2012 because of rising ocean acidification levels brought about by climate change. After falling in love with Atlanta drug dealer and gang banger music, O.R.N. decided to write novels inspired by the creativity of the ATLien impresarios and internet phenoms like Migos and Lil B The Based God. The purpose of these novels are to spark a culture war that will revitalize the world's youths commitment to a global sustainable revolution...I think. Declaring that, "Cool is the Weapon" O.R.N. continues to freelance as an intellectual internet troll at www.thir5ty.com. O.R.N. hopes to return to the ocean one day, but continued human destruction of the environment has proven it is unlikely. Until then, O.R.N. is committed to terrorizing the world with O.R.N.'s sardonic intellect, creativity, and dark sense of humor, or whatever.

Book preview

Tweak3nd

Tweak3nd is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred, that means you, Kry$t@l. Haha.

Published by O.R.N. at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781301091843

Copyright © 2013 O.R.N

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Smashwords made me type this, IDGAF!

A Thir5ty.com Production

www.thir5ty.com

3-Day Weekend + Tweak

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TWEAK3ND

A Disaffected Look at How it is to Be Young and Cool, or Whatever.

O.R.N

A thir5ty.com Production

The DEDICATION

(Not to be confused with the Weezy mixtape)

For the ones who I smoked blunts with, duh.

Cuz it’s the one’s who smoke blunts with ya…

You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it [cocaine] or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.

–President George W. Bush

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue

#ThirstyThursday

#FadedFriday

#SmackedSaturday

#StonedSunday

#MeltdownMonday

Excerpt from Sequel

About the Author

This book would have been impossible without the two years I spent in college and the year I spent post graduation doing absolutely nothing. So, here is to you, ennui: the 18 to 20-something War of Attrition.

PREFACE

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Shoulda burned my diploma, although going to college and spending the entire time high is the equivalent.

—Pudé Poet, that means please, no seeds, just pass the peas.

On the glorification of Merry Wanna: The Gateway Drug to Coolness (because, like, cannabis addiction is SO cool, and everyone in the history of life who has been addicted to yerba always goes SO far. Disregard the fact that the sticky green occasionally reveals many inevitable truths about life which are later rarely remembered; fry short-term memory, fry!).

You don’t know someone until you get high with them. Wait, no…when you get high, you only ever find out other people’s neuroses (that is if you’re even listening). Let’s try again. You don’t know someone until you stop getting high and you realize you never knew them to begin with. All the memories of friendship you thought you had were based upon the fact that the people who you thought you loved were simply good enough to get high with. And if you get high frequently, you come to accept that anyone will do; that is until you actually need someone. Then you see who your true friends really are, if they even exist. Don’t think about it too hard; just lose your cell phone and experience what I’m talking about.

Most of the people you get drunk and high with frequently never achieve anything with their lives outside of maintaining a sub-cultured mediocrity. If you finally move on and grow up (okay, let me not take it that far; let’s say you finish grad school, apply for a job, and abuse drugs and alcohol on the weekends and at Coachella, you know, grow up), what makes transitioning so challenging is that in the beginning you’ll have all these high memories of your life that seem so great. Time will tell you that it wasn’t who you were with or what you were snorting that was so beyond (even though, sometimes it kind of is, haha); it was you feeling free in those moments, because you were perfection gilded with the innocence of youth. Those euphoric feelings you had…those sensations were all just science, and no one was ever really your friend, except maybe the high (but even she leaves you). The high is the only part that can be considered by the depressed, self-loathing, socially-awkward minorities (who never really feel right at parties) as cool. But in hindsight, the high is only cool because it allows you to block out the fact that everyone hanging around you is just using you, and because you are pathetic, afraid to be alone, and hate yourself for your inability to stand up to the world, you let them. After some time, you retrace your steps into your hazy drug and alcohol-stained past and see that the only thing that mattered is how perfect you were, not because you believed in the world, goodness no, anything but that; but because you believed in fun and the magic of celebration to declare what was wonderful about a free existence.

