“The restroom mirrors in the Back Alley spoke in tongues and the graffilthy on the walls was written in braille.”

—Excerpt from Confessions of a Lint Head, by Wyatt Duvall, pg. 77

The restroom mirrors in the Back Alley spoke in tongues and the graffilthy on the walls was written in braille. But tonight, with the lint smoke filling my head, I didn’t want to hear what they had to say. I’d paid my parking ticket for the fourth stall on the right, and it was my turn to take another hit.

I didn’t have time to read cautionary stories. I didn’t have time for grim fairy tales. I didn’t have time to straddle the best-seller list with yet another fabricated ode to imagined excess and don’t-you-forget-about-me trust-fund depression and grind. I just wanted to bounce. The pipe was calling. I obeyed.

An hour later, I was writing sonnets on the underside of the toilet seat and penning dust-bunny fortune cookies with nothing but my own blood and somebody else’s shit. Every word was a revelation. Every line was an apocalypse. And when the seventh seal was broken, the beast rose out of the commode and spoke. It needed pancakes.

The fate of the world depended on it.