With gentle yet precise shove, I am pushed out of a door into the proverbial never-ending hallway filled with more doors than Monsters Inc. I see my shadow tall in front of me. I don’t recognize the shape. Who is that creature relegated to a cliched semi-hallucinatory state after browning out for over a year to the borderline intolerable?

The ceiling immediately opens up and it starts raining bowling balls. I am mesmerized by the vibrant rainbow of colors tumbling from the sky. I cannot feel the devastating impact created as they pummel my body. Blow after blow bounces off my flesh producing a visible mark and audible wince of pain without response from me. I continue to marvel at the large, polished orbs designed to knock down anything in their path. Finally, as I watch its entire descent from the imaginary sky, a psychedelic tye-dye ball painted with a big smiley face hits me smack between the eyes.

The pain is immediate and radiates down through my body to reach my very core. All the while the ball that struck me is laughing wildly through its now demonic smile. I try to run for cover but there is none unless I open one of the endless doors.

I grab the nearest door knob only to be met with purple slime coating the knob and now my hand. It is impossible to turn it. My movements become frantic and breathing is difficult. There is no air in my lungs to produce a scream.

When I look over my shoulder, I see the bowling balls have morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West’s evil, flying monkeys. They are headed straight for me and their creepy Oz theme music blasts my ears.

I pull back and thrust shoulder first into the door and it cracks open. The thought of trying another door without slime all over it never occurs to me.

My successful escape from monkeys borne of bowling balls is met with an involuntary belly flop into a giant pit that resembles the dungeons at ChuckECheese filled with those bacteria-ridden balls. Except this pit isn’t filled with balls, it is filled with millions of over sized pills. There are capsules the size of my foot, round, powdery tablets that could be used for frisbees, and gelcaps that look more like garden globes than medicine.

The more I struggle to find the edge and climb out, the deeper I sink into the morass of pharmaceutical phalluses. A loud, creaking sound emanates from below the infinite quick sand of drugs and the farther I fall, the louder and screeching it gets. I try to turn my head downward to identify what is generating the now piercing vibrations of high pitched metallic squeals.

That’s when I see it.

A massive hypodermic needle with a shiny tip that glints so bright I have to shield my eyes. My attempts to remove myself from this nightmare shift into high gear to avoid being stabbed with a shot bigger than my beat up old station wagon. The more I grab at the capsules and tablets, the closer the needle gets to my ass. I am like the last salmon in the river willing itself against the current, desperately trying to make it across the final rocky rapids to freedom.

Of course, I don’t and am deeply punctured through the junk in my trunk up through my torso until the once shiny tip emerges from inside my skull covered in gray tissue, dripping with blood.

It has not killed me and, as I reach over to take a bite out of one of the football sized gelcaps,  the only thing that comes to what is left of my brain is “Wow. Wonder what would have happened had I tried to fight it out with those damn monkeys?”

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p.s. Can it be a Hunter S. Thompson moment if I reference Monsters Inc.?