This concept of freedom is the only thing worth remembering, and for however long the high lasts, it serves primarily to feed your consciousness with these chemical reminders of this natural state of being. Every day afterwards, it is as if life is commanding you to chase it in its natural form, to move beyond the pills, powder, and the pipe unto where it rests within creativity and passion. All the meaning of life is wrapped up in this concept: freedom rolls down your temples with sweat as the music swells and roars (bass), your breath is shallow; euphoria and fever quakes through your bones, creeps onto your lips as you kiss a stranger and pass on the eternal gift of love. It’s a free life you love, and as more bud is passed around and the THC traverses the maze of your veins, you stare out into your life, connected with the fluid, synergetic, unified consciousness thing in a way that makes you feel as if you are simply coming out of your face to just taste existence, because knowledge of its flavor transcends our world of lies and puts an everlasting honesty in your soul that nothing can ever diminish.

—O.R.N.

The Sort-of Prologue

Wednesday

The three of us sat in Allie’s Beamer getting high. It was Allie, Stephanie, and me. When we happened to lift our faces from our cell phone screens, our eyes traced the lit, red-orange end of the strawberry Swisher. The tobacco paper shrunk and shriveled with each draw, and we blew out the hot air, feeling elevated, feeling free, feeling as if the exercise was one grand metaphor for our twenty-year-old existences. We passed the diminishing blunt around as we rapped along to Soulja Boy’s "Pretty Boy Swag." This was phase three of our pregame.

You are back in time with me. It is 2009, and along with Soulja Boy’s S-O-D Money Gang and Gucci Mane’s The Burrprint 3 tearing up the dorm room iTunes PAAAARTY playli$t$, my friends and I are deep in our roles of college cool; meaning: we are pioneering all types of trill shit. Sorry A$AP, you’re late, son. But then again, maybe you are right on time, because for all intended purposes, for our generation, cool c’est cool, and we fucks with the 1 Train. Ra$pect to the outlaws with no laws.

Whether or not you are two or three years removed from the game, after some stage, everyone’s image is a reprisal of some aspect of The Ultimate Cool Kid’s Fantasy. The grace period for late adopters exists because the transformation from suburban, westbumblefuck lame to Cool Kid all happens quite gradually. One moment you are insecure and friendless, and the next you are still insecure, but blessed with a bevy of fairweather friends and rocking the right slang and trends (steeze, yams, and tweaks, ya heard). This is a slight accomplishment, I suppose, and it only becomes important once you make your entrance at every amazing party and have interactions with other cool strangers. These interactions are usually non-verbal acknowledgments achieved by quick head-to-toe glances and head nods to the beat:

I don’t know how we did it, but we all managed to look, think, speak, and act exactly the same. Glad to know we’re cool like that.

Cue that Digable Planets song.

Allie squeals as she reaches for the volume on the radio.

Omigod, yassss! We gotta listen to this song!

Ughhhh—well, I didn’t come here to sit in the car. I’m gonna go, Stephanie The Campus Slut snaps.

Slutty Stephanie slides out of the car, head buried in Blackberry. It is usually important to walk into parties together, you know, for female solidarity and shit, but Stephanie has spotted penis and the countdown for coitus has begun. She kegels as she prowls, chanting, Must fuck someone’s boyfriend.

Fuck that no-walls hoe. That’s why she goes to abortions alone! I mutter, shrugging. turn it up!

"That’s her problem—cuz I still got another bluuuunt!"

Rebirth of slick. Hell yeeeeeee!

Allie and I race down the street and head towards the party, straight mobbing, steady mobbing, a shade of manic delirium and a little bit of our characteristic drunk and high personalities. We run past her old fuck buddy, who in this moment is definitely gay, as he is outside sharing fags with a dandy cabal of partially-closeted gay boys (bisexuals). We make silly faces at them and generally play their closeted existences as we make our way towards the lounge door.

I funk but not like thaaaaat, I woop obnoxiously, dramatically waving their cigarette smoke from my face.

Hey, Allie—wait up! Fuck Buddy yells.

"Omigod, he’s so gay," I whisper to Allie with a smile.

She laughs, saying nothing, and ignores him as she strut-staggers in her thousand dollar heels, head in iPhone, and waltzes indoors.

