Interview with a Dirtbag

Chapter 24 - Michael’s High Horse (Brill!)

Michael had held off on the ice cream all evening for this. Ice cream was going to be amazing after he was good and high. It hadn’t become a chronic habit, but the chronic was becoming a welcome way to destress himself. The trauma people experienced, it was awful. He’d only spoken to two people and they were in his pack. No telling what would come out of people he’d not really met.

Ah well, Michael thought, surely this is a healthy coping mechanism, right? He laughed quietly to himself. Yeah right. That said, his first three attempts at smoking marijuana had not gone too well. He didn’t smoke, so the concept of inhaling was in no way established. Usually, he figured, people started smoking cigarettes first before marijuana, at least tobacco was a more accepted habit. He hadn’t developed the muscle memory for inhaling that one who has smoked cigarettes a while must have to develop. Michael had smoked cigars though, which requires a different set of muscles to enjoy. Therefore, when he tried to smoke his first joint like a cigar, it just went into his sinuses and made him feel congested for the following three days. No high was enjoyed. The second time wasn’t much better. The diminished return of the high for the anxiety caused by the previous failed attempt did not help.

The third time, with Carl, was very different. Michael had Carl to sherpa him through the experience. Carl gave him the rudimentary tour of joints vs spliffs vs blunts. The finer points were lost on Michael.

Yet, something must have stuck with him.

Michael had felt inner turmoil. No more than anyone else likely had, but enough to make him tense. In an anatomy and physiology course he’d interpreted, the professor had noted that human cells were generally negatively charged. There was some jargon about gradients and ease of locomotion, but what Michael walked away with was that if the average bodily cell was negative, it made sense that people were so cynical. It was the easiest way to go about your life: passively hating everything around you was much easier than actively putting something positive out in the world.

But when Michael smoked, it was like his brain was giving itself a hug. He thought of all the good things he’d done. His usual negative thoughts were overwhelmed by positive feelings and even citations by way of memories. No, you’re not an asshole. Remember when you a) let those people into traffic when you didn’t have to? b) you went the extra mile and returned the shopping cart to the shopping cart corral? There were other, more prescient ways that his brain turned his inner frown upside down that went up in smoke, as it were, as was the nature of getting high. All the genius thoughts one had when they were high were gone by the time morning came.

That was one of the more recent experiences. On the other hand, This is a sad one. Michael typed into a note on his phone. Michael became upset that what he was thinking wasn’t sticking, instead of remaining upset, he came up with a plan. He opened his phone and started typing his thoughts.

Remember to breathe.

Breath of life. Those first breaths of life that my children took. Images of Katherine and Doug shone in my brain. Their first breaths on their own and the crying that followed. I wonder if they cried like that when I moved out? I was there to take them to school that morning, then I wasn’t there when they came home. Bill advised me to do it while they were gone so there weren’t any tears. Or was that to save me from tears? Did they still shed tears and the trick was that I didn’t have to see them? How much more of an asshole does that make me? Making a thing that’s hard on all of us easier on me? And just me? I guess. It still hurts my heart even though I wasn’t there to see their hearts break.

Breathe again.

Gut punch again to have to experience, remember and then have to remember to retell. And a fourth gut punch when you read that next sentence to remember what you’d forgotten.

Therefore I am writing it down for the first time. Before I forget.

And I’m having a good time that I’d like to remember.

But also ice cream?

Linnet looked at me and told me to “have fun”. Is that angry or jealous, or what? What is that face? I’m not at all ready to go to bed. So she can go to bed and I’ll keep on going. Maybe she thinks typing while high is cute.

Like, she’d be mad if I came up with a million dollar idea while I’m high and if I were then to forget it because I was high and thought it and wouldn’t have done that / been able to do that, that that would be ultimately acceptable.

I just unpurposefully typed three “thats” in a row that makes sense.

Fuckin brill so far, Mate!

So I choose to think you’d think this was cute.

BESIDES, selfishness, or I should I say, putting myself before others for once is something I admire and try to emulate. It’s part of our bargain is that we are two ends of an extreme and we make ourselves more normal.

Anywhoo breathing. And ice cream. And remembering well enough to retype what I just thought again from memory. ;)

See? Brill.

Brilllllll

Bra iiiiiiiiiiiiiiil

Nope, funnier with one el. I tried it out.

“Iiiiiiiiiiiillllll”

Is inferior to brill with the brill with a single el.

El.

El oh el

GO GET THAT ICE CREAM DAMMIT!!

That was brill! Getting up. Getting the ice cream. Realizing that it’s been 20 minutes since I thought about the options of what we choose to believe. And I hadn’t gotten the ice cream.

So I come back and realize it’s getting dark and I need to close the curtains. I lean in onto the couch with my right knee. Coming closer to the left hand side curtain I couldn’t figure out how to grab the curtain. So I think I should grab it high, but the physical length of my arm was not enough to reach the intended target height. So I grabbed it lower. Like a human. Like a human would. Jesus Michael. How’d you pratfall yourself into the right choice? Of acting like a human.

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Then ...to close the other curtain

OMG WHY AREN'T WE USING ELLIPSIS LIKE THE DOPPLER EFFECT‽!

Like

Why

...don’t we?...

Use our...

...ellipses to show the depth of the pause between ellipsisized the words are between.

And seeing...

Like a dumbass

That that doesn’t work when each line gets its own space.

... ...

That looks like nothing.

