Bad breath, coughing a lot. Dry cough. A dry hacking cough – the type that makes you feel that your lungs are getting torn each time. Dry eyeballs. Can’t rotate them in their sockets. Dry tongue. Like sandpaper. Dry like you couldn’t imagine. No spit. No way to swallow. Throat constricted. Closing up on me. Heart beating like fuck, like it’s gonna jump right out of my chest. Big-time tachycardia. Crazy tachycardia. Tachycardia like you can’t imagine. This buzz is no fun. Being tormented constantly by an itchy arse and having to drag my bare butt across the carpet like an old dog back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth trying to get some goddamn fucking relief. In vain I might add. Which hasn’t done the carpet any good at all. Or my arse for that matter. Keep on promising myself I’m going to give it up. Real soon. The Jimson Weed, I mean. Things have been going from bad to worse ever since I started smoking that stuff…

LADY

I was standing there looking for some rocket salad only a few hours ago in Marks and Spencer when this lady came up right next to me and put something back on the shelf. I don’t know what she put back on the shelf because I wasn’t paying attention. As she did this she unexpectedly launched into telling me something complicated. At least I felt that it was complicated. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t complicated at all. Perhaps there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my time sense – it was as if I couldn’t grasp what she was saying because it was happening too quickly for me. I couldn’t understand a single word of what she was telling to me. Not a word. She might as well have been talking in Klingon for all the sense she made. By some self-protective reflex I smiled and – I think – managed to indicate that I was actually grasping what she was on about. Then she was gone again. I still don’t know if it was her or if it was me. Either there was something very freaky about that lady or my time sense is completely screwed. I don’t which it is and this troubles me. Maybe she exists in a parallel universe. I’ve had experiences of that. Or maybe she never existed in the first place. That’s happened to me before too. Jimson flash-backs, they call it. Well, I call it, anyway. Sometimes I wonder if everything isn’t just some kind of flashback.