We set off to Indianapolis and soon, we were cruising down the highway. We had three-hundred-dollars lining our pockets, and ready to spent on our hedonistic desires. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on more supply. All I wanted was another joint. It was as if I couldn’t breathe until I had that taste.

As we drove, Jack and Thomas played poker. Jack had just bluffed and won ten-dollars. He had a pair of three’s. Meanwhile, Thomas had a royal flush.

While the poker game ensued, Travis sat in the passenger seat, writing poems. Travis and I have taken the liberty of selecting only the best poems for you to read:

Fuck You x48

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck you

Fuck You

Fuck You

Fuck You

Fuck You

Fuck you

Fuck You

Fuck You

Avant-Garde is Just for Liberal Pussies

Avant-

Garde

Is just for liberal

pussies

and pop culture

is only

for

soulless human beings

with questionable

levels of

intellect.

Most People Replace Their Addictions With Lesser Ones

the simple truth is

i always get addicted to things

that distract

me from the fact

that i exist

We had just entered the outskirts of Avon, Indiana when Travis spotted a smoke shop. It was a dingy little place. Not much going on. The stained windows were covered iron bars, the parking lot was full of trash, and the asphalt was cracked with a multitude of holes in it. The glass door had an advertisement for American Spirits. The best cigarettes a man can smoke.

I pulled into a parking-spot, and I stepped out the van with Travis. The air was thick with humidity. Such is the case with summer. I can distinctly remember passing through Arizona, and how dry it was. And it was spring back then!

Thomas told me that he was on a winning streak in his poker game against Thomas. He feared that even stepping out for fresh air would ruin his luck. This should’ve been Jack’s cue to stop the poker game, to quit. But his own stubbornness did not allow him to do this. You had to give him credit, the kid was indomitable. This would end up costing him fifty dollars though, which all went to Thomas. No matter how hard we tried, we could never beat him.

The inside of the head shop was a stark contrast from the outside. The floors sparkled under the lights and the glass containing hookah pipes were like the clearest mirror in the world. Each piece of illicit merchandise were the cleanest motherfucking pipes I have ever seen. If the hookah pipes were plates at a three-star Michelin restaurant, some dumbass on Yelp would still say, “Really puts the fine in fine-dining!”

Travis busied himself with picking up each individual bong and studying them. As I wandered around the store, something caught my eye. It was a jar on a shelf in the far-back of the shop, with some weird looking leaves in it. The bright-green pedals looked like if you took vomit and dried it up into a powder. I picked the jar up and looked at it. In big letters on the lid, it said, “Salvia Divinorum.”

I held the jar up for the cashier to look at. She bore a nametag that read, “Samantha.”

“Hey, what does this do?” I asked.

Samantha shrugged. Her broad shoulders were brought up to her blonde hair. “Never tried it, I didn’t even know we had it in the shop.”

I nodded and curiously looked at the leaves again. “Well, how much is it?”

“Uhh…” Samantha mumbled. “I’ll give you twenty-five for it.”

“Deal.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crisp roll of cash. I handed it to Sam, she rang me up, and I had gotten a hold of the mysterious plant known as, “Salvia.”

Travis and I used our money to purchase a carton of cigarettes, and a brand-new bong that was shaped like a Christmas tree. We headed back to the van, and this is where I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. When we got back in the van, I decided to pack a healthy amount of the salvia into the brand-new bong and smoke it.

I was told by the guys that as soon as the smoke exited my mouth, I began to scream and screech like some kind of fucked up zoo-animal. I spun around and flung my arms in the air. They tried to grab me and restrain me, but that didn’t work. I simply knocked them away from me, and fell onto the ground.

I then proceeded to squirm on the ground yelling, “I’m an orange! I’m an orange! I’m a fucking orange!” Over, and over, again.

After the trip ended, which only lasted, lile, five minutes, they said I was a total idiot. I was told that I couldn’t formulate a single sentence. All I did was sit in my seat mumbling like some senile grandfather. It was as if I had been set back to my toddler-years, crying and shitting my pants.

But the thing is, I don’t remember any of that happening. All I remember is taking a hit off the bong, and then almost instantly reality got wiped away. Imagine a television shutting off, that’s what it looked like. Then everything was replaced with horrific images that looked like some horrible, twisted, version of Candyland.

