I walked down Kerkstraat feeling giddy. My body was buzzing with electricity and I was hyper-aware. What a rush! It had been a looooong time since I had allowed myself to play so freely in public. I was flooded with memories from younger years, the emotions connecting the times as if they had happened in sequence without all the years between ever having occurred. This was one reason why attentiveness to emotions was so important; they were deeply intertwined with memories in ways thoughts weren’t.
But I thought little of such things as I walked toward my apartment. My buzz gradually dissipated and by the time I was walking into Albert Heijn on the corner of Vijzelstraat I was tired. I purchased a few groceries along with energy drinks, beer, and a bottle of wine. I slumped the rest of the way home, my body spent and my mind exhausted. I had expended a hell of a lot of energy in a matter of hours. I pulled out an energy drink just past Utrechtsestraat and guzzled it. I was one extremely long block from home, but I felt like I wouldn’t make it carrying the grocery bags.
When I finally arrived, unlocked the apartment door, and grabbed Susan’s mail I felt like crashing at the bottom of the stairs. They looked so daunting, but I forced myself to climb them. I got inside the apartment, took off my coat and shoes, and put away the groceries, stuffing the shrooms into the fridge as well. I wasn’t sure I would be up for another round. I ate a sandwich loaded with veggies and deli meats while drinking a beer.
I opened another beer and went to the couch next to the window. I loaded a bowl of Super Lemon. I was going to have to make another purchase soon. I took two puffs, a swig of beer, then opened the window to have a cigarette. My body and mind were grateful for the cannabis. The rain had stayed away since early afternoon and the sky seemed to be nearly cloudless. I looked at my watch; almost six. After the cigarette, I turned on the satellite radio and tuned to a disco station. I took another drink then lied down. I was listening to a song by Blondie. I had no idea why 70s disco seemed appealing to me; it was what it was. Probably related to my mood. I pushed the thought away. I didn’t want to think. I closed my eyes and tuned out everything but the music and the pleasurable ache of bodily exertion being massaged by quality weed.
I woke just before nine. I was groggy and body tired, but I made myself sit up. There was godawful disco music playing. How I thought that was a good idea, I had no idea. Mood. Again, I pushed the idea away. Why was it continuing to pester me? I didn’t want to think about it. What I wanted was another puff of ganja. In fact, two puffs. The half bottle of beer on the table was lukewarm, but I took a big drink anyway. Ugh. I got up and emptied it in the sink then filled a glass with water. I drank three glasses. I should have had one when I had arrived home earlier. With all that activity, my body needed hydration.
Fuck, hard to be attentive to the body regularly. I wasn’t in the practice yet. I could see that being attentive was going to be a lifelong project. Maximizing attentiveness did not mean maximum attentiveness was possible. I imagined optimizing attentiveness was like blowing up a balloon; it would always seem that attentiveness was maximized because the balloon seemed full whenever it was stretched to a fixed capacity. That didn’t mean maximum capacity had been achieved, though, because the balloon might--or might not--have more elasticity.
I felt well enough to eat a dose of Hawaiians. I wanted to see what would come. Having slept and relaxed I had a chance to reflect on the day’s events. I could not have predicted an afternoon like that. It was entirely spontaneous, no pre-planning, just explosions of inventiveness. I washed the shrooms down with water and grabbed another beer from the fridge. I went back to the couch, opened the window, and lit a cigarette. I was still high from the pot with a cig in one hand and a beer in the other. Something about that combination made me feel free. There was a light mist sitting still in the air. There were numerous walkers heading mostly away from the Magere Brug toward the life of the city. The other side of the bridge, at least for some distance, was relatively quiet, no nightlife or even much day life for that matter. The other side of the bridge was a great place for quiet and solitude.
I closed the window because the dampness was making my skin feel slimy. The air was dead outside, no wind. The water hung not as rain or drizzle or even mist. The air was wet, a dish rag wrung out and put over a towel rack in a bathroom with a running shower and a humidifier humming on full power. I tuned the radio to a jam band station. String Cheese Incident. I took another puff from the pipe and relaxed. My mood shifted.
