Re-acquaintance with the World on the Rocky Grohman Lakeside

I would be tired, but a mug of caffeinated sludge keeps me up. I'm roaring down the highway in my sport utility whatever, ten clicks over the speed limit. The road is curved like the contours of the Mona Lisa.

My genes are not meek. They inherited this system of roads. Genes and roads are structured enough for their purpose. The Ministry of Transportation maintains the highway, drawing from sales tax I contributed from this afternoon's trip to the convenience store, to impulsively purchase a simosa and a wonderbar. I don't know how many Chinamen died to pave this road, or how many Iraqis died to fuel my car this far. I'm not an activist so I'm not about to calculate the number. I got with the winning team. I can drive my car, not really mine, ill-gotten with the reigning culture of a hegemonic species, to the parking lot of the park.

I park. There are a few other cars here, a bit of a drag but what did I expect? Three or four people stretched across this narrow park makes for a lot of room, it's first class. How many people have such easy access to something like this? Still, it makes me a bit prickly. I must be, at least partially, in "social mode", I must be partially proper. But I also must do what I came here to do, which is smoke an outlawed plant.

I take three bong hits inside the car. Vapours swirl into the air.

The crumbs you clumsy stoner, you dropped pot crumbs all over the seat, what about the next time you cross the border, they've got everything on you, license plate in closed-circuit camera checkpoint will bring up your red-flagged file, cross-referenced with the report of the rent-a-cops who busted you with energy drinks and a head full of paddywhack in Lakeside Park after closing, they’ll know you’re not really “Mr. Smith” and that isn’t your “maiden name” (the stupidest lie you’ve ever told), they'll pull up your passport, go over your elementary school records, browse a breakdown of your last border crossing complete with drug dog, detainment, search... Oh Jesus, stop being paranoid and just vacuum the fucking thing later, don't waste your stone on paranoia, get out and get back to nature or something like you figured might happen if you got high enough.

I get out. Detail detail right away, the colors colors colors, so pure bright intoxicating, I'm colordrunk. I enter the westbound path, nervously sedate, the usual paradox of cannabination. I notice all the spiderwebs I'm tearing through. Sorry spiders. So arrogant. But it's not my fault. It's my nature. How could I do anything but?

Freaky woods. Hegemonic species my ass, we don't run shit. We’re a symptom of this planet, this woods. We’re food for viruses while alive, food for worms when dead, food for the earth, life feeds on life. We thought we got a Faustian deal to squirm out of that niche, we thought we would loot the future, that was something we could do. Reality is what we can get away with, we say, so why not, why waste time worrying, guilt-tripping?

That's why "liberal" has become a dirty word. Departing from traditional semantics, the liberal is now the priss who's staying sober at the party so he can drive us home safe. We'll chug beers and snort rails and poke fun – the kid hasn't learned the Dionysian mysteries and won't be initiated, the neotenic loser. We'll taunt him until he gets pissed and becomes an anarchist. He'll say, "Fuck you assholes and your society, you can save yourselves,” and then he'll smoke a joint with the spacey hippie chick outside, and then he'll pop a tab of acid and a hit of E and lose total innocence about the mind and the universe, he’ll enter paradise and come down in the slums of the People’s Republic of Planet Earth, the dregs of burned-out conscious civilization, the ass-end of the novelty trip, in the gutter staring up at the smog-blurred stars. But he’ll still enjoy television mob dramas like The Sopranos, and he’ll still enjoy his wonderbars, and gas prices will stay low enough for him to drive his parents’ car for another decade, and he’ll follow the political cockfight, the left and right pecking each other bloody, with interest, until the game becomes lethal and the issues become life and death, and the oil runs out, and the reality is unignorable, on a mass scale, bringing real anarchy – which will be the end of the line for the self-styled anarchist, time for the last act of will, the last perverse turn of phase, the last coping mechanism, the last binge, the poppy, renewable resource, he’ll alter his value system completely, chemically, disregarding consequence – it won’t matter anyway. And then he’ll… who? Who was “he” again, eh?

Woah, weird tangents... Woah, weird woods! So alive, demented facial fractals, hyper-real, gorgeous and frightening, reminds me of The Brothers Grimm and their dichotomy, divinity-canopy, horror-chasm. What a beautiful Kootenay glow, filtered through flapjack flavor-layers of foliage, May sunlight, edgy, angled, boreal. Natural intelligence as a force beyond human understanding isn’t superstitious, just receptive. There’s a power here that my values slip off. It’s better that way, makes worrying about apocalypse seem silly. I could piss anywhere I wanted if I wasn’t so neurotic.

There is an annoyance, an ache. I've got to drain my bladder but I'm fretting in foreign territory, paranoias, tickets, fines, worlds of damnation and toxicity, regulation, inferno, concentric circle, what did I do to earn this natural bounty when so many people live in such horror? My existential right to be here is in doubt. My presence is pretension, every footstep ill-gotten.

But finally, the path ends and I forget about the ache. I emerge from the density of the woods and my first physical sense is chill. But the feeling interlocks benign to the scene, open: Open to the valley’s paranormal panorama, lake bending into mountain twists at each jagged horizon. Fuzzy thickets of grass here and there, giggling sprouts of rock-hugging shrubs, an algae-brown eco-pool, and large slabs of grand rounded gray, candid, skinny-dip into the water. I want to embrace them. Can this all be for me? Really?

