The Alicorn of Music

Shit happens...

Not only does shit happen, but shit stops things up, smells bad, brings you pain, and worst of all, knows very little relent.

Everyone deals with shit once in a while. I do, you do, she does, he does. We're the only thing that keeps the shit flowing due to our basic need to eat, only I'm not talking about biodegradable body waste, I'm talking about real problems like war, murder, and all the other things that (unlike actual shit) aren't so easily forgotten about.

My life, or rather, my toilet, was so clogged up with shit that no amount of plunging or chemical treatment could undo the damage that had been done. The only way to fix the problem would be to remove the toilet and put a new one in it's place.

I pondered replacing my toilet daily. I had a plan, the tools needed, the motivation, even a specific date and time to do it, but every time I would get to that moment, I would hesitate.

A voice in my head just kept saying, "Something else is out there!", and I would never cease to listen.

It's not that I thought that I had a bad life, it's just that I was a massive hermit of social awkwardness. I was under the assumption that my situation was normal and that I had no real reason for being as depressed as I was, but the fact that I was an only child that had grown up with no other family besides my parents (who just left me by myself most of the time) and the fact that I hadn't practiced ANY methods of social interaction beyond small talk had really taken a toll on my perceptions of things. Not to mention that I was an on an off drug addict for about 10 years.

Yup, I had been using since I was 15 years old, be it methamphetamine, alcohol, sleeping pills, some new research chemical, air duster, and you guessed it... Pot! Not that marijuana is all that addicting, but for me it was anything that would help me escape from the reality I was living in.

At that point, all I ever wanted in life was a friend, but ever since my last true friend shot herself about a year before my drug use started, going out of my way to make new ones was just something I didn't do out of fear that whoever became my friend would leave me like the last one.

...

11 years went by since her passing and I was living in a trailer park in a decent suburb. A little upscale for my taste, but what could I do? I never had people over, nor did I really care to. My desire for friendship was still there, but I guess I was just too lazy to chance it.

My only human interactions during that time were with the employees I worked with at a fast food restaurant... I was one of the managers so I guess you could say that they worked for me, but being the boss of a bunch of stubborn teenagers wasn't really the best way to make friends. That and the fact that being the one in charge of any major establishment involving youth automatically deems you, "the asshole".

But back to the toilet thing. Most of the unsettling things that happened to me in the past were long hidden away. I thought about them from time to time, but never actually got too deep into the thoughts to care as much as I used to. The thing that made me want to get rid of the plumbing so much was the fact that my life was boring and lonely. It was the same routine every day, with not very much free time to spare, but even if I had free time, what could I have done with it other than just sit in my trailer? It got to the point where I found myself enjoying being a drone at my job more than having time to myself.

I could not have gone out to make friends. I had a difficult time looking people my age in the eye let alone conversing with them. Believe me when I say that I had a massive handicap. I had no concept of realistic social interaction back then, and this story would be almost complete nonsense and illegibility had I been writing about these events as they were happening.

I considered that 25 years of age was too old to make something of myself and that conforming to what society wanted was the right thing to do. I had given up on any of my former dreams and goals. I was very lucky and fortunate with the job I had anyway, and I wasn't about to go and risk it after all the hard work I did to get it.

I felt terrible. Terrible, because I thought that a boring and lonely life was nothing to feel terrible over. I looked at myself in the mirror every morning and saw a miserable face staring back at me that would always say, "Grow up and stop whining."  Deep inside, I still wanted to leave this world and cease to exist.

...

I was sitting on the cheap couch I had purchased from a flea market some time ago while wearing my work uniform precisely according to the employee manual's instructions. It was a little too early for me to head over to my job, so I decided to go fill up my gas tank and buy a bag of potato chips.

When I arrived, the "gas station" process went about as usual: slide card, unscrew tank cap, place hose in the tank, and waste my money. However, as I finished up and was removing the nozzle from my tank, I noticed a small orange bottle sticking out of an already full trash can. I took a second glance only to see that this was someone's prescription. At third glance, I had recognized the three pills inside of the bottle as Oxycontin 80mg.

I had not used any opiates since I was 22. Not because I wanted to quit, but because my dealer had a child and wanted to make sure that it stayed safe. But being the person with the "do" instead of the "think" instinct, I made one of the worst mistakes of my life...

Forgetting about the potato chips, I quickly drove home and spilled the pills out into my hand, sucked off the protective coating that gilded the oxy, crushed up the pills on a small mirror with an old credit card, and cut the white powder into 6 very clean lines.

I rolled up the five dollar bill that I was originally going to purchase the potato chips with into a small straw and stuck it up my left nostril... The burn I got when insufflating opiates like oxycodone never hurt as much as other drugs like crystal meth or alaprozam. Anyway, I finished inhaling the crushed up oxycontin and sat back while I waited for the effects to kick in.

The familiar sense of opiate-induced well-being took over my body in a warm rush of orgasmic bliss. I felt my body go numb as my stomach began to feel like it had a smiley face in it. I closed my eyes and let the effects of the drug take me.