“Hold on. I cannot escape this fucking word!” I had been pushing the words “mood” and “attitude” from my thought all day. They were classifiers, descriptors. Of what? What did “mood” convey? “I’m in a good mood.” What the fuck did that mean? “He’s in a good mood, she’s in a bad mood; that other woman’s in a good mood and that other guy is in a bad mood.” Did the two in a good mood have anything in common other than this “mood”? Did they think the same thoughts and behave in the same ways? No, not necessarily.
However, they did feel similarly. Those in a good mood had some behavioral similarities such as smiles, but the thoughts seemed vastly different. One perhaps thought positively about a book she had read whereas the guy in a good mood thought the concert that just ended was invigorating. Mood was clearly related to emotions and feelings. The difference between an emotion and a feeling? According to neurobiological findings, emotions were physiological whereas feelings were neurological; feelings were interpretations of emotional signals—language then came along to conceptualize.
Mood, though? Was it a necessary word or did it just confuse matters? What was the difference between “I feel good” and “I’m in a good mood”? It wasn’t apparent that there was a difference. “I feel good” didn’t say anything other than “I don’t feel bad.” Anything could be meant by “I feel good”: happy, content, giddy, silly, energetic, free-spirited, peaceful, relaxed, and so on. The same with “I'm in a bad mood”: frustrated, sad, depressed, tired, anxious, etc. There was at least some nuance with those more specific words even if each of them could be refined further and further, words with definitions that placed them in the vagueness of cosmology or the specifics of the quantum … or anywhere between. Mood was like a galaxy, far too complex in composition to mean much of anything without a shitload of words coming before and after to distinguish it. What does it mean to say “that galaxy is big”? Mood didn’t seem to have much meaning at all without comparison to what it was not. To describe it further meant it could be dropped completely: "I'm happy" versus "I'm in a happy mood"? Come on.
Attitude, like mood, seemed tied to emotions even if thoughts and behaviors were influenced. But, of course, that was just what the word conveyed rather than what might be. Attitude, as much as anything else, seemed like a belief system about emotional disposition. Was optimism an intellectual belief or an attitude, an emotionally-based belief that things will work out for the best (or some variant of that)?
I finished the beer. I had been absentmindedly looking about the room without registering much of anything other than my thoughts. I suppose after a night and day of body and emotion taking precedence, language was craving attention. There was something bugging me about “mood” and “attitude,” though, something more. I lit a cigarette and opened the window again. The air was dead water. Swamp air. As I puffed while looking out into the increasingly foggy haze, I felt my mind twitch … then tingle. Awake. Waking up.
The Hawaiians! “About damn time.” I hated dwelling on stupid shit like moods and attitudes, trying to figure out what the fuck they meant or if they meant anything at all. Obviously something within me was irked by them. I assumed it was because they were poorly defined, that they didn’t explain anything in a useful way. The Hawaiians, though, were clearing debris. They had found some part of my mind where there had been a structural collapse, where ideas were circling one another without ever going anywhere, without communicating at all with the array of ideas that worked together in a vast network of thought. The ideas in that area of the mind were trapped, atrophied thoughts fucking up the system and drawing way too much energy from the functional and useful network.
The Hawaiians were innovative, though. They were transforming wreckage into new pathways of thought, building bridges and tunnels and thoughtways to expand the network by incorporating this formerly gnarled mindspace in creative ways. With the damage repaired I was able to see the problem: I had used the words “mood” and “attitude” as starting points and was trying to work backward to experience. No wonder I was confused. Shrooms to the rescue again. Those Hawaiians, damn, exceptionally efficient at identifying and repairing uncoordinated thought.
