“Fuckwit!” I cursed, not sure if I was cursing myself or what had just happened to me. It was ten-thirty in the morning and I had been sitting in my favourite coffee shop Mr Bean on Week St, my thoughts elsewhere as usual, when a sudden convulsively clumsy movement on my part had knocked over a full cup of coffee, spilling the most part of it straight onto my lap. Apart from the fact that the coffee was still very hot, I was wearing some brand new white jeans that I had just bought on special offer in Primark. At the time of buying it I had I must admit been in two minds about whether I should make the purchase or not – I had been worried that it was just a bit too brilliantly white, but had rather liked them all the same. And now here I was looking like a total twat, with jeans that were spectacularly, eye-catchingly white – apart from an embarrassing brown stain in the crotch. I didn’t want to stand up – even though this was of course my first instinct – because I didn’t want to attract attention to myself. So I just sat there, grimacing and stoically enduring the pain, biding my time until I could come up with some sort of a plan to get myself out of the predicament I was in. So that’s what was happening with me, sitting there in the Mr Bean Coffee House. Which is a real place, by the way. I’m not just making all of this up.
I remembered what I had been thinking of the moment before I spilled a cup of scalding hot coffee all over my brand-new white jeans. I had been thinking about this You Tube video that I had been watching last night. Someone had sent me a link to a video about DMT called The God Molecule and I must admit I found it very interesting. Rather more than just ‘interesting’, in fact. DMT occurs naturally in the bark of a vine found in the Amazon rain forest, and is mixed by the indigenous people with a naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitor to produce a mixture called Ayahuasca. Which you probably already know. What really interested me about all this however was the fact that DMT is a naturally occurring brain-chemical – which is to say, the human brain naturally produces it the same as it produces all other brain chemicals such as serotonin or melatonin or dopamine or acetyl-choline or what have you. This really got me. If this spectacularly awe-inspiring hallucinogen – said to be sixty times more powerful than LSD – can be produced in the brain via naturally occurring metabolic pathways then why was I leading such a crappy life? This was the question that stuck with me. This was the question I couldn’t get over.
Why were people in general, not just me, leading such banal and repetitive lives, buying lotto tickets, reading the Sun newspaper, watching East Enders on the television, arguing with their partners or kids about crap, hanging out in shopping malls, and all the rest of it, when each one of us possesses the capability to produce in our brains this thing called the God Molecule? What the hell was going on? How did all this dreadful heap of crap which we are proud to call ‘human culture’ come to pass in the first place and why on earth was it ever taken seriously even for five minutes, never mind five centuries, or five millennia even? What was it all about? What was going on? Was it all just some sick kind of a joke? Was someone somewhere having a laugh?
It was along these lines that I was thinking just before I spilled a fresh cup of coffee all over my virginal white jeans. Like some kind of a total fuckwit. I was thinking that after just a few milligrams of this chemical released into anyone’s brain the Sun newspaper would be about as interesting as a dollop of high-grade dog shit that had been laid by some pooch on the pavement and then allowed to dry. That lump of premium dog shyte would hold infinitely more interest than the lousy Sun newspaper for God’s sake. That humble mound of dog poo would speak eloquently of distant galaxies, that lowly turd would invoke the unspeakable majesty of spiral nebulae on the very edge of the known universe. The tiniest smidgeon of that canine crap would partake in the very breath of Cosmic Creation, would resonate mystically to the Music of the Spheres that only a few very ancient and very wise Neo-platonic philosophers had ever heard, whilst the worse-then-crappy Sun newspaper wouldn’t partake in anything, wouldn’t resonate with anything. Under the influence of the God Molecule the Sun newspaper would be starkly revealed for what it was – hideously banal recycled garbage, in a universe in which everything was always new and fresh, a universe where even a crumpled-up empty cigarette packet was a marvel of cosmic proportions.
