Distortion

I didn't believe him when he told me, but then I'd always been skeptical of the things Paul came out with. Like the time he called me excited in the middle of the night, assuring me we could get high by mixing enough nutmeg into boiling water. We both threw up for hours and felt nothing.
There was the time he showed up at my house with a packet of Homebrand poppy seeds intent on brewing his own opium tea. Seeds got stuck in our teeth, and we felt nothing.
Paul was a big-time stoner, regularly spending entire days from morning till night stoned, going to school stoned, going to sleep stoned. It was his normal state of being. Regardless, he was always looking for other things to smoke, eat, lick, sniff, ingest, always trying to get higher.
I think it haunted him, that the outcome of all his adventures into mind-altering substances produced exactly what he was running from. He felt nothing.

Paul had started dabbling in music and had picked up a guitar like all adolescents do at some point. He stuck with it and became surprisingly proficient. I think it was the first time he'd ever succeeded at something. He started hanging with the music kids at school, and he'd brag to me when he saw me that they had the Best Weed.
But I knew Paul better than that, and I knew he was still looking.

For a while we didn't speak, I immersed in my study, and Paul, I imagined, immersed in his music. Then he came to my house again in the middle of the night, as was his style. He rapped on my window, holding his guitar in one hand, with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He looked different. He sounded different. There was some new quality to him that I couldn't quite identify, something I'd never encountered before but something that wasn't entirely human. Perhaps that is too foreboding a thing to say, but I'd never seen anyone look and talk the way Paul did. At first glance he looked as normal as ever, but if I stared too long I felt that the lines of his face, the angles of his body, the surface of his skin had deviated.
When he spoke, his voice reminded me of television static, crossed telephone lines, radio feedback, garbled and metallic and crowded.
In this new tin static voice he told me he'd found it, the thing he was looking for, the rush. He wanted to show me.
He pulled a miniature amp from his backpack, and cables and plugged them all into his guitar. His eyes flickered strangely as he moved about the room. Pushing me onto the bed, he told me to relax and listen. The strings hummed, and he began to play the guitar softly. I felt nothing. I looked up at him impatiently. Did he mean for me to fawn over his playing skills?
He saw my impatience and emitted a crackled laugh. He moved to his backpack and brought out a pedal, and plugged another lead in. The other end of the lead, he placed in my hand, and as he closed my palm around it I felt a soft vibration from his skin. His whole body seemed to hum to me.
He winked at me in a second that felt like several fragmented moments, then jammed his foot down on the pedal.

Buckling Warped Bent Collapsing in on me Contorting around me. Disfiguring Crushing Changing Whipping Shaping Screaming Curving Bloating Laughing laughing laughing laughing laughing

I felt distortion.