3/30/08

smelfplay

Sometimes I like to stay away from the baseline world for as long as possible. And I had lots of ketamine, so I got into repeated dosing and on a plateau, not able to sleep, wanting something. For want of a woman, I thought of smoking salvia – hadn’t in years. Could barely remember what it was like, just thought it might be worth doing, so I did – and had one of those breakthrough trips, shattered the mellow that had whimsied the idea in the first place.

I was at my computer during the flash, mostly just sitting in my chair, slack-jawed. I tried to write as soon after coming back as I could – the feeling persisted enough that I could translate some of the trip, far better than on previous attempts. My notes were serious no-bullshit attempts to get across that thing. I’m hindered being a writer, beholden to art and ego. Literature can corrupt raw experience. I tried to be plain and honest in my notes, and leave the poetry for later.

-

I’m holding my toke and counting the seconds. Accidentally exhale at twenty and think I’ve blown the hit. Then I realize something’s different. I think okay, I guess this is the trip but everything’s the same, isn’t it? No “visuals”, but it’s using what I happen to be looking at, my knee, my rug, my beside table to the left and pants crumpled to the right. This is what salvia has to work with. So it’s saying, what, this, you’re part of this? This?

I’m spinning and realizing “this” is just painted on a wall. Vague sense that it’s because I smoked salvia but the overwhelming feeling is of reality coming apart, the issue being that what I felt as normal and real was dependent on an arbitrary collection of sense data now seen as a painting. “Silly paint, dreamed he was a person”. The joke’s on me, I forgot I was the wall and everything “that person” represents is what I can sense in the visual field and my own body peripherals. I can see the edges of my red jacket and left arm. Also my mind is filling in an image of my face with my black toque on, so this accurate self-image, in conjunction with the bedroom floor in its current state, has become the painting.

I’m spinning and my sense of identity has shifted to null-space. I’m being pulled backward and outward. This is what salvianauts mean by “gravity”, a pulling on the mind, the rug pulled out from under me. The painting on the wall seems arbitrary, why that and not anything else? It’s silly and shocking. Some vital part of consciousness associated with “the self” and “what is real” has become unhinged and confronted with the void. It’s not a void exactly, there’s something there, echoes, ghosts that live in the cracks between dimensions. I’m hearing the chorused voice of an amalgam of minds, no neat separation. Parts of myself are chipping off the painting or combining with other parts to smear into the collective. The collective chatter is noisy and not entirely unified, but vaguely conveying something like: “hey, actually, it’s like this”, a sly twist, strong yet subtle, cerebral yet bedrock. On past salvia trips, I’d thought of those anthropomorphic, eerily communicative energies as facets of my subconscious, but “smelves” is a perfect term, being a play on elves and selves – entities straddling a dichotomy of artificial categories, alien, human, cartoon, playful, wise, in bright primary colors, an external method of living, a place consciousness was not meant to inhabit except by mythic creatures, fish out of water, pigs in space. I can’t call them malevolent but I can’t call them benign. They’re creepy and sarcastic.

I’m spinning and the pulling feeling accelerates, more of a peeling. The paint is peeling off the wall, sometimes in scales or tiles (the lifting of a group of personality traits / visual associations). There’s an undead feeling to the painting, it’s coming off like a skin. It peels in every thought and frame of vision, not simply in direction but in the dimension I only sense with salvia. I’m being invited to ask the self that peeled off a rhetorical question. I know it will solve everything, it’s on the tip of my tongue but it won’t quite come. It’s hilarious that I can’t explain it, but it’s too serious to permit laughter. It’s telling me “The very point of this pulloff is to reveal you as unsustainable, impossible.” This is the one thing that does not fit in my reality, it’s the key to ontological demolition, the essence of what I must not accept to go on living. How can I be alive to witness it? What is dead? It’s about animate and inanimate and breath and time and wet and dry. There’s an irreconcilable conflict between two worlds. My field of vision and its associated objects is a child’s drawing, and the idea of there being a person in there is perverse.

