Last week I made a mistake and I’m not ready to forgive myself. I’ve relived the incident, imagining better decisions in a better place. Eternal regret may lie ahead and I can’t help but think it’s justified. Despite all this, life may still be worth living. It would be easy to spend restless nights torturing myself, but I’ve resolved to learn from my error. Wisdom gained through horrifying experience is my only consolation. There’s no way to undo what has been done. The only remedy to this travesty would be traveling back in time, but that would require hyper-accelerated movement of both natural and man-made elements. Sadly, I don’t have enough zinc in my blood, nor do I possess a turbo-powered carousel. No, I can only attempt to move on. I must come to terms with what I’ve done:
I went into the outside world without chemicals in my system.
Even in retrospect I can’t understand what could’ve compelled me to act so recklessly. Not to say the causes weren’t present, but there should’ve been a voice inside me advising against such foolishness. Lesson learned - never trust the voices in your mind. They’ll promise riches and a deep understanding of the universe, but the moment you actually need them they’re nowhere to be found. In fact, at this moment I’m shirking personal responsibility and blaming everything that happened on Count Slick Whiffle. He is officially evicted from my head.
I remember waking up feeling annoyed and sticky. The heat was rising again, much to the air-conditioned joy of channel eleven’s smiling hairdo, or “meteorologist.” I’m sure the “fun in the sun” weather helps her plastic coating gleam flawlessly for another season. Blazing coffee on my blistering lips swishing around my sweltering tongue seemed redundant, so I skipped my morning caffeine insulation. I shaved and put on people clothes because it was too hot for my lemur costume. Kisses and telepathic groping transpired between my wife and I. Promises of returning with mechanical wind and frozen treats were made. My child ran out to see me off and I patted his head, instructing him to hunt the floating chicken heads until I got back. If only I’d listened to his cries of protest instead of stroking his fur lightly.
There was no incident between the time I skipped downstairs to when I entered my car, but only because the creatures in the other apartments were still slumbering from their last feeding. I popped my Candy Yam and the Dump mix CD in the stereo and hit asphalt. The first thing I noticed was an unpleasant looking woman taking up my driving space as she crawled down the road in her 1980s Astro van at 1mph. She was shouting something in Spanish at a flaccid-faced girl on the sidewalk who appeared to be staring at a pole. I pulled into the street. The waddling van pilot had the nerve to look at me as though I was inconveniencing her! She accelerated to a rushing 3 mph and turned the corner. My mind was flooded with images of pursuing the woman, running her off the road and pelting her with mustard packets until she lost consciousness. Then I remembered the climate control situation in my apartment and resumed my mission.
I drove down the endless street, wishing a hydrogen bomb would drop on the city. All the buildings caked in the crust of skin flakes and urine would look much better as radiated dust particles. The people on the street with their loud voices and asinine conversations would be whisked away before I snap my tongue in celebration. This is no different than what I usually think about while driving. In fact, I call this fantasy “Hydro Snuggle: Fourth Sequence,” but this time something didn’t feel right. The people and structures really did begin to fade away and not just in my imagination. A fog of tingling brain fuzz crept in from the outer edges of my peripheral vision, devouring everything. Aside from the static, all I could see was a row of palm trees. Two mental gears clicked hard enough to leave my mind blank as I sat at the stoplight and stared at the trees.
“Trees are pretty,” I thought.
My cognitive faculties instantly snapped back into place. Trees are pretty? What the fuck was that? Something was wrong, very wrong indeed. Then it hit me like a runaway wheelchair - my brain was operating without any type of drug or chemical substance.
The terror of my situation nearly plagued me to the point of sickness. I knew I had to get to the store immediately. Already I had begun to notice strange changes in my environment. The people on the street and in their cars were once brainless jangle jockeys, but at that moment there was a startling transformation - they were thinking. It wasn’t just random contemplation either, they were all thinking about me. I don’t know how I knew this, but I could feel their newly developed thoughts diddling my mind. A man who looked exactly like Mickey Rooney in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was in a truck directly to my right and he was smiling. Smiling! At first I thought he was happy because he got his Asian-eyed novelty glasses for half price due to the costume shop’s new Cambodian owner and his desire to clear them out of the establishment as quickly and profitably as possible, but no, that wasn’t it at all. Mr. Roon was smiling because he was fantasizing about tying me to the back of his truck and dragging my corpse down Pacific Coast Highway. Without hesitation, I made a sharp left at the light, leaving Mickey behind forever.
