My story begins in the perpetual yesterday that makes other stories so timeless. I awoke in the morning feeling a little sick to my stomach, and my brain was pounding against my skull like a god damn wrecking ball. I couldn’t quite recall exactly where I was or how exactly I got there, but I knew the desire to evacuate immediately was a legitimate one. I stood up slowly, taking in the colorful surroundings of the strange room where I now found myself. It must have been seven o’clock in the morning, or perhaps in the evening, I couldn’t accurately tell if the sun was lying.

The liquid paralysis of the morning after began to overcome my feet and slowly crept up my legs with the chill of a ghost on linoleum. I knew something terrible was brewing in the stale air of the room. There were cobwebs blanketing the corners, and if anything is a tell-tale sign of an unkempt environment, it’s filthy cobwebs hiding in the corners and shadowy places. I knew if I didn’t leave now I would end up in the newspaper as another casualty of the stinging shockwave of endless counterculture theories being rehashed by self-righteous conservative neophytes. This was no time for mild mannerisms; this was a time to flee.

But first I had to clear my eyes of this cold darkness that was lingering in the room like burnt popcorn. There was a lamp sitting on a four-legged splinter table and as I reached to operate this contraption, it burst forth an intense ray of sun that burned a scar in the center of my retinas. It’s funny because I cannot recall touching the lamp at all, let alone turning it on. It must have been cutting edge technology to possess the ability to read the hazy thoughts of a twisted junkie who didn’t even understand the inner workings of his own mind. Indeed, it must have been the most psychic lamp I never touched.

I remember after the light pierced my eyes, I stumbled backwards and felt myself slip to the sin of lost motor skills after a binge. What a strange and terrible tragedy it must have been for the child standing in the doorway to witness. Wait, there was a child standing in the doorway! Was this some sort of sick joke being played on me for the entertainment of some outback yokel trying to polish his shotgun into a syringe-laced hysteria, who wishes only to bury me under the Ferris wheel in his backyard. No. This was no joke, at least not one of an amateur’s intellect. This was a test of wits; can a man endure such depravation of consciousness as this and still be able to carry on a conversation with an innocent child standing in a doorway under those horrifying cobwebs.

I was determined to undermine this sadistic prankster and show him that a mind fucked up does not equal a corpse underneath the circus. I knew the task would be a difficult one, and as soon as I regained control of the outer regions of my body I glared directly at the boy and screamed, “you fucking Nazi pigs can’t fool me, I see through your trembling charade.”

They must have understood I was no incompetent drunkard, for the look on the boy’s face turned to one of dread. “Take that you mind bending control freak bastards,” I yelled as the boy exited the room with a mouthful of screams and eyes swelled over with the tears of a soldier on a failed mission. It was now a matter of who can call who on their cocaine-driven bullshit. It was the apocalypse to end all other apocalypses, and it had only just begun to end.

I darted through the cobwebs and the door with the pace of a marathon runner and double the heart rate. It was a quant little house furnished with empty bags of pork rinds and recycled latex gas chambers. I could feel the cool wind of October stirring through the shattered windowpanes, when I remembered it was the middle of June. Something was amiss, something crucial and ugly.

I found myself standing outside the front door of this hell-stricken sweathouse, with only one shoe on and a half a pack of cigarettes. The sun had been swallowed by the horizon, and my retinas where still placing odd colors where they did not belong. Blotches of smoky insight filled my brain like a pack of wild buffalo storming across the countryside in search of the wild Native American spirit. How did I get here, why was this happening? Perhaps some giant gravy train had winded me from yesterday to today in the mist of some wacky night brigade with grim intentions only to play psychological head games in some rundown crack house. What did they want with me? How could I escape?

I was just east of the borderline and I had full view of the Sierra landscape, silhouetted mountains, mangy rodents, and ancient pick up trucks. The highway looked like a divine scar on the face of the world that offered me my only hope for refuge and security. I saw headlights cutting through the vague distance and I knew the bastards were after me. I looked the other direction and began to shift my weight in a manner that resembled walking when I realized that these scoundrels wanted me to head east. “Double dealing swine,” I thought aloud when an angelic voice from the outer regions of my periphery shouted, “get the hell outta the road!”

