The door opens and a police officer steps in explaining his urgency to get me out of the house, something about carbon monoxide. Across from me I can see Ed J. Carlson slowly falling unconscious to a sleep we all know he never wakes from. I grab my mac and head out the door with the police officer.
In his car he explains that he is no longer an officer of the law, but instead a contributing member of it, he tells me how his past employment left him with vertigo and a debilitating acrophobia. As he speaks I can see the road getting longer and longer as if I were not moving but instead the world moving around me.
I blink and Maggie is standing there in the middle of the road speaking to a man, I see the words "Jealous" and "Skipper" pass her lips but again no sound utters free, another blink and I gasp for air.
My room. The same cigarette burning through to the filter tip that all now hangs ever threateningly over the whiskey glass I often use as an ashtray. My eyes sting and my throat is a pin hole in tin foil, each breath tearing through with a sickly tasteless sensation. I drink a water bottle dry and pull up my shirt revealing my stomach. I jab a needle into it counting, "1, 2, 3, 4..".
As I lay I listen to the silence that engulfs me, I can just hear so distant in my own head a music only I can understand, the guitars, the drums, the piano, the violas and the cellos. Somewhere a glockenspiel is driving it.
- Max
Yellow Journal, 17/12/1983
