Babylon and Babel Join Forces!

I was playing Xbox games at a party with the inside knowledge that there was an orgy upstairs – I had peeped into a room and seen it firsthand. I was also eating tasty cookies I had reason to suspect were laced with SOMETHING. I should have stopped eating the chocolate delights, but the way it worked, the more of them I ate, the hungrier I got, so the more of the tasty things I ate! Sure, I sat there and laughed at everything and played soccer using my thumbs, but I hardly moved otherwise. A vigorous moral battle proceeded in my head all the while. It didn't help that I kept overhearing that certain persons had been upstairs for many subsequent times after their first.

Neither was my higher state of consciousness necessarily a good thing: I seemed to see straight into people's minds and hearts, to read their thoughts and intentions, to decode the various inflections of their words and laughs, which in itself should be a superpower to cherish, except that the particular emotions I noticed were icky. They involved visceral animal lust for easy anonymous no-strings-attached random group sex. (Icky only when you observe it in others, but not in yourself. Like a belch.) So I fixed my eyes on the screen to avoid reading people's souls.

Seriously.

The hostess came to talk to me. I knew straight away that she had come to appraise the impact of her chocolate cookies on my behavior. I humored her, by parroting all her drunken questions in a higher falsetto. When she was firmly convinced that my brain had evaporated, she laughed convulsively and disappeared into the kitchen, feeling good about herself. “Who's fooling who?” I wondered, and laughed out loud when no actual conclusive answer came to me after some hard thinking.

The music kept me jumping in my seat, and feisty dancers a few feet away occasionally derailed my Premier League campaigns with suggestive distracting seductive gyrations.

Shortly, two familiar latecomers joined the party - enter GalPal and Angela, dressed sensationally, with make-up and everything. They didn't hide their surprise at seeing me there, and neither did I pretend to be surprised to see them there. As we greeted each other, GalPal told me to warn her BFF Angela not to give in to Lucas' pleas for a second chance. “Better to stay single,” I told Angela obediently, “For example, me here.” She shrugged and pouted and I saw that her black eye was taking rather long to heal. “He'll just hit you some more,” I warned, thoughtlessly. And Angela immediately pretended to look for the hostess, leaving GalPal to rebuke me with, “Well put, wiseguy!”

Sarcasm. I laughed, and immediately, I began searching GalPal. She sat next to me, oblivious that I was on a higher consciousness, and she spoke unwarily of mundane things.  Meanwhile I was in the zone of her personal space where her sweet perfume was clouding my supreme thinking, while her little black dress exposed smooth, even expanses of skin and cleavage. Her mellow voice wafted into my consciousness, dreamlike, issuing from tasty-looking full lips, little meaningless tinkling words to one who enjoyed the seductive sound that delivered them at expense of their meaning. Her long, delicate neck was  the embodiment of youth. How her earrings swayed. How her waist narrowed. How her legs extended to infinity. Shortly, in such an environment, my supreme thinking became adulterated with iniquitous thoughts, and all thinking nearly ceased altogether. I soon realized however, by actually paying attention to the actual conversation, that GalPal was still sore at me for pushing her away last we'd talked.

We would have proceeded to an argument about whether-and-if-so-why I like pushing people away, in which I was determined to come out blameless. But Angela emerged from the kitchen, party hostess in tow, and claimed her BFF, so that the trio of them went to a couch of their own to gossip. I was left to regain my bearings. It happenned only very slowly.

The next few hours were a blur as I ratcheted up the number of games I played and the number of sudden guffaws that escaped me spontaneously. Ordinary things were relegated into the mental background, such that, as my eyes were fixed on TV, I was automatically multitasking chocolate cookies, soft drinks, laughing, overhearing a trio of girls gossiping about what-the-heck that alcohol advised them to discuss (upto and including Men), and listening and headbanging to music. When I did eventually look up, the scene wasn't much different, except for a guy who  confidently settled himself next to Angela on the couch. He had giant guts, intruding upon a girl-gang like that; his steady gaze was fixed firmly upon Angela all the while, and he was smiling broadly, like a game-show host. He immediately began to charm Angela, now employing words.

“I'm QezH,” he said, "You're Too Darn Hot."

It must have been the way he did it. Watching Angela's overwhelmed smile, and the associated envious smiles of her two friends, I heard my alter-ego stirring from sleep. It wasn't slow to give a speech.

Now there's a guy who likes what he sees and knows that he wants it so he goes for it, Mr. Feelings! Here's a plan: GalPal.

My higher consciousness had no counter-comment, especially as I surveyed said GalPal in the light of recent developments. Golly, she too was looking my way, pretty eyes and all.

*********

I awoke, hours later, seated upright in the couch in front of the TV, with
1.) no recollection of when I fell asleep, surprised in fact that I was waking up in the first place ;
2.) a gamepad on my lap, and
3.) a sleeping GalPal's head resting on the other lap, using it like a pillow or something.