Out of the indescribable images of horror and violence, a woman made out of leaves and flowers stuck her hand out to me. I grabbed her hand and she pulled me out of the nightmare. I was suddenly in a pitch-black void. There was no light, no friends, there was nothing.

Then, without any warning, I was an orange. I had turned into an orange dangling from a tree in a large forest, spanning hundreds of miles. It was a peaceful life as an orange. Not much to do, as I was hanging from a tree and had no limbs. But it was peaceful, and that’s what mattered most to me.

I must’ve been an orange for countless eons, until a feminine voice spoke out to me, “What did you learn?” The voice was soft and angelic. I would’ve been fine with being an orange for all of eternity, just as long as I could always hear that voice.

“What?” I asked. Somehow I was able to speak and hear, even though I was just a fruit.

“What did you learn from this experience?”

I let out a croaking sound as I tried to gather my orangey thoughts. “To never do this shit ever again?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Good.”
The green lady appeared again and this time she pulled me from the tree and held me in her hands. A warm smile crossed her face and as she locked eyes with me, I felt the pain of disintegrating into an infinite amount of particles. Then, I awoke sitting in the driver’s seat.

* * *

We stayed in Avon for three more days. It was a nice little place, if not a little boring. It was also right on the edge of Indianapolis. We would’ve gone into the big city, and explored, were it not for the fact that we didn’t want to spend money at toll booths.

On the final day, we decided to drive into the forest, and camp there for the night. We set up a fire, and sat around it under the stars. We joked, shared a bottle of vodka, and smoked joints. When it was time to go to sleep, there was just one problem. There were only three blankets. I took the biggest one, Thomas had the smallest one, and Travis and Jack shared one. The sharing of a blanket, would cause this problem.

“Hey… Travis?” Jack whispered softly.

Travis groaned and turned on his side. “What?”

“Do you think I can pass the Navy Seal training?”

“…”

“Do you?”

Travis turned onto his back. “I don’t fucking know. Why’re you asking me?”

“Well, I just thought you’d know.”

“Well, I don’t. Now go to sleep.”

“…”

“Hey, Travis?”

“…”

“Travis?”

“…yeah?”

“If you had to join one military branch, which one would it be?”

“I do not know.”

“Just pick one.”

“Why don’t you go to sleep, and stop fuckin’ bothering me?”
“Why can’t you pick one?”

Travis let out a deep sigh and threw the blanket off of him. “Fuck you all,” He said as he stood up. “I’m starting my own fire, and I’m making my own blanket!”

Thomas snickered and rolled over on his back. “Good luck with that, and tell us how it goes.”

Travis raised a middle-finger and pointed it vaguely in Thomas’s direction. “Fuck you too!”

“Uhuh.”

Travis walked away and went somewhere into the bushes. We could hear him rubbing sticks together at a furious pace. Eventually, he got up, and took the flint and steel from Jack’s backpack. But he still could not make a fire. So, in an act of desperation and shame, he grabbed every leaf and twig he could find and moved back to the original fire. He made a shoddy little cover with twigs and leaves, that really didn’t do anything.

I will tell you this, men are a different species of animal. They descended from the Homo Erectus, just like everyone else. But somewhere down the line they’re brain structure and chemistry completely changed from that of a woman’s.

Now that you know this, I can fully explain what happened next. Thomas was the first to fall asleep, so I grabbed a sharpie and walked over to where Travis was sleeping. “Hey…” I whispered.

Travis rolled over and rubbed his eyes, “What is it?”

“Thomas is sleeping,” I said while pointing over to him, “So let’s draw some shit on his face. Go get Jack.”

Travis stood up, stifling his giggles. We gathered Jack, and together, walked over to Thomas. I was the one with the sharpie so I decided to go first. I drew a nice, big, cock on his forehead, then handed the sharpie to Jack.

Jack colored in a hitler-stache on Thomas’s upper-lip and then a swastika on his nose. He handed it to Travis, who colored in mutton-chops on the side of Thomas’s face. We all stepped back and admired our work of art, our Mona Lisa. It was absolutely glorious.

Soon, we all went to sleep. In the morning we packed up everything and hopped in the van. It would take a full twenty-four-hours until Thomas noticed our art on his face. And yes, he did go into several public places before realizing it.

