Status: At 75 hours in I lost it. I fucking lost it.
I didn’t capitulate to the ethos of my quest. I didn’t fire up the celebratory macanudo’s I
have stowed in my humidor or traipse
down the street to see my good friend Sunshine at Western Liquors where I’m sure any day now they will be
expecting a delectable shipment of Sam
Adam’s Spring thaw. I didn’t kowtow to my Keurig, fondle the miniature glass
silo of my French Press, grind up oily beans from Country Morning Coffee in Kewanee
which I love into grainy crumbs and midnight specks before planting the ground
manna into the upside-down pyramid of my mother’s second-hand used coffee
maker, watching with still-life astonishment as the horizontal beam of liquid
sluices into the potbelly carafe, flooding the glass organ with a light
obstructing shadowy fluid capable of triggering neurological encores of caffeinated
cognizance, static applause ushering ricocheting synaptic
intellectual surfs of enlightenment.
I didn’t drive over to Pottstown deli and get a rack
of Lamb, ring up my brother Brent at Haddad’s and have him carve something
sirloin esculent bludgeoned raw it still has splotches of drool courtesy of Brent’s
inimitable hometown cleaving skills, a hybrid between a physician’s needle and
a Lumberjack’s fluctuating swing.
I didn’t escape to my Uncle’s farm outside of Glasford and ford up in his basement feasting on venison jerky and venison sausage and all things deer-related until spring.
But I lost it, and I did something I vowed I never
would do.
I did Decaf
It tasted fetid. It tasted putrid. It tasted
squalid. It was as if someone working for the fecal collection department sentenced
my taste buds to some sort of public malfeasance. To say that it tasted like a moribund
hog-nose skunk inflicted with field leprosy crawled into the back out of mouth
to hibernate and then exploded would be too kind.
Imagine Courtney Love pausing in the middle of a
performance, boomeranging her guitar around the blithe knobs of her drywall
shoulder blades then, w/out a thought, she grapples the hem of her dress and
yanks it up near her elbows. Then imagine that Courtney Love with one hand
thumbing open the flimsy elastic off-
white of her undergarments and, with the antipodal hand, she then begins to fish
around the interior of her panties like she is searching for loose change inside the
plastic bin of an interstate toll booth.
Then picture Kurt Cobain’s widow pinching the inside
bottom of her underwear and, with a subtle prick, reeling out a thoroughly used maxi-pad, holding
it up in front of a foaming flannel-clad audience like she is scrutinizing a
film negative from a forgotten homemade porno before she places the thoroughly
sullied sanitary napkin on her face and begins to blotch at her methed-out
china doll countenance, swiping off cracked dollops of three-day old caked
cosmetics, crunching the make-up fraught max-pad into a crinkled corsage, spiking
the remnant into the stage before flicking her cigarette out on to said item of
note.
Then picture Courtney lowering her dress before
leading her cadre of fellow musicians into a high-pitched screech-riddled
rendition of Tame Impala’s ‘Elephant’ (A kick-ass psychedelic hymn for tortured tie-dye if ever
there was one).
During the screechy rendition of Tame Impala’s
‘Elephant,’ a pygmy in drag draped in a pink cape and stiletto’s and wearing a
tiara guides an actual elephant on the stage. The elephant is withered and
craggily and the color of shale. The tiara-pygmy places his thumb and pointer
finger into his lips and whistles a cue to the elephant who crouches in defecating
posture, and, as if goaded by the elusive Higgs Boson God particle, begins to
release his craggily bowels on the aforementioned Courtney Love make-up splotched
used maxi-pad.
Just as the elephant is punctuating his snarled
business, emptying a tower of digested Babel sized fecal movement on C.Love’s
hygienic accessory, a shot whizzes from somewhere out of the foaming flannel
clad audience echoed by the words Bullseye in a British accent. The audience
turns to see a middle-aged man who looks like he just got back from safari
wearing a monocle, wielding a musket with little wisps of cobalt hovering above
the nozzle. The hunter breaks into a roaring rendition of God Save the Queen as
the elephant topples, on top of its own pyramidal feces, on top of Courtney
Love’s used make-up removing maxi-pad, with a thud.
