little, but it’s never coming back; we feel it at the same time, turning to look at each other swallow our own little co-op of sick – the collective noun for sick is in fact a co-op – these are the things that drive us; if you feel something so viscerally that your body expels its own nutrients, then you need to pay attention.
With that out of the way we can indulge in a little tab of bacid; a bacon-based psychedelic displaying the general properties and dose effects of lysergic acid diethylamide, but with the onset time of dimethyltryptamine: it is placed on the tongue in the traditional fashion but then begins to fizz, feeling much like popping candy; the ensuing vapour is then inhaled, thus arriving at the brain in an extremely expedient manner. People’s features become delineated; deep purple grid lines reveal facial contours we just never notice in the everyday. Then we enter the submarine, or rather the pig’s snout. The musac now beautiful, dancing along the liquified pews, synesthesia taking over; smells fill our ears, and euphonious notes daub the effervescent ceiling with hues not witnessed in the most ebullient of dreams; tasteless consumables shimmer and glow, their comforting lists of synthetic ingredients pin sharp, their prices reasonable on an Aristotlean level.
“You need to leave the fucking church,” I say, “it’s going to exploooode.” Still he doesn’t move; I can see why he isn’t moving; his legs have been replaced by traffic cones, and not the ones students put on their heads in the age old fashion, handed down from one lack of imagination to the next; no, these were those really heavy ones used to keep jumbo jets off patches of the runway that are still a little tacky. No wonder he can’t move. But he can’t see what I see. It could be fear; fear does that to a man; I once saw a guy who’d broken both his legs in a motorcycle accident, but it was actually probably the fear that meant he couldn’t move at all. But this guy doesn’t have fear in his eye; he has belief, he has grit, and not the kind that requires a soft saline eyewash; his hands upon his leather belt now, like it was the wheel of some big ocean liner [10 points for the reference]. I look deep into his swirling orange pupils as he stares right back into my dilated watery abysses; we meet somewhere across the ether, in a parallel universe we converse as brothers, an unspoken bond between us, we are about to have what can only be described as “a moment”. Then Perl appears and clonks him on the back of the head with a packet of milk chocolate hobnobs – an open packet, I notice. We then drag our unconscious brother to a shopping trolley and hurl him down the cold meats aisle towards the exit [now remember this bloke, coz he’ll probably turn up again in, umm, oh I don’t know, part 17? (I now have absolute faith in our ability to reach part 17, if only for this blokeWhoseNameIHaven’tThoughtOfYet’s sake)]. The not insubstantial crowd of parishioners who have gathered outside the shopfront take care of the man who will forever view this time in his life as a near death experience. Fool; there’s no such thing as a near death experience, we’re a split second away from death incessantly, you’re either alive or dead; if you want an experience, choose a full-on life one…like blowing up a co-op whilst tripping off your nuts. With everybody now out of the shop, Perl and I mix the last of the chemicals together as we hear, or rather see, the cans of condensed chicken soup [I made this bit up – I’ve no idea whether condensed soup still exists] tell us that three of the emergency services are on their way – as soon as the co-op go down the inevitable route of sailing shops, we’ll be
[bacid art courtesy of Arthur Browne (go comment and make history)]
Trenton Babbage Enterprises 