We dropped the pickle early. Maybe at 4:52pm. And then another follow-up pickle way too soon on the heels of the first. That rotten new fuel now burning away in some secret, long-forgotten drawer of the brain. Incandescent! Dimmed only by the slimy grace of neurotic congestion. Knock-off time traffic. You can’t understand the severity of its congeniality; the massacre of time levered through an into an envelope width of thought. Like an excess of clean socks, folded neatly and overflowing the shelf. Unused. Yes. An eternal sunrise of clean laundry: signed, sealed, and delivered. Impossible bliss. Only with this caveat: a searing acid of regret, of brilliantly plumed chickens on their way home to roost. A few hours into this shit, I hardened my resolve to digress just a little courage before these wildly rampant tigers of the dark-jungled brain. In such a state, I said, we encompass a neon-lit bloody truth, an inconceivable resurrection, Christ electrified on the cross while we all watch on like little foetal Buddhas, chanting ineffectively against the onrushing blaze. Singing “look on the bright side of life.” ‘Of course,’ Morrison replied, ‘hrrrgggngghnnnhh… hrggngh’ Then he fell silent. Apparently quite happy with his unintelligible explanation, Morrison then just sort of jutted out his chin and scratched the underside of it with the back of his hand, almost as a cat would but without all the excessive licking of himself. No licking of himself at all, in fact. That would probably come later. In any case, it was intuited by me as a nod of agreement. What was actually meant by him is lost to history. Within these moments of temporal murder and neurotic terror, moments that seemed to be flitting in and out like a hairy overweight male cocktail waitress dressed in neon pink and performing scenes from Swan Lake very poorly, gratingly so, there existed also these moments of clarity and gentle, pointless commentary. It was like suddenly donning a dry pair of fresh underwear while caught out in a force-nine gale off the south coast of England. And then a wet Hitler-moustached fish in your pocket…
The next morning: A Vietnamese fried chicken breakfast. Concrete sidewalk anonymity. Salty pickle-head recovery. Sweet-sweet-sweet viscous coffee. A heart in check, like an inept soldier out of stride, formation. Morrison taking selfies of us, of himself with the teenage Asian waif of a waitress. His monstrous flirting intent gargling like an idling Harley Davidson, then, when revealed, he was suddenly as bashful as a hand-operated egg-beater. Limpid charity exuding from his jolly soul. A harmless beauty of creation.
‘I’ll have the… this chicken dish,’ I said, pointing at the item on the menu.
‘We’ve already ordered,’ Morrison interceded with supple force. ‘Get him another coffee,’ he added. Confiding in the waitress with an old-friend-on-New Year’s familiarity as if he’d known her for twenty-seven years and half the month of the following January. She giggle-grinned and made what appeared to be a cursory order in her notepad brain. I remember thinking how delicious her youth was: incandescent bone, hard on the iris. Nevertheless, beautiful.
I looked down, the fabric of my button-up shirt reminded me of the cover to the original version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. A sort of melting tv test-pattern…