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Morning incandescence floods humming hospital rooms. Blinds misinterpret light, throwing out random radiance across green floor to ceiling tiles. Scattered light, blinding Big Ross, head in his quarterback hands, sulking at the foot of my body. I want to tell him, I want to pull out the plastic tubing, walk cold and barefoot to his gloom, I.V.’ed hand on his shoulder. Tell him everything’s gonna be okay. Let the machines do their barking.
I finally had my mid-twenties crisis at twenty three years old.
It came on suddenly, peripheral showing slideshow after slideshow of tunnel visioned flashbacks. Little crumpled yellow photos of youth leading to an intense sweating from armpits, ribs, lower back. My little cubicle at Decatech, well, I let it close in around me. My final fading memory was a copy machine collapse. From the carpet I was lifeless with a tie and my office looked so much more interesting. I was your modern day post-grad, say, white collared Jesus.
For two weeks leading up to the big breakdown, I’d get an uncanny sternum ache, couldn’t quite place it. Craved nicotine but I never dabbled in cigarettes. After work I was always slumped over in a dim bar with some clever upbeat name. The Foggy Goggle. Whisky Dick’s.
My best friends and I, we used to pick fights in these bars. Now I was the victim, spilling my nostalgic guts to barroom strangers. All those friends, grownup and successful, well groomed behind big brand names. Single, young, professional, nested comfortably in obnoxious stucco houses way too big for just one person. I always used to say, ‘I’d rather die doing something I love then live doing something I hate’, so on a Monday afternoon in my cramped cubicle I let go.
Steady my payless shoes in the office carpet.
Gnash my teeth ‘cause I’m a child of the Eighties. I feel very alone, all the time. I’ve never been in love, and I have a profound feeling that the only worthy moments of my life are memories.
Falling, I am Kevin McLaughlin and I really need a drink.

Twenty-three years old and I was only alive with a condensing pitcher of golden booze in a smoky pub.
Fridays dusk til’ Sundays dawn meant I was a ghost at Decatech.
Resurrected as a barroom hero, a perks only affair. I met bikers, authors, struggling musicians, ex-bullies, high school wrestlers turned addicts, suicidal housewives, in the closet husbands with kids, and every time we’d chat I’d feel like less of a mess.
We all had the same question. No one had the answer to: what now? I put it in my fucking chips, I played my hand, I went to school, got my degree and I’m more lost and desperate then I ever was.
We are still afflicted with a malignant angst that grips us when we see the success of others. We continue to drown in bartender ‘Big’ Ross’ alcohol, like haggard underpass junkies, because it is the only way to truly express the injustice we feel.
Together in this dark bar we will all lose ourselves.
Our baggage will disengage with every sip. It will melt with every shot that you take and our problems will bleed into a ball of healing energy that will conjoin us as we dance and sing. This healing blue light is not Decatech, it is not my job or your addiction, your child support or your abortion or your bulimia. It is absolutely not my alarm clock or Sunday nights or your overdoses. This phosphorescent strength is me stumbling over to you, blonde stranger (with the disorder) and we can dance and sing in this crescendo of perfection. And I know you will boost this ego if need be, and I will balance you, dear, on your Stiletto heels as you vomit into the trash.
And at that culmination of glory when the bar caves in on itself, the jukebox will break the silence with the song of our generation. My tie will fly behind me like a cape, I will slur some romantic what-nots into your gaudy earrings, your new manicure will dig into the back of my DKNY informal and for those short moments we will be alive.
Where did that go? And where did that come from? Who digs the grave of being twelve and riding bikes? The sleep-overs? The public pool high-dive? The high school cliques? Life?
I am the millennia martyr. The tragic figure, falling in slow-motion.
Soon to be sprawled out on Decatechs new carpet. Warhol Christ.
Splash of super-latte spreading along from my fingertips.
Looks like a target market murder scene.
Desecrate my death pose with a wheel of white receipt tape, seal off and outline my corpse with fast-food grease.
Always wanted to be the hero of sorority girls and the working class.
Collapse in Decatech’s the bull, mind-numbing jobs are the china-shops.
As I feel my legs give out and my chest cave in and the room plummet, I’m thinking: I want girls to swoon. Maybe a snapshot of my Banana Republic corpse sprawled eagle, blown up at print to fit a throw blanket or ceiling poster, available to buy and mount in frat houses everywhere. I want my comatose body to be the God of struggling, confused young people of…everywhere.
“Fuck work.”
Maybe next net year will see altered work conditions, more ventilation. More windows? Maybe.

