Reflections

MophdKhairilX/Shutterstock.co

The small green bottle circled around, clanging against the prop-up breakfast-in-bed type table, which he’d set up next to his relatively inert and positively relaxed body. He was laid out—not exactly sprawled—against a beanbag, his head supported by the queen-sized mattress on the floor and his long thin legs crossed and fully stretched out.

He’d been working on getting the small green bottle to stay straight for some time now — maybe four or five minutes, but he wasn’t so sure.  His hand simply refused to just, like, align the small green bottle’s base parallel to the table, and gently lower it until it rested surely on the table.

required an abnormal degree of concentration

Meanwhile, an old show was projected on the wall across from him, some 90s American sitcom with laughing tracks, bursts of pop-rock music between scenes, and more than a few likable characters. It required an abnormal degree of concentration for him to retain the plot of the movie, so the small green bottle would have made a decent substitute for it, were it not for the fact that it was, for the moment at least, impossible to put down.

‘It couldn’t possibly be that I can’t put this small green bottle down,’ he pondered to himself. ‘Either I really can’t put the damn thing down, or I just don’t want to put it down, and my hand, for some stupid, exclusive reason, hears that loud and clear.’

VOICE IN THE DARK

He stared unseeingly for a moment at an elderly hippie-looking dude with an exceptionally low voice and who—because neither his appearance, despite its hyperbolically one-dimensional gist, nor the necessary personification of marijuana’s pernicious consequences, itself an indispensable element to the portrayal of the stereotypical 1970s button-down-checkered-shirt-tucked-into-straight-blue-jeans American father’s outlook on illicit substances and the irreparable developmental traps they embody, itself a crucial component to the comedic aims of the standard plot, lay far beyond or just past the newly imposed constraints on his apprehensive instruments—needed to expound a few more-or-less discernible phrases to lay bare his role in the show as the caricatural stoner.

WRESTLING WITH ME

‘But what the hell kind of a notion is that?’ he resumed, ‘I might not know a whole lot, but my hand is usually right in line with my blasted thoughts, no matter how blasted. If a part of me could want something different from the me part of me, and that first and part of me can override my hand (albeit after a few drinks and a tetrahydrocannabinol-nicotine cigarette), then that first part of me would be stronger than the me part of me — and there’s just no way in hell.

thinking-me part of me, which begs the question

Unless of course, that part of me that apparently insuperably controls my hand also controls, in the same way, the thinking-me part of me, which begs the question: why the hell would that ultimate administrator choose two conflicting outcomes, even if one were directly and the other indirectly?

JuPhotostacker/Shutterstock.com

I guess it sometimes helps, when you’re organizing stuff, to let the tough stuff be dealt with by the baddest in the business (the me part of me?), and you yourself keep the underlying mechanisms stable and smooth-functioning… (the non-me part of me?)’ and he ruminated on, eventually falling back with mind-bending clarity on a somewhat circular realization: ‘I got the central administrator high.

Boy was he blasted.

And maybe that’s why his hand wasn’t responding to his attempts to impose an animus on it; why it wouldn’t follow his admittedly ephemeral stream of thought—still with that small green bottle resting on the prop-up breakfast-in-bed type table as its end.

IN RETROSPECT

The central administrator’s inebriation led to the confusedly half-assed delegation of authority to the hand that was holding the small green bottle, leaving it to its own paltry devices.

This abstractive spiral, the object of his infrangible rapture, was broken only by the chaotic series of percepts of his company standing up simultaneously, looking like they were making a break for the door!—‘the session is over?’

He found this new development rather perplexing, for the whole point of his fragmented and unsuccessful employments for the past half-hour had been, so he had thought, to pass the time between the first and the second tetrahydrocannabinol-nicotine cigarette.

BLACK OUT

The justification for this sentiment had been, until provoked, submerged beneath his conscious thought, inaccessible only because frankly unnecessary.

It pleasurably surfaced in cogent form: he’d thought this because the last time this gathering had happened, in this place, with these people, he’d smoked two THC-nicotine cigarettes and despite himself, lost consciousness (peaceably of course, but not without first bursting into multiple bouts of garrulousness which were received, peculiarly, with great hilarity) before the third THC-nicotine cigarette was lit and smoked.

