fugue

so...what the hell happened to me?...i feel like i did when i woke up in the middle of the road in central arkansas…my breath smelling like week-old roadkill stuffed with really expensive cheese...as i recall, i lost twelve days on that one...good christ!...its been over a year this time...i cant be absolutely certain what happened and i may never be...whenever i am absolutely certain that I may never be absolutely certain about something, i seek guidance from the real thinkers of the world…it stands to reason that anyone who has sores on their elbows from sitting at a bar drinking and bullshitting all day, must be doing some real thinking, and must be good for some form of guidance…so i assembled a dream team of medical/lifestyle advisers down at the pickled pepper for a consultation…after some lengthy, alcohol-soaked discussions of all the evidence, after beer-tears shed and accidental punches thrown, we concluded that i suffered what can only be called an intellectual coma...a traumatic event overwhelms the mind, pushing it past the point of critical, meaningful thought...the brain and body continue to function... but the mind and soul are hiding under the bed as if their alcoholic uncle henry got called in to babysit at the last minute…you can still drive to work…you can still stand erect while brad relentlessly refers to matters regarding the local sporting distractions in first person plural…sporadically staring downward, shaking his head and interjecting his mantra “we need defense, man”…you can even still listen and understand as shirley irrevocably eradicates forty minutes of your life, verbally molesting you with every last detail of a thirty minute show that you just told her you already watched… gone, however, is the ability to think “wow! brad and shirley really are assholes”…autopilot lifestyle...on...........the final thing that i remember was attending my weekly transcendental twerking class back in may of last year [the thursday class was being overrun by snobbish wine swirlers who were just out to prove something, so i switched to wednesdays] ...notwithstanding the countless breakthroughs of medical science in the field of twerking, there are still many unknowns...based on the current volume of data regarding the physiological, psychological and spiritual effects of a really intense twerking session, it is possible that i entered an altered state of consciousness known as hyper-realistic perception...this occurs when you experience such clarity of mind that the bullshit of our modern existence is stripped of all of its apparent "normalcy" and seen for the madness that it truly is...this was my trauma...i remember being reborn into a world where people take the time to gather together in groups so that they can ignore each other while they facebook [yes...it's a friggin verb now] or text with people who didnt even bother to take the time to sit down and ignore them...a world where parents fed their children a strict diet of saturated fat and high-fructose corn syrup so that they would be weak and lazy enough to sit all day playing expensive video games, watching traffic camera clips of people being killed by trains or learning how to properly ignore people with their iphones...this way, both parents could go out and work just to be able to afford the latest video games, computers and iphones to forestall their children’s hatred for abandoning them [thats not the disturbing part...they actually wondered why their kids ended up being sociopaths, but i digress]...the world i saw was teeming with people who were so desperate for the smallest crumb of eminence or recognition...so hungry for anything that could verify that they truly were the superstar that the lifelong marketing blitz had convinced them that they are, that they made pseudo-celebrities of themselves by endlessly updating their status or obsessively tweeting out selfies (strategically hashtagged for maximum exposure, of course) to a world that couldnt possibly give a shit less that they just had a yummy lunch or that theyre feeling a little blue today *sigh*... this was a world where everyone was trying to be anything other than what they really were…anything...people moving, living and thinking in herds…each one trying to act like everyone else in the group, leaving only some lowest common denominator of a human being…every personality trait focus group tested and deemed safe for public consumption...laughable caricatures of who they wish they were...bland, insipid, vanilla people who would think, say or do nothing offensive, unexpected or out of the ordinary for fear of being seen as someone less than enthusiastic about conformity...thereby risking rejection, and ultimately the solitude required to help them realize that their lives were swirling down the bowl while they chased someone else's dream…wave after wave of unabashed, mind-raping idiocy assaulted my senses…i snapped………the first thing that I felt can only be described as going from a normal existence, standing here in the earth’s atmosphere to being encased in cottage cheese (or greek yogurt for you trendy types) within a split second…the all-encompassing pressure of raw stupidity rushed in on me…a tsunami of insanity…it was too much for my mind to bear…the next (and last) thing that I felt was ridicule…as if the simple act of perceiving the madness of people, somehow made them aware of my scrutiny of their “normal” behavior…for which they chastised, belittled or otherwise laughed at me…I was instantaneously inundated with visions from my past... pointing out the everyday, beacon-like stupidity of people who would never argue against the point that I was making, but would invariably call me an idiot and deride me for “thinking too much”…hmmmm...and just as I was fading out, one final critical thought flashed through my mind which set my life in motion for the next year…”when surrounded by idiots, the idiots will call you an idiot”…there could be only one course of action…I opened a parking lot that sells "art"…the art of parking…to be continued