I’m spinning and being told to look at that perverse person. The pulling/peeling intensifies with each rotation of the existential tableau. My former self is a series of body parts, bits of me or wholes of me from various angles and surrounding sense data in peripheral vision and blind sight, red-arm-jacket, hand-behind-back-with-lighter, knee-crumpled-pants, knee-rug, subsumed in an escalator mountain spiral circuit, spinning salvia scales, an aesthetic unit. Each “scale” is a personified pastiche of self-fragments seen from outside, shoulder with tan face like a cartoon character from some obscure central asian filmboard, the next “step” in the escalator my toque/neck with a fleck of red-arm framed with chains like a swingset. Imagine a top, fused with a staircase, fused with mount rushmore, fused with myself split into a classroom of confused children. Although it feels inhuman, it also has a sly sophisticated social consciousness, a super-intelligent personality overlaid on a conscious crack. It has vast implications but it’s of the micro moment, eternal but infinitesimal, ambassador for the voidoids.

The “other” is watching me become aware of this interdimensional membrane, and saying, in an amused, almost cruelly mocking way: “See? Hehe.” It’s asking me to just try these tiles, just try them, I dare you, ask them a question – like it’s not something that would have occurred to me in ordinary consciousness, to address these scales as people, but now I realize I can and must, or I’d be denying a revelation. So, as the spiral escalator cartoon version of myself comes around for another cycle I address its spinning scale-steps as people. They’re conjunctions of self-identity and what happens to be in my field of view at the time. They have faces, expressions, but I no longer see them as aspects of myself, they’re too weird. I see them as entities who live in the cracks between myself and whatever alien chaos exists in the mental vacuum outside. So I say to these things, hey, look, I managed to step outside something, do you see? What does this mean?

I get the idea to tap the red-arm scale on the shoulder, so I do. To even think of it as a thing that has a shoulder is like doing that to, say, a nondescript spot on the rug, but I’m tapping on each of these scales as they pass upwards and outwards in their cycle, startling them. They’re saying: “what the... I’M ALIVE?! I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ALIVE! YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ALIVE! THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN! HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?” I’m talking to myself at this point, in two alternating voices, like “Yes, there you are… What the fucking hell?!”

The scales are spinning with a speed and angle that is not entirely parallel to my salvia gravity. So in addressing them, it’s like I’m peeling them off their spinning self pastiche cartoon and dragging them toward my gravity. I’m sticky with my questions, and what were inanimate components of the bedrock material of reality, either physical matter or some mental construct, are becoming confused peoploids peeling off their peripherals. They’re becoming more than the hallucinogenic characters I imagined them as. Latching onto them with my address is granting them life, making their bizarre personification a reality, and it feels incredibly, mind-blowingly REAL, like HOLY FUCK, this dimension actually exists! And I realize that peeling these peoploids off their reality is creating the impact in their world of a salvia trip, ridiculous, indecent, perverse, shocking, cruel, hilarious, and their gravity, their normal rate of cycling in the spin, is being slowed by my sudden unexpected perception. My awareness of them is grinding their gears, throwing their whole operation into chaos. I’m thinking perpendicular.

So this is what salvia does, I think. Although that doesn’t seem to have a lot of meaning in and of itself. The thought is like the launching pad under atmospheric haze back at Cape Canaveral. It’s like the crease of the fold, I know it means something but I’m not sure what, like yeah, I smoked salvia to cause this, but this, what is this, what was that? What is anything?

The insistency of this feeling fades after a few minutes, and I become aware of myself as a whole. I keep saying “Holy fucking shit, what the fuck was that?” Maybe five minutes after the dosing (impossible to tell) I decide to focus all my energy on remembering and describing the trip, which immediately brings me “down” to a functional level, but also keeps the feeling focused in memory for a good ten minutes afterward.

The first thing I write is “okay, something serious just happened”. I go on to write that “some system exists between dimensions”. The rest is notes that I turned into this report. I’ll have to do it again, but I’ve already forgotten why. The feeling is gone, there’s just words.

Salvia is sufficiently advanced shamanic technology. Not that it has no psychological/physical explanation (the two would need to work in tandem, meeting at truth by tunneling through opposite sides of the mountain) but any explanation of what causes the self-peeling feeling is far beyond whatever understanding presently exists in psychology and neurology – or at least in my understanding of that understanding.

