The Metaverse Describes Itself (ChatGPT as Hunter S. Thompson)

“The metaverse is a place where you can be fully alive, and fully yourself, in a way that is simply not possible in the physical world.” (Pretty good ChatGPT.)

Let me give it a shot.

I was five minutes out from Anderson Coopers’ house when the acid kicked in. The bottle of Casamigos Añejo in my hand was fresh out of the freezer and I had to switch it from hand to hand as I walked the 200 yards up the front driveway to the house, for the holiday party AC gives each year with Andy Cohen. I could hear the lizards clickity-clickitying in the bushes along the driveway. I was halfway to the house, I could see it lit up in the distance. A white wedding dress flowed in steps up in front of me, I couldn’t see the woman wearing it, she was dark and it was dark.

The kaleidoscope of blues and greens began flashing off her dress in a hypnotic message that alerted me to my altered state of consciousness. The blues and greens melted into a puddle and slithered up the driveway just 5 steps ahead of me along the driveway. My head felt like it was crawling with ants or headlice or spiders, but actually, as I reached up to scratch I realized it was on fire. My hand came back like a piece of burnt toast and the smell of my own burning flesh brought me to my knees on the smooth black warm driveway where I noticed a microscopic rodeo of aphids riding lantern moths and doing tricks. There were lion tamers a tiny clown car a horse ring with a ringmaster cockroach named Gregory squeaking/barking out tricks to the ever-faster-running beetles with rolli pollis riding them in tiny red overcoats, reigns in their wide grey toothy mouths.

As a grotesque giant human overlord and I would’ve stayed there for the entire show but a group of three of the six housewives of Dubai bumped into me, crushing the tiny circus in a few randomly placed Manolos. They bumped into me (I was in black tie) and I smashed my nose directly down on the driveway on top of the clown car.

I never made it to AC and Andy’s party. One of the wives was an old fling I knew when she was 23 (now 38) who helped me up. She could not stop laughing. “I’m trippin balls,” she said, and then she stuck her tongue down my throat and we wound up in the side hedge and then into the palatial pool cabana and then ubering to her house and it was four days before I emerged out of Venice Beach in some unknown velour tracksuit, like something Ben Stiller wore in I Heart Huckabees.

Read more Short-Short Stories from John.