Round 1

“Look into any eyes,
You’ll find by it you can see clear to another day-
Maybe been seen before, through other eyes,
On other days,
While going home…”

-Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia (RIP), Box of Rain, as
performed by the Grateful Dead. American Beauty c. 1970
Warner Bros. Records.

Every entity in the Universe imagines its name is “me.” Each inhabits a cosmos populated by its own kind, and lesser beings. I’ve been running around like a maniac, tapping myself on the shoulder, demanding explanations.

All I can say is, I guess my bullshit filter must have been a bit off- center. A rather unfortunate oversight when navigating the meandering labyrinths of hidden knowledge and the myriad pretenders who hawk it in the unregulated marketplace of the psychedelic underground. I must have been stoned out of my gourd on ego.

Otherwise I’d have seen how pointless it was. How unnatural.

How…blasphemous. The hubris.

The sheer asshole self-seriousness of it all.

Time. I crane my head to check the time in the burning, cloudless sky, as phalanxes of aerocars zip noiselessly past overhead. Rush hour. Nine o’clock, I guess, or ten at the latest. Soon my stolen sweatshirt will be drenched with the panicked product of my undeoderized arms, and I will be reduced to my bright orange, crudely stenciled hospital scrubs.

Dumpster dive for lighter gear. Yummy.

Already the whiff of frantic frenzy reaches my wrinkling nose, merging with the stink of speed and seed in the part of town I was always forbidden to enter. Four hours, now, or five, since I liberated myself from the Tower of Psychobabble. The net will have been cast by now. There’s no way my absence could still be unnoticed; I have to get off the street.

Running out of time, again. The story of my lives.

The pockmarked alley is crowded with the ragged, semi-permanent residents of makeshift dumpster-and-cardboard domiciles, collecting cans, gnawing garbage. The majority seem to be well into the day’s pickling.

They pay me no mind, and I return the favor, allowing them to unobtrusively decay in peace.

SMACK! I am knocked on my ass by an angry-looking, smudged urchin poking her dreadlocked, elven face and braceleted wrist out from under her trash-bag tarpaulin. I prepare for battle.

She coughs, struggling to hide the streaming whitish smoke trailing from her nose as she assesses the intruder, but shrugs and returns to her abode as she determines that the commotion of my passage is not the buzz- kill patrol coming to interfere with her manner of respiration. I duck behind a vacant telephone pole, squatting and panting, gathering breath and nerve before venturing onto the Row.

I scan the assorted piles of junk for some lighter attire, but nothing offers, though I spot a paperback discarded near a dumpster, and toy with the notion of salvaging it. I could stand to lose myself in a book, even a very bad one, right about now. But I haven’t got any pockets to carry it, or leisure to indulge, so I abandon the distraction. Probably some crappy fiction for juveniles, anyway.

They’ll be after me. Eloped psychiatric patients are pursued by modern, private police armed with not only current photos, updated weekly, but finger, toe and retinal prints as well. Because Fairfield Hospital was held to be responsible for our welfare, they employed a band of mercenaries, failed bailbondspeople and dishonorably discharged military personnel, to hunt down any of us chickens presumptuous enough to fly the coop before beheading.

Our “Welcome Orientation,” where the terms of my involuntary incarceration were explained, had covered this extensively; we ought not even to think about absconding, for our minds were mystically monitored.

Fantasies of freedom were considered a sign of disconnectedness from reality and entered accordingly in our charts. Everyone wants to leave the asylum, but it is mad to think it can be done.

Color me wacko. It’s not the first time.

~ )))0((( ~