Restructured to make a little more sense.  Still haven't gone chronological, though.  Everything that has been added in this iteration of the compendium has (new) next to it.  Six (new)'s under non-fiction and five (new)'s under other.  So, eleven entries worth putting on the revised compendium.  The last time I did one of these was about this time last year.  Not a good sign.

Non-fiction Stories(with no organization whatsoever):
(new)You're Creepy, Hunter - A girl tells me I am creepy.  I get even.

(new)Phoenix - I don't think I am supposed to write about something that is supposed to be anonymous.  Oh well.

(new)Strange Format - Saturday Show   -  Seriously the strangest format or lack thereof I have ever used.  Almost like a poem.  I've bad luck and things get out of hand.

(new)Graham's 21st Birthday - "No, dude, we're walking home.  It's like two blocks."

(new)Dead Cicada - A woman is assaulted while holding her child.  I intercede.

(new)A Warning - First Friday's in Richmond!

Salvia Gets Too Real - Fourth and worst trip on Salvia.

The Most Puke I Have Ever Seen - Imagine this next scene.  Try to visualize it with me.  My eyes open to the ceiling, my body shocked out of deep REM sleep.  My legs and waist are moist. . .

Drunk People - An interesting twist-- I'm not drunk in this story. For once in my life.

Black and Mild - I'll miss drinking with friends on top of the roof at my old apartment.  I will miss that Mediterranean market, with its natural soaps and cheap spices.  I will miss all those families who called the cops on me when I played music too loud on Monday nights.  Ahh

Hunter Takes it to the Limit, Throws Up Everywhere - In The Top Five Drunkest Nights

Pissing in Pools I & II - My double standard on people who pee in pools.

A Retelling of the First Time I Smoked

A Trip To Walmart - Seriously one of the best destinations while high.  Interesting, entertaining, sometimes a little creepy.

To Move My Body - When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. This story has procession of Segways!

The Things I Remember - I somehow wake up at 2PM in my dorm, still drunk from the night before.  A rough bus ride does me in.

Hunter Blacks Out, Goes To Patient First, Blames Free Beer - Pretty self explanatory.

A Tucker Emulation, It Seems - The very first story I wrote.

Handcuffed, Robbed, and 6 O'clock Rush - Pretty self-explanatory.  Breakfast club.

Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues - I get high, and drive.  Sort of.

Lebanese: A "Nice Guy" Failure - Nine Guys, One Girl.  I get the girl and ride off into the sunset(upstairs), but turn out to be a "nice guy."

JMU, PART I - The first and, since, only time I have been breathalyzed.  There is no part II.  Part II would be better though, as it includes doing mushrooms, a starving French guy, five plus parties, nearly getting run over, really drunk chicks with australian accents, and BLOODHOUNDS.  But this story has none of that.

THE WEEKEND - A three day bender, with a decadent interlude of cheating debauchery.  All set to the soundtrack of the very trite Garden State. 

Bloody in '08 - A New Year story, complete with someone who attempts to smash a full, unopened champagne bottle over his head.

Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning -- This story is far too long to hold your attention.  Do not read it.

Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):

Saint Dympna - My favorite.

The Sink at Sunset - Guy has mobile home of a heart.  This is life at 20.

Shells - My drug induced interpretation of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly caused this short.  Later turned into a short fiction piece (for a class) called Mise en Place or The Writer.

Nine-Tenths is Nothing - Our children are here to replace us.  One man attempts to slow this process by proving he is better than them and protecting his wife from kid perverts. 

The Last Boat to the Disappearing - A seven vignette fiction piece about flaming zombies.  As much as I wish I had written them gay, they are actually on fire.

Story Starter Exercise - A brief story about a friend who got kicked up and did a lot of drugs while living in the woods.
 

Other:
(new)At The Edge of The Neighborhood - Vivid zombie dream.

(new)Shut Down or Reset - Up late? Two options.  Special bonus feature: scene from this year's Best Friends Day @ Hadad's

(new)A Haiku - About a day I spent at the river getting drunk with someone I didn't know.  She was taken and I fell and cut myself on a rock.  Then there is a sexual allegory at the end.  There, I ruined it.

(new)My First Near-Ticket on a Bicycle

(new)Autumn - The Greatest and Best Time of Year

Can Blood Cells Have Car Accidents? - Thoughts after the fire.

Janus - Girl cheats on me.  Girl dies in short story Sink at Sunset.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part I  -- I test my voice recorder during a toking session.  Heavy on the dialogue.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part II -- The better half of the overall recording experience.  A lot of in depth high conversation. 

Friend's Mom Finds Out About Hunter's Livejournal, Missiles Fly - Probably one of the more significant events in the history of my online writing.

Under a Hot Chicago Sun - I didn't even know my neighbors name.

H-D-P-E Does Not Spell "Hope"  -  Recycling is hopeful.  I am not.

It Is Only Hubris If I Fail - Childhood with a heavy dose of failure, sprinkled with Sloane Crosley.

Sick Dream D.A.N.C.E. - Dreams are fun.  Dreams about partying and religious fanatics that all have the same face... strange.  Sick dreams are most disturbing.

Rape, Tacos, and Love - I get raped, noticed for my writing at a party, have sex for the first time high, eat really good tacos, and listen in on a nasty girl shit.

Tainted Elephant Oil Prices Dowsed in Sickly-Sweat-Stained Dreams - More sick dreams, musings on family life and relationships.

Zombie Christ Day

Metal Shows - Are awesome.  Especially when you know the band.  Even if it's at a lame venue. 

Derelict Father, Are We the Cause of Our Suffering?

Shit's Run Its Course - I inherit a bike from a metal head who stole it from a crack head.

The Bear, The Bee, The Rhino - I connect with mother nature, understand things I never thought possible.

Night Luck - I have only gotten in trouble with the law when sober.  Sobriety really takes the spine out of me.

Condom Debacle - A young Hunter hides a partially used condom in duct-tape.

Jesus Freaks - I lament about my hatred for street-preachers.  This is a Facebook classic.

Bloody Knuckles - It wasn't a game that gave me these.

Diphenhydramine - The first time I ever tripped on a deliriant.

Bulgarians are Hardcore - Intoxicated 5 times the lethal limit, this Bulgarian gets hit by a car and sent to the hospital for minor head trauma.

A Little Funny and The Encroaching

Sunchips? - Do you know why they call them sunchips?

LIRICKES -  The funniest rap "lirickes" you'll read all week.

The Binary Universe and How Choice Works  -  With diagrams and shit.

Poems - A little too sing-songy.

Soundscape - High times.

The Nature of Souls and Soulmates - Got a decent response for this one.

Scanner Darkly and the Universe as a Vague Set of Prepositions

Demon Play, Demon Out - Your shoes are not an extension of anything that matters to your person.

Clocked Out - A New Year - 2007.  Some things get better, other things are mentioned less.

New - I miss writing.

    I dream of suffocating vision, binding tunnel vision strangling my eyes.  I dream I am drunk and high and there are puzzle pieces strewn across my otherwise empty floor in my otherwise empty room.  A former roommate looms over the pieces and stares at me with dark circles under his eyes. The majority of puzzle pieces form a picture of a lighthouse.  I realize this should be in the bathroom down the hall, framed in ancient drift-wood and having 4 pieces misplaced at the bottom.  Not that it matters, in this puzzle, there are merely two shapes.  Every other piece is identical-- in waking and dreaming states. 

    You can still fit in even if you don't belong.

    My diminished key-hole sight causes me to panic.  I lose control of my body and drunkenly stumble out of the room.  What the hell is wrong with me, I ask myself.  I make it to the bathroom and begin urinating in the toilet.  The toilet relays the news, "You're piss is dirty.  You're going to fail."  A current roommate, Graham, apologizes, somewhere off in a distant nadir of my mind, for blowing smoke in my face.

    The toilet grimaces and becomes the Great Pit of Carkoon.  I fall and it consumes me.  Darkness and exudate outline rigid spikes as I dangle from a giant tongue(I hope).   Despair overwhelms me.  Tinges of thought, prickles of suggestion, move my mind to believe I am in hell.  And this, when this thing pukes me out, I'll be in heaven. 

    Apparently that is a terrace outside of Versailles Palace, lit by barely pre-crepuscular light.  Gold receding into silver blue into black.   I sit in silence overlooking courtyards below much as I did in waking state, looking down at the end of Richmond, the bend in the James and a traveling commercial train. 

    I wake up shivering and drink several glasses of water.  I have to go pee for the last time.  I get there, wait for what, to my bladder, seems like forever and in the end it's diluted.

   

This is a collection of things I have written that I think are at least half worth putting back up.  Since last I did one of these, I have added two short stories and maybe ten other forms of writing.  With 19 solid "Stories,"  7 short fiction pieces, and over 25 others, I would like to think that what I do for enjoyment is steadily becoming something I could do for money.  Years down the road, that is.  Enjoy.

STORIES(with no organization whatsoever):
Salvia Gets Too Real - Fourth and worst trip on Salvia.

The Most Puke I Have Ever Seen - Imagine this next scene.  Try to visualize it with me.  My eyes open to the ceiling, my body shocked out of deep REM sleep.  My legs and waist are moist. . .

Perfect Night Ruined by Marriot, Morning -- It turns out that drinking in the dorms is a bad plan.  But, for me, I have a great night, only to have it ruined by a morning hangover and the loss of my license. 

Hunter Takes it to the Limit, Throws Up Everywhere - In The Top Five Drunkest Nights

JMU, PART I - The first and, since, only time I have been breathalyzed.  There is no part II.  Part II would be better though, as it includes doing mushrooms, a starving French guy, five plus parties, nearly getting run over, really drunk chicks with australian accents, and BLOODHOUNDS.  But this story has none of that.

Pissing in Pools I & II - My double standard on people who pee in pools.

To Move My Body - When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. This story has procession of Segways!

Hunter Blacks Out, Goes To Patient First, Blames Free Beer - Pretty self explanatory.

Drunk People - An interesting twist-- I'm not drunk in this story. For once in my life.

A Tucker Emulation, It Seems - The very first story I wrote.

The Things I Remember - I somehow wake up at 2PM in my dorm, still drunk from the night before.  A rough bus ride does me in.

Handcuffed, Robbed, and 6 O'clock Rush - Pretty self-explanatory.  Breakfast club.

Hunter Gets High, Driving Barely Ensues - I get high, and drive.  Sort of.

Lebanese: A "Nice Guy" Failure - Nine Guys, One Girl.  I get the girl and ride off into the sunset(upstairs), but turn out to be a "nice guy."

A Trip To Walmart - Seriously one of the best destinations while high.  Interesting, entertaining, sometimes a little creepy.

A Retelling of the First Time I Smoked

THE WEEKEND - A three day bender, with a decadent interlude of cheating debauchery.  All set to the soundtrack of the very trite Garden State. 

Rape, Tacos, and Love - I get raped, noticed for my writing at a party, have sex for the first time high, eat really good tacos, and listen in on a nasty girl shit.

Bloody in '08 - A New Year story, complete with someone who attempts to smash a full, unopened champagne bottle over his head.

Short(or long) Stories(Fiction):

Nine-Tenths is Nothing - Our children are here to replace us.  One man attempts to slow this process by proving he is better than them and protecting his wife from kid perverts. 

Saint Dympna - My favorite.

The Sink at Sunset - Guy has mobile home of a heart.  This is life at 20.

Shells - My drug induced interpretation of the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly caused this short.  Later turned into a short fiction piece (for a class) called Mise en Place or The Writer.

The Last Boat to the Disappearing - A seven vignette fiction piece about flaming zombies.  As much as I wish I had written them gay, they are actually on fire.

Solipsism - A creation story.  A story with Robots and Gods and space battles.  A story with a twist.  A story that kind of sucks, but has novelty.

Story Starter Exercise - A brief story about a friend who got kicked up and did a lot of drugs while living in the woods.
 

Some others:

Can Blood Cells Have Car Accidents? - Thoughts after the fire.

Janus - Girl cheats on me.  Girl dies in short story Sink at Sunset.

Black and Mild - I'll miss drinking with friends on top of the roof at my old apartment.  I will miss that Mediterranean market, with its natural soaps and cheap spices.  I will miss all those families who called the cops on me when I played music too loud on Monday nights.  Ahh

Under a Hot Chicago Sun - I didn't even know my neighbors name.

H-D-P-E Does Not Spell "Hope"  -  Recycling is hopeful.  I am not.

It Is Only Hubris If I Fail - Childhood with a heavy dose of failure, sprinkled with Sloane Crosley.

Sick Dream D.A.N.C.E. - Dreams are fun.  Dreams about partying and religious fanatics that all have the same face... strange.  Sick dreams are most disturbing.

Tainted Elephant Oil Prices Dowsed in Sickly-Sweat-Stained Dreams - More sick dreams, musings on family life and relationships.

