I had ceased to trust El Cid after the knife incident in New Mexico. I had stress fractures forming in my brittle psyche. I could feel the paranoia drifting in through every pore that wasn’t already blocked with bug guts, salt, or 60-weight bike oil. Every access point-the nostrils, the ears, the parched tear ducts, the busted and seat-polished asshole-it seeped in everywhere, slow, gray, like gutter bile. Paranoia defies the laws of permeability and non-permeability. As with nickel cigar smoke or a dirty New Orleans B chord, the gamy bitch beds where she damned well pleases, and the best defense is arrogant allegiance. Ride it, ride the sick mother like an adopted twerp, whipping and screaming, beating the juices out of it with a crop of tightly woven doom, into the rubber wall of relativity in hopes of being hurled all the way back to contemporary reality, social acceptance, and perceived salvation.