Basically, it turned my mind inside out, inverting sense of self and what is “alive”. The self that existed within the confines of my body became alien, undead, and what had been alive and “me” was outside that strange cartoon person. My mind was in the crack, the void, the room, not just in the sense of physical space (“physical space” seemed two-dimensional, a painting) but some mental dimension outside my normal way of thinking – like before I’d necessarily been a solipsist, thinking all that was “me” was locked inside the head. Now some formerly unknown outside meta-me was pulling a prank on that narrow normal one by switching places, having me confront the “outside” I could never believe in before through a rapid chemical process, mockingly transient.

Although certain metaphors and themes occur with frequency, overall I’m amazed at the diversity of experience people report. I guess it demonstrates either the uniqueness of any given mind, that the trip differs so greatly from one to another – or it shows how difficult it is to describe/analyze/remember, if everyone is having essentially the same experience, but in the telling, they all sound like separate worlds.

Existential is a good word to use. Upon being “peeled”, my awareness is left to confront a field of vision and all that it “means” – the associations that make up my human delusion – from an external perspective, the void outside my head. Suddenly, the me gestalt is rendered arbitrary. The most absurd thing is that I’m still physically locked in the gestalt, I can receive no information beyond the capacity of the body’s sense organs, but my awareness seems to have moved outside the body, to the “dead” world beyond the head. But the salvia reveals that what’s outside my head isn’t dead exactly, just a kind of consciousness I can’t normally recognize as consciousness, or communicate with in any way other than cryptic kinetic chaos.

I’m not sure what effect being on the residuals of a k binge might’ve had, but I suspect that mindset helped me analyze and remember more. I could ease into it, flow, and not fight the trip. I was still shaken to my soul, but it wasn’t as mind-blowing as it probably would’ve been had I been sober. Although in that case I probably would’ve “given way to astonishment” in McKenna’s words, and not questioned what was happening or interacted with the trip. Doing those things allowed me more insights.

One thing I can say, inter-dimensional travel is a good way to get the mind off sexual frustration.

3/27/08

corn syrup

It don’t matter, Then evereything mattersssss

ohk

this is ridiculous…

comma, comma, comma,

burn, burn

yeah

keep the fires burning

yeah it’s wrecked, but the opp
ortunitty still lives, livs, lives in these
conneccions
if you kin
rock it kinda slow kinda easy
getin better one more?
i asked him – i’m grime!? mine?
not sure we won’t know until the full
assessment has taken place in due course, so it’s gonna fall into certain holes
predictable, and if your very fortunate, you can engineer a footprint for that powder hole ----- she likes kootenay snow, i like kootenay snow in my sinus cavities, yeesh. it is indeed easier, but i forget which side of the clock i’m on – well, k&d will show me where to go

i’m one of the retards

one of the flashes

one of those neurons you lost

blue girl

chewachewachewa

part of your brain
maybe you’ll find it again in a double stacked apple
happenstance providence sleep interrupted girl interrupted
tryptamine therapy? i dunno man, tha machine elvez be gone and what’s in between?

well the crustzst crackZSX is where everything is
where you can find every hole every hollow every low
all

ultimate… --- I’ve fallen short of lilly surely, but thank God it is what it is, it wants to be a demon, half-lid, being whatitis, yeah, melthoughtslikthis, that’s what you get… in the creekslurrs, that’s what we’ve got here for you…
ok? OK

as long as there’s k
and everyone
becomes
on
the
same
point

well,
there was a hole for you
you found yourself pretty well there
what else do you do at 2 in the morning
with 2 more days to work
dissociation is sometimes worth the money
but it’s fleeting, in the way it interacts, well that
gives me leverage, arbitrage? at the very least
anaesthesia, cause no one’s up – two thirty eight
at these ridiculous hours… … yeah why not k binge after a hard night at work
let’s call absense substance… i wanna get back when i forgot i was in a
family of the universe that sort of thing following energy streams, peelings, purpose,

what am i working for?
root 5 position? hey – we got the structure worked out
i’m not going to try to collapse your face in
the cracked happy and unhappy accidents
it got dented for sure, but for christ’s sake’s, merz is
inspiring me to ring my ringedingding
i’ve got the powertools for krysth’s sake
it’s the uncomfortress if noise