Zombie Christ Day

Metal Shows - Are awesome.  Especially when you know the band.  Even if it's at a lame venue. 

Derelict Father, Are We the Cause of Our Suffering?

Shit's Run Its Course - I inherit a bike from a metal head who stole it from a crack head.

The Bear, The Bee, The Rhino - I connect with mother nature, understand things I never thought possible.

Night Luck - I have only gotten in trouble with the law when sober.  Sobriety really takes the spine out of me.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part I  -- I test my voice recorder during a toking session.  Heavy on the dialogue.

Transcribing the Knowledge of The Smoke, Part II -- The better half of the overall recording experience.  A lot of in depth high conversation. 

Friend's Mom Finds Out About Hunter's Livejournal, Missiles Fly - Probably one of the more significant events in the history of my online writing.

Jesus Freaks - I lament about my hatred for street-preachers.  This is a Facebook classic.

Bloody Knuckles - It wasn't a game that gave me these.

Diphenhydramine - The first time I ever tripped on a deliriant.

Bulgarians are Hardcore - Intoxicated 5 times the lethal limit, this Bulgarian gets hit by a car and sent to the hospital for minor head trauma.

A Little Funny and The Encroaching

Sunchips? - Do you know why they call them sunchips?

LIRICKES -  The funniest rap "lirickes" you'll read all week.

The Binary Universe and How Choice Works  -  With diagrams and shit.

Poems - A little too sing-songy.

Soundscape - High times.

The Nature of Souls and Soulmates - Got a decent response for this one.

Condom Debacle - A young Hunter hides a partially used condom in duct-tape.

Scanner Darkly and the Universe as a Vague Set of Prepositions

Demon Play, Demon Out - Your shoes are not an extension of anything that matters to your person.

Clocked Out - A New Year - 2007.  Some things get better, other things are mentioned less.

New - I miss writing.

    Against a brick wall, my body hardly able to stand, my mind runs a list.  There was that time in the park, when Jeff was on acid, Yetti and I high.  They wanted to run, but of course we got off because we didn't.  Once, when Jeff was sober, a cop pulled us over because he was serving.  I was wasted, and the cop could totally smell me-- he was called off to something more important.  There was that time I was on mushrooms on my roof with Lenora, when I confidently dealt with a cop for fifteen minutes.  And, of course, at JMU, Patrick basically puking on the boots of a tempered veteran cop.  Wasted, and breathalyzed, I got us out of that one too.

    I take my backpack off and with as much discretion as I can muster, I slide it across the floor with my leg.  I nearly fall over, doing this, but no one notices.  My limited carry-on party stash is safely not associated with me anymore.
   
    My back to the brick, I think to myself that every time I run into cops while I'm fucked up, I get off-- free.  The only time I have ever been 'caught' was for my illegal U-Turn violation at 2 in the morning.  When I was sober.  In the swirling nexus of beer, wine, and pot, I think tonight will again try the theory that being fucked up makes me more supple, and thus, less susceptible to arrest. 

    I reassure the girl next to me, "We'll be fine," more for my comfort than hers.  The bulldog hardass cop that has my ID is using someone's phone to take a panoramic of the scene.  Piles of beer cans on this one table and the bulldog, breathing heavily, says, "Oooh, that's a good one."  Everyone who is not a cop scowls and looks around the room to each other-- This is fucked up, right?  What else can you think about cop porn?

    And then the cop's phone goes off, blaring.  He desperately shuffles to squelch Fall Out Boy's "Dance Dance," losing credibility by the millisecond.  I chuckle to myself.  Another cop, some kid who looks much younger than me, flips through a book of charges.  They're charging one of the guys that lives here with 405 of an unscheduled drug.  That's possession of alcohol, and he is 21.  Which means he'll be fine.  These cops suck.  Sucks that the guy has to go to court, but I am out the door in the next few minutes with my ID and my backpack.
   

This is the complete frame for the story I want to tell.  Thematically I am displeased with myself, but at least I got this out of my system.

FLAMBIES: Zombies Aflame.

"I just needed to get some fresh air.  Away from him.  He just never stops."
    "Yeeeah,"  says Samantha, elongating and trailing her words with a sigh.  "Can't we just have a conversation?"
    "Exactly. Enough staring into a computer screen, Jesus Christ."
The cold punctuates their words.  As they push the words through the air, so exits warm moisture.  It is the driest, coldest November for the region.  On the West Coast, this is especially prevalent as wildfires encroach ever so slowly from the southern tip of California, north and east.  It is on the news nearly every day, but neither of these individuals are aware of it.  Miles away, the all-consuming fire is of little consequence to them.  So, so far away. 

    "I should really get going," she says, annoyed at the presence of Jake, their mutual friend, who is on FACEBOOK, a company that poses to "connect you" and make you "closer" to your friends, when really they're selling something out of the back.  That something is your information.  When you list information about yourself, it is leased to the highest bidder.  Once that happens, FACEBOOK allows the advertisers to link ads to your login, specifically targeting you.  Jake is still on FACEBOOK, having his soul siphoned out, hours after they leave.
    "Alright, yeah, I've really got to get up early anyway," she adds. 
    Cabel and Samantha put their cigarettes out together, both having finished within exactly two minutes-- inhaling an entire cigarette, burned. 

Scuttling
    "So, you still haven't told me why we're here, Fisher. Or why I couldn't come the first time," Kristopher hisses through his pearly teeth.
    "Ampulex compressa," Dr. Fisher responds.
    "The wasp?"
    "The wasp."
    "What about it?"
    "It evolved in tandem with roaches-- developed a toxin that it injects into their brains.  Inducing the toxin makes the roaches follow a scent back to the wasp's nest, where it becomes an incubator for the wasp's eggs, who hatch and eventually utilize more roaches for procreation."
    "Well, we're not going to find any wasps in a dark cave."
    Dr. Fisher grins with crooked yellow teeth. He cuts at the skeleton of a Fuji with a rusty knife.
    "That's disgusting."  His friend and more formally apprentice, Kristopher, sits on a damp mound of granite.  Staring in concern for his mentor, not friend, he iterates his point, adding, "You're going to get lockjaw or something."
    Dr. Fisher uses the force of a thumb opposite the rusty, though sharp blade, sliding it toward him.  "You know nothing.  Apples are good for you, clean out your teeth.  And I'll be fine."
    Kristopher continues to stare, annoyed.  He sighs and looks up at the sky of rock.  A drop of water drips.  Drips right into his eye.  Putting up with moments of eternity, Kristopher reminds himself this is worth it.  Misery and his mind wander to gold watches and beautiful women. "You know, we should probably be doing work. You've been carving for thirty minutes."
    "Twenty-six, and what's your hurry?  I could cut this forever, given the right sharpness. You can always get smaller pieces, if you understand how.  We need to understand how to find what we're looking for.   And we'll find it when we find it."
    Kristopher begins a retort, but the air is knocked out of him, as the granite stump gives way to his weight.  Dr. Fisher rises cautiously.  His understanding of caves shaken, just not as much as Kristopher's. 
    "What the fuck?!"  Kristopher belches angrily from within a sunken rock formation.  "That is not supposed to fucking happen.  Is this one of your tests, one of your tricks... I am so sick--"
    "Wait!"  A scuttling noise echoes, and Dr. Fisher continues over discontented whispers from Kristopher, "Do you hear that?"  Kristopher's hands push down on the outer rim of his accidental rock fox-hole, and he pauses.
    "Yeah. I do.  What is it?" he whispers, calmly excited.
    "It's what we're looking for."
    Dr. Fisher turns his helmet-light to full and Kristopher is blinded.  He returns the favor, but Fisher is already creeping down to a nearby pool.  "In there," he says, pointing through a hole in the wall.
    "What about in there?"
    "You're climbing in there."
    Normally one for confrontation, Kristopher trades his grief for anticipated glory and fortune. He begins to move himself forward in the crawlspace to the pool.  He promptly sticks himself the wrong way, and can't move forward.
    "I'm stuck!" he yelps.  Frantically shifting his weight, he continues, "I think I can get out, but I can't go forward anymore"
    "Wait! What can you see?"
    Kristopher stops panicking and remembers the new car he needs.  "Just a wall."  He turns his head.  The light moves with him, panning the wall.  Outside of the hole, Dr. Fisher paces.  Bites his nails. 
    "Anything yet?" Fisher ponders aloud.  Before Kristopher responds, Fisher gets his answer.  Light beams outward from the hole, enveloping Kristopher and startling Fisher.  He shields his eyes and asks Kristopher if he can see it.
    "Yes," he breathes, "it's beautiful."  
   
Consumer
     Cabel's iPod boombox blankets the noisy television in the next room, blasting her favorite song.  The speakers, busted, screech during the higher pitches, while the Media makes hopeless attempts to educate Cabel.  From across the kitchen, she sees shocked eyes on gaping anchor-faces, and thinks little of it.  Shit happens every day.  Every day, shit happens. 
    Bing, microwave ravioli is done.  She reads the nutrition facts.   Fourteen grams of protein, Eight-point-one grams of sugar, and Two-thousand-nineteen milligrams of sodium.  Eighty-four percent, she reads and thinks, Oh well, it's been worse. 
     Years ago, when Cabel is fifteen, she fails a drug test for the last time.  Unable to tolerate it any longer, her mother kicks her out of the house, changes the locks, and nails the windows shut.  For the next week, Cabel lives in a neon-pink and yellow Fisher Price tent in the woods.  The forgotten woods between a new apartment complex and ancient rail-road tracks.  The sewer water leaks through to the creek, and she lives off of fast food.  Her friends tell her she looks pale and malnourished.  Three things go through her fifteen-year-old head:  1) Burning those effigies of my mom in the back yard with my friends, our little arms beating it with lead pipes and sticks,  seems retroactively justified.  2)Maybe I should quit smoking pot.  3) Maybe I should quit getting caught for smoking pot.

     She never quits.  She is high right now, in fact. 

    Her Crest-whitened teeth take their first bite of the faux-violi. If it's better than it was, it's best.  She lowers the volume on her boom box and catches the end of shocked words from a shocked mouth, "Our prayers are with the missing Dr. Bernard Fisher and all of those suffering in California."  Cabel straddles her couch, flipping her left leg over.  She carefully lands on the cushions, facing the television.  She thinks about Dr. Fisher missing and is, inexplicably,  unable to cry as the news fades to commercials.  Pushing her lack of empathy to the back of her mind, she turns the volume up.  Cars overpower cheetahs and horses, victorious, even, over Earth itself.  Medicine cures the minor and embarrassing--  backaches and heartburn, flatulence,  anxiety and confidence issues.  Lose weight, follow our god, monitor your neighbors.  Beware.   A cyclical tale of kindness shows last on the screen-- everyone seeing everyone else lend a hand, and everyone continuing the cycle, until it returns to the first person.  Some music accompanies it and then the logo of a large company fades in and it says, "We care about you."   Cabel begins to weep uncontrollably.
    The news returns, ending the commercials. The ads continue, with a voice conditioned to sell ideas. "Now we return to our story on why breastfeeding may be harmful to your child."

    Later that night, she rolls a spliff and smokes it out of her bedroom window, alone.  Off in the faded black, she hears a train and thinks of her father, who used to take her to chase and photograph trains when she was younger, back before he left her mother.  A wailing metal ghost groans, for it is inclined to keep going in one direction, forced to remain on a set path.  The conductor of the ghost pulls its vocal chord, and it lets out a smaller and smaller call.  And then, when she can no longer hear it any more, off in that dark distance, she tries to cry.  She tries so hard, because she feels that it means so much.  So much now that it's gone.  And it's gone.  
   
 Flambies
     John Goh  lies face down at the foot of the forest.  His skin, stripped from his body, oozes out from under his retardant yellow fatigues.   The hair on his body burns, emanating a bad smell, and no one but the trees, engulfed in cones of fire, claim witness.  John's mind painfully wanders to the edge of sense, and he passes out, dead and still burning. 
   
    Earlier, John tells his compatriots of Buddhist Monks who, protesting the Vietnam war, doused themselves in gasoline.  They lit matches and sat, lips sealed, burning.  Like that guy who loads his shotgun and goes down to the ashes of the twin towers and hops the fence, John says.  Wearing a sign that details why he is about to do what he is about to do, he positions the barrel against his throat and pulls the trigger, splattering himself on the grave that launched a war. 
    John and his group of firefighters get off of their transport vehicle and gear up.  They stand gazing into the perimeter of flame.  Dwarfing them, it gradually advances its will across the California soil, stretching upward to burn a hole in the sky.  Stretching to reunite with the gods of fire in the night sky.  Fighting this fire is a constant struggle, and there is no sleep for those who wish it halted. 

