milk

Laughing hysterically...more a maniacal, rabid cackle than just a hearty belly laugh. Laughter worthy of ridicule, deafening fucking laughter. An absurd and misplaced, non sequitur laughter that no one else is sharing.

Thinking then what to say next as everyone in the room stared at him. Eyes bulging from the heads of the audience - Black Hole Sun type bulging. Eyeballs out beyond the lids meant to contain them. Out of their sockets and showing curvature never meant to be seen outside of Biology class or an autopsy. One lady crying, another speechless with hand on the topside of her breast saying "jesus mary and joseph", and still another citing a quick 'our father' through a searing apoplexy. "Why the fuck would anyone let that disaster in here? Guy is a fucking disaster still."

"Where the fuck am I?", to himself. And sitting down then next to the podium in his seat on the panel. An uncomfortable smile to the folks in the front row who cannot or will not make eye contact with him. Scratches the back of his head and smoothing his hair down, squinting a little bit pinching the top of his nose and rubbing his brow feeling for pimples that need popping and can be popped with a scratch of the fingernail. The sides and back of his hair are long - basically needing trimming around the ears and squaring and shaving of the neck.

"you've seen that sweaty jetrag feeling come on over him...and I have seen that boy nod...into a dream a time or two"

He drank down his milk. Always with a glass of milk this guy. A clear glass too so that everyone has to see the thick milk slowly recede down the sides of the glass. At home, in public, at restaurants asking the waitresses if they serve milk - and restaurants have those big bags of milk - most often expired - in the metallic square industrial fridges in their kitchens, after working out - a glass of milk, phlegming up his throat no doubt. And then sucking the sputum and mucus up through the back of his throat right through his GD sinus and into his brain presumably because where the fuck else does it go? Sucking it up there with huge snorting noises through the nose but more with the throat and leaving it to sit atop his nasal cavity in his sinus or trying to swallow it down through the other milk-phlegm. touching his brain probably, the portion of the milk-sputum that cannot be swallowed back down and fogging his thoughts, the loogie...and thinking something stupid like "from whence did this loogie come?" all because his throat cannot process it, the milk.

And when he gets annoyed? Oh god. The sucking and snorting get violent - like he, his brain, has to win the fight against his throat or the phlegm or whatever other enemy he has created just then. Just a transference, you know, obviously of some other more massive life problem that he suffers...the violent sucking = a weak-willed thinly-veiled bodily manifestation of a larger issue.