Listerine Hookah, Hidden Vodka

We should have known when Jose filled the hookah with mouthwash instead of water that things were getting a little strange. The fact that it didn't even phase us is evidence that things may have been even worse than we were prepared for. The night that Jose filled the hookah with Listerine is a benchmark. These kinds of things allow you to create points on the timeline that define the entire purpose and meaning of your life.

To protect the innocent (Jose is not innocent, he is secretly mad as a fucking hatter), a name has been changed. We'll call him/her Terry. Never before had Terry shared with me that he/she could make a drink he/she shared with me on the night of Listerine Hookah. "Oh yeah, you can't even taste the vodka." It was LITERALLY a glass of vodka with some lemon juice and like half a nanoliter of club soda. But I could not taste the vodka. I don't know how this works as I have seen people go to endless lengths with all manner of juices, sodas, fruit, even vegetables and Gatorade to kill the taste of booze so they could get hammered faster and easier. "This is insane," I thought, "that the secret is just adding lemon juice to an entire tumbler of vodka." The night went on and took a turn for the worse that I will not go into to detail here or anywhere ever.

ABSOLUTE MELTDOWN   

The important thing is that what Jose's Listerine Hookah and vodka hidden by lemon juice was a benchmark, one of the many that define the passage of my life. What did it benchmark? Me losing the last traces of my sanity. There it is, add it to the timeline. My mind has been on the fritz for years, but the following morning I realized, yup, that was it! She's gone -- I'm talking about a person driven so mad by life that they sing "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" while clipping their toenails, or smoking cigarettes in the bathtub while listening to David Bowie while the house burns down around them. True insanity, not the cute fake kind, or the kind you see on Desperate Housewives.

Terry's insane vodka cocktail, the mouthwash smoke curling around the edges of my tongue and mixing with the "fruity delight" flavored tobacco, looking up and realizing we were watching Sex and the City, truly understanding completely for the first time that I had ACTUALLY placed a floor lamp ON TOP of the dining room table which was now in my BEDROOM, grappling with the fact that we were fucking completely FLAT broke, comprehending fully that we had re-adopted a dog we thought we'd never see again only to find that she has developed a nervous disorder, and so on, you know, just average everyday shit. Trying to assimilate all this at the same time caused my brain to overload, and subsequently meltdown into a dried puddle of burnt plastic next to the fuse box that was previously my central nervous system.

Then someone on TV [not Sex and the City] said something like, "My neighbor is suing me for killing squirrels." That was it. Any last shred of evidence that my mental faculties had ever existed was gone for good. Terry went home and Jose went to bed, stating, "Oh my Gat, I theenk dee Leeetereeene was a bad hidea..." and then I was left to my own devices. One can only take so much before just letting go completely, and that's what I did.

Sure, I made a few calls I don't remember, but that's par for the course. At one point I remember sitting on the pavement scratching my dog's ears and telling them I wasn't sure if everything was going to be alright. Then flash to a hazy moment of looking for a plastic toy microphone for reasons I can no longer conjure, and a brief try at reading a book of poetry before giving up because my eyeballs were rolling off the page and into a bad neighborhood.

Everyone has had it right now. Everyone I know is having moments of eruptive and unwelcome revelation, everyone is trying to hide their vodka behind some lemon juice, and everyone is doing something equally as insane as smoking a hookah filled with mouthwash. Because we just don't know what else to do.

For the purposes of this blog I will blame it on the economy and job losses. But I think we all know something pretty fuct with the universe has to be going on to make you put a floor lamp on top of a dining room table you've moved into your bedroom.