He must have been one of their cronies and I could sense the tension in his voice. They probably had him working the late shift in their game of surrealistic torture, preying upon the weak and downtrodden junkie. What kind of animals were these assholes? Was the whole world a part of their mind trap? I knew that the point of hopelessness was near, and then I knew it had arrived. There it was, right there.

I felt my body twist around and fall gracefully into the dirt. I lied there with my face kissing the heavens, and the stars staring down at me like celestial DEA officers. I felt the disenchantment creep into my subconscious like a kamikaze test pilot. My heart was beating silently behind the prison bars of my ribcage. I began to drown in an ocean of lucidity, breathing in the holy cosmic vapors of the young mountain night. The calm rhythm of the wind overcame me, I felt clairvoyant; touched by the divine; with it. No one who has never experienced the agony of drug addiction can tell me they have felt a moment of serenity like the one in which I was now engulfed. The warmth of competence shrouded me like a wedding veil and for the first time in my life I felt truly and completely free.

I remembered my childhood in Yuppie, Rhode Island; long days listening to Ledbelly and drawing pictures with a black magic marker until I would pass out. That was the beginning of my downward spiral into the far corners of the drug underworld. I remembered my years of college, the years I had forgotten. The grand puzzle of my existence was starting to lead me in the direction of self-realization, piecing itself together into a menacing nightmare of memories. I could feel my bones beginning to tremble and I thought to myself, “have I squandered my life into a drug and alcohol-induced haze?”

I immediately thought about my daily regiment of vitamin Q that I had to neglect due to extreme circumstances that were dealt to me by these rat bastards. I reached into the pocket of my brown polyester jacket and found my bottle of clarity. I spilled them out all across the earth I had been laying on, and I had an extremely difficult experience attempting to locate these tiny white pills in the middle of all these terrible bugs that were slivering and withering all about the ground. I knew this was another one of their attempts to induce fear into an otherwise sound mind like my own. I thought back to Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” when I remembered I had scheduled my leap to a knight of faith for today. I knew these sick clowns wouldn’t be able to touch me if I had an abstract deity in my corner. I knew that with such brute force as a soul on Quaaludes in the presence of the divine maker of men, I couldn’t be trapped by anymore dirty head games. These bastards would pay.

I stood up slowly from my meditation bed where I had fallen and I turned around in a circle seven times to get my blood flowing correctly when, once again, I fell to the ground. “Sweet Jesus, they must have replaced my vitamin Q with dizzy pills!” These rodents were playing hardball and I was up to bat. I stood up again and turned to the house only to find another one of these pig fuckers standing in the doorway of the house. This one, however, had a blue uniform with a shiny piece of gold for a heart and I knew they were trying to fool me again.

“Fuck off, pig fucker,” were the words I shouted very tastefully at this brain washing conspirator. He approached me very quickly and the night went pitch black from then on. I assumed I must have found some fourth dimension time hole because I found myself surrounded by pale lighting in some dusty iron prison cell. “What were these twisted children of the night trying to do to me now?” I had a vision of my future with a red-hot flaming piece of iron being forced up my rectum by someone with a clown suit on and I knew I had to resist.

“Cock-sucking lunatics, I’ll give you angeldust, mescal, ether, andrenachrome, amphetamines, what is it that you want from me you pig bastards?” “Is that a confession?” replied one of the pranksters. “No you asshole, it’s a proposition to get me out of your torturous game!” But I knew they weren’t listening.

I began wondering what the big picture had in store for me. What is a world full of freaks in Buddha attire, policemen using brutality, angels with wings made of acid? I found myself once more in the mist of a surrealistic epic saga, with no headlights to guide my way. The world felt as though it were spinning backwards and I’m forced to run the other way to reverse it into its natural order. Time loops, nitrous balloons, magic mushrooms, silver bullets, crumbling skyscrapers, all part of someone’s dream to find a voice in the deafening chaos. I was riding the crest of a weird and strange revolution. A revolution intent on self-discovery and then again on self-loss, spinning eternally into the neon-lighted night where transvestites dance under the disco ball and mothers cry for the sake of their disillusioned children. A time like none other; whispers escaping into the pale quiet of the night, begging for an absolution, a voice, a mission, some sort of content. Yet the whispers fade and disappear in the wind while the world spins eternally in reverse. And I lie on a bed of concrete, shifting between visions that resemble a Salvador Dali painting and a generation lost in the time warp of the perpetual tomorrow. And I think to myself, “it’s a strange time, this one of ours.”