The Spike
This is the problem with the spike. It sends you deep down inside yourself, locks you into an inner fastness where light and sound and time skim over your eyes like vague figures underwater and far away. All that’s left is the racing heart, the spinning head, the obliterating blast of hot, unhealthy joy wiping out the urgency of everyone and everything. Your shaking hands try to gather up the needle and swabs, as your scattered mind tries to convince itself to deal with the trickle of blood down your forearm, the improbable, guilty quantities of narcotic scattered slovenly all over the kitchen bench like a crime scene photo.
You can stand there for hours, if you let it happen, staring into space and talking to yourself in long, winding spires of grammar, clause on clause, phrase on phrase, unfinished sentences tail jacking into and over each other, round and round and up and up, unending declensions, conjugations, sound without meaning, language without thought. I never let it, I tell myself. I’m a veteran of the spike, I tell myself, and the most important thing, the vital thing, is to immediately channel it all into some kind of activity, some focused, mundane thing I wouldn’t normally bother with, and use these minutes, hours, days, to learn a thing.
Today, I reckon I’m gonna draw, spill the rot from my head, saturated in smooth curving limbs and priapic pounding shafts – the spike can take you like that sometimes – and scribble it all in painstaking grey lines on a blank page: fill the book and clear the mind. I’m getting old, though, and even if I wasn’t, the spike fucks your eyes – fucks them good and hard so everything looks like an eighties porno, soft lit with a spatula of Vaseline slopped on the lens.
I’m smart, though – I got glasses. And, as I always tell my kids, if you put things in the same place every time, then nothing’s ever lost. So I head to the little shelf above the fridge, where I keep my ten dollar 4x reading glasses on their old librarian’s chain, so I can cut through the methamphetamine Vaseline filter and fill the book and clear the mind.
Which would be a great plan, only they’re not there. No problem. I’m amped and ready, I am a young Christian soldier with a straight back and strong arms, and days and days before I sleep. Finding my glasses is a trivial quest. I just wish I could see a bit better. The spike fucks your eyes – fucks them good and hard… nope. Been there already. Just get the glasses.
They’re not there. No problem, I’m amped and ready. No, you fuckin’ idiot, you’ve been there already. Find the glasses, fill the book and clear the mind.
It’s a good plan. I’m a young Christian soldier with a straight back and strong arms. Finding my glasses is a trivial quest. I just wish I could see a bit better.
