the much deserved agony of a hangover. filled to the brim with shit from all manner of munchies, head all fluid and filled with pressure.

five missed texts from sara.

1 2 3 4 5 days until college graduation, the point of no return.

it’s a creeper high, so i had time to fully and rationally cognize the meaning of what i just saw. i exhaled the weed smoke out of a raggedy gravity bong into a paper towel. a brown oval appeared on it where my mouth had been. struggling in vain to reduce the smell - lest anyone walk in and know for sure i was high. rather than just hiding in the bathroom waiting as the creeper set in to fix all my problems. my phone turned off. wireless disabled. what was i hiding from? the cops? sara? or the future? i was digging my heels in time and saying no, a tantrum like when i was with my mother who i hadn’t seen in years.

must be gumming up my lungs something fierce. the constant weed smoking has got to be like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. it’s not good. that creeper setting in and my normal fears are slithering their way into deep anxiety riddled paranoias. good, i thought, feeling these snakes of eden offer knowledge into my own darkness, good i thought because maybe it’ll make me stop being such an idiot and quit.

“i don’t know why you always pick weed over me,” she txted.

don’t do stupid stuff. D.D.S.S. i wrote it on my hand when i was a boy to remind myself to stop masturbating so much and just be normal like everyone else. shameful stuff. and here i am, again, fighting something i can control but for whatever reason choose not to. who am i rebelling against? my girlfriend? is that why my lungs hurt so so so so bad i can hardly breathe? like they’re bruised?

my body clearly passed the point of breaking long ago, signs which i ignored. ignored them like my final exam in  east asian religion, which i missed this morning due to my abject terror of knowing what god damned day it was.

“fine. ignore me. i’m going to bed.”

i imagine that graduation will feel like it takes forever, but this will be due mainly to the fact that my atoms, inasmuch as they are gravitationally being pulled into Zeus’ black empty heart, are merely being stretched through time as gravity struggles to keep my constitutive atomic bonds from exploding with the sheer force of this vast sucking nothingness. Zeu’s heart, timeless for all eternity, here on the cusp we know His date, the time where He stopped time. May 17. The day time collapsed into the vast swirling heart of the mighty Zeus.

“we need to talk about this. i’m done with the drugs.”

and who could complain, really? to be in the heart of our mighty creator, a timeless matterless element of Him, too vague for words, too unified for demonstrative gestures, me a part of the infinite.

nothingness. emptiness. blackness. love.

to me, graduating college was the end of time. a moment beyond which reality ceased.  the date was the moment that time would devolve and blast at beyond light speed into pure black nothingness. such were my life’s plans, at the event horizon of that sunday afternoon. for weeks i could feel the sucking force of that black hole day.

///

“i’m really glad we got fucked up tonight,” my roomate said, confidently - as if it were the summation of a long and meticulous thought process, “because my shoulder hurt today and-“

his voice trails off as i walk to the bathroom of my college apartment. always with the excuses. what was mine?

blowing off steam from another semester at william and mary? hardly. the only final i had this semester was East Asian Religion, which i knew by heart. when was that test anyway?

rebelliousness? i checked my phone instinctively. no messages from sara. a sigh of relief.

my excuse? i was useless.

i knew that i was that stink rot tree of chuang tzu and i knew that the value of life was to be like the cloudlike oxen not like the jaguar always falling into traps, but still. daoism didn’t seem hardly near close to justifying being as high and as drunk as i was. as i was every day that spring.

riding experience like a white bit of dandelion puff that spreads everywhere in the spring time. not forward or backward, more toward or more away from a destination, but just higher or lower, ready to land or not. and i don’t forsee my landing being pretty.

skidmarks on the tarmac, that’s me. the return of the fucking discovery space shuttle, skids a million miles long, as long as a martian canal. NASA modules back from nowhere, orbiting with our heads up our asses while other, more advanced beings laugh and point at the inferior landwelling race that barely can hurl crude metal bits with fire out the back to get to their own moon.

