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pink elephants

One of my most vivid memories from high school is of second semester tenth grade, when I got a really terrible case of the stomach flu. I was home from school for four days, and I couldn't drink anything but tiny sips of Gatorade, and on the last day I couldn't even drink that because ANY stimulus to my esophagus started my gag reflex. I threw up several times in a row that morning and didn't try to consume anything else for the rest of the day.

By that night, I was completely, miserably dehydrated. I have never been that thirsty before in my life. I couldn't think about ANYTHING but liquid, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw all the beautiful liquids I wanted to drink: peach nectar, grape smoothie, sparkling apple cider, milk (which I normally find disgusting and intolerabe), cranberry juice, water. My normally racing mind was fixed on the same altered money shot, which it repeated over and over, of each liquid, in turn, flowing from an overturned flask into a clear drinking glass, splashing up against its sides and coming to rest in a tall, drinkable pool. I was SO thirsty, this was all I could think about for two days.

I wasn't into sex yet, so this was my first time acknowledging that physiology had any effect on my thoughts.

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It's also the closest I've ever come to hallucinating about anything. I've never done any hard drugs. I may have tried Mary, twice, but she failed me, both times. No high, just throatache. I also took a shotgun from someone who pretty much just wanted to kiss me. Again, failure.

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I went, belatedly, to get tested for STDs and HIV the other day. All clear on the first count, waiting to hear on the other. The nurse who drew my blood spent ten or fifteen minutes looking for a serviceable vein, and she found one, in the crook of my right elbow, but when she pricked it, nothing came out. It started bleeding the second she removed the needle, but obviously she couldn't reinsert it into the same spot (or so she said, but I don't exactly see why), so she tried again a few millimeters away and didn't get anything at all.

I had to come back the next day and get pricked again. It sucked. I have what look like fresh track marks on that arm. I'm also a little worried about the fact that I apparently don't bleed on command.

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Lastly: I used to watch a lot of Sesame Street, back when they were still using reruns from the late seventies. There was a character on there, a game show host with a yellow face, a wide smile and a microphone attached permanently to his hand. His name was Guy Smiley, but when I was three, four, five and six, I misheard the announcer and thought he was saying God Smiley.

I was a teenager before I stopped picturing God as a sycophantic yellow Muppet. I think that was a major factor in my development as a skeptic. I just couldn't get behind that, the image of Guy Smiley as lord and master of the universe, because somewhere in my child's brain I understood that he wasn't even capable of autonomous movement, without someone moving the wires attached to all parts of his body.

It was a confusing time, even more confusing once black Baptists started telling me God wasn't the iconic white-man-on-throne, either. I mean, that's who they put on the stained-glass windows, except at our church, where someone had taken the time to dye those peachy panels brown.

I would much rather see God as a circle of diamonds, anyway, but I don't ever want to be sick to the point of hallucination again.