After all you had to do to learn how to forget, without narcotics, why would you rip the scab right off like this? Why would you cause yourself pain? It’s almost like you’re testing. Because you want to suffer. You’re no masochist. You’re just the type who really loves relief. So test: how much BAD MEMORY you can handle without having to regress. But it doesn’t seem deliberate. Because, once the thought is unleashed, once the fifty foot fuse of obsession is lit and sizzling there really is nothing you can do but step back and hope you don’t suffer burns over more than ninety percent of body. Psycho-emotionally speaking.

You survived the recovered memories. It’s the unrecovered ones that scare the shit out of you… The memories you never had to recover. Because—do they count as memories if you never stop remembering them? When the same loop plays continually, is that a trailer? These are not really like memories, they’re more like brain spam. With so much meth in your bloodstream you have to pull the air off your face in strips. You have to sit down to pee. Because if you stand there for too long, staring down, the toilet will turn into the head of a mammoth you’ve found thawed in the snow.

CRANK-TASTICS

The professor called them the American Champions. The Crank-Tastics. He said he was writing his doctorate thesis on Amphetamerica, and forgot he said it, and said it again, like he said everything again, and again after that, spilling his thesis that societies do not find drugs, drugs find them. “Drugs, see, utilize the host users and abusers the way a flower uses insects to spread its pollen far and wide, to propagate the species.” America’s psycho-topology, in this year of Our Lord, favored speed. “I mean, when you make rockets, you need rocket fuel. And America still thinks it makes rockets. It doesn’t realize.” “Doesn’t realize what?” you say, after five minutes of him staring slack-jawed at the wall, like it’s got a TV in it. He’s so immersed he forgot he was talking, or what he was talking about, giving you ample time to stare at him and ask yourself the question you don’t want to ask, while he’s chasing some Red Devil lightning around his head, some thought that solved everything, that solved the fucking world, even the problem of what the fuck happened to his life that he spent eleven years trying to finish his doctoral thesis and at five different colleges—and what happened to your life, that you have to be here naked in front of him, to get a Pass on a Pass/Fail so you don’t lose a shitty scholarship to a community college, $2,500 that you already spent anyway on shitty crank you needed to get up and go to the class that you never went to every shitty day, and the whole plan to sell some to pay for what you use never works, never fucking works, and now—well, look at you, Cinderella!