The next few hours were typical for Saturdays. I spoke to some customers while I fished leaves out of their filter baskets, remarked how clear their water was, and smoked half a gram of David Bowie spaceship level weed in the truck every hour or so. For years, whenever I touched marijuana I would succumb to debilitating panic attacks. I could not be alone, and I especially could not be near other people. On the island, for some reason, it lived up to the hype, but only on Saturdays. On Mondays, the island might as well be a landscape of mousetraps, ready to catch any errant appendage in a death-scream. Everywhere I walked I was about to step on one. Tuesday through Friday? Maybe not quite so dramatic but my identity, whatever was left of it, shifted in strange, rated-R ways into characters in movies I hoped were aliens when I was a kid. Not real human beings, not like me. I fear to have the mind of the character that scares children into hoping adults are another species entirely, and not their inevitable future. But you see what I mean? Weekdays just weren’t the right goddamn time. On Saturdays, weed was calming. Nothing for the tendrils of anxiety to latch onto and make home. No inner Cthulhu to contend with. And it made lunch taste so much fucking better. Oh, yeah, Sundays? Give or take, honestly.
Nick Denardi 