This morning was another nightmare morning. Exactly the kind that should teach you a lesson, but never seems to, especially when you're an aimless junkie shitbag.
Now, look. I may be an aimless junkie shitbag, but I have integrity. Personal integrity. The kind you can't get at a leadership conference or the Spring semester Ethics 202 class at an Ivy League university that churns out Fortune 500 CEOs like so many individually wrapped Kisses from a Hersheys factory where the cocoa hopper has been replaced by a vat of dog shit.
The downshot of this personal integrity is that it always shines through like a Bodhisattva soul when I look in the filmy mirror at one in the afternoon after a night of huffing paint and jacking off to pictures of glassy-eyed Iowa girls just getting started on the parabolic ramp of depravity that is the Southern California amateur porn circuit.
They were hoping to be movie stars. I was hoping to be an engineer. We both end up, on an average daily basis, full of the same amount of intoxicants and covered in the same amount of crusted semen. Chalk one for me, I guess, since I'm covered in my own.
The splitting headache is nothing unusual. It's horrible but I know I won't die from it. On a scale from one to ten, one being appendicitis and ten being the unending agony endured by Judas in the jaws of Satan himself, it's comparatively light at around twelve. I used to think that the headache was some side effect of killing large portions of grey matter. That is, that the pain was caused by a physical reconfiguration as the rest settled into a slightly more dense, slightly crispier configuration, but the recent CT scans have shown that it's mostly the outside parts that get eaten away.
Anyway, the doctor told me that the brain doesn't have any pain receptors in it.
After a halfhearted glance at the shower that worked fine before I sold the fixtures, I decide to sponge off and wear my least dirty teeshirt. A comb through the face to get the crusted paint broken up, and you might almost believe I was a college kid the night after a bad bender. I learned a long time ago to huff brown paint - it matches the homeless beard.
It's hard to convince them to sell you more paint when you've got a cannibal costume of Glossy Cardinal Red or a Mardi Gras pregame of metallic gold.
The paint. I need more paint today. I remember kicking around a bunch of cans and realizing they were all empty except the last-ditch emergency stash under the sink, next to the mummified Brillo pads and the paper bags.
It turns out that cheap spraypaint is the only thing I can afford anymore that gets me stoned enough to do what needs to be done, which is to stop the world from ending.