Coming Down Dehydrated
Feeling the Dopamine Desaturation After Los Angeles
I try to see my internal narrator. I squint and do everything I can to bring him into focus. But he always slips away and I can’t get a good look at him. Is he a tiny version of me sitting in a command chair? Does he have his own miniature brain? Is he wearing socks?
Or is he a cloud of vapor with no obvious origin or end. Like a phenomenon they’d stumble on in Star Trek and gaze at on the viewfinder. Words float in and out.
Its a mystery.
I talk to myself and the words actually come out of my mouth, but most of the time I feel the voice in my head like a vibration. The words settle near the back of my eyes where I can read the subtitles.
In the best of circumstances he’s a ‘behind the scenes guy’, narrating things and making observations. Like check out the way those starlings fly together. Or look at the hot oil pooling on top of the ramen. He likes to watch things come close and move apart.
Maybe you should call your friend, he says. The old friend you spent so much time with back in the day. The old friend you don’t talk to anymore.
When he’s not feeling nostalgic he calls me names.
Like slug.
I’m dragging myself around in the 100 degree heat, leaving my slime trail on the sidewalk.
Slug.
I’ve got a flagella, you know the whip tail of the single celled organism, and I crack it to move forward a few steps at a time.
It’s good you have Bub, Cassandra says. You’re using it to work through things. And she’s right because good ideas and bad ones go into the game, and I can sift through and see their true nature instead of just how they make me feel.
Maybe I should pick up the phone and call this friend. How many experiences did we share? Way too many to count. Many thousands. But when I think really hard, all of these experiences blend into a single feeling instead of separate memories. Sure there’s a few that stick out clear as day, but the others have vaporized.
My thinking is influenced by living across the Atlantic.
Such a distance!
Hours on an airplane over the open ocean. Ripples of turbulence and weather fronts underneath the atmosphere and a million crisscrossing satellites.
Sometimes I’ll catch a familiar smell and I’ll follow it. The other day it was grilled meat. It was the exact char grilled burger smell of my childhood neighborhood, where Dads endlessly flipped burgers for all the hungry kids on a summer night. The whole street smelled like it. Anyways it hit me like a truck so I dragged my slimetrail around the block, trying to find the source.
What was I going to do? Just stare probably. Maybe they’ll ask if I’m hungry, I thought. Maybe we’ll have a conversation. Maybe they’ll glance at my slug body like, are you ok? Maybe they’ll pour me a cool glass. Maybe they’ll put me on the back of a scooter and whisk me home. There’s so many hot sidewalks between here and home.
Nah. Things like that don’t happen here.
I bet they’re in a shaded courtyard. It’s private and cool and impossible to reach from the street. It’s surrounded by yellow stones and gates studded with iron. Maybe I’ve discovered a trick of physics, and the swirling gusts of the valley have brought the char grilled smells of this distant cookout to the other side of the river, where one last elusive sniff lingers like talking to your friend through a cup and a string.
