How Bob got Zonked:

Once, Bob tried LSD.

The first time was cool, enlightening, and a decently fun time was had by all.

The second time Bob did it with a friend named Henry and it was nothing he could have been prepared for. They dropped LSD and then began to play video games. The immersion was amazing. They were in the game and around the time that Henry was jabbering about needing to kill things and pointing out that real life and video games were blurring, they cut it off. After a few hours, Henry was supposed to go to a tea party that Bob was not invited to but had friends they both knew attending. Bob was laying out on the couch, trying to close his eyes to the swirling thoughts and ceiling. Then came the decision. Bob said sure, he would go.

Bob was driven there and it felt like they were in a spaceship where the reaction time is heightened and yet decreased. As if they were in a time fluctuation where time was slowed to a snail’s pace and they were operating at normal reaction. The trip, although only eight blocks, felt like hours. With that being the case, Bob thought the car had transported him to some foreign place he had only seen in the core of the planet. Although he had been to the tea party’s residence many times prior, it felt fresh and new.

Needless to say, some of it was a blur to Bob upon recollection. Sadly, he did remember tidbits and snapshots from the time he stayed at the Warmest Core of the Planet. His mindset was that outside was an empty and hollow wasteland. As if nuclear holocaust had already happened and it was uninhabitable. Being that it was late February and at night, there was no question that the cold and darkness enveloped him and seemed as if he was in a frozen menagerie of Purgatory. It felt like hell had frozen over to Bob. Not in the scary imagery of Hell, what with demons and suffering. Just a shattering feeling of abandonment even though Bob’s friends were around the whole time.

Then, Bob entered his idea of the “Center of the Universe” where the tea party was being held. The walls were painted in pastels and warm colors, it smelled of sweet teas and nature fragrances he couldn’t even fathom, and everyone was smiling, happy, and laughing. Bob honestly thought it was the last bastion of the planet that he’d slipped into. As if this was where our world would be reborn, with college students having a tea party at 9pm on a Friday night. Bob was quite beyond himself.

So naturally, Bob fucked shit up.

Bob remembered thinking it was the center of the world and how things were becoming a bit too Freudian. The few people he knew personally were talking normally, and yet all the others were speaking normally laced with profane and sexual imagery. They would say words like cock, clit, fuck, sex and the like between discussions of how their days were and how they all felt. The exact describing term eluded him, but “primal urges” was the best way to think of it. Bob later learned they were passing around a book of sexual poems they were reading aloud in the room. He thought they were speaking in erotic tongues, similar to speaking in tongues at a church, only with sexual profanity instead of gibberish. Bob was given a cup of tea to just keep him occupied and away from people. He was starting to become a social pariah at the “Core of Happiness”, but Bob sipped it regardless to please the now ethereal and last traces of humanity in this warm sanctuary. The tea had no taste, it simply felt like warm fluid. It could have been piping hot, but Bob didn’t feel it. It was just a warm something going down his gullet.

While on LSD, the surroundings dictated his mood. Bob had to leave the Core, nothing felt right and he was becoming a nuisance to friends and strangers. So he was ushered outside with the Henry and other friends to discuss things happening. He whispered, “hold me back, I don’t know what I am going to do.” and then asked his friend Henry to fight him or for Henry to punch him in the face. Henry, like the gentleman he was, didn’t and with a new-found confidence Bob was somehow let back into the house. Bob remembered being a lying and charismatic bastard at this point by saying he was fine and the journey was over, but of course it wasn’t.

Bob slipped into the front door of the Core, where it was so warm that it made his vision immediately blur in his glasses. He was allowed to mingle in the kitchen of the Core while his friend Cody guarding the door into the living room. Bob had picked up a kitchen knife and grazed it against his fingers, the blade making a razor-whisking noise as it slowly drew away from him. Cody gave Bob a head shake of disapproval and then Bob threw it back against the wall-mounted magnet where he had found it. At last Bob felt that he could be with the icons beginning what could be a new world. He took his mug and filled it up with tea for the last time and wedged his way into the hardwood living room where the other entities were mingling. Bob then slowly made casual eye contact with everyone in the living room. It was quick, not a death glare, but just enough to capture the attention of everyone. Bob stared at the whole tea party and simply turned the cup of tea upside down on the floor. He ran out of the house, stealing a mini orange he’d found in the kitchen moments before and fleeing the scene.