    It is a moonless night, one of the firefighters notes, and John thinks of how maybe it is just a sunless night.  Either way the moon is out there, imperturbably lording some bit of fate over the world, its oceans, its fish and its fishers.  Somewhere higher than John and the firefighters but lower than the moon, fire and gravity play fiend to the group, and a branch, incinerated,  snaps.  It careens, inexorably, as a spear on fire, through the skull of Todd Jennings.  He drops to his knees, his eyes bursting with blood.  He throws up and lands in it. 
   
    The firefighters stand, paralyzed.  John begins to move in to check the body, no longer Todd Jennings, when the body writhes and squirms, launching itself upward.  John falters backward and falls on his ass, as the firefighters, their feet made of concrete or lead, watch in horror as Jennings' body stops flailing and stares, eyeless, through them. 

    John scrambles for his radio. 
    "DISPATCH!  We've run into trouble, CHRIST!" is the understatement he manages before the body begins acting up again.

  The body, with its antenna of flame and face covered in burst over-easy eyes and sizzling blood, stands more erect and hisses.  Then screeches and yelps.
     "This is Dispatch, what's wrong Goh?"
    It clicks and clacks its jaw and rushes forward, rearing his right arm backward.  With an arc of his arm and a claw of a hand, the body effortlessly punctures the eyes of Cameron Dollio and rips down and outward.  John, thinking of the madness on Black Friday, the crowds rushing and violently pushing and breaking eachother to get the better deal first, is unable to respond to the radio.
     Dollio's lip comes with the hand as the body continues to tear.  The body reaches around and sputters blood into Dollio's ear before eviscerating it with its teeth.  Though wearing retardant gear, Dollio's body soon catches fire from the increasingly engulfed body attacking him.  Dollio's corpse crumples to the ground. 

    John gets up, stumbles, and begins to run, as do the four others remaining.   Two bodies chase and catch them with ease.  One down, and fire is spreading more quickly toward the road they took to get here.  The road where more firefighters, from the last shift, rest and recuperate.  Two down, this time three bodies mutilating one, setting it aflame.  Three down.  Four down.  John can see the road ahead where firetrucks and lights and tents with coffee and food wait idly.  He begins hyperventilating, and removes his mask.  Sputtering, he collapses.

The Elephant
    Snuggled tightly in a cocoon of Thomas Lee sheets and blankets, Samantha happily watches a movie at midnight.  The IKEA lights dimmed behind an IKEA shelf, she peers over blankets, her eyes fixed upon her wall-mounted 60" Sony Bravia.  She is watching George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. 
    Outside her window, down the alley and in the next yard, a man swings open a gate and slams it shut.  Hearing this and terrified of the undead on the screen, Sam cuddles closer to a favorite Beanie Baby.  A Beanie Baby that was fifty dollars, and the one she wanted most for Christmas one year. Current Value: six dollars or "priceless memory."
    The man outside takes a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts.  He stares at the ground.  Through the cracks of the fence, and off the walls of the cobble-stone alleyway, orange light filters into his mind.  He runs through the yard and up a flight of wooden stairs, spinning around to look over the fence.  A wall of bodies, aflame, rush through the beginning of the alley way, arms flailing outward.  
    All this commotion has Sam up and out of her bed, staring out her window.  She sees the man ripping up wooden steps and throwing them into her yard.  Her condensed moisture words smash against the window, "Fucking lunatic."  Assuming it is one of the city's ill-minded street denizens, she exits her room, the movie paused with the hero pressing a pea-shooter to his temple. 

    On her back deck Sam, oblivious to the fires several yards down to her left, yells across to the man, "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"  Un-phased, the man readies a hose over the railing facing the yard, leaving it on full blast.  He begins banging on the door, but these people are out of town.  He smashes his hand through the door and unlocks it.  Baffled, Sam turns to go inside to get her cell phone to call the police.  As she does this, she immediately understands the nature of the man's behavior.  Standing there, in the cold night air, with the encroaching fire there in front of her, she is unable to move.  Something about the sight of fire, whether vast or small but especially of this magnitude,  renders a human transfixed.  In awe.

    An inhuman screech comes from across the yard.  Crashing through a window is the man, hands gripping the shoulders of a flaming person.  He falls on his back and yells out.  With built adrenaline, he heaves the person up and through the railings of the deck opposite of Samantha.  He picks the hose up and douses himself, putting out patches of flame.  Finally he notices her.  He begins to say something when the wall of flame reaches the back of their apartments. The man's gate busts open, several bodies falling through to the ground, which, covered in dry brush, catches immediately.  In seconds, ten bodies pour through the opening and more climb over the fence.  Scrambling to keep up with the larger bodies, children run with the pack, their flame flickering like a strobe light.  The man directs the hose to them.  Hearing the water sizzle, he realizes the amount of water he can utilize is fruitless and begins to run back into the apartment as bodies attempt to jump the gap in the stairs or climb the pillars of wood.  This sets the deck on fire. 

    Sam, seeing several flaming bodies jump her own fence, runs back inside.  She runs through the apartment, which seems enveloped in daylight.  Reaching her front door, she swings it open and heads downstairs.  Outside, Samantha witnesses a condensed demonstration of human nature. 
    On the street several friends are running for a car.  The foremost friend stretches out his arm and unlocks his car ten feet away.  This allows he and all but one of his friends to jump in the car.  The leave him, halted by a horde of flaming zoo animals.  A fiery elephant slaps the hood with a crimson trunk and the driver crashes through the windshield, his body sailing through the air and into the fire.  The driver catches flame, and runs for his car toward his friends who are fighting each other to exit the vehicle.   
    "Over here," someone yells on Samantha's side of the street.  The yeller, "Tom" perhaps, struggles with a handful of keys, searching for the right one.  The left-behind friend, maybe "Fred," runs across the street.  Eventually Tom gets it and they enter, not noticing her, and drive away. 
   
   The car takes a right turn past a CVS and 7-11 where the lights are off.  They prematurely disappear from sight when the man from the back deck steps in front of her, saying, "FOLLOW ME, WE NEED TO GET IN THE BASEMENT!" as loud as he can.  Samantha pees a little and passes out in the man's arms. 

    "Shit," he says.

Answers
    Samantha awakens, her face smushed against cold slate.  She pushes herself up and rubs her eyes.  Her stranger-savior rocks back and forth, hands on his knees.  She looks behind him, where the ancient iron doors are sealed.
      "You can't begin to imagine the drugs they pumped into these things.  Hunger amplification, high concentrations of melatonin, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish," Kristopher shakes words from his bruised head.  "No, I didn't think this would happen." 
    Samantha contorts her face, puzzled.  "Isn't that the stuff in your skin?"
    "No," he responds.  "Melatonin is in your brain.  Regulates your rhythm, uh," he pauses-- straining his eyes in the darkness of the basement.  He continues, "Sleep patterns, dreaming, belief in the supernatural even.  Might be linked to the God gene, I don't know.  Melatonin is triggered at night, in our brains.  I remember when I was a kid, I got frightened by the dancing stuffed animals on the shelf next to my bed-- kids have a hard time discerning between reality at night because of melatonin and the developmental level of their brain."

    Samantha pouts, remembering the flickering children.   She thinks of something--How can insects have melatonin?-- to ask him to keep him talking.  She is comforted by his knowledge.

    Kristopher begins again, knowing that telling her something about how it started will release him of the burden.  The longer winded he is about how it happened, the longer he can keep from thinking how it is happening.  "Nearly all life has it, regulates the circadian rhythm, you know, the physiological cycle of day and night, night and day.  They first discovered melatonin in insects back in the seventies--in the compound eyes of crickets. And when inducing more than was 'natural,'" he says, using facetious air-quotes with his fingers, "their night activity increased substantially."  He chuckles, "Eventually eliminating day-time activity.  Not the case, here, though.  Not completely."

    Samantha brews.  At this point, Kristopher has run out of things to say to her.  He doesn't feel he can communicate on her level, which, for him, is much lower than he is willing to venture.  Able only to see dim reflections off his eyes and protruding cliff-face of a nose, she wonders aloud, "Why in their eyes?  Is that the only way we can tell whether it is day or night?  Can't we feel the sunlight or lack thereof on our skin?"

    At this, Kristopher perks up, remembering the gruesomely bloody candle-wax face of a body, dripping gaps in the face, six inches from his own face.  "They don't have eyes, he says."
    They launch into a verbal foray.    
    "You said you found these in a cave, right?"
    "Right."
    "Was there any light down there?"
    "No, we had these heavy fucking helmets mounted with lights.  You know, like Hollywood."
    "You were in California,"  she smiles.
    "Yeah, not twenty miles from the edge of the wild-fires."
    The conversation dies with Samantha's last, sleepy thought, "Will they ever burn out?"

    Kristopher begins to fall asleep as fire sweeps through the city, conforming the minds of all willing beings.  His last thought is of the helicopter, bursting into flame--fading into the clouds. With Samantha asleep, he removes a translucent box from the inside of his coat.  Within the box, a white mantis-like creature is stretched by hexagonal distortions on the outside.  Kristopher shakes his head as the inside of the box ignites and extinguishes several times.    

Abednego
    Cabel peers across an empty ocean.  Antarctica is supposed to be here somewhere.  It would be hard to miss, but it is missing.  One day, the flaming bodies collectively decide to rush for the oceans.  Every survivor of the immortal flame that were the mysterious bodies, now stands alone, against a tide of change-- across the face of their planet, they must soon learn to survive.  No longer will they subsist. 
    Visible gusts of air exit her lungs, and her lips begin to crack and bleed.  She looks to her right, to her father who stands looking out into the blue oblivion with her.  Words have yet to jump his perfect ivory gap.  Puffs of air cannot be seen coming from his mouth.  Cabel does not notice.  She just leans against the wall of the deck and rubs her gloved hands together and against her body.  She cannot remember arriving on the boat.  Her last clear memory is of the man who head butts her in an attempt to force her aboard a helicopter.  It happened so fast, she thinks.

    "Abednego, goddamnit!  Abednego!"  Cabel shakes a chain-linked fence with meat-hook fingers.  A security camera watches the sidewalk where she shakes the fence.  It pans to the surrounded parking lot. "HEY, HEY, I'M RIGHT HERE!  YOU LET ME IN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" 
     "Yelling at the camera won't get you inside."  Two rows of perfectly straight pearly teeth meet her teary-eyed gaze as she spins around.  A man faces her, unreadable behind huge bug-eyed reflective lenses.  Red eyes and a pouting mouth mirror her own.
   
    "My father is missing, and they need to let me in here.  Now."
    "I understand," say the pearly teeth. A hand extends for hers.  "My name is Kristopher Elijah and I work here."  They shake hands.  Before she can introduce herself, he continues.  "What has your father told you about Abednego?"  He smiles for an answer.
     "It's our code-word.  When I was little, he gave us a code-word, for safety. He said if I ever needed him, I could come to his lab, and if I said Abednego, the guards would have to let me in."
    "Drag you in, maybe.  Who did you say your father was?" he asks her.
    "I didn't.  I'm Cabel Fisher."
    At this, Kristopher's smile evaporates.
    "Follow me," he says.
    Kristopher approaches a box on the gate.  He retrieves a key from his pocket and uses it to open the box.  He removes his sunglasses and hunches forward to place his eyes in front of the box. 
    "These things destroy your vision." 
    The gate creaks sideways, dragging itself on rolling wheels.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you should know," Kristopher begins.  "I saw it.  I experienced it.  Everything I saw profoundly changed me."  He laughs, "And your father, him too.  But he actually has one.  Or maybe one has him."
     "What did you see?"  Confusion strikes Cabel blind to Kristopher's actions.  They enter completely black room.  Kristopher paces to the back wall and plucks something from a rack.  It clinks the keys in his pocket, sounds like glass.  They exit and keep walking.
    "Where are we going?" 
    "To the roof?"
    The building seems empty except for a few rooms they pass to the elevator.  In one, Cabel glimpses a man strapped to a bed, his muscle exposed to the air.  In another room a man is pulling organs out of a body and placing them on a table.  The body squirms but makes no sound she can hear through the door.  She throws up a little in her mouth and grabs Kristopher's arm. 
    "What is this place," she says muffled, her hand over her mouth. 
    "We just wanted to make money off of suffering.  That's the human way."  Before she can respond, he says they have reached the elevator.  He enters, but she does not.  "Do you want to see your father?"
    "Yes."  She enters.  The doors slide shut as a clicking and screeching noise bellows somewhere in the hallway.  The crashing sound of metal against stone is the last thing they hear before the doors shut.  They look at each other.
    Kristopher presses 5 and says, "I saw everything beautiful in this world.  Everything right.  I got this feeling, in the pit of my stomach, that we, as humans once had it right.  The oceans were crystal pools on the face of a green rock. Before Prometheus, before the first revolution, we were not separate from this world.  I was stuck in this tiny hole down in a deep cave with your father.  We were looking to make money off of this new species we had discovered.  Incredible evolutionary abilities.  We're not even sure how what it does is possible, but we've witnessed it.  And, there I am, seeing into myself, my father, his father, our kind.  All our sins replayed in an instant.  In that eerie mirror, where only the light in my mind exists, I am overwhelmed with the horror I witness.  Our world burns as our moon tosses itself, crashes into our surface, shattering.  Splintering.  I see the lives of each person, each ancestor, played out and destroyed.  I scream and tell your father to pull me out, but he has gone.  I don't know where.  A few days later, he shows up here--"
    "But?"
    The doors open to the fifth floor, which is essentially a hallway leading to a ladder.   
    "Your father is waiting for you on the roof" is the second to last thing he says to her, pointing to the ladder.  The last thing he says to her, after she comes scrambling down the ladder minutes later is, "You have to go," right before head butting her.

