(((Dreamscape #Q and a Half)))

Oprah is doing an episode on Ativan (aka Lorazepam for you anti-brand name Pill Monkeys out there) addicts. She has three guests that are cleaned up as much as addicts can get cleaned up. They are sitting around her coffee table on some couch that probably isn’t as comfortable as it looks—especially with these folks on it. Too much comfort and they would go on the nod in front of a live studio audience. If one of them did it, it would be great for the ratings, I’m sure, but if they all did it would make for some terrible interviews.
“Uh, hi, I’m Oprah and my guests are all asleep. Buy my shitty magazine.”
Anyhoo, the three guests are comprised of two white women and one Latino woman. All of them are roughly in their early 30’s, or in a rough early 30’s. From the neck down they could look their age, but their mouths, their teeth, the weird addict lip-wrinkling told a 50-year old story, and their eyes told yet another story from six-feet under a dumpster somewhere.
Oprah digs and wants to know what it is like to be hopped up on the At-Ats (a silly but potentially soon-to-be-adopted nickname used by people who don’t do drugs but are trying to sound hip). The three women demonstrate the same perplexing yet incredibly specific element to their habit, hinting that the drug, a sentient civilization with committees and consensus-style votes, takes hold and programs the addict to do what its species wants the addict to do. The women all shamefully pull small-to-not-so-small containers out of their purses. One of them pulls out one of those infernal campfire espresso pots that have done nothing but piss me off and waste coffee every time I have tried to use one.
It would appear that, like mescaline, not all of the drug is absorbed into the body on first pass, and in a repugnant act exclusive to Ativan junkies, they have found that if they save their spit after ingesting the drug they can catch a mild high by drinking it later, either as a buffer to prolong the feeling, or for when supplies get low. One of the women claimed to have had at one time roughly two pints of spit saved up in her closet during a time when she was particularly flush with supplies. In an unusually non-addict maneuver, she was saving for dry times (no pun intended) like a Y2K kook stockpiling food in a bomb shelter [as if my laptop crashing could start off a nuclear war… c’mon].
The lady with the coffee maker seems to have a good supply of spit saved up, and the one to her left only has a half-inch or so of spit swishing viscously around the bottom of an old Mountain Dew 2-liter bottle. You can see her eyeing the other lady’s supply.
Oprah, with a look of concern on her face, though the concern is for her ratings rather than the health and salvation of her guests, wants even more. She asks how bad things can get… how far they would go to stay high.
“Really, is there a limit, ladies? This monkey can’t be THAT strong, could it?” she asks in a thinly veiled dare for someone to trump the act of carting around bottles of drug infused spit.
The Coffee Pot Lady looks at Oprah, hating her possibly, but eager to earn her $100 appearance fee. She puts her purse aside, her coffee pot of spit on the table to her near right, leans over the knee-high coffee table, puts one finger to her left nostril and proceeds to exude a three-inch long rope of thick, yellowish-green snot from her right nostril. She does it expertly and lays it from her nose to the table, breaks its connection with her nose with the tip of her finger, and sits back. She leaves a perfect line of snot on the table, all shiny under the studio lights.
The audience is aghast in that Roman Coliseum-way. They gasp and screech in horror, but you know that they feel completely blessed by the God of Watching Others Fuck Up for Your Own Sick Amusement (St. Fox Television, I believe is his or her name).
Camera cuts to Oprah, to snot line, to Snot Blower, back to Oprah, who looks out to her adoring public with both hands out, mock pleading, mock-speechless.
Camera cuts back to a lingering shot of snot line and then a blur and a ruckus. The envious lady with the Mountain Dew spit had swooped in and re-snorted the line of snot.
The Coffee Pot Lady looks at her with a burning hatred in her eyes, jaw clenched, and jumps up. A string of expletives (in this case bleeps in the key of C#) erupts and fingers are wagged. Apparently Coffee Pot Lady was going to snort her own snot to give Oprah the horror show she wanted, but Mountain Dew Lady upset all At-At protocol and stole the line for herself.
Camera cuts back to a full shot of the guest couch and Oprah as Mountain Dew Lady starts to rise up into Coffee Pot Lady’s face, but before she can get fully erect, Coffee Pot flies into her, taking her down in a flurry of obscenities, fists, and security guards.
Out the corner of the camera you can see the third guest, who had remained reserved and quiet throughout, lean over and lick the space on the table when the snot line had been. She then grabbed the Coffee Pot Lady’s coffee pot and chugged the whole thing back in one giant swallow.
Cut to commercial.

-8 June, 2008