One block from the store I witnessed the mutated lifeforms confabulating with one another about the most effective ways to kill me. I rolled up my windows, praying to Xenu to keep their air from infecting me. After three minutes the inside of my car became a rolling can of meat and sweat. My clothes were sticking to my skin and I began to fear that my brain would bubble out of my nose. Reluctantly, I rolled down the windows and gritted my teeth to filter the air. The store was in sight and with it, my hopes of regaining mental stability.
Dreading my next move, I opened the door and exited the vehicle. My ears were instantly assaulted by the collective waves of other people talking. As usual, the voices were mashed together into an incoherent babble of mindless hullabaloo. This time, however, a few phrases broke free from the cloud of chatter. I heard a voice yell, “Not there! To the left!” Obviously a sniper was trying to focus in on me. If they were going to shoot me, they would have to work for it. I began taking irregular steps that varied in speed, length and height. Bobbing my head up and down was just for fun. In the distance I heard another voice yell, “That’s my nigga!” At first I was befuddled by this declaration. I didn’t know this man, so logically there was no way I could be his “nigga.” After a moment of not thinking very hard, I realized “nigger” or “nigga” if you will, has switched meanings yet again and is now defined as “Joe the conspiracy target.” On any other day I’d stop to ponder how the word would be spelled, given its new definition, but people were out to kill me. I quickly shimmied myself inside the store.
Someone in the control room must have been in on the plot to snuff me out. The second I walked into the store a bright light blinded me. They were attempting to disable my already scrambled senses with beaming lights and shitty, uptempo pop music from the early 2000s. More determined than ever, I raced across the store, gathering my desired purchases in alphabetical order. There was an old woman fondling liquid soap down the aisle from me. She had a bottle in each hand and was slowly weighing the store’s entire inventory. Her plan was evident to even the most feeble mind - she meant to poison me with soap and wanted to get the most value for her buck. All around me frugal shoppers thirsted for my blood.
I arrived to the back of the check out line only to find more people plotting to murder me. Why!? Why does everyone want me dead? I close my eyes and tune out the six screaming urchins clinging to their mother’s leg directly in front of me. Of course! Everyone in line believed killing me and dismembering my corpse would intimidate the cashier into honoring their expired coupons. These people had obviously gone insane with delusions of super savings and ritualistic sacrifice. I knew the only way to counter their fiendish plan was by hollowing out their bodies and planting trees in their open chest cavities.
No! I have to stop thinking about trees. They were giving me ridiculous ideas about digging out ribcages when the rational side of my brain knew the gardening supplies were inconveniently placed on the other side of the store. My only option was to grab my keys and stab randomly at the homicidal cretins. I felt someone’s breath and knew they were within touching distance. These fucking people and their oxygen intake disgust me! Just as my fingers looped around the key rings my plan was halted by a voice that called “Next.” I abandoned my key plan and walked to the counter.
I smiled politely at the person behind the register. There was a bleary, weary dullness to their eyes. Focusing my mental radar, I could not sense an urge to kill me in the cashier, only a nearly broken dream of escape. Wishing her luck among the twisted grunters, I paid as quickly as possible and vacated the phosphorescent stucco cage. The eyes of a thousand conspiratorial murderers followed me as I rushed into my car. Cracking open a can of concentrated caffeine, I guzzled the liquid normalizer until it was empty. I took long, deep drags of my cigarette, letting the chemicals nest in my lungs. The fog in my head was still there, but was thinning to a tolerable degree. This would hold me over until I got home to the half-empty bottle of vodka that’s been in the fridge for four years.
Stubbing out my cigarette, I noticed a shift in the terrain. The plotting, savage eyes of those around me began to lose life as their jaws slackened. I could no longer feel any homicidal plots or, for that matter, any thoughts emanating from them. Trees faded to the farthest point of the landscape’s background, replaced by smudged concrete and layers of mold. The world around me was no longer bizarre and dangerous; it was once again stupid and silly. I turned the key in the ignition and breathed a sigh of relief in the knowledge that I was going home.
If chemical deprivation can have such an adverse effect on a psychologically well-adjusted person like myself, imagine some weirdo walking around with no mind-altering substances in their system. Sadly, I know there are people operating heavy machinery without chemicals dancing in their brains. This isn’t the way the world should be. Drugs shouldn’t be legal - they should be mandatory. Everyone needs something. Whether it’s booze, pot, meth, caffeine, pharmaceuticals, PCP, mushrooms or a plastic bag of ammonia, something needs to be present. People are only tolerable with external static surrounding their senses. If everyone took the extra time to snort a crushed pep pill or chug fermented prune juice the world would be a peaceful wonderland. Or maybe we’d all just end up killing each other. Oh well. It was going to happen anyway, at least this is faster and funner.
