Oh K

I'd been drinking all day yesterday, starting at brunch. There was gospel and unlimited alcohol. I drank so many flutes of champagne that I lost count. Before I knew it the game was on and I was eating a burger. Two giant, cold glasses of double-IPA down the hatch. An old fashioned for good measure. Then the Warriors had won. Two of us went back to my place. It was a mess but we were drunk. Alcohol has a way, in some people, of inciting trouble; the sort of trouble that makes you a danger, mostly to yourself. Suddenly I was reaching for a bag of ketamine. For the next few hours I was awake, though I could be convinced I was dreaming. It was like coming out of general anesthesia; soft, silly, weightless, wobbly. Sound seemed more malleable, and heavier, fuller. Narrowing and widening, it coursed through my inner ear like stormwater through a metal gutter, gurgling. Entire realities seemed to exist in a single song. Time dilated. We grooved under a shimmering, sedate psychedelia. In the bathroom, looking out through the open window, over the burning candle, I realized I was estranged from myself. Disassociated. I, or whatever was left of me, giggled with maddened delight. Everything was amplified and dulled. Contradiction and dichotomy seemed just another shape of synesthesia. I became more of an observer than a participant. Whatever motions I found myself performing seemed to me predetermined, as movements do in a dream. Somewhere volition had been lost. I felt demented, manic, liberated.

All around me reality was made of many ripples, stretching out and expanding, colliding, collapsing, combining, fracturing, and all the while remaining one inestimably vast, amorphous whole. Above me tall shapeless peaks climbed like ivy against black nothingness. Things seemed gaseous and galactic. Parts of me, familiar and not yet known, near but far, watched and ascended as I expanded into expanding. I was always drowning and at the same time coming up for air. My identity corresponded directly to how much of it I'd lost. There can be peace in disintegration; power in taking another form. My body did not end at its physical boundaries. It seemed to change shape dynamically, assuming whatever configuration was necessary to better feel the music. It was as though I had every size I ever was and ever would be at my disposal, from the single cell to infancy to brief adolescence to hobbled old age, to dust. The worms of time's passing gnawed at me, gently feeding like a litter of newborn puppies drinking in their mother's milk. It felt intoxicating to sustain them. All around me I had tentacles. My balls looked like hairy little squids.

I suddenly want calamari.