From Jester To King XX

Let’s all take drugs and see how fucked up we can get in the process. Let’s sit at low tables in cloudy rooms and get utterly fucked and tell everyone how fucked we are and how we’ve never been so fucked in our lives and then look at each other for approving responses and you know what, I didn’t even know what I’d taken and I’m meant to feel better the more fucked up I’m getting is that how it works, I’m meant to have this sort of careless glee about it just ‘cos I’m doing what everyone else is, what they expect me to do, you know what fuck that for a game of soldiers.

You see I’m scared of drugs and have every right to be and by the way I have no idea what all the old boys from school were doing there on their way to Bangkok or was it coming from, sounds like hogwash to me, but at least they said hello though before they went on their way. And yours truly is sitting on the floor round this low table, hoping I’m high enough to fit in but not too high to not have to puke instantaneously, I mean how are people going to know or care how I feel anyway, you know when that top-heavy sicky feeling hits and whirls over you errrrghh and you don’t know what to do with yourself, surely that in itself is not worth any of the hassle. But you’re only someone when you’ve done speed, coke smack, barbs, ludes, acid, meth, wacky baccy, angel dust, X, P, PCP, so the poster read, you name it and every so often there were these circular flashes of light, coronas, just above our heads like these neon bright flashes, was it the drugs who knows but they were cool I suppose, but the point is I knew no one really wanted to engage because I hadn’t gone for it one hundred percent, how smug they were about the whole thing, the place reeked of this smugness, and how many people crammed into this paltry dim blacked-out room, hardly space to breathe in and then how had it completely escaped me the two proper ceremonies coming up, one tomorrow, one the day after which I’m down to attend, and didn’t everyone just know I’d wimp out and not go to them or only drink a slither and have to watch as everyone else gets fucked up beyond belief having their breakthroughs and breakdowns and their deaths and their rebirths and talks endlessly about it from thereafter to eternity. But then again I’m thinking, well what an opportunity this medicine presents, truly a transcendent thing it is, their singing and chanting, how they literally pull your demons right out of you and I miss that, and what an opportunity, that I just so happen to be in a place where we shall drink of the vine tomorrow, so I suppose I will drink but then again I know I’ll pull out at the last minute just like last time and the time before that but I have to say it was nice to be back wherever it was, Colombia, jungle, university, the salle d’attente for poets manqués, because of the people, so many lovely fleshy people to touch and be around with, but actually I hate being with people, it’s not necessarily the people themselves that’s the problem, I mean I love the warmth and everything but inevitably I always end up feeling spurned and not wanted and not included and not in on the joke and like a bystander, just tolerated at best, like people have to go through the motions with me and I have to pretend and they have to pretend they’re not going through the motions and I wish I could just be there being absolutely loved as the real John Magnolia popular and especially with the women, oh god the women, always so many more women than men, I think that everyone should find me potent and impressive and cool and all the things I know I am but the only time any of these girls really had anything to say to me was to show they were doing it right and so I could tacitly say yes you’re doing it right and so they could tell me that I was too, woo hoo hullabaloo let’s all blow each other’s bagpipes for two weeks and then go home happy.