    On the boat, her father begins to speak, slowly.
    "The bonding trestle of heart and mind.  If only you could see as your Leviathan sees, perhaps you would would understand as I do.  As gods do.  Your fractious construction of lineage, your muddled perception.  Darkened shadow compressed to brilliant diamond threads, all for you, undeserved." 
    "Dad."
    No response.
    "Father."
    Nothing.
    "Abednego"
     Nothing.
    She rears back.  "I don't understand."
    "You're not meant to understand.  You never were.  You are a flashlight in the dark.  We are the dark."

The Ward
I work with mental patients.  Most people send these people here because they can't deal with it at home.  The breakdown of their loved ones is just too much. Out on the streets of the city, more of them roam, gathering up trash and scraps.  But those people, they don't have anyone to care for them, especially not themselves.   In here, though, there are white walls, pale pills, and me.  Everyone's seen me.  I'm the big, bearded bouncer of the ward.  I'm the bear-like creature that wrestles patients to the ground when they get out of control.  On TV and in movies, I wear white and I am portrayed as a reason you don't want to be in the ward.  In real life, I wear a faded brown uniform and I am actually one of the nicer people you will meet here.  I won't disregard what you say until you're shot up with sodium pentothal, like all the doctors here.  But I'm not a doctor.  No, I'm like a nurse-bouncer.

I believe in listening.  I believe, as long as you aren't hurting anyone, your reality is yours alone.  If you asked me what I thought about the Bible, I would tell you it is an interesting story.  A good story, a good version of reality, is more entertaining than anything else.  Seeing the universe through someone else's eyes.  Living vicariously.  These are ways to reach out beyond our internal experience.  Every patient I see has their own volume.  A reality they author.  Sometimes through incoherent babbling, sometimes through art, and sometimes through violence.   There is only one particularly violent case here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  A man I call "Hero."  Muscles ripple over his body and hatred fuels his motives.  And now I understand why.  We were keeping him from something important in his life.

Rounds
At the beginning of the day, I make my rounds through the building. Nothing interesting or significant happens.  The afternoons are where I enjoy my job.  It is art and social therapy time in the cafeteria.  In one corner, child-minds doped up on some prescribed lifestyle, they fingerpaint.  One of them manages to make a turkey with her hand.  I tell her it's cool, but one of the other nurses just stands there looking past his nose and he says, "It's not Thanksgiving yet."  His parents were probably condescending to him, too.

In the middle of the room three patients idly drop red or black discs into a yellow frame.  They are playing Connect-Four, a two player game.  Click. The first player, Jones, drops his red disc into an empty slot.  Click-click, two black discs fall, one from Tamera and one from Doc.  I guess if you expanded the constraints, you know, the yellow grid, more people could play.  The two players with black, Tamera and Doc, aren't using what amounts to a two-turn-in-a-row option(?).  They're playing against each other with the same color.  They're playing by their own rules.

And then, by the windows, Strawberry and Hero.  The windows are the kind you see in bathrooms with the pattern that disallows viewing, but still lets light in.  When they constructed Saint Dympna's Ward, they decided the outdoors would distract from what was going on inside.  They may as well have built the complex underground and set up a synthesized sunlight system.  Real or otherwise, the light is hitting Strawberry's flaming red hair, and you immediately understand her name.  She wasn't bald upon birth.  She had one single strand of the most crimson-red hair, so her parents named her Strawberry.  The day the father was driving the family back from the hospital, they got twenty feet from the parking lot.  And a Ford pickup slammed them.  No one died, but both parents were sent right back to the hospital, twenty feet back.  Both in a vegetative state on arrival.  The grandparents of Strawberry put her up for adoption, but kept her parents on feeding tubes until she was twenty one.  Then they sent her a letter.  "Your parents are alive," it said.  Well sort of, they meant.  And she broke down.  And she's here.

I am talking to one of the patients about their awesome rendition of the human hand via finger paints when a table flips from the other side of the room, crashing into the wall.  I turn to the noise of a splintering wooden table.  Against the wall is Strawberry, her head facing upward towards the heavens, eyes closed.  Around her neck is a hand.  Hero's hand, gripping tightly, fingers pressed inward on her skin.  Inside, her wind pipes begin to strain under the pressure.  Choking.  The owner of the hand, Hero, his brow is smushed in on itself.  His eyebrows tell her that he hates her.  His eyes are ablaze with the reflection of her hair-- now dancing up from her back, situated over an air vent.  It rises and falls.  Rises, oscillates, falls.  Extends itself outward, reaching maximum buoyancy, and falls.  In this split second image, I am rushing over to bear-hug Hero and wrestle him to the ground.  Before I can, a doctor gets there and tries to negotiate.  She is strong-armed to the floor with a swift, balled up fist.  I step over her crumpled body.  The next thing I know, there is a colored pencil in my throat and I am laid out.

Roommate
It is a day before my neck covers a sea-green colored pencil in blood.  A day before Hero grabs a single, makeshift weapon from a box of seventy-two potential tools, I am lying in bed-- naked.  Next to me is my girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-in-disguise, with a voice angels envy.  She writes her own songs and sings them to me.  Sometimes they're about me, and how, in the past, I have been a stupid dick to her, but, it's okay, because here and now is what matters, and here and now is perfect.  Here and now, she is snoring.  Her incredible range is being utilized by runner's lungs, keeping me awake.

Before getting out of bed, I lean to her and kiss her on the forehead.  In spite of her snoring, she is the most devine creature know to man.  To God, or this, or whatever anything is.  I stumble through the ambient light from the street, looking for my boxers.  They are hidden under a sheet that was, with my boxers, kicked off the bed earlier in the night.  I wiggle them up my waist, and grab my girlfriend's pack of cigarettes.  Be right back, I say to her snores.  I crack the door and slide through, sideways.  I walk to the back of the apartment.  I notice her roommate's door is open.  That means she's not here.  She's never here.  Only in the mornings, when her alarm is blaring for hours, is she here-- sleeping.  My girlfriend tells me near-insomnia is the only means she has left to get fucked up.  She tells me she has a bad past.  She killed people.  Not on purpose, but on accident.  She had been speed balling one night.  This is when you mix heroine and cocaine.  One is basically a downer, the other an upper.  In addition, she was drunk.  And driving.  Swerving across the road one night, she slammed the right side of the car into a tree.  The car wraps around, metal frame hugging wooden trunk, and two of her friends die instantly.  Now she goes to AA meetings.  Now she stays up until her body can't handle the sleep deprivation anymore, and she just passes out.  Now she does art therapy.  Just like a case at Saint Dympna.

I reach the kitchen in the back of the apartment.  To my left, the microwave reads 0:18 where it should say 2:48AM.   To my right is the door.  Before I exit and smoke, I light my cigarette with the oven.  This singes my eyebrow and the room fills with that burnt-hair-smell that no one seems to like.  One of my feet rests in a black square while the other rests within a white one.  At the door, I slide locks from left to right, and twist the door knob.  From left to right.  It opens and I am through, to a world of light pollution.  Living in the city, you don't really see the stars.  It's like being in a mental ward where the windows are only partially translucent.  You get some light-- a fraction of the big picture.  You are only graced with a relative abundance of stars on clear nights like this, when the air is thin and cold.  I shiver momentarily, but the head rush of nicotine quickly comes to my body's aid.  Aid.  I am a cigarette's patient today.

I focus on the cherry, which is glowing brightly against the wind.  In French, they call it le fraise.  "The Strawberry."  It makes me happy that some things are naturally universal, like this. Fire.  The color of it, the idea of it, is intertwined in human history, I think.  But now, though not everywhere, there's electricity to give us warmth.  Century old technology.  Wires in the sky.  Big cylinders, converting energy.  These things aren't beautiful.  We don't relate to power plants.  Fire is so basic, so elemental, that its beauty is ingrained in us.  Especially now, as I shiver on the back porch of the third floor, 2425 E. Fields, apartment six.  Alone, sharing my experience.

The faux-gold emblem of a camel on the side of my cigarette isn't wearing scrubs or a lab coat, but right now, he is my doctor.  With every deep drag, the cold retreats from my skin.  Doctor Camel will be with you shortly.  With a sufficient headrush I go back inside.  The roommate's door is closed as I walk by.

I lay down next to my girlfriend and wrap my arms around her.  In the bathroom adjoining the two bedrooms, a light is on.  The roommate is in there, taking a shit.  Plop, is the last sound I hear before a blaring alarm wakes me up in the morning.  My girlfriend is gone to work, having woken me up briefly to say goodbye.  I don't remember this clearly, but I remember it happening as the alarm was going off in the background.

My girlfriend leaves for work at six in the morning.  It is now seven thirty.  The alarm has been active for an hour and a half.  Before leaving, I put my clothes on and go into the roommate's room.  Blankets cover her windows, making it dark, but trapping the sound.  The constant beep, beep, beep gives me a headache.  I can't imagine what it is doing to her dreams.  Several prescription drugs lie on her dresser, filled in those transparent orange bottles you get from pharmacies.  One of them has pot in it, the only thing she didn't quit.  Medicine bottles are like the next step up from your standard issue sandwich bag.

I hit the off button.  Next to the alarm, I notice a box of colored pencils.  A sea-green pencil is upside-down in the box.  I flip it around to be right-side-up.  I get the idea that I will bring this for my two favorite patients at the ward, so I leave a note for the roommate.  In the note I am telling her they are being put to good use and that I will have them back to her at the end of the night.  Or, the beginning of her day.

Physics and Biology
Two ideas cannot occupy the same space simultaneously.  This is why I have a hole in my neck.  A sea-green pencil and my neck had a dispute over who should be where. Over the hole is a big white bandage framed in surgical tape.  In the ward's cafeteria, there are also holes.  In the walls.  From Hero and his massive fists.

Hero, the patient that stabbed me, he tells me he is sorry, but she had to die.  The other nurses and doctors believe he is only sorry because he is now in a sort of solitary confinement.  Fettered to the walls with some metal covered in nylon, something they use in special cases like this.  Special cases that also call for a muzzle.  A face mask, situated around the back of the skull like a belt on a waist.

After I was stabbed, Hero was quickly surrounded by the rest of the staff and backup is summoned.  There are now five individuals encircling him.  He punches the wall behind him to, they assume, show his strength.  These are those cinder-block walls painted over white that you see in nearly every institution.  They are strong, but where his fist lands, the wall crumbles in around his arm like a sand castle.  The surrounding crowd takes a collective step backward.  Hero has frightened a ten legged monster.  A mob.

The monster rears its head forward, toward Hero.  It is another nurse, breaking from the crest of the outward semi-circle, making his way for the center.  Everyone calls this nurse Big Mac.  This is because every day, at lunch, he has a hamburger from a burger chain.  Every day, a standard helping of processed perfection.  On Wednesdays, that's today, he shares his number seven selection with millions of other Big Mac guys out there.

"And then he bit my ear off.  He bit my fucking ear off," Big Mac tells me.  "He cups my chin with his big hand and lifts me.  I am two-twenty-five, man!"

It's true, he's a big guy.  You don't eat number fours for breakfast every day and lose weight.  He turns to me and hands me his pack of cigarettes, saying, "I know you're not ready to admit that you're a smoker.  Here."   His bandage, a painted window frame on his face, covers a sewn up ear.  His smile nearly reaches it as I take the cigarette.

Yeah, I tell him, I smoke, but I'm not a smoker.  Buying my own pack, that would make me a smoker.  A prisoner.

"Oh yeah," he says, "they want you inside.  Something to do with the maniac."  He's referring to our very own Mike Tyson.  I go inside and start my Wednesday morning in the ward's basement.

Odds
"Four-hundred-to-one odds is what I'm up against," he says, "and I can't defeat four men in brown suits because they have shock-sticks and stinging spray cans."

My superior tells me I am the only one Hero will talk to, and here I am, listening to the tail end of his story.  Being surrounded and tasered is the last image Hero remembers before waking up bound to a metal-dungeon in the basement of Saint Dympna's Ward. I ask him what he means by four-hundred-to-one odds.

