It’s like schizophrenia, I guess, but my thoughts are completely normal. Maybe it’s half schizophrenia; my thoughts are sane, but my vision is insane. Maybe it really is schizophrenia and I just think I am sane. I don’t know. I just know I have to go through this alone.
I call the watery world, Rolling World.
My friends call it, Acid Ocean Eyes.
But — I can see in the third person without everything rolling, thank Yahweh (or whatever God likes to be called), so I don’t miss my old eyes so much.
Sometimes I believe that I’m blessed with my God’s Eyes, just like the people on TV that say they are blessed with psychic powers. God’s sympathy is why I can see this way, even though I have never been a BIG fan of God’s. Someday I’ll figure out why He gave them to me.
Maybe I am His son, like Jesus Christ, but regarded as the fuck-up of his two children. Who knows…
Occasionally I enjoy my rolling world. It can put me into a peaceful hum that relaxes every twitchy nerve in my body. Sure, it’s hard to get around when you can’t see straight, but sometimes it is pacific-beauty.
Once I asked a doctor, “What is wrong with me?”
I figured he wouldn’t believe me. Even I don’t believe me. Who has ever heard of acid ocean eyes?
But the doctor was just staring at his wall, paying no compassion.
Then he shrugged.
He said, “There is always something wrong with someone.”
Scene 2
The Warehouse Between Dimensions
I live in a warehouse with three friends and two strangers.
My highest of the three friends is named Christian. He has a speaking problem caused by drug abuse as well — maybe that’s why we became friends — but it is quite the opposite of mine. His problem is that he never shuts up, like he’s naturally cranked up on snoopies, the dippy-fun guy. He talks and talks and talks, even when there’s nothing to talk about, even when he’s alone. Over and over, the same subjects, annoying mostly everyone he comes into contact with. Most of the time all his talking gets on my nerves as well, but I’m sure that all my silence is a pester to him.
But it isn’t like that all the time. When I’m alone with him, we communicate differently than with a crowd. I speak more and he speaks less, so that it all evens out to a medium speed somehow. Besides the small people in my wall, he is the only person that I enjoy talking to.
Nobody knows that Christian and I speak differently when we are alone. They say that Leaf is as silent as a leaf, and Christian is as obnoxious as a Christian.
I don’t remember Christians being obnoxious, but my friends tell me they all were at one point. So they say. There are no more Christians today, at least not the Christ-worshipping kind, and there aren’t any religions either.
The religions were the first things that everyone became bored with. People stopped praying and going to church, holy water went unblessed, crosses and candles were no longer being purchased. The whole religious phenomenon just vanished, like snap, besides the few who considered their religion’s ways of living too routine to stop.
Routine is an important word today, because it is the only thing left that makes the world go around.
The people of Rippington are excluded from this statement, since the walm is the opposite of routine. And the walm brings out odd feelings in the beings that surround it. These feelings are the natural reaction to the foreign energy that fuels the walm, the stuff that makes it go. We call the energy sillygo, but that’s not the scientific term. The name the scientists gave it was the stuff that makes it go, because the scientists didn’t care much to give it a proper scientific name.
We call it sillygo because it makes you go silly. Nobody knows any more about it than that. Probably because everyone in Rippington went silly, and I’m sure everyone outside of Rippington could care less.
As for the people that come out of the walm, they could give a pig’s twat about the native Rippingtonians. They are Earth’s new toys, and the only things Child Earth pays attention to these days are the new toys. No longer does he enjoy watching the lives of us outdated action figures as he did with my ancestors. New toys are now higher classed citizens as far as Earth is concerned, even if the old toys have more money and better living arrangements.
The new people live on the streets in small settlements. Two settlements are nearby the warehouse where I live. One is a medieval tent village by the train tracks. The other is a colony of midgets that dress up like past U.S. presidents. (The word midget, by the way, is no longer an offensive term since no one is offended by anything anymore.)
I think I’ve seen an Ulysses S. Grant midget once, but I’m not for sure. Grant was the closest president that popped into my head at that time, so I guessed it was him. How many were fat and bearded anyway? Most of the midgets are not very good at impersonating. Maybe they like it that way.
I am sitting in the warehouse with my cello right now.
It’s not a very healthy cello. I found it in an abandoned apartment house all crippled and warped. But I’m not a very good cello player, so it all evens out. I like to make scratch-crazy noises on it, defacing it with the bow. I’m very good at this. Getting more and more obnoxious every day. And I am very proud of myself.
The cello is also the soundtrack to my rolling world vision. Right now, I’m scratching at the strings, creating a sound similar to a saw cutting wood, ogling at a group of steel sculptures, very sharp-spiked and crude, and they roll around like lardy belly dancers.
The warehouse was once used for producing hundreds of steel sculptures by a female artist known as The Lady of Steel. The works are awe-interesting in my roll-woggy eyes, but none of my roommates appreciate them, spitting candy-phlegm on the ground sometimes. The outside world has probably lost all interest in art by now. Not even the citizens of Rippington care for it. Not even my friends.
After The Lady of Steel lost all her money, she gave us her warehouse and all of her sculptures. She said she was going to go through the walm to find a less boring place to live in, one with an appreciation for fine art. She was the only person I can think of who wanted to go through that horrible walm door, into another dimension-world.
I look down at my forearm:
The arm hairs are fanning without wind, crawling like creeper-weeds, wire-spiders, pulsating soup skin.
I look to the window: a malformed wave of water, coming to crash over me, the drool of a senile planet. My stomach turns with the wave. My breath vibrating. I can no longer keep up with the rolling world, so my eyes close drunk.
Whenever my visions get me dizzy from an overdose of movement, I either shut myself off from the outside world or look through my God’s Eyes. I’ve chosen the latter.
God’s Eyes:
I go to my best friend, Mr. Christian, looking down at him through the cloud’s chin-hair, as he walks up the train track carrying a steel drum. Christian is wearing a polyester suit; he always wears a polyester suit. We call him a wannabe rude boy, smoking on his cheap cigars. There aren’t any more rude boys. There aren’t any more wannabe rude boys either. The term I am speaking of is a Jamaican slang word for gangster.
In the sixties, Jamaicans would pretend to be rude boys. They would dress up classy in zoot suits, porkpie hats, cold eyebrows, smooth words. They were influenced by ska music, which often glorified the lifestyles of rude boys and made everyone want to be one. Years later, the same thing happened with rap music. Glorifying gangsters (sometimes spelled/pronounced gangstas ) in music usually creates wannabes.