ON THE GROUND IN PARIS

I collapsed in a kebab shop. We were stopping for some food on the way to the club. I hadn't ordered anything, and wasn't going to. I stood by the wall, and suddenly became a bit faint. Then, it was pins and needles across my body, and mild hallucinatory breakups in my field of vision, like television interference in the shape of stars. I needed to sit down.

Two Brits came in and started hassling my friend, for whatever reason. I was told later they wanted a sip of his drink. At first, they made their demands in perect French, but before they realized we were Anglophones, I had apparently passed out.

I remember one of the Brit's last remarks before he switched to English. I recall having a couple of my mate's fries, and thinking that I badly needed a seat, but there weren't any available in the tiny kebab shop. Suddenly, the dizziness churned at motor speed, and my ears started ringing, first in a low shift that pitched upwards rapidly...then everything faded away, and I felt this "whoosh", like the earth tilting, and then a clumsy, weightless collision. It ended in a suspended darkness, as if I were in liquid, and I could hear some mutterings around me. I woke up on the ground.

When I got back on my feet, no one had any idea what had happened. I figured out pretty quickly that I had blacked out (after all, when you're on the floor, and the last thing you remember is being dizzy, it's easy to put two and two together). I smiled at one of the Brits and humoured them with something like, "Uh, yeah, I'm not sure what just happened there but I think I had an acid flashback."

"Roight," said one of them, with a bewliedred look. "You just 'ave a seat, mate."

I turned my head and everyone was looking at me. "I'm just gonna to go sit down outside, yeah?"

I left, and sat on the curb, leaning my back against the shop window. The Brits came screaming out, one of them loudly explaining to his buddy that they were "surrounded by inhospitable people!"

My friend came outside. "Are you ok?" she asked. "Has this ever happened before?"

"Um, a couple times but usually when it does, I sit down and it wears off. I didn't sit this time, so maybe that's why."

"Are you diabetic at all?"

I've never been tested for it, so how could I know? She talked about blood sugar but at that point my brain was mush if I had to think for more than 30 seconds. The feeling lasted for much of the night.



The friend with the food joined us outside. "I thought you were fucking with those British guys," he told me. "Like, 'These guys are being so ridiculous I can't stand up right now.' But then I realized that was maybe too extreme."

He explained that the Brits had stormed in, very persuasively trying to glean a sip from his drink, and then pursuing the cause aggressively. "Then your eyes just kinda closed and you fell."

"How did I fall? Did my legs give out?"

"No," he said. "It was more like you crumpled."

It's difficult to imagine myself doing that. I told him about what it felt like, and what I remembered, but I was pretty cluless after that.



"The kebab guys thought you were on drugs or maybe drunk." I hadn't been.

I don't why it happened, or why I managed to avoid it in more dangerous places, like while walking along the sharp banks of the Seine, or climbing up a spiral staircase in some museum. In fact, I'm not really sure why a kebab shop and two strange Brits might be involved in stimulating my blackout.



I tried to think of some health reasons, but nothing other than some pretty unlikely chronic illnesses came up. I had been walking a lot, outdoors, in the rain, not eating much because of the expenses, and sleeping on a floor at nights for only a few hours at a time. I did get sick later on in the week, but not the kind of sickness that makes you black out.



So perhaps it's for psychological reasons that my feet gave way to kebab shop floor. I woke up with my face on the tiles because things are moving too fast right now. Maybe my brain has had too stable a relationship with my cranium for too long. It's inevitable that something had to disrupt my balance, and whatever it was psychologically seems to find its way into the physical stuff too. It's a safety call, I think, from the ref on the sidlelines. He's blowing his whistle in my brain as I get tackled in my endzone.

It reminds me of something related to me as a kid. My mom used to have the most creative ways of explaining the most complex medical stuff. To demonstrate how the brain reacts to hitting the cranium, she would put a cauliflower in a pot, shake it around for a bit. "See," she'd say, "you can see what happens to your brain when it hits your skull."

I change in very strange and unexplainable increments. I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but for the first time in a long time, I'm discovering a new place in my head, like taking pictures in the darkness and seeing only what the flash exposes.



From there, it was on to Fleche D'Or, and although I felt a bit bizarre, it was a good time.