Phantasmagoria (noun): An extravagant or rapidly shifting series of images, scenes, or events.  Often surreal, like the fever dream offspring of Salvador Dali and a fog machine that accidently got doused in absinthe.

This six-syllable beast is French by the way of Italian (phantasma, meaning apparition) and Greek (phantazein, “to make visible”).  It originally described spooky lantern shows in the last 1700s, where ghastly apparitions cavorted on the walls to the audiences who clearly hadn’t discovered Netflix yet.  Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and now the word applies to anything dazzling, surreal, or chaotic enough to make you question what you just saw.

Last Tuesday, I found myself on a regrettably misjudged blind date at a “conceptual sushi” bar.  The walls were painted in migraine-inducing hues of magenta.  Tiny drones floated around distributing soy sauce, landing in your palm like mutant fireflies.  Somewhere about us, a DJ dressed as a sixteenth-century plague doctor spun trance tracks that sounded like a Roomba choking on a harmonica.  My date, a professional “life coach,” was Instagramming her un-photoshoppable sashimi while babbling at me that mercury was in retrograde.
Somewhere amid all this aesthetic carnage, the dried seaweed I was chewing achieved an unfortunate synergy with the sake I’d been guzzling wholesale to cope.  And then, like clockwork, the bathroom hit me with an urgency that felt almost biblical in its scope.  On the way there, I tripped over an LED art installation of “origami tigers,” clawed at a neon bonsai tree, and landed in front of a video montage projected onto the bathroom door.
It was a phantasmagoria of winding anime pandas, old Godzilla clips, and stock footage of oil spills.  “Experience Transcendence Through Crisis,” the caption advised.  I stared at it, utterly destroyed by existential malaise and the sushi equivalent of a bad acid trip.
Needless to say, there won’t be a second date.  

N.P.: “Living For The City feat. Tash Neal” – Slash