On getting blitzed, part two

Part one, written late last night after returning from an after-pickup Ultimate restaurant, is here.


Things unrequited lie in the dominion of why-not. It's an experiment in self-control, and every experiment needs its materials. (Underline the word twice in your lab notebook if you like, but stalling won't make time go faster.) A body, an eye, two eyes; a breath of something sweet, a breath of something bitter and caustic; we will need a dash of pheromones, perhaps a teaspoon, and two scoops of hormones, extracted from the hypothalamus-pituitary axis for best results; and a heart, one slippery, convulsing, 10.5-ounce heart, alive, slathered with goo, leaping off your hands and spraying us with the taste the rust.

Now the procedure.

Throw together. Focus. Here's where the eye comes in. Find and fantasize. Let the elements slosh in the Erlenmeyer flask and -- here's the other two eyes -- notice your reflection, the pigments like rivulets branching from a heart of things, the veins pulsing with expectation.

When it comes it comes hard, unsparing, cruel. After initial contact it drains you, slowly, a series of explosions numbering so many thousand that it feels like one continuous agony. Your cavities are flooded with saltwater. Your insides hollowed out. A pang, like hunger, strikes at your core, and -- you don't see this -- a tumbling little black hole like the universe spins out its ferocious energy in the gut of your stomach, devouring all your better senses. Every disorder manifests itself on your body, occupying your waking state, invading your unwaking state, making every sound a little sharper, every breath a little heavier, rewiring your mind so that every word becomes more meaningful, as if our destiny were written in them, louder, as if you'd gone a mite bit deaf and need to shout out your ego, complete the evacuation, find something that will only appear after all has been emptied clean.

Renascent happiness, it awaits -- that is our hypothesis. Screw the if-then-when. Singing Sad lonelyheart, poor forlorn heart. The burlesque plays on, independent of variables, dependent on voids, chasms, abstractions, theoreticals like wormholes, hypotheticals like God. We know only that which we see, am only what I think, exist because because, says Descartes. Who knows who peers down from lofty seats?

But I propose a radical, new idea that'll make those white-coat stiffs shiver and shake the foundation of even the loneliest shut-off hermits in the otherworld. There will be no more why-nots, only why-hasn'ts. This has all happened and will happen again. Seize the loop with both hands, squeeze, force the current to U-turn. Why hasn't the response come, the chemicals reacted, the thing come alive: oh but it will, my friend, it will. This is what the future tells me when I, costive and shrunk beneath a damp shirt on a cool night, drunk, one arm tucked inside against a frail mortality next to a thing that goes thump, thump, thump, glimpse past it and everything and jump straight through, not even stopping at the conclusion. Future, my scientist friends, my experimenters-in-arms: you will find what you seek, my love, my life.