Fear and Loathing

by Crom

There’s a point you know. Where all the shit you were thinking about, lamenting about, twisting and turning over in the easy bake oven we all call our brain, just melts away as if you never thought about it. The body’s reaction to this total mental catastrophe is to supress the normal warning signals, and other autonomic functions. You begin to babble a little bit, the serendipity you so desprately craved suddenly washes over you. It’s like what they describe a brain aneurism as. You’ll end up in strange, out of the way, places. Movie theaters you haven’t been to in months; and you’ve no intention of seeing anything. You might play a game of video football, or just stare blankly at the wall. You get in your car and start driving; no particular direction is decided nor required. You’ll end up in a liquor store, there’s no way to avoid this step. It’s important to get drunk at this point, it’s one of the few remaining roads of salvation.

You see… you’ve lost it. The pressure has finally got to you and now you’re just an empty headed shell of a man. Your brain has splintered off into 99 different little worlds; all your thoughts, mere jumbles. The booze will help. Oh, i’m sure right now the level-headed crowd is selling the usual line “Alcohol is not a way to deal with your problems”. I agree. Booze cannot make problems go away; it’s not a cure-all for the ails of life. Nor do i advocate drinking whenever you start to let your mind wander. No, this recipe we’re cooking up now isn’t for problems. It’s for total, and complete mental collapse. There’s no way that this could lead to abuse, either this cures you in one shot, or it won’t do anything at all. Now… you’ve got the booze. It’s time to find some useless task for yourself, you’ll need something to keep your mind occupied until the towering drunkeness comes to fore. Generally you’ll end up playing some stupid video game, that you’ve played and mastered 6 months earlier; but that’s the hitch, you need something that isn’t difficult to do. Otherwise you’ll start thinking, and that can only lead to a shitroad.

Look man, all this is leading up to one simple effect. Once you’ve reached the point where all the things you once knew have become smoke and mirrors, you have to reboot the system. You’ve blue screened. The point that you are at now is teetering ever so close to rock bottom. But, rock bottom isn’t good enough. No, you need to hit bedrock and start digging. You need to crash the system so hard that everything needs to be reset. Once you’ve started drinking you need to push it to the limits of your body. An entire case is childs play, you need to crash and burn. I don’t mean vomiting, that won’t have the desired effect. But, i do mean the kind of drunk that would make you tell your boss that he’s an idiot and that you know how to run the store better. Then actual tell him how, and when he agrees, then you’re in like flynn. The critics will be casting stones at this point. Calling me an idiot, or worse (since idiot is fairly mild). However, i’ve been there.

I’ve lived this little dramatic arts scene we’re brewing here. The kind of fucked up mental state where everything becomes a not-so-funny graphic novel about a dairy queen worker gone mad. Where everything that you once thought was the foundation of your entire existence is gone, washed away in the river of molten pressure and stress. At one point i nearly didn’t make it out. Almost lost the battle. I was standing in the parking lot at the shopping mall across town. Just standing there, next to my truck. I had flatlined. Zero brain waves. Alpha had been shot down over the gulf of mexico, Beta waves had packed their shit and left. So i stood there, locked up in a continuous cycle. I had looped my brain, count to infinity packets were smashing off the walls of my head. Hold down timers have failed, and i forgot to cron a reboot. Somehow through the murky depths of the tapioca pudding that was now my shattered mind, i managed to send a telegram to my cerebellum. Pony express rode hard. GET IN THE FUCKING TRUCK. I blinked and turned the key; turned over the engine. Then i got drunk.

I stayed awake to ungodly hours, i had been conscious for 24 hours, and during that whole time i had been pounding my mind and body with booze. This is the point, where it all turns around. A clean reboot comes through for you. I don’t care how much sleep you get (in my case i slept from 6:30 am to 9:03am) it’s like 50 hours of hybernation. No hang-over, no headache. You’ve become Bruce Willis, you went off the rails of the crazy train.

It’s the clarity you notice the most. All the pieces were rounded up; you’re brain was defragged. You feel good, and you are confused at how you’re still alive. Kryptonite is your only enemy. You shuffle to the kitchen and eat something. At that moment you’ll stare out the window, at the rising sun. You realize: Friedrich was right.

Crom