What was this sensation?  A feeling of warmth, compassion, and goodwill towards all the like of which he had never felt before.  Along with it were colors swirling before his eyes, stars erupting here and there, quantum mechanics floating in front of him, grinning.  And he didn’t even know what a quantum mechanic did.  Fixed quanta, he supposed.

    And so Johnny sat, stoned, the TV on, Larry King talking about Kosovo, and his brother’s stereo pounding Black Sabbath through their two bedroom apartment.  Can he walk at all, or if he moves, will he fall?

    The phone rang, he stretched to pick it up.  A wave of vertigo hit him as he stood up too quickly.  Their mother was calling.  Something about getting a job.  He couldn’t hear her through the din of music and drugs, and she wasn’t the first person he needed to converse with.  After exchanging a few words of greeting, he muttered that he had to go and hung up without waiting for a response.

    Sitting back down, he ate a few pieces of stale popcorn sitting there from the night before.  Larry King was gone now and some muppets were spelling words on Sesame Street.  The letters on the television floated by and in his mind he spelled words of his own, never remembering what they meant.  Love, hate, joy, despair, fear.

    And he watched the muppets.  And they were good.  And the song on the stereo seemed to have changed.  No longer Black Sabbath but Metallica.  Never free, never me, so I dub thee Unforgiven.

    And the phone in his mind called, and Johnny picked up.  Hello Johnny, this is Johnny calling.   Leave a message after the beep and go to hell.  Grover was practicing his crazy antics, and Elmo was being cute.  Metallica blared, and he was trying to talk with himself.  Too bad the quantum mechanics were too busy fixing quanta to fix his head.