No Fury

He pulled into his usual spot in the gravel parking lot, just a few feet from the entrance to Shermans front doors.  As he emerged, he paused and took note of the azure blue sky and the slight river breeze that had become so much a part of him but did nothing to quell the oppressive Florida heat that he had grown so accustomed to.  At least there was the breeze.  Strolling casually toward the bar, coming to within feet of the door he was stopped dead in his tracks by a young man exiting the bar.  Sans shades and squinting to assure that his eyes weren’t deceiving him Peck focused as best he could.  Eyes acclimating he found himself looking at the largest young man he had ever seen.  Behemoth large.  Approaching him was a guy that stood 6’10” maybe 6’11”, preternaturally muscular, his weigh somewhere between 330 and 345 pounds.  At their current proximity and from Peck’s angle to the sun, the young man appeared almost entirely in silhouette.  His shear size caught Peck entirely by surprise and rooted him where he stood.  Admittedly there was a reason for his being so remarkably…rooted, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, flumaxed…ummm…he ran out of words.  He was not entirely not stoned but, he wasn’t quite not stoned either.  Altered perception… that’s what is was.  In his state of altered perception he stood mesmerized by a large man in a parking lot.  He owed it to the roach in his ashtray that he had taken a couple of hits from on his way over, and it was some nice sticky blue tinted stuff that had a funny name so, maybe he was pretty fucked up but definitely not over the limit of rationality.  They came to within feet of each and just stood there.  Peck imagined himself to appear, in contrast, to be almost munchkin-like.  In the interim they had both shifted ever so slightly so that now Peck had a better view of this man before him.  With the improved vantage point, and from his compromised synaptic perspective, the scene became even more bizarre.  Peck, not only mesmerized by the shear size of the guy, now, in the improved light, noticed the frigging t-shirt the guy was wearing.  Not only was it large enough for a small person to camp in but it was uncannily out of context.  For Peck to see this particular shirt on this particular person was, to him, tantamount to seeing Rush Limbaugh wearing a ‘What Would Jesus Do’ shirt.  The guy was wearing a thin white tee shirt, stretched taut across his massive chest, with the words LOVE ME printed across the front above an adoringly childlike image of a sleeping puppy just below the VE ME.  At that point, with that image imprinted on his consciousness, Peck was unable to move.  He simply, inexplicably, rudely, just stood there and stared, gape mouthed.  ‘What the hell’, Peck thought.  ‘Love who?’  Was this a person reaching out for affection, advertising, as it were, for a mate?  Was he an advocate for animal rights hoping to make a point by wearing a totally arcane t-shirt that could invariably invite derision?  Maybe he was one of those guys that just liked to fight.  Maybe he had an extremely arcane sense and just thought it was a funny t-shirt.  On a woman the shirt would look a perfectly reasonable, even endearing sentiment.  On this oversized specimen the shirt just looked odd, out of place.  One thing was for sure, only a man that size could wear it without inviting ridicule.  Peck’s thoughts then segued into the realization that weed did amazing things to his thought processes and he had  actually been standing there for some time thinking about completely stupid shit.

Offering Peck a dismissive glance (obviously perfected over years of similar dumbfounded stares) the man continued toward Peck and in passing said “Good afternoon.” He patted Peck on the head as though he were a child and continued on his way. 



Perplexed, slightly unbalanced and still more than a little toasted by the weed, Peck continued forward and pushed his way through Sherman’s padded double doors.  He was met with the all too familiar smell of stale beer, cigarettes and bar sweat at 3 in the afternoon.  He inhaled and became moderately depressed to think that this was probably the highlight of his day.  Then he just stood there, allowing his already strained eyes to adjust to the light, or lack thereof, and tried to assimilate what had just occurred outside.  The only thing that came into his bemused little brain was that the guy was obviously a football player.  They breed em down here.  As for the shirt…he would have to think about that one later. 



“Brenda, did you just see a really big guy in a Love Me t-shirt with a drawing of a puppy dog on it?”



“Your eyes look like they’re bleeding” she greeted him.  He stood there trying to come up with a snappy retort.  The retort did not come until he realized that the optimal retort timeframe had severely lapsed.  So he let it slide. 



After some required retinal adjustment the bar became more clearly into scrutiny. Flat screen television monitors occupied every wall.  He paused to better observe the fare offered on the various screens.  Offered were visions, or versions of visions of American culture at its current, lowest common denominator.  One screen presented a veritable feast of intra-familial, inbred, cousin fucking insurrection, pre-recorded for your viewing pleasure.  Obese siblings ripping at each other’s clothes, screaming vitriolic obscenities at one another, verbiage reduced to a steady stream of censor generated beeeeeps, the onstage participants fueled by a rabid audience, bordering on the feral , themselves enthusiastically encouraged by a vapid little rodent-like MC, emphatically pandering to the adrenalin fueled, clearly delighted squeals of seemingly normal looking…Americans, feeding on each other, feeding on the hapless idiots onstage, simultaneously feeding on the reciprocal rage generated by the televised horde.  Glancing to his right and yet another screen offered one of those shows with studio courtrooms presided over by “street savvy’ pseudo judges, looking amazingly like real judges, all making a good natured mockery of American jurisprudence by arbitrating the most inane and banal of domestic disputes between sadly clueless, amazingly sincere people.  Where the 15 minutes of fame to come at sucha large price?



He watched for a while, thinking why do these people allow themselves to be made a mockery of?  Are these people the real America.  Are they the norm?’  Who the fuck watches this shit?  Thankfully, the remaining monitors were cycling through national sports highlights via ESPN and all its various incarnations.  Standing there feeling superior in his denouement of American culture, or lack thereof, he realized that he himself was actually quite enthralled with the action presented by these idiotic productions.  It was the metaphorical train wreck from which he could not look away.  Before being inextricably drawn in further he was abruptly leveled with yet another dope induced epiphany.  He was stoned and he was watching this shit, enthralled by it.  What if one fed the other, a deep seeded cerebral seduction?  What if his beloved marijuana was the catalyst for this mass psychosis of sub-standard mediocrity?  But pot was illegal.  It was illegal and the vacuously inane sitcom ‘Two and a Half Men” was already wildly popular, then my god, what if they legalized weed?  What would the media come up with next.  Would sitcoms add laugh tracks after every other sentence instead of the standard every fourth sentence?  The thought made him shiver.  He had to stop his marijuana fueled paranoid thinking.  It could lead to nothing good.  He tore his eyes away from the monitors and rapidly went to the bar for a much needed drink.  Sometimes he just thought too much.