Previous ||| Next
Condimental State
"Lover, brother, bougainvillea, my mind twists around your name..."
Huh?
"Can you feel it? Can you feel it?"
What are we, the Jackson Two?
"Oh man, can you? Here it comes!"
Uh, yeah, yeah, totally, I can feel it... it feels like... ow, it feels like a seizure.
"Who are you tryin' to get crazy with, ese? Don't you know I'm loco?"
You certainly are, look, since you seem to be high on your own produce...
"There it is! The indigo bliss! Have you got that feeling? It feels like... it feels like... oh, what’s the word, it’s..."
Elusive?
"Nah, it escapes me."
Conversations like this had become the norm for me now that I was getting on the harder stuff. It had started innocently enough with horseradish on my roast beef sandwiches. Pretty soon I was nibbling on mustard seeds in the corridors at work, or slugging down shots of white wine vinegar followed by a piccalilli chaser. Where once had been tidy piles of neatly folded newspapers and cereal packets for recycling were now jars of Branston Pickle licked clean, and Patak's sweet lime chutney. I didn't ever care for popadoms anymore.
Weeks of this abuse had taken their toll though and my taste buds had suffered daily overloads, leading to the need for the thrill that had previously been so easy to achieve from a touch of Worchester sauce snorted from the back of a fingernail being sought at greater extremes like Sambal suppositories or the failed sweet chilli enema that had cost me my lower intestines.
And now I found myself in a rancid council tenement, surrounded by junkies, pleading with someone who seemed to talk entirely in music lyrics for just one more shot of his special homebrewed Tabasco mind rotter in exchange for sexual favors. My head hurt and my tongue was numb, I really didn't think I could sink any lower until someone pulled out a baggie of wasabi peas.
May. 1.2007