working title: I HAVE NO PAVLOV AND I MUST DOG

While I was trying to pick up the pieces of my identity from various parts of the otherworld after a substance induced trance, I came to a realization.

I don’t like writing dialogue.

As I rearrange shards of myself on the bathroom floor (in a completely new way that’s for sure to become a hit this time), Herman Hesse walks in. He’s much younger than the age he died, and he is shredded, he’s also not stoked. He asks me how dare I steal his metaphors. I say “actually considering the self as constituting of multitudes is a very common trope, you were neither the first one in doing it nor will you be the last.” The blonde blue eyed literary and literal giant of massive girth walks up to me while mouthing “You think so? I’ll show you who’ll be the last one you shit fucking cunt.” I can only muster some of “But it has been 95 years, the copyright is over!” before my head and the porcelain bowl get really intimate.

I am really sick, dear reader. There’s only one cure. I need to become a dog.

The only constant in my inner sanctum during the recallable past has been the ceaseless turmoil between two schools of thinking. The first school, we’ll call it the school of Pavlov, wants self improvement. There’s nothing it wants more than to go up, improvement up, improvement down, improvement sideways. Improve, improve, improve. The disciples of this school are known to be ruthless assholes, however they have one massive flaw in that none of them actually knows what self improvement is and how to measure it.

…

There is no second school, fuck the schools. I don’t go to school. Go back to dogs.

I need to become a dog.

I need a new perspective that makes self-improvement both desirable and imperative.

That’s my illness. What my brain wants to happen and what my brain wants to do seem to be not very well aligned and that seems to be making some of my neurons very angry. The conscious, subconscious and the unconscious seem to be stuck in a perverted Mexican standoff and there’s no good or bad, only ugly. So what’s a man to do? Man has found respite in becoming a dog. I need to Pavlov myself. Why does one want anything anyway? Why does a thing a make my brain secrete the happy juice and the other not? Is it in my fucking genes? I don’t think so. I’ve been Pavloved for the last 25 years. Everywhere I go I see flashing lights, see increasing numbers, taste overwhelming tastes, hear overwhelming sounds, feel overwhelming sensations. My primitive lizard brain wasn’t made to endure this sort of stimulation, it’s suffocating. The over-saturated world of 21st Century won’t keep draining my balls. I’m pushing rope, I’m done. Now I know what Peter Sinfield felt when he wrote 21st Century Schizoid Man. I’m not schizoid though, that’s amateur hour; I managed to split not just the mind, but the whole thing.

Hesse smashes my head through the toilet bowl and my skull that was already bursting at the seams finally craps out on me and bursts open. The contents are sent flying through the proverbial spacetime once more.

I wake up on hard wooden floor, an imposing man of considerable height is standing over me. I immediately recognize him. He knows I know. I stand up.

“Pavlov.”

“[REDACTED].”

“I’m going to gut you like a cornish game hen.”

“I’d like to see you try. I’m only a figment of your imagination, already dead, immortalized in your psyche. There’s no way out of here.”

I stand up, he’s got a point. Brute force only works on me.

But I’ve learned.

“Have you not realized where we are?”

He looks around, the realization slowly setting in.

“…Chekhov, no…”

He turns back to me. It’s too late. I have the gun. I don’t even say a cool line, I just blow his brains out. Metaphorical guns for metaphorical cunts.

No, no, no, I say “Fuck you, and your dog!”, then have my catharsis yelling “This is all your fault! Why did you have to make the neurons so plastic?”, a question he couldn’t answer because he was dead, even in my head.

Unfortunately I’m still not a dog, and now Pavlov’s dead too. It was worth it. We need to go deeper.

I turn the gun to myself and pull the trigger. My head explodes in a colorful blast of literary devices.

Looking for suspects for my suspect mental state, there’s no easier target than my parents, however much I still love them. I often find my dejected and under pressure little self when I plunge the depths of my madness, so they will have to go too. My conscience, which astonishingly hasn’t been lost throughout my escapades to derangement unlike my sense of coherence, prevents me from describing this in gruesome detail. Bullets fly, heads roll, they’re emblematically no more. It’s a clean cut. With them I also shed my childhood, my upbringing, some of my deeply held beliefs about myself. Nothing of value is lost. They scatter into cosmos as dust, perhaps for some author seeking inspiration to find and finally unlock their own trauma.

The night is long, and blood has touched the wolf’s fangs. I’m thirsty. I need more.

With little me dead I’m once more severed and cast into the abyss. I’m a stray bullet ricocheting in my own brain, looking for a new name. I recombine myself at each step as I transpose through the space at lightspeed, each step a new me, a different creature, I shift from a primordial beast to a transcendent omnipotence and back at every blink. “I can’t recognize you anymore!” screams a desperate voice in the distance. I know where I am going. I’m going to her.

She’s such an easy target because she’s already dead. I just leave a bouquet of flowers on our grave. Sometimes you die but it takes a long time to catch up with you, that’s what has happened here. It was so easy, doesn’t even feel good. I think I became a wolf instead of a dog; Hesse had warned me, I didn’t listen. I need the big release, I need to find the big game, I’ve been building it up for far too long.

Four people sit around the table in a distant echo of a memory, one of them says “Why do you even need a therapist, just talk to us.”, a woman in a white coat screams “We are losing him!” in another corner.

It’s so hectic out here, pure pandemonium. The universe has the clarity of a TV screen tuned to a dead channel. How does one look for peace if they have never found it? How does one lose something if they’ve never had it?

