July 26, 2008
Alternate title: The right to arm bears
Suicide, it turned out, tasted not like the cold barrel of a gun but instead like an artificially sweetened malt liquor.
I lost my mind before I even walked through the gated arches of the police station. The psychological effect of the drugs was strong and my will to live free was gone. I told the dispatcher I was there to confess to crimes - I was dying from the drug and it was time to confess my wrongdoings before the final judgment.
Contrary to the popular perception of dying it was a uniformed police officer, and not St. Peter, that was taking my final deposition as I sat there facing the consequences of my choices. For nearly fifteen minutes, the officer listened as I rambled on about various perceived wrongs I’d committed, which were primarily focused on poor choices often related to my drug and alcohol abuse. It was clear that the policeman was getting very frustrated that he’d had to deal with me at all. His attitude was that I was wasting his time. He said he needed to address something else and asked that I return to the waiting area in the lobby.
At the moment I slumped down into the chair and started to hang my head low, another police officer arrived inside, walking through the same gated arches with a black bear cub escorted in his custody. That officer turned the bear over to a booking officer and walked back out through a set of sliding glass doors that let in a glorious amount of sunlight. The soft glow of the sun, and the slow saunter back to sobriety started to elevate my mood. The gentle rays from the sun beaming down on me energized me. I realized life was worth living.
At the same moment, the booking officer took the handcuffs off the black bear cub, and instantaneously, the black bear cub let out a deafening roar and threw the booking officer to the ground with a single sweeping push. Next it circled the waiting room while loudly expelling its horrible screaming sounds from its voice box. I was fascinated and couldn’t help but stare at the bear. It soon noticed this and became aggressive towards me.
Looking right into my eyes, it roared again, and I was tharned by the gravity of the situation. The bear acted quickly and decisively to lunge towards me. I was knocked aside, but the bear managed to bite into my arm with a surprisingly weak chomping force. It didn’t even feel like it broke the skin. I was able to shake the bear off.
But the experience of defeat seemed to only galvanize the bear. Now it was distraught and seeking revenge. The bear managed to find a long rifle and picked it up between its teeth. The bear pointed the weapon at all the people in the waiting room in a threatening manner, like it was about to execute every last one of us.
But with a thunderous boom, an officer outside blasted a 12-gauge slug shot through the sliding glass doors and into the bear’s torso. The single shot was devastating to the cub, now laying there with the rifle beside it, surrounded by a pool of its own blood.
During the ensuing confusion, I simply walked out of the station and never returned. The entire experience was so hard to deal with, it started me drinking again.
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April 14, 2007
My neighbors really need to start obeying zoning laws. I’m driving by, and what do I see? A flatbed tow truck parked right on their roof. And next to the tow truck is a guy standing on the roof, building another house right on top of the roof of the other house. I’m wondering how this two-story, wooden house can support all this weight. I reach a stop sign at the corner where this house is, and as I make a left turn onto the intersecting street, I see the wooden ramp he’s built to drive the cars onto his roof. It turned out the tow truck wasn’t the only vehicle on the roof. There were also three passenger cars with yellow light bars, parked at the frighteningly steep incline of the roof. I think I might write a letter when I wake up.
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April 7, 2007
The fluorescent track lights are lit too early; it’s only 6 AM and the light from the sun isn’t even pouring in yet. The other riders are split between sleep and stress, where this author prefers the former. But that locomotive’s diesel droning just lulled me back to sleep like I was at home in my bed. With my eyes closed but my ears unclosable, the train refused to allow me the courtesy of a full deep sleep. But deeper and deeper down, I would have never known. The train started to become less and less real. The “no smoking” sign in the corner made me ask: am I smoking? Remembering my laptop in my travelling bag made me ask: am I on my computer right now? If I am on my computer, am I looking at something other people on the train shouldn’t see? I saw a black and white photo of a nude woman. Is there a sign telling me not to get hot over this photo? But there comes and there goes my stop, and now I know this morning is off to a bad start.
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February 10, 2007
When had I been here before? This place looked like a postcard from one of the abandoned gift shops on the Taconic parkway. There was a wide body of flowing water, a cliff over which it was flowing, and in the other direction, a massive construction project overhauling some old building near the way. I drove my 93 Mitsubishi Diamante right down the dirt road towards the water, and then into the water. The water was only about two feet deep, and it seemed drivable, as if I had been to this place before. I followed the water against its direction of flow for about two hundred feet before cutting the wheel to the left and trying to pull it back up onto dry land. The land I selected wasn’t exactly dry, either. So I turned the car around and tried to head back to where I started. The engine was now flooded and wouldn’t even crank over. Pushing the car, I neared an edge where water flowed freely over. When the front wheels went over the cliff, I knew the car was about to escape me. I had a leash tethering me to the car and vice versa, but it snapped without haste. The car and I went over the edge of the waterfall, and the car sank without delay. But I could open my eyes underwater here, and I could see my car at the bottom, alongside a blue and white Mini Cooper that had also made its way to the bottom. My front wheel was also broken off, probably from the impact against the river floor. But I took a deep breath, swam down to my car, and started the long journey to push it out. But it was of no help, since with everything soaked in water the car wouldn’t start once it was back on land anyway.