Whether language was a problem or not was not the issue. The issue was the procedure of thought, not recognizing how language fit into the overall process. My mind was a trainwreck, filled with ridiculous notions about how to think about things. That was one reason I functioned better through spontaneity—the thought processes that had been fucked up through cultural brainwashing couldn’t get in the way of my innate abilities to create and play. As Haruki Murakami wrote, “If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” Best to write my own damn books and read them. I wish I had been allowed to do that all along. I might never have been introduced to vague notions with no coherent relationship to life such as “attitude.” How many words in my vocabulary had poor relations with experience? Too many. That explained how my mind and body had been separated from one another, how I missed the damage being done to my body without my awareness. "I feel like shit, but I guess I'm just in a bad mood. Maybe if I change my attitude the herniated discs in my neck will miraculously realign!" Grrrrr...
I lit another cigarette, my mind whistling at a thousand kph. The Hawaiians were working furiously. I barely saw or felt anything. There was music playing but it may as well have been white noise. I was so far inside my thought it was as if there was no world outside. And yet … the way I was thinking was necessary. I had been attentive to my body, sensation, and the external environment much more regularly. There was still the issue of my mind, though. The shrooms always knew what needed attention. It made sense--the shrooms widened the boundaries of my consciousness to allow just a wink of my subconscious to come to light. The subconscious—for lack of a better term—worked without conscious direction yet the shrooms allowed me to observe. Over the past couple weeks, a greater and greater synthesis was being realized. What I had been building consciously for decades was haphazard, patched together with duct tape and chicken wire. Ideas like “mood” were decaying, causing well-functioning areas of the brain to degrade as well. Even useful words like “fork,” a seemingly invincible word, might eventually lose coherence without more active “language gardening.”
I took a puff from the pipe. My mind was electric, zigging and zagging. Everything seemed enhanced, but thought was receiving the biggest jolts. Still, there were powerful emotions underlying all of it. I grabbed another beer then pulled out another cigarette, puffed away, and thought. For words like “spoon” to remain viable, words like “attitude” were either going to have to be defined in useful ways or discarded so they didn’t corrupt the rest of my mind with nonsense. The only other option was to embrace absurdity. I had been onto something with the idea that attitude was a belief system based on emotions. I hadn’t been able to pinpoint what that meant because I was focusing on the words. But if I viewed the issue through the lens of experience then it was possible that a family of emotions translated through feelings configured specific attitudes which had a range of behavioral and conceptual expressions.
Attitude, though, was a conception of beliefs about a person’s emotional disposition. Why beliefs? Because attitudes were no more a reality of what a complex of experienced emotions were than a construction of what they meant. Emotions may have been this or that, but unless the emotions were related to exactly what created them all manner of conceptual interpretations were liable to arise. Throwing one’s hands up in the air while saying, “I don’t know,” was the only honest answer to the question “Why do you feel that way?” The complexity of being is unmeasurable; no human mind or technological wizardry can account for all the variables making up pleasure or pain.
People of every age have believed the answer to who, what, how, and why we are is nigh. “Neuroscience will tell us the answers, you’ll see.” Yeah, right. “Wait until nanotechnology is more advanced, then we’ll know.” Uh huh. Everything previously had failed so why the blind belief that new inventions will find the answer? “Well, we’re more right now than we used to be.” Then why do certain “primitive” cultures score higher on happiness scales than the most well-developed and scientifically advanced societies that have ever existed? Maybe knowing isn’t the end-all, be-all we’ve been led to believe. “Knowledge is power.” Okay, but is knowledge happiness or fulfillment? Didn’t think so.
There was some movement in the air outside. The humid mist turned to a light rain. The air wasn't nearly as thick. It was a relief; my skin and lungs were grateful. Strange that I smoked cigarettes when I was promising my body I would be more attentive to its health. I couldn’t do everything at once, though. I was moving and eating well enough to make improvements. Cigarettes would have to wait as I enjoyed them too much to give them up. In time.
