Excerpt from "The Anti Christ, Trials and Tribulations, Schizophrenia in the 21st century.

As He looked for his sterling silver cross pen that was right in front of him. I couldn’t help wonder why are all the psychiatrists foreign? Aren’t there cultural variances some just don’t understand?

“I just had it,” he started thinking. Sifting through the pages of his note book.

Surely this doctor from India had no inclination on the comings of white America. No. In the medical model, were just machines with broken pieces. No more then the sum of our parts. Where he’s from, it’s way over fucking populated. Full of garbage and jammed with traffic and noise. Plus they’re cultural norms. They’re so fucking disciplined and proper. Never went through the dysfunctional revolution we did after the 70’s.

I just kept staring at his pen all jabber eyed. So many ions on silver. He looks up at me and it seems like I’m just staring down into nothingness.

He shuffles open the drawer.

“What are you looking for?”

“Just..just my pen.”

“It’s right in front of you.”

“Where?”

“On your desk.”

“No it’s not.”

I uncross my eyes. Let it reappear.

“It is.” I say and look him seriously square, right in the face. I love fucking with people.

He looks down at his desk again.

“Oh...I just um...”

“Do you have history with substance abuse”

Between you and I, balls yes. I took a lots of substances growing up. Mesk. Acid. Shrooms. Pot. Speed. I took it all

“Nope.” Lying through my bleached white teeth.

It started when I was 5. Sugar. Sugar was the real gateway drug.

I used to eat handfuls of that white powder. Let it melt in my mouth like cocain. All over my tongue and between my teeth. I loved it. a fucking fiend for energy. I’d eat it and Buzz the fuck around. All through the house. Chasing our cats and dogs. Pissing mom off. Running of in Shopping marts. Drug stores off. Grocery stores. She yelling at me, threatening to put me on a leash. I loved to lose her in stores. Hear her Calling my name. But I just fucking answer. Then she really did put me on a leash.

I was six when I finally got caught. Forget the cookie jar. She seen my hand right in the fucking sugar can. Huffing a handful of the shit.

“Dylan!” Is this why we’re going through sugar so fast? Why your so hyper? Mother Mary.

She crouched down and grabbed me. Shaking me while she lectured me.

“Dylan. You can’t eat the sugar. It rots your teeth. You don’t want rotten teeth Dylan.”

“So no history of substance abuse at all?

I stayed coy. Rhetorical. Socratic. He did this thing where he’d just talk to you about your philosophies and break it down and down and down with questions until he reached the paradoxical level where there is no answer. Travelling across the country side challenging all these prominent philosophers on their ideas down to the point where witnesses could say they didn’t know shit compared to Socrates. The most famous philosopher? No. He just figured out the paradox.

“When does substance use...turn into substance abuse.” He stares at me blankly. Like he’s cracked my shell.

“So there is some substance abuse.”

“That’s not what i said. I asked you a fuckin question.”

“Any substance use can be abuse. What substances do you use?”

“I put too much sugar in my coffee....”

He’s getting annoyed.

In all honesty it doesn’t matter anyway. Not for a diagnosis.

“Abuse is...when it becomes a problem. Wouldn’t you say? Dr.? And when it negatively effects you, or others around you?”

“Yes...do you or have you had problems with some substances.”

“Yes...”

He clicks his cross pen. Jabbing out the ball head. Ready to make notes. Info on me he’s not getting.

“Which.”

“I told you. Sugar.” I sit back and put an ankle to my knee. Fold my hands behind my head. This’ll be a while.

“Ok...are you being serious?”

“Ah..ya.”

“I mean real substances.”

“Sugar...can fucking kill you man.”

I might have got caught eating sugar. But it didn’t slow me down. I just honed in on the human hunter instinct. Learned to climb. Be more secretive. Keep stashes of it hidden.

The sweetest things can be so deadly.

A WHOLE LIFE IS AHEAD OF YOU. It was splashed in red with a shooting star above the third grade coat rack at school. That bloody cheap mural was an utter fucking lie for Suzy Q. She would have been fine if she never met me.

Mommy and Daddies little princess. Dressed up in her little school girl clothes. Matching shoes with bow ties. It was the beginning of fall term. The delirium of that first day of school air swelling in the head of every kid. She was just in grade one. I was in grade three. Still binging on the sugar.

Such a brief little instant. Just this chance meeting in the hall. But so fatal. Like time and life and death fucking.

She needed a bathroom back. I needed to get the hell out of class because I needed some sugar. The first day of school was always better on drugs.

She came out of the bathroom and sipped from the fountain. That green germ infested no pressure nozzle.

“Hi” I said. I looked like I was in grade one. “I’m Dylan.”

“Well I’m Suzy Q.” She said as she wiped her mouth from her drink.

“What do you like?”

“I like books...and colouring. And the alphabet. And love mommy and Daddy. And clothes. And dolls. And my tea set. And dolls.” She was a fantasmic list of childish life.

That second of silence where death spleens in the air.

“What do you like?”

“I like sugar.”

“Me too. But mommy and daddy said I can’t have any cause it can make me very sick and I might not come back.

Not coming back didn’t really make sense to me. To me everything was always eternal. Energy and atoms transferring and transforming like ingredients for time. For forever. Time is of course forever. Infinite. Even if there is “no time” or time “stopped,” there has to be an amount of “time” time was messed with, so there can technically never be no time at all. Nothing can be timeless because there has to be an amount of time it was timeless for. It’s an impossible mind fuck. Just another Socratic paradox. If you get right dirty with it, it fucks up a lot of things philosophically. Dismiss it. Walk away.

Coming back, as she so studiously said, is inevitable because time can never be ungranted. It keeps going. Forever. Thus repeating.

“My parents say the same things too. But it’s just to stop me from eating it.

“You don’t get sick?”

“No. Mommies and Daddies lie to you so you do what they want you too.”

“My Mommy and Daddy don’t lie.”

“Yes. I’m sorry they do. I’m a early born grade three, so that’s like almost grade four and your what?”

“One.”

“So I know more about the world. And sugar doesn’t make you sick. And Santa clause. And the Easter bunny are lies.”

“They’re lies?”

“Ya. I have a brother whose thirt-teen. That’s grade seven. He told me he stayed up and saw mom and dad putting the same presents under the tree. But not to tell mom and dad I know cause I won’t...”

“He’s thirteen?”

“Ya.”

“They lie about sugar too?”

“Ya. Cause it makes u hyper and they don’t like it.”

“They let me have some.”

“Ya. The best thing I can teach you, that you won’t learn here in school, is you just gotta know how to keep things a secret from them, like they do you.”

Technically I was giving great childing advice.

“Watch this.”

I went to my book bag and pulled out a brown bag of my hoarded stash. White and brown sugar mixed together. The brown chunky and glistening with the white like cocain. I pulled out a handle full of a couple chunks and shoved it in my mouth.

“What’s that?”

“S-gur.”

“Can I have some?”

I swallow. “You can have a lot.”

She reached her thin deathly little fingers in the bag and grabbed a couple chunks.

“Mmm. It’s yummy.” She said.

And we just stood there in the hall enjoying sugar together. Like it was nice to have met each other.

An hour later I heard the ambulance. Suzy Q went into diabetic shock. She grew faint. Sweaty. Nauseous. Thirsty. Dried up mouth. She peed her pants. Her heart beat out of her chest. She O.D.’d on sugar. Passed out and died on the floor.

“Look. I don’t think sugar is really a problem and your just wasting the time.”

“You see those lines...your not writing on. You need to read in between them. Doctor.”