Sheriff Jim Witt was supposed to wake up dead on New Year's Day, but he didn't... he only woke up wishing he was dead, which was pretty much exactly the opposite of what he'd been going for.
The night of December 31st, 2041 had been just another Saturday night for Jim and he'd celebrated the new year by doing what he always did on a Saturday night... he got stupid drunk on 190 proof double rectified moonshine and tried to kill himself. A weekly suicidal drinking binge had been his tradition ever since he'd been forced to resign his commission from the army. Over the past 20 or so years he had actually come close to punching his own clock on more than one occasion, but invariably he would wind up blacking out before getting down to the brass tacks of it... oh, and it didn't help that Sheriff Jim Witt of Podunk Country, Georgia, was also a hopelessly cheerful drunk, which only made for bad suicide vibes every time. If it wasn't for the fact that he had a county to sheriff and a moonshine route to drive, Jim would have chosen to stay drunk all the time.
For as long as he could remember, all Jim had ever wanted to be was a soldier. It didn't even matter to him what branch of the army... driver, pilot, machine gunner, secret agent, nuclear bomb commander, starship trooper, latrine digger... whatever. His stepfather had been an army soldier, as had his stepfathers stepfather, and his stepfathers stepfathers stepfather before him... on and on in an unbroken line of stepfathers for almost three or four generations. It was more than his step-family's lineage that Jim felt responsible for as his stepfathers only stepson. It was a chain.... a family chain forged upon the guilt of forgotten promises, tempered with the memories of a traumatic childhood, and finally bound together by the cold-welded links of modern tradition.
Jim had been inspired to join the army when he was 26, after watching his stepfather slowly devolve into an intolerable asshole after a drunken mishap involving a hand grenade juggling incident.
Not only was Jim not dead, but the inside of his noggin felt like it was getting scrubbed vigorously with a brillo pad, and simply trying to think was nearly impressible, what with shouldering a devastating, planet-sized hangover - which was just about exactly the opposite of what he'd been expecting that Sunday morning.
He came to buried underneath an avalanche of murky confusion with absolutely no idea who he was, where he was, or why the silent depths of sweet oblivion had felt it necessary that he should be vomited back into existence. There was no identity, no ego, no perception, no nothing. For Jim Witt, the entirety of his being during those first moments of non-oblivion consisted merely of a familiar sense of resignation, accompanied by mild disappointment. No biggie... just a kind of 'all encompassing 'oh well'.
After passing out again and immediately bouncing right back to suffocating (I don't think the suffocating part was mentioned earlier, so... yeah, suffocating) underneath an avalanche of murky confusion, Jim became aware of a cold, hard surface pressing uncomfortably against his entire body. He couldn't begin to fathom what it might be, which made the inside of his brain itch like the image of a madman's head fungus. He could feel the cold, hard 'whatever it was' trying to squash his eyeball as it pushed against the side of his face, just pressing and pressing, like some kind of giant, really bad spatula.
A kong, drawn out gasping, choking, suffocating, and drowning noise, like that of a dying, pathetic creature, issued forth from Jim's throat as a perfectly causal reaction to some insanity-spanning horror that most likely lurked just beneath his conscious memory. No doubt about it... it was definitely like some kind of fucked up Jack-in-the-box.
No likey, he thought. He said it out loud - 'No likey no likey no likey' - and then he shouted - 'ME DEFINITELY NO LIKEY!' He awoke suddenly as if from a nightmare, and the murky confusion transmogrified into a conscious thing. 'What the heck happened, and what the heck is this crap that's happening!' he screamed inside his own head. Then he passed out again.
::: Exposition :::
Consciousness came crashing into his noggin like a forty car pileup.
::: Exposition :::
Well, there was the cold, slick thing he had cradled like a teddy bear against the declivity near the top of his chest, with the long end of it pushed up snugly under his chin. 'Huh', he thought, feeling vaguely repulsed. 'What's this thing?' Although he held it like a teddy bear, it definitely wasn't comforting like a teddy bear ought to be. No, this thing was... could be... comforting, yeah. But not like teddy bear comfort... more like a 'Smite Thine Enemies' kind of comfort.
What the hell? he thought. Never mind, I don't wanna know.
He'd been more and more of a mind to do something about the problem of, you know... WAKING UP once and for all, but he never seemed to get around to it because he keep passing out at the crucial moment.
::: Exposition on suicide and plans for suicide and screwing up his own suicide :::
What he'd gotten instead was the grandmother of all hangovers. No, it's was the grandfather... Whoops, it was the step-granddaddy of all hangovers.
The inside of his mouth was dry and his lips were spit-welded. They made a moist 'pop' as they came unstuck. He tried to build up a little saliva by smacking his tongue and lips together, which made a nasty noise, like a dog snacking on its own nether regions.
'Tastes like a dogs butthole.' Jim muttered.
He tried to inhale through his nose and was greeted with the smell of snotty, freshly snored boogers. His eyes were gummed up and crusted over. Jim was definitely disappointed. He'd chickened out again. If he was really serious about blowing his brains out, really, he was gonna have to man up and do it sober.
Jim's head was full of this... this all encompassing, everywhere kind of nausea... Ubiquitous, Jim thought to himself as he heaved and pulsated while trying to catch his breath. Ubiquitous. He'd learned that word some twenty years ago from some science fiction novel that he'd been reading, and at the time he'd thought it a pretty damn cool word. Ubiquitous - meaning ever present, abundant, all over the place, filling the nooks and crannies, just all over everything. The boogers in my nose are ubiquitous, he mused as he threw up all over the kitchen floor. The ubiquitous vomit covered the kitchen floor.
Jim thought of all the ubiquitous things in his life that he hated. The ubiquitous waking up that happened every day was the worst... then there was the ubiquitous hangover, followed by the ubiquitous passage of time. Inside of that was the ubiquitous dread, from which he observed and followed his own ubiquitous habits, every day, ubiquitously. Oh, how he hated that word. If was just so... pretentious! And ubiquitous!
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