Hi. I'm about to embark on a major writing project and I am trying to exercise my brain before I start. I'm really proud of this piece, and I'd like some people to read it, but I sort of need the anonymity of the internet to get honest feedback. You'll see what I mean. Any suggestions you have about style, anything, please be honest. I appreciate it.
Disclaimer 1: this story is "fictional"
Disclaimer 2: this story may be disturbing to young people or squares
Divine Moments of Truth
It’s Sunday afternoon. Still slightly hungover from last night’s fire dance. I pour out the rest of the bag and hesitantly examine the quantity. My desire to peer over the edge is so overwhelming that it induces anxiety. Life, for many people, is experienced in a constant state of numbness. Their lifelong sleepwalk lowers the volume and mutes the colors. So many ants, marching toward their death at the speed of light. The weight of everydayness flattens us with the gravity of a collapsed star. Decades are lost tying shoes, buying coffee and sitting in traffic. My goal is not simply to escape quotidian reality, but to push intensity beyond the scope of feeling. I am most alive when I inhabit immense intensities. Today, I will induce intensities so powerful that they flow through me. I will no longer feel intensity, I will become intensity.
I place the contents in a homemade peanut butter & jelly sandwich and eat it slowly, deliberately contemplating each bite. It takes conscious effort to swallow. I occasionally gag as it migrates down my throat, my face contorting with disgust. Once I get it all down I start to collect items to take with me on my journey. Music, Emergen-C and Bruce Banner. Irony swirls above, mocking me for thinking I could prepare for a journey I’ve always already begun. Awareness expands within minutes, first by a sensation of the multiplicity of chemical reactions pushing my consciousness through space and time, then by a thickening of space itself. The distance between objects slowly becomes its own living being, only a matter of time before it becomes self-aware. This is it. My spaghetti string legs move me outside and my soul shivers with nervous excitement.
Nausea takes hold by the time we get to the roof. Three of us, nomadic pioneers, moving sideways through dimensionality while only 15 feet higher than the rest. From this angle the entheogenic surfers can see the set approaching in the distance. It’s hard to keep it in my stomach and I have to lie down to light a ***** to smooth everything out a little. Reality distorts as I lay smoking, looking at the full blue sky. Thousands of lines emerge to fill the blueness, lines of light and energy, swirling in and out of shapes and patterns. Endless layers of moving cross-hatched lines are radiating like the hair of a deity. They form a face, a mutant animal and a tesseract. The waves of intensity have arrived, and my board is the plane of immanence.
This body no longer fits me. Glancing down I notice some other being’s legs attached to (my?) torso, but they see me too and they stretch themselves to the other end of the roof, cowering like a wounded dog. Consciousness drifts around with each point of focus more animated. Seemingly benign objects come to life and express personalities. The chair across the roof seems fairly non-judgmental, but its neighboring air conditioning unit can be quite the a**hole.
“Dr. Venkman.”
I look to my fellow surfer.
“Yes, Princess?”
“What do you see if you look at someone’s face?”
It is immediately surprising that the lines of energy filling the sky are reflected in his massive aviator glasses. Stubbly facial hair slowly retreats back into his skin and then grows back out. It seems like the hairs are miniature sea anemones, swaying back and forth, waiting to close in. I notify him that he might want to get his facial hair examined by a professional. I look to the other co-venturer, his goatee migrates to one side of his face and his skin seems to emit light. This makes me giggle, but my being has crystallized as a consciousness separate from my body. He doesn’t know I’m laughing.
Time for a shift in perspective. The vomit storm has passed without raining a drop. Those alien legs shrink back into position and propel me to the non-judgmental gravity hammock. It’s much hotter over here under the sun, its presence rages with unspeakable power. Socrates was right. “When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.” Drenching ourselves in sunlight is like pulling the trigger, and for a moment it is overwhelming. Each tiny aspect of every instant of sense input becomes its own intensity. On top of this, cognitive processing becomes lateral, pushed on its side. It’s as if every idea, memory, image, shape and figure in my brain has been taken out of its filing cabinet and shuffled by some hysterical cosmic trickster. I don’t mind, I think it’s funny too.
Eyes close, but it is not dark. The sun is too powerful, and it casts vibrant reds and oranges onto eyelid screens. Before long, the whole red region of the rainbow is morphing into a kaleidoscope tube, encasing whatever is left of my body. It spins around me and stretches eternally upward. My brainstem hops inside a fourth dimensional spaceship and blasts toward Betelgeuse. Moving this fast sidesteps time, mutates perception with time dilation, and for a moment I feel myself as a reptile. The kaleidoscope shows me more shapes, more animals and finally a massive grinning face. His deliberate stare startles me and I open my eyes.
