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One time, in the seventies, my sister dropped two quaaludes before boarding a red eye flight from SFO to Toronto. In those days there were charter flights, very bare bones that you could get very cheaply, especially if you had some flexibility and could quickly take an empty seat on a privately chartered flight. Which she did. She had a couple of drinks at the airport and what with the ludes and the whisky sours, she leaned her head against the window and fell asleep almost as soon as the f;ight attendant demonstrated the belts and barf bags.
When she woke up, an hour or so later, she thought that she might have also accidentally dropped acid. Next to her was a very fat man with a GI Joe hair cut and a sweaty face. She nodded to him as she got up to go to the bathroom. He gave her a big “Hello!” in a language she did not recognize and lifted up a shot glass of something clear out of a bottle that had a label she couldn’t decipher from where she stood and she smiled and turned away thinking she had to get new contacts, not that she had them in. As she made her way down the aisle she wondered if this was a trade association of something. They all looked vaguely related as if they were third cousins on the distaff side. Many of the men had crewcuts. Everybody was standing up, sitting on one another’s lap, passing bottles and bottles of, maybe vodka?, around. Many kinds of pungent pickles and sardines and saltines and sausages
It was incredible. A party. People hugged her, one older guy fell sloppily against her and told her that he loved her still. Except, it sounded completely different. She took a gulp the next time a bottle was offered, went to the bathroom,looked at herself in the mirror and realized that she did not and had not understood even one word that anyone had said after the thing about the jerking the life raft. She wondered if she was deaf so she rapped against the wall. She could hear it. Through the narrow door she heard laughter and now, suddenly, gusts of singing, shrieks and hoots and weird sad solos. How could anything that sad be funny? And how, for example, had she understood that man.
OK. I also hate drunkenstoned narratives that go nowhere and this one sort of does. It is a true story and part of a longer one and it has a logical explanation but I don’t like it as much as this one – like Alice in Wonderland, my sister is suddenly stranded in a nonsensical world where language, (which is what most of us overly rely on for communication) only seems to make sense and only to some people. She cannot crack the code although she suspects that she ought to be able to and the people are so warm and kind and inclusive.
But language, sadly, only makes sense when it is used to first construct and then convey meaning to ourselves and each other. There must some agreement, even if malleable, that words mean what we think they do. Otherwise our utterances are no wiser, and probably a lot less so, than that of a pig.
Once you switch to using words as just sybaritic nonsense, language no longer holds the power to mean and, if you are the right man at the right time, apparently no one on Earth can stop you.