Life is a strange strange thing and it’s hard to sometimes stay rooted in place and believe that all of this, and you, and me, are anything more than figments of a grander imagination. Of my imagination.
I once tripped acid beneath an ancient oak tree on a small mountain in California. At times, it felt as if I were living out a dream I had had years earlier:
about old folks heading down a dry valley in a silver Amtrak train, telling me I didn’t have a ticket to ride. As I stumbled out, I passed a lone concrete hovel. A flop house for addicts. A shell of a building with my friend Johnny telling stories by a hobo fire. Here is where we go when we trip, a place close enough to the valley to feel the dry wind on the backs of our necks, but still removed. So removed. That those on the train pass us by and look sadly down at our gesticulating stories of the valley we could just barely perceive. Even as it baked in the unnatural grey sun all around us. The dream told me that tripping was me pressing my face against a dirty window to gain a blurry image of the truth.
During the middle powerful moments of that trip under the tree, I realized that the moon and sun belong to me. Are part of me. And if I could not raise the sun up from its dark well on the other side of this imaginary orb we live on, then I was actually wasting my time. Not just my time, but everyone’s time. If I am not enlightened, then I am holding my people back with my very presence. So I decided to die.
I asked my man to shoot me, because I didn’t have the courage to do it myself. His own trip was along a different path, but I brought him into mine, and he struggled to survive its grip. We both made it.
At another point, while lying in the dirt loosely wrapped in an old sleeping bag, or perhaps just sitting on the cold concrete floor of that flop house in the hot valley, I found myself coursing along the riddle at the center of the universe. A Möbius Continuum colored like a jack in the box, with scallywag clowns walking silently beside me in the vast space where this riddle twists and turns, silent and purposeful. The garish keepers of the riddle looked at my squirming mind with furrowed brows, not unlike the way the people on the silver train looked at the gathered interlopers around the fire as Johnny foretold a new age to come.
These things are real and I was there. This computer I am typing on and the desk upon which it rests is real too. I am here. The two existing in one reality is the strangeness of life and makes no sense to me, keeps me blurry and distant even when I’m sitting right next to you.