Lessen
and leven
yes, jack, like that, you’re flowing and following unfortunetaly.
disperse the vowels, you want a consonant?

all the pipes are leaking
my thought fluids
drizzzll dezberrry…. it is important that i write this channellleled zen ;libne rfight biwq –soeey – damn

that’s how it went – an exit strategtegsasfyda./

thump

thymp

thump

thmo

succumb

Fatalism in my genes. Writer's block. Cockblock. It's nice to laugh. I can count on a few when I visit Robyn. So I guess I'm going on the trip. A sense of unworthiness. Why should I worry about worth? Is anyone worthy of anything? The questioning animal. The domesticated cat in her natural habitat, the sun-warmed sofa. No Jonesy, you can't come with us, there are fewer monsters here, you'll be safe.

Coffee, black and sour. I've succumbed to many things. I will eventually succumb to everything. A soporiff on a platform. These aren't metaphors, folks, except for the one about the mandible. I should know. Long black veil in my head. Nihilism for dummies. The Ballad of Mr. Awesome. The very region for happiness. Ebb and flow of energy. Which few did you have in mind, sire?

No sense putting off looking at the clock. Otherwise I'll be playing the guessing game for an hour. How many hours still to work? Sometimes even the "conservative" estimate is optimistic. Fragments - I won't say sacred. And I shouldn't be writing cause it just makes me want to sleep, even though I've slept enough. What is enough? I won't say "no end in sight", cause I don't want to upset anyone, don't want my negativity to rub off, I need it more than you, don't want you to take it the wrong way, or the right way.

How soon until the wave of pharmaceutical goodwill catches up to the guy that bags my groceries? Maybe his depression is too far downstream - or too far upstream. Maybe the causation chain hasn't reached his mood yet.

Insoluble. Insoluble. That is my name. The place where possibility is torture. Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter? In the long run, we'll all be dead. Dignity is dollars, currency, how we buy fuel. I'm not sure what that means anymore.

I've solidified into my adult psychological patterns. I think I'll be like this for the rest of my life, there's nothing much else coming down the pike. It's been persisting. I'm too tired to be angry anymore, now resigned to the loss of dez. The name seems strange now, strange to think I was ever on a real name basis with her, did I dream all those years? Most likely. I will go off my anti-depressant medication when I meet a girl who loves me, romantically, thus I will likely be on the meds right through monastic destiny, I just hope they take effect soon, before I’m the abbe of dull purity, playing the piano with the missing D, with a virtuosic past but no juicy stories to tell in the tavern, but memories of picking fruit, actual cherries, wide experience in that, both organic and pesticide coated, and a conversation over coffee in caustin, during a rainstorm, with that german girl in the okanagan.

Spare some corn for your king?

3/25/08

karefree ketamine korner

the title that was not to be - a tryst with the k christ - the only purpose is in revealing chemical context in yellow snowballs, piss drunk - de k poetry, that's my genre - if you like crinkles, you're my audience, if you can stand the grime - i am my own parasite, kobain said it better, did it better - well, he's not exactly a role model...

strange times - ketamine is futuristic, reveals to me present vistas, and foams on the lips of what might be in this strange little niche of creek street with the people that i meet here in this nook - i'm sure it's just a string on a fretboard of grand delusion, but it resonates in creepy minor seconds, with some voices that do harmony, jamais-vous and deja simultaneous - and i feel responsible to play the part, the role, the idiotic quixotic lunatic, even while in downtime, even when proclaiming myself to be a loser, like contra does, if he can be a loser than i'll gladly wrap myself up in that tatterred bundle, there won't be much oil to burn in the future to warm us in the winter, but maybe the greenhouse effect will trap enough carbon to make that not matter - i'll be a loser, the path of least resistance, but i won't be eaten by a grizzly bear, and werner herzog will not make a documentary about me - but lord knows, i am not healthy - this can't be good for my head - cortisol has been under control, and i've had multivitamins under my belt, but that gravy train's over - now it's sertraline and k, cross purposes? i guess i'm the first human guinea pig for that combo

this is one of those times, one of those bouncey commodious times, when names for bands can be snatched from the rubber walls of every subatomic particle precept - anything, NOISEGATE? yes, you can have it, i just tossed it off

