Start with something simple…. always something simple.

After that, don’t do what they tell you, draw outside the lines….


Your first grade teacher, the one you had a crush on before you even knew what that word meant, is on the floor of a large and rusty tan rectangular box with eight flattened charcoal black wheels.
She’s lying on her side, snorting coke mixed with blood and talcum powder from the top of a large mirror shard; she found this lying flat between herself and the once fashionable and now stained ‘I-think-it-was-green’ shag carpet.
It has been hours or days since her husband came home reeking of cheap perfume and ‘a few drinks.’ The antique wardrobe that her parents had given her along with their blessings, on the most beautifully-perfect wedding day, is now tainted with splashes of dried white and dots of coppery red; and hundreds of differently sized circles blemished the color of cheap gin. When two people stay married for long, monotony becomes complacency which fades into habit. Somewhere on the floor there is a greeting card; “Ten Years of happy marriage and good times”, it says.
They’re all written by Hallmark. Period. In the back of her mind, she knows this. There is no other company, just “previous employees,” Most of these guys are desperate for the next big card idea, the card you can give to Grandma and Hitler. Some of these guys get so desperate for an edge on the other, they binge on crystal and crank, until there is nothing left but a soulless husk of what at one time was the NBCI champ three maybe four times. Now they are nothing more than ‘cee-zees’, Card Zombies if you will. These guys can write cards all day long, only problem is, they aren’t worth the envelope you put them in. So measures have to be taken. By putting very small amounts of highly psychoactive and unstable chemicals in the card, cost can be cut immensely. The ink is made from a “cost efficient” carcinogenic carbon, by a starving boy who will die knowing that the most thought any foreigner ever gave about his home was whether to call it a “third-world” or a “developing” country.
It turns the minuscule droplets of scattered teacher blood, her blood, into cancerous blackness. She does not know this. As the white powder slowly seeps through her mucous membrane into soft and pink tissue, she does not think about dopamine. Above her and just over the doorway hangs the lone decoration of the wheeled home, a slanted, cigarette-faded picture of an embroidery which reads; “Home Sweet Mobile Home.” She cannot remember how it became slanted, maybe… “it was meant to be” she says aloud to herself, as she twists open a small orange bottle…. The white sticker on the bottle says, in small letters, “Do Not Drive”, it says to “Drink Water”. In bold orange and black print it has instructions to induce vomiting and call 911 immediately if alcohol is consumed. She knows this. However, she doesn’t remember that in a way she taught her husband this essential fact last night.
She also does not know that large doses of talcum powder will likely cause brain damage, or liver disease, or sudden and complete short term memory loss.
For her though, there is no pain. There is only dopamine.
Right now, she’s counting each wool-white sleeping pill, as one after the other jumps over the tobacco stained rutty old fence that someone somewhere once wanted, badly. One…two…thirty. She was always telling kids “don’t fuck with lines”, now you know why.
In “The End” which occurs every time some starving artist burns away the very last of their creativity using the newest designer something from a friend of a friend of a guy who works for a big company that only wants to help everyone live better lives with science and a few hardly noticeable side effects; Something happens, maybe just when the brains cells that send that message ‘hey I feel great’, die from lack of oxygen, you start to realize, hey, I really shouldn’t have bought that get well soon card from the guy who won’t stop shaking or mumbling something about NBCI’s and talcum powder.

Don’t smoke drugs.