Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I'm the Dragon King


Lay down your thoughts; surrender to the void. Those words bounced around my head as we blasted down a winding passage in the deep Georgia swamplands. We'd lost the path again; now we were meandering somewhere down highway 13, a two-lane, sun-dappled honky-tonk backroad that winds through a string of handsomely dilapidated southern towns -- Camelia, Pelham, Ochlocknee.

On the bright side -- I had a full dose of salvation in my bloodstream.

Salvation. The promise of it began to consume me a few days back. By the time we reached Atlanta, I was hell-bent on mind-expanding psychedelics. I was hoping they might warp me like a prism -- maybe let some sort of light in. Perhaps they'd unlock some answers.

My desperate earnestness went unacknowledged by my companion. Still, he seemed happy to join me for the ride.

We'd ingested the tabs at a rest stop ten miles back and washed them down with cold soda and chips produced from the local vending machine. The only other visitor there on this weekday afternoon was the occasional trucker with a schedule to keep. They paid us no mind.

We sat in the car, top down, and inhaled the sultry air. I stared out and tuned into the hypnotic whine of katydids in the nearby brush.

"People don't do this anymore," said Thompson, assessing the now empty baggie.

"I can't understand why. It's perfectly safe." He glanced at me for a moment and cackled wildly.

He was right, it did seem like we were somehow communing with the past, like we were performing a lost ritual. I weighed Lennon's words in that moment, cribbed in a burst of naive sixties exoticism from a similarly ancient source.

"Well," said Thompson nonchalantly, "see you on the other side." He turned the key, the Corniche purred to life, and we were off.

Now, as he piloted the 4,000-pound convertible at god knows what speed, I felt the distinctive effervescence creep down my spine, and the dark willows, whizzing by, gradually became positively impressionistic, a living Van Gogh painting. Wisps of airborne dandelion acquired a glowing, charged state -- dancing white-hot embers that sizzled and popped as they passed.

Thomson was chattering as he drove -- rehashing the story of how he sixty-nined that hot Auburn co-ed last week -- but his words gurgled and buzzed crunchily into oblivion, and suddenly I pictured myself no longer in our copper-hued Rolls, but instead straddling a dragon's back as it swooped lowly through this swampy forest -- a lost scene out of Space Harrier. All of this was scored to some intergalactic bebop music. Infinitely complex and intertwined, a brambling orgy of horns and hi-hats.

Somehow, then and there, I realized my brain is -- and always will be -- the antithesis of its own happiness. A double-agent conspiring against itself. Throughout my life, it promised various forms of lasting contentment only to then steal it away. Now, in this moment, it was exposed for what it had been all along: a miserly, squirreling, treasonous, conniving traitor.

And then, as the lunar jazz gave way to a crescendo of tribal drums, it became perfectly obvious that this was my chance, my opportunity to change things. A euphoric Cheshire grin stretched itself across my face, and I, with great calm, reached ever so slowly into the console and firmly grasped the revolver we kept in there.