Home Sweet Home

So you've arrived back to California where it all began once upon a time at 3am and the stars slowly keep disappearing the closer and closer you get to disfunctional society. 3 and a half redbulls later from whence you started, you pull up into your driveway that hasn't changed for 22 years. Get out. Sigh. Knock on the door and your mom, a petite zombie with sleep covered eyes hugs you, asks you how your trip was, asks you a lot of things that she won't remember come morning, and you unload your shit. All of it.

Pass out head first into 1000 thread count pillows and memory foam that doesn't remember anything about you. But hours later, your alarm clock beeps patronizingly at you from across the room, perforated green lines that stitch numbers together bequeath 8:12. Awesome.

Take the best shower of your life. Sweat pants sprout up your legs by some means of divine intervention because you swear you didn't put them on and you are out the door into a car onto a free way paved to san diego. Flash. You are in the waiting room, with too many screaming infants, lost in a children's hospital because this is where your surgeon is working this week. This is clearly for her convenience, not yours. You are just another patient with another plastic bracelet for impending surgery, you just happen to be 5 feet taller and weigh 10,000x as much as all the others. They weigh you, take you temperature, do everything that they're trained to do; they ask you stupid questions, serious questions meant for small children, that you're not supposed laugh at. Put a gown on in a bathroom that smells like baby fart and cheap air freshener. Walk out to nurses with too many wandering eyes to be professional and you are brough back for a general consult. Sign verification after verification and you can't wait to get to the "DNR" slip. There is none. Sad.

Flash. You are mildly claustrophobic in a small room with a table and that is all. Your surgeon, Dr. Cunningham, comes in laughing with the anesthesiologist and the head nurse. These are the kind of women that you would rather go out drinking with to bars and night clubs, not usually the ones you expect to be operating on you, in charge of this whole "living" thing. Consider: you love them and they are probably in their later thirties, early forties.
Aside: "Are you really getting this old that you can say this?"

They take you still smiling and laughing and you can't tell if they're really succubi behind those fleshy cheeks. They strap you down onto a bed and you tell them that you should all get drinks when this is all over. They burst out laughing, throw a mask on you, and say: "good night." Taste metallic copper, smile, say: "goodnight."

Awake to the head nurse handing you a dixie cup of vicodin tabs. Say: "Well, goodmorning!" She smiles, blonde and perfect in every way -- the ideal nurse. Realize: you are very high. Down the vicodin with the gatorade that magically appears in front of you and a lot of things feel like magic but that's just the drugs whispering more than faintly into your ear.

Twenty minutes go by and you put your clothes back on, you walk outside, fall asleep in the car, and the world floats by in a nauseous-heavenly kind of way. It hasn't been 24 hours since you've been home and you are already on drugs, even if it is for the pain. What did you expect though? Really? Oh, home sweet home.