The Hawaiians dislodged a massive obstruction from a forgotten passageway in my mind. I felt air rush into a tunnel stirring up dust which the shrooms vacuumed away. I’m not sure what the obstruction was but it felt as if the shrooms had expanded the passageway so much that dent in my skull had been popped out and smoothed over, making me physically more symmetrical just as much as mentally. A thought raced out of the long lost tunnel screaming, “Attitude is an imposition! It judges rather than describes!” It was true. I never said, “I have a positive attitude” or “I felt a shift in attitude.” Well, maybe I did say or think those things, but they weren’t my ideas. Attitude is what persons do to describe their impressions of others: “Your son has a good attitude,” “that little snot could use an attitude adjustment,” or "Man, does she have an attitude or what?" It was also a psychological term used to label others. “Let me define you with these words because I need to categorize you for my own purposes rather than for your benefit.”
Attitude said nothing about me, but it said plenty about what others thought of me. “Attitude” was fuel for gossip. It was simply a word used to judge whether a person liked another or, if used to describe oneself, a judgment about whether a person liked the way he or she felt toward self or others. Attitude described preferences more than anything else. The word just confused matters, hid what was really happening.
I had taken to pacing back and forth in the living room. There was definitely something to pacing in relation to thinking. Maybe it was the repetitive movement. I didn’t know and my thought returned to the issue of attitude. “These ideas I have will not go over well. Too many people believe the word means something significant, meaningful, and useful. But those beliefs obfuscate the dangers lurking within its use. Individuals are defined by the term and some define themselves using it. This is like believing a picture of a river is a river. Not just in the sense of the representation taking precedence over the real thing, but robbing the real thing of its movement, its length, its water sources, the living organisms within, the sand, mud, and rocks making its base, the gravity directing its flow, and so much more. Attitude is not just a distortion; it’s a constriction. Minds and bodies atrophy because of its application. This is bad, very bad.”
I had the sense that I had discovered something vital, something everyone needed to know or else they were all going to remain trapped in lies they didn’t know they were telling, making false judgments without even being aware that they were doing so. It was possibly true, but as I paced, I also remembered how shrooms can sometimes make even the obvious seem extraordinary. It wasn’t difficult to be filled with grandeur while shrooming because the lightning bolts of discovery sizzled with powerful emotions and overwhelming awe. It was easy to think, “I’ve just discovered the most incredible truth ever known! I am a genius! I should be worshipped for my greatness. How the masses suffer by not being able to think my thoughts, to be in my presence, to feel what I feel. I despise them for being so wretched while simultaneously feeling sympathy for the brokenness of their minds. I can no more help them than I can teach a mouse the Gettysburg Address.”
I recognized that tendency, though. It was sometimes impossible to feel any other way, but I usually snapped out of it. It was funny thinking about it while shrooming because I was existing within my grandiosity while also being amused by how ridiculously over the top it was. Then I started thinking I was a genius for recognizing that I was not a genius. “Dear Lord, this spiral could go on forever!” I laughed so hard I slowly slumped to the ground, rolling around guffawing, snickering, and tittering. “Frumpy fettle fire! Whooo! Choo choo!” I littered nonsense everywhere; words were littered all over the floor, not one of them related to any of the others except through proximity. It was going to be hell sweeping them up. I wondered if they might dissolve or stain the floor. Hard to say.
My mind was clearly shifting to another level. Whatever had been coherent was dissolving fast. I rolled to a still on the floor and simply cast “wheees” at the ceiling. “Wheee” tickled my tummy, rubbed my belly. The way the sound and feeling escaped from my lungs through my throat and out my mouth made me feel incredibly happy. I wrapped my arms around my self and squeezed. “I love me soooooo much!” I was having so much fun. “Attitude” had made me forget all about how playful I had been all day. But here was playfulness again, returning home. I must have inadvertently let him slip out the window while having a cigarette. Thank goodness he came back. Must have gotten tired of the rain.
I joked with play, “You have such an attitude!” A new round of laughter, more guffaws, suppressed giggles, whoops and shouts. Play tickled my feet then the sides of my belly. “No, stop! You’re killing me! Oh my god, how many hands do you have?! You’re tickling me everywhere! Stop! STOP!” Play wouldn’t stop, though. He kept right on going.
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