Member-only story
Excerpt from my upcoming book “Blue Dreams, Galactic Somersaults”
Living makes me want to smoke cigarettes. Camels, in fact. Camel filter 99s, more matter of fact. These burn long, and if I take more than a puff each minute while letting the world pass beneath my nose, I lose my vision, they’re that dizzyingly intense.
Living also makes me want to exist in a semi inebriated state, one in which I exist peacefully between both worlds of being present in reality and the other, sinking into a dream space. If my mood swings too far to the left of the pendulum, I hunker back into the very moment I wanted to run from. However, should my mood swing too far to the right, I might start urinating myself and hitting on anything that moves.
I like to talk about the people who have killed themselves. Why not? I think it’s a privilege. They did not sign the final dot, and left pages whose words were smeared by splotches of coffee. It’s unfair. Really, these are the only kinds of stories I like to give happy endings to. So, let’s narrate one before I continue to narrate mine, which doesn’t end too nicely. It hurts when someone who created the best memories becomes a memory.
The year was 1997. The era was marked by several cultural shifts. Relative prosperity and peace. Hair metal was dead. Grunge was popular, but on its way out once Cobain blasted his head off with a .357 shotgun and everyone had lost their raison d’etre to wear flannel shirts. A real gold mine of a decade, so far. And then there was this thing called the internet that I had only used once in a library.
The day was May 3rd. The weather was its usual; awful, steaming and buildings were soaked in mirages all down the asphalt cracked Main street in Benson, Arizona. The hour was merely ten am, but my nose had dried up already. Each time I tried to pick an annoying scab inside, my finger returned with dark red blood caked into the nail’s cuticles. I stood with my arms folded, like I had somewhere to go. With each passing car, a whirlwind of sand would funnel up before settling back down. I’d have to hoist up my trousers if the gust were too strong.