"These are numbers I have no problem with," he says.

No problem with doing what, I ask.

"Killing."

Oh, I say, killing four hundred innocent people without a thought.  Like Strawberry.  He takes offense.

"I'm sorry, but she had to die.  Just like everyone I've killed."

Why?  Why is the red-head that likes colored pencils dead?  Why couldn't she live.  She was the soul survivor of a car accident, an orphan, a smoker.  Why couldn't Strawberry live, I ask him again and again.  He is silent for several minutes, refusing to tell me anything beyond "she had to die."  I ready myself to leave and motion to the guard at the door.  The guard is going to put the muzzle back on.  Before he does, Hero, he says, "Wait."  He'll tell me.

Strawberry sits across from him, happily dazed by the day's regimen of drugs, coloring.  She draws a bronze sword and says, "You're going to have to kill me."  Hero looks up from his blank page, but she remains coloring.  Now she is drawing a deeply tanned hand gripping a hilt of a bronze sword.   She barely colors in the lines.  It's all blurred.

"What did you say," Hero asks her, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers, stopping the colored pencil.  She looks up and, using her other hand, removes his.  She goes back to drawing an arm, saying, "She is waiting for you, but you have to get out of here first.  And then you have to be led."

Hero says he can get out himself.  He can make it on his own, as he has before.  He has used rocks to crush skulls.  He has toppled war elephants.  He has traveled countless distances.  But this is different.  Strawberry explains to him that he needs guidance, and there is only one person in the ward that can help.  One person he can rely on.

"And that one person," he says in the metal dungeon, chained to the wall, "is you."

Gods
"Isn't that what we are?" she asks, looking past the steering wheel in her hands.  This is my girlfriend driving me back to her place.  We get off of work at roughly the same time, and there she is, outside in her Red Honda.  It faces away from me, so I sneak up and push on the trunk, rocking the car.  She twists around and looks out the window, laughing.  I smile at her and open the passenger door.

Now we're on the road, heading to her place to cook dinner.  I have just told her about Hero and she seems overly interested.  Any man that can usurp her attention from me in any form and I suddenly feel less confident.  And, Hero isn't just any man.  He has served in World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam.  He has used swords, pikes, and the occasional axe.  A battle-axe, like his body.  God, his body.  A tank build.  And she, unlike everyone else, doesn't think he's crazy.

"I mean, we're talking about Gods here," I remind her, "powerful entities who control the course of mankind."

She says, "I know."  What we are, she thinks, are individual gods, encapsulated within our minds.  "Just listen," she says, "willpower."  She looks over, her black-hole pupils radiating to amber.  Amber stretching, in tendrils, to blue-green.  She looks at me, her crinkled forehead accentuating her word, Willpower.  My eyes meet hers.  I see the whole universe in a split second glance.  And then it is refocused on the road.

"Willpower?" I ask.  Willpower, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, is "the strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans."  She tells me this, her driftwood-brown hair streaming through the invisible wind.  The wind streaming through her hair.  The wind streaming through rolled down windows, outside to in.  The mind streaming through it all.

"And what makes us different from ants?" she prompts me.

"Well, in regard to willpower?

"Yeah."

"We have more."

Right, she says, we have more willpower.  From an ant's perspective, humans and larger animals are gods, who have the ability to exert their unstoppable will over them. We can smash them, burn them, save them, arrange them. Through our imagination and innovation, we wield unending power over them.  So, above us, out there, is there anything advanced enough, through tool use or mental/physical prowess, to play god with us?  At parks, this is why she tip-toes through blades of grass.  Why her eyes are focused on the ground more than ahead.  She doesn't want to arbitrarily end the life of a lesser being.  Because why couldn't a galactic foot just snuff out our life?

She asks me what's so hard to believe about a goddess watching over Hero, using him for the benefit of mankind. She asks me if I think it's as romantic as she does.  She asks me if I'm going to help him.

Paranoia
One of the patients here has a severe case of psychosis.  The third player in Connect-Four.  The second black disc.  His name is Doc.  The reason his name is Doc is obvious.  He was a doctor at a local college campus, taking care of students.  In student health, it's pretty much the same thing every day.  Kids worry about having unprotected sex with more than three people in the last couple of months, and they need to get tested.  Suspicious partners looking for proof.  Others with concerns about the heroine they shot last night.  Some not worried at all, carried in on stretchers from alcohol overdose.  And then there's Doc, who worries alongside them-- for them and himself.

Some of the time he is genuinely concerned about his patients.  Other times, he is genuinely concerned about his patients suing him.  His patients, with their rich mommies and daddies and their combined law degrees.  Or worse, political backgrounds.  Mafia ties.  Alien descent.  And it started with simple auditory hallucinations.  The kind of thing you can write off as a mistake.  Hearing your name whispered in the wind is nothing.  Suddenly your name becomes a list of things-- everything but the name itself.  "James" becomes: fame, tame, maim, trains, feign, blame, anything to convince yourself you're not crazy.  You're in a crowded room and everyone's talking, someone must have been talking to another "Greg" over by the window. The high pitched police siren and distant jackhammer sounds you just heard combined to make a sound similar to "Monica."  Having a more unique name makes all of this self-convincing difficult.

After the initial stages of auditory hallucinations, then come the delusions.  The conspiracies.  Doc, he says he would change his route to work every day, just in case someone was watching him.  Ex-Special Forces do this, he says.  They're powerful tools, and just because they're not in use anymore doesn't mean the government is just going to let them live out their lives.  What if they snap and kill innocent people?  They could.  What's from stopping them?  Knowing that they are always watched by someone, that's what.  So what's to stop them from watching Doc, he thinks.  Maybe they worry he'll start removing people's innards to sell on some Chinese black market.

And near the campus, there's a tobacco manufacterer's headquarters.  The name's not as important as the placement.  It is two blocks from where Doc works.   He says it's ironic, and comments on the smoke stacks around the city.  The tobacco company owns all of them.  They're all venting nicotine into the air, getting us addicted.  And that's controlled by the Bildeberg Conferences.  And those by the lizard men at the center of the earth.  And that's about the time that he checked himself into Saint Dympna's Ward.  Not because he thought he was crazy, but because he knew it would be one of the last places they would look for him.  And here I am, watching him from across the room, thinking to myself about the nature of paranoia.  Paranoia like my fear of Hero, and my girlfriend's fixation on him.  It is not so much Hero that threatens me, but the idea of someone being better in her eyes.  Hero fights for his Goddess over the course of eons, in hallmark conflicts across the globe, and I help loose realities focus on dabbing fingers in paint.

Sword And Shield
Through the fractal cafeteria windows, I see a pastel smudge of red.  It is my girlfriend's Honda, colored outside the lines.  I walk outside, sneaking up.  Only the eyes of the tail-lights know I'm there.  I press my hands, palms down, on the trunk, and rock the car.  My girlfriend laughs.  I get inside the car.  This is the part where I tell my girlfriend everything Hero told me.  Right before she goes off on what it means to be a god, and whether or not I'm going to help him.

Goddess was the shield, Hero the sword.  Sort of like Christianity- of truth, and of faith, but less about spreading a belief.  They were armaments for the good of mankind.  And these gods, they're real, every last one of them.  These gods don't have specific affinities, they work more like a loose net of visitors to our planet Earth.  They don't always stay, unless they like what they see.  Some came too early, seeing basic creatures--humanity in its early stages-- and left for more fruitful ventures.  Others have come, set up shop, making business of the human condition.  Others come bearing pity.  Some genuinely care.

To think that Earth was so special that it would only have the one and only god, and that god would make Earth the pinnacle of all creation, this is absurd.  Earth is just another spinning atom.  Another wave on the beach.  

Goddess visited Earth first as a spectator of the great battles humans would wage.  Because Gods don't have warfare, this was sport. Gods don't do battle in the physical sense, they just deny each other joy.  This is worse than death.  Human warfare began small, with boney fists and hurled rocks.  This is when Goddess enters the picture.  She witnesses Hero.  Hero, standing tall over the body of a little girl, bruises all down her cheek like bludgeon-tears.  All around him, four men, bigger and broader than Hero himself.  The girl stole something from the men, a fruit.  So they beat her.  And Hero stepped in.  But it wasn't enough.  Hero's tall body takes blows for the girl.  One man falls, eyes gouged to mush.  Grapes smashed, red wine spilt.  The other three men bring rocks down on Hero's back, his body wrapped tightly around the girl, protecting her.  And then Goddess steps in.  And ever since, he has been her sword.  Defending the defenseless here and there.  Acting as Aegis.

At this point in the story, the Red Honda has stopped, dead, at a red-light.  My girlfriend leans in and kisses me on the lips.  She looks up from closed lids and asks, What happened next?  I tell her, You'll love this.

Hero fell in love.  Unfortunately, to be with her, he would have to die.  But she was his shield, and thus made him invulnerable.  It was torture.  She was just an echo.  A shadow.  To have her exist seperate from himself, he became detached and angry.  In battle, this served as his edge.  He would slay a million men putting himself in impossible situations.  To die.  But now she loved him, too.  And she wanted him to experience what he had given so many defenseless individuals.  Life.  So they were both unhappy, serving each other.

One day, in the last couple of decades Hero says, other Earth overseers hear of Goddess and Hero's love affair.  Repulsive.  God and man.  An abomination.  So the gods, they take away Goddess' joy.  They made her mortal, no longer able to protect Hero.  It was his turn to play shield.

My girlfriend urges me to continue.  But that's all he told me, I say.  The next thing I know, he's complaining about being downed by nurses in faded brown uniforms.  We talk about Hero's idea of gods, she asks me if I'm going to help him.  It depends on what he wants me to help him with, I tell her.  Then she asks me what I was thinking about cooking for dinner.  Some sort of seafood, I say.  Shrimp, she agrees.  We head to the market before going home to her place.

Applause
A room full of applause, and the only sound is my girlfriend's high heels clack, clack, clacking her up to a stage.  Through a field of waving hands, she struts, down a swath cut in black foldable chairs.  She is accepting an award at a local elementary school.  This is where she works.  Not here in this particular room, we're in the cafeteria-- a large room with high ceilings and white tiled flooring.  The windows are tall, crystal clear gateways to the outside world.  The outside world covered in bright green grass and metal playgrounds.  The kind with bridges that connect towers, with little useless steering wheels made out of plastic.  And those steering wheels, they take you nowhere, except in your head.

My girlfriend reaches the front and scales the stairs stage-left.  She looks out over the crowd.  A multitude of individuals, clapping silently for her.  I wave my hands too, back and forth, rotating to a point, stopping, and rotating back across the air.  I clap the same clap that a girls' chorus might use in one of their songs in an elementary school just like this one.  But not this one.  There is no singing here.  But there are spirit fingers.  Applause.

Waving hands begin to descend against laps as my girlfriend raises an open palm out toward the crowd.  Her right hand, thumb crossed inward, reaches her chin and then up away from her body.  She says, "Hello."  She goes into her wordless speech about art.  This is what her award is about-- art.  She is getting an award for revitalizing the school's once-dying art program.  Dying, like the deaf community itself.

With advanced hearing aids, the deaf needn't learn a sub-culture so detached from normalcy.  Hearing is important.  And they can fix what's wrong with you.  With advanced procedures, stem cell research, transplants.  They want to help you, restore your ability to experience the world.  What little perception we do have, it is to be cherished, and everyone sitting around me, they're missing out.  Missing out on tone.  They're missing out on music.  And sirens  and distant trains in the night.  Babies crying.  Lovers grunting.  Girlfriends snoring.  They're missing out on the obnoxious alarm going off in the next room for an hour and thirty minutes.  

While they're missing out on sound, we're missing out on heightened reliance on sight, smell, touch.  The nuances of tone have nothing on the nuances of facial expressions and hand gestures.  Maybe we're missing out.   But the numbers don't lie.  Majority is normal.  If not that, then plurality.  If not that, whoever's in charge of things is dictator of Province Normal.  High arbiter of all things usual.  

Dying or not, this packed room of the hearing-impaired is all focused on the woman at the front of the room, high above us on stage.  Single-handedly, she saved the art program at this school.  She struck a deal between the school and a local church.  On weekends the local church would use the school for one of those twelve step programs.  This quasi-religious recovery-program off-shoot of the church would help fund the school's need for art classes.

I went to Glorify Recovery, the twelve step program, only once.  I went because my girlfriend wanted me to.  She was going to show her support for the program.  More like her support of their support, I told her when  we entered that cafeteria a few years ago.  She scowls at this remark.  This is the kind of thing that got her writing songs about me with phrases like "You're a stupid dick. . ."

