Let’s talk in the liminal space between my exit wound and your thirty-ought-six.

Murder me in mayhem, casual stranger. Now I sit here with all the dead-Os and watch the Land of the Living. Hear them laugh, giggle and cry out loud in sheer wonder at the magnificent, beauteous, bounteous, glorious, redolent, subliminal hypnotic druglike Heaven on Earth. Step right up. Five bits a pop.

Wanna experience total transcendence? Then come on in. You’ll not believe what I prepared specifically for you. I knew you were coming. I prepped the machine. We’re all lubed up and bent over, ready to go.

And when I say we I mean me. This is me alone in a room reaching out and taking a firm grip of your hand in the darkness. If there’s one thing I believe in, dear reader, it’s you. Me and my pen sprint across the grass cropped short like a golf course and jump off the edge of the sickening cliff.

It looks like the whole ocean’s beneath us. The ocean is you. Into your willing arms I splash and sink down to the bottom and begin probing your sand with my pen. I know it’s here somewhere, the treasure lost for so long. After years of toil, following leads across deserts and into deep jungles, all of which proved to be dead ends in the end.

Until one day, sitting at the bar in LaGuardia airport, a man with a scaly face slid the map over to me with a hiss and a warning that I might not like what I find. Pff whatever, I don’t believe in – tap tap. Thunk thunk. Well, well, what’s this?

Something hard and hollow introduces itself to the inquisitive end of my pen. What, my friend, could it possibly be?