At the peak of my pleasure, I remembered that I still had to go to work! I knew I shouldn't have been driving, however, the thought of those stupid teenagers messing things up with out a leader to coordinate their actions alone made my head hurt, even with the effect of the painkillers still running.

I wobbled up, grabbed my keys, and left.

...

I had been out of the opiates path of terror for 3 years, and one thing I forgot was that after that long of a break, your tolerance goes down... I woke up in a hospital bed with all kinds of suction cups attached to me, an IV in my arm, some kind of clamp thing on my finger, and a woman sitting in the corner of the room who hadn't yet noticed my sudden awareness.

I wasn't sure if I should have made my presence be known, or if I should have just waited this one out, but my cocky instincts took over as I managed to mutter an "ugghelllo?" sort of sound.

She heard me and without a word, fled the room almost immediately returning with 2 older men and another woman. The 4 people stood above me with a look of indifference on their faces.

The dialogue between us was short lasting and unimportant, and with a few more hours of being tested, evaluated by a psychiatrist, a prescription for some antidepressant called escitalopram, and the signing of a few papers... I was on my way home.

I was told that I had overdosed and landed in a ditch right outside of my trailer. Apparently they got me out of the car right before I was about to drown in my own vomit. At the time, the only thing that I was really upset about was the fact that they didn't just let me drown.

To this day, I still have no idea how my job got this information, but the corporate offices found out about my drug problem and fired me. On a side note, the other employees completely screwed up their work shift duties.

It may not seem like that big of a deal to lose a job as a fast food restaurant manager, but I was pretty upset about it... That job had literally been my only instrument of accomplishment, and it had been flushed away at least 30 times faster than it had taken for me to get the job.

Finding a new job that would pay my bills? Not in this economy. Getting roommates? Ha! Going to rehab? I don't have that kind of money. Becoming homeless? Likely... Pretty much everything I had ever worked for as an adult was lost, and I was no where in my right mind to go looking.

...

The months passed by with was no emotion left in me... Not happy or sad, just a complete state of dissociation in which enveloped my entire lifestyle. I had no push to do anything. I would get up on occasion to eat and drink, but only barely, and by the end of the third month jobless, I had lost almost 50 pounds.

Finally, the 24 hour eviction notice came along. There wasn't a sudden realization that I needed to get my life back in order, or some kind of mind-altering epiphany. It was just sort of an "oh well it was bound to happen sooner or later" situation. I had fully grasped what was going on, but I just didn't care.

The 24 hours was counting down as I simply walked out of my house with nothing but the clothes on my back and watched some people drive up to the trailer, go inside, take pictures, change the lock, and put some sort of sign on the door with writing that was too small to read from where I was standing.

...

This was the point for me where I had totally given up... They took away most of my physical possessions, and I had allowed drugs and self-pity to take away everything else, so I took a walk. I didn't really have a destination point, but after a while I found myself looking at the apartment building I grew up in as a child.

The old complex stood gravely as memories of life and death were the cause of it's ever fading luster. It appeared as if nobody had lived there in a while, and there a ladder on the side of the building that lead up to the roof. Do you remember the toilet metaphor?

I began to climb the ladder, higher and higher. I was very tired and undernourished, so it took a lot of strength out of me. However, I eventually reached the top. I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the far away ground. I was at least 70 or 80 feet up. This was it. No plan, no time, no date. Just the "do" instinct that I had always had. I was finally going to break free from these chains I thought I was bound in.

I flew off the edge as all of my inhibitions left my body. My life didn't flash before my eyes and I didn't feel regret, all I felt was this profound sense of freedom that spread carelessly through my emotions... This was probably my very first time experiencing real happiness since I was at least 17 years old.

Even though the time from when I jumped from the building to when I crashed to the ground was very minimal, It felt like forever. It's not that I was scared, but instead so very eager and full of anticipation to leave this world. The ground came closer and closer, and right before I could experience hitting it... Black.

...

I floated through what felt like the very fabric of every trans-dimensional possibility which I believe to have been infinitely more massive that the millions of galaxies with billions of stars with billions of planets with trillions of moons with google-complexities of possibilities that we call the universe... This was not the universe, this was existence itself as a whole, and I was experiencing every part of it at once.

Words do not describe what this felt like. I wasn't a body or a soul, I was just another piece of this fabric that had a one in every possible number chance of having the gift of perception. I was just there, somehow able to know what was happening. No other part of me had come along. There wasn't any emotions or memories of anything... I mean, they were there but just not as important or noticeable as to what was happening at that very moment. The only way to sum it up is by saying, "This is everything, everything is this."

My perception then began to float higher and higher, gaining speed. Trillions and quadrillions of light years I sped upwards, all in a matter of milliseconds, or hours, or years? I guess I had left my perception of time back home along with my body.

I had reached the highest point of the highest place of existence, I looked upon the vast plain of everything. It looked at me, too. Then, as fast (or as slow) as I had gone up, I fell. It seemed as if I was falling faster (or slower) than I had risen upwards. I continued falling, reaching the lowest point of everything, and then I noticed that I was falling towards something like looked much like a surface of some sort. It was approaching much like the ground had done to me on Earth.

The vast void of existence dissipated as I slammed into the surface, and much like what had happened before, everything was black.