Brain Farts

An original short story from the winter of '93. Something worth pondering in the Indian summer of our dispair.

What’s on your mind?

Man, you fight and scratch and freak all the way to some plateau for control, but arrive seconds too late, and empty your empty pockets only to find them fuller than the emptiness that drifts around your stomach. You’re dizzy, too. Too dizzy to count the number of times you’ve made a fool of yourself, but then again, that could just be a memory thing. You have a fair idea of where you ended up, but the harder you think, the harder you force the thoughts around your tilt 'a whirl head, the harder you clutch your handfuls of nothing—for whatever your life is worth, you can’t remember where you started out.

You lie still and stare at the stucco ceiling that hovers at some unfixed distance over your head, and you try to think. You try to think hard. The harder you think, the more the pressure builds, until the jumble of half-conceived thoughts releases in a fit of brain farts. Pffft. This has been happening too often for your taste. Brain farts all day long, conversations that go nowhere and seem happy enough to remain stagnant. Stale talk, hard thoughts, and pffft, pffft. You’ve had one hell of a time.

Even though nothing makes sense except your acceptance of this insanity, and although you remember little of anything that matters, you remain perfectly lucid on the one thing you’ve made an attempt to forget. You remember the girl. How could you forget? Will you ever forget her? What can you do to forget her? You can still see her goofy smile, hear that goofy clicking noise she’d make with her tongue, the way she’d say your name…what was her name?

Shifting about to swing your feet onto the floor, you curl your toes to prove you can do it, and spend the next several minutes cracking each individual joint, hoping to conquer the numbness and restore circulation. Unfortunately, you’re aware that success won’t come as easy with your back. It’s hard to believe that you feel this bad.

As you drag yourself over to the telephone, you catch a glimpse of the clock as it dangles on its cord outside the window like an underweight anchor. The memory of placing it in that curious position returns to you briefly—the loathing you felt about its domination over your life, the bells, the alarms, the seconds, minutes, flashing by—“ticking away the moments that make up a dull day…” as you step on the Pink Floyd disc that sent these lyrics into your meat grinder of a head. You wonder why you can remember every word to every song you’ve ever heard, but nothing else that’s supposed to mean anything really important. How are you supposed to know what’s really important?

Picking up the phone, you dial automatically a number that you think you want to call, but freeze in horror when a machine picks up to tell you, “Hi guys, this is Stacy. I’m not in right now, but you know you can leave me a message and I’ll call ya back. Click-click.” You hang up rapidly, and with your hand still gripping the receiver, you look away ungracefully and hate yourself for your stupidity and pettiness and remember what you’ve known all along despite your best efforts: Her name is Stacy.

The bathroom doesn’t make you any happier. All those mirrors and lights make it too easy to hate the way you look right now—the way you’ve looked for too long. And its not like you’ve done anything strenuous, or unhealthy, or anything at all really. That’s probably the problem. Something you once told a friend flashes to consciousness for a visit: “When I get tired, my mind tends to wander. Sometimes it wanders into other time zones, and I get jet-lag.” You’ve certainly done your share of wandering. But you can never seem to get as far out as you’d like. You constantly get your shirt caught on something that reels you back to where you least like to be, but where you most often find yourself stuck. For a moment, you wonder aloud where wind comes from and then try to brush your teeth.

It’s the morning ritual, kiddo. Hard to call it a morning ritual when your morning begins somewhere after two-thirty in the afternoon. Sleep is good, you tell yourself. You like sleep. It’s a funny thing that despite all of the hours you’ve logged with this particular pastime of yours, you still spend every waking hour in some psychosomatic trance, a trendy-dressing zombie unable to follow his own train of thought without the aid of tracking equipment from NASA. Sleep is good, you tell yourself. And today is just another day you wish you didn’t have to wake up at all.

A generous dousing of your face with cold water spewing from cold pipes travelling through cold ground covered with cold snow and colder ice is almost enough to jar you back into the land of the living once again. The trauma of the splash serves only to help instigate the convulsive process of ejecting the purple/green organic glob that collides with a psychedelic gesture against the soft white sink. So that’s what you’re lungs must look like, you figure. Sucks for them.

No need to shower this morning. No need to do anything, really. You’ve pretty much figured out how to organize your life around the simple principle of avoiding work, avoiding conflict—avoiding further need to organize your life once it’s been set in motion. Minimal friction. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, Sir Isaac told you. And without the friction, you’re hoping to coast along on physics. Returning to your room, you take as deep a breath as you can muster considering the condition of your lungs and stop pitifully in mid-inhalation to let out a deliberately extended sigh. That ugly bear she gave you still smells like her perfume. You’ve got to get rid of that fucking bear, you think to yourself, and add that you’ve always hated physics.