Listen to the beeping machines pumping fluids.
Look up into Ross’s big blue eyes and think of healing light.
Remember the sex in the bathroom stall with the Oxycontin housewife.
I remember her nails digging, pulling up skin, sticking to cotton.
Her apartment smelled of mothballs, knock-off perfume.
“All men want is sex”, she announced stirring my drink. Laughter echoed through her dingy apartment. I was half naked and buzzing.
She asked me how it felt to know her husband would be transiently out, sure to come back any minute now. To know I would be the one responsible for his incarceration.
Stare at fixed drink, smile with the corners of my mouth. Even when it stings my tongue and burns the eyes, drink to melt this new baggage, looking for that light. There was no jukebox, just the rumble of a Harley five floors below. A beautiful opera tune hemorrhaging from ambient speakers hung like dead men. She danced like a spirit, stumbling in her heels. Her blonde hair pin straight, I couldn’t help but wonder if she remembered me holding it back as she dry heaved at the bar.
Floating ice cubes and I was twelve again, trembling on the high dive. Twelve, guiding my bike through suburbia with best friends, sneaking out in the early morning solstice when the grass was still wet and dark.
“I have to go”, curtly placing down drink on consolation coaster.
“So soon? But the party’s just begun.”
“Yes, well you met me at a really awkward moment in my life. I’ve had a momentary lapse of all things reason.”
“and?”
“I’ve been looking for love in all of the wrong places.”
I grabbed my khakis, tears rolling down both cheeks, running through white washed hallways to the elevator. As the doors converged I caught a glimpse of the husband biker I had shared many a drink with, we had spilled our baggage together on more than one Friday night.

Awake and Big Ross is gone. Sprawled out beneath the floor to ceiling green. Look down at a gaping hole in my chest with plastic tubing sprouting like wildflowers. In metal pans are cold metal instruments covered with my muscle and bone. Life support still packed up in its pink plastic.
It took four doctors and a security guard to hold Ross back as I was hauled away for an autopsy.
They would later tell him that gamma butyrolactone was the prime chemical used to poison and sedate me the night before (a household floor stripper mixed with Draino) and it took nine hours before my body converted these chemicals into the fatal combination of Gamma hydroxy butyrate (or Gamma hydroxybutyric acid). My temperature had climbed so high, my heart had ceased. I was pronounced dead at 11:17 AM, the exact moment I hit the carpet at Decatech.

Yellow lights pass me overhead, and I can still taste the bitter pitcher beer, I can feel the warm embrace of strangers all looking for answers that didn’t exist. Our lives lead cryptic. That healing brilliance we all searched for like a ghost, tricking each other and ourselves into believing we all didn’t have this amazing life within us already.
We didn’t need booze or a dreary bar to see it, we just thought we did. Depression, irony, and envy, our reluctance to live had fueled these feelings.
I am post-mortem and all I want to do is float down, grab these post-grad tragic figures by their slumping shoulders and show them that they have an entire life to live within them.
In a dark enough bar, when the jukebox gets tired, you’ll hear my name whispered.
At a wild enough fraternity bash, you will hear the drunken cries pierce the night, the ritual chant penetrating the night sky, screaming McLaughlin to the Gods.
Sometimes when she’s all alone, the blonde dances in her heels to opera and thinks of me. My Drakkar.
Big Ross ended up educating other lost young people who all dragged their feet through life. He told them about the hibernating, resonating light they all had within themselves. He closed the bar, and finished his PHD in therapy. He took an old photo of me in my college years, in my most perfect moment, had it blown up to poster dimensions. Soon college girls stared back at me from their beds, slipping into sleep under a ceiling poster rendition. On walls of dorms and frat houses the world over, in between John Belushi and the Kiss, is me. A new age college James Dean. I’m a campus legend because I died for the man, died in an office as a slave to the grind. But I want young people to remember me as someone who could have made the right choices, could have followed my heart, but opted not to. I want to be the reason you pursue your dreams. Be happy and poor, because there is so much more to life than worrying about what other people think.