The room is dark and even if I were not high as balls I would still only see random colors and shapes as I glide onwards into the sea of bodies: sequins on a party dress, the sparkler attached to a bottle of champagne a waitress has hoisted in the air, the sheen of a passerby’s gelled hair, the streaming colors from a hidden strobe light, the flicker of a chrome watch on the wrist of a stranger, the multicolor beams from the buttons at the DJ booth, and the arrays of floating white teeth, gleaming behind spread lips, awaiting the blinding, lighting-white flashes of digital cameras. I see all of this without ever tearing my eyes away from the blue hue of my Blackberry.

As I push my way through the crowd, I feel myself step outside of my mortal form and into the body of a hamster racing on a red, plastic wheel. Within this mammalian transformation is the certainty that I will never make it to where I am going, and yet, I have no idea where that even is. I am somewhere now, and everything up until this point was the buildup to a night of empty sensations.

Everything around me is an abstraction: unfinished texts and BBMs (so-and-so is typing), incomplete thoughts about a drink order, half smiles, sideways glances, interrupted conversations, and the endless mixes and remixes of the music. There is always some deep house music playing, woven between a pastiche of songs that I already know and will probably hear looped into the nightlife realm of social consciousness for the next three months, or either hear on this specific occasion and never again. Fuck a mashup; all of this is irrelevant. It is all so annoyingly repetitive, and although I took the necessary precautions during the manic drug-ingesting, alcohol-guzzling pregame, I am only partially numb to self-disgust and conscious of everything else. So I do what every other cool kid does: I nod my head to the beat and pray the DJ refrains from playing dub-step.

The time has disintegrated into a blur of synchronized moments. I am a firefly trapped in a jar spiraling around the stale air. I am miserable but executing mechanical smiles and forced embraces. It is all just as natural as breathing. This is just another night out.

Tonight, I am attending an online magazine launch with my best friends of the month. Truthfully, we have no idea what the event is, or what the online magazine is about; we just heard there was a party with an open bar. The real occasion is that the blizzard is over, and instead of staying high in a house, we can just stay high with 150 of our closest friends dressed in our party clothes. The place is a lounge that I am pretty sure I have been to a couple times, but the fact is I cannot really be sure, because although it feels like a new night, everything is playing out so predictably that I am almost positive I am trapped in an endless moment of partying déjà vu; and then again, I am high. What is definitive is that everyone is here and everyone always comes here, so there should be the usual surprises during the song and dance, suck and fuck routine.

Shots, shots! Let’s take some tequila shots.

I ignore the requests of more friends and move away. I keep getting whiffs of something foul-smelling in the air, but most importantly, I am wondering about the status of my lipstick-lipgloss blend.

I have made my way upstairs now and I am almost positive that I have reached Heaven. A voice rings out and declares, Congratulations you’ve won! I know this voice; it is the dreaded voice of an online pop-up. This is the beginning of a paradigm shift that I am choosing to ignore. Everything up until this moment has been sheer madness. I cannot find the specific place where it started, because I cannot remember. Somewhere in between the drugs I have done and the drinks I have swallowed, I fell into this elaborate vortex of time that warped reality and inverted any sort of significance I relied upon to distinguish things. The conclusion is rather awful and I stand about in the fog of my world wondering if my entire life was meant to lead up to this very moment; or perhaps, I really am just that stoned?

I am not quite Alice flailing down the rabbit hole. I am a speck of dust desirous of an organized form to contain my energy. At the first opportunity, I rapaciously chew my way through the earth’s core, unaware of the fact that I am devouring a bleeding asshole, and at best all I will ever amount to is an anal blister. I cannot think; I cannot sleep. I just grow and throb with a build up of suppressed emotions and an intolerable urge to self destruct. Pus.

"It’s so good to see you!" coo more friends on the staircase. They are wearing those grotesque Herve Leger bandage dresses.

Bow, bow, bow busting out them seams.

Suddenly, everything I used to say is awkward in my mouth. They are just things I heard and am repeating.

Heyyyyyy! You guys look…so…fancy for this.

Herve Leger, girl! You look cute as always.

