A crisp warm Saturday evening. Me and Luke hesitantly chew on the acid tabs for a few minutes before deciding to walk to the supermarket. We walk down the street kicking a shiny silver spoon along the foot path. “I feel strange” says Luke. Trying to ignore him I stare straight ahead at a man jogging with an ipod on. Mistaking him for Hayes the camera of my vision zooms intensely into the man’s face and then back out again. I turn to Luke and reply “me too”.
At the supermarket we’re thrown into uncontrollable fits of roaring laughter, triggered by a row of smiling soft toys in the window of the reject shop. The acid leaks steadily into our minds. I try to gain access to the public toilets but the door is locked and spattered with tomato sauce and /or blood. Waves of paranoia and confusion as we stroll past the skate park. Things calm down when we notice the stars are dancing and moving about.
For some reason my sense of smell sharpens and I can smell every kind of meat sizzling on the hot plate of every backyard barbecue in town. Everywhere people stand outside their houses, and in their open garages holding cans of beer and cooking sumptuous meats. Luke notices this before I do. “Why are there so many shindigs tonight?” Luke asks. I ponder quietly to myself – “shindig...shindig...shin dig...shin...dig” . I'm terribly confused. “What the fuck does the word shindig even mean?” Instead of replying to this verbally Luke starts clawing and digging at his own shins furiously. I stare at him, dumbstruck and horrified. Shin diggers.
Lukes shins are raw and bleeding by the time Brad calls me. After a scary and awkward conversation with him about where hes to pick us from I hang up. I feel lighter than air in both my body and my mind. I wasn’t expecting anything like this at all. We sniff hungrily at the night air in between painful fits of mutated laughter, before crossing the street and entering Brad’s car in one single frenzied motion. I gratefully take off my hat and mop sweat from my brow. The head deck of Brads cd player displays dolphins that dive in and out of digitized water with the rhythm of the music. It’s beautiful.
Brad stops somewhere for some reason and gets out of the car leaving me and Luke to fend for ourselves. We’re tripping balls and Luke forgets whose car we’re in or why. I stick my head out of the car, not sure if it’s stationary or not. I pull my head back in, scared out of my wits. Are we on a boat? Brad returns and puts a small bag of marijuana in the glove box. Next thing I know im in my kitchen drinking pineapple juice. Brad rolls joints on the counter and I'm not sure where Luke is. “I need to change my shirt” Im thinking.
The smell coming from my body is other worldly and frightening, but at the same time new and interesting. Deodorant does nothing. After spending what felt like days trying on different ensembles of clothes and parading them for myself in my bedroom mirror, I decide to go with a simple black t shirt and pair of shorts, and muttering something about the possibility of ghosts infiltrating my shoes I melt back into the kitchen where Brad is having trouble rolling his joints. Luke tries to help him but hes tripping balls way too hard for this task which he usual completes with supernatural ease. “Im sorry Brad I just can’t do it nothings making sense to me right now” Luke says, his head buried deeply his palms. Brad rolls a terrible series of joints and we go out onto the balcony.
The marijuana doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest so I light up a cigarette, and smoke it while watching the night sky pulse with a greenish pink glow. Brad and Luke are discussing dinosaurs and I’ve forgotten about the cigarette in between my fingers. The two of them are screeching at me like raptors now, with their fingers arched into claws and their teeth gnashing horribly. Their performance is scaring the absolute life out of me as I writhe and squirm in my chair, sweating and panicing. Are they dinosaurs? Back inside I try to cook a whole lot of frozen chicken, which quickly becomes an impossible mountain-like challenge. The food seems strange and alien like to me, as I empty the boxes of frozen breast meat onto a metal tray. I feel the nuggets with my fingers. Frozen solid and unforgiving. What kind of life did these chickens live? Did they have dreams? Aspirations? Goals? The entire concept of freezing things and then thawing them out baffles me beyond belief, yet I manage to shove the tray into the oven before turning it on.
The phone rings – a terrible nightmarish wail, and at first I think the ringing is in my head, but someone tells me that it really is ringing and i creep cautiously towards it on all fours, sweating and anticipating. I hold the ice cold receiver to my ear. “Hello?”. The voice on the other end is raspy and unfamiliar. A disgusting and confusing conversation ensues. It’s a man called Neil who I know from somewhere but can’t remember exactly where or how. Hes asking what Im doing during the easter holidays and my mind is blank. I don’t even recall when easter is. “Well Neil I can’t be too sure of that. I’ll have to check my calendar and get back to you” I blurt out in one almost inaudible sentence. Now hes asking me if I have a girlfriend and I tell him I do for some reason – a flat out lie. The plot thickens when Neil tells me he needs someone to babysit his kids over the Easter break and all of this is too much for me to handle. I’m crouched by the phone, pouring sweat – appalled at the thought of this man, whoever he is, trusting an acid tripping space cadet like me with his children. Luke and Brad are watching all of this, mesmerised and probably frightened. Forgetting who it is im talking to, I say “Listen I’ve gotta go now I’ll email you” and then hang up.
“Crisis averted” Im thinking. And probably saying. The odor coming from my body intensifies and I try using more deodorant, but now the deodorant also smells exactly the same as me, which confuses me beyond belief. Five minutes later and we’re back out on the balcony talking about... robots? Antiques road show? Jamberoo Recreation Park? The acid is working to its full potential now; every blank surface I stare at swells and dilates with beautiful multi coloured interlocking circles.
My mind wanders. I think about my life and the direction it’s headed. Impossible to predict. I think about all the insects in the world and if there is a way to control all of them simultaneously somehow to maybe get them to do things for me. Ants, beetles, grasshoppers,centipedes, moths, spiders,crickets,worms, beetles, crickets, moths, crickets, beetles, crickets, crickets, crickets, shiny black crickets. Their legs are so crunchy.
I suddenly break out of my hypnotized state, leaping up out of the chair and shouting in horror – “THE CHICKEN!” It feels like hours and hours have passed since I fed the frozen meat into the oven, but I would later find out that it had only been around 20 minutes. The breast nuggets make even less sense now that they're cooked. Steamy and golden. Some of them are even coated in white crunchy bubbles which I try so hard to understand. I say something along the lines of “I can’t get my head around these alien treats” as I study one of them intensely.
So Im sitting in the kitchen prodding this culinary specimen with a thin wooden skewer, and Brad is saying “These fucking things are salt and vinegar flavored, it hurts when you inhale that shit”. I don’t reply to this because the thought of inhaling chicken fills my mind with a nameless dread. Fade out to black and then back in again and we’re all the three of us sitting in the appropriately Asian themed lounge room, eating the chicken with skewers and dipping them into rib sauce. I eat about 3 of the treats in total before giving up and staring in awe at the ceiling – a fantastic multi coloured performance.