“their own moon,” these alien creatures would think, “imagine not being able to travel to your OWN moon.” maybe they wouldn’t laugh at all, but have pity and await our arrival into their ranks of interplanetary species riding light like einstein on a bike in switzerland.

how long have i been in here, jabbering in my robe to this machine?

such strong feelings about space exploration. another puzzling effect of the THC.

i promised her i wouldn’t smoke tonight. but we both knew my promises didn’t mean anything anymore. not when there was still weed to be smoked. i had to pee.

the squeels of a movie, probably batman outside. my roomates’ presence made my every decision look normal, accepted - yeah have another beer, natty light in bottles dottles. but where would we be in a week? they’d be surviving another summer break at home, i’d be a lonely brute, grunting to no-one.

the passionate and desperate feeling that other people make you normal.

the writer’s curse of fear and loathing. now more than ever.

no.

snap out of it, man, i thought, as i swayed my half flaccid penis back and forth above the clogged and ashstrewn toilet. life’s dank. in my robe, in a bathroom, in a college, in a state, in a country, in a world, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in orbit around a black hole. how exhilarating to know that i am speeding at a precise trajectory in relation to the black empty sun to our sun, the abject nothingness, the middle of our milky way, our creator (and how so absurdly fitting) Nothing. not even light, or mass, or time. a black hole. the Tao. the mighty creator Zeus.

22 years, in orbit around the sun, on the earth, my atoms always in a trajectory to take into account the speed with which i rotate around an instantiation of no-thing and no-time. i am relative to nothingness. and i am here, indeed. high above the normal thoughts of men my age, in robes, on computers, hiding from their girlfriends in their bathrooms, with a vast porn collection and a predilection to use it.

///

“Useless, sure! He can’t catch mice!”
-Chuang Tzu

the single greatest flaw in the human species is metaphor. the belief that we are the protagonists of our own life stories. the belief that our horrifying and random utterances are dialogue. that the things we say and do are literary. meaningful.

i had just graduated college. living with my father. unemployed.

by all accounts a loser.

it’s hard to even imagine knowing the significance of buying that wooden dugout at the

head shop that balmy day in north carolina. the salesman was helping a group of teens buy a new glass stem for their bong.

“do you have a standard stem?” asked one teen.

“do you mean a 19mm?” asked the shopkeep.

“no, we need 9mm.”

“do you need the other piece?”

“no, just the stem,” said the teen.

etched in the wooden box was the shape of the continental united states, emblazoned with the stars and stripes. the canton was recessed and stained so that tiny stars rose above the darkened northwestern states.

“excuse me,” i said.

“hey man, just trust me. get both. you don’t want to have a lady over and have her see

this. just do it Right,” said the shopkeep. the teens ignored him and started moving
toward the beaded doorway to the front.

“how was moving into your new place?” asked a girl standing beside me.

“oh i’m still packing up my apartment,” said the shopkeep, “you should come over, the key is under the mat.”

“you shouldn’t have told everyone that, now they’re going to rob you,” she said
indicating the teens, the black men who just walked in, and me.

“none of these kids know where i live,” he said, “besides, i’d shoot these stoners in the head.” at this he  mimed the recoil of a shotgun.

she smiled.

“excuse me, can i buy this…” i hesitated. there were many signs warning that use of drug slang would result in immediate removal from the store.

“dugout?” he said.

“yes. this one. with the flag.”

he handed it to me and walked to ring up the teens.

“what is that?” asked a man standing beside me. he was a short black man with tight dreads and a red flat brimmed hat.

“it’s a dugout,” i said, opening the top to remove the cylindrical aluminum chillum pipe painted to look like a cigarette hidden inside of it.

the man smiled and nodded in appreciation.

“ohhh,” he said, “and it’s got the flag on it, very patriotic.”

“yes. america is the best country in the world,” i said.