Total isolation from my sick social network. Total solo confrontation with the world, like there was never anyone else but me and it, this, what Adam must have felt.

I am reacquainted. Simple joy, for being alive at the rocky Grohman lakeside. It beats the hell out of synthetic rewards we contrive to offer ourselves for achieving certain objectives in our video games, like winning the battle of the bands, or scoring the next bag of scag. No, this valley is a planetary reservoir, renewable. I feel spirits here, ancestors, welcoming me. Not necessarily people. The garden is not severed but Secular, because there is no other.

Good energy here. I go to the edge of the craggy shoreline. Chillier, windier here, warm early summer sun muted by the force of the current, the water, the air, kinetic, sweeping, changing, Heraclitian, swirling bubbling face of the lake drifts by with its hydrogenic payload blue,green,gray gnarled patterns of liquid light, waterbark reflecting trees behind us, we must use the Royal We here, because We're surrounded by so much living energy.

The wind sweeps off the lake. I stand on the rock, insanely anthropomorphic. Colors scream to me from every direction. Faces in the waves, bodies in the waves, minds in the wavelengths, vibrations, everything strangely alive, weirdly benign, miraculous, vast luxury, microcosmic clouds, stratosphere bleeding out into space, pine needle patterns, lichen worlds.

BILLBOARD

on the highway, facing the bench.

This scene brought to me by Hillbilly Jambouree!

No illusions I'm not in a little penned up facsimile of nature but the outhouse sure was convenient. I’m sinking into the virtual human world again, that uniquely crystallized psychedrama: Drugs, has it become prepositional, dumb as a sack of hammers, bluntly up and down, plainly about chemicals? Is there no free lunch? Will I pay for this feeling of wonder with a grotesque stretch of malaise equal in time or intensity? Oh why get into that trip? Look around, reacquaint!

It's so trippy! I haven’t been to this park since childhood and these paths are barely remembered, but bound to the associative fabric of lost Atlantean vantages on taken-for-granted cosmic dramas, the zen surety of infancy, the dumb man in the beautiful dream. It’s journeying into my subconscious and having it manifest as woods. Paths beckon, every path a paisley pretzel, gleefully prefigured, not "random" at all but fine and graceful as a Mandelbrot, leaves and branches heaving, breathing soil, the "tone" of the scene an audible vibration, holy shit, synesthesia! Adventure beckons, total transformation available to ingest (just a question of motivation) and those crannies mimic the shape of every crack I ever found in the bedrock and forgot. It's all back, salvia trails, tryptamine rivers on the tips of my tongues and tentacles.

The highway above, surreal. Cars streak, sonic trailers hum, chrome flash reminding me of the billboard I refused to read, wonder if it was the one Clay chopped down once in legend. Too many reminders of the gritty human fractal to let my ego dissolve, but this is all nature. Can't I appreciate the human fractal as it interlox with everything else? Why must I hate my nature? Does a virus suffer self-loathing? Do viruses have viruses, or is that biologically impossible? Should I trust every damn thing to the scientific method? Extrapolation? Are metaphors more important than statistics?

Boardwalk, was there always a boardwalk here? How unobtrusive. How Dao in design, a shade of pale wood, goes with the grain of the marshland, and what is that on the end of the log in the pond? Oh my God, is it a turtle? No, can't be. Hey, it's a bird. But it’s not moving. A duck, gotta be a duck. But no, that's too perfect, almost ironic, like the Parks Department winking at me. A goose, like something out of T’s five methoxy euphoria? No, it's gotta be a duck. But it's still not moving. Gotta be fake. A fake duck? But that's so... so blatantly synthetic. Why go to that trouble? That's downright sarcastic. With the BILLBOARD sitting across the highway, laughing.

Oh but remember the lake, in the other direction. The rocky shore, so long, so unmovable. They dammed it upstream several times, but here is nature without human blight. There's that self-loathing again. I'm projecting into nature, limiting my awareness. Understanding is impossible when it's all just projection by this penned up value system. Nature is truly alien, inscrutable, what the Severed Garden’s all about.

"Dirt isn't dirty", brooksy once said. Shambhala was wonderfully filthy. Even the crudely synthetic MDMA felt at home. All forms of filth, spiritual filth, biker weed lit from the morning sun, a parade of record spinners and laptop DJs. We spent a lot of money there.

Get out while the getting’s good. Don’t linger and let the wave break, change the venue, switch the paradigm. I drive home, still stoned, jittery at the wheel, appropriately neurotic regarding traffic.

Home, straight to the piano, feeling like virtuoso king of the universe because the feeling is flowing through me in so many snowflake iterations glazing the moment, even if I'm objectively aware of the flaws in my technique. The well-manicured progression, the demonic dissonance, the dolce melody, the full-fledged fat groove gravy comes from shutting off the mind and letting the fingers do their work, but I can appreciate intellectually too, impressionistically, any way I choose, any palette of perception. If I could play this on a grand… No worries about state boundaries, that phrase was so last month, and maybe I finally am getting burned out on being burnt out. Or maybe I'm just stoned. Happy, to use Cobain's euphemism.

But I'm spottily happy and life is still strained and psychestained, and I'm still a whiner. But I'm enjoying life right now, playing music that I love, even if this is a wanky ego trip. If I die tomorrow - oh what do I need to think about that for?