He’s still there! In the sky!
The face dissipates by the time I repress the instinct to notify my fellow travelers that we are being watched, and I realize I am still smoking the *****. Has all of this happened in only five minutes? It makes sense given my position outside of space and time. I don’t even have the occasion to finish this thought before a tree in the background blossoms into a double spirograph, green lines pushing outward like a slow-mo supernova. To the left, a pair of palm trees guarding the adjacent neighborhood start to make out with each other. They seem happy, but I’ll bet the one on the right is unfaithful. I can sense the playful deception in its fronds. Four somber cypress trees loom in the foreground. They look like black statues set against the bright blue sky … until they breathe heavily and sprout slime-dripping tentacles. The bricks on the chimney begin to rearrange themselves as if Bert is playing some surreal game of Tetris. An instant of perception carries me to notice that it is all happening at once! The tree’s spinning electricity, the jaded arecaceae lovers, the cypress octopi and the chimney Tetris are all simultaneously tickling the event horizon of my consciousness. Time for a cigarette.
The music dancing out of the Ipod dock sizzles with beauty. I can align my own intensity with that of the song and at some point we merge. I walk into the song the way a dream traveler crosses the shroud to enter a painting. Only three drags before the conversation begins to materialize. Princess is sitting in the other hammock, and Isito is standing a few feet away. Their words are sprinting up an intellectual spiral staircase, and I can tell that they really want to see the view from the top. My mouth opens involuntarily to see what it can muster.
“Wow. “
This is going to be more difficult than I anticipated.
“I feel like it’s raining good ideas inside my head.”
Much better, but still an understatement. More like a veritable hurricane of sensations and associations. Somewhere inside I hope the storm does not blow down my house of rationality, but Dionysus persuades me otherwise. Princess and Isito are discussing academic work as an outlet for expression and social influence. Ironically enough, given the circumstances, I tell Isito that we already have the intellectual power to change the world, with or without a PhD slip.
“It makes me sad that people don’t believe their own potential. They dream, but do not realize how close their dream is to reality. You have the power to create, resolve or destroy anything you wish. No matter what it is that you want to do, I guarantee there is at least one person out there that can help you do it. If that’s true, then it only becomes a function of finding that person and persuading them to help you. We live in the age of Google, Wikipedia and Youtube, which means it is possible to communicate with virtually anyone you wish. The only reason your dream isn’t a reality is because you haven’t chosen it yet.”
They’ve heard this rant before, and they appreciate the idealism, even if they think repression is more significant than I give credit for. The dead horse has indeed been beaten. Milliseconds accumulate as the thinking machines construct a new interaction about technology. I remark that I would enjoy spending a day with someone that has never been exposed to modern technology.
“They actually teach classes in prisons for people that have been in jail for several decades to learn about new technology,” Princess explains. “Some of these people have no idea what a cell phone is, let alone the internet.”
“It must be hard for those people to integrate back into a society that thinks and lives in a completely different way now,” I reply.
Isito takes a step to the side, but he also remains in the same position. There are now two of him, sides blended together like a cartoon tracer. “No, my people are fine without advanced technology. Surprisingly, people can live quite well without technology.”
“Isito, your people have technology, it’s just a different kind.” In the moment it seems completely reasonable to me that technology is cultural, manifesting differently in different communities.
The surrounding chaos of the living landscape has subsided, as if the universe collapsed in happy exhaustion after laughing too hard. The cartoon caricatures of grass and concrete breathe slowly and heavily below. Another wave is approaching, so I turn and prepare my board to paddle. I notify Princess and Isito that another ***** shall be prepared, and then I begin the descent. The substance responsible for this state is intertwined with my brain, but it also flows through my veins. It can be felt at every point of contact. It is like a direct injection of liquid geist into the bloodstream, which eventually seeps into the bones. This body still isn’t mine, and yet I’m responsible for getting it downstairs. It takes effort and mindfulness to navigate to safety. I travel a total 15 feet to my room.
The bladder is more important than the *****. I walk into the bathroom, which is ordinarily three square feet. Not today. All six walls start to wobble and vibrate as I piss. Slowly, they start to close in on me. It is a little frightening at first, but then I get the impression I am in the Death Star trash compactor and I laugh it off. Finish, flush and escape just in time. As I finish washing my hands I notice that there is another Dr. Venkman in the room. We stand to examine each other.
