No bullshit.
One day it occurred to me. It came over my spine like a leaf and tightened suddenly like a vise.
I don’t know if there was some trauma that brought it on. I can’t remember. Maybe I have amnesia. I don’t care. All I know is, I can no longer do any bullshit. I have to avoid it like an allergic dodging bees. If you are allergic to bees, which I am not.
Ahem.
I came to this satori while sitting in an office. Well, that’s where I was born, anyway. I couldn’t tell you what my name was. But I had some kind of personality, all right. I was sitting ramrod straight, my spine as if a rigid antenna, suddenly tuned to new notes.
I turned my head slowly. Cubicles. Cardboard. Paper. Ennui. Paper clips. Pencils. Printers. Fakery. Hell.
I stood up, looking straight ahead. There was a door there, a few cubicles down. My mission was interrupted by a chirp to my left.
“Where you going, Louis? You gotta go to the bathroom again already? You got 4 more hours on the clock.”
I didn’t know where this voice was coming from and I didn’t care. But it was definitely directed at me.
Still looking at that door, my eyes fixed on it, I said, “Who the hell is Louis?“ And I stepped out of my cubicle and went to the door.
There was a longer, narrower space there, I would later learn was a hallway. I went through it. Another room. Double-wide doors which opened with a thunk. People stepped into them. The doors thudded shut. More doors opened. People piled out. Paralleled with pings and lights. I studied the formations for a while, trying to decide. Eventually I followed a short blond woman to my right. Luckily for me, the box went down.
I followed the herd into the sunlight. And then I smiled.
Unidentified voices kept popping up in the back of my head: “But where will you go? What will you do for money? What will you eat? What are you leaving behind?”
I pushed them aside and followed my nose. There was a bus. I tried to get on, but an angry man told me I had to buy a ticket. “So where do I do that?” I asked. He pointed. I went up to this window but someone said, “Hey buddy wait your turn!” I asked him what that was. He asked me if I was ‘retarded.’ I said no, I thought my name was supposed to be Louis.
After some more confusion and a little scuffling, I noticed my chest seemed to be more alive somehow, and my senses more alert, and another man came up and led me by the elbow to the ticket counter when it was my turn.
“This man is retarded and he would like to buy a ticket.”
Eventually I exchanged some green paper in my pocket for a ticket. Suckers. I got on the bus. I had no idea where it was going.
7 hours later I was starving and deposited in Arizona. Something was telling me this was going to be a painful journey, this new departure of mine. But there was also some kind of rocket juice expanding at the back of my head, spurring me on. This was the drug I was now addicted to – this rocket juice. Adrenaline plus endless novelty plus crack pump from another dimension. I couldn’t stop moving now.
Soon I was on my stomach in a desert, talking to a rabbit. For a while, I thought he was my soul mate, but then he said something most unlikeable, and I told him I was going to take a leak, and never came back.
I ended up throbbing red and half nekkid except for a loincloth fashioned out of shed rattlesnake skin in a town called Palimo, and this is where our story begins.
[Wait I can’t say that because I already started the story - in my office with the satori. I will change much of this later, scribbling in notebooks as I go.]
“Well, aren’t you the neotribal fashion plate,” purred a voice to my right. I looked over and it was a beautiful blond lady wearing a green headband driving a black convertible. I tried to gigolo her but she wanted to be my nurse. She took me back to her cool adobe and bathed me and fed me and watered me and removed dead skin and bad vibes. She spread aloe over me and soon I was glowing. “No bullshit” I grinned. I would print it on t-shirts and make a lot of money.
Serotonin flooded my groove pools and I lasciviously heralded sensuality graduating into sexuality. She dressed me in pajamas and took me to bed. She got out a big red book and started reading. It was gospel. Seemed some guy found the original version of this book etched in braille on flattened spam plates superglued together and turned into pages, bound by 3 iron rings and tossed into a ditch. It would turn out to be the Book of Jeb. Now, if you followed the story he found, and followed his proscriptions, you, too, could sleep with underage girls and one day run your own planet. My nose pulled me to the window and leaped through it, yelling as I went, “No bullshit!” I landed in sand and guano, unnerved the bats hanging from under a great wooden beam above me who flapped and fled north. I followed.
The moon was out. Eventually I lost the bats. They were too quick for me. I bent on my knees under the dark blue sky and starlight and awaited my next sign. Nothing came and then I was reminded to open my eyes. The lens cap was on. I was in the middle of a road and headlights bore down on me. Screeching, honking, they managed to swerve around me in time. I ran down the street in my satin pajamas with a big J stitched across the left breast. For “Jeb.” Another car whizzed by and someone yelled out the window, “Goddamn Jebbite sleepwalkers!”
I soon came to a denser urban area and noodled into an alley. An alley seemed a place of comfort. Perhaps I was turning into a dog.
