GOD INVENTED INVENTED HEAVEN TO SPITE ME PART II (small part got carried away with being a little too descriptive have you read the Loser by Bernhard? How long can a title be ho doggy pretty darn lon-

I started as a poet so i like describing things

Merle was not and then he was. Something happened and it had interrupted the drunken vagrant’s expedition probing the depths of the affluent side of town. One moment the methuskónaut was slurring his way down some impeccable boulevard and then suddenly he just wasn’t.

At least from what he could recall. After that there was a deep black that seemed to go on forever. Then a second later eternity returned him as a conscious thought-form and he became once more.

And that was pretty much it, that was dying.

‘Cuz Merle was dead.

But he didn’t know that. Yet. All Merle knew now was that he was hanging in this kinda, void-thing. Floating as a disembodied being of pure awareness that felt similar to the pre-conscious nowhere he would pass thru before waking up (not exactly how Merle would have described it himself, but that’s essentially the gist of it). This wasn’t the place where dreams happened he was pretty sure, but as an enthusiastic dipsomaniac he perhaps wasn’t the best one to ask.

Merle like most drunks rarely made a visit to the incoherent terrain of dream-country, traversed the weird topography of the land of Oneiros, or so he believed. Even on the rare occasion when he got a stretch of sleep in without any booze (which were few and far between in the last decade plus) the alcohol had worn down the receptors of his perceptual apparatus to such a degree that he would need to have been dry a week before even an inkling of recollection could be smuggled over the border of wakefulness. This place felt more like the amorphous zone from which his daylight-consciousness was aroused and started to come online.

But he was only ever wherever this was for a fragment of a second. This was same space used as the lathe’s of heaven’s liminal loading dock, what came before the traumatic event of Merle waking up alive. Again.

But not this time.

Because it served as a point of spiritual transmutation for other phenomena associated with consciousness as well. A transcendental loading screen that any and all intelligences will pass through when experiencing the mind’s immaterial functions. Dreams of course but also psychic events, remote viewing and the big one death.

There were more after that but that was for those who had gone through that funereal rite of passage to find out.

Still, the diffuse mass of consciouness that in life had been Merle Obregard mistaking this for another morning-after wearily braced itself once more for the cranial pain that started upon his reentry into the physical world of the living. Old habits die hard. He assumed that in his drinking the previous night (or day for that matter) he had passed through the initial black stage of blotting out his consciousness and was now probably lying in an alley or jail or somewhere else under a nasty set of circumstances. He found this reassuring.

And Merle needed this reassurance because he was starting to worry about how long now it was taking for the outside world to barge in its usual manner. He had never spent this much time suspended in the empty hallway between dreaming and “real” life. At least so far as he was aware (he did drink a lot). But normally this transition was only ever a fraction of a second, itself being more the impression of time than a genuine expenditure of it.

His anxiety wasn’t the usual broad and ill-defined sense of unease that came with the booze leaving his system. Usually each day of the last decade he had arisen in a low-grade panic as his central nervous system clamored for the alcohol it had grown accustomed to being inundated with. That psychic symptom of his somatic malady normally was paired with jitters & a nausea that precipitated later dry-heaves. A violent wretching: the automatic & involuntary response hardwired into his anatomy that had it try to retroactively purge the poison it earlier had been forced to ingest upon the command of its apathetic, troubled master. Thus Merle, beginning to freak out thinking he was stuck, tried to squeeze eyes that he didn’t have shut while clenching his similarly non-existant asshole trying to use a will that in death was useles to force the whole wakey-wakey process to kick into gear and steeled himself for the usual hangover routine.

He waited. He felt a bit awkward on top of being afraid, just being there waiting the imminent arrival of the world that wouldn’t come. Or at least, not the one he he was from. Merle was heading for one a few doors down although he didn’t know it yet. So he waited some more, unaware that he was mortuus and thus had a different destination than the one he thought he did (similar, very similar actually, but yet not quite).

…then something else happened.

Radiant light brighter than anything that ever was or ever will be shot through Merle’s floating awareness. An explosive illumination erupted all around this space which revealed to Merle that wherever he “was” (Merle actively avoiding the sticky topic of what he himself could technically be designated as) he was contained within this space that also consisted entirely of himself. He was on a hyper plane of fractal Merle-space: a loading screen where the besotted lug simultaneously was as a whole (not that the hs dropout Merle would have described it as such). So it was this recursive, looping onto-cosmography (Merleography?)that served as the ground for which his consciousness was located now bathed in this ecstatic white vibrancy. Instantaneously this deluge of immaculate gossamer washed over him instead of the stark uncaring hangover reality and the pain of withdrawal.

He was enveloped in this shimmering wave of light and a warm, pleasant sensation permeated the formless void that was him as was in himself. It felt fucking great. Like the time he dabbled in heroin 10 years back, (before the market was flooded with that synthetic trash fetty) he let himself be swept away by the tide. (¹

Although to describe it as light is a bit of a misnomer as it was more than light, more dazzling, more effulgent and stunning than any luminescence had ever deigned to shine and reflect itself off so miserable a specimen as him. It was light that also was as it was in itself; light prior to the collapse of its wave function as Merle had observed it back in the world of appearances where he used to live. And the paregoric effect the noumenous illumination had on him, the warm euphoria that imbued Merle’s ephemeral consciousness felt vastly better that mainlining opioids, but that was the only point of reference he had in the life he didn’t know had been drawn to a close.

He felt happy.

And then he opened his eyes on an unexploded head he bizarrely now had again. He was in some fuckin dining room. But he didn’t have a headache, he couldn’t taste the morning-after whiskey-breath, he didnt feel like he needed a drink.

What the fuck was going on?

1. merle could never register and hit a vein on his own and when Tre (RIP) who was the guy who helped him shoot up for those three months was found OD’d in a TGI Friday’s women’s restroom he quickly returned to his original demon, whiskey. Despite the 8 year old memory’s innate haziness Merle fondly recalled those months of rippin off copper from worksites while he and Tre were staying at the Mother of Mercy homeless shelter and bangin dope nearly every day. He missed Tre. He was a friend