Opening line:
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.”
Mr. Derwood Hunsdale-Talbot’s comments:
As the young people are wont to say, “Been there.” Although now a model of abstinence (except for the occasional pinch of snuff), as a young student at the Academy, I was not entirely immune to the spell of Bacchus. I still wince at the consequences of an evening christened with amontillado and ended with absinthe.
On awakening the following morning, I “found myself transformed” into an encephalitic whose now enormously swelled cranium had apparently lain through the night wedged tightly in a fast-reciprocating paint shaker, the result being a global subdural hematoma of boiling blood. Struggling to lift my eyelids, I felt as though I could feel individual photons of light crashing and exploding on my retina. My mouth felt as dry as arrowroot. My teeth–gelatinous.
When I dared stand before the mirror, what looked back at me from the glass certainly was not a monstrous insect. I likened it more to a crustacean (especially the protruding eye stalks). Perhaps a coconut crab. After being run over by a bus.
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Once in high school health class, we we compelled to sit through an anti-drug movie called “Grass Fire.” In one scene, Sonny Bono smokes marijuana, then looks in the mirror. His reflection turns into a chimpanzee with a yacht club commodore’s cap on its head. I swear this is true. To this day, I don’t know if Sonny was serious. (He ended up being a conservative politician.)