Category Archives: Ambien Art

January 1, 2023

Art by Tasty Piece,©️ The Safehouse Collection 2023

Happy New Year, dear reader!
I don’t typically make the changing of the calendar year a big deal, but typing “2023” just now felt great.  See, 2023 means that next year is 2024, and 2024 is The Good Year.  Which makes 2023 The Absurdly Busy Year, but I am here for it.

Fun Fact: I have an unusual startle reflex and I don’t jump at all at nearby gunshots or explosions.  Some of my friends know this, but not all of them.  Certainly not the one who gave me the bag of Ambien™ to help me “sleep through the fireworks at midnight.”  She gave me careful instructions about when and how many to take, and of course I thanked her profusely, shut the door, and took everything in the bag.  I don’t have a solid recollection of much, but I know I stayed up quite some time making bizarre art.  And like Christmas morning, except better, the morning after an Ambien™ binge is always full of surprises.  For instance, this “poem” I have no memory of writing:
Happy New Year, my friend
I say to my friend.
The dash between us is like the space
between strangers on a train;
it’s not what we know about each other that matters,
but what we don’t.  The dash is how it feels
to live in two states at once, the territory of the hyphen,
here but not quite, home but not really.  
The dash is how it feels to be in exile,
the space between where I am and where I want to be,
or so I tell myself.
But the truth is I’m happy here.
I’m just not used to being happy.

What the fuck does that even mean?  The dash?  What dash?  There’s no dash here.  God knows what I was thinking.  Doesn’t even sound like my style at all.  Maybe I’ll get back in to writing verse (sober verse) this year.  My sober stuff isn’t that great, but it’s quite better than this dash nonsense.  Never mind.  Happy New Year.  Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Reduced Voltage” – Blancmange

July 30, 2022

Art by Tasty Piece,©️ The Safehouse Collection 2022

I’ll be honest with you, dear reader:  I didn’t buy a ticket for the Billion Dollar Lotto.  It was weird, but in the end, winning that kind of cash would force me out to resurface from the underground about at least a year early, and I haven’t come this far to start fucking around with The Plan now. So, no ticket, no billion dollars.
One interesting thing to come of the weirdness of this week as I plotted becoming disgustingly rich and then chose not to was the re-discovery of Ambien Art. Ambien Art is an offshoot of Shitfaced Secret Santa. Shitfaced Secret Santa started several years ago when I discovered that if you get significantly drunk, high, or, ideally, both, and then got on your phone and went absolutely apeshit on Amazon, chances are, if you did it right, you wouldn’t remember a thing in the morning. Then, a couple days later, you get a wonderful surprise from the most insightful Secret Santa possible, your shitfaced self: it’s exactly what you wanted.
I was fully set to embrace Shitfaced Secret Santa as a lifestyle, or at least a highly effective method of self-care, but technology got the better of me. Soon Amazon wasn’t the only show in the online shopping town, with virtually every big-box retailer having their own robust online presence. Thus came that dark day when a surprise order arrive from Costco.com, consisting of items like a barrel of 72 pounds of parmesan cheese and a bagpipe starter kit.
At that point I remember some sort of crude, low-rent intervention, and I had to sort of take a break from Shitfaced Secret Santa. But the stage had been set for shenanigans when I discovered that if you load up on Ambien and then force yourself to stay awake and create art for as long as you can possibly manage, magical things happen. Sure, it’s about as unhealthy as anything can possibly be, but the benefits far outweigh any potential drawbacks, which benefits are twofold: first, you make truly unique art, as in art that is truly unique to you. Whatever you churn out whilst in the throes of the Ambien Haze will likely be fundamentally different from the stuff you’d do without Ambien. If you have a “style,” your Ambien Art will be a completely different style. Which, from a purely artistic standpoint, is a very cool thing. Second, which is really the icing on this somnambulistically creative cake is that Ambien acts as an extreme amnesiac: you wake up the following afternoon or whenever, surprise! New art that you have absolutely no recollection of doing.
So last night, evidently that’s what happened, because I awoke to find I had recorded a song and written a bad free-verse poem about the lottery and created a disturbingly phallic cloud painting to go with it. To wit:

Winner
At the urinal, an angel told me I’d with $1 billion in the lottery
If I pissed on a cloud.
I said “What cloud?”
She said, “The one you see there.”
It was just the sky. No clouds in sight.
Without waiting to be prompted, I pissed on the sky anyway
And won $1 billion in the lottery.
Lord, the wrong number of digits
for wrong numbers.
the outgoing message, our number,
unlistened to message of my own voice—
voice of a man who is not yet dead.
What the fuck does that even mean?  And what’s up with that goddamn picture?  The poem was one thing, but I went all to pieces when I saw that goddamn electronic sketch my drug-addled brain apparently produced.  Anyway, yeah.
N.P.: “She Left – 2018 Remaster” – C-Tec