Black Dog
Predator Press
[LOBO]
I’m not going to give you a lot of scientific equations and reference materials to buttress this, but I think you’ll find at least some of this plausible enough to follow along.
“Black Dog” is a trucker’s term.
You see, at some point when deprived of sleep --no matter how jazzed up you are on caffeine and cocaine, whatever—the human body starts to generate whatever goo it does that makes you dream. I don’t know why … I’ll leave that to the people getting paid to figure out that stuff.
The problem is that, eventually, you don’t necessarily have to be asleep for this stuff to kick in.
The “Black Dog” is a fairly common hallucination, hence it’s name. This “phenomena” is not limited to truckers either; stories about a black dog darting across the road have bent a lot of fucking flesh and steel over the years.
My buddy, a wizened old vet of the trucking game, once told me that “everybody has a black dog all his own”. He was exasperated with me. He pointed out stories of deer, owls, hitchhikers, ad nauseam. I was trying to explain to him that I was following a car at night during a storm at a fairly safe distance when the car driver opened his window and a puppy fell out. In the roughly four last seconds of it's life, it skidded spinning to a halt, big furry paws already sticking to the asphalt. It staggered woundedly into the middle of the road, peering at the car it occupied merely moments before, racing away.
On a wet road, I was driving a vehicle in excess of 70,000 pounds and seven stories long at about forty-five miles an hour behind it.
Fluffy went bye-bye. FOOM! Straight to Fluffy Heaven.
Thomas, incredulous, insisted that that was my Black Dog.
***
Now, I’m old friends with sleep depravation. I daresay my first “Black Dog” was when I was about sixteen. I’m not bragging, not proud, but the was a time when I was dating to girls at the same time and they weren’t aware of each other. Virtually all the time I had out of their sight was when I was at work or sleeping.
So I did what any fine-blooded American male pup does in that circumstance: I gave up the sleep part.
I carried this on for ten days.
And I swear to God Almighty, had you seen these two and been sixteen, you would have too.
Well, suffice to say, on the tenth day I had an overwhelming sensation I can only liken to a hummingbird … and it permeated everything. The distant static buzz that separated me from whatever the hell reality was at the time drowned out everything; it was like living in the constant state of leaving a “Who” concert. Even when I killed those two broads an stuffed 'em in a garbage disposal, all I can remember was this buzzing ....
[Ha! I just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention; the only thing in danger of dyin was the rabbit, and I'm not really even sure what that means.]
What really happened was that, while lounging on my couch and watching the television, I "dreamed" my buddy my Tim was on the couch next to me asking for guitar lessons. “How do you make the guitar whistle?” he would inquire. I could see him, faded Ozzy T-Shirt and too-too new jeans (before they came "pre-washed"), smiling with his confused teeth. I guessed he meant the harmonics, and I would play them.
I slept for about twelve hours in a chair with my guitar in hand.
And when I woke, I got a phone call telling me that Tim was dead. An industrial accident at the Les Paul factory left him fatally impaled by a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar ... Even today in that factory, late at night, you could still hear him --with hooks for hands-- butchering "Stairway to Heaven" through the halls ...
But seriously folks.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Well, it wasn't really stormy at all. It was pretty damn humid.
And come to think of it, it wasn't that dark either; a full moon gave it a kinda Tim Burton-esque effect.
[*ahem*]
I had driven for about seven hours straight to get to a job interview. I hadn't really expected the trip to be done in one shot really, but I was taking these over-the-counter speeders called "Yellow Jackets". To this day, I think they're pretty much like ingesting a tea bag. In fact, when you burp on the stuff you would swear you tasted tea.
One of the side effects of "Yellow Jackets" is appetite suppression, so you don't stop to eat. Thus, you don't need to stop for a piss. Or anything. You just get where you're going, spray the body parts and playground toys off of your radiator, and feverishly grind your teeth until those fucking worm people stop poking you and you can finally sleep.
My job interview isn't scheduled until 10:00 in the morning, and it's about 2:30 --over seven hours early-- when I find the place. [Can't really relax until all the bases are covered. The worm people are real pricks about this stuff.]
I'm admittedly very tired, looking for a motel. But most of all I'm starving.
There's nothing in this town. It's not small, either. But it's 2:45 in the morning: gang-raped, crack-dealing tumbleweeds are blowin by lookin for trouble. I took the main road on the map completely east, and then eventually doubled back over to the west. Hell, at that point a goddamned Shell station stocked with microwaveable burritos would've been fine.
It's foggy. I've been in a few bands and we've used smoke machines, but this is the first time in nature I've seen a fog rolling at about eighteen inches off of the road.
So I'm now about six miles out from the town, resigned to no meal and sleeping in my car. Disappointing already. The job I'm interviewing for is for a warehouse supervisor, and I need to be sharp --well rested, and devoid of any distractions. These jobs involve a lot. If you're lucky you get to hire your own team. Pull gems out of loam. Shape them. Inspire them. Go to bars with them. Hold their heads while they puke, and get them home safely. With a good interview, offers of $30,000 a year are pretty standard issue for this sort of thing.