Under the influence of the God Molecule buying a lotto ticket would be a supremely meaningless act. Even if you won the damn lousy lotto what the hell would that mean to someone with a righteous dose of DMT running around their brain? If infinite vistas of interstellar space suddenly opened up inside you, if everything you have ever known, everything you have ever thought, everything you have ever imagined, the total scope of everything you had ever thought possible dwindled in front of your very eyes until it became no more than a single tiny mauve dot in a cosmic torrent of kaleidoscopically shifting shimmering points of light of every conceivable hue and colour, not to mention the ones you couldn’t conceive of, if you were whisked away right out of the known universe at several billion times the speed of light, if the space-time continuum itself folded up and disappeared right in front of you like mere cardboard, like an origami trick, like a discarded empty packet of fags blown hectically under the wheels of an articulated lorry hurtling by you at top speed on a busy dual carriageway in rush hour, what would winning three or four million euros mean? It wouldn’t mean a damn thing, for God’s sake. It would mean less than nothing. You wouldn’t give it even half a second’s thought.
And yet in our ridiculously tedious day-to-day lives we are endlessly consumed with a burning concern for minutiae. We are relentlessly driven by an unquenchable passion for insanely unimportant trivia. We are fanatically obsessed with pointless, irrelevant details. All we care about is the sale in New Look. Or what’s happening in Coronation Street. Or which high-profile celebrity has been found to have the visible signs of cellulite on her upper thigh. That’s the level of our interest in what going on. That’s the high-tide mark of our collective curiosity about the universe we live in. That’s the limit of our mental horizons…
It was at this precise point in my runaway ruminations that I knocked my coffee over, I then remembered. This thought brought me back to earth with a bump. The idiot in question was me, I suddenly realized. The fuck-wit was me. The moron was me, no doubt about it. Never mind about everyone else – how stupid was I? How ridiculously banal was my fucking life – me with my stupid white jeans from Primark. My life was totally ridiculous, totally banal, and I could see that fact all too clearly. A slow wave of humiliation washed over me then, hurting me more than the hot coffee had done. I was a joke. I ought to go around wearing a fucking clown suit with a red nose and size fifty shoes. I was a figure of fun, the butt of every joke. The whole universe was laughing at me.
What was running around my brain, I said to myself, was not the God molecule but the Fuckwit Molecule. The Moron Molecule. I couldn’t help laughing to myself at this, despite the fact that people were starting to stare at me. That had a good ring to it – the Moron Molecule. I liked it. There was no shortage of this particular molecule anyway, no shortage at all. I wondered if it was produced naturally in the brain the same way the God Molecule was. If so, the metabolic pathways in question were working well. For fuck’s sake – they were on total over-drive. The Moron Molecule was probably some species of endorphin, I surmised, secreted in copious quantities as a result of watching TV, listening to DJ’s on the radio, reading copies of Cosmopolitan, Elle or OK, checking your Facebook feed. Every time some poor sucker picks up a copy of some daily tabloid every gland in his or her brain probably has an instant orgasm, ecstatically squirting out a whole test-tube of the stuff. No wonder everyone I know looks as if they’re on smack – including myself. I didn’t want to leave myself out of the equation. Forget DMT, we’re all gunning for Henry the horse, the big H. We want to gouch out. Our money’s on the junk, the skag, the smack, the white lady. We all want to go on a trip to noddy-land. We’re all bashing the big brown snooze button, as hard as ever we can. Over and over again. We ain’t ever gonna wake up.
Or maybe, I speculated, it’s being fed to us as some kind of special secret ingredient that’s put in all processed food. A secret ingredient known in the trade as Vitamin ‘M’ – pumped into the population by the ton by the food industry, by the sinister corporate entities who tell us what to eat. Maybe it’s in all the breakfast cereals, the biscuits, the chocolate bars, the fizzy drinks, the fast food, the microwavable instant meals. Maybe it’s even in the water – fluoridation was the first step, moronization the logical follow-on. And if the authorities catch you with any of that bad DMT shit on them you will do ten years in a state penitentiary. Where you will learn your lesson. Where you can be gang-banged at leisure by White Supremacists with swastikas tattooed on their dicks…
We’re living in a world where it is compulsory to be a moron, I realized then. There really wasn’t any other option open to us. It had all been decided for us right from the word go. We were never given any other alternative…
With the implications of this thought resounding in my head, I got up from the table and walked out of the café. Slowly I made my way down Week Street, threading my way through the crowd of Saturday Shoppers who were out in force now. The conspicuous brown stain on the crutch of my otherwise brilliantly white jeans didn’t bother me any more. Fuck it. After all, in the bigger scheme of things, what did it matter?