But if your sentences were structured in such a way that the words wrapped ...exactly where the true impact of the Doppler Ellipses...

...lay.

...or is it “lie”?

Punchline: used the Doppler Ellipses somewhere in the ...remembrance... of the story to show the effect of one word without explicitly saying so?

And there it happened.

I wasn’t going to write a whole big story. I was going to do what I do and try to answer the question with a question? Inside the question. Bruh.

And the ice cream is melting again.

That line was worth its weight in callbacks.

—-worth its weight in gold in terms of callbacks.

Sorry, I just had a bite of this ice cream. Goddamn!

My mouth feels like it looks like an ice background of a game or TV show. White tint. Shadow? The shiny part that’s supposed to demonstrate something’s 3D-Endesa. Motu las mofuckas, you know I didn’t intentionally write Endesa. Pardon. 3D-edness. Not Ernest. Or earnest. The capitalized one. Ednessa.

Shit. Don’t blink for too long when you’re enjoying the ice cream, Michael. Thanks Narrator. Point being the slow blinks = forward spinning. Don’t ruin the goodness of the ice cream with unwellness of feeling like I’m going to throw up while eating the ice cream. That’s sad.

Chuckle. Back to this being a sad one.

Oh dear. That train of thought came and went.

But that was the thought. That I would forget something and feel sad and that’s the theme of this trip and whatnot. And that’s sad that I think that this is brilliant and it may be and it may not be. But you nodded your head. It was amusing and cute so you can do it. Can it really be a sad trip if I am finding evidence for doing whatever you want goes back into a positive thought category.

Of course, Linnet could probably consider all of the choices of how to feel at the same time. Damn those girls and their ability to feel multiple things at the same time.

I bet she wishes I talked like this without having to write it instead of talking. Maybe not alll of this, because this is the Jubba Hanna goddamn you autocorrect. I definitely intended to say Jubba Hanna. And not jibba jabba.

I can still slow down and choose the choice that feels most right. Feels more funny. Lighthearted. That’s why feeling sad and hard to breathe are things I don’t want to talk about, maybe some of it is.

Maybe breathing and deliberately choosing words is better than typing impulsively which leads to things like Jubba Hanna.

Strange to slow down far enough to find the punchline. The funny part. The part that separates the joke being funny and the joke falling flat. This won’t be funny tomorrow. Sad again!

And scene.

Do you know how hard it is to remember a thought I just had right now?

The real thought was pretty funny but it’s kinda funny just letting that sentence stand there as it is.

Just thinking that the slowing down is like leaning back into a giant slingshot. Slowing down. Stretching it out. Finding the right tension to make the sentence it’s maximum amount of funny!

But no, thinking back to brill is a fucking stretch. See? Maximum funny.

What direction is my brain taking me now? That face? Oh Rachel. That angelic face. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. No one should lose a limb, especially for the sake of trying to help someone else.

That was it, wasn’t it? She was trying to save Amber. What if she could? What could have saved her? And her own arm?

Ooh, this is sad. I thought things were supposed to be funny when you’re high. Shouldn’t I be listening to the Dark Side of the Moon or some shit? The light into the prism becomes a rainbow, right? That’s that one right? Or is that the one with the bricks. Ha!

No, but are these remembrances actually as funny as they are in my head? Or valuable. I think I mean valuable instead of funny.

All the ha ha’s back in one place in the short term memory of person reading this piece as well as the short term memory of the person writing this piece

...and then reading it again to remember what it was that we’d experienced remembered then forgotten only to read about it and remember it again.

Either this is big brain shit or it ...is...

...garbage.

Is almost as funny as showing the effectiveness and the ineffectiveness at the same time in the same sentence.

Still able to edit myself. Censor myself. That means I haven’t gone beyond my boundaries.

This ice cream is good for memory. Oh no! I tried to remember by reading the beginning and I just hurt my heart again. So let’s try to remember that thought without going back to those stinging emotions.

Right, so Bill texted tonight. He asked me who the CART operator was at school and I knew that I knew because I was only just tipping over into intoxicated but the WHIRLPOOL HAD NOT HAD ME YET!

So anyway, I thought I could do it and then I got real paranoid about it being the wrong name.

Whoa feelings! ...luckily getting overwhelmed by my ability to self censor still!!

Aww, Amber. Rachel. Laser. Dark side of the moon. Light into prism. Laser into prism. Laser. Into. Prism. Could prisms stop lasers? Or like, make them less deadly?

Wait! Don’t I have a crystal or prism or something of some kind?

Means getting up again. You know what happens then what happens!: briiiiiiil!

There it goes again. Autocorrect. Hero and villain of my writings.

It didn’t correct or rather force a piece where it doesn’t fit with the word chart. Goddammit AC. AC accepts that that’s a word. But you’ll accept a spelling in one instance and not in the one explaining where it all went wrong. And I had to retype every word in that sentence with hunt and Peck. Ok. That last word I did swipe type. Thus the capitalization.

Either that paragraph is circularly logical or it is ...absolute... shiiit¡¡

Briiiiiiiiiiiiil!!¡

Phone

Dead.

Going to bed.

Horizontal waves.

Ah well. So it goes.

Stereoscope? Viewmaster.

A real mirror image of Flowers for Algernon feeling.

He self censors himself so much that he is not comfortable continuing writing. I’m so uncomfortable that I’m writing about what I was thinking about this process of writing that I had and may continue to shall ... referred to myself in the third person.

I, uh, I’ll shut up now.