MORNING FOG

N.Aleksandr/Shutterstock.com

‘Next time,’ he told himself as he walked home the following morning, slightly groggy but warmly reassured by his capacity for movement, ‘I’ll be conscious for that third joint’— ‘joints’ were what he called this specific class of cigarettes.

He was quickly forced to come to terms with the fact that the one joint which he’d had would be his only joint of the evening (for which he’d been impatient for precisely this purpose), that the several moments in which he discussed or enquired about the second and third joints—the memories of which suddenly flowed back into his mind with vivid and compunctious clarity, and the increasingly terse and confused responses which drifted back each time gaining new apprehensions—, and that because everyone else was leaving,  he could either stand up and leave, in staunch defiance of his inebriation, or stick around and chew the fat with Simon for a little while longer, presuming such fat could be found and chewed.

ZERO GRAVITY

‘Sticking around might seem a little intransigent,’ he thought, ‘and in this desiccated state, there isn’t much of a shot of me putting up any big conversational impulsions. But then again, I’m probably a bit paranoid.’ A gently ethereal wave of fuzzy fatigue, a supernatural mental and bodily impaction, a gravitational precipitation, the cast-iron-weight of his arms—all this he suddenly felt, deeply impressed in every registered percept.

The small green bottle came leisurely to a rest on the prop-up breakfast-in-bed type table beside which he lay.

The small green bottle circled around, clanging against the prop-up breakfast-in-bed type table, which he’d set up next to his relatively inert and positively relaxed body. He was laid out—not exactly sprawled—against a beanbag, his head supported by the queen-sized mattress on the floor and his long thin legs crossed and fully stretched out. He’d been working on getting the small green bottle to stay straight for some time now — maybe four or five minutes, but he wasn’t so sure — but his hand simply refused to just, like, align the small green bottle’s base parallel to the table, and gently lower it  until it rested surely on the table.

Meanwhile, an old show was projected on the wall across from him, some 90s American sitcom with laughing tracks, bursts of pop-rock music between scenes, and more than a few likable characters. It required an abnormal degree of concentration for him to retain the plot of the movie, so the small green bottle would have made a decent substitute for it, were it not for the fact that it was, for the moment at least, impossible to put down.

‘It couldn’t possibly be that I can’t put this small green bottle down,’ he pondered to himself. ‘Either I really can’t put the damn thing down, or I just don’t want to put it down, and my hand, for some stupid, exclusive reason, hears that loud and clear.’

VOICE IN THE DARK

He stared unseeingly for a moment at an elderly hippie-looking dude with an exceptionally low voice and who—because neither his appearance, despite its hyperbolically one-dimensional gist, nor the necessary personification of marijuana’s pernicious consequences, itself an indispensable element to the portrayal of the stereotypical 1970s button-down-checkered-shirt-tucked-into-straight-blue-jeans American father’s outlook on illicit substances and the irreparable developmental traps they embody, itself a crucial component to the comedic aims of the standard plot, lay far beyond or just past the newly imposed constraints on his apprehensive instruments—needed to expound a few more-or-less discernible phrases to lay bare his role in the show as the caricatural stoner.

WRESTLING WITH ME

Sriyota/Shutterstock.com

‘But what the hell kind of a notion is that?’ he resumed, ‘I might not know a whole lot, but my hand is usually right in line with my blasted thoughts, no matter how blasted. If a part of me could want something different from the me part of me, and that first and part of me can override my hand (albeit after a few drinks and a tetrahydrocannabinol-nicotine cigarette), then that first part of me would be stronger than the me part of me — and there’s just no way in hell.

Unless of course, that part of me that apparently insuperably controls my hand also controls, in the same way, the thinking-me part of me, which begs the question: why the hell would that ultimate administrator choose two conflicting outcomes, even if one were directly and the other indirectly?

I guess it sometimes helps, when you’re organizing stuff, to let the tough stuff be dealt with by the baddest in the business (the me part of me?), and you yourself keep the underlying mechanisms stable and smooth-functioning… (the non-me part of me?)’ and he ruminated on, eventually falling back with mind-bending clarity on a somewhat circular realization: ‘I got the central administrator high.

Boy was he blasted. And maybe that’s why his hand wasn’t responding to his attempts to impose an animus on it; why it wouldn’t follow his admittedly ephemeral stream of thought—still with that small green bottle resting on the prop-up breakfast-in-bed type table as its end.

about the article

Coming to grips with the concept of a little, evasive, green bottle.

You May Also Like