My first thought is that his image is reasonably attractive, but it could go downhill fast. Am I in there? Which part of what I’m seeing is me? Where is the constellation of identity? Psychological weirdness swirls around me. It crescendos, and we lock eyes. I crawl out of my pupils to get a closer look, but I lose my balance and fall into the abyss. An eternity in an instant. I react to what I see in the abyss with a sublime form of existential mortification, pull the plug connecting our dilated pupils and move my cartoon accordion legs to the chair.
It’s never taken this long to roll one up. I have the necessary focus, but my muscles are drunk. Close my eyes, take a deep breath, visualize what I am trying to do, open my eyes, do it. I am so proud with myself when it’s done that I ride the pony back to the ladder and demand an award from Isito and Princess. They are not impressed.
When I return, I have to convince Isito that I am committed to the non-judgmental gravity hammock and he should move to another location. It works. The light is receding and the scenery is taking on a more artificial cell-shaded tone. Isito stands up and looks over to us. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“…no…Well, I can’t say I don’t believe in the possibility of reincarnation. I believe you are your choices, but I don’t understand how you can be the same person if you have truly lived a whole spectrum of previous lives, each posing a completely different frame of experience.”
“I like your move of tying identity to material experience. That makes sense to me, although I’m pretty sure traditional concepts of reincarnation have some way to wipe the slate between each life. It does not seem impossible, I’m just not sure if it’s real.”
Isito and Princess have fully become cartoon characters by this point, their personalities magnified and projected onto their physical appearance. Princess, ready to present himself in any situation, and with enough happy curiosity to wipe cats off the face of the planet. Isito, expressing himself through dance, has a different dance for every emotion, response or query. I am glad they came to the beach today. Isito suddenly decides to make everything serious.
“What would make you give up smoking right now today?”
A very tough question. I think about it very hard, even though I already know the answer.
“The only thing that would make me quit is if my family told me they wouldn’t love me any more if I continued.”
“But they will love you no matter what.”
“Yep.”
The sun pulls the Earth over its face like a blanket right around the time the pizza arrives. Princess is scared of mosquitos, and he casually pours a tank of bug bite paranoia into my mindframe. I can only take it for so long before I believe both legs are being consumed like sap from the tree of life. We stand together on the roof, take in the moment, carefully untangle ourselves from the infinite, and descend back to ground level. The intensity begins to collapse, but it leaves a fountain of happiness and pool of spirituality behind. We put on A Nightmare on Elm Street and my body begins to reassemble itself. As I relax I find it comical and ironic that Freddy Krueger is driving the taxi, taking me home from Toontown. I’ll make sure to tip him well.
Disclaimer 1: this story is "fictional"
Disclaimer 2: this story may be disturbing to young people or squares
Divine Moments of Truth
It’s Sunday afternoon. Still slightly hungover from last night’s fire dance. I pour out the rest of the bag and hesitantly examine the quantity. My desire to peer over the edge is so overwhelming that it induces anxiety. Life, for many people, is experienced in a constant state of numbness. Their lifelong sleepwalk lowers the volume and mutes the colors. So many ants, marching toward their death at the speed of light. The weight of everydayness flattens us with the gravity of a collapsed star. Decades are lost tying shoes, buying coffee and sitting in traffic. My goal is not simply to escape quotidian reality, but to push intensity beyond the scope of feeling. I am most alive when I inhabit immense intensities. Today, I will induce intensities so powerful that they flow through me. I will no longer feel intensity, I will become intensity.
I place the contents in a homemade peanut butter & jelly sandwich and eat it slowly, deliberately contemplating each bite. It takes conscious effort to swallow. I occasionally gag as it migrates down my throat, my face contorting with disgust. Once I get it all down I start to collect items to take with me on my journey. Music, Emergen-C and Bruce Banner. Irony swirls above, mocking me for thinking I could prepare for a journey I’ve always already begun. Awareness expands within minutes, first by a sensation of the multiplicity of chemical reactions pushing my consciousness through space and time, then by a thickening of space itself. The distance between objects slowly becomes its own living being, only a matter of time before it becomes self-aware. This is it. My spaghetti string legs move me outside and my soul shivers with nervous excitement.
Nausea takes hold by the time we get to the roof. Three of us, nomadic pioneers, moving sideways through dimensionality while only 15 feet higher than the rest. From this angle the entheogenic surfers can see the set approaching in the distance. It’s hard to keep it in my stomach and I have to lie down to light a ***** to smooth everything out a little. Reality distorts as I lay smoking, looking at the full blue sky. Thousands of lines emerge to fill the blueness, lines of light and energy, swirling in and out of shapes and patterns. Endless layers of moving cross-hatched lines are radiating like the hair of a deity. They form a face, a mutant animal and a tesseract. The waves of intensity have arrived, and my board is the plane of immanence.