but when the ego reforms, will he want to be noisegate? probably not - there's something in the way - something in the way - mmm mmm, to quote cobain again, why not? in these times of having been abandoned, the stopgap saving me from the horror of a monastic future, but everything is qualified, in retrospect she was as right for me as anything i could conceive and it's infinitely horrible to realize that as right as that was it was so fucked up and wrong and she's moved on, obviously

and i'm trying, ketamine keeps things flowing, and sertraline keeps seretonin going, and i wouldn't have written that last letter to her if it weren't for a window opened by k, even if i was over the trip as i wrote the actual words, but i can't claim it was a pure self writing, even though i didn't regret what i said until it became clear it was completely unrequited

hopefully sertraline and ketamine will get along with each other, i see no problems so far, and that kind of scares me, because i'm a master at seeing problems and sinister harbingers of existential apocalypse, so something's wrong, where is it? well it's in the fall of every breath, as i said, even as i've assimilated my parents aging, and my parents parents aging aging past the point of decency, but we're civilized, and i say that verbatim to retain the taint of sarcasm you would assume i intend, but actually, i really mean that, it is civilized to be decent and let the elderly live as good as they can, we hope, whatever that could be, you can't generalize, it's on a case by case basis, i think alice still enjoys her smokes, hey years from now, she may pine for that ability, oh, to be eighty again, and now we're into the struldbrug dregs

well it's four AM, the night is young - maybe i could do a 2nd k wave, how about it Rome, do you feel like falling again? Am I sparticus?

The

Killer context is always suspect - if you shelf it like that it will fall like that in these crumbs we deal with here on creek street, here on creek street it will repeat, it will loop, i it will l l it will frag it will frag ment like that and that's what we like so that's what we do i rolled into this snowed scene in the snow one snowblindazed but this ain't the epiphony, just anotha monday but i'm trying to put everything in it and choose every letter cause there's never been a better time to bare arms or arm bears, bare all the tentacles of fantastic redacted scholastic madness on this, more powder means more consistency and i did pay for the priviliage, those paper notes go far in this day and age of powderered wigs what an infogluton i am, indeed - and itall falls like this here on creek at three in the morning, is contra working on a mix? it's as crazy as can be and is adding punctuation sundering nations? or am i just as comfy as can be?

3/22/08

half trance

Don't feel like nostalgia tonight. Don't feel like much of anything. Used up. Not sure what I was used for. But there's little left. Subsystem, system failure. Auxiliary failure. Rivulets of solvents. Putting weight into gravity. Agent of collapse. Another contact circuit. Zero. Flawed swallow. STING. That'll wake you up in the morning, boyo. But what about in the evening? I never made it through both traffic control classes. But I made it here. Got a job. Some kind of life. Slave to the ebb and flow of energy. Can't circumvent currents. Can't find the thrills. Guess I should do something crazy. Don't know what though. Shudder to consider context.

I'm not utterly solipsistic. I see how others write like this - expressing desolation. I read them sometimes. Not the generic other, but characters. I relate in some way I can't say poetically. But I see, reflections of redundancy. I don't know what every magic word means for them. My language is algebraic, trinomials, a future fractal of joyce, septuple bastardized. I'm left to express the dregs. Haven't written anything good in ages, the last words I cared about I read at the Vienna last week, and those were written a month prior to that. I guess it's why writing about drugs is a stronger addiction than getting high, it's guaranteed to bring temporary meaning that weighs me down in the end, magic fader. Trading sanctity for the meaning of sobriety - how could it not render everything absurd?

I'm writing to see if I can write, to see if I care about anything, to see if words make any difference, other than in the strict binary sense, of information. It may be that I'm flattening out. I won't say why. But I suppose that would be better than misery. Maybe I should give up on words. And just be a musician.

Eye sting brings memories. Neurochemical sophistry. My playlist is shuffling. I'm telling myself to resist the urge to skip every ten tracks for one I like, and give in to the wisdom of the random. Wait ten seconds, and maybe you'll see that random choice that winamp made is just what you NEEDED to hear. Iron Maiden? Yeah, okay. It's true, it does work like that. My split second reaction is NO, THIS ISN'T RIGHT, but letting it sink in brings a kind of real-time integrity. What little integrity life can squeeze out for me, these days. It's gonna be a solitary season I think. Which lends itself to integrity. I'm learning how to be anti-social again, how to stop craving.

