A gray day. After showering and getting dressed, I opened the window to have a cigarette. No rain, little wind, but cold. I made breakfast and stretched, turned on some tunes then indexed most of the morning. After eating lunch I went for a bike ride to get some exercise. I stopped at Romeyn Tailors, “The Gentleman’s Store,” and bought some gloves after looking around. Fine leather black gloves. Fucking expensive. Why was I shopping on Utrechtsestraat? I needed the gloves, though. Too fucking cold riding without gloves on cold days like these and the store popped out at me.
I rode back the other way over the Magere Brug toward Oosterpark. I was primarily trying to get my blood pumping, but it was also nice biking around without a destination in mind. I roamed around streets I didn’t know, buzzed passed walkers while ringing my bell, swerved in and out of traffic on busy streets, and let myself have fun. When I found my way back to Niuewe Kerkstraat I cycled no-handed over the Magere Brug and kept riding past my apartment. I hadn’t done that since I was a teenager. Surprising how easy it was after all those years. Shifting hips for balance and guiding the steering with my knees. Cycling was so fucking fun; I had no idea why anyone would want to drive a car when riding a bike was an option.
I cycled down Kerkstraat to the smart shop near Leidsestraat. I popped in without doing my exercise routine—I had been biking, calisthenics were not necessary—and purchased two doses McKennaii and one dose Hawaiian. An uneventful purchase. I didn’t even flirt with the woman who was working. I rode back to my apartment, gliding the last block without using my hands. After I locked up and went inside, I ate an apple and drank water. I needed a water bottle to take with me on bike rides. There was a slot for one on the frame of the bike; I just needed to find a place that sold them. Then I realized I could use a good-sized empty water bottle and refill it whenever I went out. I didn’t want to use glass, though. All the bottles I had been using were glass, mostly because they were truly recyclable and didn’t have PCBs or petroleum in them. I could have easily stopped at Spar, a grocery store, on Nieuwe Kerkstraat. Ugh.
I smoked hash and indexed a couple hours. By late afternoon I was ready to shroom. I made a sandwich and a salad then chomped on the Hawaiians. I opened the living room window and smoked a cigarette. There were a few stragglers on the street. After my cigarette I smoked more hash then sketched. When the shrooms showed up I felt like moving. I put in a Phish CD. I moved in the middle of the room to a long jam of “Weekapaug Groove.” I came dangerously close to Susan’s glass case of figurines and decided I needed to slow down. I closed the window then sat on the couch against the wall. It seemed like the place to sit. I wanted to be able to look out the window without having to turn around or sit at an odd angle to look out. I couldn’t see the street from my seat but I could see the soft, pleasing lights from the apartment windows across the way.
The shrooms took hold and I wondered what was happening in those apartments. It could have been anything. My mind drifted across the street and through a window into a neighboring apartment. In the living room a three-armed woman performed acrobatics, swinging from chandelier to chandelier, in one bedroom a man wearing a bear costume masturbated onto pages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in the other bedroom three children were attempting to reenact the Yalta Conference; in the hallway outside the apartment a cosmic void, the building’s maid, vacuumed a rug and on the stairs to the third floor a dazzling vision of a priestess pouring sputum from a chalice enthralled thousands of liliputians; in the third floor hallway the holy terror of forbidden sex between demonic goats and angelic lions made unseemly noises; a doorway of hazy fog led into a wildness of technological free expression, exhibitions of innovative contraptions that had no discernable purpose, and optical illusions of blank blue computer screens that doubled as sky tiles; on a cloud two armored knights air-fenced next to a shaman performing an energy healing on a faerie with a broken wing; on a field of grass dozens of ostriches sat in silent prayer as nude cyclists weaved between them, in and out, slaloming to form, as my point of view rose above them, an intertwining wreath that rose to place me in the middle and gradually shrunk to hover over my head as an elderly man wheeled me into a gray-walled psychiatric ward the size of an airplane hangar, no windows, the floor covered with hundreds of children in straightjackets screaming to be let free, insisting they had been lawyers before the witch cast her spell, nurses wandering about to shove pills up their anuses as they screamed, gargoyles flying high above shitting on them, and a lone dog barking from a doorway on the far wall; I fell from the wheelchair into a mud puddle and looked beside me to see a woman in a white Victorian dress holding a pink umbrella with one hand and half a dozen leashes in the other as she walked cobras down a muddy path toward a farm house where cartographers had gathered to build a one-to-one scaled three-dimensional map of the universe as it was a billion years ago using only marbles and cotton candy; somewhere in the cellar a woman declared she was writing love poems and mortaring them in walls using an Easter basket as a trowel; in a labyrinth far below the dirt floor a painting of a feral cat disemboweling a Panda sat on top of a mound of severed limbs that tumbled upward, blinding my descent into a Lucida Handwriting “Q” on a rooftop of a skyscraper in a cityscape created by corporate Svengalis.