As I’m hurtling through the space with the gracefulness of a loose brick, an object of utmost velocity registers in my peripheral vision. It’s going so fast. It turns wide and aligns itself with my trajectory, aproaching me head on. As it approaches with superluminal velocity, I start being able to make out the features. Oh, oh no.

It’s me.

We suspend in the air an arm’s length apart after an abrupt stop. It is not seldom that I have trouble recognizing my face, but this is one of the better days. It’s not the first time this has happened, and all of those times are best described by the compound word clusterfuck. I’m wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a narrow black tie, and I have a look that can be aptly described as a precise mixture of apathy, disdain and pity on my face. I’m so me. He is, that is; I don’t even know what I’m wearing.

“Cool place, shame it’s so fucked up. Have you been picking at your scabs again?”

“I really don’t have time for this man.”

“Oh got places to be, have you? Are you having another one of your pretentious episodes of “"”introspection”””?”

“Well, yes.”, I stop for a second and realize I don’t have to humour whatever this is. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be anyway? Me from another dimension or something? I thought I had purged all of the tropes.”

“You didn’t purge shit, fuckhead. Listen: you’re spiraling out right now. Normally I don’t do this but you’re pathetic at the moment. Do you really think any of this matters? Neither your life nor your unintelligible “writing” is interesting, even worse: it’s wrong. It’s just a shitty mask that you’re trying to wear to show that you’re sophisticated. You’re hollow.”

He’s got a point, but we’re reaching levels of contrivance David Lynch could only dream of and I just can’t deal with it. Don’t worry, I know he’s wrong: under his veil of unimpressedness and tired and subtly superior energy lies an insecure and broken kid whose only defense mechanism is pretended indifference; he is an earlier model.

I reach into his mouth and unhinge his jaw. Nobody really tells you how much bite force the human jaw is capable of, but it’s surprisingly large; an evolutionary leftover from our apex predator days. His mouth enlarges, and the rest of him is sucked into it like a perverted ouroboros that keeps eating itself until it has completely disappeared.

“Phew”, I say, “Close call”.

But my hubris comes back to bite me in the ass, as I spot another thing converging on my location. Is this going to be a recurring thing? My murder spree must have been making waves; soon enough I’m talking to the man himself again.

“What are you doing?”, he asks. A bit more seasoned this one, the timbre of his voice more serene, less chaotic. I recognize his clothes.

“Look, I’ll pay you $100 to fuck off.”

“Just tell me what you’re doing and I’ll fuck off”. His voice is commanding, I have no other choice.

“Just some spring cleaning, you know. Need to get rid of some baggage”.

“Why though, what does that accomplish?”

“They were holding me down, I needed to free myself.” He should fuck off any moment now.

“That’s the thing though - I don’t think that’s going to help.”

“Look will you leave me alone? I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain.”

“You don’t understand, you’re unhinged. You-“

“Yes I am, and I’m getting impatient with this whole different-me-from-different-wherever-patronizing-me bit. Just go back to wherever you came from and live your life if you think you have it all figured out.”

“I’m you dumbass, this is all you. What you’re trying to kill, it’s also you. What we’re inside of, it’s all you. It’s what makes you. You’re unhinged, literally. You’ve unhinged from yourself and you’re floating.”

He had a compelling argument.

“You can only go back by subtracting, but not in time. We’ve been tainted; we can’t go back to a younger self and be clueless and blissful. If you go through with this there’s only ruin for you in the end. You’re doomed to repeat this cycle of erasure over and over again.”

“What do you suggest then?”

“Let me help you. You and I are facets of the same prism. Eddies of the same current. We need to go back. You must need to feel what it means to be in multitudes yet in unison.”

I consider for a moment.

“I will pass”.

I dash forward to dispatch him, but am only able to grab his right arm. He makes a quick feint to the side and grabs my left arm. We are suspended in a pose of struggle briefly, trying to make some sort of purchase, an advantage. Maybe is right after all, he is as strong as me.

“It’s for your own good” he says through his strenuous breath.

“Just let me be please” I say through mine.

My downfall, after all, are my glasses. I never learned to headbutt properly, you see. I must’ve been somewhere else when he did. My face is a red doormat after the third one, and the fourth one sends me into free fall. He catches me in my reeling as he takes my head between his hands. We are staring into each other now, face to face. There is a familiar, nameless emotion in his eyes; fury bridled by sorrow, lashed by pity - something I’ve seen in a mirror before.

“YOU WILL - LET ME - HELP YOU - HELP ME - HELP US” he says. “Damn, I think he’s the unhinged one now”, I’m thinking to myself. But before I can say my funny quip all of the emotions blend into the iris and a blinding light fills my vision. I feel an emotion so extreme, I can’t even tell which one it is - overwhelmed to the brink of my existence. It starts burning its way through me as everything melds together. When it finally reaches my skin on the inside, I’m not there anymore. The blaze breaks the boundary between [REDACTED] and the outside world and thoroughly dissolves it. The body has turned inside out and it is everything else’s turn to reel, but inwards this time. Everything is converging on what was our body - now an incomprehensible abnormality of the very fabric of this spacetime. Each and every one of the dust particles, characters, emotions, feelings, friends, parents, lovers, stars, pulsars and black holes make their way to the confluence and all enter what became of me.

And there, I saw Pavlov, I saw my parents, I saw her, and then I saw you.

You were there.

I was there.