This body no longer fits me. Glancing down I notice some other being’s legs attached to (my?) torso, but they see me too and they stretch themselves to the other end of the roof, cowering like a wounded dog. Consciousness drifts around with each point of focus more animated. Seemingly benign objects come to life and express personalities. The chair across the roof seems fairly non-judgmental, but its neighboring air conditioning unit can be quite the a**hole.
“Dr. Venkman.”
I look to my fellow surfer.
“Yes, Princess?”
“What do you see if you look at someone’s face?”
It is immediately surprising that the lines of energy filling the sky are reflected in his massive aviator glasses. Stubbly facial hair slowly retreats back into his skin and then grows back out. It seems like the hairs are miniature sea anemones, swaying back and forth, waiting to close in. I notify him that he might want to get his facial hair examined by a professional. I look to the other co-venturer, his goatee migrates to one side of his face and his skin seems to emit light. This makes me giggle, but my being has crystallized as a consciousness separate from my body. He doesn’t know I’m laughing.
Time for a shift in perspective. The vomit storm has passed without raining a drop. Those alien legs shrink back into position and propel me to the non-judgmental gravity hammock. It’s much hotter over here under the sun, its presence rages with unspeakable power. Socrates was right. “When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.” Drenching ourselves in sunlight is like pulling the trigger, and for a moment it is overwhelming. Each tiny aspect of every instant of sense input becomes its own intensity. On top of this, cognitive processing becomes lateral, pushed on its side. It’s as if every idea, memory, image, shape and figure in my brain has been taken out of its filing cabinet and shuffled by some hysterical cosmic trickster. I don’t mind, I think it’s funny too.
Eyes close, but it is not dark. The sun is too powerful, and it casts vibrant reds and oranges onto eyelid screens. Before long, the whole red region of the rainbow is morphing into a kaleidoscope tube, encasing whatever is left of my body. It spins around me and stretches eternally upward. My brainstem hops inside a fourth dimensional spaceship and blasts toward Betelgeuse. Moving this fast sidesteps time, mutates perception with time dilation, and for a moment I feel myself as a reptile. The kaleidoscope shows me more shapes, more animals and finally a massive grinning face. His deliberate stare startles me and I open my eyes.
He’s still there! In the sky!
The face dissipates by the time I repress the instinct to notify my fellow travelers that we are being watched, and I realize I am still smoking the *****. Has all of this happened in only five minutes? It makes sense given my position outside of space and time. I don’t even have the occasion to finish this thought before a tree in the background blossoms into a double spirograph, green lines pushing outward like a slow-mo supernova. To the left, a pair of palm trees guarding the adjacent neighborhood start to make out with each other. They seem happy, but I’ll bet the one on the right is unfaithful. I can sense the playful deception in its fronds. Four somber cypress trees loom in the foreground. They look like black statues set against the bright blue sky … until they breathe heavily and sprout slime-dripping tentacles. The bricks on the chimney begin to rearrange themselves as if Bert is playing some surreal game of Tetris. An instant of perception carries me to notice that it is all happening at once! The tree’s spinning electricity, the jaded arecaceae lovers, the cypress octopi and the chimney Tetris are all simultaneously tickling the event horizon of my consciousness. Time for a cigarette.
The music dancing out of the Ipod dock sizzles with beauty. I can align my own intensity with that of the song and at some point we merge. I walk into the song the way a dream traveler crosses the shroud to enter a painting. Only three drags before the conversation begins to materialize. Princess is sitting in the other hammock, and Isito is standing a few feet away. Their words are sprinting up an intellectual spiral staircase, and I can tell that they really want to see the view from the top. My mouth opens involuntarily to see what it can muster.
“Wow. “
This is going to be more difficult than I anticipated.
“I feel like it’s raining good ideas inside my head.”
Much better, but still an understatement. More like a veritable hurricane of sensations and associations. Somewhere inside I hope the storm does not blow down my house of rationality, but Dionysus persuades me otherwise. Princess and Isito are discussing academic work as an outlet for expression and social influence. Ironically enough, given the circumstances, I tell Isito that we already have the intellectual power to change the world, with or without a PhD slip.
“It makes me sad that people don’t believe their own potential. They dream, but do not realize how close their dream is to reality. You have the power to create, resolve or destroy anything you wish. No matter what it is that you want to do, I guarantee there is at least one person out there that can help you do it. If that’s true, then it only becomes a function of finding that person and persuading them to help you. We live in the age of Google, Wikipedia and Youtube, which means it is possible to communicate with virtually anyone you wish. The only reason your dream isn’t a reality is because you haven’t chosen it yet.”