These two girls in a car drove up to me and asked if I had driven my car into the river, and I said yes. They said I shouldn’t have tried to be sneaky and take it in (also, I didn’t sign-in at the entrance). I noticed a stick of dynamite, unexploded, sitting right behind me. If only I had a lighter, but alas I too was soaking wet and incapable of immolating anything. The conversation drew me towards the nearby construction, and I peeked inside, seeing the bare wall supports and plasterboard still going up through the pane-glass doors. I opened the door and walked in, and started walking down towards the basement. But the basement, it turned out, was not under construction at all, it was a bustling underground bar. And walking around the perimeter of that floor, I realized there was yet another underground level still: a grand hall with wood trim and wood décor everywhere, and with yet another stairway to another basement level.
This third basement resembled a subway station, with cool white tiles and light, except that the ceiling was too low (no more than five feet), which was supposed to be a “security feature” according to someone I overheard. I didn’t want to be down there, so I started to run as fast as I could through the tunnels. I passed friends and family and lovers in the tunnels and none of them said a word to me. Running out of this complex I found myself topside again, back where I had parked my car in this quiet and unsuspecting scene from a postcard.
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January 13, 2007
This New Year’s party was like no other I remember. No one I knew was there, but everyone’s face was familiar to me. Some of their voices sounded an awful lot like my friends and family. The party wasn’t going well, it seemed. In fact it didn’t seem like much of a party at all. The mood turned angry and then everybody was mad at me. What I had done was unknown to me, but as the crowd became angry, I became angry in defense. I noticed that someone had disassembled my rollerblades. The bolts and ball bearings were scattered around haphazardly. I left the party, but was unable to find my keys or my car. I started to walk instead, off into the sunrise.
In front of me then was the rushing water of a stream or river after a hard rain. The otherwise beautiful postcard scene of this watershed was disrupted by floating orange and white plastic barrels partially submerged in the water. They were labeled as though they were some type of hazard, but I couldn’t decipher their contents. It occurred to me that these barrels could be linked together because of their peculiar square-like shape. Before long, a series of them were linked together forming a tiled floating dock over the majority of the water, still running below.
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December 19, 2006
I was in Hawaii, but I couldn’t determine which island. Some friends and I were traversing the rocky cliffs over the ocean. Taking one wrong step, I knocked a rock out of alignment and caused it to start to fall down the face of the mountain. Looking down, though, I noticed my friend Steve Ng, who I hadn’t seen for ages. I shouted down to him, and he reached up to give me a high five. But reaching the end of the rocks, and back on the ground, it started to rain. Everyone I was with ran in different directions. I found an umbrella somewhere, and without my friends there with me, started the long walk back to our hotel. I missed my flight home for sure.
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December 17, 2006
While meeting with a history professor, I was given a hand full of pocket change. It was immediately obvious I had just received more than just average pocket change, as I noticed the penny in my hands was in fact a steel penny. The coin was tails-up in my hand, so I flipped it to check the date. Oddly, this steel penny was not a typical 1943 war penny, it was from 1950. I didn’t think any steel pennies were made in 1950. Then I noticed this penny also had some superfluous metal that wasn’t properly removed by the circular cutting die. My professor noticed this, and tried to grab the penny back from me, but I didn’t let him have it back.
I found my seat in the classroom. Sitting next to me was a girl named Lindsay. I had never formally met Lindsay, but we had talked online before. I finally introduced myself and it was nice to meet her. Before long, it was my turn to stand before the class and deliver my final presentation. I stood up, ready to speak, when I remembered that I needed a compressed gas cylinder to perform part of the demonstration. I didn’t have any gas cylinders with me, nor could I easily get one. I spoke only for a few moments, before sitting down.
Later that night, thinking about that girl Lindsay, I went online. But instead of her, some woman I had never met started messaging me. She was thirty years old, but looked much younger. I hoped that one day I could introduce myself to her as well.