Now picture the author of Succulent Sobriety
II. He is seated at his writing desk at
the corner of Ayres and Waverly in West Peoria in a room stuffed with books and
a fold-out couch stationed beneath a kick-ass painting by local artist
Christopher Robin Keller he purchased from the artist directly after a poetry
reading three years ago at the Speak Easy art gallery. The author’s hair is
wounded back in a pony-tail and he has three day stubble dotting the side of
his face. He is wearing a blue U of I sweatshirt he lovingly purloined from his
friend Valena and he is looking at a screen that resembles the same exact screen
you are perusing at this very moment only it is slightly different because it
is in Blogger editing format mode.
The author is taking a voluntary hiatus from all the
vices he loves including his daily alcohol intake, tobacco, caffeine and is
adhering to a Vegan lifestyle, something he has never done before. He is
experiencing some withdrawal symptoms and feels rather turgid and languorous at
times. The author normally blows through about two-three pots of coffee a day
and has not has a cup of coffee in almost 100 hours.
Tomorrow will be the longest the author has gone
without a cup o joe since May 1996.
Needless to say the author is feeling just a tad
petulant and pissed off and moody, even though he has been juicing, like,
incessantly for three days straight and his urine smells like what he envisions
a wet cabbage patch kid must smell like.
There is a shuffle followed by the scampering of
footprints and the author thinks it is his cool roommate Kyle Devalk (who is
also, ironically, taking a sabbatical from the sauce) getting ready to break
into one of his infamous OCCUPY laced tirades against all things corporate and
anti-constitutional until the author of Succulent Sobriety II readily discerns
that it’s not his beloved roommate but rather three ninjas. The Ninja’s scuttle
around his room, pouncing on the author’s fold-out couch and knocking over his
bookshelf with the photo of short-story writer Raymond Carver on the top. One
of the Ninja’s whips out what looks like a reel of Christmas lights but is in
actuality some sort of barbed-wire laced binding element. The ninja’s truss the
author to his chair, swiveling it around several times in a row which doesn’t
auger well for his equilibrium since he is moody and suffering hardcore
withdrawal symptoms.
He also has a numbing migraine and is full of
homemade V8 swill and he really has to, like, pee.
The Ninja’s then stop the chair, placing their
gloved hands on top of the author’s head before laughing. The troika of ninja’s
each take a step back and slowly doff their ninja masks. As they remove their
masks long hair sprawls in every direction. The author then realizes that he
has been duly abducted by the trinity of females whom he would notably classify
as the love of his life. The one who got away. The one who married the CEO’s
son and is millionaire. The one he was going to propose to then he walked in on
her fucking her roommate.
The three muses he would give every syllable of
every manuscript he has ever tithed just to wake up in their vicinity and hear
their voice in tandem with his breath once again.
The three ninja’s begin to strip. Slowly they remove
their tops. They then bend over and begin to rattle certain northern and
southern hemispheres of their anatomies. Before they are completely naked, clad
only in bra and panties they dim the lights and point to the screen on the
opposite side of the bedroom wall. A slide show presentation begins. Each slide
is a picture of one of the muses performing lewd sexual acts on her current
spouse, the male the muse exchanged for the trussed author. There are several
bleeps as the slides continue to change. In one slide the muse with the blonde
hair is holding out a tape-measure and looking at the author of Succulent
Sobriety’s crotch and laughing, In another
the muse with auburn hair is topless holding out her husband’s credit
card on a Mediterranean cruise. In the final shot is a picture of the muse with long black hair. She is with
her husband and her three kids posing for a picture that you can tell is used
in church directory. Everyone in the photo has a smile welded into their lips.
You can tell by the look on everyone’s face in the photograph that perhaps they
don’t have a lot of money but the comfort and familiarly of domestic bliss is
somehow worth it.