They’ve heard this rant before, and they appreciate the idealism, even if they think repression is more significant than I give credit for. The dead horse has indeed been beaten. Milliseconds accumulate as the thinking machines construct a new interaction about technology. I remark that I would enjoy spending a day with someone that has never been exposed to modern technology.
“They actually teach classes in prisons for people that have been in jail for several decades to learn about new technology,” Princess explains. “Some of these people have no idea what a cell phone is, let alone the internet.”
“It must be hard for those people to integrate back into a society that thinks and lives in a completely different way now,” I reply.
Isito takes a step to the side, but he also remains in the same position. There are now two of him, sides blended together like a cartoon tracer. “No, my people are fine without advanced technology. Surprisingly, people can live quite well without technology.”
“Isito, your people have technology, it’s just a different kind.” In the moment it seems completely reasonable to me that technology is cultural, manifesting differently in different communities.
The surrounding chaos of the living landscape has subsided, as if the universe collapsed in happy exhaustion after laughing too hard. The cartoon caricatures of grass and concrete breathe slowly and heavily below. Another wave is approaching, so I turn and prepare my board to paddle. I notify Princess and Isito that another ***** shall be prepared, and then I begin the descent. The substance responsible for this state is intertwined with my brain, but it also flows through my veins. It can be felt at every point of contact. It is like a direct injection of liquid geist into the bloodstream, which eventually seeps into the bones. This body still isn’t mine, and yet I’m responsible for getting it downstairs. It takes effort and mindfulness to navigate to safety. I travel a total 15 feet to my room.
The bladder is more important than the *****. I walk into the bathroom, which is ordinarily three square feet. Not today. All six walls start to wobble and vibrate as I piss. Slowly, they start to close in on me. It is a little frightening at first, but then I get the impression I am in the Death Star trash compactor and I laugh it off. Finish, flush and escape just in time. As I finish washing my hands I notice that there is another Dr. Venkman in the room. We stand to examine each other.
My first thought is that his image is reasonably attractive, but it could go downhill fast. Am I in there? Which part of what I’m seeing is me? Where is the constellation of identity? Psychological weirdness swirls around me. It crescendos, and we lock eyes. I crawl out of my pupils to get a closer look, but I lose my balance and fall into the abyss. An eternity in an instant. I react to what I see in the abyss with a sublime form of existential mortification, pull the plug connecting our dilated pupils and move my cartoon accordion legs to the chair.
It’s never taken this long to roll one up. I have the necessary focus, but my muscles are drunk. Close my eyes, take a deep breath, visualize what I am trying to do, open my eyes, do it. I am so proud with myself when it’s done that I ride the pony back to the ladder and demand an award from Isito and Princess. They are not impressed.
When I return, I have to convince Isito that I am committed to the non-judgmental gravity hammock and he should move to another location. It works. The light is receding and the scenery is taking on a more artificial cell-shaded tone. Isito stands up and looks over to us. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“…no…Well, I can’t say I don’t believe in the possibility of reincarnation. I believe you are your choices, but I don’t understand how you can be the same person if you have truly lived a whole spectrum of previous lives, each posing a completely different frame of experience.”
“I like your move of tying identity to material experience. That makes sense to me, although I’m pretty sure traditional concepts of reincarnation have some way to wipe the slate between each life. It does not seem impossible, I’m just not sure if it’s real.”
Isito and Princess have fully become cartoon characters by this point, their personalities magnified and projected onto their physical appearance. Princess, ready to present himself in any situation, and with enough happy curiosity to wipe cats off the face of the planet. Isito, expressing himself through dance, has a different dance for every emotion, response or query. I am glad they came to the beach today. Isito suddenly decides to make everything serious.
“What would make you give up smoking right now today?”
A very tough question. I think about it very hard, even though I already know the answer.
“The only thing that would make me quit is if my family told me they wouldn’t love me any more if I continued.”
“But they will love you no matter what.”
“Yep.”
The sun pulls the Earth over its face like a blanket right around the time the pizza arrives. Princess is scared of mosquitos, and he casually pours a tank of bug bite paranoia into my mindframe. I can only take it for so long before I believe both legs are being consumed like sap from the tree of life. We stand together on the roof, take in the moment, carefully untangle ourselves from the infinite, and descend back to ground level. The intensity begins to collapse, but it leaves a fountain of happiness and pool of spirituality behind. We put on A Nightmare on Elm Street and my body begins to reassemble itself. As I relax I find it comical and ironic that Freddy Krueger is driving the taxi, taking me home from Toontown. I’ll make sure to tip him well.
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... dunno, I'll finish it later...
