#ffsse

He’d told a friend he took psychedelic drugs for their “spiritual benefits” — he claimed they expanded his mind, altered his way of thinking and allowed him to question societal norms. Longterm use, however, caused him to sometimes suffer sporadic hallucinations when he was stone cold sober, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Occasionally he’d spend whole days lost in a strange and disturbing parallel world, trapped in a mental maze with no apparent exit, wandering the dreadfully circuitous contours of his own badly damaged and delusion-prone mind.

Severely depressed after several difficult lonely years, he spends his days sitting silently in his bedroom with the lights off and the blinds drawn, chain-smoking cigarettes, eating very little, filled with vague terrors and a limitless desperation, his mind wandering in dark and troubled zones. Scanning the newspaper each day for omens of the apocalypse is his one remaining pastime. “Metaphysical rust has clogged all mechanisms,” he whispered into his microcassette recorder, huddled under a blanket in the bedroom closet, alone in silent darkness late at night. “Everything’s ending here.”

Spectacular Fourth of July fireworks displays. Brightly colored flowers in full bloom. Tranquil blue cloudless summer skies. Whenever he sinks into a deep depression, he tries to bring beautiful images to mind, hoping to dispel the inner darkness, though more often than not it has no effect whatsoever and all too frequently his thoughts end up tipping into total horror. A fireworks accident requiring amputation of one or more limbs. Flower blossoms decaying into fetid mush. Toxic black death clouds filling the sky as far as the eye can see.

“Hell is all around us,” he whispered into his microcassette recorder, curled in the fetal position on the floor of his apartment while suffering through an intensely nightmarish “bad trip” on magic mushrooms as menacing demonic fractal-pattern hallucinations tortured him viciously and unmercifully for what seemed like eternity. “We are powerless in its grip.”

Becoming lonelier and more depressed, he’d been spending his days sitting in bed chain-smoking cigarettes and dreaming up weird science-fiction scenarios like sexually perverted robots with power-drill penises and drug-addicted grey aliens trying to kick their hallucinogen habits and psychotically demented NASA astronauts committing shocking gory ax-murders in low-Earth orbit. Mostly he just tried to keep from thinking about his failure-filled life or the bleak unwelcoming world outside. He scribbled down all these ideas in a notebook with the phrase “Robots & Ray Guns: Cheaper Than Therapy” written on the cover, convinced his oddball sci-fi fantasies were the one thing keeping another total mental meltdown at bay.

In a dream last night he tore a Band-Aid off his forehead and a beam of blinding white light shot out. Perhaps enlightenment is not an exalted spiritual state but a kind of injury that requires basic medical care, he thought the next morning, taking a drag off his first cigarette of the day. Lately he’d been staying up well after midnight, scribbling out odd science-fiction and horror stories in his notebook involving aliens with hideous facial deformities, bogus doomsday prophets with sickeningly perverted sexual proclivities, deadly radioactive storms that turn humans into puddles of hissing toxic goo. When he was younger, in his late teens and early 20s, he used to imagine all the wonders the future would bring, technological and otherwise, but now he just hopes the future won’t be too much more terrible than the present, which is bad enough already. “The event horizon of black holes — the so-called exit door from the universe through which anything that passes can never return,” he whispered into the phone, peering out the blinds to check for signs of trouble. “Direct me to the nearest one immediately.”

He broke open his fortune cookie and there was nothing inside. He had a split-second vision of Jesus emerging from the clouds with both middle fingers defiantly extended. He hoped with all his heart that reality is a simulation created by machines from the future because then nothing in this world is real, all the ugliness and suffering and sorrow and heartbreak is ersatz, and if it’s all some elaborate computer program then there’s always the possibility some benevolent robo-controller will hit the “off” switch and everything will disappear forever.