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December 12, 2006
I was at a very nicely built grocery store at the top of a hill, with white concrete and glass art deco architecture. Walking to the exit of the store, I noticed a good looking young lady dressed brightly trying to sell something to people. As I got near her, she started her sales pitch, and I moved slowly out the door as she shadowed me. I couldn’t understand her words, but she didn’t seem to mind that I was distracted. Finally outside standing at the curb, and looking out at this monumental grocery store, I confessed to the saleswoman, I was only walking slowly because my legs were asleep.
I later was at a marina on the Hudson River in the dead of winter. The river wasn’t frozen, but the air was brisk and there was snow on land. Two younger men were following me on a mission to walk around marina in the pitch black night with no flashlight. We walked down a floating service dock, but were blocked because cars were parked on the dock, perpendicular to the way we wanted to travel. The cars were covered, but appeared to be brand new cars. They seemed out of place. The whole affair was laced with a feeling of wrongness. I decided to take a detour and walk down a set of one foot narrow dock segments. As we walked down the floating dock, I couldn’t help but think about how the two men behind me had never been to this place, and they didn’t know I had ever worked there. Lost in the thought, and coming back to the situation at hand, I realized I couldn’t see anything. I immediately became disoriented and stopped. The guys behind me bumped into me when I stopped, and it caused the coupling on our dock segments to break. The docks tipped over and we were thrown into the river. The water was cold, and the current was strong.
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December 11, 2006
I was in the Nanuet Mall, but it was after hours so the mall was mostly empty. I wandered around the open atrium and looked at some of the stores. Eventually I went to leave. Ascending from the first floor to the second, there was a glass-doored foyer seperating me from an exit, with one door propped open, and that door had a sign posted on it that read: “Do not use.” Walking through the door, and through the big box department store behind the door, I eventually ended up outside.
That was when I was picked up in an older light blue OKA. I hopped in and the car was driven by the shadow driver to the mountains. Once we arrived we circled some interesting buildings and ended up on a path made of dirt. Rains had fallen recently and the dirt road was reduced to a muddy puddle. Racing around the mud roads, it became obvious that we were actually competing against other drivers and even people on foot running around this track as well. I thought for sure that the OKA would get stuck but it didn’t; at one point it was brought to a full stop in inches thick soft mud but it was able to get going again very quickly.
Things took a more macabre turn as I became aware that there had been a horrible incident at my house. We went there as fast as we could. I ran into the house, and there were lots of people crowded around a bathroom. There were children in the house, being shielded from the horrid sights that I too had yet to see. There were police officers there investigating the crime scene in the bathroom, and I asked one, who I knew, if she could tell me what was going on. She said I’d have to see for myself. Looking into the bathroom, I lost my stomach, and lost myself in the scene. The walls and floor were covered with blood, and birds feathers were scattered about as if a bird had exploded. No one said that a person was what had left the blood, but then again no one had to.
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December 10, 2006
I was heading back to Nanuet, from Troy. My car had been reasonably packed up. I had a lot of electronic stuff in the car. A few friends asked if I wanted to stop by the “Troy Music Hall” which was in Albany. It was dusk as I arrived in Albany, and I wanted to leave because I was expected at home soon. I pulled into a spiral shaped underground parking garage at the place I was going to. I was almost at street level as I parked. I walked into the street and around the block because I thought my friends were there.
Night was falling rapidly. One of my friends said, “You didn’t tell anyone what was in your car, right?” I said, no, why would I have done that? He said he just wanted to make sure because it was a bad area. That made me want to have to pee, so I stopped, found a recessed stairwell leading to a ground level apartment, and peed right on someone’s door. No one noticed though. We all started walking back towards the music hall.
As we walked back, we were picked up by another friend in a helicopter. Everyone else in the helicopter had automatic weapons, although I only noticed the CAR-15 in particular. The helicopter was also piloted by a PlayStation 2 controller. We were flying around Albany and the police were trying to follow us with little success. Somebody said they were thirsty, and the helicopter was then flown into a grocery store. As it neared the drink rack, I volunteered to get a bottle of soda. I got out of the helicopter and jumped onto the tile floor in the supermarket. I grabbed a bottle of soda, but for some reason, the helicopter had flown back outside into the parking lot, so I ran back out into the parking lot to catch the chopper. As I did, a white woman in her 50s, wearing a grey fleece, tried to stop me, and I laughed at her. She grabbed my arm, and I grabbed the helicopter’s landing bar, and at the moment we started to ascend, I pushed her back to the ground. The helicopter then took off. The police were chasing us, but because people had guns, they were shooting from the planes.
I was back at the music hall now, dropped off at the main entrance to the parking garage. I started walking in, but there were lots of people blocking the way. I didn’t have to ask what was going on because it was obvious there was a freestyle rap battle taking place. Except it was planned, and there was security and a crowd. I tried to get to my car, and a security guard asked to see my ticket. As I explained that I didn’t have a ticket, he grabbed a red sharpie marker and put a slash-mark on the back of my hand. Then he let me through.
