absurd reflection

   I sat there, looking blankly at the curser blinking in front of me. School had got the best of me and now when I needed to the most, I was unable to do any work for it.

   “Too much going on. New prescription. Double dosage. Empty stomach. Gotta get out of this place. Now,” I thought to myself in fragments. I had been awake for about an hour, absently Googling my way around the internet, but it  felt like I had still only just woken up, in spite of the 80 milligrams of Straterra floating around in my brain and muscle tissue. I could feel the chemical compounds invading my flesh—it was like a damp pharmaceutical blanket draped over my entire state of being, and it left a bitter taste in the back of my mouth.

   “It may take up to a month before the drug really starts to take affect and make it easier for you to pay attention,” my doctor warned me. She failed, however, to warn me that in the weeks leading up to this fantastic day when I’d be able to pay attention to life once again, I’d be a total space case unable to prepare for finals or write the eight short essays that various professors had demanded of their students.

   Vibrations around my apartment distracted me as well: the heat fan whirring noisily, the fish tank bubbling and humming uninterrupted, the registers hissing quietly, the distant squeaking of a gerbil running in its deadly metal wheel in the other room, the familiar refrigerator sound. It seemed like this droning cacophony owned me. I tousled and scratched at my short bleached hair nervously for a few seconds—a twitch I had affected in childhood—and shook my head quickly. My cat stretched in the small patch of sunlight on the floor. I proceeded to find my old reliable glass pipe and the bag of weed that I’d reluctantly bought yesterday.

   “What would Cale think?”

   I brushed this thought aside and picked up my cell phone to call my mom before packing a bowl. It was only after the pleasant 10- or 15-minute conversation that the convoluted psychology at play here had occurred to me. Maybe it was a kind of toddler-like defiance left over from the days when I lived at home with my parents that delayed my getting stoned. Like lying about where I’m going before sneaking out to drink. “Ah, high school.”

   But now my stomach was really feeling queasy from the ADD meds, my arms felt like warm jam and the bits floating in it were thorns and gravel. I needed to force down some food, STAT, or I would feel like this for hours. Nothing looked appetizing, I knew it wouldn’t. But I reached for the apple which had been sitting in my fridge for months and was baffled at how it was still good. A little soft here and there and starting to wrinkle… slightly sweeter than usual, but still good. Almost immediately, my stomach began to settle and the sticks-and-stones-jam feeling in my arms subsided.

   This weed was exceptionally dry and sent me coughing and hacking into the bathroom before I pissed myself. When I returned to my desk, the assignments still hadn’t written themselves, but I found that the short story due Monday didn’t seem to have a problem falling out of my fingertips at all. I took another bite of apple and hit the bowl again. I imagined what comments such a self-telling story would render in class.

   “Really explicit… so honest… kind of blunt? A cheap cop-out on an assignment I had been putting off for days?” More coughing. Another bite from the apple. Oh this just won’t do. I’ve got to add something, a conflict or something. That Straterra bit up there seemed like it could go somewhere. No, too “Garden State.” Maybe the marijuana-cale-mother figure-defiance conflict? Nah, too “American Beauty.”

   “Well this talking to yourself bit while getting stoned and forcing down breakfast is probably just going to weird people out.”

   “No no no, man this is the stuff of great movies, as was clearly stated.”

   “You’re just getting stoned again, on an empty stomach. With 80mG of dopamine-mongering chemicals in you.”

   “This is starting to feel like Fear and Loathing.”

   “Oh, good stuff. Have you read Where the Buffalo Roam?”

   “No, but I’ve been told to.”

   “You should.”

   A few moments of silence pass… or rather, relative silence considering the constant owning drone mentioned before. It’s more tangible now. It’s like I’m… in it.

   “Come on! That’s a direct Garden State rip-off!”

   “Shut up, I’m trying to write.”

   “Sorry.”

   Holy crap, am I going insane or is it just the pot? I didn’t think this was very good stuff—it’s shwag—brown and stemmy. But then, I’ve never tried any writing exercise like this before.

   It makes me think of Jack Kerouac though.

   A single clear moment, fleeting, but nevertheless unforgettable, of understanding and knowledge occurs and I am illuminated with the truth that all things are interconnected somehow and no thing can exist without its equal opposite. Love flows through me like magnificent white light and I’m thinking back to Greg telling us it’s difficult and sounds flat (or something like that) to try to interlace a good story with thoughts like the ones I just had. Oh well. I’m having fun with this at any rate and eating up poetic license like this here apple I’m having for breakfast. That whole “Absurd” genre keeps finding its way into my thought process too.

   I hit the bowl again. I notice how the past-present-future tense has been manipulated and it is sure to happen again. I take another bite from the apple, run a spell check and word count, re-read the whole thing and I’ll meet you right back here in about five minutes.

   “Cool. See you then.”

   “986 words of utter nonsense.”

   “Shut up, you’re not my editor.”

   “Yes I am.”

   I’ve thrown the apple away. I accidentally took a good look at myself in the mirror while I was in the bathroom. I look tired, tense in spite of the 10 hours or so of sleep I got last night. I look insane: blue sparkly fuzzy slippers, bright teal bath robe, bright blonde hair, black roots, dark circles under eyes, dilated pupils due to various chemical reactions taking place just behind them. Writing a god-damned story like this one. I look like… I make a strange face, twisted up in surprised confusion… a writer. Weird. My Betta fish looks hypnotized by something. I hit the bowl again. 1,107… 1,108…1,109… nonsense I tell you. 1,113…

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