The Substrate

Tonight, I was shown the substrate. I’d never imagined. The soil of the mind is nurturing. It’s a cold, dead, love. I shuddered, then I shivered, then I wrapped my arms around a rock, closed my eyes, and heard the salmon spawning. Put things into a perspective I hadn’t cared about in centuries. How had I lost that excitement? Strange to feel it again. Was trying to sleep, in my slothful way, unexpectedly stimulated by a scientist on the radio, making more and more sense, making sleep less and less necessary, something I could put off for a tantric while, better enjoyed on the river styx. After mystic burnout, I needed empirical basis for wonderment. The best of both worlds. Now I’m awake, with a perfect gift idea, to patch over my gap in seasonal shopping. Intentional chocolate.

It’s something I would have laughed off as new age marketing for a clever placebo if I’d come upon it out of context, like I come upon this parade of pointless stimuli in a patchy lichen life – but I’d heard of intentional chocolate as the entrepreneurial byproduct of a laboratory experiment. It was to determine if human focus could enhance food-derived mood supplement by influencing the natural process of quantum entanglement. For “focus”, they turned to practiced meditators – you know, your monks, your drunks, your various practitioners. The subjects were your average chocolate eaters. The double-blind experiment found eaters of “intended” chocolate to report significantly higher levels of mood elevation than those stuck with chocolate sans quantum manipulation. Yeah, it’s over my head, but the guy explained a markoff chain and I got it, he’s a numbers guy, and reminded me of when I used to be, and was on my wavelength, in an old paradigm way, in causal symmetry. A bias in truly random numbers. Truly random, corrupted by intention from the future. Whoops. No, it’s okay, the mistake is the masterstroke.

Of course, when given over to business, there is the expected degree of corporate schlock – and buddhas and zen bridges, no wait, the zen bridge is mine. I make a little room for zen, if it’s red, and it’s a bridge, and it’s cool with its petname. We’ve all got our pet associations, it’s not anyone’s fault that the median is slightly distasteful to me. I’m sure the chocolate tastes good anyway, especially with intention. And if it is a placebo, well, those work too.

Intention is okay, again. Awareness. I’ll even say consciousness, with intention, from the inner, aware how it sounds to the outer, aware and not caring, smug and stretched out, in the substrate, in the rolling hills on a geological timeframe, making time for the part of me that isn’t alive, by human standards, patiently waiting for the personal apocalypse, or the general armageddon, whichever comes first, the second coming let’s say. Liberation from me – now that would be something. I can hear metal jaws salivating faith in a future stream – don’t want to go there. So maybe I’ll just use it for poetry and consumerist whimsy, for now – because the ego is a strange flower that cocked out of the substrate – ornate in violence, thorny, poison-tipped, tripped up on its own vines, can’t see the garden for the petals. Can hear the salmon swimming when I close my eyes. For a while. Then it starts to sound like static. Retrocausal static, drowns memory, taints the true random that would give rise to a salmon, what was a salmon anyway? Fuck a duck.