My name is Joe, and I’m an addict.
Damn, hard to say that.
Now, thing to understand about how I got this way, boys and girls, is that I’m a risk-taker. No, not just in my off hours – I’m a stockbroker. Risk-taking is my job, and I’m damned good at it. I gamble to make my morning wages, and I’m no vegas blowout, fuck no. I’m a guaranteed shoe-in, a money-flipping machine, the man to call when you want two fortunes for one at guaranteed odds within six months or your money back.
I love that job.
I love that job.
I really, really, truly do love that job.
But….sometimes a man needs to relax, you know? Even if his preferred recreation isn’t so relaxing.
Can’t calm down, you know. Nah, too small, too slow. Me, I need to calm UP. I change braintracks, I don’t change the speed, if you can get what I’m saying.
So I do drugs. Lots of different drugs. LSD, a bit of cocaine, PCBs, meth, whatever. I switch around a lot. Keeps it from getting stale. No pot though. Too mild.
Not an addict though. This was all strictly recreational, like I said. Business is business and fun is fun and I got my adrenaline highs just fine at work without sticking a needle in my eyeball or anything else, you know?
Then one day I end up with an actual weekend. An actual, honest-to-god, full two-days-plus-Friday-night weekend. For the first time in eight years.
What the FUCK am I supposed to do with that? I’ll be bouncing off the goddamned walls come breakfast Saturday. I needed a new thing, a new trick.
So I checked in with my dealer – never you mind who – and he tells me he’s got a new thing. Hands me this little tiny round pill.
What the fuck’s this shit, I ask.
Omnipotence, he says. Go on. Give it a try. Everyone wants it.
So I pay him, I take it home, I have a glass of water and put that pill in my mouth bottoms up gulp down it goes and woah woah woah.
WOAH.
I dropped the jar, by the way. First time I’d done that since I was a teenager. Took me ages to pick up all the pills afterwards.
Now, I’d seen some things. But nothing like I’d seen with that shit. I mean first things first, everything was pitch fucking black. BAM. Like someone’d hit the ‘off’ switch on my eyeballs. So I wanted light and then FWOOM, there it was. Holy hell.
At this point I decided this was maybe some sort of lucid hallucination, so I decided to see what I could get away with making, with screwing around. But first I’d need a place to put all the stuff, so I was ‘hell, let’s make the world.’
And bam, I made a world. Did the whole thing. Got the ground and the sea and the fishes and the birds and the skies and I made myself a sweet place to crash and then I just had a five-minute break before I got SERIOUS and bam, I woke up. Checked the clock, it’d been seven minutes.
Seven. Minutes. That’d felt like seven DAYS.
Well, of course I had to get more. There was a whole weekend left over, and I hadn’t done jack yet. So I drove back to my dealer and he was laughing his ass off. Knew you’d come back, he said. Everyone wants this.
Fucker. Bought a big jar, just to show him. Wouldn’t see me around again ‘till the weekend was over.
By Sunday morning that jar was down to the dregs and I was higher than an astronaut with six joints. And I’d been doing some serious work. Big-time serious. This was better than Lego’d been when I was six.
I made some people, and I told them to listen to me. No half-assed mom/dad wait-twenty-years-and-maybe-they’ll-be-okay crap, just made ‘em flat. BOOM. BAM. Of course, they still didn’t listen to me, but whatever. I kicked them out of my place and took a break for munchies.
I came back in an hour and shit, someone’d filled up the planet with douchebags. Worse than a cockroach infestation; stomp one, ninety million to go. Had to fumigate the whole place – went with water, yeah, douchebags drown like everyone else. Bit of overkill in retrospect, yeah, but what’re you gonna do?
But then everyone started asking me to do shit. Everyone. Eve-ry-one. And the ones that weren’t were making up stupid shit with names like Bool and Mersomargarine and telling their imaginary friends how lame I was.
After that…well… the weekend got longer than I’d thought it would be at first. A lot longer. Felt like years, and years, and years, and years. I think I shot bugs at people and turned things into snakes, turned the skies into a nosebleed and threw bears at people. Kicked the shit out of a guy and broke his leg for… some reason? I made a bet with a guy that I could ruin somebody’s whole life and he’d think it was okay or something, the details are a bit fuzzy. I can’t even remember if I liked the guy or not. Won the bet though; I think for a followup I made a fish eat the same poor schmuck too – unless it was a whale – or maybe that was someone else. Was it a shark maybe? Whatever it was, there should’ve been more of those and the seaside in general. Should’ve spent more time on the beaches; felt like I spent half my time wandering around some desert in the assend of nowhere, though I think I only did that because I was pissed off at the people that wouldn’t SHUT UP at me and wanted to show them who was boss. I think.
God those guys were useless. I gave them some basic ‘here are the rules of this house’ shit on rocks. Rocks. And you know what they do, no joke, right away? Like, immediately? They break them. I put them on ROCKS for fuck’s sake! And you know why they broke them? They got in a big fight over whether or not they should all just wander off and worship a cow statue made of everyone’s melted-down pocket-watches and wedding rings.
Damn. I mean, just damn.
So….right.
Right. There I was, it was Sunday morning, and I had something like six shots of Omnipotence left. And I was sick of the shit, but I couldn’t stop taking it. It felt too good. I mean, sure I had to deal with petty little assholes whenever I was high, but at least I was in charge of them for once – beat work, I can say that much for it.
Now, I’d been a good boy ‘till then. No experimentation. No double-dosing. One pill at a time, dealer’s orders, nice and safe. But you know what? That was because Omnipotence alone felt crazy enough. And that had been yesterday. After all I’d done and seen and been it was starting to feel…boring.
So I took all six at once. What the hell, only die once, right?
Well, I woke up with a head that felt like there was a little supernova embedded in its base and a hardon that could moor the RMS Queen Elizabeth. And too many really, really bad memories.
I couldn’t tell if I was one or three people, I’d fucked off and left my worldful of crazy little people to their own devices, and I’d gotten some girl pregnant on her honeymoon. Also I think I’d waited for the kid to grow up, then nailed him to a stick. Unless I’d nailed myself to a stick. Maybe I’d done it first just to show him it was okay, you do that with your kids, right?
Right?
Right.
So I’m clean now. I think. I had to give it up. Had to give it all up. I can’t take more drugs because they aren’t Omnipotence, and I can’t take more Omnipotence because fucking hell that got messed up towards the end. And the middle. And the beginning. So no more. Not one more. Not even a little bit. Even if I had one more, which I don’t.
Yeah, this would sound a lot more convincing if I weren’t talking to the bathroom mirror. Hell, just one more won’t hurt. It was stuck under the couch, right? That makes it floor food, right? That doesn’t count. You have to eat stuff you drop on the floor anyways, finders keepers finders weepers or whatever.
Wonder what the kid got up to. I sort of wigged out on him there.
Bottoms up!