“i Heard that,” he said.

the whole scene was hopelessly beautiful.

nodding my head to the music blaring from police speakers, dancing futily under the glittering stars of the american flag that fluttered dejectedly in my room as i took a long and potent swig of mad dawg.

high and alone in my room, like i’d always been. but now with the eyes of the world watching. my room glowed under the radioactive spotlights of camera crews outside. the chkchkchk of national news and m-16 magazines. so it goes. the kind of absurdity that is the beautiful side effect of liberty. a fully rational life is unimaginable torture for any living organism and should not be attempted.

another free floating parasite in the capillaries of lady liberty’s beautiful  breasts that taper perfectly to a tight stomach that drips down to her bellybutton, swirling in the rapids of her illiaic crest before sliding like a waterfall to the ground. how could a woman as beautiful as lady liberty suffer from such apocalyptic impulses to let the world burn?

absurdity. sheer gibberish, nonsense. the sound of severe pounding from the apartment upstairs. the chinking of armored SWAT amassing on the stairs outside. the buffeting of helicopter blades chopping through what air was left above me. such savage noises vibrating in the air, competing with the groovy beat of da funk. my microphone jutting impotently from the adjustable reading lamp, wires spewing projectile spaghetti into christ-like patterns on the floor. my hunter s. thompson poster the same red and white as the stripes of my american flag, fluttering in the ac on this godlessly warm evening in charlotte. signs of struggle. corpses of creativity. failed expeditions to the truth. now the truth had amassed outside.

what else could one do but get fucked up? the consequences of taking truth seriously in this country were cataclysmic. when faced with total freedom, ultimate power, even the beautiful countenance of lady liberty could furrow, one eye squeezed holding her breath, steady her aim: fire. our mother, the murderer. our mother, the war criminal. our mother, gleefully flinging matches in vietnamese huts, iraqi shelters, churches in waco texas. gone was the look in her eye when you first knew that she truly honestly loved you with all her heart. her retina spewing madness now, leaking it in place of tears at images of charred children on national television 24 hour soundbites, “No, Mister Congressman, I do not recall.” how could she?

“How could you, Mr. Blankwell?” Attorney General asks me, CSPAN podium coverage.

halfway finished with the mad dawg. running dangerously low on weed. by now the swirling sound effects of the music reflected the way my mind was ebbing and flowing, glowing and fading, in and out of reality. reminding myself to breathe. reminding myself to think. sargents outside reminding men to reload.

the defining moment in an american’s life. faced with the horrifying torturous face of their mother, understanding the atrocities that have been greenlit from those glimmering marble buildings in downtown DC. faced with the overwhelming evidence of this horrifying and murderous beast in your own room, fluttering in the a/c, how do you proceed? do you give up? let her do whatever she wants? hide like ticks in suburban malls, hoping she just doesn’t notice you scraping an existence on her hair follicles? or do you confront her? tell her that she is wrong? write a letter in your careful 12 year old handwriting like i did,

“mom, i’m sorry. either the alcohol goes or i do.”

one sentence. accidentally memorized from careful study. the frightening scrawling evidence of the most horrifying feeling for a mother - her son’s disappointment.

now drunk himself, staring at the stars and stripes. wondering what sense could be made of any of it. what were they doing outside? what was i doing with my life?

the answer rose from my aortic valve, through the circulatory system and finally resonated in the brain.

i was to take up the mantle of mark twain and hunter s. thompson, the voice of the america that should be. the one that recoiled in horror at what america had become, lady liberty gripped by the throat of 24 hour news cycles. choking the truth out of her. someone needed to slap the shit out of america, someone who loved her not as she was was, but what she represented. someone who could feel the smooth taut tummy of lady liberty as his hand slid down her silken robes to her beautifully shaven vagina. someone who could stimulate the clunt of liberty. if i wasn’t that man, if this wasn’t that time, then i implore the mass of law enforcement swirling like the black hole at the center of the milky way to strike me dead.

but how??? i thought as the police swarmed like ants outside my apartment.

what was there to say??

how could anything compare to the truth??