featuring all of the track titles, albeit non-sequentially, of Alanis Morissette's third studio album, Jagged Little Pill, released June 13, 1995.
Eugene, Oregon. Winter, 1995. It rains. Always. Wet VW vans are colorful horseshoe crabs scuttling about asphalt streets and muddy fire roads. I am lonely. Always.
I am lonely no matter how many Deschutes Obsidian Stouts swirl darkly down my gullet. After draining a bottle to the dregs, I pause to belch once or twice. Each guttural emanation of gas a sweet redux of malted barley. I grin to no one in particular (no one’s there to see it) and pop the cap off another gently perspiring bottle waiting for me in a black and blue cardboard six pack sitting atop a short squat dark brown mini-fridge.
Stout is best when imbibed between 50-57 degrees Fahrenheit. Stouts, generally, are not bracingly bitter like American IPAs, and higher ambient temperatures allow the aromatics of the former to blossom. As they’ve long known in England, cold small beers are for slowly dying drunkards. Or the already dead. Room-temperature stout is the beverage of choice for the man who still believes himself to be alive. Who may still want to live. It all comes down to temperature.
The atmosphere both outside and inside my dormitory is so so green it's alive. Bluegreen evergreens tower just outside the small rectangular opened window. Redgreenwhite resiny indica McNuggets reek dankly through double layered Glad sandwich bags ferreted away in the very back of the very short, but very wide, credenza drawer. The credenza drawer itself tucked beneath a cluttered desktop on top of which sits a towered gray computer and enormous seeming, in 1995, 19” monitor.
A cluster of (maybe four, maybe five) miniature dark green, pine scented, gas station purchased air fresheners dangle nakedly from the handle of the armoire on the other side of the small room. Each little cardboard cutout tree’s cellophane wrapper fully removed in wanton disregard of the manufacturer’s labeled instructions. These faux trees radiate redolent artificial pine aromas.
The armoire belonged to my former roommate, Sprout. Sprout preferred this moniker to his given name, Bryan. Sprout had moved off campus, with two of his friends, just before the first trimester ended. Sprout’s departure left me a singleton in a double dormer.
The air fresheners were the larger part of my, mostly ineffective, efforts to conceal the odor of Alanis. Alanis’ stank grew stronger and greener each day. The smaller, and equally ineffective, part was leaving the room’s window open to allow a small plastic box fan to blow indoor air outdoors. Alanis’ olfactory changes were primarily due to her having been confined inside Sprout’s armoire. The room’s hazy air, air you could literally taste, was pulled through the fan, blown out the window, in one continuous exhale. The exhaled green air dissipated unnoticed into the even greener atmosphere outside.
When I first arrived at the dormitory room, a befuddled fresher lugging nothing but a backpack, Sprout’s armoire had been stuffed to overflowing. Sprout’s armoire was bursting full with smelly gym shoes, dirty clothes, and a god-awful smelling, magnificently effective, magnificently pink, 3 foot tall Graphix bong. The armoire, the whole room, stunk of California college boy. After Sprout departed for downtown Eugene proper, his armoire remained mostly empty. Become mostly scentless. A few plastic clothes hangers. A faint sad whiff of the Container Store.
Then suddenly, one day, a week or two later, Sprout’s armoire was once again overflowing. It exuded a different, green, earthy, subtly feminine smell. I had wallpapered the interior walls of the armoire with aluminum foil. I had hung hazy sodium halide lightbulbs from the aforementioned clothes hangers using several cheap yellow extension cords. The extension cords ran from the base of the armoire to a multi-outlet power strip nestled under what was previously Sprout’s credenza. These cords prevented the two cheap wooden laminate armoire doors from fully closing, thereby contributing to the swirling green aromas in the small, half empty, double dorm room.
