No Idea

I have no idea why I wrote this last night before going to bed.

Normally when I hit a new town the first thing I do is find a place to sleep and the second is find a place to drink, so I can. Tonight wasn’t going to be like that and I could smell it. To be specific, when I left the motel room all I could smell was flesh. Flesh charred so black there was no doubting it was done. The smell clung to my nose hairs and lingered long after I had my first shot of whiskey. The odd thing was that I seemed to be the only person bothered by it.

People talk, they can’t help it, it’s what we do to make sure that our life is actually that and not some demented pig dream we never wake from. But no one had mentioned the smell yet and I was starting to think maybe I was going crazy. When the bartender brought me my third shot, I opened my mouth to ask him about it. Before I even had time to force air into my larynx, the bartender held my eyes solid in a steel trap of a gaze and shook his head, “No”. He held my eyes a moment longer waiting to see if I got it, and I did. I haven’t lasted this long by running naked into thorn bushes, if you know what I mean.

The third shot went down like battery acid, so I could only assume that he’d made sure to poor me a shot of bar mat run-off to punctuate his point. The next time I ordered I got a beer and watched it go from tap to glass. He brought it over and let me know it was on him. I dropped a few dollars tip out of politeness and sat there hoping it’d relieve the burn in my throat.

Back at the motel I passed out dreaming of barbeque.

The sun was like a cruel God blinding me for my own good. It punched through the cheap curtains of the room and it didn’t much matter which way I rolled, it made my eyelids seem transparent and rebellious to their purpose. When I finally relented and rolled over, the clock on the bedside table laughed 7:00 AM. I coughed up some mucus and swallowed it for breakfast then rolled out and up and tried to stand. As usual, the band in my head kicked in and made me sit back down as the thunderclouds rolled across my eyes.

At first I thought I smelled bacon coming across the lot from the Diner, but then I realized it was the same smell from the night before. The smell of bacon turned to charred human flesh in a instant and I almost puked, but not before I felt hungry. Something was wrong in this town and I was pretty sure it was the kind of wrong that not only got people like me killed, but possibly eaten too.

No man can fight hunger for long, even if they are disgusted by their surroundings. The human has an amazing ability to choose what they suppress and for me that was a desire to find out what was really happening here. First things first; shower, cigarette, drink and breakfast. Not necessarily in that order.

Breakfast is for me something of an anathema. I get it, the body is a furnace and you have to feed the fire, but I’ve never figured out why someone can’t just combine a multi-vitamin with beer.