Your life has basically stopped since you last saw her, hasn’t it? When was the last time you’ve done something that really made you feel good about yourself? Who are you punishing? Strange, how you can ask yourself these questions daily and still not know the answers.

You lie back down on your bed and pick up the book that you can recall falling asleep with while reading sometime earlier in the week. For more than a few seconds, you cannot decipher the markings on your calendar well enough to determine the current date. Is it the ninth? No. Can’t be so soon. It’s not still January, is it? Pffft…

It doesn’t take you too long to realize that you’re not going to get too far with Act Two of John Webster’s "The Duchess of Malfi." You let The Norton Anthology of English Literature fall to the floor with a mighty thump as you reach for something you can deal with right now. "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs is the call you make. Satisfied, you sit back and attempt to plow through the almost hopeless mess of a human mind that is represented on the pages when your eyes slowly glide shut under the pressure of gravity, dart open with deliberate intensity, carelessly ease shut again, make one last desperate effort to re-establish themselves, and then…simply…relax…

By the time you manage to re-open your eyes, you’ve completely lost track of all reality—a state of being that allows you to let small inconsistencies in your immediate environment slide by for the moment. It has happened before on occasion, and has never been much cause for alarm. That is why you don’t have too hard a time understanding why your ceiling appears to be breathing.

Slowly and severely, you begin to change your assessment of the situation. It’s not like it’s just waving around or moving back and forth chaotically. No, that might have been no problem—perhaps a minor hallucinogenic anomaly battling with your visual apparatus. Unfortunately, the ceiling isn’t merely breathing, but it is matching your respiration breath for breath, making you feel somehow trapped inside your own battered lungs. This, of course, makes you a tad uneasy. Your own perception of this discomfort only serves to escalate your heart rate and send your ceiling (and the walls, too, you now notice) into a frenzy of hyperventilation. At one point, you suddenly cease and desist all breathing—a tactic you somehow realize won’t get you too far. Two or so minutes later, the walls and ceiling almost explode all over, leaving you a puddle of mush with two useless hands and an incessantly ubiquitous wawawawawawawawa sound zipping back and forth through your ears. Uh…help, you think to yourself.

At this point, you’re quickly and completely overcome with a nagging yawn that just won’t go away. You can’t be sure of the time, but you figure that this one yawn—not a fit of yawning, but one simple yawn—goes on for an hour and a half. You’ve somehow aged significantly by the time you’re finished with this stupid yawn. In the immediate afterglow of its anticlimactic completion, you sit in frozen thought about the seemingly endless stream of thoughts that bounced around your head and off the walls during the ordeal. It was that smell. The godddamn perfume. That intoxicating stench of putrid memories that stain reality. It invaded every breath, every subsequent thought, every attempt to alter your situation, your thought processes, your life…Man, how can you be expected to defeat the diffusion of perfume particles, the only tangible manifestation of her existence in your life—a constant, stubborn reminder of all of the—Aaaarghh!

You throw your limp fist toward a window in the desperate hope that you can shatter the glass as easily as you’ve apparently shattered your grim life, but as the momentum of the lunge appears to forecast inevitable demise for the window, on impact your fist merely melts into the glass matrix with viscous authority. No crashing. No cataclysm. Just the simple integration of flesh and glass. You are hardly surprised when your left hand and forearm follow the same bizarre course right into the semi-solid glass windowpane. By the time you decide to smash your head against it in a fit of spastic rage, you’ve already hurled your upper body forward and you find yourself falling rapidly through space as you flip and flop on top of a twenty foot soft snowbank.

Lying prostrate on a sizable mound of collected snowflakes, you feel cold but comfortable. The sky above you is the brightest of blues with scattered collections of thick white clouds that swirl about like in a taffy maker. You carefully soak up the surrounding atmosphere. The cars, the houses, the trees, the walkers, the joggers, the dogs, the dog owners, the delivery people, the squirrels—everything appears animated and vital. You can somehow recall the sound of air escaping from a punctured basketball coming right up against your ears as you fell from the window. Sssssss. Sssssss…all the way down. The window is neither too close nor too far from your new perspective. You find it difficult to judge the precise distance. You can almost crack a wry smile as you take a deep breath of starved satisfaction and almost cough up a lung when you realize that you're lying on top of a pile of dog crap embedded in the snow.

The stink is bad, but you’ve experienced worse in your time. The sun burns through the crisp air, and as you lie there in the snow, partially immobile on a pile of dog crap, you shake your head sharply in opposite directions like an Etch-A-Sketch toy. Aw, what the hell, you think to yourself. Some things in life smell like shit.