Snorlax - "Slow it Down"

Curiosity is a peculiar condition. How disappointing it is to spend hours attempting to uncover the mysteries of the universe, only to discover that they are not worth knowing! How queer it is to consider that man will forfeit his own well-being for utter irrelevancies! But what a clever trap; that the realization that ignorance is, indeed, bliss, renders itself trivial.

* * * * *

The day Jason Holmes was born, his father shot himself in the left temple with a hollow-point 9mm bullet fired from a .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum. The funeral was held the next day. The casket remained closed so no one had to look at his mangled face. Everyone attending the funeral had seen a bullet wound before, most of them on television, but some of them were doctors and had seen one or two in real life.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes was five years old, he held a butterfly in his hands. His mother preached to him: “Hold it too loosely, and it will fly away: hold it too tightly, and you will crush it.” Jason gazed at the lifeless guts in his hand. His eyes watered and his body began to shake. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

* * * * *

On Jason Holmes’ sixth birthday, his aunt happened to give birth in the hospital. When his mother told him so, Jason inquired, as children are prone to do: “Where do babies come from?” His mother responded, as mothers are prone to do: “The stork brings them.” Jason would not learn about sex until four years later, when an octogenarian nurse would lecture an audience of kids and separate boys from girls and blush and speak to each group separately about their own body parts and the other groups body parts. None of the students could quite understand why these two groups needed to be separated. The nurse wouldn’t tell them. Neither would their teachers.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes was eight years old, he entered the third grade of the American education system. There were twelve levels of this system, each level issued an ordinal designation. It was used to teach kids about numbers and war and volcanoes, and also reading so that kids could learn even more from books and encyclopedias. Some of these kids were mean-spirited, and would ask Jason why he didn’t have a father. Jason didn’t have an answer, so he went home to inquire to his mother. She glared at him, then asked: “Why do you need to ask so many questions?”

Jason shrugged. His mother’s face softened. She said: “You just tell those kids that a drunk driver killed your father.”

He went to class next day and did just that. They asked him: “What is a drunk driver?” Jason didn’t know.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes was sixteen years old, he entered the tenth grade of the American education system. One day, he sat in a room with twenty-five other sixteen year olds while a starry man with a steel countenance faced all of them and percolated ancient history. That day, the topic was the French Revolution. Words tremulously escaped from his mouth, gathering together and gradually forming sentences. Some of them sounded like so: “Some historians believe that the storming of the Bastille symbolized victory over the reign of tyranny that the French bourgeois had wreaked for years. Most historians know that at the time of the storming, seven inmates were being housed. The building could retain about fifty prisoners in total. The rioters had heard that the prison was more cavernous and inhuman.”

Jason laughed silently at the rioters. What an empty victory, he thought. If only they had known.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes was eighteen years old, he felt typical teenage angst, so he wrote a list of words describing how he felt in a journal he bought at Target for 99 cents. These words included: lost, confused, alone, worried, unloved, and bereft. He omitted the word “clever,” which was how he felt about himself when he completed the task. He rationalized it like this: “clever” would detract from his authenticity as a greatly troubled and burdened individual. He stored the journal underneath his mattress until six minutes later, when he removed it and added to the list “troubled” and “burdened.” He forgot about the list within a week, and never wrote in the journal again.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes was twenty years old, he began to wonder why he was no longer as happy as he was during his infancy and childhood. He started to search for new ways to be happy. One way involved sticking a needle in his median cubital vein and drawing blood into a syringe filled with a chemical compound called heroin, then injecting both the blood and heroin back into the vein. Jason and his friends who engaged in this activity with him called heroin “dynamite,” because when the brain made them feel powerful, and all of them knew the phrase “I am no man; I am dynamite,” which was attributed to a dead man named Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. They all agreed fervently that they were all, indeed, dynamite.

* * * * *

By the time Jason Holmes was twenty-three years old, he had let so many chemicals alter his mind that it could no longer process new information. He had already experienced both the happiest and saddest moments he would ever experience; so when his mother called him to apologize for lying to him for all these years and that his father had actually committed suicide, Jason only responded like this: “Oh.” Three days later, Jason snuck into his childhood home to try to find the gun that his father had used to shoot himself on the day that Jason was born, unaware that police investigators had confiscated the weapon according to Standard Operating Procedure. Instead, he discovered an epistle scribbled on a green Post-It stuck to the bottom of his father’s armoire. Jason dimly imagined he had come across his father’s suicide note. It read: “Power lies in what is possible. After you open the curtains and the light shines in, you can’t forget what you’ve seen, even if you blow up the sun or gouge out your eyes.”

While he read this, Jason’s mother entered the room and flipped the light switch. Jason saw her eyes were sad and tired and full of tears. He tried to validate her: “Thanks for trying, mom.” She nodded somberly. He left her lingering in the doorway, but could not forget what he had seen.

* * * * *

When Jason Holmes stepped outside the door, he ran until he reached the closest stretch of highway. The next day, local newspapers printed a story about a truck colliding with his body travelling at seventy-nine miles per hour. The impact caused the vital organs inside the body to hemorrhage. He was pronounced dead on impact, though in reality, Jason retained consciousness for two point four seconds. Those who read the article remained blissfully ignorant of this detail.

The man driving the truck had been moving at a speed of fourteen miles per hour above the marked limit because he had a deadline to meet. He was supposed to be delivering a shipment of books to a regional outlet of Barnes and Noble, among which were copies of “The French Revolution” by David Taylor and “Human, All Too Human” by Friedrich Nietzsche. The driver was convicted by a jury of his peers on one count of manslaughter and one count of speeding, and thus sentenced to reside in a state penitentiary for no less than eight years. After the first four years of his imprisonment, he suddenly began to laugh. Here is why: he realized that he never met his deadline because he tried to decrease his trip duration.