In my early twenties I would spend all week at my shitty call center job reading detective novels written by and for imbeciles and spend weekends holed up with a bottle of dextroamphetamine. I would take these little grainy yellow tablets by the fistful until the buildings around me throbbed with a malevolent energy. I’d wander the streets and duck into the bathrooms of tacky family style mexican restaurants and chug down pint bottles of cheap gin, and grip the edges of the sink staring wildly into the bathroom mirror, anchoring myself in the reflection of my obscenely dilated pupils, black humming voids with just the thinnest strip of color around the margins to keep from spinning out into space.
I’d creep back to my ratty apartment, my face seized by paranoid contortions, avoiding the gaze of the increasingly seeming hostile pedestrians on my way. Lock the door and pull the blinds way down so not even a sliver of light could get in. Oftentimes I’d find myself staring at the pile of filthy laundry in the corner of my room and the flies making their erratic orbits around it and try to kill them with the force of my mind, concentrating as hard as I could until it would feel like the vessels in my eyes would burst. It didn’t kill them but they did seem visibly distressed by my efforts, their patterns taking on a distinctly nervous energy. But possibly I flatter myself here.
Finally I would hunker in front of the hulking dust-streaked monitor of my computer and stare at internet pornography for hours until the images were scorched onto the retina of my eye. When I’d finally close my eyes to sleep, the lurid snapshots would swim before me like undersea-dream pornography. It was at this time, on the brink of sheer exhaustion, I’d get the notion that the world outside those four shabby walls had totally ceased to exist, replaced by an endless expanse of crackling white TV static. And honestly, those were the best days of my life.
Originally written for the Ghost Jail Podcast, 2021.