Just as the author of Succulent Sobriety begins to
get sentimental. just as he begins to wish his life would have somehow turned
out differently, just as he is beginning to wish he could do things all over
again and make something of himself and give himself for a higher cause the
three muses cackle their heads back and laugh, swiveling the author’s chair
around once again, causing the author severe caffeine-meat-alcohol withdrawal
related vertigo.
The room is dizzy and everything is spinning around
like a pin-wheel. The temptresses then turn to the author, hold their
respective mid-sections like they have just finished moonwalking and ask the
author if he wants a piece of that.
The author responds by saying one word: One word
that appears to be the apotheosis of his every withdrawal skidded pulse.
“Jejune.”
The trinity of muses look back at the author again.
They unbuckle the top of their bodies, bosoms flouncing as if orchestrated by a
unseasonal zephyr. They pinch and twerk at their respective nipples, again,
inquiring to the author if he wants some of this. The author replies by
retorting to their query with the same dual syllables.
“Jejune.” He says, looking at the entry for
Succulent Sobriety II he is working on. Looking at the picture of Courtney Love
he just photo shopped next to stacks of SANKA coffee cylinders.
The three muses pause. They then join hands and
begin to gyrate in what appears to be pre-choreographed medieval dance. They
then move apart. The one muse who was featured in the slide surrounded by the
perfect family is now holding a cup of coffee. The author thinks it is the most
perfect cup of coffee he has ever seen. It is black and potent and he can smell
from the waves quavering like diminutive S’s above the top, hot as hell.
It is the most perfect cup of coffee the author of
Succulent Sobriety has ever seen.
The muses look at each other and confer. They hold
out the cup of coffee in the author’s direction and again ask him. They ask him
if he would like a sip.
Their voice sounds like a bell.
The author tries to say the redundant word again but
the only word that comes out of his lips is the a very Molly Bloom life –affirming
colloquial.
“Yes.”
A smile erupts simultaneously across all three of
the muses visages. The author can see the cup of coffee hovering in his
periphery. He can see the black flat-top of liquid glide beneath the arch of
his nose. He can feel the heat and sniff the aromatic urge of the cup being
foisted in his face.
He closes his eyes like he is four years old and
being spoon-fed purple medicine from his mom
The next thing the author knows he is gagging.
Gagging uncontrollably. Air seems to be occluded from every vector of his
lungs. He looks up and sees that the trinity of muses have just wedged Courtney
Love’s maxi-pad, the same maxi-pad that she hiked her skirt up and seemingly
availed in front of a foaming audience, the same maxi-pad that she used to wipe
her make-up off with before extinguishing a cigarette in the middle, the same
maxi-pad that a cross-dressing Pygmy marshaled an elderly elephant out to the
center of the stage, instructing the elephant to take a calculated dump, the
same maxi-pad that the elephant was later shot, assassinated by a rather Panama
Jack looking sniper, the same creature who died on right as he completed
releases his craggily mammalian bowels on the maxi-pad.
The author then realizes that that same maxi-pad is
wedged in his mouth. It is noisome and malodorous and he wants to vomit. His
eyes avert out and he can see the three muses laughing uncontrollably. They are
still in their panties and they are wearing clown make-up and they are
laughing.
I look down again and discern that the offal taste
of sullied death reverberating in my lips is not that of Courtney Love’s used maxi-pad.
Rather it is compliments of the cup of Decaf I just
removed from lips, espying the scene in the repulsive lip of coffee below.
That said (I’m issuing a very Jane Eyre ‘Reader I
married him edict,’ here), dear reader if ever you so chance to serve me a
libation known as decaf coffee there is no way of knowing how I might react.
I may spike the glass chalice in a nest of
triangles. I may pummel you so hard that you wake up with little birds
oscillating around your frontal lobe. I may make a porno with your mom and send
you a copy of us copulating wearing nothing but bad holiday sweaters, smiling.
I shall never ingest a cup of decaf coffee again.
The caveat: Don’t serve me decaf.
Don’t say you have not been warned.
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