Alcoholism and Self Obliteration

Johnny has been at the VA for at least a dozen years. Nobody was really keeping track. He was a Navy Seal. Now he wasn’t sure where he was at most of the time. They took away his brain. He busted up the skulls of two nurses. That was the last time he came in to the mental hospital. At that point he stopped relapsing on drugs and alcohol. He no longer had to deal with what he did in the Navy. He no longer had to see the skulls explode. His mind was too confused with heavy doses of Haldol. He basically did a shuffle up and down the ward between long periods of sleep every day for more than the last decade. A patient nick named Hemming way for his epic drunken relapses and love for the writings once told Johnny that he had seen him every time he came in patient over at least the last dozen years. Johnny no longer had a brain. He was the sedated scarecrow of the institution. Johnny served as a warning to Hemingway. It worried him it didn’t seem to be helping. Hemingway had recently burned down his parents’ boat drunk, and was just in three months prior for alcohol related brain injuries and unlawful behavior. Johnny almost smashed Hemingway’s head in. He couldn’t remember why he wanted to though and eventually the nurses had Johnny convinced he had only been there for two weeks. He no longer believed he arrived the night before.

Nurse Jackie explained it to Hemingway. It was easy for Johnny to no longer live with all he’d done. It was safer for the nurses and the community too. Johnny never quit drinking. That’s what happens. It scared Hemingway. The overwhelming anxiety that plagued him all the time was why he drank. It just didn’t work as well as it used to. Johnny didn’t see a way out. A man there they called Jesus suggested psychedelic mushrooms. Jesus had never done any mushrooms, acid or LSD. He was mostly a recovering alcoholic and pot head on top of being bipolar, (though he was closer to a white agnostic evangelist.) Jesus told him Bill W. found god on a hallucinogenic flower called Belladonna, and a lot of peer reviewed literature was suggesting hallucinogenics may break repetitive alcoholic abuse patterns and lift long lasting depression, (especially psilocybin mushrooms, as they didn’t tend to be addictive in their own right.) Hemingway chose electro-shock therapy. It was no longer possible for him to deal with who he was as a person. He got what the nurse meant about Johnny.