Bob ran out of the house and then started climbing the nearby tenant’s staircase. He got to the top and then took a huge bite out of the orange, rind and all. He could only taste citrus, not a discernible flavor. He then chucked the orange over the house where the Core was, located in the middle of the downtown housing for a local university. Bob ran down the stairs and thought something was wrong, that he may have missed something. He picked up a nearby empty beer bottle and while clutching it he thought maybe planetary physics were gone, for whatever reasons that had eluded him. So, from the side of the Core’s house, Bob chucked the bottle into an apartment complex across the street. It shattered at the top of the building and glass rained down to the pavement. It worked just fine and Bob was relieved.

He felt like he was in a perpetual state of repeating history, as if the end of the world was on a loop till Bob did something right, similar to the film Groundhog Day. He ran to the nearest block, back and forth in an open alleyway. Bob had looked one direction and it seemed to stretch for eternity with street lights and buildings. He then looked from where he’d come from and the same thing was shown, except that the Core was still in view. Bob had thought to himself, “I don’t want to go back there and repeat the cycle. I’ll just be more the fool.” So he ran to the nearest apartment he could find and tried to open the door.

Luckily, it was locked and no one answered. He ran back to the alley and then kept running a few yards down one way, then back to the Core. That happened a few times until Cody, who rode there with Henry and Bob, found him. He wanted to make sure that Bob was okay. So, Bob followed Cody back to the Core. Cody wasn’t letting Bob in the Core anymore, but would hang outside to chat with him. Bob asked for another cup of tea and Cody quickly got if for him as Henry came back outside as well. Bob was on the porch and for some reason thought that the morose wasteland outside was still on loop, but from a creator standpoint and that Bob had the ability to change it. Think What Dreams May Come in the sense that what he thought would occur. Where you can get what you want if you truly believed in it. Bob looked to the sky a few times and asked open-ended questions like, “why do I still look like this? C’mon, really? Can’t I be better? Is this it?” and at end of the very last question it began to snow.

Bob had his mug in his hand and saw snowflakes come down from the sky, as if something answered him in the most minute way possible. The flakes would hit the cup and it looked like they were building onto it, adding more to the mug itself. Obviously the snow was simply melting, but it looked as if the world was building onto itself once more. Snow started to slowly touch everything in sight. Yet, the snow was a brief flurry that only occurred for the few moments Bob was outside at that exact time. Bob had taken it as a sign and let himself into the Core one last time. Bob thought he had really been given a chance to change something, a one shot deal with fate. But he also thought that he could lose all of his handicaps just like he summoned the small flurry, beginning with his vision. He took a handful of hot water, rubbed it into his face, and then took his glasses off. Bob still couldn’t see. He realized it was all a ruse, all a fake. Not the trip of the LSD because that would be too logical. More to the idea that he had nothing. He was just as lost as everyone else in this warm core they all hadn’t invited him to in the first place.

Bob kneeled, then slouched to the floor while he closed his eyes. He thought someone would help him out of this, that he’d get a sign that something really mattered. And at this feeling of certain doom, waning faith, and mental collapse, a strong kick was given to his side. The home-owner of the Core had kicked Bob and told him to get up, then Henry kicked him as well. Bob wasn’t budging and told everyone to fuck off. The home-owner had begun cracking jokes and made fun of Bob and everyone thought it was grand. Henry and Cody had then helped Bob up, got his glasses, and then left the tea party.

They had gotten back in the car and drove back to Henry’s place. Cody kept Bob in the car and explained how bad he’d fucked up a few times till he realized what he had done. Bob was mortified. Cody was understandably pissed and Henry was personally upset.

And that is how Bob became Zonked.