Bottoms Up

Thursday night, 10-10

(logged on my phone – catching up again)

I am myself, but a much darker version.  I have hit the proverbially “rock bottom.”  It’s nighttime, and I’m standing outside in a gravel lot.  I am behind a dive bar from which I was a patron.  I’m staring of into space with a cigarette in one hand, a leather motorcycle jacket on, and heavy, dark make-up cakes my face.

“Fuck it,” I say aloud to myself, and I start walking.  Through some accident of time and space (or through the sci-fi tendencies of my dream state), I end up in my hometown in the year 2002.  Unfazed, I skulk past a fenced-in playground area of an elementary school.  Children are all over, running and yelling and playing.  I sneer menacingly at their little cherub faces.  In one of the kids, I see a little James Franco.  One corner of my mouth rises in a grin.  I look at him and shake my head thinking, “Silly James Franco.”

I trek further until I find myself outside of the high school.  There is a corridor between wings of the massive building.  A bustle of high school kids in band t-shirts is filing through the outdoor corridor.  They’re milling out, all talking to each other.  An evil smile crosses my face.  I scan the faces, recognizing many, but looking for just one – me.  The kids are coming out in groups of their sections.  Pit percussion finally rounds the corner.  I can see them.  My group.  The only face I don’t see is my own.  I look down and realize that I have taken the place of my high school self.