Tales from the Third Lobe - Wormwood and Crickets

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

It's eleven-thirteen on a Monday night and crickets and frogs are yammering outside the window a couple of stories below me, fat and rich and mellow on Southern summer rain. It's just a booty call—I'm sure it means more to them than it does to me. They're having trouble making themselves heard over the drone of the compressor for the air conditioner. But now it's shut up and they're all trying harder.

The fireflies have a much better solution to the problem. Except their problem is that they keep synching up to the lightning, trying to call it down. Anyone who knows my history knows I've had my fill of the lightning, and I'm just as pleased if it doesn't come down for a conjugal visit with the glowy bugs outside my window. But if it does, they can keep it. Had my fill back in the early eighties, and, as far as I can tell, never developed any superpowers. Even after multiple tries. Done with that.

So now I'm sitting bare-ass naked (don't picture it if you don't wanna) on the bed cross-legged in front of a ceramic tray full of parts strung together in simulation of an actual computer, sipping this weird red absinthe (straight, neat, room-temperature) with the label in Spanish, a kind of cherry-red Chernobyl in a bottle borrowed from a friend I've never met. I'm letting the liquid radiation build up slowly, sipping from a tiny blue shot glass. It's smaller than the usual kind of shot glass, which, for absinthe, straight absinthe, is a fine thing. And the glass says on it, "HALF-SHOT—For My Half-Assed Friends—PANAMA CITY BEACH FLORIDA".

I picked up the glass for fifty cents in Pensacola, which just goes to show.

For those of you that don't know, chernobyl is Russian for wormwood, the herb that, in large enough quantities, makes absinthe too toxic to be legal for sale in the United States and much of the civilized world. I don't particularly know why this variant of absinthe is red instead of green, but it makes me think of old bad Superman stories from the earlier days. Absinthe was theoretically kryptonite for many writers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I guess it's only reasonable that it come in red varieties as well as green. Hopefully the writers of absinthe will stop before we encounter the gold nonsense. Or the blue. Or the plaid.

I've nudged the air conditioner back on. The frogs and crickets need the challenge. It's no good if the next generations of crickets and frogs are soft-voiced or deaf.

I hold the absinthe in my mouth for ages. Chernobyl burns my tongue and my gums and the insides of my cheeks and my palates, hard and soft. I tilt my head back and forth. My uvula squeals and shrivels. My tonsils wonder what's up, what's coming.

And I swallow. I swallow the whole bitter spinning and disorienting world.

I get up and check the insides of my lips and cheeks in a mirror. They are numbed and white and wrinkled from Chernobyl's chemical burn. Those bacteria that cause plaque? Dead dead dead. However, no dentist will recommend a dentifrice that dissolves teeth.

I pour another shot. Half-shot. Half-assed shot. The medicine is too powerful.

And yet, it is not powerful enough. The chernobyl medicine, the cricket/frog/firefly/lightning/air-conditioning medicine, none if it is powerful enough medicine to fix the wrongness, the overwhelming sickness.

See, I talked on the phone to my parents this evening. They are getting old and disintegrating. My mother is going blind and arthritic and nonspecifically cancerous, and my father broke his back years ago and has contracted, of all things, a musical career that includes mandolins and left-hand-strung banjos and the like. But no money. They take care of each other, plus a few other people, but there is no one to take care of them.

My chernobyl can't save them, especially not from age and the choice to trust the government. Twenty-two years of a military career and veteranhood has killed them both early, from poverty. Give or take five or ten years. Uncle Sam should have saved them, but Uncle Sam drinks heavily and snorts coke and blew their money on parties for his friends and the lottery. Uncle Sam is a petulant boy, weirdly self-righteous for a man with no righteous acts to his name, weirdly drunk on religious sops more vinegar than wine. Uncle Sam is too rich to help the poor people who took care of him thirty years ago.

You can't deny reality by popular vote. You can't turn off science by devoutly wishing. What is true is not media-driven. You cannot lead the behemoth with a ring in the nose. But you can sure as hell pretend. You can pretend you are doing your job, and you can pretend the job is undoable, and you can pretend the job is already done. Somehow, with the aid of a simple Washington press conference, you can pretend all three simultaneously. Evidence tells the truth, but in a world where pretense rules, evidence is outlaw.

Fuck you, Uncle Sam, specifically for wasting the lives of both of my parents, both of whom served you a life sentence. Both of whom taught me to respect you. Or tried so very much to teach me to respect you. Fuck you for abandoning them and telling us all that is the fault of the terrorists and the unsympathetic "terrorist sympathizers" that they will die early, unsupported by their favorite Uncle who promised to take care of them until death.

Not enough of me is numbed and white and wrinkled on the inside. But chernobyl will kill me before anyone is cured.

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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy.