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It wasn't until yesterday that I bought my first pair of shoes. They are a hip name brand and everything. It wasn't until yesterday that I stopped popping pills for the hell of it. It wasn't until yesterday that I woke up from my nightmarish coma. From time to time if I look hard enough into the abyss I'll feel myself there suspended from all other parts of reality. Sullen and broken, naked before all existence, ego-death in full effect. That's life on Dramamine for a few hours at least. Everyday for the past week I've been taking twenty-five pills on average, bringing me a step further from reality as people generally perceive it. A big jug of water at your disposal is essential if you are going to trip on that. Each trip takes me back farther and farther from consciousness. My third day of tripping lead me to Hell's gates where I stood before a committee of demons and angels all gnashing their teeth, pointing and tossing out messages of hate. Although I heard only the silence of my bedroom somehow almost telepathically I could perceive their words of hatred toward me. My sixth day of Dramamine I guzzled down twenty seven and felt the world shove me in the back of it's dark closet. There were industrial sounds from the windows and the ceiling fan in my room turned into a large spider ready to inject me with poison. I ignored the grim atmosphere and took to my kitchen although my feet and legs weighed a ton.

I felt that it was necessary to kick my unnatural, dare I say, "Dramamine habit". The pills haven't left me with permanent damage but the effects almost leave an aftershock. Boredom is probably the biggest threat to my existence, not the Dramamine. Ending up on the funny farm seems almost inevitable though really. If my existence on this earth were a country it would be much like South Africa, on the brink of anarchy. Although my doctor's anti-depressant prescriptions calm my brain's depression levels it doesn't quite catch everything. When you're a manic depressive everything is a bit gloomier and less sentimental. When you're trapped in a small industrial town where they produce fools and airborne cancer you're best bet is to hit the road, like Kerouac.

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Commentary and Dedications


There are many books out there, many short stories and essays by brilliant people and some not so brilliant. I consider myself a wanna-be writer at best. I hereby dedicate this short story to my dead Beatnik heroes: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs.


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You find yourself day to day in the hamster cage you call your "life" spinning in your wheel, shitting, eating and sleeping. When you live next to a refinery you feel vulnerable. Your hamster cage gets a little smaller each day and it shakes, rumbles, shakes again without stopping in a perpetual motion. Yesterday I was eating breakfast when I noticed something in the corner of my eye. It was a car crash in my peripheral vision. The passenger in the back of the baby blue Sedan died on impact, broken collar bone, broken jaws, dead at age twelve, according to the papers.

I live in a small apartment building, Lee Igoe. It's by a fairly large highway near an oil refinery. I feel truly blessed to live in this Midwestern industrial town. I want to be buried here dead before I get buried here alive.