I work from home. Only I wasn't getting too much work done. Why? Because somebody new was moving in to the apartment next door and the ruckus was driving me to distraction.
It seems my previous next door neighbor for the past ten years had, unbeknownst to me, been quite the crackhead extraordinaire. It further seems he had been going for the Guinness record for smoking the world's largest crack rock in the world's largest crack pipe.
I have no idea where or when it all began but I have a fairly terrific idea when it ended. That would be three weeks ago, last Thursday when he both attempted and failed to attain said record. David had set up a digital camera on a tripod and filmed his attempt to smoke a crack rock with a circumference of no less than four feet in one sitting.
Unfortunately, his blow torch set his gin soaked chihuahua Gustavio ablaze. Gustavio ran around the apartment like the dog on fire he was and managed to spread the flames to the curtains and some other shitty pieces of furniture from IKEA. During Gustavio's manic sprint David had caught himself a massive coronary. Wind up was his apartment sustained a fair amount of fire damage before the FDNY got it all under control.
At least that's what the fireman told me in confidence. It just so happens he was a guy I went to high school with and he couldn't help but share. I appreciated it and tried to stay productive while my landlord's workers got the apartment into rentable shape once again.
That only took about four days and as of two weeks ago my new next door neighbor was creating such a ruckus that I felt compelled to knock on his door and introduce myself.
"Hey, I'm Danny."
"Oh, nice to meet you man. I'm Dr. Senderos, but you can call me Feliz."
"Well, welcome to the building."
"Thanks, man. You ever trip out?"
"Huh?"
"Y'know. Dose. On the Sid Vicious?"
"Why?"
"Cause I just invented the world's cleanest acid. I'm going for a patent. In my last round of tests it seems to raise one's IQ anywhere from 50 to 100 points, and that's just on a weekday."
"You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. I'm trademarking it as Brain 2.0. Matter of fact, I'm on it right now."
"Um, I think I'll pass. I haven't tripped since college days which is long long long ago and far far away."
"No problem. Whaddya do?"
"Um, entrepreneur of sorts?"
"What kind?"
"Apps. Actually, I just got a patent for one of my software inventions."
"Making a lot of money?"
"Actually, the opposite."
"What's the problem?"
"Severely limited funds and I'm the only developer."
"That's too bad."
"It's okay I guess. I got a plan."
"I bet it would be a lot easier if you had a development team, huh?"
"Sure. Can't afford it, though."
"What if you could?"
"Well, I'm not ready for venture capital. Kinda scary to me. Loss of control and everything."
"What if I told you, you could have a development team to rival Google's?"
"Sure, and what if I won powerball?"
"I shit you not."
"Lemme guess? You got tech connections in the Valley?"
"Even better. It's Brain 2.0 man. Just one hit dude, I shit you not."
I don't know why I trusted him, but I guess it was the desperation of working on my startup for years and watching my bank account prepare to crawl under a rock. Whatever it was in that moment I took the proffered sugar cube he held in his big paw.
"What's the worse that could happen?" I heard myself wonder aloud.
Well, later that night as I was coding my way through a thorny issue in the cloud I suddenly heard a voice whisper in my ear.
It's so simple. So simple. So simple....
Before I knew it I was typing faster than my eyes could follow except everything was blurry.
I took off my reading glasses and rubbed my eyes.
Wow.
Everything came into crystal clear focus. I could see better than ever before. The music sounded crisper. I could hear the air I was breathing. There was other shit going on too but I was so engrossed in the code that there was no time to contemplate that noise.
Code was pouring out of my head, through my fingers, into the editor and up to the cloud at light speed. I saw the end game in ones and zeroes. I saw how it all fit together in real time in four dimensions. I continued to code all night and into the next day and the one after that. Time lost all meaning. It simply ceased to exist. Everything that had required mad brain sweat and copious amounts of caffeine hitherto was now child's play.
It had all been there the whole time, just hidden beyond a veil that now had been torn away. Years of work and frustration after frustration faded into oblivion.
Everything was integrating in my head and manifesting in reality. Before I knew it days had passed and that's when I started to experience the side effects. My hands began to tremble. Everywhere I went I could see inside people's heads. I could see their neuroses manifesting in an aura that caused me to choke on the air itself. I could soon no longer go out in public.
I knocked on my new neighbor's apartment. I had to know when this shit would wear off. But nobody answered. I jiggled the knob and the door opened wide without a hint of resistance.
The apartment was absolutely empty with one notable exception; somebody had left a single turd in the middle of the living room.
I called the landlord. Nobody knew where the mystery man had vanished. He had paid his rent a year in advance with a cashier's check. I googled the name Feliz Senderos to no avail.
He was gone with the wind and I was tripping balls and unable to leave my apartment. Soon I could no longer code. All the voices and thoughts in my head seemed to keep changing languages. It was like the spaces between my ears had become the Tower of Babel.
And my right nipple had begun to glow all the colors of Roy G. Biv not unlike a game of Simon. What the fuck gives, Batman?
I found talking and thinking in words is now painfully slow. No words in any order can serve to describe the process other than to say they merely serve to gum up the works. And yet the vowels seem to be tied in to the cosmic force somehow. The consonants seem to create mini Big Bangs. And I feel compelled to learn Japanese but my mouth keeps saying, "Don't learn Japanese. Just don't."
I can no longer discern any difference between waking and sleeping hours. And my pores seem overly large; huge in fact. The mirror has become my sworn enemy.
It's been well over a week since I dosed. I don't sense any end in sight. I had never done crack-cocaine in my entire forty-eight years and somehow it still had managed to ruin my life.
Maybe I should take up where David left off and attempt to smoke the world's largest crack rock in one sitting like it was a fucking pint of Chubby Hubby. I dunno. I just know I've had Einstein on the Beach on replay for five days now and shit's just a little too real.
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-2-3-4-2-3-4-5-6-7-8...
Somebody make it stop...
Originally posted on r/nosleep under the pen name mypumassmellfunky.