But for $30,000 you're also expected to be able to take that same poor jerkoff --tryin to feed his family-- and eviscerate and fire him when he or she gets to the point when the company numbers don't jive.
I don't eviscerate and fire for anything less than $32,750 a year.
For $35,000, I'll tape a "Kick Me" sign on 'em.
Can't really see the road very well anymore, and it's time to surrender. Head back. I'll set my battery-powered alarm for five hours and sleep in the car in the parking lot of the place. And maybe I'll wake up early enough in the morning to ruthlessly decimate the burrito population --like, well, whatever the burrito's natural enemy is. On Yellow Jackets-- before the interview.
Keep in mind that at this point I can't really see the road more than a few feet in front of the car, and I'm going about fifteen miles per hour on a main street that has disintegrated into rural, flat country. For all I know, I could have ditches on either side of the road.
Strangely, it's almost bright; lit indirectly by a full moon, everything seems to pulse with it's own opaque, innate luminescence. The landscape is a giant, flat span of cotton with an occasional stubborn tree stabbing defiantly through the near-flawless white blanket. And in the distance, the equally pale grey sky bleeds together with the ground to an obscure, bone-colored backdrop.
Enveloped completely in this white universe, it feels somehow simultaneously claustrophobic and lonely.
An intersection sign appears on a surreal, desolate landscape. A road. It takes a half a mile to find it, but I do.
Now, I pass the right hand turn slightly and back into it, making ready to hook the left back to town. My headlights sweep over the other side of the road and I absently notice it's a graveyard.
Now I swear to you that nothing here --the night time, no people, fog, full moon, graveyard-- is clicking on any conscious level. I look to my left to check for traffic.
Nothing.
I look to my right.
Of course, nothing.
The little boy in the passenger seat clutched his heavy backpack in his lap. He was in jeans, a light blue T-Shirt and a denim-style baseball cap. Smelled like Bounce fabric softener. He looked up towards me --strangely not at me. "Mister, you got any candy?"
I looked to the left again --I'm a pretty cautious driver, really. No better circumstances for an accident than fog 'an ...
I froze.
There's something in your brain that switches on in these circumstances. And I mean on ... you've heard the old adage about the hair on the back of your neck sticking up. When your brain screams "Nope! Not happening!", every faintest peach-fuzz little wanna-be hair follicle --starting from your tailbone and shooting electrically to the top of your head-- does too.
There was nobody in my car but me.
I think.
[LOBO]
I’m not going to give you a lot of scientific equations and reference materials to buttress this, but I think you’ll find at least some of this plausible enough to follow along.
“Black Dog” is a trucker’s term.
You see, at some point when deprived of sleep --no matter how jazzed up you are on caffeine and cocaine, whatever—the human body starts to generate whatever goo it does that makes you dream. I don’t know why … I’ll leave that to the people getting paid to figure out that stuff.
The problem is that, eventually, you don’t necessarily have to be asleep for this stuff to kick in.
The “Black Dog” is a fairly common hallucination, hence it’s name. This “phenomena” is not limited to truckers either; stories about a black dog darting across the road have bent a lot of fucking flesh and steel over the years.
My buddy, a wizened old vet of the trucking game, once told me that “everybody has a black dog all his own”. He was exasperated with me. He pointed out stories of deer, owls, hitchhikers, ad nauseam. I was trying to explain to him that I was following a car at night during a storm at a fairly safe distance when the car driver opened his window and a puppy fell out. In the roughly four last seconds of it's life, it skidded spinning to a halt, big furry paws already sticking to the asphalt. It staggered woundedly into the middle of the road, peering at the car it occupied merely moments before, racing away.
On a wet road, I was driving a vehicle in excess of 70,000 pounds and seven stories long at about forty-five miles an hour behind it.
Fluffy went bye-bye. FOOM! Straight to Fluffy Heaven.
Thomas, incredulous, insisted that that was my Black Dog.
Now, I’m old friends with sleep depravation. I daresay my first “Black Dog” was when I was about sixteen. I’m not bragging, not proud, but the was a time when I was dating to girls at the same time and they weren’t aware of each other. Virtually all the time I had out of their sight was when I was at work or sleeping.
So I did what any fine-blooded American male pup does in that circumstance: I gave up the sleep part.
I carried this on for ten days.
And I swear to God Almighty, had you seen these two and been sixteen, you would have too.
Well, suffice to say, on the tenth day I had an overwhelming sensation I can only liken to a hummingbird … and it permeated everything. The distant static buzz that separated me from whatever the hell reality was at the time drowned out everything; it was like living in the constant state of leaving a “Who” concert. Even when I killed those two broads an stuffed 'em in a garbage disposal, all I can remember was this buzzing ....
[Ha! I just wanted to make sure you were still paying attention; the only thing in danger of dyin was the rabbit, and I'm not really even sure what that means.]
