Like Eating a Topic on Acid

I’m tired. In fact I’m beyond tired. I’m so tired I can’t think of a word elaborate enough to describe the exhaustion I feel. Although exhaustion is pretty good. I flew into Amsterdam on June 19th. Started work the next day, my alarm set for 5.45. Yes, apparently there’s a 5.45 in the morning now. 20 days, 2 cities and hundreds of thousands of euros later, I’m still working.

One more week and I get 2 days off, cooped up in a shitty hotel in a provincial town.

Where last week I felt like a hamster in a cage, this week I feel like an inmate of Guantanamo Bay. Kept behind fences, randomly soaked or scorched, sonically bombarded by various sources at all hours of the day and night. If you get pissed off at your phone, try carrying two. Then add a 15-channel walkie-talkie and 100 or so people who want you for something which is either late or missing, all competing with a sound-system branded illegal in several countries.

Back when I was a bartender, I once worked 18 days in a row. I believe it was some sort of house record. By the last day I was a bit insane. I went out whenever the opportunity arose but I couldn’t get drunk. I’d passed the stage where everything was too much, passed the stage where everything was funny. I’d reached Dennis Nielsen.

For some reason, I don’t feel like that this time. Instead I feel I’ve been transported back in time to my first summer at highschool. It’s 1992, I’m almost 14, and I’m wanged off my tits on acid. I’m walking alongside someone, but we couldn’t possibly speak to each other, or to anyone else. I’m concentrating intensely on chewing and swallowing the first bite of a Topic. I’ve no idea why I bought it, I suppose I needed some familiarity, and back then I ate quite a few Topics.

Any sense of time is stolen from you on acid. You experience deja vu. You can convince yourself that time has stopped. You can lose 3 hours shamanically repeating your address just to keep a grip on who you are/were. All in the same night.

But this Topic is taking me fucking ages. That mix of nougat, hazelnut, caramel and class A narcotic is creating a party in my mouth, and no-one knows what time it starts or who anyone is. I dare not spit it out, and yet I can’t swallow it. I feel like the Boy David- there is no roof in my mouth, and the pointy, half-chewed nuts are jabbing directly into my brain. I could swallow my tongue before I finish this chocolate bar. I hear a car way off in the distance and sprint across the street to avoid it. I jump the chain-rope around the war memorial but my fellow fuckhead has chosen to step on his section and the chain snaps taught, catching my ankle.

Everything slows down, moreso, as my hands flail, clutching for the strips of light racing past my face, away from the inevitable; the sun-baked lawn. The Topic drifts from my hand, spinning off on it’s own axis. I’m suspended mid-air. The grass rises to meet me and suddenly I’m back on earth. I feel no pain, other than the caramel in my cavities and the nuts embedded in my brain tissue. Close by I hear laughter, and it’s coming from me.

Part of the awkwardness that came with frying my teenaged brain with LSD returned to me this week. I have difficulty maintaining eye-contact. I sat in company for hours yesterday without saying a word. Nothing I could offer has any meaning, any point, or any consequence. It’s just there, like a Topic in the grass.