* * *

On the last day of our stay in Indianapolis, Jack stayed in the trunk again. We all knew what he was doing, though he did try to hide it by thumping around in there. But there’s a difference between the thumps of someone jacking off, and the thumps of someone desperately trying to hide their addiction. The tone is completely different. Masturbation thumps sound heavy and full of hedonistic passion. Addiction thumps sound like two porn-stars fucking. It’s too hard, and no one would actually enjoy it. If anyone actually masturbated like that, they’d never recover.

As we drove, Jack climbed out of the trunk. To put it bluntly, he looked like absolute shit. His skin was dry, his face was sunken in, and his eyes had the life taken out of them. It was fucked. I wanted to grab Jack right then and there, and shake him saying, “This is what your addiction has done to you! DO YOU SEE? DO YOU FUCKING SEE?”

Jack took a seat in the front, next to Thomas. He stretched his arms out and his sleeves slid down, revealing track marks. “Where are we?” His speech was slow and slurred, like he had just woken up from a twenty-four-hour nap.

“We’re still in Indiana.” Thomas said, barely looking up from his book. We didn’t have anything to wash the sharpie off so the ink was still on Thomas’s face. Safe to say, he wasn’t very pleased.

Travis was off in his little world staring out into the passenger-side window. He thought that we were heading East, but that couldn’t be any further from the truth. I had just smoked two-joints, drank a shot of whiskey, and did a tab of acid, so I had no idea where the fuck we were. I was just driving.

Jack scratched his bald head and said, “Weren’t we just in Iowa? Everything seems hazy.”

I took the cigarette away from my mouth and said, “That’s what injecting that shit into your veins will do to you.”

Jack turned to me with daggers in his eyes. I stared back at him with a glare that could melt every ice-cap in the North Pole. “Hey man,” I said with a shrug, “If you wanna go ahead and kill yourself, that’s fine by me, but we ain’t paying for your casket.”

Jack glared back at me and said, “You guys will never fucking understand, so don’t start with this bullshit right now.”

“We’ve tried to help you Jack! And each you reject it because you don’t want to be helped!”

Jack scrunched his hands up into a ball and spit out, “Hey, fuck you man! You don’t know shit about me!”

I took my hands off the steering wheel and turned my head around. “Really? I don’t know shit about you?”

“Payte!” Travis called out. “Calm the fuck down.”

“No, let me finish!” I spat back. “I don’t know shit about you, really? Well, I know your mother walked out on you when you were born, your father’s a military-nut and that’s the only reason you want to be a Navy seal, and I also know that he was an alcoholic and that you had to raise your three sisters alone. So I don’t know shit about you? Fuck you!”

“Shut up, and don’t you ever talk about my mom again!”

“Or what? You’ll bust my head open? You’ll strangle—“

Jack bared his teeth and launched forward. He gripped my neck with his fists and squeezed the shit out of me. I reached over to his hands and tried to pry his fingers away. The van slid left and right across the road as I kicked and punched.

“Hey, cut it out!” Travis squeaked.

I slapped Jack and scratched his cheek. Thomas launched forward in his seat and grabbed Jack by the shoulders. He pried Jack off of me and slammed him down into his seat. I grabbed the steering wheel and steadied the van. I pulled over to the side of the road and turned around. “You crazy motherfucker! Don’t you ever do that shit again, or so help me God!”

“Both of you, just chill out!” Thomas shouted.

Jack looked at Thomas and pointed to me, “That trailer-trash piece of shit started it!”

“Oh, you fucking—“ I unbuckled myself and shot out of my seat to punch Jack. Travis drove his palm into my chest and pushed me back down into my seat.

“What the fuck is wrong with you two? We’re supposed to be brothers!” Travis said, repeatedly twisting his head to me and Jack.

The cold silence that permeated the van, is something that I will never forget.

I hung my head down and bit my lip. How could I sink so low? Hurting my own friend? What kind of piece of shit does that? I was doing the same exact thing people did to me my entire life. I was just continuing the cycle of shittiness through the ages, something that humanity has never seemed to overcome. I was the problem.

I looked up at Jack, and then down at my shoes. “Sorry…”