My girlfriend, the tower on stage, links everyone's mind to a single concept--intent.  She says art is intent.  The physical embodiment of your art aside, intention is, in and of itself, art.  Expression, something these kids need to understand is not limited because of their "disability," she says, is the essence of art.  Her intent was to save the art program, so, during Glorify Recovery, the twelve step programs on weekends, she sells art.  All proceeds then go back into the school's art program, and she sees none of it.

Glorify Recovery was on its first step when she sold four paintings.  The first and most difficult step-- admitting you have a problem.  Four people went up on stage that first meeting.  They all left with a painting.  All of them feeling relieved of some pressure, and wanting to help a good cause.  One guy, a sex addict, he goes home with a transitional piece about a goldfish that was squished.  He really hit it off with my girl.  Being a sex addict, I didn't trust him.  Infuriated that she would even talk to him, I walked back to my apartment.  A twelve block walk, because my girlfriend wanted to draw people in and sell art, to fund the expanding horizons of her students.

The guy, he said he was going to give it to his wife, whom he had cheated on.  She didn't know.  She wasn't there for his soliloquy on that.  She was at home fucking his best friend.  The goldfish guy would find them and leave, infuriated like me.  I saw him in a gun shop that day, while walking those twelve blocks.  I couldn't imagine why. He had just discovered he had a problem and he can work through it with the support and love of his new found recovery group.  I couldn't imagine why he was in the gun shop until I read the paper the next day.

I didn't kill anyone and I didn't need a gun.  I was just a stupid, jealous dick who disappointed his girlfriend.  Time and time again.  And she broke up with me.  It wasn't until I started working at Saint Dympna a year ago that I realized my problem, admitted it, and got back together with her.

 
Ceilings Don't Exist
Something strange happens before I exit the bathroom in the cafeteria here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  When I exit, everyone in the cafeteria is staring up at the ceiling.

It is May 18th, Thursday, when I go into the bathroom in the cafeteria.  The bathroom door is wooden, with a metal plate drilled into the middle, on the right side.  This is for hands to push, but all around the plate, there is evidence to the contrary.  Grease stains from a thousand hands, avoiding the metal, pressing the wood.  I avoid all of it, and press the top right corner of the door.  Probably still contributing to the expanding stain of hand oil.

Inside the bathroom, I now wash my hands.

With furtive grace, a silent giant creeps.

All movement outside the bathroom ceases.  Through the thick wooden door, I can't hear this, but it is happening, going on without my involvement.  I go to exit.  On this side of the door, there are no grease stains from hand oil.  Just a metal handle.  The door only opens one way, and on the inside, you have little choice as to how you will open it.  How you'll get out.

Met with gaping mouths, I then look up.  Before words can spill from my mouth to ask the others what happened, everyone falls to the ground in unison as a blast of air explodes against our bodies.  Chairs and tables shatter and little game pieces go flying.  Paints splatter and mix together against the patients, nurses, the walls, the floor-- everything covered in a sick mix of brownish orange.

The cafeteria is ceiling-less.  The blue sky and clouds are now fixed within a blank box.  On every edge of where the ceiling would meet the rising walls, there are flames slowly rolling down the white paint.  This probably releases some sickeningly toxic fumes, because several people are throwing up on themselves.

Hero once told me, "The gods won't hesitate to cleave the tops of mountains in order to crush the misbehaving villages in the valley.  They don't view humanity as a group of individuals.  When they punish a small group by killing them, that's like kicking your dog.  Where you kick the dog, that's where it's going to hurt, but only because it sends a message to its brain telling it that it's going to hurt.  If the gods punish one group, the rest of humanity is supposed to learn.  And like a dog having been kicked many times throughout its life, it's supposed to fear."

City officials would later tell us it was two low currents of air that ripped our roof off.  Riding one of those currents was a low flying jet.  The jet was flying fast enough to cause a delayed sonic boom.  That's what knocks us all down.  They didn't comment on the flaming walls or the toxic paint.  Our problem, they said.  Dressed up with a tie and suit, but Our Problem was the message.

A problem my superiors didn't address was that of a missing patient.  The building's foundation somehow shook and loosed Hero from his shackles.  Fearing him, no one said anything.  His prison lie cracked and empty.        
 
 
The Sea
"Imagine your home by the sea.  Standing on the beach, feet deep in the water, your home before you-- in flames," she tells me.  This is Tamera telling me a story.

Quick-sand recession as your weight buries your feet, the air all salty around you, clean and clear in your lungs on the intake.  Chest rising, chest sinking.  Exhale.

Waves are strange the way they lap up, slide up on and in and around your toes.  The glass of water seems flat.  From space, the brilliant diamond eyes see flat water atop Earth, but everywhere, close enough, there it is-- choppy.  Up, down, up, down.  Expand, contract, expand, contract. To that glass of water, that little ocean, we are gods--like the sun, and it's daughter, Luna, the moon.

"There is a storm in Hero's lungs," she says, "Push-pulling in the fire by the sea."

Another story Hero has told someone about his struggle.  How did he convince Tamera?  Science.
This is Tamera's idea of romance.

"Imagine you were engineered, genetically and behaviorally to need someone.  You would roam the earth with emptiness until you found them.  Every detail matters in the equation, especially the eyes."

Eyes, the window to the soul, she tells me, are the most important physical feature for this engineered person.  Once they lock with another's, they can tell one thing about them--whether or not they are their match.

"And the person you seek is the same way.  Engineered like you.  All of your attributes are the most attractive possible in that person's mind.  Everything you say matches what they would ask."

Like signals and receptors in the body, she tells me.  Biology.  I took that, I tell her, in college.  That and psychology.  I know how it works.

"And imagine standing there, on the beach, sinking.  Watching your home go up in flames.  Your life sabotaged by those who created it, those involved in the project to bring you and your lover together.  Sabotaged because it was becoming beyond their reach, beyond their abilities to stop.  And that person you have been searching for your whole life, burning up inside.  Your receptor gone, and now you have nothing left.  What do you do with your life?"

You find your offspring, she tells me.  Find the child born to human and goddess, birthed right there on the beach.  Make sure it's alive, she tells me, and you will be whole.  And make sure your creators suffer.

Final Vignette
It has been three days since the roof of Saint Dympna's Ward was torn off.  Unexplained as it was, the only thing I can believe now is what they have given us.  Maybe a god really did swoop in an shave the top of the building off, capturing Hero in the process.  Maybe a top secret special forces team took him back to the lab where he was created.  I am too small a man to say one way or the other on such big concepts.  Too big are they to examine objectively.  Too close am I.

I realize that Goddess and Hero, they weren't serving each other by being sword and shield. They weren't created in some lab to fall in love.  They just were in love.  And maybe that makes some people crazy.  It makes me insecure, I know.  But with her, I am stronger.  Able to take on more stress, more pain.  More joy than I ever thought possible.  I realize you don't have to be a hero or a god to overcome the problems you create in your life.

I look at her in the kitchen doing the dishes all alone.  I get up from my chair and put my book face down, stopping the story mid-sentence-- characters frozen at my will.   I walk up to the sink and stop.  My right foot is in a black square, my left in a white.  I roll up my sleeves, tucking them into themselves and pick up a bowl.  I turn on the faucet and begin washing it with  soap and a sponge.  She looks over, sees my soapy and wet hands, and smiles at me. This is worth my time. This is worth my time and we don't have to be saving the world for that to be so.

For B-B

if I were to continue this story(WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO, SO DO NOT READ BELOW, I would begin with the ending, and the end would begin like this. . .
Control Theory
People would like to think they can control things.  More than that, they believe they control themselves.  They feel like their actions are not just a series of circumstantial events that narrow their reality.   I believe that, too, now, faced with the end of the universe.  

"You are important," he tells me. 

I don't believe him, but he tells me he knows me better than I think.  My soul is bound to the same fate as his.  The same as the love of his life.

When I was sixteen, my older brother told me something disturbing.  Our parents got married on the basis of a "psychic feeling." 

Hero showed up three days ago and told us, "You have to come with me.  Both of you."
He shows up at my girlfriend's apartment while I'm helping her with the dishes and says we have to leave, immediately.  I don't know why we listen to him, but we do.

My parents were married after six months of seeing eachother.  This is not the strange part.  My mother met my father once, at a party in college.  It was the only party she went to.  My father and her hardly exchanged words.  The next week, my father gets a phone call.  My mother had spent days looking him up.  Trying to figure out his number.  My father picks up the phone, and it is my mother.  She tells him, "I think we are meant to be together."  He says he feels the same way. 

Three days ago, we tell Hero to wait while we discuss it in the kitchen.  He tells us we will come with him because it is our destiny.  And he seems certain, like it has already happened.  In the kitchen, I disagree with what my girlfriend says is a "feeling."  An inclination.  A draw to him.  I tell her I have a draw to her, and that going with him, I would be abandoning that draw.  That sense of protection.  But she says she feels more strongly about this than anything else in her life.  I get a sick sinking-into-myself feeling.  Does she mean she feels more strongly about going with him than staying with me?  She goes.  And I, of course, go with her.

And now I am faced with the end of the universe.  Whatever authored all of this set up safety nets in case the lifeforms living within attempted to gain control, Hero tells us.  We are in the middle of a field, where it is now raining.  My girlfriend, she is screaming at Hero to stop.

"You are important," he repeats with a new inflection, "does not mean you are good."  He shakes the gun in my face.  Killing me is the only solution, he says, and I am almost. 

"I'm over my jealousy," I tell him.  I swear, I am.   But it is not good enough for him.  My jealousy is the result of an experiment that controlled two human beings, from birth.  It made them believe they were meant to be together, and the result was me.  The first child, my parents planned.  The second child was me.  I was an accident.  I was meant to look like an accident, he tells me, raindropps splattering on his lips as he speaks. 

Whomever I have a child with will die.  My seed is virus ridden, he says.  I tell him I've been having sex with her.  "Only upon birthing the child, severing from your love, will she die," is his rebuttle.

The gods had left Earth a long time ago, and they set in place an agreement with several governments of this world.  To ensure the safety of Earth, they must devise a way to destroy Hero and Goddess' child.  Their child, my girlfriend, and I, the weapon intended for her destruction.  Hero tells me she is his daughter.  And I must die. 

He squeezes the trigger and I am shot.  As I lay bleeding, reality begins to shatter around me.  My girlfriend is screaming, holding my head up, blood on her hands, and in the distance I hear Hero sobbing, muttering that he had misinterpreted the situation.  Everything was safe, until the daughter, my girlfriend lost or was severed from that which she loved.  A child would have continued the love, as it did for Hero and Goddess.  My girlfriend was the last thing holding this world together.  My world.  And I was the last thing holding her world together.  Our world.

(But since the story was already finished, this is just an interesting, overly complicated backstory to where I was eventually headed if I hadn't stopped writing when I did.  I think it's fun to make things more epic than they really are, but in regards to this, I realized that epic or not, true love is a special rarity that few people ever witness or take part in.  I am a part of it.  A part of something meaningful.)

 

Last night a few things happened that I never thought likely.  I got a number of drunk calls, was raped, ate the body of Christ himself, and fell completely in love. 

You heard me correct, raped.  Not like penis in my anus, no, though I did make the joke while at the party: "Do you believe in puppy love? Because I tried it once and their assholes are too small."  I was at this frat house drinking, and their rule is $1 or a joke they haven't heard for a beer.  Because one beer is not worth a dollar, I usually go and lay down some awesome jokes for free beer.  I'll usually print off two pages of jokes and bring it with me.  This may seem lame, but I get free beer.  And the only thing that tastes better than free alcohol is stolen alcohol.  And I wasn't in the mood to get arrested.

So, there I am, standing in a hallway talking to some friends, when I am raped.  This unfortunate looking girl, overweight and covered in plate-mail mascara, saunters up, grapples both of my amazing buttcheeks, and starts humping me.  I turn around and shove her back, "What the fuck are you doing?"   She bounds away into a room of dancing bodies and disappears.  Her friends are laughing their asses off at this.  "Your friend just raped me," I tell them.  One of the girls, also highly bruised from the ugly stick, tells me she dared her friend to do it.  "That's great," I say.  This is a group of girls from my dorm that have neither looks nor personality.  They are devoid of all redeeming factors, and deserve to be put out of everyone else's misery.

It's weird having random people know who you are.  I was standing walking up to get beer and this chick was in front of me.  I stand there behind her waiting, and she turns, looks at me, looks away, and then turns to me and asks, "What's your name?" 
Me: "Hunter"
Her: "What's your last name?"
Me: "Caldwell"
Her: "Oh, I was just on your facebook today." 
I am like, oh, awesome, whatever, I'm trying to get beer.
Her: "I read some of your stuff, it's really good.  I wanted to leave a comment and tell you I thought it was good, but didn't know if that would be creepy."
I am elated to have her know me through my writing.  She tells me she was with one of my friends from Hampton Sydney, so it's not like it was completely and utterly random, but it was still a weird, warm glow that carried me throughout the night.  My ego was totally busting at the seems by the time I left that party, which was like 30 to 40 minutes in. I had promised to play wingman for my friend Sean, but the girl he was trying to hook up with never showed.  To my knowledge.  So, I left to go smoke with Lenora.

