MWH, Installment #1: Introduction

Introduction
         Myself and Stephen were sitting in an abandoned warehouse, discussing. I don't remember what exactly we were discussing, but I remember that Stephen pushed me at one point. My dad had given me twenty dollars to spend in downtown Bethlehem; maybe we were debating what to do with our freely given cash. Yeah, that's probably it; we were deciding what to spend our dough on. Stephen's first suggestion was to walk over to a dealer named sally and buy some pot. I was against this notion, and I intimated this to Stephen, explaining in far too much detail that I was not in the mood for smoking anything, and would much rather get something to ingest. Stephen countered by replying that we could put it into brownies. Finally the truth came out; I admitted to Stephen that pot no longer had much affect on me, except in large quantities. I had spent two weeks eating weed laced brownies, philosophizing to myself, and smoking bongs in the privacy of my room; and I had somehow built up such a high tolerance for weed that it would take at least a pound all at once to do anything for me. We didn't have enough for a pound, and we would've needed some for Stephen too. Besides, I tacked on as a crippled and limping edition to my otherwise reasonable argument, we would also need to buy ingredients for brownies. Stephen eventually bent to my will and then suggested that we try something else. His new idea was to walk to the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire and buy ourselves some LSD. I was glad of this idea, and welcomed Stephen's suggesting of it with an open and joyous heart, but I was a bit dubious as to wether we would be able to walk to New Hampshire from downtown Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then back again in time for dinner that same night. I presented my query extremely delicately to Stephen. To this he replied "Ridiculous, man," and with a sweeping motion of his jeweled hand, he pointed out a vast and tropical jungle, full of heat, pain and misery, located atop a distant hill. In whispered tones, he intimated to me that the Mount Washington Hotel was just beyond that hill. I finally conceded that he must be right and stood up from the chair under which I was sitting. I left Stephen to his horrible fate and swore to him that I would return shortly with some acid, but before I had finished my sentence, he was swallowed up in a colossal swarm of tablecloths. Wait a minute; what am I saying? Oh well. I filled my bag with all the drugs and booze that we had and prepared myself for the trip. I slowly began to egress the carnival in which Stephen and I had been sitting and discussing; or was it a warehouse? No; it must have been a carnival. I know because of this: as I rounded my second-to-last corner, there was a table at the end of it which had seated at it several unusually normal people, all laughing at something that a short, fat, angry clown had just said. I walked by too late to hear it, but I noticed the shocking normalcy of the crowd around him. As I passed by the table, the clown looked over at me, and those eyes have stuck in my memory ever since then. I fell backwards into a frenzy of yellow and orange; green and hatred; anger and laughter and strife. The glowing orbs seemed to beckon to me. Awestruck isn't the right word for it. There are some feelings that I get that don't yet have names in the English dictionary, but I imagine that they will someday, when the rest of America experiences for the first time what I experience on a daily basis. The clown spoke  something that didn't sound like noise; it sounded like something obscene, but not in a meaning that anyone's thought of before. Whatever it was, it broke my trance, and I moved on. Paranoid now, I watched the skies for airplanes, Or was I still under the sheltering roof of a warehouse? A carnival? Yes, that's right, a big one. The faces all stretched like those in concave and convex mirrors as I passed them. It was Phantastes all over again. It was as if George MacDonald was reborn as a god and given total control over our entire planet. But as I continued to watch the skies, I noticed that al I was really doing was staring blankly at a daddy-o, holding his hand out for my ticket, I gave it to him, or at least I thought I did, and moved on. I rounded my last corner and looked to see what was there. Waiting for me was a towering golden archway leading out of the carnival; out of the warehouse, and out of downtown Bethlehem. I realized that these dangerous skies that I'd been watching with paranoid eyes were just the ceiling of a great societal infrastructure in which I'd lived my entire life. Golden light was shining brightly through the archway. Was I dying? Was this the infamous "light at the end of the tunnel?" It wasn't shining so brightly that I couldn't see through the light, but now with my partially destroyed memory, I can't think what I saw. Thank God for partially destroyed memory, by the way. Without this mental handicap which keeps me from doing so many things, I might actually be pressured into leaving behind my entire world and entering into the everyday bustle and despair of reality. But more to the point, I still didn't know wether I was dying or not. Well, there was only one way to find out. I took one footstep feeling safe and acting bold.