I blinked and found myself sitting on my couch, still a Q, but only emotionally. My thoughts shifted. I wanted to write. I felt something bubbling up within me and it wanted to take the form of language. I grabbed parchment and quill and penned a letter to my future self:
Truth is precise. Truth’s precision is determined contextually. The context of truth is determined by the precise position truth occupies within a double helix of time and space.
I made a drawing of a double helix, provided a key that distinguished time as vertical, space as horizontal, and the conflux of time and space as depth. I placed points on the double helix signifying precise truth positions in contextual relation to all other possible positions within the double helix. I continued writing:
Each truth exists as a “zero position” in relation to all other possible positions within the time/space double helix. Each truth existing as a “zero position” is a “subject” or “subject truth” or “subjective truth.” The “subject truth” is the focal position of existence from which all other positions are “perceived.” All perceived positions exist as “objects” or “object truths” or “objective truths.”
However, each “object truth” also exists as a “subject truth” in relation to each other position within the time/space double helix. Each position within the time-space helix continuum has the potential to be a “zero position” (subject truth) and a “numbered position” (object truth). Each subject truth can be perceived as an object truth by a different subject truth, but neither object truths nor subject truths can be perceived as a subject truth. Perspective is the factor (lens) empowering the perception of any position as a numbered (object) position. Perspective resides within subject truth (zero position). Perspective cannot perceive its position (subject truth, zero position). Perspective can only perceive “other than itself” (object truth, numbered position). It cannot perceive “self” (subject truth, zero position).
After I had written I grabbed the pipe and took a puff of Arjan’s. I read what I wrote and said, “What?” None of it made any sense to me, but I resisted the urge to burn it. Instead, I wondered about perception and kept getting stuck. It came from somewhere and that somewhere had to be within me, but I couldn’t find the source of it. I called the source “perspective” as if that meant “me.” That was too simple; it didn’t make sense to me. Very little did. I was all over the map.
What is “my perspective”? I had a vantage point and it rested not behind or in the eyes but … somewhere, a “place” that could not be detected. Because it couldn’t be detected I wondered if it existed independent of time and space, independent of such a thing as “subject.” Maybe subject positions were merely vessels for perspective. “I” was a conceptualization of something that couldn’t be conceptualized, my being merely a lens for a perspective existing in a way that couldn't be detected by awareness. What the fuck did that mean?
I tired of thinking and lit a cigarette. I didn’t bother opening the window. I was flummoxed and didn’t like it one bit. “I didn’t ask to think about that. I didn’t choose it. It’s just there.” I thought for a moment. “What if I masturbate? Maybe that’ll take away the thoughts.” I didn’t feel sexual, though. “This is fucked up. Why not just let what is be? Stupid to try to understand things that are whether understood or not.” I walked around the room puffing my cigarette. Thoughts continued. I sat and wrote again, stupid as writing seemed to be. I had to get this shit out of my system.
The condition of humanity in the twenty-first century is fragmented and confused. Entertainment and technology separate the individual and the group from reality as it is experienced within the body. Individuals sit isolated from one another by flashing lights and loud noises. Abstractions of gossip displace the physicality of relationships. The passage of time is distorted by the speed of electronics; self is distorted by the digital. Purposes and meanings are lost in sinkholes of pixilated promises and pointless platitudes. The only absolute is randomness. Pi has finally displaced probability and science tells lies in the pretense of fact.
For some, anything seems possible, but they’ve seen too many YouTube videos to distinguish between hyperbole and subtlety. Conflict is not inevitable, it is unending. Down deep, there is only fear and loathing, insecurity and distrust. On the surface, yoga will save us all.
There’s a “fuck today, tomorrow’s where it’s at” vibe emanating from techno-zealots. Meanwhile, the movement of NOW is a teen pop star. If hedonism were the rule of the day there would be less reason for complaint, but what passes as pleasure is merely nauseous.
There are a few vagabonds and wanderers left, living the wild and in the wild, the few spaces left on earth that are still wild in some sense. For the rest, ideas have replaced persons and only iPhones are real, the only real worth mentioning, empty communications, noisy nothings. Literary criticism has become its own narrative, the stories critiqued serving as words in book-length sentences. There’s no discernable perspective from which to perceive. Buddha’s “nothing” is “everything all at once.” Suffering continues undiminished, a world of creators slaves to their creations. Despair is not an option because there aren’t any advertisements for it.
Our collective meanings are at odds with reality.