It is so strange, the way memory works.  I believe it is called something like state-dependent recall, where, when you are in an altered state, you can recall doing things once in that state again.  For example, in the movie Beerfest, the two brothers are drunk as shit the first time they go to the underground drinking competition.  Once they're in Germany looking for the place again while sober, they can't find it.  In order to find the place again, they get one of them roaring drunk.  And it works.  This is totally the case with Lenora's apartment on this particular night.  For some reason I walk four streets in the wrong direction, using flawed logic instead of inate directional sense.  Eventually I come to, realizing I am walking in the direction of oblivion, and return to the correct street. 

I come to the door, call her, and she comes down to let me in.  She opens the door slowly, seeing me, and stands there, knees bent in what looks like attack position, smiling at me.  She is unbelievably cute.  I smile and she says, "C'mon!" and we rapidly ascend into her apartment.  I take my jacket off and lay with her on her bed, where she is watching Dirty Dancing on her laptop.  It is the last few scenes, and she is explaining everything to me.  She makes fun of Jennifer Grey("Baby") relentlessly.   I join in.
Her(singing it): "I have nooo hiiips"
Me(singing): "Oooor tiiiiits"
Her(singing): "And Iiiii have a witch noooose"
Seriously, Lenora is the funniest girl I know.  You have to get kind of close to see this, but hell, I'm about as close as they come, and she says some of the funniest shit ever.

Lenora let's me read a poem she wrote about me.  It pretty much nails me and my relation to other girls.  They are all background.  I think about this the next day while walking, and it is absolutely true.  It's like all the girls I have wanted to get with or have gotten with have been filler.

We smoke out of my bowl and come inside to watch the coolest video of I have seen in awhile.  It's from a movie called Les Triplettes de Bellville.  In the movie, three retired singers from the 30's help a bicycle rider in some fashion.  That's all I really know about it at this point, but I really like this video.  I have watched it like ten times, and I plan on renting the movie at some point.

The entire night she seemed freaked out, ever since her neighbor and sister's boyfriend, Aaron, saw us, ducked down, and shut off his lights.  We were eating tacos when this happened.  Tacos that were of Christ's very body and soul.  This was the most delectable thing I have ever eaten.  Lenora can throw together the best meals out of just a few things.  Like, I am not a big fan of beans on my tacos, but goddamn, girl, you are amazing. It was funny, she actually sighed at the fact that she had to press multiple buttons on the microwave to heat something up.  Also, she made an excellent point.  Why the fuck is there a reheat button?  That is what a microwave does.  She said, "Like, is there a DEheat function?!  I don't think so."  I asked her something about how she made it so delicious.  She said, "Jesus gave it to me."  Maybe we were talking about her talent, I don't recall, but the other night, among things like, "Shirts are historical," I said, delirious with half-sleep, that "You are the King of Kings."  Since she is saying that Jesus gave her the tacos(or the ability to make them) I tell her that since she is the King of Kings, she must be Jesus, and that it would make sense if he brought them, since she is him.  After Aaron ducks down from his window and turns off his lights, she turns off the kitchen light, saying, "We need equal light-protection."  It's so funny the way she worded it, but 100% true in a combat sense.  Like, if someone is one-upping you, respond accordingly and be prepared.

Post-eating, we kind of make out, and you know, get around to sex.  I have never done anything high, so this was a brand new experience for me.  Let's take note of some things.
1. Kissing while high is among the greatest things ever.
2. Holding her was like the best feeling in the world.  Just the warmth and her company.
3. Everything was amplified.  Every curve of her body that my hand rode.  Every breath breathed. 
4. Last time I jacked off while high, I almost shit myself.

So, I am worried that I will cum too soon, because this is like the most incredible shit I have done with my life.  And I am doing it with her, which makes it ten times better.  I'm trying to maintain, but, then, her roommate comes home, and she kind of freaks out because we don't hear her after she gets in.  "Don't you think that's weird," she asks me. So, paranoia supercedes my hornyness, and we stop having sex for the night.  It is still in my system the next morning, and it makes me suck, and it doesn't feel as good as it did during the night.  A poor tradeoff, that morning.  But I'm not complaining as long as she isn't.   I like being good for her, and, in Sahara's the night before, she whispered to me that the sex was really good, so I'm not worried about sucking once in awhile.  Especially because I can apply the typical, "I was high" excuse.  A classic.

I am more paranoid than horny at this point-- I guess preservation is more powerful than sex.  I lay there, reasurring her and thus, reassuring myself.  I am a little sketched out, as I don't live in that apartment and am relying on her judgement when it comes to what's out of the ordinary and what isn't.  But then I think about it.  You know, really think about it, and I came to the conclusion that, even if somebody broke into her apartment, what is the worst thing that could happen?  I get shot? Dude, I am so unconcerned by bullets.  I sit there and realize that, for Lenora, and through my love of her, I would stop at nothing to defend her.  All the rules go out the window when you fight for someone you love. 

Things I am not afraid to do to you if you break into my girl's apartment while I am there:
1. Kick/stab/punch/bite you in the balls
Seriously, I don't care.  I am going for your weakness.
2.  Snap your neck. 
People say I am an angry person sometimes.  This comes in handy when you need the strength to destroy someone.
3. Stomp on you/your balls.
I watched wrestling excessively as a kid, so I am pretty much certified to power-bomb you into the tile floor and commence the hoedown.  Except I will actually make contact with your body.
4. Light you on fire.
My girl has a lot of hairspray and lighters laying around.  This would pretty much make my day if I could do this to  you.  So many times I have seen this in movies and just been like, "BAD-ASS."

So, I lay there, her sleeping in my arms, and I finally hear her roommate.  She goes to the bathroom adjoining their two rooms.  Through the cracked door, light and sound escapes into my girl's room.  I can hear her roommate sit and begin peeing.  Then I hear "sploosh."  I think to myself, "No way."  Another one.  Plop-sploosh.  I am listening to her roommate take a shit.  It is like the grossest end-night image I could imagine.

Chuck Palahniuk said, in Fight Club, that all we can ask of perfection is one moment.  That moment stretches and engulfs time when she's around.  Before long, we are both asleep.

I wish I could have recorded my experience and the images that went through my head.  I wish I could convey and project my understanding onto you, but all I have are words.  They are insufficient in describing this particular encounter with salvia.  And, I'll start off by saying I've done salvia several times and that I am not inexperienced.  Granted, I have never done 15x, but I knew I could handle it.  Or, at least, thought I could.  This is that story:

The night began when Horatio and Yetti show up.  I know exactly why.  Our friend, PK, his house has been empty for two days, this being the second.  Last night I was over there getting rather drunk on shitty beer(See: Natty Ice).  Tonight is the night of the actual party, in which a lot of people are showing up.  Horatio's nose dons a bandage.  We went to a Children of Bodom show recently, and someone's fist or head met up with Horatio's nose, crushing it a bit to the side.  He went to the doctor to get it fixed.  His bandage says, "I'm on hydrocodone and feel good!"

We head outside to Yetti's vehicle and hop in.  We have to stop by his house to grab a GB cap.  I'm excited, I only expected shitty beer to be at the party.  When we get to the party, though, I am less excited, because no one has pot, just salvia. I notice a bubbler sitting on a table.  I remember John Lee telling me a story of how he acquired a bubbler, and since he's sitting on the couch opposite it, I assume it's his.  I ask him about it and he retells the story to everyone.
John Lee: "Nick Volante just gave it too me.  He was just like, 'John, I never use this unless you're around, here, take it.'" I was like 'Sweet!'"
Horatio: "He was high as shit wasn't he?"
John Lee: "Yeah, Nick was high as shit and I was drunk as shit."
Hunter: "Wait so, you have your bubbler here, that implies that there's pot.  Is there?"
John Lee: "Nah, [PK] and Alex have some salvia, though."

I have done salvia many times, and none of them were particularly interesting: 

The first time I did it, Horatio and I went down to this place in the city, AfricaHouse, and bought some really overpriced shit.  We mixed it with pot and took GBs of the concoction on the rail-road tracks near our house.  The effect was smooth and nice, I saw colors that I wouldn't have normally, you know, purples instead of blues.  And, the trees lining the railroad tracks bent in towards eachother and formed a tunnel of brances. 

The second time I did it, I did it with Yetti and PK on Horatio's back porch while he was gone for the weekend, which is kind of fucked up. It was purely salvia, sans pot.  We packed it tight and took GBs.  I laughed really hard for about 10 seconds before I started choking.  I had to remove myself from the situation and sit on the steps, because I was "Choking on the spheres that we're all made of."  It was a brief trip, and not worth choking for. 

The third time I did it was terrible and made me hate salvia.  My friend Chocolate gets some and we decide to smoke it.  He has a small piece that has a hole too big for salvia's fine, ground up leaves.  Theft, being the boyscout and theif that he is, goes into the bathroom on our dorm floor and whips out his knife.  He pries a faucet guard out from the sink.  He feels accomplished, and fails to inspect the guard.  We go outside and light up.  It hits incredibly hard.  We are all gasping by the end of it, and I fumble the piece.  Something hard and charred falls out of the piece.  We look at it like dogs look at the source of a high pitched noise, our heads all cocked to the side.  I pick it up and go, "Guys, I think we were smoking plastic."  THE GUARD WAS FUCKING PLASTIC, AND WE SMOKED IT.  Knock about 10 years off my life.

Flashbacks aside, I am standing in PK's kitchen playing Drink The Beer.  With myself.  John Lee stands next to me, visibly drunk.  He is standing on a ledge of stairs, and I tell him to be careful.  He only says, "That ledge is my bitch." 
The typical beer vs. liquor argument breaks out.
Horatio: "You know who is the only person on earth to have thrown up on beer alone?" 
He points to me.
Schwemmer: "Haha, really?"
Hunter: "Hey, hey, hey.  Now, that was all under an hour.  We're talking 40 minutes or less."
Horatio: "It was like seven beers dude."
Hunter: "In like 30-40 minutes."
Schwemmer: "Damn, that fast."
Horatio: "Well, yeah, he did throw them back pretty fast."
Hunter: "And beer does terrible things to me.  I am a liquor fan."
Schwemmer: "I can understand that.  I mean, genetically, we respond to things differently, all of us."
I am impressed and agree.  PK is offended that I am knocking beer, because that's all he has.  I reassure him that it's cool and I'm not complaining.  Just defending my pride.

By my third beer, another group of people shows up.  Clay, back from the military, carting two large party packs of Smirnoff bitch drinks.  Lot of good the military did in teaching him to be a man.  Behind him, two girls follow with a small group of gothic characters. Black, red.  Some pink on one of the girls.  She is quiet and reserved, and heads immediately downstairs with her group.  Only one of them is sociable, other than Clay.  It is the other girl, and she seems cool enough, but I notice she has a hollow-point bullet on her necklace.  I slowly back away while Horatio hits it off talking about guns and her shirt, which is of the band Yellowcard. 

I am in the dining room where a piano is.  John Lee is playing it rather drunkenly and I am attempting to communicate good vibes to the other group.  They are angsty and resist.  I give up and start talking to Clay.  He gives me a stern handshake that not many people can muster and I ask him:
Hunter: "So, how is 'it' going?"
Clay: "Have you ever blown up a tank with a rocket launcher?"
Hunter: "Uh, no, have you?"
Clay: "Oh yeah."
Hunter: "Oh, the perks of being in the military."

Basically, because there is no group cohesion, Yetti, Horatio, and myself head outside to smoke some of the Salvia Yetti has been saving.  He snatches John Lee's bubbler on the way out.  I chug my third beer and grab a bitch drink because I am a hypocrite. It is Smirnoff Ice, and it is delicious.  We sit in a circle... triangle really, and Yetti loads it up.  Before we start, he notices my drink and goes to grab one.  He comes back and we light up.  Yetti hits it first, passes it to Horatio, and then to me.  My reality dampens as I exhale.  Salvia hits really fast, by the way.  I put the bubbler down on the concrete.  On its side.  So, now, there is water in a small puddle in the middle of us.  No one notices but me, and I don't actually care at this point.  It's refillable.  No big deal.

