The most interesting weekend of my life involved three separate incidents that happened but I can’t prove them beyond a reasonable doubt because they are so bizarre.
The first incident involved stones being thrown on our roof, the sound following me from room to room and thought to thought. I remember there being an intense sound like stones rolling one at a time off a steep tin roof from the peak down to the gutters. Nobody else in the house was hearing it. The rock would cascade down the roof as my spine shivered then straightened up as if I was involved in a drill from hell-week, having to stand straight up in the rain for hours and salute someone I admire and hate at the same time. I began to march around the house to see if the sound intensity would follow. The more I moved the quicker the rocks would trickle down the roof indistinguishable from my spine.
Just when I was about to lose my mind and throw a glass inside my dad’s stone house to see what truths may unfurl, my much younger brother Alex looks at me, thumb up pointing behind him he says “I can hear those beer bottles!”
It seems the stone throwing was a snapshot of all the time I spent inside bars hearing the chatter of elevated egos putting glass to glass as my spine became a sieve for molecular god transparency against the demon that is alcohol. Problem solved, as the symphony of beer bottles eventually faded into the background like a drunkard does at the peak of celebration by amateurs.
I then soberly slithered into the couch for a good night’s rest before the next maddening thing would target my mind and body.
I’ve written in the past that I sleep with my wrists bent, pressed against my upper rib cage causing my hands to go numb. That night after the beer bottles incident my numb hand had gravitated to the upper right part of my face like a vacuum to the palm of the hand.
I was somewhere between dreamland and lucidity as my numb hand felt like it was inside my head massaging my brain, which in turn was electrocuting my hand. I could not tell where my face started and the hand ended feeling as if it was a stranger violating my space with gruesome intentions. I eventually woke up and was able to discern between hand and face but separating them would take full consciousness. I lay there confused for a minute with my lifeless hand upon my face wondering if the experience was extremely dumb, exceptionally unique, or overtly scary enough for me to not tell anybody.
The third oddity of the weekend involved my mind and body but also my spirit. I’ve had good luck with cats in the past. Meaning that I know what it entails for curiosity to kill the cat. No I haven’t hurt animals but the amount of paranoia a cat exhibits as it looks at the moon over your shoulder, there is no wonder why dogs embrace the moon. And with that being said, no wonder why young men aren’t revered for kicking cats but are for ringing that bell. That is one bell ringing I will never forget.
I’ve been trying for years to forget what happened on the couch at my dad’s place but it’s too awesome to let go. I was getting good rest that night having gone through some intense mental processes but as the cockadoodle doo a doodled I woke up motionless.
I’ve heard of cats stealing your breath in the night but they never told me that one day I would wake up to find the eye of a cat millimeters from my eye as if trying to break down my DNA for some doomsday plot to weaken the human animal by making me feel closer to being an animal. It was insane that I had been trapped by this beast who had his eye on me, literally, to make me feel weak if only for a second. In that instant I realized the cat did not have a soul, that it was hypnotized by the atoms of my eye, paralyzed, and had not a thought in its head. So I swatted that little fucker off my chest and continued on with my weekend. A weekend that was only the start of things to come.
If our soul is our DNA, with then and now there is no escaping where we are headed. FEM
Francis Erich McElroy 