3/14/08

homage to the caveman

blueball tendrils from charity's exudia mainline maraschino cherry

i still pay homage

even when setting myself up for disappointment
we brought home a barrow full of lottery tickets
from the food bank

when i win, i will take a vacation
to encino

3/13/08

Knock on Plastic

Bought many things today, things for maintaining and improving my quality of life, things for sleeping better, things for eating better, things for hearing music more clearly. A pile of more stress, more maintenance, more to lose. It gives me no comfort. Can’t muster the energy needed to keep my silly little life going. Can’t get into the materialism trip. So what am I working for? No one’s come to visit, not one person, since I moved in here. I feel potential meaning in people but they continually disappoint. I’ve tried to find purpose within myself, in my projects, but there’s nothing there. Just the same old patterns that stopped giving pleasure. No poetry today.

Was supposed to be a new paradigm but it solved nothing. An afternoon daydream of self-esteem for a terminal cancer patient. Variations on depression, in blog form, the minor algorithm in arpeggios, thank heavens it’s on permanent record. This is what I have to contribute. I have no one to take care of. No one who needs me. There are infinite degrees of circumstance worse than this. Doesn’t make me feel any better. Happiness is just a flaming moe away.

3/10/08

vision quest

now we'll do just what we like, cause agendas fray like faithful tatters, and placebo poetry immediately unfolds, a pre-emptive placenta

jemima surrender, cause that's what i hear
the review of a progress report
comfort with pieces of kokopellis

i'm gonna give it to you - cause i came here for chaos
and the fuck it feeling that frays with fun frills

how's everybody doing tonight? could not contact blogger? that's okay - you'll find it in the fray - a carrier wave? i've heard the words before - B o C buzz

it's an easy chair, veils and vantages, memories...
what do i let on that i know? heh - that sort of flow...

it amounts to more mound - having attained the tools

silly headgames... powder... substance... poetrite...

possibilities...

dissociatives... fits a pattern... where othere's have, yes, i remember now, self-expereimentation - it all fits a pattern, fanfic, and reality, it will get wrapped up in that gravity, lol, all of a suddeen, ways out you never imagined, the creaky holes popping up again, creek street node, this time?

some aesthetic flange...

philomystic

so here goes be ying down the hollow - but with soundwaves like these - see? who could appreciate ? those days that vitamins came my way - it can't be cracked but has to function...

keep those

ceiling tiles

coming

cause

god knows, i'm not worthy

goddamn soun sysmtes

uh oh

cruved shadows loook like selvesss yeah....

keep going - like that -

exp k sub - + re wiri

re wiring of a mind - available appenfage''''''

pontoic please let me get beyond the dpdsa gdoddsamn pontiaca thasrasodaw wsoe alsdkjaspijasp]] glowre
i t wasd ain hr weas fr erep'tataktakoafaolsaosjasoijsolijsolisjdf sd'






foruy u sdg hgererere'

3/09/08

Charlie, if you done anything you wasn’t supposed to – you know, like with the devil or something – maybe it ain’t too late to get out of it. Maybe you could go back to being the good simple man you was before.

3/08/08

return for refund where applicable

some quit because of the smell - some were fired for reasons too nuanced to go into here - best not to think about it - he was almost as upset as me

nevermind what i said - poetry beats prose, in the end

i guess i really don't need to write anymore

3/04/08

nightmare

that which resists persists - sometimes it persists anyway, but writing won't hurt, and i need a longer waking buffer before i dare close my eyes again

one of those dreams, where i wake up and stay up for fear of slipping back, insanely long bleedover, spooked with gnosis that if just the hint of that paradigm came back for an instant, i would scream - i hardly ever have nightmares anymore and my mood's been better than usual lately - so there's an imperative to sort this out, where did it come from?