The way I dress is also just a combination of things that I saw and are imitating. The source of which I have based my image upon is yet to be confirmed. I am a reblogged photo getting mad hits on Tumblr, oblivious to how I exist only as a consumerist ideal. The people who are into me only desire this glimpse of the social intangibles my appearance radiates. I am only marginally aware that I do not posses what they are looking for.

Let’s take a picture! This place is so opulent!

Twitpic!

Hashtag: Fuck my life. I am quietly standing on the edge of emotional ruination, having my picture taken, and ruminating about how strange society is when one is completely emotionally detached from our force-fed reality. The first feeling I will have months later about this very moment is self-hatred of the acutest kind. I will be unable to distinguish self-hatred from how I normally feel, so I will compare the sensation to a hangover and tweet about it or probably make a Facebook note which no one reads. The comments and likes I may or may not receive will serve as a welcome addition to my stockpile of social relevancy. Most of my online social relevancy manifests in the form of weak cosigns from my network of small-minded peers who are actively competitive for online celebrity status in the cool-kid rat race. Still, none of this will have an effect on me, and I’ll still go out every night.

Although all the signs for me to move on with my life are present, I will wait for something violently dramatic to happen to shock me out of my misaligned pattern of being. But until then, it is just the manic highs and lows of partying, bullshit, and being cool as fuck.

The disaster of my reality is contingent upon my half-assed attempts to civilize myself as part of my life-long quest to become a successful member of society. I know these mythical concepts of civilization are rooted in a history of perversity, and at the end of Western, societal cult logic is an execution, crucifixion, lynching, pederasty, etcetera. So I am kind of emotionally aloof from morality in the midst of circumstance. I am too damned frightened to move on with my being out of a sense of warped duty stemming from my belief in the myth of social equality, or at this point in the evening, marijuana and Adderall. Plastic smiles precede the smartphone camera flashes. Cheese! By the way, I am dead inside.

My servile nature is why I smile at bouncers and wear makeup.…At once, I am chained to the neck of it all, and the parties, the clothes, the drugs, the invitations, the mixtapes, the music, the cool, all of it is this rusted yoke weighing down on a concept of myself which I never fully understood in the first place. I feel as if I sold myself short for a stylish outfit and the most-excellent night out, but the ideal night out includes an immaculately designed room filled with glamorous people. But all that ever happens is Drake’s playing, singing Dreams Money Can Buy, we’re all fucked up and woozy, and it is stunningly clear that what we want is some fuck shit that will never exist.

Each second I stand around with everyone, I feel the urge to break away from the herd slice through me like poison darts on raw skin. Naturally, I have retreated to the bathroom…I am all isolation now, all partied out, washed out and weary; and yet, the pangs of fear are so sharp inside my chest. I am so deathly afraid of living for myself, and I hardly feel beautiful. Not that beauty matters when you are afraid to live, but still, as a young girl, I was sold on this dream, and almost everything good and bad about my life, up until this point, has been about this…

Now I have started succumbing to trippy sensations. I have been staring at what I perceived to be my reflection for about forty-five minutes, but I cannot see myself; there is absolutely nothing there. This sounds like a bad movie on IFC at two AM, but alas, this is real. I cannot tell if I am pretty or if any guys downstairs will want to fuck me. I move outside into the hallway and try to reacquaint myself with my fragmented sense of time. Forty-five minutes is ample time to study oneself, and presently, I am surrounded by six feet of walls of full body mirrors which allow me to observe myself from every fathomable direction. I proceed to do so, and nothing changes. I am invisible.

I do not understand it. It is as if I am not even there, but I am there, upstairs at the swanky half-empty lounge for the online magazine launch party. I keep telling myself where I am in hopes that I will reappear; but maybe it is too late, and this is just one horrible moment when my mind is too far away. I lean closer and stare at the space in the glass where my face is supposed to be. The walls are vibrating from the music. The bass is booming from the party below, and pretty much everyone cool that I know is down there wasted and out of control, rubbing against one another, and dressed up in everything they thought looked expensive but stylishly on streetblogger trend. Downtown chic! Ordinary personalities sprayed with cocaine!

I know what is going on down there, and it could not interest me even if I wanted it to. I am here and I am not exactly wasting an outfit because of