#mindfuck

Our trip started in late February as my three friends, John, Steve, Max, and I drove in my truck deep into the backwoods of Boxwood Gulch to follow the North Fork of the South Platte River. Steve owns a cabin up in the backcountry so we left my truck there and began our 57 mile hike into the wooded terrain following the river.

Every now and then, I get a snatch of a song running through my head. When that happens, it can drive me nuts, and it's a devil of a time trying to get another song in there to replace it. It's gotta be another song, though. I can't ever just have a head full of peace and quiet. Sometimes the song I try to listen to and replace the persistent one will instead mix with it, creating this weird cacophonic mash-up in my skull that makes me want to stab somebody.

Call me a misanthrope, an introvert, whatever. The fact is, I always thought I preferred being alone. I had a couple of friends. Well, mainly acquaintances. People I worked with. People I lived near. Family.

Maybe it's late at night, but you can't sleep. You're bored, or you can't stop a bazillion thoughts from racing through your skull, or maybe you had too much coffee, or you're a little drunk. Whatever the case, I've been there, my friend. I know how it feels to sit there and realize that you're not really living right now. You're just existing. Surely there's something you can do, right?

Grandpa was 97 years old when he passed away. He lived far from where his three children had settled. Grandma died when I was a small child, and he ended up remarrying another woman a few years later who demanded that he move out west so that she could be nearer to her sons. She was a piece of work, was Grandma Hester. We all wondered how Grandpa could stand her. It turns out that perhaps he could not.

Kevin awoke and there was no music from his alarm clock radio, only dead air. Lucky for him, the blaring of a car alarm from the street below was loud enough to wake him. He lurched out of bed aware he was running late and hurried into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and was about to step in, when he heard the noise of a cart being pushed across the floor of his apartment floor. With the shower still running and some water dripping onto the bathroom floor, he slowly creaked out of the…

Dear Diary,

What actually happens when we die? It’s crazy to think that there is something else, and the biggest reason for that is…can you imagine your own mind being a totally different person? Is it scary to think that your mind, or your soul, could end up transplanted in a new body, with a new name, new life, but it’s still you? Even moreso, continuing in a new life like this, and still being you, but losing all of your memories, your experiences? In that way, I guess it may not be a big deal to some,…

I sat down with my bowl of popcorn, drenched in butter, just the way I liked it. I picked up the TV remote and flipped throught the channels. It was the same old stuff as always, advertising for the newest toys, or soap operas about Italian families who never get along. I stopped at the news channel.

Out in the Arizona desert, there was a child who has never seen a human face, nor heard a human voice. She resided not on the surface, but beneath it, contained within a bunker. The reason for her situation all came down to a singular issue. The Existence of God.

I'm a surgeon. Now, I've seen my fair share of strange medical events, But one event that I saw still haunts me to this day.

Day 1

“So what’s your story, morning glory?” he asked her, staring into her big brown eyes. They were like two magnets pulling him in. Of all the juke joints in town, he had to walk into this one. Where he would see this exotic gold skinned beauty in a dress that could cure cancer. It was a red dress. One that had seen its share of blood and lives fucked up beyond redemption. If dresses could talk, this one could write an encyclopedia of misery.

The cops had everything about the kidnapping of Joey wrong. Their prime suspect, Scooter the Clown was a well known children's entertainer in town. He performed at parties, like Joey's all the time. At the precinct I am an insignificant ant flailing for the attention of titans. Finally, a cop turns to me and says, "Are you lost little boy?" On cue, my silence held no longer.

“Bobby! Pay attention!” he heard his teacher say. He snapped out of his reverie and looked up to see her glaring at him. “Did you hear anything I’ve been saying?” she continued. Bobby shrugged his shoulders. Prior to being disrupted, he was daydreaming that he could freeze time, and before that he was imagining himself navigating the classroom if he was only 5 inches tall. The teacher continued to rant at him, just as they all did, then she placed him on detention Friday night after school.

When you are admitted to a hospital, they place on your wrist a white wristband with your name on it. But there are other different colored wristbands which symbolize other things. The red wristbands are placed on dead people.

Late one night about ten months ago, I found myself rushing my daughter to the hospital. I remember the morning. What time I woke up, the food I ate, and the sound of my girl’s voice yelling “See ya, daddy!” as she ran out the door to catch her school bus.

Sam loved owning pets for as long as he could remember. After his son and wife were killed by a drunk driver, he was left emotionally and mentally scarred. He tried seeing psychologists, but the medicine they prescribed did nothing to ease his pain. All the pills managed to do was make him nauseous and cloud his memory. However, Sam discovered that pets have helped fill the void that the tragic accident left in his heart. Sam had failed to protect his family, so the idea of caring for and…

My basement has never exactly been a welcoming place. It’s unfurnished; there’s no carpet and the walls consist of boring, exposed bricks. There’s a set of old wooden stairs on one end that creaks whenever anyone uses them. Behind the stairs is a storage area that begins about four or five feet off the ground and goes maybe fifteen feet further back underneath the garage. The place is a dump, as my brother NEVER cleans it, and toys and tools and random things are sprawled out across the entire…

Pardon the sloppy handwriting, but I'm doing this on the move. We didn't mean for it to happen this way. Bottom line is, we made a mistake, but there's no going back now. The days, if you can call them that, have melted away into meaningless expressions of a life beyond our reach. Well, my reach. The others are gone now, leaving just me in this hell. It didn't seem like the best of ideas, sure, but in the moment it was pure curiosity that drove us to investigate the light coming from the…