What really happened was that, while lounging on my couch and watching the television, I "dreamed" my buddy my Tim was on the couch next to me asking for guitar lessons. “How do you make the guitar whistle?” he would inquire. I could see him, faded Ozzy T-Shirt and too-too new jeans (before they came "pre-washed"), smiling with his confused teeth. I guessed he meant the harmonics, and I would play them.
I slept for about twelve hours in a chair with my guitar in hand.
And when I woke, I got a phone call telling me that Tim was dead. An industrial accident at the Les Paul factory left him fatally impaled by a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar ... Even today in that factory, late at night, you could still hear him --with hooks for hands-- butchering "Stairway to Heaven" through the halls ...
It was a dark and stormy night.
Well, it wasn't really stormy at all. It was pretty damn humid.
And come to think of it, it wasn't that dark either; a full moon gave it a kinda Tim Burton-esque effect.
[*ahem*]
I had driven for about seven hours straight to get to a job interview. I hadn't really expected the trip to be done in one shot really, but I was taking these over-the-counter speeders called "Yellow Jackets". To this day, I think they're pretty much like ingesting a tea bag. In fact, when you burp on the stuff you would swear you tasted tea.
One of the side effects of "Yellow Jackets" is appetite suppression, so you don't stop to eat. Thus, you don't need to stop for a piss. Or anything. You just get where you're going, spray the body parts and playground toys off of your radiator, and feverishly grind your teeth until those fucking worm people stop poking you and you can finally sleep.
My job interview isn't scheduled until 10:00 in the morning, and it's about 2:30 --over seven hours early-- when I find the place. [Can't really relax until all the bases are covered. The worm people are real pricks about this stuff.]
I'm admittedly very tired, looking for a motel. But most of all I'm starving.
There's nothing in this town. It's not small, either. But it's 2:45 in the morning: gang-raped, crack-dealing tumbleweeds are blowin by lookin for trouble. I took the main road on the map completely east, and then eventually doubled back over to the west. Hell, at that point a goddamned Shell station stocked with microwaveable burritos would've been fine.
It's foggy. I've been in a few bands and we've used smoke machines, but this is the first time in nature I've seen a fog rolling at about eighteen inches off of the road.
So I'm now about six miles out from the town, resigned to no meal and sleeping in my car. Disappointing already. The job I'm interviewing for is for a warehouse supervisor, and I need to be sharp --well rested, and devoid of any distractions. These jobs involve a lot. If you're lucky you get to hire your own team. Pull gems out of loam. Shape them. Inspire them. Go to bars with them. Hold their heads while they puke, and get them home safely. With a good interview, offers of $30,000 a year are pretty standard issue for this sort of thing.
But for $30,000 you're also expected to be able to take that same poor jerkoff --tryin to feed his family-- and eviscerate and fire him when he or she gets to the point when the company numbers don't jive.
I don't eviscerate and fire for anything less than $32,750 a year.
For $35,000, I'll tape a "Kick Me" sign on 'em.
Can't really see the road very well anymore, and it's time to surrender. Head back. I'll set my battery-powered alarm for five hours and sleep in the car in the parking lot of the place. And maybe I'll wake up early enough in the morning to ruthlessly decimate the burrito population --like, well, whatever the burrito's natural enemy is. On Yellow Jackets-- before the interview.
Keep in mind that at this point I can't really see the road more than a few feet in front of the car, and I'm going about fifteen miles per hour on a main street that has disintegrated into rural, flat country. For all I know, I could have ditches on either side of the road.
Strangely, it's almost bright; lit indirectly by a full moon, everything seems to pulse with it's own opaque, innate luminescence. The landscape is a giant, flat span of cotton with an occasional stubborn tree stabbing defiantly through the near-flawless white blanket. And in the distance, the equally pale grey sky bleeds together with the ground to an obscure, bone-colored backdrop.
Enveloped completely in this white universe, it feels somehow simultaneously claustrophobic and lonely.
An intersection sign appears on a surreal, desolate landscape. A road. It takes a half a mile to find it, but I do.
Now, I pass the right hand turn slightly and back into it, making ready to hook the left back to town. My headlights sweep over the other side of the road and I absently notice it's a graveyard.
Now I swear to you that nothing here --the night time, no people, fog, full moon, graveyard-- is clicking on any conscious level. I look to my left to check for traffic.
Nothing.
I look to my right.
Of course, nothing.
The little boy in the passenger seat clutched his heavy backpack in his lap. He was in jeans, a light blue T-Shirt and a denim-style baseball cap. Smelled like Bounce fabric softener. He looked up towards me --strangely not at me. "Mister, you got any candy?"
I looked to the left again --I'm a pretty cautious driver, really. No better circumstances for an accident than fog 'an ...
I froze.
There's something in your brain that switches on in these circumstances. And I mean on ... you've heard the old adage about the hair on the back of your neck sticking up. When your brain screams "Nope! Not happening!", every faintest peach-fuzz little wanna-be hair follicle --starting from your tailbone and shooting electrically to the top of your head-- does too.
There was nobody in my car but me.
I think.
Comments