I was trying to find my car in the garage, except the garage was confusing me. I felt like I was drugged. I ran through the sloping, square, dirty white tile and cool white fluorescent lit hallways that spiraled around the building. There was actually a second concentric ring, but it was for maintenance only, and it was dark, and I didn’t go down that way. I went down three levels and hit the very ground floor. There were people on the very ground floor, and they were standing around miscellaneous cars and debris. I said I was looking for my car but they said they hadn’t seen it. So I started going back up, figuring I had missed my car. I saw my car through a reflection in a glass door, but when I opened the door, I was inside the building. Then I couldn’t go back into the garage.
I was on the second subbasement floor, I knew that much. The architecture inside was amazing. The rooms were mostly a muted peach color with old wooden hardware everywhere. The doors had arched tops and some had angled tops, especially when they were jammed into corners. I walked through a library and some guest rooms where there were people discussing poetry and music. They asked me to stay, but I said I was running late. I walked through a series of two wooden doors and back into a stairwell that took me to the first basement level. Again I thought I saw my car through a glass door, this time even seeing the dirt on the treat of my brand new snow tires, and when I opened the door, the car was nowhere to be found. This time I didn’t let myself walk through the door and have it lock behind me.
I went up a flight of stairs and was now on the main floor. I ended up waltzing into the backstage area. This led me into practice spaces, dressing rooms, back hallways, and catwalks. I was then even more seriously disoriented than before. I ended up on the top balcony and overlooked the empty but soon-to-be-filled music hall. I left and walked through the plaster-walled and oak-trimmed 1900’s style hallways, and moments later I was in the expansive dressing room, lit with cool blue hued light, watching performers get into costume. I couldn’t figure out how to leave. I walked through a door marked EXIT and it took me into another hallway; this is where concert patrons were waiting. As I walked out trying to find the exit, feeling convinced I had finally made it, I heard a girl call my name: “Peter?”
I turned around and saw a blonde, brown eyed girl, just about my height, and as I turned around I noticed her eyes were dead set on me. I said hello, but I couldn’t remember her name. She said, “It’s been a while!” I said it certainly had, but I didn’t know at all how long it had been. She asked if I was staying for the show and I said I couldn’t because I was already running late and trying to leave. She started walking away backwards asking, “Did you manage to decide on a career?” I said yes, in Information Technology. She laughed and said good luck, still walking backwards. Then, still looking dead on at me, she said in a hushed tone, “At the xerox machine…”
She turned and walked away briskly. I followed her, and she ended up walking to a set of stairs and up to the fourth floor. When I made it up as well, I was distracted because I saw a costume rack with all kinds of police uniforms on it, and I wanted to take one. I didn’t take one because I wanted to find this girl, but then by the time I came to my senses, I couldn’t find her. I walked in circles trying to find her. After a moment, she found me and said, “Don’t worry there’s a consolation prize.” She started walking away again and went into an open elevator. She hit the button to take us to the 7th and top floor. The elevator was slow.
Looking at her again I couldn’t help but wonder where we had met or what her name was, but I didn’t ask. She got very close to me and with her face inches from mine, asked if I wanted to stay for the show.
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December 9, 2006
I was at a mountain resort. From the outside the building was five stories tall, painted white, and shaped like a circle. Inside the walls were all white but I wouldn’t have guessed that the building was shaped like a circle. My room was on the second or third floor. I was with a friend, and we were done snowboarding for the day, so we went into the hotel to have drinks. We were mingling with other guests, but I didn’t get along with them well. They were well-to-do, and I’m not. I left the party and went to walk around. I walked up the stairwell to the fifth floor. There was a window with light poring through, and I walked to the window to look out. Next to me was an elevator shaft with its doors ajar. The elevator was one floor below. I noticed however that there was a quarter inch thick ball-chain hanging down into the shaft, draped over a pulley at the top of the shaft. I tugged one end of the ball chain, and the other end pulled upwards easily. When I let go, the other end started to drop, so I must have disengaged some kind of clutch by tugging the rope (like window blinds). I couldn’t get the other end to stop dropping, so I eventually just let it go. Then a blonde lady from the fourth floor ran up and asked what I did to her laundry. I said I didn’t know what I did to make that happened, but she said I owed her. She was being friendly about it. Shortly after this I went to check out of the hotel. I ran outside with my snowboard, down a set of about five wooden stairs, over some verunda about thirty feet, and back up another set of five or six wooden stairs. There was a road covered in snow here. I set my snowboard down in the middle of the street, and ran back into the building to get the rest of my belongings.
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