A large terracotta pot filled with potter's soil occupied the majority of the floor area inside the armoire. A handful of random seeds collected from various bags of dope over the past few months occupied the pot’s soil. One of the seeds wound up sprouting. A singular, green, meter or so tall, verdant and pungently odiferous female marijuana plant stretched upward toward the lightbulbs. The plant had just barely begun to flower. The plant’s erumpent early flowering, I felt, was thanks to neither of my green thumbs. The plant’s flowering, I felt, was instead a result of my obsessive-compulsively well organized and color coded light/dark/water schedule.
I named the plant Alanis. It was the 90s. This seemed funny, at the time, to me. I thumbtacked Alanis’ color-coded schedule to the outside of one of the armoire’s doors. The armoire’s other door was largely taken up by a hot pink Sex Pistols poster advertising: “Anarchy in the UK LIVE!"
Alanis was all too soon thereafter brutally murdered by Randy, Mike, and Fergus. Randy, Mike and Fergus were three guys who resided in two different dorm rooms just down the hall. Randy, Mike and Fergus were the same three guys who I asked to keep an eye on Alanis when I traveled home to St. Louis, Missouri for winter break. They were the same three guys to whom I had provided Alanis’ very well organized and very color coded light/dark/water schedule. To whom I had given very specific and very detailed instructions for which playlists were to be played for Alanis at which times of day. Alanis very much liked classical music, especially Bach. Especially Bach. Ironic.
When I returned to the dormitory in late January of 1996, Randy, Mike and Fergus had depotted Alanis. They had stripped her down to a single skinny green stem. They had dismembered all of her little green flowery budlets and half-assedly tried to speed dry them in the common dormitory kitchen’s light tan-brown and very crusty very small microwave. Their cowardly efforts had left maybe, just maybe, a quarter ounce of still damp and somehow simultaneously singed mossy green, yellow and brown lumps. They had smoked her leaves all up. Her green stink had become too noticeable in the dormitory hallways, they said, and the sophomore RA’s had started to ask too many questions. So they said.
I agreed, ex-post-facto, to a 50/50 split of Alanis’ remains with her killers. Their fee for their time and efforts. You oughta know, they said, we did our best. I smoked up my half of what was left of Alanis using a little brass metal pipe, alone, in my dorm room. What was left of Alanis and I listened to Bach. She smoldered. I cried.
I cried mostly because holding in each harsh lung filling hit of Alanis burned. Badly. You learn. I held each inhale in as long as I could. Usually, I learned the hard way. I hardly even got high. All I really want, I thought, was to get high. Head over feet. High. I barely got high enough to strip Alanis’s armoire bare.
Red-eyed, I took down the lights. Light-headed, I removed the foil from the armoire’s interior. Green-faced, I carried the soil filled terracotta pot down the hall to the trash chute. I consumed two jumbo sized bags of salt & vinegar crisps and washed them down with three or four (or six or eight…) Obsidian Stouts. I passed out uncomfortably on the yellow extension cords haphazardly coiled atop my small single bed.
I half woke up around 3:00 a.m. One sleep deadened arm beneath me. Hand in my pocket. I rolled over to vomit what felt like salty concrete in mushy heaps onto the dorm room’s gray-blue industrial Dacron carpet.
It was raining greyly in a very fine and very depressing sort of windblown wet mist when I finally came to. Alanis was all gone. She’d taken whatever had remained of her aromatic calling card with her. The slowly desiccating beige piles of vomit smelled very badly. My dorm room was filled with the sickly vinegar stench of sickness, of death. Gone were the vibrant, almost painfully sharp, green green aromas of real and artificial pine forests, of freshly flowered marijuana, of someone else.
I choked back down bile. I swallowed dryly. Loneliness is a jagged little pill.
-- Benjamin K Herrington (bkh) / wears many masks & speaks in many voices / looks for hidden messages _ v e r _ w h e r _ / feels incredibly grateful to have had his poetry & prose published by The Prairie Review / La Piccioletta Barca / B O D Y Literature / Granfalloon / sculpts stories / paginates poems / runs Lake Michigan shorelines / is working on a novel & seeking gn0s1s.