Midsummer (4th of July, Really) Night’s Dream (or A Psychedelic’s Fault)

Someone was not straight with me on Tuesday.

Or Wednesday.

And now it was Thursday, early in the morning, and I couldn’t join the festivities unless I went shopping on this holiday I hadn’t planned on.

So, I went shopping for three with two: Eldest and Youngest. As they were blithely doing their do, independently, I was in angst about what to do at checkout. When I arrived there, I decided I would be 100. So, I rang up, erected, and told the guy, ‘No bag.’

Registers stopped talking, people stopped pressing flesh to muted machines, and all came round to see. The entire store, that is, came to witness the showdown.

He stared at me with such undisguised brutality, I felt the beating he imagined. But as he lifted his scanner and pointed at the package behind the shopper-on-shopper divider bar—a challenge that really was none, with all around watching, including the beneficiary of my neutered-self-discipline-cum-largess, he knew I’d not ask him to void it—right then, a friendly wind approached my rear. I knew the voice would soon accompany it.

He told me to leave it alone—'I think, even the items’ I had maybe possibly already purchased. They seemed cursed with bad plastic juju anyway, so I did.

He took me to sit in the Brooklyn Bridge Park (the plastic bag nightmare had happened in west of the Mississippi, but we were suddenly cresting the lower levels of heaven), under the pall of dusk.

But either transported there by his excellent storytelling and my unabridged imagination, or I was doing that dream-movie-psychedelics business where you can change realities willy nilly, which means I was most certainly the thrall of one of the bookends, most likely the latter. He was a psychiatrist after all. (So, it was totally legal).

I knew he was of that same profession in this induced iteration, as he was out there, because I heard my mom in a flashback admonishing that you couldn’t trust psychiatrists. But, I was trusting this one. Yes, as much as to defy her, as usual, even at this age. But also because he had not only saved me from the anti-anti-plastics gestapo, he was the one who defied my mother’s, or was it a former shrink’s or professor’s or someone prominent in my fears and domineering’s further ‘advising’: psychologist (we’ll throw in psychiatrist here, but laden the wisdom with more weight) can’t perform psychological tests on other psychologists (certainly not psychologists on psychiatrists, if that’s the measure).

I wasn’t technically a psychologist, though. Not in every jurisdiction. He was certifiable, wherever.

And, besides, my rescuing, fellow–star gazer–hopeful had done that very thing. He’d created a whole new science of his art(ifice).

In fact, he had tricked so many of his colleagues with his tests that were billed a study of one thing and were really a measure of another, that they had given him days free of lecture, where he could roam the South saving wretched environmentalists from dreadful moral dilemmas, and magically transporting them to a dusky BK (possibly, I’m just looking around here, Eldest-Youngest-free?).

Oh, yeah, and in this alternative space, they’d given him a Centre, as well. Not at that other particular college at that other particular university or anywhere recognizable to the masses. But, a Centre nonetheless.

And he had made that Centre into a living, breathing museum of his experiments—including 3D blot tests and basketball-player-long by (American) football-jockey-wide cockroaches. (Eldest had killed one yesterday with his barefoot, so maybe a dream?).

So, now I’m thinking in here he’s Oxonian, because they were the ones with the Kafka exhibit we had just visited before arriving to this land between two shining seas—or is it between one shining sea and a relatively matte one? (Never truly understood that ditty, and the dream-possibly-psychedelic(s) was-were proving loath to enlighten me).

So, yes, not at Oxford or anywhere recognizable—that part needn’t be repeated, it was Oxford—enough murder mysteries were hosted there—everywhere there was recognizable.

So, he had been given his centre, at either one recognizable university or some unmentionable one. And, of course, by whatever magic had become my master—I refuse to ‘just choose one, already’ Mom! Sorry, Mum, in this telling—he transported me across a possibly shining waterway to said Centre of Something Alliterative and Clever where I was duly impressed as he’d intended, and thus proved his powers over mere therapists: I had had every intention of not being impressed at the start.

Tricky bastard.

Then it was fully night, and I had one on him—he was falling in love with me again, right then, in real time, and he—using his mighty manly psych powers—knew I knew. We were back on the bench and he pointed to the now–dark space that hovered between lit bridge and the stars, stripes, ribbons, and banners whizzing off in the distance beyond, and he…just pointed. Clearly this was unreality, as reality would have pressed us into the mass of bodies we both lived in the country to avoid.

Clearly he was going for mind control through the subconscious, and needed the space clear, and to point into nothingness—read: love is but a void we’d do well not to get sucked into again.

Oh, but he forgot, I was the master of this domain. He thought psychoanalysis the domain of quacks and pedos. Until he met me, of course. Though that wouldn’t stop him from forcing me to finish the ‘science’ in pseudo-science during castigations, lest he suggest some sort of equity by homiletic—I would have said dialectic, if I were even half the snob—miscegenation. ‘Remember?’ I reminded.

I, the psychoanalyst, whose family had fled real, inscribed laws by conscious maliciousness penned by real psuedos, quacks, and, possibly, pedos; I, this descendent, who once again needed a quick exit north; I, his only true love, who he wished to whisk back beyond this stopover in King’s County, back to the birthplace of his heart’s sovereign, the place he ludicrously held as the sanctioned adult companion (never mind the acronym!)—if not the very midwife—of civilization’s (no, no infernal “z”), again, civilisation’s forward progress, and where he thought I belonged, always, by him, because he was truly, deeply in love already, again, I, his heart’s sovereign, reminded.

He had been defeated with this point, and we were hungry, so he brought out an unpackaged chocolate chew to tide us over. But I knew instantly it was not gluten-free. Though I did appreciate his environmental sensibilities—and make-it-from-scratch gumption, I had to shake my head, no.

He was defeated again, The States and its many ingeniously marketable conditions and substitutes had conspired against him. So, this time he brought out a proper toast to our love—a chocolate-covered hazelnut Humanutty bar, free of glaze, gluten, cane sugar, or added psychedelics.

Happy 4^th of July, you scheming piece of chocolate deliciousness.