it was all familiar things, mostly short term as in yesterday, or very very long term - my mom, mike, steve the studio guy's dog, and the hume - all safe, comfortable things - and all reflecting blank pitiless hostility, all empty vessels for accusatory dread - i had to think, who in my life has ever made me feel so shamed and dreadful? no one except myself - the only way to interpret the dream is that it was my subconscious distilled to pure self-loathing, complete lack of confidence, hopelessness, and despair - in the dream i never questioned why these people, mike, my mother, my employers, were so totally contemptuous of me in my desperate appeal for understanding - i felt i'd slipped into a state of psychosis and was unable to deal with life

what sent my dream into the dark woods was a conversation with a mockup of contra in front of a washing machine at the edge of a suburban patch of forest - it recapitulated an actual conversation we'd had about death last week - in that waking conversation, i'd reassured him that in my view (or maybe just hope), our inevitable deaths are "just" the death of ego - and there is conscious continuity in a sense that should assuage any fear - when the ego is gone what is left? everything else, thus, consciousness joins consciousness - but in the dream, re-iterating what has become easy axiomatic dogma, resulted in a cold mutual countenance, because we saw through it - we both felt it was semantic trickery, not giving the ego its due, "death of ego" being a more profound thing than i'd allowed - and the idea of conscious continuity without ego was nonsensical - but we each said nothing for fear of making it true

then the hume called and i realized with shock it was 3:30 AM and i was late for work - i start work at 3:30 PM, not AM now, so even though it was the hotel calling, it was obviously recalling my last job, when i worked graveyard and often postponed arrival until ridiculous hours like that... the hume has always treated me well, but in the dream i was terrified of fucking up - wandered downtown to get to work, feeling more and more psychotic, less and less confident i could work, this sickening building pressure - finally i made a decision to skip work and wander the streets trying to find a niche as an unapologetic madman, but this only intensified the shame - somehow wound up at my parents' house, needing comfort - knocked on my mom's door - she vividly looked, sounded, and felt like who she was supposed to be, but from her entry into the dream, till the time i woke up, she had a merciless scowling contempt for me, expressed telepathically, scolding me for being a psychotic fuckup - mike and the friendly dog i petted in the recording studio yesterday showed up later, both exhibiting that same attitude, voices in my head - all the good associations in my life, my only hopes to offset the fuckup feeling, the last refuge being the harshest expose to the reality of the void - i could not deny what they were saying: that i was a failure, unable to help myself, and what's more, no one could or should help me, my free ride was over - it was the full flowering of my disease, the culmination of my life - all joy and innocence had been spent, this was the end game, and it was all my fault, i'd waited too long to learn a coping strategy like everyone else - it was not fear of any imminent action but something far worse, philosophical, encompassing everything - trapped, but the nightmare statue wasn't being chased by anything visible or tangible, the monster was the ground beneath me

so where did this come from? i noticed a vague piss smell upon waking - a very tiny leak - i haven't wet the bed in decades, so my theory is that the content of the dream was triggered by the smell - it could have brought me back to childhood, when my conception of my mom was more severe, matriarchal, a goddess who could destroy my world or save it with a look - it reminded me what a horror show childhood really is, and how we forget what the stakes are, before we've constructed our reality - and how flimsy that reality is, outside the comfort zone - how powerful dreams are, simulated schizophrenia depersonalizing like deconstruction, stripping the psyche to its elements - i guess that realization is why i wrote this

the freakiest thing about the nightmare: i woke up and decided to lie down again - i was back to sleep in a minute or two and it picked up without missing a beat - i was walking down a winding road at night with lakeside/gyro overtones, with mike, and the feeling kicked in again, re-contextualizing everything, i suddenly knew it was returning and there was no escape - the "psychosis" was actually the dawning perception of my true self and by extension all of existence, but i felt it as a tangible tug on my cerebral cortex, an unwitting obsession, a telepathic exchange with mike, who quickly averted his eyes and abandoned me because he knew where i was going, shared in the nausea, couldn't help me and wouldn't if he could - a horror so pure as to eliminate any possibility of sympathy, leaving only disgust and dread

march light is filling up this creek street room i've secured for myself through musical connections and financial transactions, i think i can live with this strange self again for now - i hope so anyway - i'd forgotten how cruel the subconscious can be but i'm fucking tired, i'll risk sleep again, what else can i do?

The Twin Gears of Cringe and Cling

Donating. Actually doing something - an interaction - over the web - financial transaction, christmas shopping, or sort of gesturing to chri...