Friday, February 2nd, 2007
Half Sane & Waiting to Die: The Ticking Clock and the Dreamer

I hadn’t gotten drunk in a while, which is usually the natural factor behind any decision regarding the instinctual “need” to rectify that current timeline. Now the past is a different past, and I have gotten drunk in a while, and I can sit back and think about that for a while.

Outside the liquor store I park the car and hand Eugene nine dollars as we exit, telling him to get me whatever the hell is on sale. It’s then I remember that this is the Christmas season. I change my previous order, saying “Get me whatever is on sale, but if they have elf beer, or beer with an elf on it, or just any sort of shit involving elves, you fucking get that and don’t look back.” I lean on the car as I wait, expecting this girl Gaby and her friends who were supposed to be meeting us to show up any second though they never do. The balding middle-aged manager of the adjoining mattress store is staring at me from the doorway, not even trying hard to conceal the fact that he’s there. I’m assuming he’s pissed that we’ve parked in the “For Mattress Store Customers Only” lot but It’s like 9:00 at night and no-one is showing up to buy mattresses anyhow you asshole, let this one go. I try my hardest to stare off at nothing and pretend I don’t know he’s there. When I turn back, he isn’t.

Eugene exits the store with a paper sack filled with a six-pack of PBR and a big bottle of something called “Bad Elf Beer.” It looks fucking terrible and I’m so proud of him I could cry. We find Gaby and a lot of other young “hipsters” at the house they share, all sitting around a shitty looking coffee table while the large framed poster of the doors hanging over the T.V. glares apathetically at us. The girl in the adjoining room is playing The Sims for PS2 and reminding Eugene of the $10 he owes her, which seemingly exists parallel to the dimension in which he owes me for the premium Zelda: Twilight Princess Guide Best Buy mistakenly had priced at $10 I loaned him money for. I’m getting as drunk as I can as fast as I can so that I have an excuse when the conversation I’m having on DC Comics’ current “52” storyline gets to the point where the scant knowledge I’ve collected from the two issues I’ve read while working at the card store betrays my show of confidence in such brilliant statements as “Robin is a fucking pussy” or “They need to do more shit with Booster Gold.” Some girl hands me the latest issue and I’m too drunk or stupid or both to make it through one dialogue bubble before deciding I need to suddenly start talking about how good food tastes.

At the “Wok Express” I’ve given Eugene another six U.S. dollars with which to purchase me fried pork dumplings and pork fried rice. I guess I like pork on some subconscious level, or maybe it’s the fact that 90% of the restaurant’s offerings likely have pork in them. Scanning the menu I notice that these items cost roughly ten dollars – though I mention nothing. Later when arguing over who owes whom what I’ll claim I contributed $8 and no one will say a thing otherwise. The slightly chubby Asian guy sweeping the floor is wearing a Naruto t-shirt and I wish he wasn’t. It just seems too… like when you don’t expect something and then it happens and you’re like “Why the fuck didn’t I expect that?” Why did I assume the only people who cared about Naruto were white, unkempt, and occupying some terrifying digimon hentai message board somewhere? I wouldn’t know. Playing off my whispered joke (a poor one), Eugene loudly asks the young Asian woman if she’s okay with us robbing her. I yell for him to shut the hell up before she calls the cops but she smiles, and not in that “I can’t wait for these fuckers to leave” sort of way. It seems genuine, and for half a second she’s the most beautiful girl in the world before I fall backwards into a booth, a bit lightheaded. I forget what happens here, I think I’m playing with a salt shaker or chopsticks or something but before I can remember the food is ready. The place apparently sells fortune cookies four for a buck which is retarded but the lady throws them in for free. God bless her soul.

Back at the house I’m for some reason in charge of answering the door and greeting people I don’t know. I do this inbetween the Chinese food and cans of beer, as well as trips to the bathroom accompanied by the antiquated Lum graphic novels Gaby has in her room. On one of those trips I return to find a shaky woman sitting in a comfy chair, just… shaking. I wonder how you go through life knowing everyone you meet wants to know why the fuck you shake so much, like if you have palsy or something, but no one has the balls to just come out and ask it. The bald guy with the lazy eye across from me is looking at me with his good eye, explaining the science behind having your head cryogenically preserved. It’s a lot of up and down nonsense about cell fidelity and other things I don’t care to understand. He shows me his “Do not autopsy” necklace and I kind of want to steal it for myself. The kid next to me catches wind of what he’s talking about and starts rambling about some science fiction novel where people have their consciousness downloaded to robots, and how it really isn’t immortality. This sparks an argument with some guy I was previously talking about magic cards with, who is arguing a different issue entirely but keeps saying that the book is right. As they yell back and forth I realize that the people having their heads frozen for the future aren’t brilliant scientists and leaders but instead Best Buy employees with lazy eyes. The future is dead already, fuck it all.

When I was a child, the idea of the universe exploding comforted me. I sympathized with the cookie-cutter villains of yesteryear who were hell-bent on blowing up the world with various death rays and other such devices of unspecific horror for reasons never made entirely implicit. I wanted to sit at the end of the world and watch it all end, to ride the cataclysmic destruction of anything and everything. I wanted to know that I was a part of that final moment and that I had seen all there was to be seen.

It’s going to happen eventually, right? So why not now?

I had a dream this year, one where I was a costumed superhero in the abandoned sewer system of some long forgotten city. And right before I was to ride my dimensional traveling rocket cycle away from this doomed timeline, I told the blonde standing by the wall that maybe everything would be all right.

I woke up not knowing if I had been lying.