Everyone is quiet for a second.  Yetti is staring at the ground when Horatio asks him a question.  I don't understand the question.  Apparently, Yetti understand it less, as his only response is a two-syllable word in what seems like tongues:
Horatio: "[questioning tone]"
A pause ensues.  Yetti looks up.
Yetti: "Barr-haw!"
Another pause ensues as everyone, even Yetti, runs the interaction through their head a second time. 
Hunter: "Did you... did... What the fuck was that?"
I am laughing uncontrollably at this point, which spurs laughter in them.  We errupt and sit for about three minutes just laughing.  We manage to get a few words out inbetween breaths, but they only serve to feed the raging fire of hilarity.  I have never laughed this hard.  Ever in my life.  I am seriously ROLLING on the ground.  Suddenly Yetti is worried:

Yetti: "Guys, oh shit."
Hunter and Horatio in unison: "What?"
Yetti: "We broke the bubbler."
Hunter: "What?"
Yetti: "Yeah, look, it's broken, there's water everywhere."
I explain and talk him down for like ten seconds.  He grabs his now empty Smirnoff, holding it opposite the hand clenching the bubbler and says, "Then what's this?"
Hunter: "That is your empty bottle, it's fine dude."
Yetti inspects it and goes, "Oh, oh yeah."
At some point he calls Horatio a motherfucker which is really out of character for him.  He is joking of course, but it's a sure sign that he's still riding the high.  He explains his experience as Horatio becoming part of the background and me as a laughing enigma.

We go inside, but within minutes are back outside with a larger group of people, drinking more.  Schwemmer, PK, Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Also, this kid Alex, who is drunk as shit, stumbles all over the place.  I ask him what he would do if I drop-kicked him into oblivion.  He just laughs at me and falls down on his face, unable to get up.  He stays down for a few minutes while the big boys talk.  Then he gets up and decides to go inside.  A few of the others do too, and then there are three: Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Again, ready to smoke more.  We sit down in our "circle" and begin.

For greens, Horatio and I play Rock, Paper, Scissors.  It is a hard fought battle, us matching eachother 4 or 5 times in a row, but I eventually win.  I take notice of the bowl.  It is packed to legendary standards.  I ignite the patch of green, inhale for several seconds, and hold.  I pause for a few more seconds and exhale.  I cannot emphasize enough how much I took from this one hit.  A heroic sized cloud rolls from my lips, and I say, "Guys, I might die," jokingly, but the next thing I know Yetti and Horatio have evaporated, interwoven into the scenery.  They have, as Yetti said earlier, become a "part of the background."  They become part of the fence, the ridges.  Small, individual slivers that make up a whole.  I am a very visual person, and sometimes it is hard to describe what I experience.  This experience boarders on impossible-to-describe.  For 30 minutes, head time, I am flying around the back yard, which is about 100 times as large as it actually was. The weird part is I see myself doing these things, as I am a plane.  A plane with a face.  And a propellar for a nose. I am swooping by the fences(made up of Horatio, Yetti, and the shed I see in the background).  I am pretty sure that I fly into the sky, and suicide drop to the ground.  I stretch, endlessly against a black backdrop of time and space.  My thirty minutes of head time take about 10 seconds of real time, and I swoop back into the shell of Hunter Caldwell, my body.  My mind has returned, and now I am standing up, facing Horatio.  I run my hand against my forehead and back beyond my hair.  I am sweating, and Horatio is talking to me.  I am pretty sure he is trying to get me to fuck a vehicle.  He might as well be speaking in a foreign language, I can't understand anything he is saying. 

I asked Horatio what he saw from his perspective and he said this: "Yeah we were all sitting down and then you burst out nervous laughing and stood up and just started roaming around babbling incoherently. And you would grab various objects which I termed 'anchors.'  Like, to keep you in this world"

It's true, I do vaguely remember grabbing things, because I felt like my world was being torn apart, like my reality and actual reality were at odds, fighting for their place.  And my strange reality was slipping back to normalcy, and I was coming down.  I stand, staring at Yetti, not truly recognizing him.  I head to the front of the house, bumping into the fence and a van. Yetti somehow makes it to the front door before I can, slips inside, poking his head out and says, "Dude, I am going to find you a pen and some paper.  Just don't wander off."  I tell him I am probably going to.  I have no idea where a portion of my time went, and I am confused and still buzzed off of the beer and bitch drinks I have consumed.  I head inside, say peace to a few good people and leave.  I give John Lee the power fist before I go, because I don't feel up for much more contact than that.

I am speed walking down the street, terrified out of my mind at what just occurred.  Nothing seems real in this blanketed  world of cold air and blaring gas giants.  It is night time and a pick up truck is slowing down in front of me.  Its lights are aimed at me, but I walk past it. 

"HUUUUUUUNTER CAAAAAAALDWELLLLL!!!!"  A voice emanates through the thick shadow.  I am going to die tonight.

"It's NICK, man, what's up!"

My heart pounding, I wave and continue walking.  Things are still too real and this is totally unexpected.  Nick Volante, the guy whose bubbler it was originally. That I smoked out of, was calling my name from an ominous pick up truck.  He was heading to the party, and I was heading home.  Heading home, afraid that I would never be normal again.  Afraid that life was going to turn on me, and all the taking I have done from the universe would reverse itself, and start taking back.  Afraid that my future was doomed.  Afraid. 

But, by the time I had marched home, I was normal again.

Because I want to write about something, and I was just reminded of the first time I ever got high:

It is freshman orientation, and I am working the Fencing table with a friend of mine and my girlfriend at the time("Jane" again), who was a junior.  We have fun cracking jokes on freshman, because, hey, we're no longer one of them, and that's what we do.  Freshman suck. 

Jane gets a call on her phone.  It is Paul Ruecroft, a senior at James River High.  He and my good friend Luke are hanging out and want us to join them.  I didn't know Paul well, other than the fact that his father taught my sixth grade science class, but Luke and I had become pretty good friends by this point, dominating any class that we shared.  So we go over to Paul's house, enter, and head straight to the back of the one-story building.  It is kind of run down and packed with random shit. 

Let me explain the setup to you.  Paul's parents were both huge hippies back in the day.  His mother is sitting on the bed, his younger brother is sitting across from me.  Another family member, female, is there.  The rest of us are positioned around a gravity bong(GB, for all of you who don't have better things to do with your time than say everything out, fully).  Now, you may be thinking, "where is the father?"  Good question.  While we're in this nearly vacant, white room smoking bud, the father of the household is paralyzed from the hips down in the room next to us, asleep.   Mr. Ruecroft had been in a biking accident a year prior, and was basically fucked.

9:00PM: Mrs. Ruecroft tells us we have to be relatively quiet.  There is someone in the next room who works for the county.  Yeah, my sixth grade science teacher.  We could get "in deep shit."  I get the impression that people who smoke too much are really paranoid.  Paul takes the first hit off of the GB.  The resevoir is dirty.  As my first time smoking, so far I am unimpressed.

9:05:  I am taking mental notes on how to hit a GB.  Of course, being a noob, I botch the first two.  I drop the bottle, half full, into the water and it looks like a jet engine streaking across the sky, smoke pluming up and into my face.

9:15:  A lot of sexual inneundos about "sucking correctly" are made.  By now, on a fourth GB, I have it down.  I turn to Luke and inform him that I, and I qoute, "Don't feel anything yet."  His only response is, "You should take more." 

9:25:  Luke is telling me not to talk to Satan if I see him.  Being stupid and naive, fear washes over my heart.  I am not an atheist at this point in my life, and my belief structure allows the fear to be acceptable to my reality.  "Don't talk to Satan if you see him, he might convince you to give him your soul."  I believe him, but quickly forget and begin poking things.

9:30: I take my seventh and final GB.  Somewhere between 4 and 6, I have been poking my girlfriend relentlessly.  She is visibly uncomfortable.  So, instead of being logical, I be high.  I continue poking and groping on her body. 

10:10:  I am in the back seat of a car, on the right side, Luke to my left.  In front of me is my girlfriend, and, driving, is Paul.  We are on one of the most treacherous roads known to man--Old Bon Air.  Let me explain.  This road is home to over thirty car-related deaths, ranging from people flipping their cars at the bottom, in a creek and drowning, to vehicular manslaughter. It winds, with many trees and branches hanging over the gnolls that encase the road. Mostly drunk people die on this road.  Luckily, we were just high as shit. 

I decide that unbuckling my seatbelt and opening the door will be a good idea.  Apparently, I didn't realize we were in a moving car.  I begin stepping out of the car as Luke bounds across the backseat, slamming me back with a swift elbow to the chest.  He basically saves my life.

10:19: We have arrived at Wendy's.  I didn't realize, until now, that we were on a food run.  I had been viewing our exodus from Paul's house as I would view a movie while high.  If you've watched movies high, you know exactly what I am talking about.  Every scene is interesting and totally unrelated to the subsequent scenes.  Like a group of interrelated short stories that have nothing to do with eachother.  What I am saying is there was a lack of cohesion to my thought, and I'm not going to lie, it was awesome.

10:03: We are still in front of the bright menu.  There are like 3 cars in line behind us.  Paul slowly turns around to look at Luke and I, probably to ask us what we want.  I just see two bloodshot eyes and a huge grin.  I begin laughing uncontrollably.  Everyone laughs, but Paul pulls us back together to focus on food.  The employees in Wendy's are alerted to our high, I am sure.

11:30:  We are in Luke and Paul's friend's house.  His name is Cory, and his entire family is getting high.  This is awesome.  I feel like I am on the Underground Railroad for Smokers.  The Wendy's is long since destroyed, my girlfriend has left, and Paul has lectured me on making her uncomfortable.  I say, "whatever," and proceed to join a group of people sitting in a circle passing a pipe. 

12:40AM:  We finish passing the pipe around.  I am riding another high. Cory, Luke, and I go for a walk around the neighborhood. 

12:50:  I decide that ding-dong-ditch will actually be fun, for once, since I am fucked up.  Luke and I go up to a random house. Cory stays behind on the street because he is a very paranoid person.
12:50:05:  I ring the doorbell as fast as I can.  Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
12:50:15:  We have forgotten that the "ditch" is key to playing.
12:50:20:  The door begins to open, we freak out and start bolting.

12:55:  Cory is nowhere to be found, and we can't find his house.  Nothing in the neighborhood looks familiar. 

1:00:  We see a man in a robe and boxers marching down the street toward us.  We walk by and say hello, immediately cracking afterwards.  Definitely the guy who came to the door.  He is now stampeding around the neighborhood seeking retribution.  We are apparently bigger than he thought we would be, because he doesn't even question us.

1:10: "Psssssst."  "Pssssssst."  What the fuck is that sound, I ask Luke.  We are in front of Cory's house, but aren't sure which one is his.  All the lights are off.
Luke: "Were the lights on when we left?"
Hunter: "Uh, yeah, I think so."
"Pssssst," a sound eminates from the bushes.
Hunter: "No, seriously, what the fuck is that?"
Luke: "Cory? Cory, is that you?"
Cory pops out of the bushes and stumbles towards us, scared shitless.
Cory: "Dudes, I thought the cops were coming."
Apparently he had run back to his house, told everyone to hide, locked everything up, and turned off all the lights.  He closed up shop. 

Inside, I pass out under a table in the living room and have the best sleep I have ever had.  Luke and I walked back to his house the next day, and I was a changed man. 

My head is still spinning from the weekend.  I went to Farifax to party at my girlfriend's.  There is a terrifying amount of money in Northern Virginia.  I was kind of sketched out at first, you know, a little uncomfortable at the prospect of being the peon of the group, what with my Richmond background and all.  But no, the culture is the same almost everywhere you go.  There is Subway.  Sheetz.  Taco Bell.  Blockbuster.  Everything you'd expect in any suburban area.  The Suburbias of Richmond share all the same aspects, just at a different(see: lower) living standard. 

It was my first time getting hit on by a 0-star girl(out of 5).  According to Tucker Max, a 0-star is that fat girl who, in addition to being obscenely unnattractive, also has a terrible personality.  She is loud, overly foreward, awkward, and all around obnoxious.  He calls them "Wildebeasts" and says that "basic human rights do not apply to them."  And she hit on me. 

I am upstairs toking.  Despite all the money in Nova, we smoke out of a ghettoblaster.  I laugh at this in my head at the time and out loud after I've been smoked out.  I am a bastard. 

I head downstairs tipsy and high and I go to grab a beer.  As I walk into the kitchen I hear, "I really wanna make out with someone."  I glance over and see her--Allison, with her chubby cheeks, thick-rimmed emo glasses, and she looks at me. 

I grab a beer.  What the fuck is she thinking?  No one will make out with her.  She is She is at a party filled mostly with 18-19 year olds.  Most of them girls.  Is she lesbian?

She contorts her hefty body on the couch to see me grabbing a beer.  She goes, "...But you're already taken."  Damn straight, bitch.  And even if I weren't... are you... are you serious?

I am not drunk enough to respond to this situation frankly.  I grab a second beer.  I want to be honest, so I load my proverbial gun of truth.  In other words, I start drinking seriously.

It was a fun weekend, I just thought I'd document that one instance.  Plenty of shit happened, including something absolutely horrifying.  It's a subtle glow, warm and pulsing through your body like an ocean of vicodin.