Emergency

“There’s so much goop inside of us, man […] and it all wants to get out.”

Fuckhead encounters a high Georgie in the opening paragraphs of the story. Georgie claims he’s mopping up lots of blood on the operating room floor, and when Fuckhead tells him there isn’t any there, Georgie ignores him. His hallucination brings on this pseudo-philosophical musing that carries metaphorical weight later in the text, suggesting the messiness of both Fuckhead’s and Georgie’s lives and their desire to live better—to purge the “goop” that’s inside.

“I want to go to church […] I’d like to worship. I would […] I need a quiet chapel about now.”

After their hospital shifts, Fuckhead and Georgie lie in the back of the truck, considering what to do. The desire for the sublime and salvation pervades the story, and in this moment Georgie voices his need to change something about his life. Fuckhead seems uncomfortable with Georgie’s desire, and he never lets on that he has heard or considered it.

“It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life, I’ve taken as much [LSD] as he has.”

The future Fuckhead, who narrates the story, remembers the county fair, where there was a man who advocated for LSD use. Fuckhead now sees himself in this man, demonstrating self-critical hindsight as he acknowledges how his younger self was careless or deluded; the younger Fuckhead “pit[ied]” the man without realizing their similarities.