I scanned the writing and again thought of burning it. “Where the fuck did that come from?” I’d had amazing experiences over the past few months. How could so much negativity be vomited all at once? Maybe that’s what it was, a vomiting of negative thoughts about the world. Perhaps they needed to come out and be put on paper; a purging. I thought the writing contained some truths, but the tone was a truth about me … or, perhaps, who I had been. I was ejecting vileness to make room for peace … or madness. Probably the same thing.
I smoked a small bowl of Arjan’s and cashed it. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. I gulped it down. I filled another and drank it, too. I needed to sleep, but I wasn’t tired and my thoughts were racing too fast. I went to the window, opened it, and smoked a cigarette. I looked across the street even as a thought screamed, “No!” I saw another window and inside the apartment the light was red, the red of the red light district, neon red, a heated lighting, a light making sure whatever occurred was carnal, a room lost in sadistic lust, fuckings of bodies without minds or hearts, violent fucking that broke cocks and made pussies bleed, cum and juice and piss and spit and blood, several feet of bodily fluids so thick and heavy the floor gave way to a dungeon below where elephant men in tuxedos and hippo women in lingerie wore masks made from twigs, the bodily fluids creating a river that flowed through an open door into a field smoldering from a recent brush fire where wraiths of humanity wandered aimlessly to view giant LCD screens displaying orifices unidentifiable as either biological or mechanical, openings into an absence surrounded by excretions of electrified green ooze, a viscous substance that flowed into the river of bodily fluids carrying me far away to a desert of giant chess pieces where Jesus carried a cross past pawns on his way to nowhere.
I turned back to the table, pulled out another cigarette, and lit up. "Fuck, the other side of the street is freaky." What would have happened to me if I had rented the neon red apartment? I couldn’t resist looking again, the Hawaiians completely in control. I saw a window with thin, nearly see-through curtains closed, a pleasant yellow light suggesting there was a woman in a nightgown reading a romance novel while her cocker spaniel sat at her feet sleeping. Just then I saw a silhouette standing behind the curtains. Fuck! “What the hell is that?!” A specter haunting the woman, forcing her to sit in that chair reading the same sentence over and over eternally, her dog ever sleeping, her mind screaming helplessly, lampshades made of blonde human hair creating that soft yellow glow, dozens of naturally blonde women being held in the bedrooms, herded like sheep to have their scalps sheared every couple of months to make new lampshades, the women wailing and clawing their eyes out, all of them blind, each of them with differing visions dancing in their heads, the collection of visions harvested by the specter and displayed on electron screens for the view of protons eating popcorn, laughing crying clapping booing screaming oohing aahing sighing.
I made myself look away and walked to the bedroom. I wasn’t going to sleep and I was sure that the visions I would have with my eyes closed would be even stranger than those I viewed across the street. I walked out the back door onto the balcony. A light rain was falling, but the balcony above protected me from it. No wind. I went to sit in the wicker chair and looked up at the sky, glowing yellowish orange. Skies like that disturbed me when I wasn’t shrooming, but now I felt comforted by it, sure there were fires in the south of Amsterdam lighting the low-lying clouds to prevent darkness from swallowing the city. I looked over across the way and saw a thin vertical blackness jutting up from the patio on the roof of the police department, the figure starkly defined by the contrast with the grayish backdrop of the police department building wall. There was an orange dot moving up and down and I realized it was a human, a police officer, smoking a cigarette. Fuck. Did the person know I was insane? Was it illegal to be mad? No, not in Amsterdam. Hell, I might be awarded a medal for losing my mind.
I waved to the figure. The figure waved back. I took a breath knowing I had been given the spiritual key to the city. A meeting with the mayor would probably follow tomorrow morning. Shit, I better go to sleep! I probably needed to get up early. I got up and went inside. I went to the living room and loaded a little hash into the bat of my dugout. I took a hit and blew out the cleanest smoke that had ever existed, a smoke so clean even pure oxygen gasped when in its presence. I closed the living room window then floated rather weirdly to the bedroom and managed to misuse my body in an effort to uncover myself from clothing. “Fuck, this is going to be a problem. I have seconds to get into bed before I forget it’s a bed." I took no chances. I got my sweatshirt off but only one leg of my pants down as I threw back the covers and dove onto the bed. I managed to pull the covers over my head. I couldn’t tell if I was uncomfortable, but I definitely had two differently shaped legs, one denimed and the other skinned. “Fucking fuck, this is going to be weird.” Visions appeared, indescribable, a sensation of zipping through redwood forests on a hovering jet ski flying thousands of miles per hour, shades of gray a blur of lines that red my black and started back rhymes and rhythms shimmering bleating fresh or twelve … on it went until I woke in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment