The Hipster Hillbilly

    Oh Jesus!  What is this light squirming through the blinds like vicious vipers?—their mouths open and fangs gleaming in the sun.  I open my eyes.  Ouch, shit!  They’re biting me!  They’re crawling all over my chest and burrowing into my skull.  I’M BLIND!  I’M DYING!  My head throbs and my stomach churns.  It’s the worst possible feeling known to man, worse than the pains of childbirth, decapitation, or being drawn and quartered by a fleet of draft horses.  Yes, my friend…I have a hangover.     The last thing I remember I was finishing off the last beer out of a twelve pack while my roommate vaped Delta-8 and we “vibed” to some tunes.  Also I might have had a few shots of whiskey.  I normally crash around 8:30PM, but was up well past midnight.  And while I’m usually awake by 5:00AM, I had apparently slept until the terrible rays of the rising sun bled into my room and put out my recently opened eyes...

  “ Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves.   You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can't get a grip. ” —Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary     Nerves like rusty razor blades chipping away at my spine.  A mind rattled in thick hazes of fog and nervous stupor.  Trembling hands and a shaky stance.  The fear was setting in.     Four months.  Not a weekend visit or even a week-long vacation, but a change in setting and routine for four long months.  I started to feel uneasy about it.  What had I just agreed to?  But I’d come too far to turn back—there would be no retreat, no surrender; my only choice was to charge headlong into the fray, bayonets gleaming in the sun, and “embrace the absurd, and take the plunge.”     At 7:45AM, I cracked open a chocolate-flavored Buzzball, shot it home, and chased it with a Monster.  My mother stood on the front porch sobbing uncontrollably. ...

         The Norse god Thor has blessed my arrival to John’s Island with the thunderous pound of his hammer and lightning like electric spider webs cast upon a dark, breathless sky.  Almighty Thor has a hard-on for sacred trees, so I must visit the Angel Oak in the midst of the storm.  Maybe I should sacrifice a goat from one of the many farms on the island as a gift to Thunderboy and hang its bloody corpse from one of the oak’s scrawling branches?          Tomorrow is the big day.  Jesus, am I nervous.  My anxiety would be at an all-time high, but I’ve self-medicated with Jose Cuervo and beer.  I don’t like uncertainty or anything vague when I make plans.  I’m all down for spontaneity and random adventures, but when I go somewhere I like to know my arrival is down in the books and there’s no room for error.  I’m stressed out about opening the gate to my bourgeois community.  You have to search for...

 “O n rare occasions he showed flashes of stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard.” —Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary     Day four of quarantine:     I write to you on the verge of madness and total mental collapse from overwhelming social isolation.  The human being, by nature, is designed as a social creature.  I am more adept than most, having spent seven years developing and honing loner, misanthropic, and anti-social tendencies.  But at least I had a job where I could shoot the shit with coworkers and listen to the humdrum idiocy of the common customer.  Now I am relegated to re-reading books, listening to podcasts, watching television, drinking myself into a stupor, and having full-blown philosophical discussions with my cat.  Human contact exists solely via a text message, Facebo...

      I look like a madman freshly escaped from the asylum—disheveled and unshaven; my thick, curly hair poofs into an oily afro reminiscent of a Medusa head full of squirming vipers.  Unusual odors permeate from my pores and soak into yellow stains beneath the armpits of a previously white t-shirt as the warm, cleansing water of the shower rests unused and unwanted in rusty pipes.  I don’t even remember the aroma of my body wash or deodorant; my cologne as foreign a smell as a former lover’s perfume.  If I could only catch my breath long enough to crawl down to the closest intersection, passing vehicles would shower me with loose pocket change and crinkled dollar bills thinking I some broke miscreant beggar.  I have the croup, the plague, the Black Death of the 2020’s…I am the rider of the white horse Pestilence, wielding a bow and the dreaded crown of COVID-19.        My boredom torments me more than my symptoms, like some fatigui...

    “No journey is too great, when one finds what one seeks.” —Frederich Nietzsche        A week from now I will be out of my element—a stranger in a strange town, working in a strange store and surrounded by strange faces with unfamiliar expectations.  I’ll be living with strangers for four months in a two-bedroom, two bath apartment in an area I’ve only visited once in my life.  Just about a week ago as a matter of fact.  My life will consist of long work hours in a congested, upscale shopping center surrounded by looming live oaks with their branches dangling in sheets of Spanish moss like silver tinsel on a Christmas tree.  Ah…the coastal air, full of the salt and brine of the sea, cool spring breezes blowing off the marshes of my much fetishized Low Country—the land of shrimp and grits, oysters on the half shell, local beers and spirits, the first shots of the Civil War; a realm glowing with the pale reflection of the crescent moon ...

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